Carrion Stars

By

Jarrod McCutcheon 

Chapter 1

“CONDEMNED REGISTERED. COORDINATES CONFIRMED.”

Kioma was not an optimist. One look through the voidglass porthole, a few glances at the wretched panic of the condemned around him. That was all it took to know death’s pale maw was open, and utterly famished. 

“VOIDDROP COMMENCING IN THREE. TWO. ONE. THE DRIFT ENDURES.”

Charges detonated in triplicate. The blast shield shrieked as the world inverted in a violent descent. Kioma glanced up, watching his home bleach into a formless blur of metal rings. 

“ATMOSPHERIC ENTRY; T-MINUS TEN SECONDS.”

The artificial voice hissed sparks as its mechanism tore itself apart, grinding words into a metallic funeral hymn. Each mangled syllable lingered, worming its way into the cavities and gaps in the voidpod’s patchwork hull like a reverberating deathbell. Like a promise. 

Kioma had heard the warning before. He couldn’t say the same for the damned souls around him though, three more yellow jumpsuits to share in his fate. Three more notches for the Drift. 

His eyes twitched upwards as the overhead supports chattered. An entire row of bolts rattled loose from their sockets, falling like steel rain. His breaths hitched as the entire pod rattled, gripped and shaken by some gravitational colossus. 

Kioma knew what came next. Forewarning did nothing to assuage his terror.

“ATMOSPHERIC BREACH. BRACE FOR DESCENT.”

His feet pushed firm against the metal floor as the voidpod hurled plantside. Vibrations rumbled through his legs, strong enough to shatter bone. The entire pod rocked in a crescendo of screeching metal, thrown in the magnetic currents of an orbital storm. Panels and pipework across the interior came loose, spraying misted coolant through the room. A scream blended into the vessel’s violent decay. 

This voidpod left nothing to the imagination, nor to hope. The engineer that scraped it together had given it a material rating half that of Kioma’s last descent. A rating that might as well have been a fission-round through the skull. Four inches of patchwork decking-steel, held together by reused bolts, tape, and eco-welding. Four inches that had been five at launch, before orbital debris dislodged the aft-blast shield. 

The hull groaned in agony as decayed air singed its skin, charring away every inch of exposed wire, insulation and component not rated for two-and-a-half thousand degrees kelvin. The whole structure trembled as another plate dislodged from the aft. Two more inches of steel, and the pod would become a crucible. 

At least it would be quick. 

Through the porthole above him, Kioma made out the other two voidpods. Trailing nearly a hundred metres behind each other, the closest broke out into a vicious spin the moment it breached the atmosphere. Guidance fin malfunction — one had come loose, bent at an angle. A sheared bolt, a sabotaged wing, the reason didn’t matter; it was an execution all the same. 

Small chunks of debris broke away first, before friction peeled the hull like a rotten fruit. Oxygen-fed fury engulfed the pod, the pale black expanse behind it morphing into a bleached grey as the atmosphere swallowed it whole. 

Kioma’s teeth clenched as he watched the pod’s bulkhead rocket into the air. In an instant, the vessel seared into a hollow grave. Four souls snuffed faster than he could blink. 

He closed his eyes for a moment, the limit of respect he could offer to such worthless deaths. 

Debris from the voidpod splayed out like orbital buckshot. Some burnt up in fiery milliseconds, larger pieces screamed into the void in a violent display of molten steel.

Kioma’s eyes narrowed on the largest chunk, watching it spiral out to the side, and straight into the other pod. The impact sent its stabilisers veering of course, careening out of view. Another scream stabbed at his ears, drowned by the vicious crash of the atmospheric-shield coming apart. Kioma felt the heat instantly. It seared into his hazard gear like he was held to a furnace. He strained against the penal chains holding him down. His every movement fought for precious inches of distance. Sparks churned into the pod, lost in the mist of dust and aerosolised coolant. This was it.

“TERRESTRIAL IMPACT IMMINENT. BRACE.”

Kioma readied himself for his final moments. Reverse thrusters fired, crushing his body against the seat. His eyes flicked up as a pale white seeped through the pod’s voidglass. He winced as a colossal white sun stretched into view. Its malignant presence drowned the pod in shades of hideous grey. Kioma cursed as he stared the decaying supergiant down, bracing his knuckles against the chains.

“Just get it over with.”

He muttered the final word as his sight wrenched into blackness. 

All he could see as he jolted into the void was the pale white outline of the Carrion Star, scorched into his mind.

