The carrier's repair bay stretched on in dim vaults of metal and pulsating red biomatter that climbed the walls and old maintenance gantries in wet strands. Numerous cranes or manipulator arms hung unmoving from the ceiling in the stale air. A dead ship dreaming weakly in the dark. Marie moved through it carefully with the rifle tucked high into her shoulder, her boots ringing softly against the deck plating. Her suit lamp swept across old Taiidan warning glyphs half-swallowed by fleshy growths that breathed almost imperceptibly.
Then she heard the music. She didn't hear it as music first exactly, just a dull rhythmic distortion echoing through the bay from damaged speakers overhead.
khhrrm—ta-ta-ta—khraaa—uum—
A drumbeat beneath static. Fast. Defiant. Something with a dance rhythm to it. Taiidani voices half-lost beneath distortion and reverb. Somebody laughing somewhere far off. Marie stopped beside the husk of a ruined maintenance crawler half-buried in Beast biomatter. Her visor display painted movement outlines beyond stacks of cargo canisters and collapsed scaffolding.
Three. No, five.
Blue Kinship.
One of them stood atop an overturned container in a stained EVA suit with the reflective layer of his suit's visor pushed open, his suit's lamp shining against various objects in the dark while he supervised a portable plasma cutting rig chewing through strips of harvested Beast matter. Another was knee-deep inside an opened maintenance conduit pulling free red fibrous tissue in long cords and stuffing it into insulated crates marked with faded Ahkzulan transit seals.
One of them noticed her. The music continued.
—aaah zhannn— khorod nai veleska—
The raider stared for one suspended second through his visor. Then he jerked backward and shouted something in Taiidani. Marie fired first. The rifle cracked through the repair bay and the recoil shoved into her shoulder hard enough to feel through the suit. The round punched into the man's chestplate, then another went through his head, then his shoulder, spinning him sideways into a support rail. The Beast virus wasted no time in stripping his dead body to the bone, fresh red strands forming and jutting through the holes in his suit, connecting to the support rail. Another raider immediately opened up with a mass driver from behind a crawler chassis. White-hot slugs screamed past her and burst sparks from the wall.
The entire bay erupted. She moved instinctively. Low. Fast. Crossing behind a hanging cargo pallet while rounds hammered the metal around her. Over comms she heard Ka'pt immediately react.
“Marie.” Its voice came calm but sharpened. “Multiple discharge signatures detected.” “Yeah,” she muttered, slamming another magazine home into the top of her NabaalTech bullpup and slapping the bolt release paddle on its side. “I noticed.”
The music blared louder suddenly as someone somewhere boosted the PA gain.
VRRAAA—ta-ta-ta-ta— khoram velesk—ahhhhhh—
A warped horn sample echoed through the carrier like something ceremonial, drunken, and mournful all at once. Marie leaned out and fired twice more. One round shattered a hostile visor, putting down another. The other struck a shoulder joint and spun another scavenger backward into a mass of red biomatter climbing the wall. He screamed.
Not immediately from infection. From panic. His gloved hands clawed uselessly at the breach in his suit while the others kept firing around him. Nobody even looked at him twice as the Beast virus began its terrible work. They were professionals. Or desperate enough to function like professionals.
Marie saw the flesh on his face melt off for a split-second, then he stopped struggling.
The music continued.
Somebody farther back behind cover was yelling lyrics, hooting and hollering along with the song while firing bursts blindly downrange, high off the chaos. "WOO! POMRY, SUKA!" Marie paid no mind to his bloodlust, waiting for him to reload. She leaned out of cover again for a moment to put him down with a single shot when she noticed a lapse in his barrage.
“Marie,” Ka'pt said again. There was a pause. “I can hear music.” Marie ducked as rounds snapped overhead and punched through hanging sheets of metal.
“They hijacked the PA,” she said breathlessly. “They're salvaging what they can of the ship. Biomatter too, probably.” Silence from Ka'pt for one strange second.
Then:
“...I see.”
The remains of the raider who got his body taken by the Beast while still alive jerked once. Twice. Then the ship reacted. Somewhere deep inside the repair bay a bulkhead slammed shut with a heavy metallic concussion. Warning lights strobed red.
A dormant maintenance arm suddenly lurched alive overhead and swung wildly across the bay, smashing crates apart and spraying harvested Beast tissue across the floor like wet roots that immediately began merging with the rest of the biomatter around them.
Marie froze for half a second.
Over comms Ka'pt spoke immediately.
“One of them joined the ship.”
“What?”
“The individual with the compromised suit.” Ka'pt's overlapping voices remained terribly calm, but a hint of concern creeped in. “He is still conscious.”
Gunfire erupted again. Marie fired toward muzzle flashes through steam and drifting smoke while backing toward a collapsed support pillar. One of the scavengers caught a burst through the throat assembly of his suit and fell writhing. The ship shuddered again. Panels flickered. Another door somewhere nearby began cycling open and closed over and over with mechanical violence. Ka'pt went quiet for a moment.
Not absent. Listening. Feeling.
Through the vast neural topology of the dead carrier it could sense new minds entering the wreck like stones dropped into water. Panic. Confusion. Reflexive terror. Some fragmentary understanding spreading among them and becoming more complete.
A sensation horribly familiar struck Ka'pt. Not death. Continuation. Marie heard something over the PA between bursts of black static. It wasn't the music. Somebody yelling and swearing incoherently. Then the song surged louder again and drowned it out.
KHRAA—ta-ta-ta— velesk—velesk— ahhh naiiiii—
One of the remaining scavengers shouted from behind cover. “Who the hell are you?!” Marie fired through the thin plating he was hiding behind and the answering scream told her enough. Ka'pt spoke again, quieter this time.
“The newly joined may attempt to manipulate local systems. If they figure out how to activate one of the PDA's in there, get out.”
“I know,” Marie muttered. A nearby cargo elevator suddenly activated and began descending fast enough to crush anything beneath it. Marie moved just before it slammed into the deck with a deafening impact that shook the entire chamber. Somewhere in the carrier's immense dead interior something groaned. Long, low, and almost alive.
The music never stopped.
And beneath the gunfire, the echoes, and the blaring Taiidani voices there lingered another sound now. Hardly audible. Wet electrical whispering spreading through the walls themselves as the ship slowly consumed what had been fed into it.