Shiplife sucked. But it sucked less than colony life. And it wasn't as bad as military life. And it was certainly preferable to core world life, not even to speak of life on one of the so-called ‘free worlds’. Most of all, you had to be glad that you weren’t caught on one of the thousands of failed stations after the collapse of the Kakashi Conglomerate. 

Actually… looking at it... maybe it was just all bad, no matter where you lived. 

But as always, people made the most of it, living their little lives – even if galactic expansion had turned out to be the worst mistake humanity had ever made, possibly since the invention of the sharpened stick. If people had known how lucky they’d had it with Earth, they might have treated her better. Well… Earth was dead now. Sol was a slum. The rest wasn’t faring much better. 

Still, somehow, life had gone on.

And then the Darkstar had been discovered, and all twenty thousand colonists caught in its energy field had become its crazed thralls. Filled with mad visions and terrible knowledge they had ripped their colony ship apart and turned it into a fleet much more advanced and dangerous than anything humanity had produced up to that point. And then they had started conquering, one system at a time, starting with the irreversible process of turning a potentially life-giving Sun into a seething ball of unimaginable malice. Whoever felt the caustic warmth of that dark energy was forever changed and turned into one of them. No one knew how it worked and every scientist that had tried to study it had lost themselves to its madness and joined their ranks. Its power could neither be understood nor contained. No one was safe.

And still, life went on. The galaxy continued spinning and people weren't simply going to lie down and die no matter how bad things sucked. There was always hope, and the universe was a big place. As long as humans remained humans, they would always carve out a place for themselves to survive – maybe even to live. No matter how bad, no matter how hard.

Still, shiplife sucked. Especially right now, when shit was broken.

Neve was covered in sweat that she did her best not to wipe off of herself -- because that way she was going to cover herself in generator grease, and that shit would burn for hours. Getting it on her hands was bad enough and she definitely didn’t want it on her face.

“Spanner,” she called, and in the hatch above her, Marika’s dark-skinned hand appeared holding the tool she had requested. Neve handed the plasma-welder back and took her new weapon of choice.

“So that means you’re done, right?” came Marika’s voice from up above. Neve bent over and began fastening bolts.

“Yes, just closing the housing.”

“You sure the fix is going to work?”

“Has it ever not?”

“No comment.”

“It’s going to work. Go tell the princess we’re back on track. She’ll spin up for five minutes or so and then we can go down the restart checklist.”

“Good.”

And with that, Neve heard Marika jog out of the engine room, boots clanging on metal at a frantic pace as she hurried off. Neve couldn’t blame her. She could feel the urgency biting at the back of her own neck. They had dropped back into 3-space in void-touched territory. The galaxy was way too fucking vast, but apparently not vast enough for whatever alien technology the Darkstar had whispered into their crazed minds. They needed to get back to hyperlight, or it would be only a matter of time before the void-touched spotted them and snatched them up.

She shook off the thought and focussed on her work. She had been quick. Really quick. They should be safe. No way they’d be that unlucky.

The generator was already humming back to life as she pulled the last bolt tight with a creak. She sighed. What a piece of junk. If it wasn’t for her, this ship would have disintegrated at least five cycles ago. She grabbed a rag and wiped her hands. They felt slightly raw from the grease, but it wasn’t too bad. All in all, it had taken only an hour or so to fix the faulty cooling conduit and get the antimatter containment back up and running. Thank the stars for the redundancy, or they would be a superheated gas cloud right now.

Not that they were going to volunteer that fact to their high-value human cargo in transit. Hell no. That sweet innocent fool would probably die from panic. Bless her heart.

Neve climbed out of the maintenance tunnel and closed the hatch with a deafening clang, and she could swear that she could hear a screech from the mess.

“Calm down princess,” she muttered to herself. She shook her head and smiled to herself. Scared of loud noises... what a piece of work.

“I can’t believe this is happening!” Morena sighed. Her head was in her hands, and she felt herself shaking. “Another fifteen minutes? But the engine is fixed, isn’t it? Let’s just go!”

The lady captain crossed her arms. Why? Morena knew she wasn’t being unreasonable asking for some expedience. Why couldn't they leave, now?

“It needs to spin up, and we need to go through the cold-start checklist. When we lost cooling, our antimatter dumped itself into emergency containment. Don’t worry, we’re fine. That’s what safety procedures are for.”

“This never happened on Father’s ship,” Morena groaned. This was horrible. She still couldn’t believe how she’d ended up on this horrible excuse for a freighter. She was sick of it. She was entirely sick and tired. This was beneath her.