Chapter 2 

A chorus of alarms wrenched Kioma’s eyelids open to the ruined voidpod. Sparks fell from every corner of the pod not hissing with coolant. Pale white drowned the impact alarm’s pulsing reds. Smoke churned from the ventilation — at least the filters of his hazard suit would keep it at bay.

Kioma’s legs buckled as he strained against his binds. The fused latch of his penal harness anchored him against the pod’s warming metal. A circular outline still lingered in the dead centre of his view. 

It always did.

Movement caught his eye as a figure rose across the pod. Chains rattled from their harness. With shaking hands, the woman crouched to snatch a stash of items nestled beneath a centre console. 

“It's McRhea, right?” Kioma yelled, his voice choked by the bulky apparatus ensnaring his face. “Harness’ jammed, get the saw!”

“Yeah yeah, gimme a sec,” the woman growled, scrounging through her toolkit. She drew her weapon slowly; an 8-inch lascutter, overcharged by exo-class arc cells. The saw’s blade whirred into singeing existence.

Kioma scowled as McRhea moved over him, the superheated blade of the engineer’s tool loosely angled to his throat. “Go on then,” he dared. Something akin to disappointment rose as the blade stopped shy of his Hazard suit, charred metal dust staining his chest as the harness fell away. 

He grunted as he stood, pushing his limbs into a stretch. Each of his ancient joints cracked with sickly squelches. His forty five cycles hadn’t been kind. 

He kicked a foot beneath his seat, dragging out a security vest by its strap. Light ballistic armour, topped with a D-38 Fission Rifle slung upon braided electrical cables. A fleeting relief settled over him as the cold steel filled his gloves. The familiar grooves of its hexabored grip came tarnished by centuries of overuse.

“Fucking finally!” A voice shrieked from beside the bulkhead, high and whining like Kioma’s tinnitus made manifest. “Get me the hell out of this you fucking scrapeaters!”

McRhea paced the pod, lascutter humming. 

“You so much as scratch me with that thing and I—”

“Illia,” McRhea growled, the engineer’s com-modulator twisting her voice with static. “Shut. The fuck. Up.”

The Navigator squirmed as the blade carved through her harness. The moment the chains broke, she scrambled away like an insect, recovering her equipment with a string of deliberately unsubtle curses. Orbital scans and site maps spilled from her case. She gathered them up with a manic haste. 

“Wake your ass up, Cowen!” Illia’s voice came even higher through the static of her respirator hood. Each of her breaths pushed through retrofitted life-support filters with a serpentine twist, its opaque visor hiding whatever hideous expression lurked underneath. She kicked her pack, the muzzle of an ancient firearm peeking from an unzipped pocket. “Deckscum! Get up! I’m not carrying all this shit!”

Cowen stirred slowly, pulling away from his chain harness. The red cross of a triage jumpsuit paled in the starlight. 

“I—” He dropped to his knees, hands rushing to his throat. 

“You puke, you’re dead!” Kioma yelled. “Keep it in, moron!” 

McRhea rushed down, holding the young medicaid steady. “Breathe, kid. Slow.”

Kioma rolled his eyes, pacing towards the bulkhead as he checked his chronometer. 

0803/ 1954. 

Eight hours until nightfall, if the rotational calculations were correct. “Get him up,” Kioma grumbled over his shoulder. They’d lost time in the void. “We need to move.”

“Give him a second,” McRhea spat back. “He’s just a kid.”

Kioma’s eyes narrowed, grip adjusting on his fission-rifle. “A dead kid, if we don’t clear the Belt before stardown.”

“I—I’ll be okay,” Cowen mumbled, making an effort to stand. McRhea guided him upright, handing him a slingpack of braided cables when he seemed comfortable on his feet. “That landing just… fuck.”

“Whatever, let’s just get this over with.” Illia fumbled a grip around her ballistic sidearm, its rust infinitely older than its wielder. She slunk back as McRhea passed, sporting a sleek and battered plasma-slicer. The blue glow of its magazine hummed in the voidpod’s shadows.

Kioma readied himself, weapon raised as he paced to the bulkhead release. “Four down,” he grumbled, grinding a notch into his stock with a loose nail. Four of five, a sentence nearly served. 

“On you, boss,” McRhea grunted. 

