Chapter Text
nest - chapter one
a no man's sky fanfiction
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PLANET: Reaje XVI
SYSTEM: Traheiian
REGION: [unknown]
somewhere in Calypso Galaxy...
"Hey, Lucien. Check this out."
The undergrowth rustled behind Traveller Zed as he hacked away at a tangled mass of vines, the dull metal plating they crawled down slowly revealing itself. Light dribbled from the crisscrossed canopy onto a marking - a simple skull symbol, just like the one on his chestplate, hurriedly sprayed with bone-white paint on the container's side.
"They never picked it up." Zed sighed, pulling the remaining vines off the stack of cargo crates. As he pried open the lid, a puff of vapour revealed several lines of glass tubes filled with an off-colour liquid. "Dammit," he snapped, picking one up as Lucien poked their head into the clearing. "They're all worthless now."
"Refrigerator broke down." After some examination, the Korvax pulled a tool from their belt, removing the screws holding a panel in place on the box's side. It fell to the ground with a muffled clunk. "It's filled with those little tentacle things..."
"Ugh." Zed fired a boltcaster shot at the slush beneath his feet. He could have sworn the tendrils coating it hissed and slinked backwards. This whole mission was a mess. "You think they escaped?"
"Not likely." Lucien pulled something from their backpack, handing it to Zed. A twisted piece of metal - more black than purple now, it appeared to be a piece of starship body. Printed on it was that same skull insignia.
"It looks to have been charred by some sort of small explosion. There were a bunch more on the ground back there."
He tossed it aside. "Hm...any other leads?"
"I'm getting something on my transmitter."
Zed looked up at the huge tentacles arching overhead, caging the sickly yellow sky. The stagnant air was cold but humid - his Exosuit hazard protection turned biting arctic temperatures into an unpleasant chill clinging to the fur on the back of his neck. None of the muffled dripping and slithering from the darkness around them could drown out the slow, sharp beeping of Lucien's device.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Beeeeeeeeeep.
"There."
"What is it? Is it pirate?"
"Looks Korvax. There's some distortion; it's probably one of ours. But it's weak."
"Let's go, then."
Lucien passed him the little blue box, and Zed circled around the clearing, listening carefully to the subtle changes in beep frequency that indicated where the signal was coming from. He picked a direction, and it was not long before the pair had left the clearing behind, slicing through the undergrowth with knives and mining beams.
The deep grinning jungle pressed in around them, selfishly gripping the remains of the settlement that had once stood here. Now and again, a rooftop or a crumbling wall would catch the light, warped by vines into an otherworldly sculpture. Everything outside the shrinking sunbeams was a deep mess of brown and black - a world of Schrödinger's cats, where hungry tricks of the light eyed you from obsidian shadows. It was a great machine they were amongst, or an organ - the lurking, the dripping whispers, the slow consumption of wood and stone. The stirring, insatiable wild. The air like iron, firmly closing in.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
"...What happened here?" Lucien's electronic whisper seemed a lot louder than it was.
Zed didn't know how to respond. He'd been trying to avoid that question. "Still no clue," he said. "It's impossible, but..."
The Korvax nodded, face-lights flashing with nervous curiosity.
Beep. Beep. Beep. went the device.
Zed began to speculate, filling the silence for both of them as they pulled themselves through the vines.
"I don't know - maybe we're missing something. I've been to a few infested planets before, but I've no idea where it all comes from. Of course, they're pretty dangerous - bio eggs and stuff. Oh, and the worms. We really need to stay away from the worms."
They both paused, scanning the canopy for some nest they might have missed.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Faster.
"Still doesn't answer the question." Dissatisfaction fragmented his words as Zed began blasting a sprawling flora in their way. "The plants are pretty fast growing, but how would you get them all over the surface?"
"Artificial mass seeding event? No, that would be impractical."
"Yeah, this place was pretty busy. Someone would have heard by now if something on that scale was going on."
