Into the Darkness (1)
"Starks? I'm not picking up any signal from this side."
｢St-static—help—stzzt, static｣
"What? I can't hear you! Say that again!"
｢Stzzzt-static, this place is—stzzt, static｣
"Goddamn it!"
The moment the transmission cut out, Milo spat out a vicious curse.
"Hey! Can't you get the comms back up?"
"We're looking into it, Captain."
Right up until they'd passed through the docking port, nothing had seemed out of the ordinary. The signal chips embedded in their vac suits had broadcast cleanly, and apart from a faint crackle of static, communications had come through without a hitch.
But once the boarding party set foot inside the ship, they'd vanished from the detectors one by one—and then the comms had gone dead entirely.
"Their signals are transmitting just fine, but something in between seems to be jamming them."
"Can you fix it?"
"Well, uh... someone's going to have to go in there and deal with it directly."
After what had happened to the people he'd already sent in, he was supposed to feed more men into that hole?
Maybe I should just cut my losses.
Like any cartel boss, Milo didn't place much value on his underlings' lives. What gave him pause was that some genuinely useful talent was among the pirates he'd dispatched to the ship.
Still, it'd be a shame to lose Starks and Justin.
The vice-captain was a smuggler who had run with Milo for years, and Justin was one of the rarer breed—an engineer worth his salt in the Spacedog world.
He was still weighing whether to abandon the two of them when a subordinate called out from the situation room.
"Captain, we've got a signal!"
"Hm? Who is it?"
"Justin, sir."
Even the Wolf God answers the prayers of those who speak His name. Justin's movement lit up on the detector.
The dot on the display was drawing closer to the side where the docking port was connected.
"Wasn't he sent to the engine room? Why's he coming back?"
"No idea, sir."
"Pull up the docking port camera."
A camera feed appeared at the bottom of the situation room's massive display.
A moment later, Justin walked into frame at the docking port.
He was in the middle of pulling off his helmet—God knew where he'd tossed the transparent visor. As a result, the camera caught his soul-drained face in perfect, unflinching detail.
"Huh? Why the hell is he taking his helmet off?"
"Oh, you motherf—! The little bastard's got the bomb in his hands!"
It was the bomb Milo had given his vice-captain with orders to blow the ship if there was nothing worth salvaging aboard.
"If that goes off inside the docking port, the damage will be catastrophic!"
"You think I don't know that, you idiot?! Hey! Get the speaker on!"
Milo snatched up the microphone and hailed Justin in a hurry.
"Justin! What the hell do you think you're doing?"
｢Captain.｣
Justin, who had been trudging toward the port with the bomb cradled in his arms and his mind a thousand miles away, came to a dead stop.
"Where's Starks? And why are you carrying that bomb?"
｢Captain, I...｣
As far as Milo could tell, the man was not in his right mind.
For one thing, it was suspicious as hell that he'd ended up with the bomb meant for the vice-captain. And wandering around the interior of an unknown ship without his helmet? That made no sense either.
But if the lunatic detonated that bomb in the docking port, the Calvin was guaranteed to take crippling damage.
｢I'm scared.｣
"Hey, hey, scared of what? Come on, man—what's a pirate got to be scared of?"
While keeping Justin talking, Milo gestured to his men behind his back.
The order was to seal off every section of the Calvin connected to the docking port.
"That's enough. Put the bomb down, come inside, and we'll talk it over. Yeah?"
｢You don't understand anything, Captain. I'm trying to save the Calvin.｣
"What?"
Justin, who had suddenly begun spouting nonsense, fixed his eyes on the camera and smiled—a twisted, wrong smile.
｢Heh heh. No, it's already too late. The darkness—the darkness is going to swallow this ship whole.｣
"What?"
｢Kihyhihi, kihyhihihihihi!｣
"Wait—!"
Grinning so wide it looked like his mouth would tear, Justin pressed the switch on the bomb.
Before Milo could utter another word, the bomb went off, and the entire hull shuddered violently.
There we go.
The instant I felt the shudder run through the ship, I began preparing to leave it.
Structural changes first.
I reshaped the ship's interior so that the site of the explosion, the engine room, and the chamber where the kids were waiting all connected in a straight line.
The black walls squirmed and shifted, and the space holding No. 26 and Adhai merged seamlessly with the engine room.
No. 26 had cracked open the vac suit's helmet and was stuffing dozens of tentacles inside it; Adhai had peeled her victim's helmet off and was busy draining the blood from his neck. Both of them looked up and gave me a knowing acknowledgment.
｢Big Baby!｣
｢Me｣｢Hunt｣｢Success｣
[Zzz zzzzzz (You all did great)]
Roughly half of the intruders who had boarded the ship had blundered into my traps and ended up as pools of gore.
A few had thrashed and clawed in desperate attempts to escape, but No. 26 and Adhai had taken care of those.
Thank god the Erosion Tentacles can trigger the Predation Effect too.
