Chapter Text
Shiro bent over the console, hammering buttons with blood-slick fingertips, breathing hard and blinking sweat out of his eyes, cursing brokenly as his fingers slipped on the keys and he had to start the authentication process over a second time. A noose of panic tightened around his throat, breath whistling in the echoing silence.
Something clattered in the vents above him and he swung backwards, pulse rifle trained on empty air.
The beam of his flashlight quaked in his unsteady hands.
I’m not going to die like this.
I have to make it through this. I have to go home. I have to.
I have to.
I’m not going to die --
To his left, a panel in the wall bowed outward and then burst, spilling a wretched, twisted mass of limbs. Discolored entrails dragged like wet ropes along the floor.
Choking on fear and recycled air and the smell of rot, Shiro fired.
---
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
---
Artificial sunrise was hard to get used to, no matter how many times he woke up to it. Shiro fumbled in the fluorescent dawn light, eyes half-closed, groping for the off button that would let him sink back into darkness. He knocked something off his cluttered table and swore, voice hoarse with sleep, before he gave up and hoisted his legs over the side of his bunk.
The floor was warm, and he was nearly naked, covered in a thin sheen of sweat. His quarters were close to the ship’s engine so he was used to the constant heat; he almost didn’t mind it at this point. The pneumatic hum of its thrusters swelled and ebbed like a massive, mechanical lung, or the heartbeat of a great beast. It lulled him to sleep every night even as he’d kick his blankets off.
The Kellion wasn’t a large ship, only big enough to hold a skeleton crew: Garrett -- better known by his nickname Hunk -- was their senior ship technician; Lance, primary pilot and security officer; Pidge, technologist; and Shiro, secondary pilot and systems engineer.
The four of them had been working together for the better part of a year under the CEC, usually on minor, routine freight missions. Only rarely did more tempting opportunities like recon or exploration ever cross their path -- but when it did, they leapt at the chance, which was how the Kellion ended up out in the middle of fucking nowhere floating through the airless dark of deep space.
He jumped as someone pounded on his door.
“Shiro!” Hunk said. “Get your ass up or Lance is gonna eat your breakfast for you!”
Shiro tugged on his vest and boots and jogged out the door to the kitchens, where he grabbed a cup of coffee and a plate of watery eggs before heading across the corridor to the bridge. Lance was there, spinning in slow circles in the pilot’s seat.
“Hey, big man,” Lance said. “We’ve got news.”
Shiro sipped the awful coffee and raised an eyebrow. “Good or bad?”
“Real good.” He swung his chair around with a wide grin. “We found her.”
“What? Already?” Shiro stepped past the control consoles to peer out the wide porthole, and he nearly dropped his cup. Sure enough, there she was, massive size apparent even from a distance, a hulking shadow against the haze of Kerberos’ atmosphere. The Ishimura.
Holy hell.
Earth’s greatest hope -- now little more than a hollowed-out husk. The ship itself was dark, long and narrow and surrounded on both sides by reinforced prongs that acted as impact dampeners. To Shiro, it looked like a massive ribcage stripped of flesh.
The USG Ishimura had been the first CEC ship built for the sole purpose of plumbing the depths of space to harvest an astoundingly powerful energy source called quintessence. Once humans had sucked the Earth dry of every possible resource, they’d scrambled into space, leaving the dying planet behind. To hear the CEC tell it, quintessence had been humankind’s savior, the solution to every possible problem. A single canister of refined quintessence could power the entire lunar colony of Titan -- some six million people -- for up to two years. A thimble of the stuff fueled warships and merchant vessels alike.
In short, quintessence was incredibly fucking valuable, and also incredibly fucking difficult to collect, buried deep in the innards of alien planets.
The Ishimura solved that. The ship was what was known as a planetcracker, equipped with a warp drive that could fling it to the recesses of space in a heartbeat, and a pair of immense gravity tethers that could pull apart asteroids, debris fields, and even small planets in an endless hungry search for quintessence. It also carried a two-kiloton drill, the very thing that gave it the name planetcracker.
It was the pride of the CEC for decades until it was replaced by smaller, specialized modern vessels that were simpler to pilot and cheaper to maintain. From what little Shiro knew, a few years back the Ishimura had been relegated to simply patrolling the fringes of space, turning asteroids to dust. Hardly noble work for what had once been the flagship of the CEC’s fleet.
