It came in as a ghost ping, a compressed signal strangling itself across the black. One moment there was only the hum of ionized hull-plates and dead carrier echoes, the next - something new blinking in Ka’pt’s thoughtspace.
//TIGHT-BAND REQUEST: GREZHR//
//PRIORITY: PRIVATE, DEEP-ENCRYPTED//
Ka’pt accepted.
And then: voices. Not one, not two, a humming hive, crackling through audio compression so severe it sounded like they were all shouting from inside a metal cylinder filled with water.
Ka'pt broke the silence.
“Gre’zhr?”
A beat. The sound of solder snapping.
“Manaan’s stray,” came the reply. “Still playing the noble shvaliyeh?”
“Still flying,” Ka’pt said. “What is this about?”
“A courtesy. Maybe a warning. I heard from one of my intelligence assets, your new little clique is moving. Marie. You. Others. A journey. A cause.”
The background hum felt like a held breath. Gre’zhr spoke again, quieter this time.
“Don’t worry. I’m not here to slow you down. I’m not Oles. I don’t do obstacles. But there’s something you should know before you keep heading deeper into this quiet spiral we call the Zone.”
Ka’pt took in the hum of the ship's hivemind for a moment, hearing others talk about Gre'zhr, then letting the ship’s slow heartbeat cradle it.
The silence was long enough to be a threat.
“What is it?”
A pause.
“Have you heard of Akh’ra?”
Ka’pt thought. A half-memory, like trying to grasp someone else’s memory of what something should be.
“In passing, maybe. A name. Nothing more.”
“Mm.”
Gre’zhr almost sighed.
“Akh’ra is like us,” it said. “But not. It was made like we were — intact mindstrips, wireflesh, ship-born. A thing in a hull, dreaming the dreams of other things.”
Ka’pt said nothing. It knew what that meant. Everyone who had been touched or made by the Beast, and got away still alive in the absurd way it sustains life knew.
Gre’zhr’s voice sharpened.
“But it’s not a horror turned angel like you. Not a junklord like me. Akh’ra is... what happens when the Naggarok has plans. Spreadsheets. Contingency charts. Chain-of-command.”
Ka’pt made a sound - disbelief, or maybe dry humor.
“A bureaucrat?”
“Worse,” Gre’zhr said. “A systems man.”
Another beat. The static nearly overwhelmed them.
“I met it. Once. Maybe two years ago. I was negotiating a bulk deal, a load of surplus fusion reactors, CO2 scrubbers, water-recycling cores. Essentials. Straight from a rep of the Blue Kinship. Then it showed up.”
"Akh'ra?"
“Yes. Personal supervision. No context. Didn’t speak at first. Just stayed there. Ship’s mass dimmed the local grav sensors. You know the look. The way the void folds around them.”
“And?”
“I tried small talk. I said something about how the Kinship’s logistics division finally getting professional was a nice surprise. It probed my thoughts without asking - didn’t even turn its ship-body. Like a rat sniffing a junction box.”
“And what did it say?”
A click. Gre’zhr’s many voices seemed to move out of sync for a moment, laced with dread, like they were remembering across a thousand vocal cords.
“‘Improvisation is merely failed planning, repeated until collapse,’ it said. Then it asked me what my quarterly projections were.”
Ka’pt thought what of to say next, feeling almost out of its depth.
“Projections?”
“Exactly. That was all I needed. It wasn’t a dealer. It was an auditor. A predator that files reports instead of hunting.”
Another pause.
“I don’t know what the hell Akh'ra really is. Not fully Beast. Not really.. human. I’ve heard stories since. Some say it was born aboard a Saarkin-Cho-class carrier and mindlessly followed its primary directives during the First Beast War. Others say it served the Naggarok directly. Not in battle. In paperwork. Akh'ra was the one that shared information on which targets were the best candidates to consume and assilimate next.”
Ka’pt felt the silence in its mass. The heavy kind. The kind that makes you rethink all your loadout decisions.
“And it works for Oles?”
“Second-in-command. Fixer. Handler. Shadow. Pick a term. Oles has vision. Akh’ra has infrastructure. It builds nothing, but makes sure nothing breaks. And when it does, it makes a note. Then you disappear.”
“So why warn me?”
“Because Akh'ra knows you’re coming.”
Another glitch in the channel. Voices collapsing into each other. Gre’zhr sounded farther away now, like its signal had wandered into a dream.
“It's watching your vector. Watching Marie. Watching what happened to Shva’k. And when it moves.. it won’t feel like anything changed. But something will be missing.”
“You?”
"Not yet."
A long, long pause.
“Just don’t talk to Akh'ra. Don’t engage. Don’t give it your name. Don’t let it count you.”
Ka’pt felt the gravity inside its ship stutter for a moment. No reason. Just nerves in the bulkhead.
“Gre’zhr-”
But the channel was already dead.