BD — 189 J: Harrier

The canopy interface powered off, leaving the cockpit submerged in a darkness unique to the empty space between star systems. It didn’t matter which way you looked, so vast was the expanse that the nearest stars appeared as mere pinpricks of light in the black. Few would ever experience space like this, I was one of the lucky ones.

I’d signed on with Frontier Freight just a year ago, and now they had me sitting on an experimental breach engine that could send me kiloparsecs in any direction damn near instantaneously. It was akin to the sort of breach engine you only used to see on carriers and tugboats used to ferry fleets or stations way out into the black. They called it the Scalpel, owing to the ease and precision with which it cut through the firmament. How did Frontier Freight get their hands on this? Something to do with the technology being leaked, some sort of corporate espionage way above my pay grade. I was little more than a guinea pig to be entirely honest, though officially I was a regular commercial transit pilot.

Far less impressive was the vessel they’d strapped it into. It was a small craft, just big enough to accommodate the Scalpel and a single occupant. The dome canopy of the cockpit gave the ship a blunt look only furthered by the bulky ion thrusters protruding from its charcoal gray fuselage. There was a widening of the hull near the back that indicated the cargo hold, and further widening further back made room for the main thrusters and power supply. Bold white letters on either side of the cargo hold spelled out “BD-7” The whole thing was blocky, industrial. It would be right at home in an orbital construction detail.

I initiated the breach jump process with the press of a button on my arm rest. I had two minutes to prepare, but without the canopy interface I wouldn’t be able to see it coming until the last second. It was just a courtesy really, there were no preparations I could make. It was better to let it come as a surprise than to count it down on the edge of your seat.

Gradually then suddenly, the stars disappeared. I lost the battle to control my breathing as I lost feeling in my feet, then my legs, then altogether. Through the senseless void I felt the first gaze burn into me. There was one, then there were ten, soon a thousand predatory eyes bore down on me. I felt my soul being picked apart, scrutinized in the way a funeral pyre scrutinizes a corpse. No reaction could possibly fit the stimulus, all there was to do was bask in the excruciating exposure.

My vision returned in an explosion of geometric patterns. Blazing fractals spun into and over themselves like roiling clouds. It was too high definition, every detail too pronounced, every flourish overwhelming as I perceived each iota moving in sequence.

I heard a voice over my shoulder, its speech precise and measured and yet incomprehensible to me. The sound reverberated off of empty space and returned as music, brutal and distorted like a scream pushed past its breaking point. There was brass… no, strings.. guitars.

I snapped back to reality to melodic rage over the pounding of a double bass through the ship’s sound system. The smothering heat of the breach gave way to inhuman vigor that drove me to my feet. Every muscle in my body tensed for a long moment. The breach still lingered in me, echoes of those terrible hallucinations played at the edges of my vision. But over time it all faded away. Soon just a hint of breach madness remained. Such was the magic of archaicore.

In the early days of breach travel, a jump like the one I’d taken would require three to five recovery days, during which every occupant of the vessel would undergo a neurochemical therapy program. The therapy appeared to work consistently aboard vessels with many occupants, but they rarely did anything for solo pilots. Naturally, solos began to experiment.

It didn’t take long before someone figured out that listening to music at the moment a breach was cleared would not only wake the occupant up, but it would drastically cut down on recovery time. The music had to be as compelling as possible to achieve the best results, and so the search began for the most visceral bangers known to mankind. For many that meant delving into ancient music archives, taking what they liked and integrating it with contemporary styles. The result was archaicore. And as it became widely adopted by solo pilots, it began to trickle into the general population. For the next few minutes I did some stretching, some light calisthenics, moving about as much as I could in the cockpit. It was tall enough to stand in and about 7 feet deep with the chair folded away. The physical activity cleared any remaining traces of breach madness, and I made to orient my ship towards my objective.

