01: Solo Dive

It is quiet aboard the Slumbering Fury. Its captain, Selene Chalcedony Morningstar, sits in front of a window, watching the acidic rain come down in sheets on the mushroom forests below. Behind them, the ship’s ionic exhaust sparkles and winks out in the downpour, brief flashes of light drowned out by the blazing alien sunset. Her AI assistant and companion, Brutus, is guiding the ship to their destination, a research facility high above the treeline. He projects a holographic avatar of sorts standing next to her seat, hands clasped in mute professionalism, sepulchral face turned to gaze out the same window she looks out of. It’s a gesture for his human companion — his holographic eyes do not see. It is unrequested but appreciated.

Brutus’s avatar turns to face her, and a synthetic voice speaks into her ear. “Twenty minutes until expected arrival.” She nods and stands as his avatar dissipates.

“Let’s go over the assignment again,” she says, walking to her equipment locker. They’ve already read and reread the provided dossier multiple times, but it’s good to keep things fresh.

His voice is professional, level — flat but not monotone — as he reads. “Distress signal received on Coalition public channels from the fourth planet in the Elysium system, previously believed uninhabited. Signal details the escape of a specimen from containment. Designated THRONE, specimen is of unknown species and was recovered by planetary surface scout. No requests for status have received replies. Staff presumed deceased.”

Selene’s armor is a set of burnished silver pieces that snap together over her normal attire: loose shirts and pants in plain colors and comfortable fabrics. She prepares herself silently while Brutus continues speaking. “No images have been provided. Following description contains all known information, given in distress signal: THRONE possesses ocher fur, eight limbs, and eight eyes. It presents bipedal locomotion, though it has been observed moving octopedally. Limited studies have shown empathic and shapeshifting abilities. Intelligence believed high. Specimen is to be terminated.”

Her armor resembles its wearer once fully assembled: broad shoulders, strong arms, the sense of professionalism forged from raw metal. Its only adornments are her crest on the back and the tightly coiled ram horns on the helmet. Her metal carapace fits her far better than the suits and ties of her previous life, a layer of protection she finds more than natural. She’s engineered herself to be a sufficient weapon, but as always, she puts on her holster and places her handgun in it.

“They really didn’t give us much to work with, huh,” she sighs.

“Yes, a map of the facility would have been appreciated,” Brutus replies. “It is to be expected, I suppose.” They both know they’re lucky to get this much. The Coalition is so broad, containing so many disparate branches and organizations, that three entities nominally under the same banner can have no idea what the others are doing.

The final piece of her equipment slithers out of the locker and onto her arm, wreathing it in slime. It gives the impression that she had just been elbow-deep in something with black, oil-slick blood. It is a swarm of colloidal nanomachines — a recent acquisition Selene never could have afforded, an experiment of some rogue laboratory she had been hired to contain. Formerly autonomous, it is now an extension of Brutus, something between a limb and a well-trained dog. Its inventors called it Principality. He calls it Legion.

There was a time when the Fury’s deceleration would have jostled its interior. With Brutus at the controls, however, Selene does not even notice they’ve stopped. “Ready to disembark, captain,” he says. A brief exhale to center herself and she heads out.

From the outside, the facility is a standard Coalition outpost. Treated carbon fiber stilts support a landing platform. Above there’s a sloped roof to protect personnel from the caustic rain. Even from the ship, it’s impossible to see how far below the landing platform the facility extends.

The Coalition must have believed the harsh environs to be security enough. Legion disables the facility’s keycard lock with ease, and Selene steps into the sterile foyer. Fluorescent lights hum overhead, unnecessarily nourishing synthetic greenery. It is, like the outside, the sort of cookie-cutter design a network of construction drones could assemble in a handful of minutes: chairs, table, staircase access, elevator. Even the fake plants come standard; they are merely a part of the tables they sit on.

The elevator doesn’t come when called, so she pries apart the doors, cheap aluminum construction bending like plastic, and looks inside. The cable is missing; looking down, she sees it bunched up uselessly on top of the crumpled elevator at the bottom of the shaft.