Kioma nodded as he slung his weapon. His gloves felt slick against the bulkhead’s rusted wheel. It came open with an ear-carving groan, hissing as the air-pressure neutralised. His eyes fought to adjust to the blinding whites beyond, swirls of landscape coming slowly through his visor. With a deep, metallic breath, he stepped out into the pale wastes.

“One more to go.”

Chapter 3

Kioma did not know the name of this world. In truth, he didn’t care to know. Designations decayed just the same as any living thing under the Pale Embrace. Names died. Like people, like fuel.

On his first voidfall, he’d wanted to know the name of his grave. Even bothered on the second. Now, the knowledge seemed more of a burden. Another irrelevant thing to be snuffed out by the stars. 

But this planet was different to the last few. Not a barren desert, or an arctic hellscape. Forests, as the highdeckers called them. Not fields of lifeless stone, but fields of stone life. Different, and yet the same. 

Their landing zone was three clicks off course — away from the Belt and into the depths of a mountainous reserve. Whatever exotic colours the forest once held were long since lost, bleached out by the starlight. Mega-ferns dominated the rolling hills of their landing zone. Their towering stems at least offered reprieve from the supergiant’s unyielding glare. Enormous leaves hung from their own branches, each the size of four men. The Carrion star had long mummified them into desiccated husks. A mercy, by the universe’s standards.

Kioma’s boots rolled over uneven terrain, trekking uphill, magnetic south. The ground felt different to the hollow metal floors of his home, to the uniformity of the ageless voidsteel walkways. Dirt, someone had called the inconsistent mixture at his feet. Filled with tiny, unseen things that existed to consume, existed to decay. He kept to the rocks where he could.

McRhea and Cowen followed his path. They placed their feet in the marks his boots left, grips shifting on their weaponry. Illia shuffled behind them. She tugged at the straps of her massive pack, grumbling with each step taken towards the Belt. 

“Navigator,” Kioma grunted as they crested a formation of pale, chalky rock. Hollow foliage and distant mist blocked the horizon, the outlines of something unnatural peering through the canopy.

“Say fucking please,” Illia growled back. “Just once, doesn’t hu—”

Kioma’s turn silenced her. “Which way to the Belt?”

“I don’t fucking know.”

Cowen shifted, gloves squeaking against the scatter-las in his offhand. “That’s your job though, to—”

Illia loomed over the medicaid. “Does it fucking matter? It’s south. Go south.”

“We need the gap, if we miss it we’re screwed,” McRhea growled.

Kioma nodded, three opaque visors turning to Illia. 

“Fine, fine—” the navigator hissed as she withdrew her maps, a navigational overlay scanning their surroundings. Its blue lasers, even in the shade, came pale and white. 

Kioma observed the map as it unfurled. Digital constructs marked the location of their goals. First, the last coordinates of the seventh Condemned wave, and the tools they’d left. Then, the deep-mantle forge, and their true purpose: fission drives. The spark of the furnace that once lit an entire globe. Should they succeed, these drives would see the Drift to its next system. Maybe even the next after, if the stars felt merciful. 

Distance gauges ran estimates. Two days on foot was the approximation. The Drift would give three before sending another team. Whittling the crew down, twelve by twelve. Soon the condemned would run dry. Then the ‘volunteers’ would fall in their place. 

At least the other waves had a full crew, twelve souls. Kioma was already down to four.

They watched as the overlay closed in on their location. Outside of the capital city, beyond reach of automated orbital countermeasures, but beyond the planet’s Belt. 

Expansive cityscapes marred the land around them but their route was not through the bleached ruins. Those would be avoided until the capital. Until there was no alternative.

Once more the overlay homed in. Lasers flickered, honing, honing — then nothing. It simply froze, and faded. 

“We need to be higher up,” Illia grumbled after a moment. “Somewhere without as much shit in the way. Can’t get a fix here.”

Cowen tugged at his suit’s collar. “Briefing said to avoid the highlands—”

“Did it now?” Illia cackled. “Lovely. Guess we’ll just stand around waiting for the Drift to notch us on the decks, you stupid scrapeating—”

“Back the fuck off,” Kioma warned. He panned a glance over the landscape. Something jutted from the canopy, uneven, sloped. A high patch of rock, a hill, where the Mega-Ferns broke. “There.”

He gave no warning before setting off. Cowen lurched to follow, McRhea not far behind. Nearly a minute crept by before he heard Illia’s pedantic footsteps fall in with the others.

Kioma’s grumble twisted through his filter. “Fucking highdecker.”

