I do not know how long I waited in that holding cell. At some point, I laid down on my side and stared at the force field, not moving nor thinking. I knew there was no point in trying to escape and neither did I find any solace in my thoughts. The Xurak had stolen even that from me. I didn’t know whether anyone I knew was still alive, but I didn’t worry for their sake. That required thinking about them, and I did not want to stain those memories with whatever the Xurak had done to my mind.

  I told myself time and again that I was dead, a corpse. There remained nothing in that holding brig, my new world, except for me. And as I had been hollowed out, there was nothing in the Xurak cell except my skin and bones. I was dead, and thank goodness, because corpses can’t feel pain. And also, as I reminded myself, corpses can’t be tormented by hope. In that prison, I was free, looking down upon the thing formerly known as Vas. Or so I told myself.

  What I do know now was that one of the rail cannons had struck Amon’s coliseum. He had fallen with the wreckage onto the surface of Rhodon, and there he and General Kairon found themselves in the thickest of the fighting. With nothing but their swords, they carved a trail of carnage to secure a ship to get off world. And all the while, the Xurak were systematically bombing anything that had an engine strapped to it. Their primary objective accomplished, they had turned to looting the Rhodeshi system for all it was worth.

  Ingrish had sealed herself away in an airtight compartment as the golden palaces turned to fiery debris and vacuum. She was just one of the hundreds of thousands trapped in orbit with no rescue coming. These unlucky survivors would soon add to the fatalities over the coming days as they suffocated before any help could arrive. At the moment, Ingrish was measuring a dose of the poison she had intended to use on Oberyn, hoping to render herself comatose and buy additional time.

  Rykar had evaded the drones on the Aphelion, largely because they didn’t care about him. He was busy crawling through the innards of the ship to the heart of the vessel. There he was going to enter the ossuary core and reactivate the Aphelion’s Ibis Engine, pulling the vessel out of dark space, right out from the hangar of a Xurak cruiser. Our home would be the only ship that escaped the ambush, with the rest of the vessels that entered FTL being taken by the Xurak.

  Indeed, however small it might’ve been, there was reason for a corpse to feel hope. However, I knew none of that at the time. For all I knew, the only people I had ever known were dead, and I was now awaiting whatever new life—or death—the Xurak had planned for me.

  I didn’t have a clever idea to outwit my captors. I wasn’t thinking I could steal a shuttle and escape. I wasn’t imagining some great act of revenge, killing the butcher who had done this to me. There was nothing like that in my thoughts, only a quiet patience that an opportunity would present itself. And when it did, I would make sure the Xurak could not take me alive a second time.

  …

  I did not lift my head as I saw boots appear on the other side of the force field. The Xurak doctor shut down the energy bubble and stepped inside the holding cell—which now smelled of rotten flesh from the spilled nutrient fluid.

  “Rise,” he ordered.

  Movement itself was a torment because it reminded me of what had been done to my body, but I pushed myself up and got to my feet. I stared blankly forward as the Xurak doctor inspected me. Prodding me with his hands, he made me lift my arms to check the newly installed feeding ports, among other things. Satisfied with his work, he turned his back on me.

  “Follow.”

  I obeyed wordlessly and we walked down the dark, gleaming halls of the Xurak vessel. Not quite arteries, not quite corridors, the curved halls possessed the same unnatural grace as the rest of their architecture. Doors opened like beetles spreading their chitinous wings. Passages were decorated with rippling tendons. Computer consoles grew from the floor and we walked on gangways transmitting the light of sickly neurons.

  The strangest thing was when I saw the occasional viewport out into dark space. There appeared to be no barrier at all, no glass, no energy shield, nothing. I felt as if I could reach my hand out and nothing would prevent my arm from passing through. I did not put it to the test, however, obediently keeping behind the doctor until we reached a set of great doors.

  The serrated gates opened, and I was taken aback as we seemingly exited a spaceship and entered into a palace. The ceiling was entirely open to the realm of dark space, though none of the eerie clouds crept in. Sinuous colonnades lined the large space, opening into dark ventricles where it looked like a thousand Xurak could’ve watched on. I stiffened, expecting to see more aliens, but my eyes only saw emptiness and darkness. The only movement I could detect was the occasional flash of strange lighting above.

  Lookin on, I saw a circular portum placed in the center of this hall, and beyond in the distance, a set of moistened steps leading to a throne of black glass.

