The Dark Between The Stars

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-ONE
AELIN

Of all the humans at the ekti-processing station, only Aelin understood the sheer power residing in the bloater conglomeration. As he flew the pod toward them, he saw several nodules sparkle and felt a growing hunger in his mind. He wanted to embrace it all, wanted to drown in it.

He paid very little attention to the shadow cloud, believing that even such darkness was irrelevant to him. As he approached the floating nodules, the gigantic hexagonal ships retracted into the uncertain boundaries of the nebula, which folded up around them. It was not his concern. The inspection pod continued toward the nearest bloater.

After the shadow cloud collapsed and then vanished into empty space, he heard a buzz of distracting voices cross his comm system. The evacuated Iswander Industries ships hovered at a distance, far from the extraction equipment. Lee Iswander remained in the main admin module, still in contact with his ships. Some of the more daring vessels cautiously returned, while others continued down into the distant star system, waiting to receive the all-clear.

Aelin, though, had no intention of going back. His pod descended toward one of the swollen spheres. A bloater sparked off in the distance, and others flickered in some kind of sympathetic rest response. He felt the residual ecstasy of the mental surge he had experienced. He longed to feel it again.

He maneuvered the pod up to the bloater, ignoring the background babble of comm transmissions until a message blared out of the speakers, directed at him. “Who’s in that pod? What are you doing?” It was Lee Iswander’s voice.

“This is Aelin, Mr. Iswander.” Beyond that, he could not explain what the industrialist was not equipped to understand. “I am among the bloaters. I need to… comprehend.”

He muted the comm and applied gentle thrust to maneuver the pod’s main hatch directly against the membrane. The soft bloater skin shifted around the hull like a mouth forming a kiss, embedding the pod.

Iswander overrode the comm block, and his voice broke through again. The transmission was rough and staticky. “Green priest, withdraw—back that pod away from the bloater.”

Aelin had no intention of obeying. He felt giddy with the certainty that he must know what was inside these nodules.

He disengaged the locking mechanisms, stepped in front of the pod’s hatch, and, without hesitating, opened it.

He faced the exposed membrane. It exuded an intoxicating smell, like oily electricity. The air vibrated with a powerful summons. He stood there, his eyes half open, letting the bloater know he was there and who he was.

They had already touched once before. With an ecstatic smile, Aelin plunged through the membrane and into the crackling soup of exotic protoplasm. The blood of the cosmos.

In the admin module, Lee Iswander lost all contact with the pod.