Chapter 4

The pale sun bore down on the open paths marching up the hill. Exposed rockery, mounds of dirt, short patches of exotic macroflora. All scorched, bleached, rendered bare by the Carrion Star’s embrace. 

Boots crunched through patches of dessicated stems, brittle chunks of hollow rock. As the four condemned marched, the ground itself seemed to fall apart beneath them. Their footprints marked deeper, and deeper.

Kioma traced the length of his fission rifle. Fingers slipped in the grooves of countless notches, engravings. Names marked over names, lost to a sea of souls condensed into the worn metal. His fingers stopped at the freshest set. Kaeda. He’d plied the weapon from seventeen cold, overgrown fingers. Hopefully it would serve him better. 

The weight of three spare magazines of depleted plutonium hung from his bandolier, besides a container for the access autoscribe. A can-sized cylinder of microcircuits and lasgrids upon which the entire mission relied, lost with the first voidfall, ferried further by the next, and so on until them. It was their only way inside the deep-mantle complex. Their only way to freedom.

But that was a problem for later; now, came the forest. 

“Keep up,” Kioma spat over his shoulder, powering ahead of his charges. Adrenaline kept his fatigue at bay but he could feel the strain in his muscles. And his tumours. McRhea pushed on behind him, legs shaking, stoicism or pride keeping her steady. Cowen at least had some sense of vitality. Age and role worked in tandem as he made easy work of the hill. Illia, though, made every step taken vertically a verbal spectacle.

“Fuck this suncursed heap, can bend over and take my—”

“Five. Seconds.” Kioma’s voice simmered with rage. “Can you go five seconds without talking?”

McRhea snorted. “If you walked as well as you whined, we’d be there by now.”

Kioma could feel Illia’s glare through her visor. “Easy for you lowdeck shitstains to say, spend your whole lives scaling piles of rust for the scraps we toss down. Those of us worth a fuck use elevators.”

Cowen stopped, head tilting. “The hell is an elevator?”

“If you were worth a fuck…” McRhea slowed, shoulders squared as she turned towards Illia. “You wouldn’t be down here with us shitstains, would you?” 

Illia’s fingers curled, drumming against the grip of her sidearm with a malicious rhythm. “Say that again, tumourborn, I fucking dare—”

The open barrel of a fission rifle cut her voice at the word. Kioma’s weapon hissed, coiled magrails boiling the very air as they glowed in a violent display. 

“If one of you so much as twitches your weapon at the other, I will leave your stump to bleach in the sun.”

The three hazard suits below shrank in his shadow. Illia and McRhea stepped apart, Cowen slinking innocently back. 

Kioma’s weapon sizzled, then relented. 

They hiked in silence until the peak. 

Kioma’s ankles screamed as they crested the hill’s final stretch of rock. Crumbling microgranite tumbled down as he dragged himself up, and onto the peak. He slowed, rifle readied, and took the first steps out onto a plateau. A circle of plain white stone surrounded a crater of black, stilled liquid. A chunk of rock came loose at his feet, rolling into the silent pool. It cracked the fluid’s surface like glass. Then, painstakingly slow, it sank into the depths. 

The pale glow of McRhea’s plasma-slicer reflected from the fluid’s surface. “What is that?”

Kioma held her back. “Nothing we should mess with.”

As Illia’s panting rounded the peak, lasers scried through the plateau. The world unfurled in a display of light that carved the rockery into gridsquares. Continents became tectonic overplates, overplates narrowed into sectors, sectors into regions. Kioma stepped back from the crater. Something moved in the corner of his eye before he turned.

A slow ripple washed across the ultradense fluid. Another crack. This time from below the surface. 

Reflex snapped Kioma’s arms into motion. Magrails growled, white-hot conductors searing the air as he raised the fission rifle to bear, and pulled the trigger. 

Boom.

The sickly fluid erupted in a cloud of searing tar. Organic matter traced the explosion as something roared upwards. 

Something alive.

Rising from the wet, sloshing depths beneath the hardened surface, a beast of shrivelled macroflora screamed to life. Stems like limbs, leaves like razors, the thing sang its deathly chorus as it flowered in a whirlwind of corruption. An enormous head of pale matter twisted from its core, prehensile, mouthed. Wooden teeth snapped. Black fluid oozed from its floral jaws. 

The fission rifle roared with Kioma’s voice. “Startouched!”

