The galleon was a derelict floating high in the orbit of the first planet. Attempts to hail the ship were met with an eerie silence, broken only by the sob of a low-frequency distress beacon. Static scratched at the empty vault of space, and very little could be discerned from the guttural voices it carried. The Grineer were difficult to understand at the best of times. Still, some progress had been made once the dialect had been recognized:
“Liberate mae- liberate mae. Liberate mae!”
The message repeated, looping over and over. It came as a surprise to Tudk, that the Grineer still remembered the language of the Creators, though they did not use it in common parlance and most could not force the syllables through the degraded mush of their minds. The fact that one had chosen to record a distress call in such terms spoke of a certain degree of madness, or delirium.
Liberate mae.
Save me.
The message did not offer specifics, but Tudk could guess. With their decrepit machinery and dirty, chugging engines, the Terminus was not the first Grineer ship to loose life support out in the black, nor would her crew be the last to suffocate on their own breath. Ultimately it didn’t matter. All indications were that of ghost ship, so Company procedure was to strip it for salvage. Everything had value. Even the greasy components of a galleon could be sold for a profit – usually back to the Grineer themselves, for they were rarely able to grasp the workings of anything beyond their own outmoded technology.
Tudk lowered the box-like helmet over his head and sealed it, feeling the subtle change in the engines as the Christi came up alongside and initiated docking procedures. A muted thud rocked the bones of the ship.
“Umbilicus sealed, Captain Tudk.”
Hoisting toolkits and thermal lances, the salvage team walked onto the galleon. The ship was dark and in a state of deep freeze, the rust-colored walls glistering with frozen condensation. Despite the bone-chilling cold, however, Tudk was surprised to discover that life-support was still operational, albeit at minimal power. Atmosphere was reading nominal. It wasn’t asphyxiation that’d killed the crew.
Tudk’s heavy bootfalls echoed in the corridor. To his rear, someone had already fired up a plasma cutter and applied it to the conduits that ran the length of the hall, throwing a rooster tail of sparks that caused the shadows to leap and float in phantasmagoric patterns. Tudk palmed the comm on his chest.
“Jhon, you getting anything on the crew?”
“Negative, Captain.”
The Grineer weren’t known for ambush tactics; if any had been on board, they’d have come to investigate by now, so Tudk remained comfortable with his original assumption. The ship, a derelict. The crew, lost. To what, however, Tudk was admittedly curious to find out. Radiation levels were dirty, but that was normal for a Grineer vessel of this size.
Tudk pressed deeper into the confusing warren of bulbous, vaguely organic architecture. A veteran of many such ships, however, he kept his bearings and steered a course for a the bridge. The cover of a maintenance hatch lay in the middle of the corridor and steam fogged on Tudk’s helmet as he passed under the open vent, leaving a thin sheen of oil. He was glad he didn’t have to breathe it.
He found the first body crumpled in the corner by an access panel.
The Grineer had been taken unaware, terminated by something that’d punched through his spine and crushed his beating heart to pulp. A dark puddle of blood had drained onto the floor, glistering with a thin mantle of ice. Tudk was no stranger to corpses, either, but the brutality of the kill left him uneasy. He unlocked the door and stepped through.
With the exception of the massive, floor-to-ceiling viewport on the far wall, the bridge was a strictly utilitarian affair. The ship’s slowly decaying orbit had brought it around to face the dark-side of the planet Mercury, which hung, rusted and barren, less than a thousand miles away. Tudk set his toolkit on the ground.
He’d found the rest of the crew – the command staff, anyway. Grineer corpses littered the bridge like confetti, crumpled and sprawled and draped amidst gallons of spilled blood. Tudk swallowed the knot in the back of his throat, unable to shake the feeling that something had been playing with them, like a cat tossing the corpse of a mouse. His comm gave a squelch that nearly startled him onto the ceiling.
“Captain Tudk?”
