It was like walking into the gullet of an enormous mollusk.
Kyla swept her torch beam across ribbed walls oozing mucus and studied the mechanical components merged with the bioship’s organic tissues.
Her salvage crew had discovered the ammonoid orbiting a dead star in the uncharted regions, its nacreous hull showing clear signs of battle damage.
It had been designed by gene splicers, made from the spiral shell of a bioengineered organism and fitted with devastating weapons—a dreadnought built for the plague wars that had ravaged this sector of space centuries ago.
Kyla led her crew mates, Xin and Varo, down an esophageal passage deeper into the ship, bioluminescent clusters emitting a noxious green glow. Still no sign of life. Her boots squelched in a thick substance pooling beneath her.
Internal grav nodes—each containing a stabilized micro black hole—generated a uniform field throughout the ship, negating external forces.
The field’s orientation changed as they neared the core of the ship, and Kyla had to rely on her space suit’s sensors to navigate the twisting passages.
They moved through a series of organic chambers supported by metal scaffolding, which might have been cargo storage areas, and into the habitation modules.
“What do you think happened here?” said Varo, passing his torch beam over abandoned personal effects and the scattered detritus of human living.
Xin focused their beam on a blood-stained wall and grimaced. “Nothing good.”
“If we can get to the cortex, we can access the ship’s data recorder and learn more,” Kyla said, unnerved by the blood but trying not to show it. “We shouldn’t waste time on speculation.”
A find like this would be worth a fortune. A living relic from the plague wars. This could be the solution to all their financial problems.
In the cortex, Kyla plugged a throbbing umbilical into a data port in her wrist and accessed the recorder.
Flashes of horrific images overloaded her senses: Warped and mutilated flesh. Blood spurting from severed arteries. A human pupil splitting like a cell undergoing mitosis.
She withdrew the organic cable and clutched her head, sharp pain shooting behind her eyes.
“What is it?” Varo asked, rushing to her aid. “Are you OK?”
“I’m not sure.” Kyla leaned against a curving wall, her head spinning, grotesque afterimages burned into her vision. “The data must be corrupted.”
A deep, rumbling sound—like digestive noises slowed down and amplified to the point they were felt more than heard—echoed through the passages feeding into the cortex.
“What the shit was that?” Xin said, unhooking an industrial cutting laser from their belt.
Kyla felt something call out to her from the depths of her subconscious. Something ancient. Primordial. A terrible hatred awakening…
She lost her balance and tumbled to the floor.
Varo knelt over her, his amphibious features visible through his liquid-filled helmet’s faceplate. “Captain! Captain, can you hear me?”
His voice sounded distant, tinny.
“We should get out of here, now.” Xin looked like they were on the verge of panic.
Varo helped Kyla to her feet. She struggled to maintain her balance, but he hooked one arm around her for support.
“Let’s get back to the ship. We can drop a salvage beacon and come back after we get you checked out.”
Kyla felt too overwhelmed to argue.
They took the passage back the way they had come, but after a while, it became clear something was off. They should have reached the habitation modules by now, but instead they seemed to be entering a new part of the ship.
“We’re going the wrong way,” Kyla managed, teeth clenched against the sick rising in the back of her throat.
“Impossible.” Varo checked the holo map inside his helmet. “We’ve retraced our path precisely.”
“Then something’s changed…”
The walls were starting to show signs of degeneration, mottled shipflesh stippled with something black and metallic, like fish scales glinting in a rainbow hue.
“Is that what I think it is?” Xin said.
Kyla’s heart pounded against her ribs. The cyber-organic plague was every salvager’s greatest fear. Thought to have been eradicated, traces of it still lurked in the void between stars, growing. Evolving.
“We have to go back,” she said. “Try another route.”
They retraced their steps back to the cortex, but instead of arriving where expected, they found they had traveled deeper into the bioship, as if the ship itself were herding them into its bowels.
“I thought ammonoids were immune,” Varo said.
“The plague has had centuries to mutate as it moves from host to host. When this ship was grown, it probably was immune. But over time…”
She tried not to think about what she’d been exposed to when she connected to the recorder. Had she been infected by some latent spores? Her inoculations were up to date, but there was no telling how this strain had adapted.
The bioluminescent clusters grew fainter as they continued down the narrow passage.
A sphincter separating the passage from the engine core puckered open, and they climbed through, emerging in a cavernous chamber filled with pulsating cables and globular machines webbed in organic growth.
“This isn’t the cortex,” Varo said.
Tendrils sprouting from the walls of the chamber gave the impression of a deep sea anemone.
Kyla shone her torch onto them, which brought an immediate reaction, the tendrils curling and writhing as if the light caused them pain.
At the base of the growths, where they merged into a single organic mass, she could make out the shapes of human features, mouths gaping open in silent screams. Tongues thrashing. Teeth chattering.
“I think we found the crew.”
“Fuck this!” Xin raised their cutting laser and opened fire, the bright red beam burning the tips of the nearest tendrils.
The entire mass recoiled, and the floor shifted beneath Kyla’s feet. The dark presence inside her grew stronger, a curtain of black webs falling over her vision.
One of the tendrils whipped out and knocked the laser from Xin’s hands, then curled around their midsection, lifting them off their feet.
“Xin!” Varo tried to grab them, but he was too slow.
The tendril dragged Xin into the shivering mass, where other tendrils extruded sharp spurs and began to rip their space suit apart, exposing bare flesh to the sea of ravenous mouths. Xin’s screams echoed off the walls of the engine core as they were devoured by the abomination.
Varo moved back toward the sphincter that had brought them into this chamber, but it was sealed tight.
A tendril grabbed him, pulling him into the air.
Helpless, Kyla watched the frightened expression in his wide, almond-shaped eyes as other tendrils coiled around his limbs and pulled him apart, blood and entrails spilling onto the gnashing incisors below.
Defeated, Kyla fell to her knees. She felt herself slipping, her mind giving way to the darkness.
Hot tears streamed down her cheeks. Her breathing grew shallow. “Just kill me already.”
A tendril dropped from above and wrapped itself around her torso, squeezing. It punched through her helmet’s faceplate. Alarms blared at the loss of atmospheric pressure. It attached itself to her neck, a leech-like mouth biting into her flesh.
When the pain subsided, she felt a sense of calm wash over her. Then a rush of endorphins. A pleasant haze surrounded her, and she could hear the many voices calling out from the dark within.
The abomination spoke to her. Not with words. But images. Sensations.
Ancient memories crashed over her like waves, and her self-awareness eroded, her inner voice dissolving into the gestalt. Her fear evaporated, and at last came understanding.
She felt a terrible loneliness. Isolation. A yearning for connection. The abomination probed her mind, searching for her place of origin. Soon it found what it was looking for—a lush, blue planet on the edge of the spiral arm, teeming with life. Her home.
Somewhere deep inside the bioship, its somnolent engines awoke, power surging through the network of organic conduits threading its hull.
The gravity shifted under Kyla’s knees, and she knew the ship was on the move for the first time in countless centuries.
The fading, human part of her consciousness feared what was to come. But the growing, alien part of her bristled in anticipation.
It would not be alone for much longer…
###
M.T. Preston, Jr. 