The Amorph's Predation Effect doesn't activate from simply eating a corpse.
To be precise, I had to consume a creature I had killed myself for the effect to trigger. The same rule applied to the evolution requirement of devouring sapient lifeforms—only kills made by my own hand counted.
The sole exception was samples: because they counted as Genetic Essence refined through an inferior process, they weren't bound by the "prey I killed myself" restriction.
Anyway, once I was fused with the ship, killing enemies with its traps and then eating them triggered the Predation Effect without a hitch.
Which means I picked up a rather interesting fusion trait, but I'll check that later.
Right now, it was time to change ships.
[Zzz (Let's go)]
｢Okay!｣
The wall at the front of the engine room melted away, and open space yawned before us.
Some thirty meters away loomed the outer hull of the pirate vessel. Through the ruptured hole of the docking port, shattered debris and the pirates who had been aboard were being sucked out into the vacuum.
I released the Erosion Tentacles.
A wash of loss swept through me—like parting with my own body—as every sense I'd spread throughout the ship vanished at once.
Along with it, the black slime coating the vessel began to shrivel and dry at lightning speed.
I braced my legs and kicked off hard.
My body, swollen to massive size by the ship's carapace, swam through the void.
No. 26 shot out after me, propelling herself with her fins much the same way, while Adhai drifted leisurely at her side, flying without the slightest constraint, every inch the dragon of space.
And there, spread out before the three of us, was the pirate ship in full—the enormous vessel they operated.
Judging by the damage, we did well.
I had manipulated the pirate engineer Justin like a parasite to blow open the docking port.
I'd had two goals in mind.
The first was punching a hole through the enemy's outer hull so I could infiltrate the ship unharmed.
The ship they ran bristled with plasma turrets, and its systems were capable of detecting anything clinging to the hull from outside.
To slip in while diverting their attention, I needed both a distraction and a doorway through that outer wall—somewhere I could enter safely.
That was Justin's job.
The bomb's yield had turned out even greater than I'd expected, leaving a fairly sizable wound in the pirate ship's hull. Which meant my second objective should come off without a hitch as well.
They won't be jumping to faster-than-light travel for a while.
My second aim was to keep the pirate ship from fleeing this location at superluminal speed.
I knew there was a pirate hideout in the vicinity. If this ship went to FTL and flew straight back to it, the one placed at a disadvantage would be me.
To prevent that, I had to engineer a situation where they couldn't dare use their light-speed engines.
As long as a ship's damaged, nobody risks running the FTL drive.
It wasn't impossible, but superluminal travel placed enormous strain on the hull. Push it in that state, and a ship could tear itself apart mid-jump.
If they were at war, maybe they'd chance it. Not now.
Until they managed to patch that hole in the hull, they'd hold off on the light-speed engine of their own accord.
Either way, both of my objectives had been accomplished.
We entered through the broken hole without a soul raising an alarm.
The moment my feet touched down inside the ship, I tore down the corridor of the compartment without slowing.
This isn't over yet.
I had to make it through before the bulkheads sealing off this section slammed shut.
No. 26 and Adhai landed almost in the same instant I did and followed behind me without a flicker of hesitation.
Far down the corridor, I could see a bulkhead door still in the process of closing.
Cameras.
Through my auxiliary organ, I sensed the movements of surveillance cameras beyond the bulkhead.
While running, I lashed out an Erosion Tentacle and crushed them one by one.
I'd have to face the pirates directly eventually if I wanted this ship, but there was no sense in getting caught ahead of schedule.
With the cameras destroyed, we slipped through the bulkhead door with seconds to spare.
Infiltration successful.
Repair crews would be arriving soon to fix the ship. I needed to be gone from here before then.
[Zzzz (That way)]
Back when I'd been puppeting Justin, I'd asked him where a person could hide aboard the pirate ship.
According to him, this vessel was a refitted Star Union trade ship, with the first and second decks given over entirely to cargo holds.
Ordinarily those holds stored sale-ready creatures and freight, but the ship was returning from a completed transaction, and several of the cargo bays sat completely empty.
Merchandise on the second deck only—the first deck's empty.
Nothing worth guarding meant no guards, and the watchers were apparently lax about their patrols—practically tailor-made for a hiding place.
We're on the third deck right now.
If we went on like this, we'd be caught on camera one hundred percent. The way behind us was sealed by the bulkhead door; the only path open was the opposite direction.
Head that way, and we were likely to run straight into the pirates coming to repair the section.
Then we go through the floor.
Drop to the second deck first, then find another route from there.
I opened a gash in my own arm and let Acid Blood drip onto the floor. The dense metal plate began to melt, a plume of toxic smoke rising from it.
Getting this big has its downsides.
The hole I'd made so far would let Adhai—or No. 26, who could shrink herself at will—slip through easily enough. Not me, though.
I bled a little more to widen the opening quickly, then seized the softened edge of the melted floor with my combat arm and wrenched it apart with all my strength.
It's big, but it'll pass.