He slapped his comm, his heart jackhammering against his ribs.
“This is Tudk. Go ahead, Decima.”
“I’ve found the crew – what’s left of them, anyway. Looks like most of them tried to clump up around the mainframe.”
“Any survivors?”
“None. There’s as much on the floors as there is on the ceiling, if you get my meaning, sir.”
Tudk got her meaning very well. There was a soft, furtive clunk from the overhead vents, exactly like a fan settling on its bearings. He paid it no mind, carefully stepping over the frozen lakes of blood to the command console. His gloved fingers worked to bring the security holograms online. If he was lucky, the aging technology would have caught the intruder on file – information that was liable to sell for quite a bit of money.
“Sir?” Decima’s voice was hesitant. Tudk could almost hear her chewing the words. “I’ve been listening to the transmission and I think the Company made a mistake.”
“Go on.”
Tudk pressed a button on the console and the bridge lights flared, first yellow, then a dull orange. Jittery holograms sputtered out of decrepit emitters mounted high on the walls, rendering the galleon’s occupants as they had been recorded in life. One of the holograms passed through Tudk’s chest, making him feel as though he’d been brushed by a ghost.
“They thought it was repeating Liberate Mae – ‘Save Me’– but I don’t think that’s it,” said Decima.
All around him, the holograms moved about their daily tasks, their movements growing more and more agitated. Rifles were unslung. Orders were barked to underlings. Something flashed through the bridge doors before they could close. A cloud of pixels fountained into the air and dissolved, falling exactly where blood gathered in heavy beads.
“Here, listen. Can you hear it?”
She played a scratchy copy of the distress beacon back to him, filling his helmet with the screams of the dead as their final moments played out around him. Grainy orange specters appeared to rise from the bodies lying dead at the top of the stairs, lifted up by shafts of pure energy impaled through the back – leaving them to hang like fish writhing on the tip of an Ostron spear. Inside his glove, Tudk’s fingers were icy cold with sweat. He pressed the console and the twitching image slowed to half speed. Something appeared at the top of the stairs, something humanoid but certainly not human, floating a half meter above the floor. Tudk had never seen anything like it. Lithe and small, adorned with trailing ribbons and armor reminiscent of the vanished Orokin and their gilded halls.
It hung there suspended, bobbing up and down. Alive, but not living.
A Grineer lancer stumbled across the floor, trying to hold his entrails inside, and collapsed at Tudk’s feet – collapsed through him to cling at the console, dragging a clumsy hand across the buttons. The Thing at the top of the stairs tilted its blood-spattered head to the side, regarding the act with a kind of demented curiosity.
“It’s hard to make out, but it’s not ‘liberate mae’,” Decima continued nervously. “It’s 'liberate tutemae'... followed by something that I think is ‘ex inferis’,” her voice overlapping with that of the dying Grineer at Tudk’s feet.
Liberate tutemae ex inferis.
Save Yourself from Hell.
Tudk knew now what had lurked at the top of the stairs, blood pouring from claw-like fingers. There had been rumors, but nothing substantial. Nothing more than Quill-whispers- but they weren’t rumors, were they? No, it was something more. Myth given flesh. Legend turned to terrible reality. They were awake, they who had journeyed beyond the universe and returned from the place the Orokin called Hell – the hollow soldiers in twisted frames, things of such unholy beauty that even the stars wept.
The Betrayers.
The Twisted.
The Tenno.
Tudk lifted shaking eyes back to the top of the stairs.
His heart stopped and fell coldly into his stomach.
The hologram had suddenly gained a twin, formed not of lasers and embered pixels, but of bone-white limbs spattered with the blood of those it had killed. Parts of it glowed with cold turquoise light, light that glistened on the curtains of blood that’d poured down the stairs.
Not a derelict.
It had been waiting here all along.
The paused hologram suddenly timed out-
-and the Tenno lunged with a harrowing shriek.
