Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

The Forth Direction

"Any signs of sentient l life left?" Scanning the ship sir.

They wait in the half dark and the silence, staring down at the orbital research station, which is now dark and dead, floating aimlessly and lifelessly I the vacuum of space. Adam knew that there was no one left on that station, no one with an Anima anyway, but he was obligated by law and by morality to check and make sure that he was correct.

He did not bother to send his marines, he would not put them in that sort of danger.

Not after seeing what was on those cameras.

It had required a hard line from the docking station to hack into the station computers, but that was fine. As long as they didn't open the airlock doors into the other ship, they didn't have to worry, and Adam had kept a close eye on that door, just in case.

Not that he didn't trust his crew, but because it paid to be paranoid.

In fact if anyone was likely to go off their nut and open that door, it was going to be him. He sort of had a history of doing stupid things during times of danger, so he had brought Sunny in to watch him and make sure he had someone to question his actions if soemthing were to go wrong.

Luckily his reckless side had not raised its head during this time, and he had been left in peace as the ship's system's expert cracked into the station and brought up view from their cameras onto the forward windscreen.

What Adam was now seeing.... Was not encouraging.

The specimen was here, tangles and wads of thick twisted bone, slowly growing outward from the eastern wing of the ship, pressing against the walls and the floors and then curling back in on itself. Many of the cameras had been obscured by the presence of bone, but those that weren't showed a ship that had been overrun, like a weed that slowly spreads its roots through the soil, leaching life and nutrition from the other plants around it.

And it was everywhere.

It curled in great dense clots inside rooms, branched down hallways and slowly crawled through ventilation shafts.

And then there were the bodies.

At least twenty of them all together, most of them scientists of some sort, and all of them.....dead?

Generally he was pretty good at identifying a corpse, but there was something different about this. Few of the crew had to look away as he examined the monitor.

Watching as the little spurs of bone grew in and through the bodies, which were held suspended off the floor by slow impalement. The oldest body was a Tesraki of some sort, just outside the doors to the far wing where the specimen had originated .

He was held aloft a good two or three feet off the floor, his legs dangling uselessly. A bone spur about the size of Adam's arm had grown through where his eyes socket had once been, and over time other spurs of bone had slowly grown through him as well. They were small, smaller than the other branches, slipping under his skin and up, following the path of his veins through his arms and hands and into his face and neck, pushing up against the skin.

Almost as if they were.

Exploring?

He had to shake that thought off as it made him shudder in disgust.

It was the same throughout the rest of the station.

Bodies suspended in the air their arms and legs dangling lifeless even as little spurs of bone grew through them.

Now, the reason why he had questioned weather they were lifeless at all.... Was because they were still moving.

Mouths opened and shut, heads twitched, legs kicked and spines arched in uncoordinated and unnatural ways. On occasion legs moved back and forth as if they were attempting to walk.