“What do you suppose happened here?” Brutus asks.

Selene steps back from the elevator doors, and they slide closed, oblivious to how they’ve been mangled. She heads for the stairs and says, “Someone got desperate.”

Below the foyer is what Selene assumes to be the office floor, a small room filled with the chemically sweet smell of carpet cleaner. She brushes past an obsolete security drone as she enters. Off-the-shelf workstations sit in neat rows, inactive computer screens embedded into desks, blinking red lights accompanying each of them. She steps over a toppled chair and taps on the nearest screen, which lights up with DATASERVER LINK SEVERED. She presses her left hand against the screen. Legion briefly extends itself, slithering into the crack between it and the desk, before retracting as the display goes dark.

“The error is real,” Brutus says. “This is merely a screen connected to a centralized server. Without access to said server it is useless.”

Selene sighs and turns away from the workstation, looking at the rest of the room. There’s no smell of blood in the air, the carpet is clean, and no bodies lie splayed out on the floor. Whatever happened here didn’t happen in this room.

Selene heads to the stairwell down. It’s bare concrete with no handrail, clearly something built out of obligation, a construction just barely human-usable. She’s almost to the next floor when she notices something out of the corner of her eye and turns around.

There’s somebody lying prone on the stairs, a trail of bloodied handprints on the wall behind them. She crouches down next to the body, turns them over, and puts a hand against their neck, checking for a pulse. Her eyes wander to the name tag pinned neatly to their lab coat. Doctor Halifax Stephenson, Head Researcher. There’s no pulse. Selene stands, letting him fall limp. “Must’ve bled out trying to get up here.”

The emblem next to his name at least give her an idea of who runs this facility. The fractal pattern of multiple eyes indicates that he’s Coalition. The single-strand RNA helix indicates he’s with the Biological Research Bureau. The magnifying glass and grasping hand are new, though she has guesses.

The next floor down turns out to be the kitchen, a small linoleum-floored room filled with the smell of yeast, cooking oil, rendered soy and bean proteins. A couple of grimy domestic food-printers — the sort of appliance you’d expect in a student’s apartment — sit on a counter in the center of the room. There’s a chest freezer against the wall. Selene opens it up, solidified condensation cracking as she does, and looks inside, Legion slithering in to investigate. To her eyes it’s all frozen-over mush, crystallized past the point of being recognizable. Legion chews through layers of ice like a worm, insinuates some feelers into the substances, pulling back once sated.

“These seem to be samples of the local flora,” Brutus says. “It has all been frozen too long to discern fully, but chemical analysis shows similarities to various native fungi.”

“Maybe it’s what they were feeding THRONE,” Selene says, closing the freezer.

“Unlikely, unless THRONE eats very rarely. The ice suggests it was left frozen for at least ten days, possibly more.”

She nods, mulling it over as she heads out of the kitchen. No bodies here either, save for the late Dr. Stephenson in the staircase leading back up. Onward.

Next is a small room Selene can immediately tell is some kind of dormitory. Cots against the wall, a sleeping bag in the corner, a few hammocks. The sort of accommodations found on a long haul freight journey. Perhaps that’s precisely what they were. Imagining the scientists working here lugging their beds off the transport that brought them here brings her some joy, but she shakes her head. Can’t waste too much time on frivolous matters. The room could house six people, assuming nobody shared beds. Good to know.

Down to the floor below. She doesn’t initially notice the walls lined with screens, each labeled with a different floor of the facility — Kitchen, Enclosure, etc. The first thing she notices is the smell of blood in the air and the body slumped over a desk, a shotgun loosely supported by limp, lifeless arms. She pulls the corpse up by their hair. The gaping hole in their trachea seeps yet more blood onto their uniform shirt. The name on their badge is still plainly visible. Eugene Newman, Security & Specimen Compliance. She lets go and the body falls backward, shotgun clattering to the floor. The door to the stairs leading down is pockmarked with scattershot bullet holes. There are claw marks on the elevator door. The screens all show static.