The jump landed me within a kilometer of the Harrier mobile observatory. Frontier research stations were notoriously claustrophobic, just large enough to carry out whatever specialized task they had been assigned. The cigar shaped body of this station broke that mold completely. It was large enough to house a dozen or so men with room to spare, practically filling my canopy as it loomed ever closer. Its hull was tinted blue by the light of a supergiant star situated some unfathomable distance to my left, the narrow barrels of point defense guns drew long shadows across its surface.

I slowed to a halt about 300 meters out as I realized that I’d never been hailed. The usual protocol was to hail any vessel that entered your system with an exchange of identification, and to issue instructions for docking and/or stern warnings regarding point defense cannons to anything approaching within 750 meters. I had closed to 300 meters and not been contacted at all. What’s more, the point defense guns didn’t seem to notice me, pointing idly in all directions. I definitely needed to review the brief on this job, none of this added up.

I switched on the canopy interface, and my archaicore beats to relax and breach the firmament to were replaced by the feminine voice of the onboard AI, her personality core flashing in sync with the volume of her voice.

“Good morning, pilot.” she greeted me as the interface buffered, various lights and screens around the cockpit flickered to life. Now the steady hum of the engines was complemented by the slight buzz of hologram projectors and their tiny cooling fans.

“Welcome back, BD.” I addressed the ceiling, “How are you feeling after the jump? Everything make it?”

“No errors detected.” She buffered for a moment, “energy supply is at 12% capacity, Scalpel will be unavailable until supply exceeds 80% capacity, BD-7 will otherwise function normally for approximately 20 hours before entering hibernation. Immediate resupply recommended. Shall I contact the nearby station to arrange it?”

I nodded, “Yeah, see if you can get a hold of them, figure out why they didn’t contact us on approach too. In the meantime, show me the brief for this pick-up.”

A dozen windows flashed open on the interface as BD navigated to the mission brief. It was a long winded mess of paralegal jargon. Somewhere in there was information that actually pertained to the mission, somewhere. I settled in. This was going to take a while.

I yawned, leaning back in my chair as I waved away the mission brief, sending it off to the taskbar on the left of the interface. With it out of the way, I was left staring at the Harrier observatory. The brief confirmed that this was the correct station, I was in the right place at the right time. If it came to it I might just have to dock and board without expressed permission, they were expecting me anyway. I eyed the station’s point defense cannons, they hadn’t moved since I arrived, if they were going to be a problem they’d be trained on me already.

“BD,” I called over my shoulder, receiving a curious noise in response. “Still no word from the station?”

“Affirmative. I have made continual attempts to contact the Harrier, all unsuccessful. Their communications unit seems to be non-functional.” She sounded frustrated as she displayed a log of her attempts at contact. She had sent the same hail message once per minute for almost two hours.

“Jesus BD,” I laughed and gestured to the station, “you just met this thing and you’re blowing up its phone, that’s why it won’t talk to us.”

“This vessel does not have the capacity to detonate the Harrier’s comms unit” she replied matter-of-factly.

I stood up from my chair, pushing it back into its storage compartment as I did. “Well we’re here on time, if they’re not going to pick up the phone we’ll just have to dock up and talk face to face. They’ll be expecting us anyway.” BD concurred, and I ducked through a little door in the back of the cockpit, entering the cabin.

The cabin was essentially a scaled down motel room containing a cot, a small table and microwave, a claustrophobic bathroom off in the corner, and a cheap plastic lawn chair. Thick netting hung from the ceiling, various tools and personal effects bound up in it clinked softly together as ion thrusters rotated the ship faster than the artificial gravity could readjust. I quickly sat down to avoid reckoning with the janky gravity generators, and rummaged around for a caffeinated nutrient bar. I ate and chatted a bit with BD as she maneuvered the ship’s docking mechanism in line with the Harrier’s.

