Sequel to AlterMyth and Eleven. Kobo Kanaeru, a 'Worldless' orphan, joins the Cover Corporation's Inter-Dimensional Starfleet Command in their home world of KW1 in their intergalactic fight against the Ancient Ones. Kobod longs to pilot their vaunte...
Author's Notes: This story is the direct sequel to AlterMyth and Eleven. It is highly recommended to read those two stories first. Book Cover/Poster art made by and commissioned from the great Akasuki_iane04 on Twitter.
That aside, enjoy!
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Prologue
It all began with nothingness.
Then, weightlessness.
Then the cold, harsh silence of the void.
These were Kobo Kanaeru's first memories when she awakened in the alloyed confines of an escape pod adrift in deep space. Her tired, groggy, blue eyes looked out the viewports of the pod and saw nothing: no destination nor salvation in sight.
No stars either, she thought. Were they eaten whole perhaps? Were they erased from the universe? What sort of terrifying creature could do such a thing?
Kobo winced, searching for something - anything - in that void.
She regretted that.
Unfathomably long tendrils of dark ichor slithered and writhed in the void of space, conjoined beyond Kobo's vision like the tentacles of an octopus under the lush oceans of her homeworld.
'Homeworld...' Kobo thought.
That word echoed in her mind, but no images or memories came to the surface. Only blankness came to the eye of her mind, no matter how hard she tried to recall. A dull headache followed soon after.
No thoughts of how she got there came to light.
Not even an iota of why she was there - or what that creature in the distance was either.
But then, one of those tendrils slithered through space just beyond the peephole, retreating towards the nexus of the grand, still unseen beast. That tendril dragged along debris of various shapes and sizes. Bits of marked symbols and stenciled names on the debris told Kobo what they were.
They were escape pods, just like hers.
Smashed to pieces.
Frozen blood leaked from the smashed hulls of the escape pods. Bodies in space suits torn in half lagged behind the pods, still attached to their vessels' life supports like umbilical cords. But those vessels, and the bodies attached to them were oozing with black ichor just like the tendrils.
It was like the creature was consuming them from without and within, assimilating them into the greater mass. One of the bodies floated before the viewport of Kobo's pod and slammed into it.
THUD!
Kobo shuddered in her seat, but she couldn't look away.
She saw the face of the dead spacefarer through the broken visor of her spacesuit. Her locks of short, golden hair rose up in the vacuum of space. Her cracked monocular optics flashed with fizzling warning signs. Her dull, blue eyes were unfocused... until one of her eyes changed color, turning blood red first and then as black as night.
