Into the Black

(Broax Agricultural Township, Thraki, Eye of Despair)

Shrask struggled to get to her feet. The bottle of theva wine was empty. That could not be allowed. Clearly, it was a failure, like the one before it, and needed to be replaced with another bottle from the cellars.

She was glad for the matron’s stick of authority, the staff that every matriarch carried as a symbol of their leadership role. Hers now. As the last remaining female, there was no one to say she wasn’t the matriarch, after all. And she needed it. The failure bottle was protesting its demotion, making her head spin as she stood, leaning heavily on the staff. Stupid failure bottle.

After a moment, the room stopped spinning, the failure bottle having accepted its failure, for the moment. No doubt it would join with the other failure bottles to scream at her tomorrow, but what did that matter? At least that screaming wasn’t like the Screamers. Painkillers quelled the screaming of failure bottles, but didn’t work to drown out the Screamers.

Suddenly, the floor shook, and her thoughts about Screamers and the failure bottles were pushed to the side. Groundquake? No, those didn’t happen around here. Thraki in general was very stable, part of what made it an excellent agricultural world, and even the relatively minor fault lines were well away from here.

No, this was different. It was almost like the thrumming of gravitic engines. Not the little ones used on groundcraft, but the ones on ships and shuttles to get them off the ground and into orbit. But that was silly. No one flew on Thraki anymore. She was the only one left, and she barely knew how to work the transporter, much less fly!

Stumbling to the balcony, Shrask looked towards town, where she knew the cargo port to be. What she saw was impossible. There was a ship! Not a shuttle, like normally came, before the Eye enveloped Thraki, but one of those light freighters, the kind that just barely fit into the cargo port when it was completely empty.

Her mind, clear for the first time in weeks, raced. The freighter must have flown low over the farm. Low enough that its engines shook the house, if only slightly. No freighter captain would be so stupid as to do that on accident. They’d be liable for any damages that farmers could put on them, even if only tenuously, and freighters like that didn’t have big corporations backing them, fending off claims.

So, if it wasn’t an accident, then it had to be on purpose. But why? Why would a freighter fly over a dead town like that? What reason could they—? Wait. They were looking for survivors, weren’t they? That had to be it!

Quickly, or as quickly as she could manage in her current wine-induced state, she stumbled out to the garage. She knew she shouldn’t drive, with how much she’d been drinking, but that was fine. No cops to ticket her. And the Matriarch’s private car had voice controls and automatic piloting, anyways, so she could just rest in the back while the car drove itself. Yeah, that sounded like a good idea.

Then another thought hit her. These people hadn’t seen the Burning! They didn’t know the danger! She had to get to them, before they burned, like everyone else! She just hoped that they would still be alive by the time she reached them.

With that in mind, she got into the car, and went through the motions of getting it started and driving to the Cargo Port. All the while worrying about the delay, and how it might ensure that these people suffered the Burning, like the rest. Maybe it was the wine, or just her nerves and anticipation at not being the only living soul on the planet anymore, but she completely forgot that her communicator, still playing music from the network, was in her pocket, and she could just reach out and try to call these new people on an open frequency.

(Cargo Port, Broax Agricultural Township, Thraki, Eye of Despair)

According to the data networks, this place was called Broax Agricultural Township. Or, that was as close as it would translate from Ihm to English. Either way, it displayed the typical terrible naming sense that most groups had when faced with the daunting task of ensuring that mundane things didn’t have names that were entirely stupid.

At least they went with the boring, instead of the over-the-top. There were some groups that did that, after all. If anything, they were worse than the boring ones. Nothing more pretentious than a farming town calling itself ‘Verdant Dreams of Providing Growing Food to the Masses Agricultural Plantation’. Hell, that name was long enough that even scientists used to saying the full scientific names of protein compounds were like, “Maybe you could tone that down a bit?”

At any rate, it was at this Broax Agricultural Township that the only recent connection to the planet’s data net had been detected. That meant there had to be a survivor, which, frankly, was impressive as hell. Either they were a powerhouse, able to withstand the Soulsheering, or there was something about them that made them immune. Either way, I wanted to meet them.

As I started the post-landing checklist, I looked over to Raven. “Any news on our mysterious survivor, yet?”

Raven shook her head. “Yes, and no. I’ve been listening on the open networks, hoping they would try and make contact, but, whoever they are, they aren’t talking. On the other hand, I am still reading the connection to the music site, as well as a connection to the automatic driving network. Both connections are coming our way. Honestly, nothing out of the ordinary about either one. Only way even I could spot the connections is because there’s nothing else out there.”

“So, whoever our survivor is, they are coming our way, but haven’t thought to call? Can’t imagine the kind of strain they’ve been under, being the last person alive on a dead planet. That’s enough to make even introverts go mad.”

“Master, you need to get out here! You have to see this!”

That was Cali’s voice, over the comms. Once the Raven was on the ground, they’d stepped out to secure the area. It was habit, more than expectation of anything happening, really, but it seemed like they’d found something.

I looked to Raven, and said, “Finish the checklist, and then preflight. Stop before ramping the engines up. I don’t think we’ll need to emergency boost out of here, but I’d rather not come up from a cold start if something happens.”

She nodded. “Already on it, Captain.”

