The ship screamed.
It was a deep, guttural sound of metal tearing apart, a noise that vibrated through the soles of Inês’s boots and up into her teeth. Red lights strobed across the corridor, painting the walls in flashes of blood. The automated voice, usually a calm, synthesized female, was a frantic shriek on a loop. “Hull breach imminent. All personnel to escape pods. Hull breach imminent.”
Inês ran. Her dark hair, usually tied back in a neat, practical bun, was coming loose, strands whipping across her face. At twenty-eight, she had spent the last three years of her life in the sterile, predictable environment of the deep-space research vessel The Magellan. Her body was compact and sturdy, built for long hours spent hunched over specimen trays and hauling equipment on planetary surveys. Her hands were calloused, her nails short. She wasn't a soldier, but she was a survivor.
She slammed a palm against the panel for the pod bay, the door hissing open just as the ship lurched violently, throwing her against the far wall. A sharp pain shot through her shoulder. She ignored it, scrambling forward. The bay was chaos. Two other crew members were fumbling with a hatch, their faces white with terror. She didn't have time for them. She had her assigned pod: Echo-7.
Her training took over, a cold, clean protocol overriding the panic clawing at her throat. She slapped the emergency release on the wall locker, grabbing the standard gray survival kit. Rations, water purifier, med-pack, flare. Useless junk on most worlds, but it was procedure. She slung it over her shoulder and dove into the cramped interior of the pod.
The single-seat cockpit felt like a coffin. She strapped herself into the harness, her movements swift and sure. Her fingers flew across the pre-launch sequence, the system coming online with a series of green blinks. Through the small viewport, she saw one of the other crew members get sucked out into the void as a secondary explosion ripped open the bay. A silent, horrifying ballet of flailing limbs and frozen vapor.
Inês didn't look away. She watched until the launch sequence was complete, her face a mask of grim determination. This was the cost of space. She knew it, had accepted it when she signed on. But knowing and seeing were two different things.
Launch initiated.
The pod ejected with a bone-jarring shudder. Thrusters fired, pushing her away from the dying bulk of The Magellan. For a single, terrifying second, she saw what had attacked them. It wasn't a ship. It was a jagged, dark monstrosity that seemed to drink the light of the nearby stars, a thing of spikes and weapon ports that pulsed with a sick green energy.
Then The Magellan exploded.
A wave of pure, white light filled her viewport, blinding her. The shockwave hit her pod like a giant’s fist. Alarms blared inside the tiny craft, a cacophony of shrieks and warnings. She was sent tumbling end over end, the G-forces pressing her so hard into her seat that black spots danced in her vision. Hull integrity compromised. Navigation offline. Atmospheric entry imminent.
The last thing she saw through the viewport was the scarred, pockmarked surface of a barren moon, growing larger and larger at an impossible speed. She braced herself, her knuckles white on the controls, and squeezed her eyes shut.
The impact was not a sound. It was an absence of everything else. It was a world-ending shriek of metal, a violent, instantaneous stop that felt like every bone in her body had turned to dust.
Then, nothing.
Pain was the first thing to return.
It was a hot, searing spike in her side, a fire that flared with every shallow breath she managed to drag into her lungs. Consciousness came back in slow, agonizing waves. The red of the emergency lights was gone, replaced by the dim, gray light of an alien sky filtering through a spiderweb of cracks in the viewport.
The smell of ozone and burnt wiring filled the cramped space. Inês tried to move, but her leg was pinned, trapped beneath the twisted metal of the control console. She was hanging half-sideways, held in place only by the harness digging into her uninjured shoulder. She tasted blood, coppery and thick on her tongue.
She forced her eyes to focus. Outside, the landscape was a desolate vista of gray rock and dust under a bruised-purple sky. No vegetation. No water. No sign of life. She was well and truly fucked. The pod’s comms were dead, the emergency beacon most likely a useless lump of melted plastic. No one was coming for her.
A wave of despair, cold and sharp, washed over her. It was more terrifying than the attack, more final than the crash. The sheer, absolute loneliness of her situation settled in her bones. She was going to die here, pinned in a metal coffin on some forgotten rock at the edge of the galaxy.
She might have screamed, or maybe it was just a raw, ragged gasp. Her vision started to swim again, the gray landscape blurring at the edges. Just as she felt herself slipping away, a shadow fell over the viewport.
It was colossal.
It blocked out the sky, plunging the cockpit into near darkness. Inês’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, terrified drumbeat. A creature? An animal drawn by the crash?
A low groaning sound started, but it wasn't the groaning of stressed metal. It was deeper, more deliberate. The sound of something impossibly strong being bent. She watched, paralyzed, as the edges of the main hatch, which had been warped and sealed shut by the impact, began to buckle inward.
Fingers—thick as her wrist and tipped with black, obsidian-like claws—curled around the edge of the metal. They were attached to a hand, a hand so large it could have crushed her skull without effort. Skin the color of polished volcanic rock, dark and smooth.
With a final, deafening shriek of tearing durasteel, the hatch was ripped away and tossed aside as if it were a piece of cardboard.
Framed in the opening was a monster.
He had to be over seven feet tall, a silhouette of pure power against the dying light. His shoulders were impossibly broad, his chest a solid wall of muscle that tapered down to a narrow waist. He wore something simple, a loincloth of some dark hide, leaving his powerful legs and torso bare.
But it was his skin, his eyes, that held her. His skin was the color of a starless night sky, and across his chest and arms, faint, intricate patterns swirled. As he looked down at her, they began to glow with a soft, blue bioluminescence, like constellations coming to life.
And his eyes. They weren't animalistic. They were intelligent, ancient, and they glowed with the same inner light, a piercing, hypnotic blue. He tilted his massive head, his gaze sweeping over her broken form, the wreckage of her pod. A low sound rumbled from his chest, too deep to be a word, more like the vibration of the planet itself. A growl, not of aggression, but of… something else. Curiosity?
He took a step forward, ducking to enter the ruined pod. The faint light caught the sharp, brutal planes of his face, the strong jaw, the flat nose. He was terrifying. He was magnificent.
He was the last thing she saw before her world dissolved into blackness.