Chapter 5

Organic blades lashed as the condemned scattered. The macroflora aberration grew with each second, its massive form slinking from the depths coated in congealed spools of black tar. Kioma’s rifle hummed, another round of fissile plutonium rocketing through magrails in its hyperferric casing. The air screamed as the superheated round whipped across the peak. A blazing white trail followed it through the aberration’s trunk, off-white sap splattering into the air as the round detonated. The beast surged through the mist.

Kioma lept. A cloud of crumbling granite erupted into the air behind him as the aberration’s body slammed into the ground. 

“Cover him!” McRhea shouted.

Beams of pale plasma hummed as they carved through the air, rending plant-flesh into scorched chunks. Thorned limbs split from their writhing stems, shredded apart in a mist of aerosolised organics. 

“Cowen, get my back!” McRhea rushed as the limbs faltered, charging her slicer into a single-beam. Aiming her weapon for the aberration’s core, Cowen’s scatter-las fell silent as a prehensile limb whipped across the peak. McRhea tumbled as it cracked against her skull, the appendage circling her leg as it withdrew. The thick, muscular vine held her limp frame aloft, slowly carrying her toward rows of wooden teeth snapping hungrily together.

Kioma’s aim locked on the creature’s exposed throat, but McRhea’s body dangled in the way.

“One of you, get her free!”

Illia lurked at the peak’s border, firing only on anything coming close. Cowen hid beneath a rocky overhang. 

“Useless cunts!” He reached down to his calf for his backup plan. A support beam from the wreckage of his second Voidpod, sharpened meticulously down to a razor edge. His joints cracked as he ran, makeshift blade raised. 

The aberration’s floral maw slipped around McRhea’s head, pale ichor dripping down her hazard suit. Kioma cut down a massive tendril, slicing another apart as it tried for his waist. He leapt as the macroflora made to crunch through McRhea’s skull. His blade slipped easily into the thing's bare throat.

From maw to stem, voidsteel rent the creature open, an acidic soup slushing to the ground below. 

Gargled screams whimpered from its sagging maw as McRhea tumbled limp to the stone. Limbs retreated, its stem curling, desperately slinking back into the tarpit. 

Kioma’s boot crashed down behind its head before it could withdraw. His fission rifle hummed, superheated barrel cooking plant flesh as he pressed it against the aberration’s core.

“This is mercy, freak.”

 Scorching plutonium made mist of the hollow stem. The macrofloral beast roared its last, a stuttered, wailing death cry, before its limbs crashed to the ground. They didn’t rise again.

Dead.

Kioma panted as he stepped back, stowing his blade. Bones crunched beneath his boots, hollow, brittle, in shapes both human and not. He stopped shy of McRhea, crouching down to check over her suit. “Is your seal intact?” His grip tensed on his blade.

“I…” McRhea pushed up to roll onto her side. “Not… not compromised,” she mumbled, one hand clutching the back of her head. “Saved my ass… thanks.”

Kioma winced as he rose to burning feet. His patience had bled dry. “Illia, map. Now.”

The navigator was busy kicking the macroflora’s limp stem, dirtying her boots with pitch-black sap. “You sure this startouched fuck is actually dead?”

Kioma didn’t bother to answer.

“Whatever.”

Lasers scried through the plateau, Kioma’s bulk pacing through it as he made for the outcrop. He pulled Cowen out by the ankle. Dust and pebbles scraped the Medicaid’s suit. 

“The fuck, hey! What’re you—”

Kioma dropped Cowen shy of the aberration’s maw. Snatching him by the throat, he held his head to the rows of razor teeth jutting from the plant’s carrion.

“You pull shit like that again—”

Cowen tried to squirm free, Kioma’s grip only tightening further. 

“—and I will kill you myself. Everyone fights. Everyone!”

“B-but—”

“EVERYONE. FIGHTS.”

Cowen shivered in Kioma’s shadow. “Y—yes sir.” 

He left the Medicaid in the tar, dragging his aching joints towards the overlay. It whirred, pinpointed, settled. A single blue laser carved through the valley’s map, firing off towards unnatural shapes jutting out above the forest. The Belt. 

“Did it work?” McRhea asked, limping back to join the group. 

Illia nodded, deep and sincere. “Yeah,” she hissed, head twitching. “It says to go fucking south.”

Chapter 6

They reached the Belt as the star began to fall. There was no fabled sunset, no glorious colours weaving through the cloudless sky. Only a dimming of the pale glow that twisted unyielding across the world’s surface. 