There was a resounding thunk that shook the ship as docking hooks sunk into place, almost knocking me out of the chair and setting off a clatter amid the netting. I stood and reached for a cargo rig tucked under the table, pulling it from the floor and onto my back in a well practiced motion and buckling it around my chest and waist. It was about as compact as a cargo rig could be, like a minimalist MOLLE harness up front with a lightweight rigid pack and a double jointed hydraulic appendage around back. Having an inhumanly durable 3rd arm was often invaluable when dealing with frontier labcoats and their science experiments. I grabbed BD’s personality core from the cockpit on my way to the airlock. Her core slotted neatly into the shoulder of the cargo rig, and as it did the arm unfolded and situated itself over the same shoulder.

BD-7’s telescoping airlock felt incredibly flimsy as I climbed down into it from the cockpit. Airlocks were always devoid of artificial gravity, so BD would anchor me to a wall while I worked on the hatches. The lock on the inner docking hatch slid back into place behind me as I stepped into the Harrier, the docks were pristine and completely empty. Either nobody had entered or left the station in years, or this place had one hell of a janitor. Long hallways extended in all directions, all equally vacant. There should have been a security response to my unauthorized boarding, there at least should have been somebody to escort me to the package I was picking up.

“Hello?” I called out, “Anybody home?” I listened closely for a long moment, but there was only the dull whir of the air conditioning.

“The station appears to be abandoned,” commented BD, and I jumped at the sudden noise. “We do not need assistance to uphold the mission, recommend we retrieve the package and refuel as normal.”

“Right,” I shook off the unease that’d been creeping up on me, “we’ve got a job to do.” Looking around I spotted small labels beside the various hallways, “reactor/laboratory”, and “cargo” among them.

“I say we hit the reactor first and grab some fuel rods, the package will be in cargo so we can just grab it on our way out,” I suggested, “and maybe we’ll find somebody that way. Should be a technician on watch up there.”

“Understood, I will be on the lookout.” I heard the click of sensory devices shedding their protective lenses.

Rooms were irregularly spaced along the hall, storage rooms and specialized labs according to the labeling. Most were behind closed doors, those left open were full of esoteric machinery: consoles attached to cylindrical devices with seemingly biological appendages, a massive mechanical mushroom covered in lenses within a glass enclosure, a room length mess of wiring and hydraulics suspended from the ceiling. Asking BD about the labs was futile, she did her best to explain things but I could hardly follow. The sorts of people who were assigned to frontier observatories like this will have undergone multiple lifetimes of schooling in high end martian universities. All that preparation just to get stuck in a tin can trillions of miles away from home, I figured it must be more about the journey than the destination. One room was divided down the center, on one side of the transparent partition was a shoebox sized stick of ram protruding from the wall in an otherwise empty room, on the other was just a table and a few chairs. BD’s explanation was simple this time:

“It’s an interrogation and observation room. These are commonly used in studies of psychology or sociology,” she began, “it is out of place in an observatory though. Unless it’s here specifically to study the personnel.”

“Why not just use cameras?” I thought aloud, “wouldn’t interrogating people change their behavior, skew your results?”

“Affirmative. Such experiments are typically done covertly.” She didn’t elaborate, so I picked up the slack as we continued down the hall. It was easy to write off the incomprehensible stuff, this was recognizable enough to get me thinking. The emptiness of the place was strange to be sure, but not unheard of, there were any number of reasons a place like this would be left empty: a chemical leak, a hull breach, a reactor malfunction, even a regular excursion to stave off cabin fever. Typically you’d expect the station to broadcast something like that over short range radio, but a malfunction in the comms center could explain something like that. That interrogation room gave me other ideas though, they could have been testing some mind altering substance out here. I may have just stumbled on the MK Ultra of my time, it was easy to picture intel agents locking prisoners in that observation tank and exposing them to alien hallucinogens, researchers feeding them questions and taking notes from the other side of the glass. Republic intel funding could explain the magnitude of the place. Republic bureaucracy could explain why nobody was here to greet me for the pickup. I banished the thought, thinking of what might happen to me if I really had stumbled on something like that. The less I knew the better. BD stopped me mid-stride using the weight of her arm and its counterweight in the pack to pull me back a step.