Its diminished reputation meant that when the Ishimura disappeared, it did so with a whisper rather than a shout. Despite being staffed by over two hundred bodies, the planetcracker dropped off the map.
CEC kept the news so tightly sealed not even Shiro had heard about it -- until the Kellion was enlisted for a search mission.
“Pilot error” was the official explanation for the Ishimura’s disappearance over Kerberos, with no further elaboration given; Shiro and his crew had been sworn to secrecy upon penalty of astoundingly steep legal repercussions. The job was eerily simple: Find the corpse of the Ishimura, see if you can bring any of its systems back online, and take yourselves back home.
“What about the people on board? The crew?” Shiro asked. “Why aren’t we being provided with rescue and medical personnel?”
The answer was polite, firm, and evasive. “That’s not part of your job.”
Truthfully, there was no better pilot than Lance, and no better engineers than Shiro and Hunk. Pidge could breathe life into anything with wires and a hard drive. They were the best choice for the mission, and the CEC knew it.
Later, Shiro would realize that they’d also been picked because no one would miss them when they were gone.
---
Hunk’s mouth was a flat line of anxiety. “Easy, Lance. No power on the ship means the docking bay --”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Lance said. “Relax. You know I got this.”
“Something something tailor, right?” Pidge said, gnawing on a chunk of jerky, her one indulgence in space. She brought a crate of it on the ship every time they launched, stowing it under her bunk and sharing strips of it with Hunk while they worked.
They were drifting into the Ishimura’s long shadow, a speck of inconsequential dust in comparison. Every porthole, every monitor was filled with its black bulk, and Shiro watched in awed silence, sweating in his heavy RIG exosuit.
Lance dipped the Kellion’s nose slightly, heading in closer, constantly checking and re-checking his orientation. Hunk stood vigil over his shoulder, arms crossed, while Pidge zipped herself into her RIG and calibrated it, checking the functionality of its kinesis mod by picking up Shiro’s discarded mug of coffee off the floor without touching it.
She looked up and grinned at Shiro, opening her mouth to say something, when the whole ship jolted violently and the cup shattered against the far wall. Pidge stumbled and Lance cursed in surprise.
“I told you to be careful,” Hunk bellowed.
Lance struggled to right them again but the ship kept juddering, dragged on some invisible current. “I didn’t hit anything!”
“Hunk, you told us she was dead! No power!” Shiro said, but Hunk only stared at him in confusion. Bracing himself against the console, Shiro pointed at one of the monitors in front of Lance.
They were getting pulled into the Ishimura’s collection bay by its twin gravity tethers -- what the planetcracker used to capture and crush asteroids. He could already feel the Kellion rattling hard like it was close to coming apart at the seams, alarms screeching over their heads.
“We have to break that hold!” Pidge cried.
“Shiro, I could really use your help,” Lance pleaded, and Shiro slid into the seat next to him, hurriedly tweaking controls and hammering their thrusters. The whole ship whined in complaint against the strain, shaking uncontrollably and still on a fast descent straight into the belly of the Ishimura.
There was no way they would be able to pull away from those tethers, and Shiro knew it. He buckled himself in.
“Hold on! ” he shouted grimly.
When they hit the floor of the collection bay, the ship bounced like a ragdoll. Shiro’s head rocked forward and ricocheted off the console, making his vision swim. He reeled, squeezing his eyes shut, teeth rattling. Hunk swore at the top of his lungs behind him.
The Kellion groaned ominously, metal screaming on metal, while endless alarms howled.
And then they stopped.
Shiro opened one eye and then the other, exhaling shakily. There was blood on his forehead, warm and unpleasant. He muted several of the alarms but his ears kept ringing.
“Everyone okay?” he croaked.
“What,” Lance said shrilly, a little hysterical, “the fuck. What the fuck. Those gravity tethers don’t activate without user input! Someone just pulled us in! To kill us!”
“Lance…” Pidge groaned.
Hunk scrubbed a hand across his face, hauling himself to his feet. “Okay, so the CEC’s estimation was wrong,” he said, wincing as he struggled to catch his breath. “The ship does still have power.”
Wiping the blood off his brow with a sweaty palm, Shiro blinked away lingering vertigo before he spoke.
“And it has survivors.”