Kioma had been born into the Embrace. Like every soul around him, he’d never known the stars to be merciful. Tales passed down by station-elders and ravers cried of ancient days when the stars had birthed life, not taken it. Where their shades offered warmth and relief, not unending agony. Their validity mattered none to those left on the Drift. The stars were pale now. They were death, now. 

“Belt should be over the ridge,” Illia muttered. The opaque visor of her suit offered no evidence, but Kioma knew his crew was exhausted. 

The Drift’s faux gravity could only fend off muscle-decay to such an extent. Being planetside was far more demanding than life on the orbiting rings of his home. Only Cowen seemed resistant to the withering of actual gravity. It almost made Kioma long for his own youth — before he’d been condemned, but at forty-five, he was all but ancient. The tumours in his spine were older than some of his peers. 

Flora thinned at the ridge’s peak, but it didn’t take long to realise why. Dirt slowly gave way to microshards of charred metal. The ground became a viscous slush of rust and scrap that moved underfoot like a scuttling horde of insects. The few macrofloral structures left seemed to have been peeled back as if by las-cutter. Voidsteel dust coated each like a powdered varnish. 

That was when they peaked the ridge. And that was when they saw the Belt. 

Millions of satellites, stations, and orbital docks lay one-over-the-other in a colossal equatorial graveyard. The inverse trench of ruin and scrap was visible from orbit, a motif across all but the least inhabited of worlds. Stretching at least two-hundred metres up and as far as the horizon would allow in either direction, this endless wall bisected the planet with an endless scorched wasteland. The final product of the decay of human systems. A self aligned knife, thrust into the jugular by entropy.

“Fucking hell…” McRhea’s voice shook with awe. True scale was something few could process before their first trip planetside. From orbit, everything seemed so beautifully distant. So inconsequentially small.

“Stay alert,” Kioma growled, his eyes trailing a voidpod in his periphery. From the third fall. One that ended minutes after its landing. “Watch the ruins.”

Illia chortled. “The fuck for?”

Kioma’s finger brushed over the names etched into his weapon. “Death.

Their descent was met with silence. The Belt’s trench seemed empty, devoid of life, even more so than the forests. But Kioma had seen what festered in the darkness. What could lie in wait in these fetid, entropying worlds.

The Belt groaned as something impacted a few kilometres down its length. A smaller satellite, charred but not chewed by the thinned atmosphere. Pathways through this behemoth were few, orbital scans showing only scattered tunnels and inconsistent routes through the rotting hulls of the largest voidship wrecks. But here before them lay an anomaly — a gap in its length, an enormous derelict voidgate holding open a tunnel through the scrap.

Kioma held his breath as he gazed up at its heights. 

“Is this thing even stable?” Cowen whimpered as the structure shifted around them. 

Kioma glanced across the gateway, to the scoring across its plasteel frame. Pockets of charred voidstone glinted from beneath the strange obelisk. Ancient, by even the Drift’s standards. “Its been here longer than any of us have been alive.”

“Looks seconds from collapse,” Illia scoffed. 

McRhea approached the wreckage first, offering a reverent touch to the exposed monolith. “It won’t collapse. This stuff will outlast us all… even the Drift.”

“Whatever. Let’s just move.” Kioma did not suffer the same superstition as those that dabbled with the void’s mysteries. Humanity’s grip on the universe had long faded from its prime. But even at its height, some enigmas were beyond even their comprehension.

The condemned started slowly into the breach. The eternal groans of a billion wrecks echoed around them in a symphony of decay. Kioma didn’t care about that though — a death by collapse would be mercy compared to what lurked in the shadows. McRhea’s plasma-slicer hummed bright, casting its blues into the darkness. Here at least, they could witness its true colour. Only in the dark could beauty be kept from the Embrace. Beauty, and something else. 

Kioma spooled his Fission rifle. The red-hot heat of its conductors offered some fleeting light for the path ahead. Only a few hundred metres til the exit. More than enough time for everything to go wrong. 

“So what—”

“Quiet.” Kioma silenced Illia instantly.

No sound. Their presence should not be felt. It could not be felt. 

The padding of their boots kept the scrap-floor from crunching, but even the faint hum of their weapons was too much for his comfort. Only Cowen had been blessed with a flashlight. It panned from wall to wall, offering glimpses of ancient designations, vessel names and the architecture of civilised voidcraft. Even as wreckage, the Belt felt less like a corpse than the ship awaiting them in orbit. 