Legion slithers off her arm, dripping onto the floor and crawling toward the monitors, infiltrating then exfiltrating their circuitry.

“It appears camera feeds are routed through the central data server,” Brutus says. “The monitors here cannot establish a connection either.”

Next floor down is data storage, where the air once again reeks of blood. A small rack of servers sits near the middle of the room, humming quietly. A guard, stomach split open, leans slumped against the wall, leaking bile and blood. Selene, more for formality than anything else, stoops down to check their name tag. Daniel Young, Security & Specimen Monitoring. She stands and places her hand against the server tower.

“Mind imaging this, Brutus?” she asks. Legion slithers off of her hand in mute acknowledgment, insinuating itself into the server.

After a moment, he speaks up. “Server encryption is non-trivial. It will take several hours to copy over, and several days to decrypt piecemeal. I would prefer we wait until you return to the ship.”

“No, this is important,” she says, lifting her hand back up. “I don’t think I’ll need Legion. Just keep it here copying over the server, I’ll come back for it later.”

“If you insist,” Brutus says. Legion remains in the server, whisper-quiet as it works.

She heads deeper, going down the stairs and opening the door to the sharp smell of ozone. A dozen security drone charging stations line the walls. The ruined bodies of several of said drones lie on the floor, occasionally twitching and sparking. They’re sufficiently mangled that a precise count is difficult; Selene estimates there are three to six of them. She stoops down to pick up a severed mechanical arm that ends in a blade. Its matte gray surface is stained red, slick with blood. She drops it; it lands elbow-first on a bipedal security drone’s torso, causing it to jerk spasmodically, speaker-grille mouth coughing up sparks.

The next floor’s antiseptic reek hits her before she enters the room, a reminder of a dozen surgeries in a dozen circumstances. A pair of lab coats hang from hooks on the wall. Dented lockers, rusted and painted over, sit on the floor by the wall, hand-me-downs from some other department. Plastic curtains cut the room in half. Someone has written “DECON” on them in messy handwriting. There’s a small gap between the curtains where a small chemical shower sits. Selene pushes past it, ignoring a lone protective suit hanging on the wall. Whatever biological agent the scientists here were worried about, she’s rebuilt herself to be immune. She’s not sure a poison exists that could kill her.

She expects a large, security-locked door to be blocking the entrance to THRONE’s enclosure. There is such a door. It’s been blown off its hinges. Plasma-tempered glass shattered outward from the viewing chamber, shards of it crunching underfoot. A messily bisected security drone sparking quietly in the corner. Ozone and iron hang in the air. Right under the observation window, a gas-masked face stares up, terror evident in dead, blank eyes. It’s a body wearing a sterile green-blue protective suit, stained red with blood. The suit’s scratched away near their hands. Their abdomen’s been sliced opened, like something out of an abattoir. Selene probes the wound with a gloved hand. It’s unmistakable. Bite marks, viscera torn to shreds, flesh pulled and torn out. Marrow sucked out of rib bones.

“A creature that’d leave bite marks this size...” Selene pulls back her hand.

“If THRONE left these impressions, it would have to be roughly three meters tall,” Brutus says.

Selene steps over the dividing wall, through the now-shattered observation window, moving from glass-covered concrete to straw-covered dirt. There’s a large metal pan on the floor, caked with layers of yellow-green alien myoglobin. She stoops down to look at it, then up at the ceiling. A chute empties out right above the pan; she guesses it’s THRONE’s food dish. A rusted cage in the corner, sized perhaps for a large dog, not for anything three meters tall. A slot in the wall to allow objects to be passed back and forth.

Selene turns back toward the door and notices blood splattering the walls. She steps back into the observation chamber, crushing a stray syringe underfoot. Someone’s had their head slammed into the back wall; blood and brain matter radiate out from the central point of impact. She nudges the body onto its back with her foot. Facial reconstruction algorithms activate, lines flickering over the body’s face for a few moments before fizzling out.

“Reconstruction is impossible, given the amount of damage,” Brutus says. “We would need to find another method to identify them.”