The captain scoffed. “Well then maybe your father shouldn’t have conned all these people, ruined his life, and lost all of his stuff.”

Morena drew in a sharp breath. The utter nerve! She couldn’t believe how they were talking to her. “My father is an honorable man!” she said.

“Honorable men don’t even know where to hire shitslingers like us,” said the captain. Morena winced again. She really wished that these people would talk less crudely. Listening to them made her feel even more dirty than she already did. Three days on this rusty nightmare, and she missed her shower more than anything.

She pouted. She wanted to retort with something clever, but she had to concede that the lady had a point. She'd been thinking about this. A lot, actually. Why would her father ever hire someone like these people unless things were really as bad as she’d feared? Was it really true? Had Father really been dealing with all these criminals? Were they really after him? No. It couldn’t be true. Someone must be trying to ruin his reputation. A political rival, maybe.

“He only hired you because…” she began, but it was hard to get out the rest. Thinking about what she had witnessed three days ago brought reality crashing back and her throat constricted with a new rush of panic. Fire. Noise. Blood.

The captain was biting her tongue, and shame washed through Morena's body when she realized that she'd been wearing her feelings on her sleeve. She didn't want anyone to know. It was embarrassing.

“I’m sorry,” said the captain after a moment. “I know you’ve had quite the week.”

“I watched our Pilots die,” Morena said, her voice leaden. She didn't know why. Or maybe she did. She hadn’t talked about it until now but she could tell that it had been eating away at her. “I’ve known them since I was a little girl. Momo used to fly me to school, and now… now she’s gone. And Paul. And Kerion. They’re all gone! Someone attacked our hangar when we tried to get off-world.”

The captain shook her head and looked at her feet. “Shit,” she mumbled under her breath.

There was a moment of unbearable silence, broken only by the sound of footsteps. It was the engineer. The one with the short, dyed hair and all the tattoos and smudges all over her. She was smiling as she entered the mess, but that smile immediately faded when she saw Morena. Morena didn’t know if that made it better or worse. She didn’t want these people’s sympathy. She wanted things to be back the way they’d been.

“She’s spinning up just like she should,” said the engineer. “Everything’s well in the green. Cooling was the only issue. Everything else is working perfectly.”

“Good job, Neve,” said the captain. Morena liked that she sounded urgent. She wanted to get away from here as fast as possible and the captain, for once, seemed to agree with her. “I’ll be at helm and run the checklist. We’ll be on our way shortly.”

And with that she stepped out. They both watched after her until the automatic door closed behind her, neither of them saying anything. Morena looked at the Engineer. She had a friendly face. Friendlier than the captain – and much more friendly than that of the security officer. That one had thankfully left earlier to keep lookout on the bridge. She seemed like the kind of person you didn't want to deal with and Morena was glad she didn't have to.

Morena pressed her lips together as the engineer sat down next to her. She smelled weird. Not like… bad, or anything, but… metallic, and sharp. Like the ship smelled, but on a person. Her name was Neve, Morena recalled, even if she didn’t know her last name. They had all introduced themselves with their first names, or at least with single names. The captain was called Marika, and the lady in charge of security called herself Gunny. That last one was probably a moniker. She was an intimidating woman, tall and muscular and gruff and with an aura of barely contained violence. Morena was glad that she wasn’t around her often.

If anything happened, however, it would certainly be a good thing to have a woman like her protect her – if they were going to protect her at all. She wasn’t sure if she trusted them at all, even if her father had.

It seemed unusual to have an entirely female crew. Part of her wondered if that had been the reason her father had chosen this particular ship for her to get her off-world – so that no man would take advantage of her.

It felt horrible to think such thoughts. She had never had to consider such horrible things. But she wasn’t a fool. The universe was a rough and dangerous place, especially for people like her. She didn’t dare imagine it. All she wanted was to be somewhere safe, somewhere comfortable, somewhere protected. Somewhere with a proper shower and that one camomile soap she liked.

This definitely wasn’t one of those places.

The engineer was looking at her with an expression of concern, and even worse, pity. “Don’t worry,” she said, and Morena sighed with frustration. 

“I wished that people would stop telling me not to worry,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm and dignified. She failed. She sounded close to tears. “My… my life is in pieces. I am on the run from criminals – and I know not where my father is or what has compelled him to stay behind and it is a distinct possibility that he has surrendered himself to die to protect me. I might… I might never know. I left everything behind! I watched friends die! And… and I currently find myself on a ship that fully lost power in one of the most dangerous quadrants of the sector!”

