Chapter 348

Space was rotted and twisted. The flow and ebb of spacetime had been wounded, become infected, and had begun to rot. Like a gangrenous abdominal wound it oozed discolored dark matter pus and noxious fumes of putrid gas. Dark lightning, the forks an absence of light, snarled silently through the vast clouds the color of bruised flesh. The entire area, a ragged disjointed volume, encompassed over a hundred light years of space.

A single star sullenly burned in the center. A thing of impossibility, it burned lightless and emitted nothing but cold and darkness as it silently consumed itself in an orgy of self loathing and hatred. Any tendril of rotting space or spiraling tentacle of gas that touched it was pulled in, screaming across particle wavelengths, to be devoured by that dark stellar mass that could only be called a star by the most lenient of definitions.

The gas and substance were not just for show. The touch of the gas would corrode battlesteel. The darkness emitted by the star could cause warsteel to decay into a rotted skein of decayed lace. The matter itself would dissolve even energy into more of its own substance with an obscene noise that echoed silently across the energy spectrums.

It was a vile place.

Most space faring species never discovered it.

Those that did became enthralled with it.

They sought to discover its origins. Decipher its mysteries. Plumb the depths of its existence.

They found only madness.

Nearly a hundred worlds had been consumed. Explorers returning home to share the hideous discoveries they had made had doomed those worlds.

Where they had gone, they did not need eyes to see.

What they had learned, they did not need tongues to speak of.

What they had heard, they did not need skin to feel.

In some cases a vast tendril of gas and matter would slowly snaked out, wrap a stellar system in its grasp, and slowly, over the course of a mere decade, pull the system into the maw of the dark mass at the center of tumor.

Even across a distance of hundred of light years.

It could have devoured it faster. Somehow pulled it into its maw in mere hours or days.

No.

It chose to take a decade, sometimes two, to draw it inside the tumor and devour it. In some way it relished the fear and despair of the species who knew not only that they were doomed but it was beyond their ability to escape their fate. They would watch, with a generation that had been born while the stellar system was in its grasp, as first the stellar mass was consumed at a slow pace. The gas giants would be siphoned off by tendrils of thick pulsating matter. Then the inner planets would be shattered and pulled into the dark maw that masqueraded as a sun. Then the outer planets would be destroyed and devoured.

The habitable planet would be last.

But the species who lived there would not be destroyed. They would not die even as their planet shattered, even as its liquid core was siphoned away.

The youngest would be devoured first.

The abomination took its time.

It relished suffering.

It would pulse out strange emissions, patterns that ceased to be patterns when examined, x-ray pulses that would transform into stellar noise upon a closer look. It would appear as a vigorous star with habitable planets only to vanish when a more sensitive scanning array was built to examine it.

And another species would seek it out.

To feed its obscene appetite.

It had been found by cold analytical intelligences at one point. Those intelligences had managed to escape but the maw had not cared. The electronic intelligences did not provide the maw with what it wanted, what it craved, what it desired.

Pain. Suffering. Fear. Despair.

Only one species had been able to break its grasp.

Call it... professional courtesy.

The tendril it had sent through the burning wastes of Hellspace had found those who escaped its grasp and found delights even it could savor. Its defeat, its destruction of its tentacle, was of no moment.

It had left its stain upon those who had escaped just as those who escaped had left their mark upon it.

Over time, a short time for the maw, but one full of great feeding, those who escaped returned to worship it, to craft prayers and mythology around it.

The maw found itself changing over the dark eons. It found itself filled with a purpose, and an obscene intellect was willed into being by those who worshiped it.

It was simply known, the electronic intelligences, as the "Anomalous Sector" and little else.

It had one particular idiosyncrasy.

The interior, where not even photons existed, a complete and total vacuum between the Maw and the vile nebula surrounding it, was accessible from Hellspace.

The electronic intelligences knew that the maw would destroy, devour anything brought to it.

Eagerly.

They had discovered eighty million years ago that the maw would sweep away any biological life form from even inside a precursor autonomous war machine, leaving the electronic intelligence intact.

Except...

Eight thousand years before it had encountered something new.

The maw had left a stain upon it.

But it had left a stain upon the maw.

The stain had grown.

As living things do.

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The space between the clouds of gas and matter to the stellar mass of the maw was a perfect vacuum the majority of the time. Particles would spring to life, appearing in the vacuum only to be devoured by the hunger of the maw.

Now, there were dozens of ships orbiting the maw.

Precursors.