Kioma slowed as a mound blocked their path, a small pile of satellites, among the first to fall. He vaulted the highest, standing vigil as his crew followed. Illia was the last to join him. He offered a hand as she climbed, but she slapped it away. 

Right as she tripped. 

Chapter 7

The crash echoed through the entire Belt. Not from outside, but within. A different sound. A new offence. 

Kioma’s weapon hummed louder, the light pushing back just a few more inches. The high-whine of McRhea’s slicer reverberated through the satellites below. 

Nothing seemed to move amidst the silent darkness. At least until it did. 

A single droplet of black fluid fell from above. Then another. And another, until it was pouring like sump-rain. It congealed across their suits, their weapons. Kioma recognised it only too late. 

Blood.

Crimson-smeared limbs burst through the metal. Hundreds, thousands. Clawed by ragged bone, clinging to emaciated masses. They descended from the decay in a silent frenzy – grips outstretched.

Kioma fired first. Singed flesh rained across him in pulped, black blood. Plasma whirred. Bullets roared. Lasers scattered off into the dark. 

Everyone fought. They fought, or they died. McRhea slashed with her las-cutter, its arc cells shrieking as they rent flesh like foil. Boney nubs scraped at her suit – Kioma stomped on the offender until he could spare the second to aim down. 

Illia dragged herself over the satellite’s fractured steel, pulling herself upright as she fired blind at the darkness. Cowen trembled as his lasers vanished into the endless horde falling towards them. 

They held until their flank thinned. Until they paved the path ahead with carrion. 

Kioma stood his ground as Cowen peeled first, McRhea dragging Illia along to make for the light. Plasma whipped before Kioma’s visor — splattering an enormous arm leaping from the dark. The blood puddled to his ankles as another swarm of things squirmed and writhed through their jagged home like deck-rats. Starving fervour drove the creatures over sharpened steel, their calloused flesh scarred so thick it felt like stone. Kioma fired his last few shots blind, and turned to run, scraping spools of the clotted liquid from his visor. 

Cowen reached the sun first. The blood burned in its light, misting instantly to leave a faint char over the hazard weave. His Scatter-Las hissed as it faltered, cooling mechanisms choking as he batted it in desperation. Illia scrambled out behind him. She turned, reloaded, and fired blind into the dark. McRhea lingered at the light’s edge, the last of her plas-slicer’s energy surging out in a final bid to cover Kioma. 

Hands gripped his ankles. They pulled, but with the strength of a long-starved creature without the weight to fight. Weak, pathetic, but sharp. He ploughed through their grips, as if willpower alone would keep anything piercing his hazard suit. 

The carrion light ahead beckoned. For the first time in his long life, it promised safety. He leapt into the pale embrace and it welcomed him like a warm grave. 

Momentum carried the fastest of the creatures into the light. Wretched, abominable things of malformed limbs in malformed places. Torsos of random size, no heads or faces. Each limb snapped with a mouth. Each digit ended in something sharp. 

Scorched, inky skin sizzled in the sunlight. The fastest reached the shade in time. The rest were left to cook, burn, and die. 

Kioma breathed deep. His joints burned, ached. Adrenaline bled to terror, and he shivered. It took his all to will himself steady as he glanced down to his suit. No hissing air, no burning flesh. Scratches, scuffs, material marred by tooth and claw, but no wounds deep enough to pierce, to kill. 

McRhea pulled Kioma to his feet. Her breaths weighed heavy with words kept unsaid. Instead, she just nodded. Kioma returned the gesture. 

“You all okay?”

“What the hell,” Illia managed through her gasps. “Whose stupid fucking idea…”

“I… yeah, fine,” Cowen muttered, wiping the char from his visor. He shrank from Kioma as he walked past.

“We need to get as far from here as we can before nightfall. We don’t have long.” No one bothered to question him, the unspoken knowledge already shared between them. 

The condemned gathered themselves, checking damage and ammunition. Kioma loaded another magazine. Empty metal fell to the microshard wastes with a hollow crunch. Three magazines left. It would be enough. It had to be enough.

McRhea spoke just before they could leave. “You’ve done this before.”

Kioma slid the bolt of his rifle into place, coaxing its mechanisms with a gentle, reverent touch. “Yes. ”

“Then you knew about those… things.”

Kioma nodded. “They’re different on every drop. Sometimes there are none. Sometimes there are…” Silence lingered in place of a number. The overwhelming truth felt better unsaid. “We need to move. Before the shadows turn,” he said, glancing up at the setting sun. “Navigator?”

