Chapter Text
A view of a milky-blue, overcast moon gradually sharpened in the front display monitor of Illuga’s space-faring craft. He reached out and zoomed in on the image. The benign surface of the atmosphere was deceptively calm and very nearly inviting. Taking stock of such a serene view, one might be tempted to venture closer to the moon. Perhaps, the bravest of surveyors might risk entering that opal atmosphere, optimistically intent on scoping out the surface and gauging its liveability. It had certainly been done before.
Illuga blinked balefully at the image of FNC162 and zoomed out with a harsh flick of his fingers, his other hand adjusting course just slightly so that he might assure himself beyond a doubt that he’d not be passing anywhere near that damned place.
“Fucking Wild Hunt,” he muttered, for good measure. A more superstitious pilot might not dare cuss out such an esoteric, all-consuming force like the Wild Hunt, especially not whilst piloting, but Illuga had seen enough in his time to know that no amount of bad language would actually make the difference between life or death in the event of a signal jam. No amount of good language, either. No amount of praying, and no pleading.
Satisfied with his ship’s trajectory as it cut rapidly through space like a stone falling from a cliff, Illuga relaxed slightly. With FNC162 far to the left, and his destination somewhere far beyond the bow of his ship but drawing closer with every second, he felt plenty at ease. Enough, at least, to scroll through his most recent correspondence with the other surveyors from Piramida.
MESSAGING SYSTEM ARCHIVE [TIME ELAPSED: 0:2:32:06]
VLAICU: Status update
EGLE: You mean, status update please
VLAICU: status update
ILLUGA: Cut that out right now.
EGLE: Sorry.
VLAICU: Sorry
VALDIS: En route to WCP824!! I’m thinking ETA 9 or 10 hours depending on whether I need to stop at Paha’s fuel station
ROLLON: dude, don’t gamble with your fuel reserves you literally lose every time.
VALDIS: Not every time…
ILLUGA: Fuel up, please, Valdis. The intergalactic towcrafts are expensive as ****
ANLEIFR: En route to the Snezhnaya planetary system.
EGLE: Local job, I’ll be staying close to Piramida for now ┐(￣ヮ￣)┌
VLAICU: what the **** is that
ILLUGA: Halfway to HSI333 and the surrounding debris now. In for the long haul
ANLEIFR: Only halfway? Godspeed
ILLUGA: thanks
ILLUGA: How is Piramida, Vlaicu?
VLAICU: Same as always. lonely without my friends
ILLUGA: We'll all be back by Sunday.
VLAICU: drinks?
ROLLON: yuuuup.
ANLEIFR: Drinks absolutely
EGLE: ＼(￣▽￣)／
The conversation was a few hours old by now, and Illuga was sick to death of the journey. There had been recent upticks in Wild Hunt readings near HSI333, which unfortunately killed the remote satellite sensor several days ago. Thus, he had been dispatched to reset the thing, and to collect some of his own data in the process. It was just a shame that HSI333 was so far away from the space station called Piramida. The travel time there and back was shaping up to be two full days and, on top of that, he had to fiddle around with a defunct satellite from the last century once he arrived.
Illuga tapped through a few other conversations on his tablet—ones between his squad, ones with his father, a few with assorted friends from Piramida—to distract himself from the cramped feeling that slowly mounted as time went on. He knew too well of space sickness, that insanity one would succumb to if they stared into the void for too long, and he absolutely refused to fall victim. The cockpit of his ship was a little small, wasn’t it— but so what? The message archive on his tablet was more interesting than his desire to stand up and run a kilometre was overwhelming.
He chuckled a bit, looking through his messages with Nikita. The old man’s newest obsession was with acquiring the necessary permits to bring a pet aboard the space station. Illuga couldn’t figure out why he wanted one, or what the practicality could possibly be.
He tapped on a video that Nikita had sent him last week, one of some inhabitants of the animal shelter on Nasha, the planet where the Ratniki regularly went to restock supplies. The video seemed unwilling to load. After a few seconds, he scrolled away with an annoyed frown.
Illuga’s cockpit monitor burst into harsh, pealing alarms.
In a split second, the space was strobed with flashing red lights. Sickly dark warnings blared across every screen and display Illuga had. In his haste to reach for the monitor, his now-glitching tablet clattered to the dull metal floor.