I turned, and pinged Cali and Jaynie’s location. They were by the main cargo hatch. I quickly made my way over there, weapons ready, but not drawn. Her message didn’t indicate they were under attack, but it also didn’t say there was no danger at all. Better safe than sorry.

What I found was, well, freaky. All around the bubble of the Raven’s shields, there were Ihm. Men and women, young and old. All kinds. All of them dead, like something out of a horror movie.

I was looking out at a field of ghosts. Some just kept walking forward, bumping into the shield and rebounding off it, robotically going through the motions of a daily life they didn’t have any more. Others screamed, and hurled themselves at the shields, raking them with their claws. They were like feral beasts.

“Raven, give me a report on the shields, and what you see on external cameras.”

“Shields reporting slight power drain. Currently at 99.3%. Nothing showing on external cameras or sensors, though the ship is ill-equipped for detecting psychic or other phenomenon.”

“Understood. It appears that the ‘ghosts’ people were mentioning are more than simple hallucinations. If they are hitting the shields enough to cause an impact, then they’re probably psychic in nature, or something else like that. Either way, inform the other teams to keep shields up on their ships.”

“Understood.”

Jaynie shifted nervously. “So, what’s the plan, Boss? I mean, I don’t have a problem with the demons or Ihm or anything like that, but ghosts? I can’t shoot ghosts!”

I took a breath, and looked out at the spectral horde. “Well, for now, they don’t look like they can get through the shields, which are psychically charged. If we went out of the shields, those screaming ones look like they could attack. Don’t know what that would do.”

Cali frowned. “Physical rounds might not work. But what about psy-shots? Or energy weapons? Or psy-enhanced melee weapons?”

I shook my head. “Don’t know. We’d need to test it, of course. But I’d rather not bother unless there was a need for it. There’s too many ways this could go wrong, if we manage to rile the ghosts up and something bigger comes after us.”

The two girls visibly winced, even through their armored helmets. Jaynie just nodded. “Right, no pissing off the ghosts that we may or may not even be able to hit.”

I chuckled. “Yes, especially since, if we did get into any kind of ground fight, I would have several very angry ladies yelling at me when I got back to the Ama-no-Murakumo. No sense in getting more trouble that way.”

“Captain, the automated vehicle is approaching the landing field. Displaying position on your HUDs.”

“Thank you, Raven.” I turned to the direction raven was indicating, and I could see a bit of dust being blown up by the wake of a gravitic impeller. It was a lower-powered version of the gravitic drives used on ships, really only good for getting the car barely off the ground, and getting it moving. Some altitude, for ground clearance, of course, but turned up to the max it was only like half a meter on the strongest versions.

At any rate, from what I could see as my helmet’s sensors zoomed in on the vehicle, this was more than just an old rustbucket that had been lying around. It was a low-to-mid-range luxury vehicle, the kind that someone who was important, but not obscenely wealthy, might have. A Mercedes, instead of a Rolls-Royce, for instance. Both have a luxury feel to them, but one is clearly more luxurious than the other.

The vehicle plowed through the ghostly horde as though they weren’t there. The ghosts just passed through it. The screaming ghosts turned, and began screaming at the car, while several ghosts that had looked as though they were just watching before now moved to try and intervene, holding the feral screamers back.

The car stopped just outside the shield bubble, and shut down with automatic precision. A moment later, one of the passenger doors was thrown open, and a hand holding a wooden staff emerged. At that, some of the ghosts, even the screamers, backed away, if only about ten centimeters or so.

That hand proceeded the rest of a bedraggled ihm female pulling herself out of the car. Almost literally pulling herself, it seemed, since she looked like she was well and truly drunk. No, she was definitely drunk, given the bottle currently in the hand not gripping the staff which was the only thing keeping her upright.

I watched her, carefully, stretching out with my senses. She was definitely real. Even the ship sensors picked her up. Physical and visible and everything. But I couldn’t detect the kind of power that one would need to survive here, fighting off the soulsheering. In fact, when I viewed her with my sorcerous abilities, I simply got… nothing. Like she wasn’t there at all, much like how the ghosts weren’t there to cameras.

The woman just blinked at us, staring dumbly at both us, and the ship, and the ghosts all around. Staggering, she stumbled forward, her eyes fixating on me, since I was in the center, as she moved up, and then stepped through the psychic shields. Her tongue slurred as she tried to speak.

“Y-you’re real! You’re really real!”

I chuckled. “Last I checked, yes, we were definitely real.”

The ihm paused, thinking, and then her eyes widened. “The Burning! You have to leave! Now, before the Burning gets you, too! Just like it got everyone else!”

“Ma’am, we have defenses in place against the source of the burning. We should be fine, with limited exposure. If you don’t mind me asking, how are you still alive?”

“I-I don’t know.”

I nodded slowly. “Well, my name is Mirikon Mollen, Captain of the Starlight Raven, owner of the Black Star Company, and Admiral of the Black Star Fleet. Who might you be?”

She focused on me, taking a moment to breathe in and out. “I am Shrask, and I guess I am the Planetary Matriarch of Thraki. There’s no one else, after all.”

“Well, Shrask, would you like to get out of here?”

“YES! Yes, please! Just, can we stop off at my home? There’s still some bottles I want in the cellar.”

I chuckled at that. “I’m sure we can make a side trip on our way back to orbit.”