All three types slowly orbiting the cold radiance of the maw, the only light from a massive Hellspace breach that hung, never closing, only a few light seconds 'above' the dark mass.

They had followed the plan. They had driven through Hellspace to the dark emptiness surrounding the Maw and had waited for the Maw to do its work.

Except...

...professional courtesy.

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Palgret huddled next to Two, his arms wrapped tightly around himself. Two had helped him beat to death the serpents that had suddenly replaced his rifle, thick twisting serpents that had struck at everyone around them with long venomous fangs.

030 had twice been forced to shut down the communications channels when the whispers had begun. Vile whispers by unknown beings who hissed sibilant truths that each man of the squad kept hidden from even themselves.

The Terran could be seen outside the field. Sometimes it was gone for long minutes, stretching into centuries or even terribly long hours or, even worse, for eternal seconds. A few times it pressed massive clawed hands against the Hellspace shield, clawing at it in a shower of purple sparks that cried out in the voices of loved ones in pain.

One the Terran pressed his face against the shield, gnawing at the energy field with a fanged maw that was full of molten warsteel that ran down its chin.

Palgret had seen the Terran attacked by what looked to be a deep crimson creature, with red bloodshot ocular orbs that possessed square pupils on the end of each of its five limbs. One side of the body was thick pebbled hide, the other full of soft looking fibrous tissue.

The Terran had been 'normal' appearing, dressed in adaptive camouflage. The creature had wrapped itself around the human, who began shrieking even as it fired its weapon. The two had struggled, scraping against the Hellspace shield, throwing purple and green sparks.

The human had crawled away from the screen as the dead creature dissolved, and Palget was not the only one who retched at the sight of the human's exposed spine, rib spinal roots, internal organs. Even the human's thick protective skull had been torn away, exposing twisted and furrowed greyish pink tissue.

"Human cerbro-spinal fluid tastes like bananas," the voice of the russet mantid Major Holds echoed through the tiny shielded area, sounding far off. "Don't ask me where or how I learned that."

Before her words had completely faded the human came back, roaring, slamming one massive spiked shoulder against the Hellspace shield, causing a shower of sparks that screamed and laughed during their short life. The human vanished back into the darkness.

It went on and on through forever seconds, each one the lifetime of a star, each one less time than it took for an unstable isotope to decay.

Palgret wasn't the only one who had vomited.

Even 030 had thrown up, managing to get his helmet open before brownish fluid burst from his mouth and onto the floor.

The droplets of fluid opened tiny eyes, blinked, and evaporated.

Three began to pray to someone called the Digital Omnimessiah.

Palgret was not the first, but not the last, to join in the prayers.

Lieutenant Mu'ucru'u had been the first to join the prayers, beseeching an electronic deity made manifest to intercede on their behalf.

281 flashed icons of importance to the religion as it kept working with the screen projectors to keep the Hellspace shielding up.

They prayed for mercy.

They prayed for protection.

They prayed for deliverance.

They prayed for each other.

There was nothing else they could do but hold on to one another.

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The Djinn exited Hellspace to the predetermined coordinates.

If Hellspace had not destroyed the invaders, the Maw would devour them while leaving the Djinn alone.

Its sensors cleared and it got a look around itself.

Dozens of Precursor ships, from all three design types, slowly tumbled through space, lit by the fires of the massive Hellspace breech 'above' the dark mass of the Maw.

The Djinn scanned. The ships should have waited for the Maw, which the Djinn could sense through the absence of emissions beyond cold and dark, to devour the ferals aboard them and then left to rejoin the fight.

It realized the Hellspace breach was there at the same time.

As the Hellspace breach saw it.

It rang out through the entire body of the Djinn.

Screams from the other AWM's echoed through the silence of space, carried, impossibly, through vacuum.

The Djinn engaged its Hellcore, tried to jump out, realizing that somehow it had all gone wrong.

But it was too late.

The core was dead.

The engines had gone cold and dark.

The cold radiating from the Maw began to seep into the Djinn's hull.

As the Hellspace breach above the star opened its bloody eye and gazed upon the Djinn.

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Palgret was holding tight to Two, with 281 holding tight to his leg, his eyes closed, repeating the prayer with Three.

Through vacuum the words carried.

The Hellspace screen shattered in a shower of sparks that danced on the black warsteel hide of the bestial looking Terran who stood immoving as a silent sentinel, revealing that his very being had been warped and twisted.

But the words had been spoken.

Palgret was down on his knees, his hands pressed to the side of his helmet, trying to keep out the words although they had already been spoken.

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