“It’s not my first priority,” Selene says, turning to leave. Cleanup isn’t her department; in this case, she doubts anyone will come back to bury the bodies and bleach the carpets. “But if we know what happened here, we can probably find THRONE.”

She’s nearly out of the door when Brutus says, “It appears as though the enclosure is the lowest floor. We would have the best access to the elevator from here.”

She turns on her heel, faster than her armor should allow. “Good catch. Thanks.”

The elevator doors in the observation room yield quickly. Selene’s hands find easy purchase in extant gouges, and she pulls it apart effortlessly. She’s face to face with the elevator, crumpled inward. Blood is the only sign there was someone inside.

“Whoever’s in here, we can’t identify them,” Selene sighs. “Even if we pry this apart, the person inside will be mangled.”

“It is curious,” Brutus says as Selene exits. “In so many aspects, this is standard Mutichiral Coalition construction.”

“Go on.” She enters the locker room, gives her armor a wash in the chemical shower. Even if it’s security theater, she doesn’t want to track anything into the Slumbering Fury.

“It would be suitable for a research outpost,” he continues, Selene listening intently as she steps over a decapitated drone. “If this were an outpost for chemists, mathematicians, field biologists, or simulation engineers, it would be suitable.”

“What are you getting at?” she asks, glancing over at the server tower as she walks. It’s still humming away, and Legion is still working inside it.

“This is a facility intended to contain a dangerous animal. The dossier said it is intelligent and capable of changing form.” The screens are still filled with static, the body is still slumped over the console. “We can assume it is roughly three meters tall, and that it is responsible for all the dead bodies we have encountered thus far.”

Selene doesn’t respond. She can tell from his cadence — the slight modulations calculated for effect, because everything an artificial intelligence does is calculated for effect and nothing is ever involuntary — that he’s building up to something. She almost wants to sit on one of the beds and listen fully, but she needs to get back to the ship. Onward.

“Everything we have seen so far is woefully inadequate for this purpose. It should not have been able to break the viewing glass; even if it had been able to, it should not have been able to breach the security door.” As Brutus speaks, Selene imagines some large explanatory feline, stalking its point through the underbrush before pouncing, sealing the argument with a bloody QED.

She’s entering the office workspace floor when he says, “This facility was under-engineered for the task at hand to an extent I cannot explain. It strikes me as—” He interrupts himself, a clicking sound as his audio levels briefly jump to zero. “There is someone else here.” His synthetic voice is lowered, as if the stranger could overhear him when he’s speaking directly into Selene’s cochlear nerve.

Selene had noticed before he said it. It’s a stranger with long auburn hair and thick, square-rimmed glasses — so cracked it’s hard to tell how she could ever see through them. Her sweater’s bloodied. She’s leaning in front of a terminal, eyebrows knitted together. Selene can just barely make out the words DATASERVER LINK SEVERED in her glasses, the red of the error screen reflected in her sweat and grime. The stranger’s tapping at the screen with increasing frequency and force. She glances up, then back down at the screen.

The stranger looks back up with a jolt, falling backward against the workstation behind her. “Who—” she begins, before Selene cuts her off, approaching with a hand outstretched.

“Captain Selene Morningstar, Seraph-class investigator with the MCC Nightfall Blades branch,” she says, titles and organizations coming out of her mouth as if they don’t taste acrid. “I’ve been sent here to see what happened with a specimen that escaped.” She pauses. “Are you hurt?”

“Asphodel Verrine,” the stranger says, taking Selene’s hand and pulling herself up.“And, ah, no, I’m fine. Please don’t trouble yourself.” She glances away sheepishly, looking down at her sweater. Selene notices how poorly it fits, too large for someone so compact. “It bled worse than it hurt.”

“Still, I have bandages on my ship, if you need them,” Selene says. “I doubt it’s safe to stay here, anyway. For all we know the specimen’s still here.”

Asphodel nods. “Lead the way, Captain.”

Selene turns toward the door, waving her hand. “Just Selene is fine.” Asphodel follows her out.