Illia did not turn. 

“Navigator.”

“H-huh?”

“Overplate complex. Directions.”

Illia snapped her focus from something unseen. She raised her satchel, fidgeting with near manic energy until she scrounged the overlay. Its lasers returned, shining across the Belt’s desolate borders, and the darkness behind. Pale blue homed, focused, until it narrowed through the bleached valley beyond. Shapes rose from the distance — not natural, artificial, hidden by deep fog. The scry-lasers zeroed in their direction. 

“There will be more in the city, won’t there?” McRhea asked. “Thats what the other crews died to.”

Kioma didn’t bother answering. Instead, he started slowly after the laser. They marched in silence as the sun fell below the hills. The pale would follow with them.

Chapter 8

Kioma glared at his chronometer. 

1558 / 1954. 

The shadows were long, the carrion star mere minutes from succumbing to the horizon. 

“Stop.” Along a rocky outcrop, he halted the condemned in the open. “We’ll make camp here.”

McRhea glanced around, surveying the wide area. “But, we’re exposed.”

“We’re exposed wherever there’s darkness.” Kioma lowered his pack, taking the sol-emitter from its casing. A photocondenser, storing daylight in its cells. A lethal weapon on the Drift. But planetside, salvation.

He set it down on the highest point of the outcrop, where its light would reach the farthest. 

They dragged the mummified leaves of the ferns around them below it. Something softer than the rocks, but not by much. 

Sunfall offered no warning, nor mercy. No moons orbited this worldgrave. The night was total, complete. Only by the ever-thinning band of stars could one tell the void above from the void below. 

Pale light flickered as Kioma engaged the sol-emitter. Its light did not reach far, barely able to cover the makeshift camp, but it would be enough. 

Kioma set his pack down at the head of a leaf, the metal supplies within offering a firm pillow no less ragged than the one waiting for him in orbit. He pressed a condenser can to the apparatus of his respirator, closing his mouth around its feed tube as the can clicked into place. Bitter nutrient-gruel filled his mouth. Chunks of insect-legs and cored-bone caught in his throat, but the foul broth was fuel, just like spite, like hatred.

McRhea settled in on the leaf beside him, groaning as she ingested her own rations through her respirator. “You know what they put in this stuff?”

Kioma shook his head. 

“Knew a guy who worked on the processing deck. From the gruel we rise, to the gruel we—”

“I would have preferred not knowing.”

“Fair enough.”

They lay in silence as Cowen and Illia settled in. The forest was quiet, but not for lack of activity. Kioma knew what lurked at the light’s borders. What waited, if the emitter died. 

“I hear them,” McRhea whispered.

Kioma sighed. “They won’t attack us in the light. They hate it as much as we do.”

“More so, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

McRhea rolled over, fidgeting with something from her pack. “How do you do it? Sleep with them right there?”

He shrugged. “Either you sleep, or you die. I choose to sleep.”

McRhea let the silence linger a moment. Silence, save the faint chatter of things moving around them. “We’re making a difference, right?”

“We’re keeping the Drift going. It’s enough.” 

“I hope so.”

“Me too,” Cowen replied from across the camp. 

Kioma nodded, not for anyone else’s sake but his own. “It’s enough…”

It has to be enough.

“Ready your doses.” 

“No one’s taking watch?” Illia asked, “I’m not fucking doing it.” 

“The light’s watching.”

“But, what if it goes out?” Cowen mumbled. 

“Then you’re better off not seeing it coming.”

Kioma groaned as he took the syringe from his pack, his arms aching, joints and tumours alike begging for rest. He held the black concoction to the intravenous line at the wrist of his suit. 

Cowen went under first. Illia made something between a cry and a hiss, before her pack slumped to the ground. McRhea stayed her hand a moment, her visor reflecting the sol-emitter’s pale glow. 

“See you tomorrow,” she said, her voice hinting at something like a smile as she whispered the strange phrase. 

Tomorrow. A cruel joke aboard the Drift, but at least here it had meaning. Tomorrow they would recover the autoscribe from their ill-fated kin. They would make the penultimate stretch of their journey. They would make it to the city, and carve out somewhere safe. Tomorrow.

“Get some rest, McRhea.”

“The Drift endures.” She slipped into the deep with a soft whimper. 

Kioma breathed in. The syringe depressed easily. He lay his head back, and closed his eyes. “The Drift endures…”

The darkness offered unfeeling mercy. He wasn’t sure if he’d want to wake from it again.