  The Xurak doctor promptly turned and left the empty court, shutting the doors behind him. I was left utterly alone without any sense of what I was supposed to do, nor the reason they spent so much special care on my surgeries. I wondered where the rest of the Xurak were. This great vessel seemed altogether too huge for the one Xurak I had encountered thus far.

  I was left perplexed, and although I wanted to find some corner of this massive chamber to hide in, I reminded myself that I was a corpse, and as such, I had no reason for fear. I reluctantly crossed the great hall to the portum. My footsteps echoed all too loudly in the deafening silence as I approached the strange edifice. I saw the design was alien—alien to the Xurak anyway. It wasn’t made out of the same materials as the ship or any of the other machines I saw.

  The grey, rough substance was flecking off. There was no way for me to determine the portum’s age, but I got the sickest feeling in my stomach. More the Xurak ship, the light didn’t reflect off the portum as it ought to. It was as if brightness itself was exhausted striking such an ancient thing.

  Eight spikes ringed the circumference, pointed contraptions half-buried in the floor. Tiny symbols were written along their surface which continued around the ring, only broken by where panels had been lost or destroyed, leaving the innards exposed. All I could tell from the incredibly complex machinery was that it looked dead—long dead. It looked barely better than scrap metal from a broken derelict, but it somehow seemed the most important thing in the room.

  The portum had seemingly been taken and placed here as some sort of prize. Or perhaps the ship had been constructed around it—the palace part of it at least. The walls themselves curved around the ring like a whorl, and I saw trailing mosaics swirl around it like waves of dark water.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Hesitantly, I placed my hands on the portum and bent over, peering at what was inside. I didn’t quite know what I was looking at. It wasn’t quite gaseous but not quite water either. It looked like a film of smoke. And beneath this layer was… nothing.

  I could see a void beneath. But it wasn’t just a hole. It was… endless. Logically, I knew that I should’ve seen the interior of the Xurak ship, or at least a channel out into dark space, but nothing was there. Nothing at all.

  As I peered down, I swore I could hear something, just barely a sound on my ears. I sat myself on the portum and bent down further. I lowered my arm to touch the smoky film, but just as my fingers were about to pass through, a pallid hand latched onto my wrist.

  “I wouldn’t,” the Xurak Queen told me with a kind voice. “Dip even a finger past the breach, and you would not come back the same.”

  …

  The Xurak Queen sat me up away from the edge of the portum. She was dressed in an ebony frock that was bound by an onyx neckpiece. Black hair fell to her shoulders. Her skin was just as pale as the doctor’s and the same scarlet eyes. When she smiled at me, it was with the same glistening black teeth. Her human-like expression incited the same fear in me even as the Xurak adjustments of my mind told me to welcome it.

  She cupped my chin with long fingernails, examining me closely. “Defiance in the eyes. Good, as was promised.”

  She spoke those words and they reverberated in my head again and again, disorienting me. However, careful to conceal myself and intentions, I stared obediently at her, trying to convince her I was entirely docile.

  The Xurak Queen’s smile grew wider. “You don’t need to hide your thoughts from me. They are the reason you are here, my kin.”

  That is the closest translation I can manage. The Xurak do not have words for family. Each is grown from the templates encoded in their Queen’s DNA. There is no such thing as kindred with the Xurak. There are only castes. But on that ship, what the Queen addressed me with was an archaic word barely remembered in their genetic memory.

  I blinked, confused.

  The Xurak Queen spoke in guttural words that nevertheless were warped into something graceful in my mind. “You must have noticed our uncanny resemblance. In our great family tree, after our first great shattering, your people went one way and mine another.”

  Images bombarded my thoughts of the destruction of Sol. I saw great ships turning outward, many towards distant suns, others to darkness. The altered part of me saw the deep wisdom of the Xurak, vowing never to allow such a tragedy to happen again. But as for my eyes, I saw the horror, as they exacted a thousand savageries upon others and then themselves.

  Making their home in dark space, they hid themselves where the galaxy would never think to follow. They looked with pity on the Fifth Aberrant War. They laughed as our worlds burned. They despised the Rhodeshi, wasting prizes of incalculable value on games and entertainment.

  “I don’t understand why,” I asked.

  “We are survivors, just like you.”

  The word for “survivor” brought the savory taste of blood. The word for “you” opened a sadness in me. Unadapted. Unchanging. I was part of a subspecies doomed to extinction because we could not acknowledge reality. At least, that was the me as I had been. I was something else now.

  The Xurak Queen got up from the portum and paced back and forth, never taking her eyes off me. “I don’t expect you to appreciate our kindness, but it is important that you understand what is to come next.”