They’re halfway up the staircase when Selene hears something behind them. Whipping around, she sees it — the obsolete security drone getting to its feet, unlubricated joints creaking with the whine of metal on metal. Brutus says something she doesn’t hear as she rushes toward it, moving past Asphodel so quickly she almost shoves her into the wall. Asphodel looks back, affronted, when she sees the bipedal figure leveling a gun-hand at her. She takes off running up the stairs as Selene grabs the drone’s wrist. Servos whine under the stress, and—

It fires. The first bullet hits concrete. It doesn’t get a second. Selene wrenches the hand off the arm in a shower of sparks and kicks hard at a metal torso, which crunches against the wall. A knee to a head and the drone’s incapacitated, its aluminum skull crumpled inward. She tosses the hand to the side like trash.

When she gets to the top of the stairs, Asphodel’s looking through the tiny window in the door at her. She opens the door and Asphodel says, “I’m glad you weren’t hurt, I’m sorry I ran, I—”

Selene cuts her off. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got armor, you don’t. It was the right move.”

Asphodel doesn’t protest further. They board the ship without further incident.

“Selene, we must discuss—” Brutus begins to say into Selene’s ear as she’s removing her armor and putting it away, but Selene cuts him off with a whispered, “Later.” She glances over at Asphodel, who’s looking at the various fixtures of the ship with interest.

“How do these lights work?” she asks, staring with a hand on her chin at one of the ship’s wall-mounted lights, a cloudy, slowly-shifting turquoise Selene doesn’t pay much attention to anymore. “They don’t seem like they’re LED or fluorescent...”

Selene opens her mouth to respond, but Brutus is faster. His holographic avatar appears behind Asphodel, and his voice comes out over the ship’s speakers when he says, “Engineered bioluminescent algae. They provide both illumination and oxygen production.” Asphodel turns, looking for the source of the voice until she sees him. He tilts his head and gives what might be a smile, if his scarf didn’t cover his mouth. He bows, intangibly projected forehead a couple centimeters from clipping into her torso. “Brutus-Athena. It is a pleasure to meet you.”

She glances between Brutus and Selene before saying, “It’s nice to meet you too.” Selene thinks she sees a hint of some instinctive fight-or-flight response in Asphodel’s eyes, but it’s quickly gone, and she can’t tell if it was a trick of the light or really there.

Or simple projection. Asphodel turns to her. “May I use your shower? I don’t want to intrude, but—”

Selene interrupts. “Of course. It’s right over there. I’ll grab you some spare clothes.” She pauses before getting them out of the wardrobe, turning back to look at Asphodel. “You sure you don’t need to be bandaged up before then?”

“Oh, no, really, it’s fine. See?” Asphodel pulls down the collar of her sweater revealing a recent wound, a slash right under her shoulder. It isn’t healed over yet, but it’s not bleeding. Judging by how Asphodel carries her arm Selene figures there’s no nerve damage. It’s a shallow wound; it might leave a scar but that’s the worst she’d expect.

Selene looks away, turning back to the wardrobe. “Just make sure you wash it out.” She hands Asphodel a set of her extra pajamas.

Once she can hear the shower head’s hiss through the walls, Selene leans against the wall and says, “What’s on your mind, Brutus?”

“When you returned to the kitchen after examining the enclosure, Doctor Stephenson’s body had been moved from the stairwell outside. You noticed it as well, correct?”

Selene nods. “Yeah, I did.”

“This implies that either THRONE was in hiding and came out to move the body, or—”

“—THRONE disguised itself as the body, and moved to the office once I passed.” Selene finishes Brutus’s theory for him, kicking her foot against the wall.

“It is the most plausible explanation.”

She sighs, closes her eyes, and rests her head against the wall. “I had considered it as soon as I saw her, but... It’s not airtight.”

“Am I correct in assuming you are aware of the risks in allowing her to stay here?”

“Of course. If there’s a chance she’s not THRONE, though, I don’t want to leave her out there.”

“And if she is?”

Selene crosses her arms. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’m not making any moves until we know for sure.”

“I respect that and will not act preemptively. Please be careful, Selene.”

“I will, love.”