Her voice cracked, and she felt another instinctive pang of shame for having lost her temper in such a manner. She took a deep breath, and her voice almost didn’t tremble when she continued. 

“Please, do not tell me not to worry. I would think that worrying is quite the appropriate reaction.”

The engineer drew in a sharp breath through her painfully gritted teeth. “Yikes,” she said. “When you say it like that…”

“–Just promise me that you will get me there safely.”

“I promise. We’re–”

And then the lights turned red, and an alarm started blaring.

“What–?” Morena whimpered, eyes wide in shock. The engineer looked at her, and to Morena’s absolute terror they looked just as afraid as she felt.

“It’s the target lock alarm!”

Morena’s heart turned to ice. No. No. This couldn’t be happening.

“Darkstar followers?” she asked, her tone begging Neve to say ‘no’.

The woman looked at her with trembling lips, and her lack of an answer was enough. Morena gasped with fear. The engineer clasped her hand.

“We need to buckle up.”

“Fuck the checklist! Get us out of here!!!” Gunny screamed at the top of her voice. Her target display lit up like a christmas tree. There were dozens of them. They had warped in all at once.

“I’m trying! Auto-Sequence is running as soon as it’s got power! Four minutes! Everyone, strap in right the fuck now!”

Her last sentence blared over the shipwide intercom and ten seconds later the ship yanked itself forward as Marika pushed the nav thrusters into full overdrive. It was barely in time. EMP detectors went off in almost all directions as missiles detonated silently in the vacuum around their ship. They had barely managed to evade the first salvo -- and there was another one coming.

Gunny stared at her screen. There were too many to possibly shoot down. On the plus side, it was easy to find something to hit. She pulled the triggers on the point defense cannons and the ship buzzed with the concussive noise of one hundred rounds a second. Pearl strings of white-hot impactors streaked across the void – and uselessly evaporated against dark energy shields.

“Three minutes!”

“FUCK!” she roared and switched to missiles. For a millisecond her brain hesitated. Every single missile had a price tag worth a hundred work hours, and all they were going to do was buy them a few seconds of time each.

She fired them, one after the other, until all twenty of them were gone.

She had damaged one ship, non-critically.

“Two minutes!!”

Back to point defense. Bursts and bursts of high-velocity rounds, trying to keep them at bay as Marika dodged and weaved and twisted the ship into corkscrews until the metal of the bulkhead groaned and ached under the stress. Seconds ticked by like hours, hazard lights flashing and claxons blaring as Gunny roared and fired, trying to–

“One minute! I’m almost out of reaction mass!”

Gunny wasn’t trying to kill anything anymore. She was shooting down missiles, knowing full well that it was entirely unsustainable. They were coming in too fast to keep at bay, but all they needed was a little more time. Just a little more–

“Thirty seconds! Come on!!!”

An impactor knocked the ship sideways, and half the lights on the bridge turned red as the ship roared with the deafening noise of splitting metal.

“Losing atmosphere!” Gunny shouted.

“Small impact. We won’t pass out for at least five minutes!” Marika screamed back just as she pushed the ship into another spine-shattering bend. “Twenty seconds! Just keep them off!”

Gunny was doing exactly that. Dozens of missiles, triangular dots within square targeting reticles, popping out of existence, one by one. But for every one she made disappear, two new missiles were fired at them. She shot down one just barely out of its effective range, and the lights flickered, and to her right, a monitor went out.

“Ten seconds!!!”

The ship roared and groaned, thrusters firing, machine gun screaming, alarms blaring in a cacophony, and points on Gunny’s screen drew in closer and closer, and she couldn’t make them get away. They were getting through. They were–

“Five!”

A point disappeared, another popped up.

“Four!”

There were so many!

“Three!”

Come on!!!

“Two!”

Another down.

“One!”

Come on, motherfucker!!!

Another noise joined the chaos. The high-pitched whine of the hyperdrive. Power was back! Just–

Everything went black.

There was no noise at all when the EMP disabled the ship. One moment, everything had been absolute pandemonium, and a second later, they floated weightless in absolute darkness.

They barely had time to scream in despair before the anti-personnel missile hit them.

When Marika woke she felt like someone had rammed a railroad spike straight into her scalp.

“It is awake,” a cold voice said, and she took in a gasp of fear as she saw the horribly pale face and black eyes of a Darkstar zealot smiling at her.

She screamed, but the horrible creature in front of her only tilted its head.

“Yesss,” it snarled. “I was afraid once, too, before I saw the truth. It does not have to fear. It will soon transcend.”