The flora toppled, disintegrating into carbon as the vines it supported sagged and slithered to the ground. In the gap it left behind was a stone archway, draped in slime and a thick curtain of vines.
Lucien's gaze wandered over the abandoned landscape. "It's like we're the only ones that have been here in a hundred years... Kind of beautiful, honestly."
"Maybe if it WAS a hundred years old." Zed approached the archway, preparing to cut down the vines blocking the view through it. "Perhaps we should ask all the people that lived here yesterday."
"Eheu..." They shook their head, hanging back. "An entire settlement destroyed, and who knows how many more - what are we chasing, Zed?"
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep. This was it. Behind this arch was answers.
Hints of the vines' calloused texture drifted through Zed's gloves as he grabbed them, pushing the knife blade against their flesh. Lucien joined him on the other side; he briefly wondered how much their heavily gloved synthetic hands could feel. The Korvax had been uncharacteristically pensive this whole trip - normally they would have goofed around a little, but their face-lights focused intensely on the vine they were cutting with a worried seriousness Zed rarely, if ever, saw in them. It scared him a little.
"Maybe whoever's signalling can explain," he said, with some vague intention of reassurance. Bright yellow fibres and a pungent stench blossomed beneath the blade.
"It really doesn't make any sense, does it?" he continued. "Logically, an infestation should start spreading from a single point, and that point should have the densest concentration of plants - but it all looked really even from the ship. It only makes sense if the infestation was very old - but that just can't be true." Zed's sawing was anxious and rapid. "We received the distress call from the smuggling team just a few hours ago. Before then, this planet was completely clean. No records of previous contamination, the strictest biosecurity laws in the sector."
The pair turned around, looking back at the smothering maze of tentacles. In the darkness, they almost seemed to twitch, to slither. Each knew exactly what the other was thinking: what by Atlas happened to this planet?
They suddenly realised that neither of them wanted to know.
Zed took a deep breath.
"Let's go rescue that Korvax," he said, making the final cut.
Zed's darkness-adjusted eyes were suddenly scoured by the light pouring in from the opening. Lowering the arm he had thrown up to shield them, he surveyed the scene before him with shock.
Once, this town square had been paved with an intricate pattern of iridescent stones; one could almost imagine their glittering in frosty light. Now, that square was shattered. Stray cobbles were buried in mounds of swept-aside snow, ploughed aside by the strangling vines riddling the foundations. Amongst this web, there were the visages of unfortunate flies - every now and again, one would perceive a hand, an armour plate, a shattered Multi-Tool that indicated the resting place of one of the infestation's victims.
Off to one side was the corpse of a starship - nose straining desperately towards the sky, its engines were lodged in the soot-caked ground. An enormous plant gripped its wings, visibly crushing the metal - evidently, the ship had not been able to overpower its Kraken-esque force. Hungry tentacles danced up its side and into the shadowed cockpit.
But the centrepiece of this gruesome arrangement was the most disturbing. A single Korvax hung in the air, speared through the centre by a group of strange, shimmering appendages. A tuberous mass - glowing, pulsing, squirming - clung to the Korvax's legs, purple tentacles twirling up its side and into the back of its head.
The mass was like nothing Zed had ever seen. A strange, distorted egg: it lay palpitating like a great unwieldy heart, exposed in a cavity of the planet's flesh. Beneath the smooth tentacles veining it, it glowed with a filthy yellow light. He couldn't take his eyes off the thing - he had never come across something so disgustingly alive.
Lucien's distress was evident. Dodging the wreck of the ship, they rushed over to the unfortunate Korvax, whose carapace was still letting out sparks. As Zed followed, trying not to look at the rest of the carnage, he realised like they had that the Korvax was still barely alive. Taking their hand, Lucien whispered to them in their own language, of which Zed could only understand fragments. He stood back to give them some space, noticing an emblem of piracy on the Korvax's splintered armour - a member of the smuggling party they were sent to help.
Lucien turned to him. Their face-lights swirled with deep concern.
