[Center][b][h2]Southwestern Abyss Front territory near borders[/h2][/b][/Center] The GNR vessel was blind. Cameras and sensors scrambled, view ports perceiving only a blackened inkiness. The stars themselves were always alive with faint traces of radiation, distant signals, trillions of tiny lights; absent. The navigational systems had logged the location but any sort of orientation was functionally impossible for the time begin. There was sound being picked up however. Not from sensors; they could all hear it throughout the vessel. Plinking, scraping, clinking – like countless tools being roughly dragged and tapping against old metal. A light rain they could hear throughout the vessel, only the droplets were serrated with scratching grooves and grated an atonal symphony out of the hull. It traveled across the vessel as a chorus of wordless whispers through corridors, pipes, ventilation, where the hull was the thinnest, echoing into its depths, distorting with every passage it spread into. Not a singular slithering trail but multiple creeping along its length. There was no need to second guess what the source of the sound was. One felt the vibrations rumbling the tables and the floors and immediately knew that they were of a very physical, external origin. Through mapping vibratory patterns, the GNR crew knew that there was something physically attached to the ship and rapidly moving across its surface. It congregated around entry ports typically designated for vessel deployment. The tapping and grating became pounding, hammering, soon, a vicious blowtorch burn. Warning signals lit up; a breach was imminent. Something was eating into the edges of the ports, burning, burrowing, forcing, hungry. The shroud of blackness over the sensors began to shimmer with motion as the pattering metal footfalls began to sound like jagged pickaxes striking metal in hundreds of synchronized rhythmic motions. As if creatures with hundreds of legs were pacing restlessly over the possibility of prey within. [hr] [Center][b][h2]Southeastern “Horn” of Augustan Space[/h2][/b][/Center] “Iterae. Bijiol. Pandemarboraea.” The voice that resonated through the open comms belonged to not so much a person as it was a shape of sorts, the only one visible in the near pitch-dark room, illuminated by little more than faint blue luminescence creeping wormlike across its surfaces. It wasn’t bipedal, humanoid, logical. It held no concrete form but a teeming multitude of them trapped in perpetual coalescence. Limbs insectoid in nature, swirling tendrils of pinkish-white ethereal power, self-replicating architectural cybernetic columns jutting out of then reabsorbing into its central mass, and at the centre of it a nebulous sickly orange nucleus whose surface rippled as disturbed waters. “The Front’s containment capability will not hold. They are multiplying and growing in power.” Calling its speech a “voice” was stretching the usage of the term. It did not have the sound of a moving mouth but a converging of streams, almost akin to a choir. Multitudes of dissonant and layered tones spoken not out of a single organ but its entire body, melting together to form something comprehensible in a singular flow that approximated speech. Vowels bent, consonants melted, phrasing pitched up and down, but it forced all irregularities into a consistency of sorts. “Prior enmity alone cannot form the basis for any interstellar accord. Mutual security will.” Multiple notifications. Short range comms directed towards docking port observation groups. The colossal dreadnought, devoid of any life support systems and made of unearthly materials, wanted a physical connection to its Augustan counterpart. Not a captain, admiral, or some leader – all analytics suggested that the vessel itself had chosen this. Systems pulsed and mechanics moved with a life that could not have come entirely from its skittering inhabitants’ command. The will of the Front lived even within forged metal and artificially grown chitin. “Information transfer and physical proximity. We ask to meet to formulate an agreement.” [hr] [Center][b][h2]Bijol Grove World Saprophage[/h2][/b][/Center] For as long as the impasse between the Front and the Verdancy had held, bordering Bijol worlds faced frequent incursions. Not by vessels, if Abyssal press release were to be believed, but by beasts. These had been the worlds of what was now the Front, acquired during the turmoil of the Yrranian Occupation, the insurgency that rose against it, and the Bijol power plays that had exploited both. The Front had been besieged from forces external and internal, then a larval creature incapable of fully contesting heavy handed agreements and alliances of convenience. Where it once slithered and squirmed in the murk, its fangs now bared themselves westward, sharpened on the bones, bark, and armor of its innumerable enemies. Each one towered like the hulking creatures it called soldiers, once splattered with the blood of the hated Yrranian occupier and no less eager to impale and reduce iterae, Pandemaborea, and Bijol to shapeless mulch. That was the impression given from whatever broadcasts slipped out of its amorphous boundaries whether to more civilized parts of space or the data and propaganda feeds of more immediate threats. They were seemingly forever a cornered collection of people but one that thousands