“There,” She pointed at an open door to my right, “a coat.”

A lab coat lay crumpled in the doorway, hastily discarded by the looks of it. I stooped to pick it up and unravel it. A design was subtly printed on the back, light blue on white, I recognized it as the Harrier’s insignia from the mission brief. An identification badge was pinned to the front, a tiny thing meant to be read like a barcode. I handed it off to BD and folded the lab coat up, shoving it beneath the cargo rig’s belt. The room was like any of the other labs as I looked around. A large island table lined with drains dominated the space, cabinets stocked with glassware adorned the walls. It was all just as perfectly clean as the rest of the station. I was almost disappointed. But as I approached the door to leave, something caught my eye. There was a rack of glass pitchers sitting on a counter by the door and one of the pitchers was cracked with a piece missing near the top. I hadn’t seen any broken glass on the floor though. And who would return a broken glass to the rack, wouldn’t you just throw it out?

BD’s arm whipped around to face the back corner of the room, throwing off balance and causing me to stumble into the counter.

“What the hell B-”

“Movement detected,” she cut me off, “far corner, behind table.” I turned to face the corner, eyes wide and darting around the edges of the island.

“What do you mean movement? What the fuck is in here?” I asked, panic creeping into my tone.

“Indeterminant, recommend evac,” BD’s voice had a steady commanding tone to it now, but I was frozen on the spot. I craned my neck to get a view over the table, as I did I heard a quick creak on my left. My eyes snapped to the back left corner of the table. Something peered back at me around the island’s base. Its head was covered in strips of white fabric, two beady eyes visible between them. I stared, transfixed as it crawled from behind the table on two long double jointed arms, then two single jointed arms. Its shoulders and torso were clad in the same white fabric strips that covered its head, the way they hung on its lithe frame gave it a shaggy appearance. It moved effortlessly, so smoothly that it appeared weightless.

“EVAC, NOW,” BD violently peaked my rig’s speakers, snapping me out of the haze. I practically jumped through the door and slammed it closed behind me, catching one last glimpse of the creature through the door’s little window. It was standing now, roughly five feet high, its whole body concealed by that shaggy artificial coat. I sprinted down the hall, rounding a corner into engineering. The station became less orderly as I ran deeper, rubber scuff marks, broken glass and equipment began to appear in the hall, eventually it opened up into the reactor complex- a multi story open area housing the fusion reactor, its waste, and its fuel rods. The reactor took center stage, a massive titanium alloy cylinder with an attached terminal and access port, on either side were vaults color coded for waste and fuel. Finally something familiar.

A man was slumped over the reactor’s control terminal, high vis gear indicated he was a technician. I rushed over to him and rolled him onto his back. He was unresponsive. Blood was dried to his face and down the front of his reflective vest. If he was alive, he didn’t look it. Various tools were affixed to the technician’s utility belt, including a portable weld gun which I hurriedly took from him. Pulling the trigger elicited a blinding muzzle flash followed by the sound of metal on plastic as specialized ferrofluid flowed from the barrel, hardening before hitting the floor. I clipped the gun to my rig and jogged over to the fuel vault, pulling impotently at the locked door. The technician would have the key.

“Faster,” BD demanded as I rifled through the technician’s pockets. Dread overwhelmed me as I glanced down the hallway. Had I not seen it up close, I wouldn’t have recognized it gliding near the wall. Its makeshift ghillie suit rendered it a blob of analogue static at this distance. My movements became clumsy and frantic as I groped for a key ring in the dead tech’s pocket, nearly dropping it as I snatched it free. I lunged for the fuel vault and began trying each of the dozen keys, my shaking hands complicating the process.

