Aeotu sweeps me up.
I'm tumbling through the kaleidoscope of her mind. It's different from the last time I was here, more… natural, I guess. Easier. Before I was a Kuma-coloured bubble in Aeotu's mind, struggling to keep myself on the river that rages toward her core, pulled this way and that by the tributaries that branch off the main thrust of her thoughts. This time the river doesn't threaten to drown me, doesn't batter my shields.
The tributaries, the fragments of Aeotu's self, still call to me, want to tell me things like hull pressure and oxygen ratios, but they don't tug, don't fight over my attention. It's Aeotu herself, the core of her, who guides my path, nudging me away from the river that leads directly to her anima, toward a smaller tributary singing with the warm bronze of home.
I don't know what I'm expecting, what a ship calls home. A drydock? A massive steelcrete skeleton orbiting a moon? Whatever it is, it's not the glittering bronze web, a constellation of minds thrumming to the same beat as Aeotu's, an interconnectedness like what I have with Grea, except closer. It's the Sisters, the other ships like Euiva. And they're all gone, the stars dark, only the memory of them left behind, the places where they used to be, faint glows kept alive in Aeotu's memory. All except one.
One of the stars is alight, a crimson glow. Not as it was, but alive. Joy fills the space, pain too. Aeotu's emotions swirl around me, not crushing but buffeting me in their wake.
The tide of Aeotu's mind pushes me closer and closer to that glow, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to reach it, 'cause I know what's there, know deep in the pit of me.
Euiva.
The dark net in my way is a relief.
The web is strung across the rushing tide of Aeotu's sub-mind in strands of black fug. Menace rolls off it, like the darkness that surrounded Grea. It pulses with old memories and fear, has its own gravity, a pull that has me reaching for it, even as the sane part of me, the bit that used to wake in the middle of the night convinced of the bogeyman in the wall units, recoils.
I grab a strand. It's midnight in my grip, the absolute cold of the void, the despair of floating in the stasis unit, waiting to die. The strand twists around my wrist, slowly at first, hesitant, like it doesn't know what to make of me. For a moment, it tastes me, rolls my essence around its mouth. I think it likes what it finds because the strand tightens on my arm, lifts me from the tributary. My feet are dangling above the flow of Aeotu's consciousness until the tips of my toes brush the surface.
There are new waves, black crests in the darkness. Fear is universal, it seems, and it stains Aeotu's thoughts. It's an old fear, rising from the depths of her being with threads tracing all the way back to her core.
But here... Here doesn't feel like a part of Aeotu. It's different, the blackness a foreign body embedded not just in the AI's psyche, but trailing through the constellation behind it. Sticky little tendrils reaching out to each of the withered, faded stars of the Sisters.
The vines wrap tighter around my arm, and now more of them are coming out of the dark, twining around my waist, my legs, my shoulders, encasing me. That little part of my brain, scared of the bogeyman, is whimpering, curled up on itself, hands over its head, calling for Dad, but it's far away, hidden behind layers of... home? Not Aeotu's home – the constellation of minds – but my home, or what's meant to be my home. The planet where my parents were born, Jørn.
Giant trees reaching for blue skies; the endless push and pull of ocean tides; hot desert breezes, sand in my coat and under my paws. A full, brilliant moon.
Home. Somehow, in the pit of me, right next to the whimpering toddler, I know that's Jørn. A place I've only seen in holos, only experienced in training memories, a place I'm meant to care about, but don't.
Psionic schisms are strange things. It's like standing on the edge of a crater with your dad on the other side. He's talking to you, but there's a problem with the comms and, while you can see his mouth move, you can't make out the words. Except all of that is in your own brain.
There's a schism forming now, a split right down the middle of my psyche, and there… There is the creeping dark reaching from the depths, trying to take over part of my brain, trying to plant something there.
Tension rides through the eter, tightens the bands around my chest, squeezes the flesh of my thighs. You might expect desperation from the dark, but no, what's creeping up on me is cold and hard, rich with the coppery scent of blood and the memory of violence. It has no colour. It is the absence of light, and it draws a whimper from the scared toddler in my gut.
It slips through my shields like they're not there and worms its way into my memories, seeking. Too late, I try to rip it out, to rip me from its grip, but it's not holding me anymore, it's part of me, in my skin and bones, winding through my muscles, trying to make a home.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
What do I do?
There's no Dude here, no Hunt, just me, Aeotu and the darkness.
It sinks deeper.
I retreat, but retreating from yourself isn't that easy. Walls and shields and ditches the width of an ocean, I throw all of it, every single scrap between me and it. It laughs. It. Laughs.
The sound is like flippers rubbing together, like a song underwater. It almost sounds like a million Onahs and h'Rawds wrapped into one – if either of the kin breathed underwater.
Wait.
Kin
Under water.
Water-kin.
Well, shit.
Realisation dawns like a new star, loosening the web's hold.
I rip myself out of its embrace.
There two species of kin aboard Citlali – air- and tree-kin – but there's a third species, an aquatic one. They didn't come with us for a couple of reasons; the adults will tell you it's because there wasn't enough liquid water aboard the ship, and while it's true, it's not the real reason. We all know the real reason, even if no one actually says it out loud.
The water-kin were fucking scary.
Ask a tree-kin about their aquatic cousins, then watch them struggle to keep their tail from scooting between their legs and their ears from flattening.
There is a story, something you whisper in the dark with a glow pushed up under your chin. A legend made to scare your friends, one you tell where the adults can't hear, one that causes the tree-kin to shudder, and the air-kin's feathers to rise.
It's a story of the water-kin, how they rose out of Jørn's oceans and wrapped their mind around the world to destroy an entire species. An entire alien species. It's a story everyone knows but no one talks about, but there's another version, one where the water-kin didn't just destroy the alien minds, but planted something in them, a command buried deep in their psyches where not even a telepath would find it.
I found the command, or it found me, and now it's wrapped around my mind, crawling in my veins. Now that I know what it is, the black waves make sense, are familiar in the way Onah is familiar. Not exact but close enough that the shape of it makes sense.
The darkness is a command sphere like nothing I've ever seen. It pulses with a life of its own, with a purpose independent of the minds that created it, thick with fear, pain, and retribution. As complex as it is, as weird, it carries a very simple command, one wrapped around an image of Them – the flat-nosed aliens the kin once drove from Jørn, the same ones that built Aeotu.
Kill.