They'd assume the hole was another consequence of the explosion in the sealed-off section.
Granted, once the repairs were underway they'd realize blast damage didn't look like this—but it wouldn't matter. By the time that registered, things would have spiraled far too chaotic for anyone to care who'd left these marks.
[Zzzz zzzzzz (Go down first)]
｢Okay.｣
No sooner had I lowered No. 26 and Adhai through the hole than I sensed human movement nearby.
Pirates in vac suits were approaching to repair the wrecked section.
Should I use the new trait?
I considered it for a bare moment, then gave up on the idea.
No. There are plenty of other ways.
Handing the enemy valuable intelligence early on was never advisable.
Instead of my newly acquired trait, I trained the Gaze of Horror on one of the pirates on the far side of the corridor.
The instant they were about to round the corner, the pirate in the middle went rigid, seized by terror, and began screaming.
"A—AAAAAH!"
"What the hell's wrong with you?!"
"The darkness! The darkness is going to swallow us all! GAAAAAAGH!"
While the other pirates scrambled to calm their convulsing comrade, I finished melting through the floor and dropped into the darkness below.
Rows of cargo containers, massive cryogenic capsules, rectangular cages barred with alloy—all manner of animal-related facilities came into view.
[Zzzzz (This way)]
Sensing through my auxiliary organ, I found a staircase off in that direction.
We ran for it. The camera mounted on the stairs I disabled with a spray of quills.
Only after tucking ourselves into a shadowed corner of the first deck's cargo hold did the three of us finally allow ourselves to breathe.
Good. Now that we're here, next comes...
I was still plotting our next move when a series of deep detonations thundered from above.
The plasma turrets mounted on the pirate ship were opening fire.
Their target, no doubt, was the ship I had controlled and then discarded.
The pirate boarding party was dead to the last man and their vessel was wrecked—the captain of this ship had to be positively fuming.
Enjoy that captain's chair while you can.
Before long, it would be mine.
"Well, someone sure made a royal fucking mess of this."
"How the hell are we supposed to patch that?"
The engineers of the Rusrak Cartel sighed inside their vac suits.
"The captain's pissed, so we deal with it somehow. Huey and I will take the outer hull. Cooper, the interior's all yours."
"You got it."
Alone, Cooper took up a metal injector to repair the damage inside the ship.
Shaped like a welding rig the size of a grown man, the metal injector was a tool used chiefly for repairing massive artificial structures like spaceships.
You connected several alloy plates to the machine, switched it on, and molten alloy poured from the injector's tip, welding itself over the damaged sections.
He'd been at the repairs for a long while when he noticed something strange.
"This wasn't caused by the blast, was it?"
The hole punched through the floor in front of the bulkhead door had corroded, melted edges—as if someone had poured acid all over it.
He leaned down to get a look at the underside.
In that instant, a hand shot out from inside the hole and seized his helmet.
"!"
He never even managed a scream before he was dragged bodily into the dark.
All that remained of Cooper's post was the metal injector, sitting forlorn and alone.
A few minutes later, Huey came back inside from repairs on the outer hull to take a break.
"The hell? Where'd that son of a bitch Cooper go?"
Seeing the metal injector sitting abandoned in front of the gaping hole, he tilted his head.
"Cooper! Where'd you go?"
"Down·stairs."
"Why'd you go down there?"
No answer came. Huey waited for Cooper to climb back up, but not so much as the top of his head appeared.
Left with no choice, he dropped down through the hole.
"Hey! What are you doing in the cargo hold?"
"Over·here."
The cargo hold was kept lit by only the barest minimum of light, so as not to agitate the smuggled animals.
Huey knew that as well as anyone—but even accounting for it, this place was far darker than usual.
"Did the lights go out?"
Still sensing nothing wrong, he walked toward the voice.
That came from the stairs, right?
As far as Huey knew, there was no livestock or cargo stored on the first deck at the moment. Hoping to slack off together, maybe, he descended the stairs without a trace of suspicion.
"Cooper?"
The second deck had seemed pretty dark a moment ago, but the first was beyond comparison.
Even a man with flowers for brains—it took real nerve to walk into a dark like this alone.
"Cooper! It's so dark in here I can't see a damn thing!"
At his shout, a white light flickered on in the distance.
Recognizing it as a helmet-mounted flashlight, Huey relaxed and followed the glow.
"What in the world are you even doing down—"
Following the light, Huey found the man he'd been hoping to see: Cooper.
But Cooper looked nothing like the man he'd imagined.
He wasn't wearing his helmet.
To be precise, Cooper no longer had a head to wear a helmet on.
Then where, exactly, was that light shining on them coming from?
Huey's gaze climbed upward, following the glow.
At a height of some five meters, four long fingers were holding Cooper's helmet aloft like a lantern.
｢Why·so·slow｣
With those words, the flashlight on Cooper's helmet went dark.
What remained after was only an unbearable blackness—the kind that swallows even a scream before it can leave your throat.