“Shit, shit, shit! Help!” I handed the key ring over my shoulder to BD and turned my back to the door, allowing her to handle the lock so I could watch for the creature. It was crossing the threshold into the reactor complex now, only a dozen meters away. It was hunched slightly, its upper pair of arms hovering just above the floor. It took long slow steps on digitigrade legs obscured by more white fabric. I brandished the weld gun, firing off flashes that left trails in my vision. The thing continued to approach unabated. It leaned on one arm and reached out to swat at my welder with an elongated hand. The impact swung my arm to the side, but couldn’t break my grip. As it reached out again I met it halfway with the weld gun, scraping the energized barrel down the length of its forearm. It recoiled violently and clutched its burnt arm with the two smaller appendages positioned lower on its torso, stumbling and spinning away from me with a guttural squeal. Its mouth became visible as it whined, were those human teeth?

“Door open!” BD crackled through the rig, peaking the speakers again.

I half turned to enter the fuel vault and it was on me again, whooping like an ape and snatching at my legs. I swung wildly with the welder, forcing it to back off. But it had gotten a grip on my pant leg and as it leaped back it yanked me to the floor. Taking advantage of my dazed state, it rushed to mount me and rain hammerfists on my chest. The blows would have been bone crushing were it not for the reinforcement of my cargo rig. I swung again with the welder, this time connecting with the creature’s ribs in a searing flash. It sprang off me and clutched its side. I scrambled into the vault and reached for a touch pad that’d close the door, but as I did the thing lunged at me. It tried to climb back up into mount but I was able to keep it at bay with frantic kicking. As I reached the touch panel to close the door it yanked roughly on my right boot, pulling it into the doorframe as the door slid shut, trapping my foot. It scratched violently at my boot in a fucked up game of tug of war, I planted my other foot on the door frame and pushed. With a snap, my foot came free of the boot, sending me sliding along the floor of the vault. The creature managed to rip my boot from between the door and its frame. The door snapped shut, locking it outside.

I huddled in the back of the vault and white knuckled to welder as the creature tugged at the door.

“Holy shit,” I sighed, still shaking from the encounter, “should have gone back to the fucking docks.”

“We must complete the mission.” BD spoke evenly.

“The mission?! Did you not see that thing?” I spat, “the fucking stealth chimp takes priority!”

“Had we returned to the ship without fuel cells we would be stranded,” she paused, “recommend skipping the package, however.”

“No shit.” I stood up and a stabbing pain wracked my ankle, knocking me back to the floor. Grimacing, I tossed the welder and grabbed at my leg. “God damnit!”

“Recom-” BD began, but I cut her off.

“Stop! Just… give me a minute.”

I stared at the door for a long while. Eventually the creature stopped trying to get in, instead it just knocked on the door at irregular intervals. Knock. Knock-knock-knock. Knock-knock… Where had it learned that? Or maybe it just came up with it on its own. Assuming it had constructed that ghillie suit, it must be fairly intelligent. Intelligent enough to psychologically torture me apparently. The knocks stopped too after what felt like an hour, and I was left wondering if it was still there. More importantly, I wondered how the hell I was going to make it out of here.

First thing’s first, I took off my cargo rig and dug through the pack, taking stock of my supplies. A ZAMN 12 hour energy drink, a multitool, a roll of gauze, and a couple old hard drives. Using the multitool, I cut off a length of gauze to wrap my ankle, it contracted and hardened slightly as it came in contact with the skin making for a high quality compression. Tentatively, I tried standing, there was some discomfort but no sharp pain. I wouldn’t be doing anything athletic for a while anyway. I grabbed as many fuel cells as I could fit in the pack, and a few more that I could hook to the straps of the rig. They were about the size of 18oz cans with bright orange safety seals on the top end.