“NO!” she screamed, and tried to lash out – but she couldn’t move. She looked down and saw that she was strapped into a narrow metal cage, arms by her side, unyielding bars pressing her wrists and elbows into her flank, and her ankles equally constricted. The metal pressed against her skin, already warmed up. She must have been unconscious for a while.

She was awake now, and her heart was racing in her chest as she realized how truly helpless she was. Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! They had stripped her naked! She had nothing. There was no way out. This couldn’t be happening.

The grotesque thing in front of her was still looking at her, its smile as horrible as ever. Its eyes were solid black, and its skin unnaturally white. It had implants in its arms and in the side of its head. Zealot. That was what the footsoldiers of the darkstar called themselves. It wasn’t wearing a uniform. From what Marika knew, none of them did. The fucked up skin and eyes were more than enough to identify their allegiance. It was sickening to think that this thing had been a man once.

It grinned madly. “You will not have to wait long. Your gunner is currently being processed. You will be next. When you are done, you will even get to watch as the rest of your crew join us.”

She spat in his face, only to see him slowly drag his fingers across her spit, wipe it off, and lick it off.

“Very good. Strong material. You will breed excellent warriors.”

“WHAT?!”

Gunny screamed. It was too much. She couldn't hold out any more. She felt it bore into her mind, terrible and beautiful and incomprehensible. The ray of dark energy hitting her eyes had taken over her entire vision, and she felt it burn away her thoughts into raging, glorious mania. Yes! Let it! Let it take her! Of course! Why had she ever resisted? She heard it! She heard the whispers!

“Yes!!!” she screamed. “Yes!!!” It all made sense now! It all made sense! Her thoughts screamed with glorious pain. She wanted more! She screamed for it, demanded it, and the zealots around her opened her shackles and let her step into it, deeper into the light – and she stepped forward, into her destiny, into the thing that would forever change her and make her like them. Like the others. Like the ones that had defeated her and claimed her. The twisted and insane! Void-touched! Scourge of the galaxy! Monsters! They had her! They had taken her! They had… they had…

Wait a fucking second. No. She hadn’t wanted this. 

They had tricked her.

Those motherfuckers!

She turned away from the light and looked at a zealot next to her. Its dark eyes were as beautiful and perfect as they were fucked up and inhuman. Inhuman like they wanted her to become. Inhuman like the rage in her chest that they had tried – dared – to make their own. But she remembered. She still remembered the stubborn fucking son of bitch she was – and they weren’t going to turn that fucking rage to eleven and not fucking regret it.

She punched him in the throat, and he went down like a sack of bricks. The next one, she kicked in the balls and kneed into the nose. By that time, the others had started attacking her. One of them was pushing an alarm. She didn’t care. Let them come. Let them all come! Did they really think they could take her? They didn’t know her! It was the last mistake any of them were going to ever make. 

One of them had a stun baton. 

“That’s mine,” she growled – and seven seconds later, it was.

Morena was weeping. This couldn’t be happening. She wanted this to end. To be over. To stop. Please! Please! She couldn’t look at the horrible thing that was guarding her. She couldn’t bear the fact that she was so utterly exposed in front of them. She couldn’t bear the fact that she was so powerless, and alone, and lost, and afraid, and cold, and–

“Do not cry,” said the horrible thing she wasn’t looking at. “Soon you will transcend, and there will be no more tears ever again. Only purpose!”

“Stop! Stop talking!” she cried. She wanted to cover herself, but she couldn't move. She wanted to be gone. She wanted to pass out. Just let this stop! Please, just let this be–

Suddenly, an alarm started blasting, and the thing next to her snarled and left. The door closed behind it with a sharp noise and she was left alone, hanging in her cage naked and terrified, as the alarm blared and blared and blared, over and over and over. She heard nothing else but her own pathetic sobs as she tried to keep herself from hyperventilating.

After a while she finally remembered to scream for help. 

There were noises of a struggle outside. Horrible noises. Disgusting noises. It sounded close.

“Help! I am in here! Please!”

The door snapped open, and the scary security lady entered the room. Gunny! She was naked, just like Morena. Unlike Morena, she was covered in blood, and carrying some weird metal sticks in both hands and – and her eyes were dark black! 

Morena screamed. Oh Stars, they had turned her into one of them! “NO! NO! NO! Leave me alone!!! Leave me alone! Leave me–”  

“Shut up, I’m here to rescue you,” said the woman, and hurried to a console by the side of the room. She slammed a button, and Morena fell out of the cage as it opened. She hit the deck hard, and it hurt a lot – but somehow she didn’t mind. Her blood was pumping too hard for that. Before she even knew what she was doing she was already on her feet.

