Chapter Text
If there was one thing Hoseok could say about their progenitors, it was that they sure had kept themselves busy. The humans that had come before him had exploded out all over the galaxy, colonizing every even marginally habitable planet, building up huge infrastructures every place they reached. Farms, mines, factories, roads, spaceports, skyscrapers. Humanity spread like a particularly chatty fungus, flinging themselves through space in glittering, fast-than-light ships and spreading concrete and wires and pipes and antennae wherever they went. Exotic minerals and plants were discovered everywhere, and shipped from place to place. Millions of precious artifacts were manufactured and traded and displayed, showing off the unique things that could be found only in the rocky crust of a particular moon, or in an asteroid in the orbit of a particular star, or crystallized in the ocean of a particular planet.
Then, of course, the other shoe had dropped: not only riches were discovered and crafted and manufactured on all these planets, but also viruses. Viruses that could infect humans and remain dormant for months, hitching rides through interstellar space and reaching thousands of planets before any of their carriers started dying. The resulting unfortunate Great Contraction had driven humanity back to nearly the same size it had been beforehand. All that had happened three hundred years or more before Hoseok had been born, so he felt a distant sadness about it, but no real grief for the fate of his hubristic ancestors.
The state of things seemed pretty fine right now, as far as Hoseok was concerned: humanity kept itself contained to the seven Core Worlds, which had ample space and resources for all of them. The Interplanetary Council maintained control over all travel, enforcing extremely strict quarantine rules, to ensure that no such disaster struck again. Virtually all shipping and offworld farming and manufacturing and mining was done remotely now, by sophisticated robots equipped with artificially-intelligent neural networks. With no human intervention at all, resources were extracted from distant places all across the galaxy and loaded onto ships and space-folded back to one of the Core Worlds, where humanity waited for it placidly. The Core Worlds were all quite lovely and homey, with axial tilts that were all about the same so that everybody got to have summers and winters the way they liked, and where gravity was at the same strength that humans had evolved in, and the main star of the system was the right distance away and gave out the right amount of heat and light, and at least two-thirds of the surface was covered by water. Perfect little habitats, each of the seven a one-in-a-billion place. Of course, when you had a trillion places to choose from, a one-in-a-billion became easier to find.
But the fact that humanity had dug themselves into their perfectly suited little corner of the galaxy, and mostly pledged to stay there now, meant there were millions of planets sitting empty and unwatched, containing all the things that its people had left behind when they either died or were evacuated. This included gems and jewelry and unique statues and ceramics and chandeliers and antique lasers and armor and forgotten plants in former gardens and anything and everything else imaginable. Nobody had any claim on it any more, so it was free for the taking: it just required that someone take a ship and be brave enough to go out there and find it.
And Hoseok, of course, was one of those someones. Officially, he was a privateer: the captain of his own spaceship, licensed to travel through space and visit any of the seven Core Worlds as long as he adhered to the required quarantine rules before going planetside. Which was a pain, so he rarely did that, preferring to spend his time scouring the galaxy for all of those forgotten treasure and meet up with other privateers to trade what he’d found and make himself richer and more comfortable. As a registered privateer, of course he also got sent potential jobs from the Department of Efficiency and Safety, to go check on things that could have gone awry at some automated mine somewhere, or a farm that had stopped sending signals on its transponder, or a robotic cargo scow that seemed to have broken down mid-fold somewhere in the blackness of space. Those things that needed a human touch, common sense, good judgment, and a bold, unwavering heart to have the fortitude zip out into an unknown situation and get things fixed regardless of what kind of improvisation was needed.
Those sorts of missions only took up a small portion of Hoseok’s time, of course. He considered them more along the line of side quests - a cover story for what he really did, which was searching for the lost treasures of the galaxy.
Because, light years away from the paranoid, sulky eyes of the Interplanetary Council and the prim little functionaries of the Department of Efficiency and Safety, he and the other “privateers“ didn’t call themselves that.
They called themselves pirates.
Hoseok wasn’t alone on his ship - a sleek, chromed-out, three-thruster, sixty-meter lugger with seven large diffuser fins projecting from the sides and a giant ramscoop on the front, which he had named The Whale. He had been accompanied for years by his boyfriend Namjoon, who also acted as the ship’s mechanic. They had met in secondary school, when Hoseok already had his heart set on being a captain and Namjoon had simply had an unquenchable thirst to see for himself all the galactic history he’d read about in class. And so by the time they had turned twenty-two, Namjoon had switched tracks from history to spaceship maintenance just so that he could follow the love of his life into the stars and go on a grand adventure together.
They’d had some scary moments over the years, to be sure, but neither of them would trade the amazing life they had for anything else.
“How’s it looking now that we’ve gotten closer?” Hoseok asked Namjoon.