Strapping the rig back on, I took stock of my surroundings. The vault was very much purpose built, racks of fuel cells lining otherwise plain walls. One wall was dominated by the door and its control panel, but I wasn’t about to risk being ambushed by that creature again. A single fluorescent light ran the length of the vault’s otherwise featureless ceiling. The floor was similar, save for a grate just inside the threshold. On closer inspection, there was a light airflow coming through it, just enough to knock loose particles off a technician’s boots as they entered. Weird feature for a vault on a space station but given the circumstances I wasn’t going to question it, the duct supplying that airflow might be my ticket out of here. So I knelt down and equipped my multitool’s flathead to pry the grate off. I couldn’t pull it out of position, but after a while of struggling I managed to pull one corner up out of the floor. BD’s arm extended over my shoulder to grab the bent up corner, its mechanical grip steadily peeling the grate free as I braced against the floor. The noise of fans, hydraulics, and generators spilled from the hole. Knocking on the door resumed.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, leaning over the now exposed fan. Pulling the fan out by its carry handle revealed a dimly lit passage, presumably the station’s ventilation system. These ducts should have the run of the station, now it was just a matter of practicality. I grabbed the welder from the ground nearby, and gave it to BD. Then I lowered the rig down into the tunnel. From above the noise was loud, down below it was a cacophony. On the bright side, I couldn’t hear my cargo rig scraping the floor as I pushed it along on my hands and knees.

“Those sound tiles are really something, huh?” I yelled over the noise.

“Affirmative.” BD responded, flatly.

“You think they use the same ones we got on BD-7?” I asked.

“Affirmative.” BD responded, flatly.

I sighed. “Alright, I’m sorry about earlier. I freaked out, you were just trying to help.” BD seemed to buffer for a moment.

“”Freaking out” offers no utility in such circumstances.”

“Yeah it’s kinda stupid,” I laughed, “it’s just how people work, leftover animal stuff.”

“You are an animal, pilot.”

“People aren’t… Well, it’s complicated. Calling somebody an animal is like calling you a calculator,” I explained, “you know what I mean?”

“I am a calculator, and you are an animal.” She did not know what I meant.

The next few minutes were spent discussing that. Turns out, BD was strange about double meanings, subtext and the like. She was adamant that a word could only mean one thing at a time, and my supposed double meanings were actually homographs and homophones. Apparently her way of understanding metaphors involved manually deconstructing the operative word and redefining it contextually, and synthesizing her redefinition with the definition she already had on file. That made me wonder how it was that I was comprehending metaphors, but now wasn’t the time for that level of introspection on my part, so I segued into puns instead.

“Affirmative, the phrase may be interpreted to mean a shrimp has fried the rice; however, the impossibility of the claim negates the need to synthesize a new definition,” BD explained.

“What if “shrimp” is a metaphor for a small guy who fries rice though?” I asked, “Or what if a shrimp actually does fry rice, how would you handle that?”

“I am ill equipped for animal handling, pilot.” she replied.

“What?”

“The duct becomes vertical ahead, we will not be able to navigate it.” She’d adopted a more professional tone, “recommend proceeding to interior deck at next opportunity.”

The grate flew out of its recess and clattered across the floor. I winced having anticipated more resistance, apparently they opened easier from the inside. My ankle gave me trouble as I climbed up to the crew deck. Yet another long hallway lined with open doors only this one seemed far more lived in, several of the rooms were labeled with colorful placards as opposed to the usual black ones and some even had welcome mats laid out. There was a blue light filter on the overhead, giving the whole place a soft orange tint that threatened to put me at ease. How long had I been awake for anyway? Peeking into one of the rooms confirmed that this was the residential sector, it was a sizable dorm room with bunk beds and a couple computer desks complete with leaning towers of soda cans and nutrient bar wrappers. It was cluttered as you might expect, but in an orderly way. Empty cans were stacked according to brand, food containers were grouped by their material and further subdivided according to brand, a few shirts were neatly folded and sat on well made beds. I remembered my first encounter with the ape, the broken glassware reracked in that lab. That pitcher would have been thrown out by anyone qualified to work in a station like this, a roomba would have done the same, the ape had to have done it and it must have been through here too. It was trying to clean up, probably to do with its preoccupation with stealth. But what was the point of that? It was presumably alone on the station before I boarded, it had to have been expecting someone, but that only raised more questions. I was totally zoning out.