“Come on,” barked the scary blood-covered muscular woman, and Morena didn’t have to be told twice.

Gunny ran down the corridors of the Darkstar structure like a berserker. She didn’t know what kind of place this was – a spaceship? A station? A planetside outpost? Didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had taken down like twenty of those fuckers that had clearly underestimated just how fucking bad her day had been. They were strong. Really strong. But she was too angry to let that stop her.

Another two pale-skins rounded the corner, guns drawn. Way too close. Idiots. She was at their throats before they could fire a single round. Their shots made strange electronic noises as they fired past her as she closed in and broke their faces. When she was done, she took the guns. They weren’t any model she’d ever seen, but they were still projectile guns made by humans. There were only so many ways to arrange the pieces. She gave one to the princess, who took it like it was made of Polonium. She would have taken both, but she didn’t have any pants to stuff them into, and giving one to the girl was slightly better than leaving it on the floor.

“That’s the safety, that’s the trigger. Learn it now. Always assume it can go off if you’re not careful. Never point it at anything you don’t want to shoot, especially me. I think they’re only stun guns, but I don’t care to find out.”

She didn’t give the girl any time to comment on any of what she had said. They had to keep moving. Whatever this place was, it was big, and they were in some sort of prison block or brig.

They didn’t have to open many doors before they found the others, similarly caged and stripped naked just like Gunny and Morena had been. Gunny had to admit that taking their clothes had been a good move. Most people didn’t have the balls to do that, but it guaranteed that they had nothing on them to defend themselves. This sucked. There was no way they would have found the knife in her left boot until it was sticking in their throats. 

She hit the button and freed their engineer. 

“Stars, what happened to you?” Neve asked, “Your eyes…”

Gunny scoffed. “What about them?”

“They’re black!” screamed the captain, voice strained with obvious concern. 

“So what?” Gunny said. “Do I act like I’m one of them? They let me taste the kool-aid, and it tasted real good for a second, but then I remembered that I don’t want to be a crazy brainwashed piece of shit.”

Neve looked incredulous. “What?! So you just… didn’t let yourself be controlled?”

Gunny shrugged. “Yeah. Guess I’m just special that way.”

“You don’t hear voices or anything?” the Captain asked.

“Nope,” Gunny said. It was a lie, but she didn’t want them to fucking panic. She had it under control. She knew that what they were whispering to her was all bullshit. She knew who she was, and she wasn’t going to forget it.

The rich kid was dancing on her tiptoes. “Can we please just go? Does it matter?” She was wildly waving her hands, pointing the gun everywhere. Gunny snatched it away from her. It was even easier than she’d expected. 

“Sorry, kid,” she said. “You’ll get another one when you’re grown up.” She handed it to the captain instead. The princess scoffed. The captain grinned and checked the sight. “Okay, what’s the plan? No way we’re in the clear.”

“It’s pretty quiet – and I got twenty-two,” Gunny said with a smirk. “But you’re right.” Her heart was still racing in a way that it rarely was. She was no stranger to adrenaline, but this was something else. Whatever evil thing they had tried with her brain had definitely crossed some wires – even if the result hadn’t been what those assholes were expecting. This felt almost… good. Even better than usual when she got to let loose. She wished she’d spent even longer in the light before she broke out. She wished they had changed her even more. She was so much better. She was unstoppable. If those fuckers had managed to turn her, she would have been such a powerful thrall. Such a magnificent servant. Such a –

“Gunny? You listening”

“Yes, cap. Sorry. Come again?”

“Did you see any signs of something like a hangar? This place is obviously huge, there’s bound to be some sort of transport.”

“No, but that sounds like a plan,” Gunny said. She turned the way they’d come and nodded her head. “Mindfuck central is that way, so we probably want to head the other direction. Or maybe the cells are all the way deep inside, and the braincase room is the way out. Dunno.”

Neve stepped forward. “We could split up and look both ways.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” the captain groaned. “No way! We go together. Let’s keep going the way you went, Gunny. Away from the… thing.”

“Alright, let’s go,” Gunny said, and took point. They turned the corner together, and carefully crept up the dark angular hallways of the void-touched structure, checking corners and looking for ambushes, inching ever further away from the place where they had tried to turn her into one of them.

Don’t leave, whispered something in her mind, and she sighed inwardly. Shut up, asshole. The only reason she would even consider going back was so that she could become even better at kicking in those pale, ugly faces. 

Damn, she had become so much better.

If only she could go back and check it out one more time. Just for a short moment…