The impaled Korvax suddenly moved, head turning with a rusty creak as sparks formed a halo around their neck. A speaker crackled from somewhere within - at first, it was completely unintelligible, but soon syllables became distinguishable, and a garbled pirate dialect emerged.
"...l...leave here," they whispered. "...don't...let it..." Words disappeared into static, then came clear again. "...kill it...kill the egg...kill it!" Their head suddenly jerked backwards, and their face lit up with a single streak of red-blue-purple-green-it snapped back into place, dim blue glow returning. "...burn...can't hold...s-s-system - failure..."
Zed's hands were shaking a little as he adjusted the settings on his Multi-Tool. "W- what did this to you? What happened?"
"From the sky...came...hungry," the Korvax spat. Oil dribbled down tears in their Exosuit. "It wants me...I c- c- can help it...make it better-"
The head twisted with a shriek, colours spewing from its screen. Streaks of light burst across it, a flock of a thousand birds congregating and condensing, a dance of crystalline souls, a face, an inconceivable face-
One perfect moment.
"Get out of here. Tell them I-"
The Korvax was gone. The hunger of the overgrowth remained.
Colours bled down its screen and into its twitching sap-stained hands, the lethargy lining its shoulders evaporating as something angry and unknown straightened its joints. The spines piercing its chest jerked, then retracted, as the tendrils behind it thrashed bands of shadow into the snow.
Its voice lingered in Zed's ear, like a ghost.
"Get down!" Lucien yelled, wrenching him aside as a tentacle jabbed right between his footprints. Their carapace replaced the arctic suns with flickering blue face-lights as they threw him forward into a run. Something crunched beneath his feet - he didn't stop to think about what it was as he ran for the undergrowth on the edge of the ruined settlement. Frozen, lifeless hands brushed his legs as he unclipped a dark purple Multi-Tool from his belt, firing a few hurried shots at the creature.
They were in the dark, back the way they had came. Colours clawed at their Exosuits as the whole world began to move. Vine after vine whipped through their path as they leaped and charged away from the creature ploughing the snow behind them. It was gaining.
"Where the hell are our ships?" Zed yelled as they crashed into the clearing, crates toppling with a splintering of glass. The plants were awake now and they spun and thrashed above his head as he fired. He and Lucien were back-to-back, searching the shifting depths for some sort of landmark. "What do we do?"
A noise shattered the storm. Sunlight set fire to blazing arcs of slush as the thing bore down upon him, face a mess of brilliant colours right next to his. A screech of metal on metal as Lucien's arm was thrust between them - only half recovered, Zed slung a blaze javelin right into it as it was thrown to the ground. Wires burned, and the thing screamed, splintered metal claws raking the air and catching his leg. His Exosuit barely held together.
Lucien pulled him up and he stumbled to his feet, leaning a little on their arm. "Up," he said. "We need to get above the canopy!"
In synchrony, the pair activated their jetpacks. Tentacles spun past their ears as the thing recovered down in the snow. Zed twisted and turned, barely keeping his eyes on the acrid sky as wind drafts knocked him about. Suddenly, a huge tentacle swung out, winding him as he was tossed into a net of smaller ones - Lucien's face disappeared behind overgrowth as he fired again and again, burning red light cutting him free. Leaping off the tangle, his jetpack roared back to life, and he shot up to see the thing grappling with Lucien midair. Enhanced with Sentinel tech, their frame was strong, but they were trying to hold off it and the vines simultaneously, and their jetpack sputtered as its fuel began to run out. Boosting, he leaped onto its back, hissing and wrenching its head backwards. It screamed again, and in the fraction of a second Lucien had their multitool on its neck. Zed dodged out of its path as a pure green beam split the air. He pulled the head away as tentacles from either side grasped at each other, and stuck a final blaze javelin right through it. He shoved the charred carapace into his pack, just in case.