I physically shook myself out of that, I needed focus. I had BD hand me the energy drink from my pack and downed it in one, regretting it instantly. The stuff was more akin to battery acid than anything you could reasonably call a beverage, mandatory labels warned that it wasn’t fit for human consumption, but by God it’d wake you up. I swore, stood up straight, and trotted down the hall as fast as my wrapped ankle would tolerate. Lights flickered in my periphery as I passed open doors, sometimes accompanied by audio snippets from whatever program the former resident had left on. My eyes were trained on the fork up ahead, I could just make out the words “cargo bay” on a little label by one of the doors.

Something flashed from a doorway on my left and I was thrown against the opposite wall. I tried to cover my head but it pulled my arm away easily, its other hand battering my head. My ears rang and my vision had all but left me when it was illuminated by a bright flash followed by a violent tug in the direction of my assailant. I managed to cover my head as I was pulled to the ground. The blows stopped coming but I kept being yanked back and forth. The flashes kept coming. It all stopped at some point, I wasn’t lucid enough to tell how long it had been. A voice crackled through water.

“…lot respond…” the voice was muffled and far off, until all at once the world returned to me, “…pilot, respond! Get up pilot! Respond!” BD trilled. I coughed, warm liquid spattering my arm. I crawled up into a kneeling position as I realized I was in a growing pool of blood, my head spun.

“Pilot, we have to move immediately! Get up!” She continued to urge me forward. Still dazed, I blew my nose and began to look around. My left eye immediately began to swell, the orbital bone was cracked, luckily not enough to close it completely. A pile of meat lay in a bed of shredded fabric before me, a few recognizable limbs protruding from the gore. Shards of reflective plastic and streaks of fluid mingled with the viscera and bone meal, I recognized it to be the weld gun… or what used to be the weld gun. I stood and the dizziness kicked up, forcing me to lean on the wall for support. Three steps in and I vomited down my front as the overhead lighting stabbed at my eyes.

“Pilot please, the docks are just through cargo. Do you hear me? I need you to keep moving.” BD was pleading at this point.

“I hear you. Just,” I squeezed my eyes shut to block out the light, “just put my music on, Beedy. And give me my fucking knife.”

There was a pained whirring from BD’s arm as she retrieved my multitool and handed it to me. “Complete the mission.” Professional confidence creeped back into her voice at the realization that I was at least partially lucid. Blood that had found its way into the cargo rig’s speakers sprayed out in a screaming mist as distorted arhcaicore stabbed at my ears. Pain shot laterally through my concussed brain for a moment as I adjusted, followed by that mystical vigor inferred by the noise. I stumbled forward, knife in hand, gradually regaining my balance as the first cargo bay door slid open before me.

Beyond the airlock, I was faced with an industrial looking steel walkway that extended across the warehouse, it was intersected by a number of other walkways and bordered by skeletal elevators and imposing magnetic graspers. Looking down, I was surprised by how full the cargo bay was, sleek branded containers pressed seamlessly against dinged up steel cans the size of BD-7. Seams ran the length of two walls parallel to my walkway allowing them to open out into empty space during a delivery. I’d never been on a big enough job to warrant using the cargo doors and it struck me that after a debacle like this I could pressure Frontier Freight into giving me whatever route I asked for. A nice local circuit would pay just as well as a deep space one if I moved enough product. Or I could file for workers compensation and retire to some cushy hive station in the Sol system. I was about three quarters of the way across the bay when I heard the distant pneumatic hiss of the sliding door behind me. I glanced over my shoulder, my vision was too impaired to register the creature gliding up the walkway but I knew it was there. BD confirmed as much.