  “That I understand what?”

  The Xurak Queen smiled at me. “The choice you were born to make. The other Queens shall split the embryos among them, create new aesthetes, replenish the recombination sequences, raise legions of warriors. A thousand spawn to them—that is no matter. You were brought here for a more important purpose.”

  “What?”

  She pointed at the portum. “Can’t you hear them? Listen.”

  I had not moved an inch and yet the sounding coming from the void sharpened like a sudden onrush. It resolved itself into indistinct whispering. If the Xurak language was intolerable to me, the hushed voices felt like claws digging into my head. I could not make out a decipherable word, but I suddenly felt dizzy. Before I knew what was happening, I fell into the portum.

  Faster than I could blink, the Xurak Queen caught me. With surprising strength, she held me just above the boundary as the whispers grew louder and louder. I felt something wet run down my nose. The smallest drop of blood dripped off my lip, but before it could fall through, the Xurak Queen caught it with her finger.

  “Not yet,” she licked the drop away before setting me back up.

  Clasping her hair so that not one thread would fall through, the Xurak Queen bent her own ear to the boundary. With terrible delight she listened to the voices before raising herself back up. My spinning vision came to a still again. I felt a wave of nausea that I had to choke back down.

  “You have not eaten,” the Xurak Queen chided me, wiping the rest of the blood from my nose. “And so soon after your reclamation. We shall correct that for when the time comes.”

  I pushed myself away from the portum, stumbling to my feet and barely keeping myself upright. I took one step away and then another, trying to escape as my legs failed me. With what the Xurak had done to my mind—no, it wasn’t that. Even the Xurak part was screaming in fear at whatever was in the portum. I panted heavily as I tried to get away, but the Queen was faster. She placed her hand on my shoulder, and pressing one finger to my forehead, she commanded a single word.

  “Sleep.”

  I was dragged into darkness even as every muscle in my body tried to run away from the whispering voices down below.

  …

  Tut had many explanations for the dreams over the years. The first was that I had been interfaced with the neural network of the Xurak vessel, the unconscious of the ship. Joined with the sub-processes and background algorithms, my mind was entangled in its thought patterns. The ship dreamed, making predictions, running analysis, putting and pulling apart data. And as I was joined with it, so too did I add my own thoughts and memories to the current.

  I was swept away in a river of unmeaning, a jumble of alien visions mixing with my own. Battle plans, hypothetical futures, religious beliefs, those were the explanations of the Belazzar. After all, I saw only what I wanted to see, and those memories were themselves misremembered. I shall not deny Tut’s rationale here, but he was sorely mistaken presuming that I had wanted to see of any of this.

  I dreamt that I was drowning—or perhaps suffocating in vacuum. I stretched out my hand, and I saw the Rhodeshi system before me. I saw what was left of it, the wreckage of a one-sided war. The stars smiled upon this day.

  Images flashed, some quicker than others.

  I walked on a midnight beach, the tide receding. There were a thousand Rhodeshi faces in the sand. Contorted in agony, their gristly remains fell expressionless as they were slowly swept away by the dark waters. I saw in the long distance two shades sitting at a board, one of Terra and another of Rhodon. They played a strange game in the dying moonlight.

  In a moment unheard, I saw a great feast prepared on a table of glass. A legion of the mouthless looked hungrily upon plates of rot and bone, soon to be processed into nutrient fluid. A Queen sat at the right hand of her master, offering a chalice to an empty throne.

  I saw the Zizurac, beating their invisible wings and swarming around the dead left in high orbit. With ivory incisors, they took something from each of the corpses before departing into their nameless realm. I saw the unknown sub-dimensions beneath dark space. The things within them writhed at the walls angrily, kept away even at the ending of the festivities.

  The undying General screamed in rage, tearing the beating heart out of a combat drone. With blood-slicked hands, he waved his zero-sword in the sky, shouting for his enemy to come back as the great warships disappeared one-by-one.

  I saw an alien wearing a golden mask with seven eyes and wreathed by the sun. He wept at his daughter’s betrayal even as he commanded her damnation. I saw talons pry open a core. The thief looked down upon a grave of neural cables, looking to rob a corpse twice over.

  I saw a bargain now fulfilled. Black boots thudded silently on the bridge of ancient vessel, its hull still stained with the blood of the last war. Taking the Captain’s chair and staring through a shattered viewport into vacuum, gauntleted fingers rapped on the armrest.

  The Xurak retreated into dark space, and the thing in the Carapace Suit followed.