Appointed
Nebulon modular frieghter First Day’s Run, En route to Sorizen-II, 37416 BCE…
Captain Elaan Selani stepped quietly onto the empty bridge of the First Day’s Run, strutting between the unmanned consoles and sensor stations as if he owned the place. That was because he did- First Day was his ship, which meant he could very well step out of his quarters and take a leisuresome stroll throughout its corridors and public spaces after lights-out any time he pleased. Rank, as he’d been so often reminded in the Kari Militia by pompous Majors and sub-Commanders, had its privileges. Elaan had never been able to join those privileged few in the militia; but now, as a “mere” civilian, here he was with the best darn multi-purpose long-distance hauler in the Nebulon Republics to his name, with a good crew to keep her running and the comfortable income that such a union would grant you.
So whenever he felt inclined to tour his vessel after-hours, with only the soft hum of her transwarp drive reverberating quietly throughout her interior for company, he promptly did just that. The dimmed lights, the inactive terminals, and the complete lack of people and their noise created an ambiance that Elaan found to be simply sublime. Sometimes he’d get himself a cup of warm tea from the galley and read an old book there at one of the booths, or he’d immerse himself in the gentle white noise of First Day’s innards in Engineering.
Sometimes, though, he’d wind up here, on the bridge, reclining in his chair at its center, beneath the primary sensor controls and systems analysis console, staring out into the tunnel of rainbow light through which First Day frequently travelled. Apparently, Transwarp looked different to every species, and Elaan thanked whatever power that may have created his people for allowing him to see it like this. The view made long trips like this one more bearable. Sometimes, even, he wished that he wasn’t such a punctual man, otherwise he’d give himself an extra day or so to marvel at the extradimensional plane around him. The bridge’s overhead lights were off, with only the soft glows of the monitors, their control panels, and the varicolored streams of light coming from outside illuminating the room. Simply sublime.
Not everyone found transwarp as beautiful as he did, Elaan knew. For some, its many dangers blinded them to its magnificence. Just entering and exiting this dimension-outside-dimensions required a brazen defiance of the scientific laws of the universe, using the exotic properties of energon to create a field around a starship which momentarily tore open a hole in the fabric of space and time, through which a ship could slip in and out of transwarp at the leisure of its crew. Accidents happened all the time: a botched “jump” could reduce a ship to atoms, or leave an entire sector untraversable for decades, if not forever. And that was to say nothing of transwarp itself: an ever-changing bundle of non-realities with few, if any, consistent rules, infinite in a way that somehow made the universe seem small in comparison. Ships got lost in the nothing, too, never reaching their destinations, and every spacer knew stories of strange and unfathomably-massive monsters which prowled the void and could swallow even a cybertronian dreadnaught whole.
Oh, well. A Knight of Cybertron had once told Elaan that “every rose has its thorns”, and while Elaan didn’t know what a “rose” was, the saying seemed appropriate. He was a smart man, he had a good crew, and he had a helluva ship. With all that going for him, he felt safe enough to enjoy the majesty of this place. He reached into one of the pockets within his open jacket and took out a small capsule about the size of a pill bottle. Through a transparent slit of reinforced glass on its otherwise flat grey surfaces, he peered at the tiny, unformed embryo suspended within the icy-blue preservation gel inside. He wondered if M335-J2 (the holographic ID which scrolled across the glass), or any of the other twenty-thousand unborn nebulons in cryo-bins secured in First Day’s cargo bay would eventually grow to be spacers like him, or if they’d be content with life on this new frontier colony where he was taking them. Maybe, if he was fortunate enough to live so long, he’d meet on of these little guys after the geneticists on Sorizen-II had grown him or her into a proper living, thinking nebulon. He laughed quietly at the thought.
“I remember when you were just a couple chromosomes in a shotglass!” he imagined himself saying to some faceless sorizian many years from now, which the younger lad or lass would hopefully find some humor in.