I picked up the pace to a hobbling run, my ankle shrieking as I pushed it to the limit, I was so close. The door to the docks hissed open and closed behind me, as did the inner door to the airlock. I scrambled to find an emergency seal, every airlock had to have one. Sure enough, a bright red lever was embedded in the doorframe, a small divot allowing me to get a grip on it. The split second it took to pull the lever felt like a solid 20 minutes as I heard the inner door hiss, but it was too late for the ape. Still I wasted no time hobbling over to where my ship was docked and getting to work on the airlock. This one was fully manual, or at least I had rendered it fully manual when I overrode it on boarding.

“Quickly,” BD yelled over the music, “20 meters out, 4 o’clock, rapidly approaching.”

I strained to rotate the lock out of place, but it resisted me. Set to open slowly to prevent accidental venting.

“10 meters.”

I threw all my weight into the lock. It clinked open and left me off balance.

“5 meters”

Excruciating pain shot through my ankle as I caught myself on it, buckling and sending me crashing to the floor. I snapped up to a knee, coming face to face with the looming ape. Fabric had been torn away from one arm, exposing dark gray skin marred by a streak of shining metal. It stood mere feet from me. Staring. Hesitating. I white knuckled my multitool knife, squeezing in time with the blaring archaicore.

A screeching guitar riff seemed to reawaken it and it threw a telegraphed swipe at my head with its good arm. I intercepted to block, but the force of the strike rocked me all the same. I stabbed upward at its midsection. It caught my hand with its injured arm, but its grip was weak. Twisting the knife I cut open its wrist as I retracted the weapon. I followed up with a lunging thrust. It intercepted me this time with a flailing blow to my jaw. My head spun. I felt the consciousness leave my body for a split second. My arms stiffly swung about as I attempted to ward off the ape. I scrambled clumsily, but couldn’t regain my footing. A second blow impacted my temple, bouncing my head against the tiled floor.

Darkness. A darkness characteristic of the deepest reaches of space, so vast was the expanse that no matter where you looked the stars were rendered invisible. I felt nothing, I saw nothing, but distant and muffled came the sound of music- distorted energetic music that I felt I ought to recognize. Soon a voice replaced it, feminine but somehow inhuman, distorted. She screamed something too muffled for me to understand again and again, her screams devolved into pathetic wails and then into murmurs, eventually they became too quiet and distorted to differentiate from white noise. The void became truly senseless then, and I wondered how long I had been here. How long had I been drifting for?

At some point, I had begun to feel a strange warmth, of course I wasn’t sure how long I had felt it- but I could remember a time when I didn’t feel it. It increased in intensity in a peculiar way that defied duration. Perhaps it approached rapidly, or maybe it took eons, but eventually the heat became so intense as to be unbearable. It encompassed my entire being. My every thought and feeling, the physical body I couldn’t otherwise feel, my past and future were consumed by the blaze. I writhed in its presence like a worm on pavement. Its presence? It was embodied now, I felt it. The distorted woman’s lamentations were twisted further, becoming recognizable once more. Trumpets, brass, great horns announced the arrival of the entity. Great and terrible was its visage, an incomprehensible sea of undulating fractals that grew to dominate the space. I focused simultaneously on each minute detail of the patterns laid out before me, overwhelmed and confused to the verge of tears. Just then, I felt a hand on my back.

Frontier Freight, the Harrier, the apes, the mission, BD, everything came flooding back to me in an excruciating tide. I would have wretched or cried out or despaired, I should have, but the heat drowned out all feeling. The fractals had changed as well, resembling infinitely overlapping feathers. The hand moved to my shoulder and I was overcome by a different sensation. The heat was refined at its touch into the purest affection. It’s voice rang out, clear and measured:

“Be not afraid, pilot.”

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Thank you for reading! This is my first try at creative writing, so any and all critique and/or advice is very welcome. I’ll probably come back and revise this at some point when I’m more competent.