Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Thermonuclear

"RADIO'S OFF! WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T OPEN BULKHEAD VIEWPORTS."

The ship shook.

Admiral Kozlov fell forward hands outstretched wrists cracking as he tripped onto the deck. All around him the crew rattled in their seats as he clawed his way back to the captain's chair.

A string of curses flew from his lips each one more vibrant and vulgar than the last, a talent he had picked up from his father, who had the spirit of a Russian poet, but the mouth of a Russian sailor.

He finally managed to pull himself back into his chair and strap in.

As he did another psychic wave hit the ship, causing the deck to rumble and rattle. Metal screamed, giving voice to a creature that did not have a voice of its own.

Fear boiled up inside his bones, giving him a crushing sensation of impending doom.

Outside those walls.... IT waited.

Behemoth

And he couldn't even turn on his cameras to see it.

All they had was radar, operating like a submarine under deep ocean.

They didn't know what the thing looked like, and they weren't' even sure how big it was.

It was a.... temporal and gravitational anomaly, with a mass hundreds of times greater than its size., a measurement that he tried not to think about.

Thousands of miles not to think about.

But with a gravitational reading that was frankly preposterous. If this thing was really reading with gravity as high as it said, with the mass that they thought, then it should have been a black hole, but it wasn't, and now, the bastard was approaching earth, and already it was threatening the delicate fabric of their solar system, and life on earth and mars as they knew it.

Deep in the blackness of space Behemoth had appeared at the fringes of their solar system pulling Pluto off course with its massive gravity well and devastating the entirety of the Pluto research station. Two hundred scientists all supposedly dead, and yet they hadn't had the time or ability to go and recover the bodies or look for survivors.

Behemoth was in the way, encroaching on their system like a plague bares down upon a medieval city.

But the Pluto station had not been the worst of it.

If initial contact was not bad enough, then what Behemoth had done to A1-36 was just the opening act, or more accurately the A1-36 station, though those on the planet's surface hadn't gotten away so easily. From what they could gather behemoth appeared from nowhere, taking the station by surprise, and giving the humans and aliens alike no time to recover , or even react as its unfathomable madness hit them with full force.

Ten thousand humans and aliens combined, swept into jabbering madness, representing worst of all in the humans.

An entire station cannibalized from the inside out. A few of those human ships had made it to the surface of A1-36 and the resulting slaughter was.... So graphic that even the military reports were.... Edited for content. Wherever this thing went it brought horror.

Thinking of all those people that died, Kozlov felt a shiver run down his spine.

And they were next.

All the had to do, all he had to do to turn himself and his crew into mindless cannibals was to open the viewport windows under the bulkhead shielding. Just one command and he could kill everyone on board without a second thought.

It was like that moment, where you walk up to the edge of a cliff and look out over a sheer drop, and somehow you imagine what it would be like to jump? He believed the French had a term for it that roughly translated to, the call of the void. Well, he felt it now,