‘Screw you.’ But that scar, that scar. It was like an asteroid impact, the shock of its landing written into the deep crystalline structure of the rock. Something cataclysmic had happened to create that scar. Something of appalling scale. It wasn’t the only such mark in all the universe but there were few, very few. And he knew it. He’d seen this one created.
*
The Presence was looming behind him and to both sides, far too close. And now it was shorn of personality again, no T’Sanko, no Rollo, no Ash. Just that incredible hunger, that distant curiosity. What is this human mind and how can I break it? Idris wasn’t breathing, wasn’t even able to blink as he fed the computations in. Gave the ship a course, a direction, a vector back to reality.
‘You’re not real,’ he whispered to the universe.
It laid a hand on his shoulder and he screamed and passed out.
*
Kris
Kris jerked awake to the echo of alarms, sound and vibration from another room, a catastrophe happening to someone else.
She was in her suspension pod, and she had been a spacer long enough to recognize the shuddering aftershock of a sudden wake-up, without the cushioning chemical cocktail that usually transitioned her to wakefulness.
‘Hello?’ she called, but comms had nothing but ghosting static for her, and the lid of her pod wasn’t opening. She rapped on it hopefully, in case Solace or Olli were just on the other side. But a creeping dread had been stealing up on her. Something was terribly wrong.
She hit the emergency release and the pod popped open, retracting its medical paraphernalia so that she could sit up. The inside of the suspension bay was empty. Olli had bedded down in her bubble in the drone bay. Kit had his own pod in his quarters. Her only neighbour was Solace. And the Partheni was . . .
Not there.
‘Hello, Kris to anyone, what’s shaking?’ she asked to shipwide comms. Maybe Solace had just woken up already. Maybe everyone was waiting for her. Somewhere. Utterly silent and not responding to her calls. Then she knew.
We’re still in unspace.
‘Idris?’ she called to comms. ‘Idris, what’s going on?’ But that was wasted effort because they were in unspace. Meaning no Idris, no Solace, no any of them. Just her and the vast chasming universe.
Something’s gone wrong. Some failsafe had tripped and the ship must have known to wake her. Probably it had woken everyone . . . But that didn’t help, because there was no ‘everyone’ in unspace. Just Keristina Soolin Almier, who didn’t know how to fix spaceships.
Get to command. She stumbled out of the suspension bay, feeling the dimensions of the ship around her all subtly wrong – too big, too small, receding off into unexpected, nameless directions. And empty, so very empty.
Not entirely empty.
Kris knew this was how it went, but knowing didn’t help. Her shoulders itched, sensing that thing somewhere on the ship, somewhere close . . . intolerable. Human myth was full of creatures that were anathema to the sane mind. Look upon them and you’d die, meet their gaze and be turned to stone. Had some ancient sage somehow touched unspace, in an age before humans had ever climbed up out of the gravity well? Because that was the Presence in a nutshell.
As Kris crept through the vacant chambers of the Vulture God she felt it closing on her, matching her step for step. But its paces were longer, so it grew fractionally closer every time she moved. It was every shame, nightmare and rejection she’d ever had. It was all these things given teeth and claws, weaponized to be her ultimate nemesis. She slipped her knife from her sleeve, thinking, Well I have something for you too, nemesis.
Then she was through into Command, seeing the captain’s chair, the pilot’s board. She tried diagnostics, but the ship systems were all stripped down to the minimum. It couldn’t tell her what was wrong. It didn’t seem to know why it had woken her. According to the ship, everything was absolutely fine. Peachy even. Why was she asking?
Everything was not fine. Kris had a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach. She needed to . . .
Something scraped, a long rasping sound, outside the command capsule.
She gripped the back of the captain’s chair, almost losing hold of her knife. I couldn’t have heard that. There were no other physical presences aboard. Nothing long and disjointed, dragging along the wall outside Command. She stared at the minimal ship display, seeing but not processing. It had moved, it was right outside. Kris could sense it reaching, fumbling its way along like a blind man. There was one precise moment when its search paused, and she knew it had become aware of her.