Lucien shook the body off, but their jetpack was failing, and the world was still angry. They reached out a sap-covered hand to Zed, who grabbed it as they both gripped a vine swung at them from nowhere. Unable to lift both of them, it was pulled taut and swung back, as they had hoped, to the twisting 'trunk' of its host. Zed adjusted their course with his own jetpack, and they made a splintering feet-first sideways landing into the plant; Lucien turned to the sky and began to climb. The vine was fraying, but he only needed to defend Lucien from the hissing canopy until their jetpack recharged. The cohesion had gone from the tentacles' movement, and they whipped around at random, allowing Zed enough space to pick off any that came near. The suns seemed closer, the yellow sky seemed brighter. Mist from sweat and panting was condensing on his visor.
"Ready!" Lucien's voice sliced open his dissolving senses, and with a roar their jetpack shot up, holding the Traveller. Suddenly the cloud-painted light was everywhere and his feet felt something solid - all around was a shifting, twisting, screaming horizon, and a small clearing -
"There! Ships!" One jetpack boost, then another launched them through the wind. Zed barely felt the bruising as he slammed into the side of his cockpit, sliding into the little yellow fighter. A black-and-blue solar ship rose into the air beside him as he fumbled with the controls, pointing nose towards the red-sailed frigate waiting for them just beyond the sky.
"Oh. Oh Atlas. What was that." Zed found himself devoid of coherent thought as he struggled to flip on his pulse engine. His communications were connected to Lucien's, and he signalled to the frigate. "It can't follow us up here can it? Oh no. I shouldn't have asked. Ternet? Prepare for warp, please. This is ending badly."
"What the hell?" crackled the calloused voice of Captain Ternet. "What did you do."
"The planet - it's alive - oh- get us out-"
His pulse engine awoke, sending the ship careening in a matter of seconds to face the frigate up close. The NH9 Broken Sword: outlaw designation, commanded by an acquaintance of the pair's. They had been dispatched to investigate the disappearance of a small smuggling party that had landed on the planet recently. That did not go well, Zed thought, as the docking bay opened his ship nestled into a landing pad beside Lucien's.
He stumbled out of the cockpit, light-headed. A sharp pain stabbed through his foot as he tried to put weight on it; he looked down and saw his torn Exosuit soaked with crimson. So the thing had scratched him after all. He suddenly felt dizzy.
Seeing the injury, Lucien caught them before they toppled over, and turned to face the battle-worn Gek emerging from a door behind them.
"Atlas, you two, what were you doing?!" they grunted, pulling a medical kit off the wall. Lucien struggled to explain what they had seen as they attempted to clean the plant matter from Zed's wound, using what they had to patch it up. It was deep, and worse than they thought.
"Well, that's new," Ternet said, their tone as unchanging as ever. "Do you think it-"
Something shook the frigate to its core.
A resonance, so loud and so deep that its vibrations shook the ships in their places. Something was groaning, roaring, calling.
It was the planet. The planet itself. But what would answer?
"All hands to stations!" Ternet's rough voice boomed throughout the corridors as they stormed towards the bridge. "Prepare for warp; I want the hyperdrive ready and the guns loaded!"
Woozy from blood loss and anaesthetic, Zed gripped Lucien's arm as the adrenaline left his body. "Luce...w-what's going on?"
"Can you walk?" they responded. "We need to go. Here..." They half-carried him down the hallways, his ragged breath on their shoulder. Their communications suddenly crackled to life - "Lucien! I need you on the bridge, now!"
Zed couldn't last. They located the nearest crew quarters, shoved the door open and gently set him down on the bottom bunk of a bed, next to a star-filled window. Barely aware of their presence, he turned to look - and as his consciousness faded, they saw the creature warp in.
A song, but a song so twisted that it sent chills through your bones. A shape spoken of only in legends - one that Ternet had only seen once before. A great leviathan, singing to the planet below. Its fins heaved stars aside like dazzling spray off an ocean as it glided towards the Broken Sword.