A shrill alarm from the navigation console at the front of the bridge snapped Elaan out of his daydream. The sound was familiar, but at the same time it confused and frightened him: it was the autopilot’s collision alarm, an alarm which should never sound within transwarp. There was one thing which scientists all over the galaxy could say for certain about transwarp: it was statistically impossible that two objects within it could see or interact with each other in any way. Something about “phased-states” or something which Elaan didn’t have the level of education necessary to fully understand. But he did understand that whatever physics were at play prevented ships from hitting each other within transwarp. The terrible monsters from spacer legends were simply that: legends.
But that, perhaps, was another one of those rules which could change upon occasion.
He practically leapt over to the helm, stuffing the embryo-pod back into his jacket, and scanned the console, which claimed to detect an unknown mass which was rapidly approaching the First Day’s Run from the port side. Something within him did not want to take the chance of this being a bizarre malfunction, and he allowed that something to take command as he slapped the the communicator built into the console.
"Everybody get up, now!" he yelled, his voice booming over the ship’s speakers. “I’m making an emergency stop!”
Whatever was going on, he wanted his crew awake for it. He reached for the black cover which concealed the emergency switch, which would flood the transwarp drive with enough energon to catapult the ship back into normal space in an instant. It would be a rough re-entry, but it was preferable to being smashed to pieces. But as his hand hovered over the protective flap, a strange sensation passed over Elaan like a kind of vertigo. His fingers curled on their own, and his legs suddenly gave out from under him. He fell onto the deck, throwing his other arm up onto the edge of the console to brace himself, as a high-pitched whine filled his ears. The muscles beneath his green skin twitched and spasmed outside his control, and he felt his heartbeat stutter. His vision became blurry as he looked up at the monitor, which reported that the unknown mass was… slowing down?
A shadow glided in front of the bridge’s windows, blocking the rainbow aura outside and darkening the room. No, not a shadow- some kind of machine made from sloping mounds of black metal, roped together by thick armored cables. Between the plates of this alien machine, pinpricks of crimson light appeared, like thousands of tiny mechanical eyes staring down at the ship. Elaan felt those eyes staring at him through the glass. For a moment, he thought he heard the voice of Satie, his best mechanic, crackling through the commlink, but then the whining in his ears rose to a painful pitch, drowning out her words and stabbing at his eardrums like hot needles. Involuntarily, he reeled and fell onto his back.
DO NOT RESIST US.
The voice, indescribable and deafening, echoed inside his head. All at once, it felt as if a clawed hand had reached into his skull and was squeezing his brain like a vice. He let out a choked gasp and rolled over, trying to force himself to get up to the console again. He wretched, and as he did, droplets of blood- oily and black, as it was with most nebulons- fell from mouth and nose.
DO NOT RESIST US. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO HELP US RENDER JUDGEMENT UPON YOUR LIMITED EXISTENCE.
Elaan’s body no longer obeyed him, twitching on the floor as his arms and legs writhed uselessly at his sides. Outside, the machine- it was impossibly large. It filled the entirety of the viewport now- opened. Its plates split apart and its cables uncoiled, revealing a deep, dark maw behind them. Huge tendrils snaked out of that maw toward First Day’s Run, and Elaan felt the whole ship shake as they took hold of her.
YOUR TECHNOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL ADVANCEMENTS WILL BE ADAPTED TO SERVICE US. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN. DO NOT RESIST US.
Arcs of red energy ran across the bridge consoles. Elaan felt his ship being pulled upward, faster than the artificial gravity could adjust to compensate. He slid into the stem of his captain’s chair, rolling over to face the back of the room. The embryonic vial fell from his jacket and tumbled end-over-end toward the door, which snapped open as whatever the machine was doing to First Day infected its motion sensors. The vial rolled down the corridor beyond, and disappeared as the hall’s overhead lights flickered out. Or perhaps that was his own sight fading…
YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN. WE ARE THE QUINTESSONS. YOU CANNOT RESIST US.
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