“SIGNAL JAM INCOMING”
“SIGNAL JAM INCOMING”
“WILD HUNT DETECTED”
“SIGNAL JAM INCOMING”
Illuga’s eyes were wide with panic as he assessed his coordinates and the position of the Wild Hunt. It had appeared out of nothing, like it so often did. There was no time to send out a distress call. There was no time to divert the ship’s power to manual.
It was the type of thing a Ratnik trained for, all the while praying they would never need to put their training to use.
The invisible ‘storm’ that comprised the Wild Hunt was so large and quick to proliferate that Illuga could have performed a complete 180° turn and he would still be engulfed by the rays. As it was, there wasn’t any chance to pull off a manoeuvre.
His ship shuddered horribly. The surge of particles that swept past was nearly tangible in its voracity. Illuga tore his hands from his controls and slapped them over his ears as the signal jam sent digital screeches scratching down the interior walls of the cockpit. One by one, his instruments and displays flickered sickeningly and then died. There was nothing to do but wait out the onslaught.
And finally, it was over. Illuga had a single battery-powered particle sensor that confirmed the passage of the Wild Hunt with a steady green light blinking on its tiny analogue screen. He took the sensor up in his hand and clenched his fingers around it tightly, breathing heavily and trembling like a ration of rehydrated jelly.
Illuga stared at the green light for what was likely an hour.
Eventually, he reached for his emergency kit and unwrapped the radiation pills stored inside.
“You never think you need them… until, you do…” he murmured bitterly, tipping his head back and swallowing them with some water. “Fuck…”
His ship was still careening along, though now it was carried through space only by inertia. The electronics were completely fried—likely beyond repair, as far as his capabilities went—and manual power would only get him so far.
Illuga sighed and dropped to his knees before the control panel to fiddle with the reset box, using a small penlight from the emergency kit as a light source. A few minutes later, manual power trickled through the cockpit with a faint hum.
Well… He had enough fuel to limp to somewhere close by, at least. After that, a solution would need to be found, but everything first depended on his immediate safety. A ratnik must remain in the moment, and all that.
Illuga’s eye caught on a certain nearby moon, still looming somewhere to the left of the ship. Its image on the display monitor taunted him. It was pale, and milky-blue, and ominously overcast. It was all he could rely on. With reluctance, Illuga modified his course and turned to FNC162.
—
The landing was rough. Illuga scraped his elbow across his steering controls (happens to the best of the ratniki) and bit his tongue (rookie move).
Once he broke through that blurry blue atmosphere, full of amalgamated thick clouds, he had spotted the corpse of a spacecraft, miraculously, sprawled on the green surface of the moon. It must have been missed by the Ratniki’s recovery mission back in the day. So, he had aimed to land close by, hoping to salvage something from the wreckage for the extensive repairs he already knew he needed for his own ship.
FNC162 was a lot windier than he had expected, however, and he struggled to maintain control. So, he all but crashed.
Groaning, Illuga pulled himself from the ship, coughing from the cloud of dust that had yet to settle around the site of impact. A quick assessment told him, thankfully, that the crash was the least of his concerns. His hull was fine. His electronics were the issue, thanks to the damn Wild Hunt.
Illuga used the ladder on the exterior of his ship to climb atop the roof and survey the landscape of FNC162. The air around him cleared, and he was able to get a good look at what he had only ever seen in clips and photographs.
This was FNC162, a small habitable moon orbiting an oceanic planet, and three decades ago, it became better known as ‘Cemetery.’
Back then, a legion of Ratniki ships and their pilots were deployed on an assignment to research the liveability of FNC162. As they drew close to the low orbit region of the moon, one of the largest recorded Wild Hunt storms manifested and eviscerated each and every one of the ships. Back then, technology was not quite developed with particle storms in mind, and manual backup power systems were not installed in the ships. The ratniki pilots crashed on FNC162 and not a single survivor remained to be spoken of.
In the following months, once the incident was properly investigated, Piramida headquarters recovered the vast majority of the debris and wreckage from the disaster.
Cemetery was still an area of Wild Hunt activity, but it was infrequent enough that nearby travel was considered safe. Unlucky, Illuga thought grumpily.