of years had forged into a highly intransigent one. Even those who lacked the legal status for “personhood” felt the same. Even as the bijol were in the middle of their expansions and incursions, the very space their fleets occupied had shared the same sentiments as the sapients they had cleansed. Shapes of coiling intricacy and festering composition emerged from the carcasses of shattered bio-machine juggernauts marked as dead by Bijol vessels, some reaching up to the size of battleships. Soon, it became clear attempts at salvaging the wreckage would only invite further casualties and remnants of defending fleets were annihilated. In doing so, they scattered the monstrosities into the wounds that dotted the flesh of Expanse space, wounds older than their aggressors, and wounds that lead to realms where return was uncertain and more than just shipborne spawn lay waiting. Ever since, Bijol fleets had to keep a careful eye. Even when slain, the swarming creatures seemed to have a knack for knowing how to fall to their doom. Some foul mixture of internal chemicals and psionic power created a coating over their bodies that made them difficult to detect when scanned, yet also protected even carcasses falling from orbit. Carcasses that always seemed to crash around and upon military hardware, logistics centres, and production facilities, to say nothing of any other important structures. It would be a mistake to say that the Verdancy and the Front had a peace agreement but neither had been willing to make a concentrated push into one another’s territory. The boundary between them was ever on a hair trigger but the space itself was never truly empty. A frequent news story for more Bijol worlds was of defensive fleets rooting out and chasing down the foul creatures. There was no negotiation that was more effective than lance and spore. The subdermal burrowing into reality’s skin could only conceal the creatures so much and one by one, they fell to splatter and crash, this time unto the surface of Saprophage. Long-distance observation caught the carcasses as they fell. This time, the defensive fleet had struck particularly true; an enormous segmented thing of fleshy bulbs attached to a flailing, spindly body accumulated with darkening, once-transparent plankton-like detritus. It hadn’t been a creature but it had been life; an amalgamation of sorts, things that had died yet whose corpses shuddered and moved – living masses of illogical anti-sense. No matter, their rickety construction did them no favours. Purple flames bent light and sucked it inwards, sickening space dark and vile on their descent as ethereal essence wasted itself. For Lumi, it would be like some parody of a fireworks display that turned the fabric of the night sky shades of mocking, exaggerated obscurity and blotted out stars in long, serpentine strips when observed from below. The light and wholeness it consumed would regenerate in time. The nausea of sighting the descent of the fragment would pass as ephemerally as it manifested. Soon, just reverberating echoes remained. The same humdrum mundaneness returned to Lumi’s life and their mycelial slumber. [i][b]BREATHE-SMELL-REEK-TRAPPED-SURROUNDED-WILDERNESS-HUNGER-FOREIGN-BIRTH-ANGER-ESCAPE-MOVE-ISLEEPWHERENOEYECANSEEANDNOCLAWCANREACH-DETRITUS-SWARMING-PUTRESCENCE-INNUMERABLE-HIDDEN-HUNGRIER-LIFELESS-COLLAPSING-REBIRTH-YOURMINDISNOTATEMPLEBUTAPASSAGEANDITWILLLEADYOUTO- [/b][/i] The shouting stopped. The cacophony wasn’t there. His ears would not ring. His body picked up nothing. The outer walls of perception couldn’t. No, that voice hadn’t come from some woodland spirit or a mere hallucination. The mind didn’t work like that. The mind did not speak to you so directly, trampling your streams of thought, drowning them under a wave of visions, sights, and sounds that were pure nonsense jammed into your senses, yet in the hyperspeed processing of the inner mind, shed their cacophonous armour to emerge with pure, intrusive lucidity. Something had called him, down there in the wood, stared at him from eyes that only the mind could see, spoke with a language not native to its intelligence, and continued to stare. The night itself watched Lumi and waited to see if he would blink. [hr] [Center][b][h2]Orbital Station above Valefall[/h2][/b][/Center] [i]Paper, ink, chemical composition unremarkable, primarily organic, natural extraction. [/i] [i]Writing – tidy, artisanal even, structured, similar to speech seen amongst other homo sapien esque organisms.[/i] [i]Entity; moderate height, hooded, incapable of proper identification – potential electronic countermeasure tech. Attempted scan was unsuccessful.[/i] [i]Counterintelligence? Unlikely to impossible; Pyrdwenites have at best rumors on Noumenon operational practices. Agency is presumably unknown. No prior contact with the Front. Illogical to presume understanding of infiltration capability.[/i] [i]Continue as planned; material resource exchange, partial extractionist policy, union meetings prioritizing Hawkrose – direct in-person contact with worker groups. Emphasize cultural exchange; semi-censored digitized and physical literature. Emphasis on private industry co-existing with worker power.[/i] [i]Approaching edge of neuromycelial signal coherence. Information transfer to on-ground operative.[/i] [i]Expected deployment time in two hours.[/i]