They were both on the bridge of the ship, Hoseok in his customary captain’s chair, and Namjoon slouched at the navigator’s panel since he was the only other crew member. They’d completed five space-folds in order to get to Brevis III, the green-and-blue jewel of a planet that was now looming large on the various screens throughout the room.
“Still no pings,” Namjoon confirmed. “Radio silence.”
They were on one of their government-sanctioned missions for once, checking on a supposedly fertile and balmy farm planet which hadn’t sent back any of the shipments it had been scheduled to. And Hoseok and Namjoon weren’t even the first set of privateers who’d been sent out - an earlier crew had supposedly accepted the job fifteen days ago, but then had never been heard from since. So they were determined to be doubly cautious on this job, in case that previous crew had genuinely come here and had something happen to them, rather than just ghosting the job.
Now that they were in-system, it was clear that something was wrong, as there should have been a constant radio signal from the automated farming system’s landing platform to give their ship instructions on how to land. But there was nothing.
“Let’s come in at an angle, and circle over the facility starting from sixty kilometers altitude, descending at five hundred meters per minute afterward,” Hoseok ordered.
“Roger,” Namjoon replied, punching the instructions into the ship’s computer.
“Thank you, honeybee,” Hoseok responded automatically.
Namjoon smiled to himself at the endearment. Hoseok usually stopped himself from using nicknames while they were in the middle of an official mission, but he used them so frequently otherwise that they inevitably slipped out.
After another two hours, they had approached the planet and descended through the upper layers of the atmosphere, enduring the friction-based heating, and now began their circling. As Namjoon tended to the finer points of the navigation, making sure the ship maintained course, Hoseok cross-referenced his map data with the known location of the facility.
“It should be just under there,” he noted, making the heads-up display on the main bridge window display a holographic indicator pointing to their destination.
There was a thick layer of clouds between themselves and it. Nothing could be seen.
“Shall I change course and descend directly through?” Namjoon asked.
“No,” Hoseok said slowly. “We need to be cautious. Who knows what the clouds could be hiding. Let’s make a wider circle and see if we can get a sideways peek as we go.”
“Got it,” Namjoon said, increasing the radius of the ship’s circling.
It took another two hours of slow, careful descent, but they finally managed to make it below the cloud layer, at which point they started getting peeks at the part of the landscape where the farm should be. They were directly over some of the outlying fields, in fact, but oddly they couldn’t spot any of the buildings. From their oblique angle, about twelve kilometers up and ten distant, it looked like there was merely some kind of hill in the middle of the fields.
“Let’s get closer and scan with lidar,” Hoseok suggested.
“Opening lidar array and descending to nine kilometers altitude,” Namjoon confirmed, flipping a number of buttons.
Hoseok inspected the land underneath them visually while Namjoon attended to the scanning. He peered out the hatches, trying to understand what he was seeing. There was a giant mottled green splotch on the ground where he would have expected the farm’s enclosures - where the robots and the supplies and even the bins of harvested produce were stored out of the elements. Had something caused the structures to collapse?
“The buildings are still there!It’s under all that!” Namjoon suddenly called out. “There’s an unknown biological growth covering the entire infrastructure!”
He then put up the three-dimensional scan on the main holographic display at the front of the bridge. The lidar-generated model clearly showed the outlines of the main warehouse, the outlying sheds, the landing pad, the parking lot for the harvesting vehicles, and the paved roads in between.
Hoseok gasped when he rotated the view of the scan and looked at the landing pad. There was clearly a ship under there.
“Oh, those poor souls,” he said quietly.
“Based on the data the scanners have picked up, it appears to be something like a fungus,” Namjoon said, sounding horrified. “Something must have mutated to be extremely fast-growing, and prefer plasteel as a substrate. Perhaps even a lichen of some kind.”
He kept The Whale circling slowly. They flew in silence for a few minutes, looking down at the dreadful scene. Now that he understood what he was looking at, Hoseok was able to pick more details from the scene down below, and make out the indistinct shapes of the buildings and roads - and yes, even the poor unfortunate spaceship - from underneath the dense, feathery lumps of dark green plant matter.
“Should I get closer and see if I can pick up any signs of life?” Namjoon finally asked.
“Joonie-bug,” Hoseok said sadly, “look at that. There’s no chance there are any survivors.”
He could see the way Namjoon clenched his jaw stubbornly, even from his position behind him on the bridge.
“If this stuff attacks metal and plastic, we can’t risk getting it on The Whale,” he went on, even as he was already tempted to give in.
“Our bio-scanners have a range of three kilometers,” Namjoon insisted. “Surely if that stuff had spores that could reach that far, the patch would have spread further than it has. I can descend and circle at that distance and then at least we’ll know we did what we could.”
Hoseok sighed.
“Okay, let’s do it,” he said.
No risk, no reward.
So far, at least, the reward was a relieved smile from Namjoon. He just hoped that they weren’t getting into more trouble than they could get out of by themselves.