He stared across the grassy plains of Cemetery. The sky was so overcast and gloomy that the light of the sun was diluted and watery. In the distance, knobby hills pushed petulantly against the horizon. Otherwise, the moon was quite flat. There were bodies of water here and there, Illuga knew, but it might be a bit of a journey to reach one. The only evidence that a hundred people had once perished here were scores of vast, grassy craters like spoonfuls of soil sipped up from the ground. It was actually quite lucky that Illuga had landed so close to the impact sites.
And, about five kilometres away, he could see that half-wrecked spacecraft that he had originally aimed for when landing. It seemed strange that Piramida would have missed an entire ship whilst recovering their fallen pilots, but it benefitted Illuga greatly.
Ah, but it was damn far. Illuga decided to sleep, first, before venturing into the… unknown, as it were. His nerves were still prickling across his skin and through his bones.
—
Illuga awoke to knocking on the hull of his ship. It echoed through the tiny sleeping cabin where he lay and instantly had his heart hammering and his palms sweating.
The knocking persisted. It wasn’t loud, nor particularly aggressive, but neither could it have been explained by anything natural. The rhythmic tap was most definitely a person.
Illuga had locked the hatch from the inside, of course. He was safe. Still, he staggered out of his bunk and frantically slapped at the exterior monitor until it booted up with a beleaguered whine. His fuel reserves had truly been doing some heavy lifting the past few hours.
“What…?”
Outside his ship, knocking with the knuckle of a polite outstretched fist, was a man.
“What the hell?!”
Illuga scrambled to the hatch, fear forgotten, and hastily undid the heavy seal. He heaved it open.
“Oh, my. So, you did survive. I was afraid of the worst.”
The stranger smiled, looking relieved. Illuga stared.
He was a tall man, with long, unkempt dark hair. He wore the austere black uniform of a ratnik and held a swinging battery-powered lantern in one hand. The impossibility of seeing a lone man on Cemetery was so overpowering that Illuga could only stare at him, waiting for him to speak again, his body half in and half out of the hatch.
“Are you alright? It was quite the impact, from what I heard,” the man continued. He gestured vaguely behind him, to the endless plains. “I came quickly, but I can only travel so fast on foot… Forgive me.”
Illuga inhaled sharply. “Who…?”
“Who am I? My name is Kyryll.”
“Kyryll…” Illuga repeated. “Kyryll… And… And why are you here?”
“Oh, I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Kyryll replied. He offered his pale hand up.
Illuga hopped to the ground unaided. He looked up at Kyryll, trying to discern the man’s history via sheer willpower. “Cemetery is deserted, sir. Why—or how—are you here?”
“Ah…” Kyryll looked around—up at the sky, which was neither lighter nor darker than when Illuga had first arrived, and down to the tall grass in which he stood—and finally his eyes rested on Illuga’s ship. “Well, I crash-landed, sir, just like you.”
“Huh, really?! And, you’re a ratnik, too?”
“In…deed.”
“How long have you been here?!”
“I couldn’t say, to tell the truth,” Kyryll admitted. “It is difficult to track days. But I have never seen another soul here. Begging your pardon, is this… not FNC162? I was under the impression that I…”
“It is, it is.” Illuga’s eyes flickered back to the entrance of his ship. “Look, should we talk inside? It’s small, but—”
“Might I learn your name…?”
“Oh!” Illuga extended his hand to Kyryll. He was feeling much better, now that he knew he wasn’t completely alone on Cemetery. “Illuga. Oriole Squad…?”
“Ah… I don’t quite…”
“That’s alright,” Illuga assured him. Maybe he had hit his head at some point.
Kyryll smiled. “Rather than your spacecraft… Shall we walk to mine?”
“Oh.” Illuga peered over the man’s shoulder, but when he wasn’t standing on the roof of his ship, it was impossible to see that faraway piece of wreckage. “You mean you walked that entire distance?”
“It was less than an hour, really.”
“Huh.” Illuga thought for a moment.
Kyryll frowned and stepped backward slightly, looking crestfallen. “I apologize. That was too much.”
Illuga looked up at him in surprise. “No, I was just—”
He gestured to his ship.
“Why don’t we just take this along?”