But it was not alone. It was not entirely itself, for twisting around its fins and its flowing trail and its head and into its ululating mouth were foul, gripping tentacles.
All of their ends were trained on the frigate.
Ternet heard Lucien enter the room behind them and stop in shock. Ternet themself was still internally reeling. The last time they had seen one of the great space whales, it had been a terrible omen. But one like this, with pain and fear and intention lining its body? They could only stand and watch until the ship's communicator flickered to life.
The green-helmeted face of a Traveller emerged from pixels. They sounded like they were grinning.
"Why hello there! I was just calling to tell you that you seem to have damaged something...very valuable to me. I only ask that I be compensated - an eye for an eye, as they say. The destruction of your frigate will suffice. You can surrender if you like, though I can't guarantee a change in outcome. Goodbye, friends!"
The image disappeared, echoing stray laughter.
Ternet's practicality and experience shook the shock out of their mind. "FIRE AT WILL!" they screamed into the frigate intercom. "Prepare for warp! Lucien, tell me everything you know about these things. Are they like the planet? Where do we need to hit it?"
Lucien was frozen. "That face," they said. "I've seen it before..."
"Where? What's the deal?"
They put their hand to their head. "I- I can't remember. I need a minute."
"We don't HAVE a minute! Get to that panel over there and monitor the warp. Where the hell's Vantin? WHY IS NO ONE FIRING?!"
A Korvax officer flinched. "Captain - no one wants to - they say it's bad luck to shoot a leviathan -"
"Bad luck my ass! You're on the Broken Sword, by Atlas! What happened to all the being cursed stuff?! Now shoot that thing before it sucks all our brains out!"
Sure enough, a tentacle much larger in diameter than any Zed and Lucien had encountered was careening towards the bridge window. The leviathan, pulled against its will, cried out as it bore down on the frigate.
Red bolts shot from the frigate's roof, blasting the tentacle off course. "Ready the torpedoes!" yelled Ander over the blaring alarms. "Warp ready in sixty seconds," someone said; Ternet made a mental note.
The first torpedo fired in synchrony with two more tentacle flails. It slammed into the base of one, turning the nose of the frigate as a soul-wrenching cry filled the bridge. The second one, however, slammed against the hull, and there was a tearing of metal as it dragged out a scar before gunfire burnt it apart. More tentacles were approaching fast, and it was all the crew could do to keep them at bay.
"There!" said Lucien suddenly. "That's the Traveller's ship!"
Ternet followed their outstretched hand - it took them a second to spot the tiny black dot whizzing around beneath the belly of the vine-encased leviathan. "They're behind all this...Crew!" Ternet exclaimed. "Get a lock on that ship! Open fire!"
The crew fired on the ship with much more enthusiasm, and the tentacles began to curl back in towards it, forming a cage to protect it. Whoever they were, they were important to this crazy plant, and that was an advantage.
"Twenty seconds till warp!" Ternet's strategy had put the leviathan on the defensive, and it raised up tentacles to shield itself from the vigorous gunfire. A second torpedo was charging up.
"Ten seconds! Fire that thing now!" someone said, and the torpedo went spinning into the leviathan's side. It cried out again, and this time something went out of it - it seemed less like a weapon and more like an injured animal, being worked until the life drained out of it. The wailing grew quieter, but did not stop. Gently, the gunfire slowed.
"Five seconds to warp..."
The plant knew what was going on. In one last effort, the leviathan's skin was split down the side of its head, and out with star-coloured blood came innumerable tentacles, reaching as the song reached into their very souls...
...then the hyperdrive activated, and the frigate disappeared.
In absolute silence, every one of the crew looked out into that swirling abyss of light.
"Lucien," Ternet said at last. "Go check on Zed, and see what you can remember about that Traveller."
The Korvax looked at them for a long moment, then left.
The alarms had stopped blaring, and the lights had returned to white. There was a sad, sad smell in the air, and it took Ternet a while to realise that it came from themself.