In the vast abyss of space, a great and terrible mass silently churned it's way through the void. Over five hundred kilometers across, long distance scans would confuse it for a particularly dense asteroid, a small moon that escaped it's gravity well and gone rogue. If only. No man living knew where it had originated from, nor what lay at the core of it's great bulk. Mangled and broken ship's hulls warped and twisted from the uneven gravity, crushing to conform to their neighbors contours as docking clamps, antenna, and weaponry protruded from it's surface like ancient spires. It was an ugly mix of bone white, caution orange, red, black, and a thousand other colors, flickering lights studding it's surface to signify that somehow life continued, even on this heap. A spray of water vapor jettisoned out into the void, a cabin depressurizing and taking with it the huddled shape of a dying man, the wandering nightmare having no mercy for the unwary within its confines.

When Ahria had been a child, the elders had called this place the "Castigation of the Weak". It was the only explanation they could conjure for this hellish landscape to exist, to drive men desperate and mad with starvation, claustrophobia, and the ever present promise of sudden and inescapable death. The notion that some god had created this monstrosity as a crucible, to lure the weak and unwary into it's holds and to flay the imperfections from their skin, gave them some form of cold comfort. The belief that, once they had learned the lesson of their inscrutable jailer, they would be released pure and with new purpose back into the universe. Bloody minded determination saw Ahria D'Val free of this place, some fourteen Referential Years ago. She'd lost blood, and friends, and more than a bit of her soul she'd wager, but she'd taken advantage of the Castigation's passing near a habitable planet to cut her way through mutants and monsters and board an escape pod. Funny. She didn't feel any "purer" for her experience.

And now. Now she was back. To spit in the eye of her forebearer's "God", and to erase this stain and all aboard it from the stars. A dark smile split her full, painted lips as she thought about that, not for the first time. Elianites were only supposed to feel connections between living things, but she could feel this thing's presence heavily upon her. It crawled over her skin, whispered toxic promises in her mind, and swept into her like an old, abusive lover who still knew all the ways to drive her wild. Some of the lower decks were still slick from where she'd decided to "rekindle" old "friendships", brief moments of weakness, but so satisfying.

"We're entering the outer edge of their deep space monitoring system now, Cap'n." a voice starting her from her reverie, "Best for you to get into character, aye?"

Ah, of course. Ahria hadn't gone by that name in a few years now. She was simply the Weaver now, Captain of the Wayward Star, and scourge of nobles and trading lanes alike. She raised a dark violet eyebrow at the presumptuous nature of her First Mate, but as ever she declined from publicly chastising him. She leaned back against the overly large Captain's chair, plush red upholstery and a shining steel frame giving it the impression of a throne as she did so. A scarlet peaked cap sat atop of her head, tilted to an off angle so that the low bill fell over one eye as a grinning humanoid skull pin shone against the red material. She was wearing a long royal blue coat with red spiralling trim and a series of golden buttons, however, it's original cut had been designed for a race with only two arms, and so she'd simply had the sleeves removed and expanded to better accommodate her multi-hinged shoulders. She'd passed on a top this morning, instead trusting a thick layer of dangling golden chains to protect her non-existant modesty. A broad black leather belt with a silver buckle had been polished to a shine, twin holsters hidden under the folds of her coat as she shifted, a short pleated skirt covered her hips, one leg crossed high over the other as thigh-high heeled leather boots covered her legs, one boot bouncing slightly in boredom causing the golden shine of the anklets fastened over the boots to flash in the low light.

Her posture was relaxed, two hands tucked behind her head, the center arm on the left hand side gripping the haft of a long spear as if it were some kind of royal scepter, as the bottom left rested against the arm of her chair. Her bottom right hand kept a tight grip on a length of steel chain, a blind folded young woman pulled half up into the Captain's lap as her remaining hand slowly but steadily stroked her hair reassuringly. Her pet wore little else other than wrist and ankle cuffs and shivered slightly, mortified beyond belief at the notion that her bare form would soon be transmitted to the most powerful men of an entire planet. Weaver softly cooed, trying to mollify her and assure her that she was being very good. Behind her, a broad black banner was stretched with her symbol emblazoned, a white spider-like arrangement of six arms over an inverted tear drop. Her chair was flanked by hard-bitten security guards, the two who'd been able to spit-polish their ceramite body armor the brightest, whose rigid scaly faces seemed set in a permanent scowl as they held their rifles braced across their chests.

"Have you locked onto their meta-particle signature yet, Mr. Swivens?" she asked, seeming a bit harder, a thumbs up met her inquiry, "Good. I want to be piggy-backed onto that signal in fifteen minutes. With their system defense boats not responding, a ranking military leader should be making their way to the monitoring station any moment now."

Below decks the pirate crew were scrambling though the jagged, organic passageways of the Castigation in search of an intercom, a hologram panel, anything to let them vicariously participate in the grand proclamation that their Captain Weaver was preparing to issue to the planetoid currently situated at the end point of their trajectory. Below decks was a misnomer applied to to the environment surrounding the Captain's impromptu bridge, consisting of some of the more habitable spaces which hours of brutality and toil had wrested from the interstellar hulk's indigenous denizens. At the moment the decks were a hive of variegated species, enmity dissolved by the bonds of shared combat and their anticipation of their Captain's speech. They yearned to see the planetoid Empyrea cowed, all of its recklessly prosperous multitudes, almost as much as they yearned for the exorbitant payment due to them.

Even further sunken into the Castigation's random sprawl Dr. Leilah Evangeline continued her own work at the edge of the "decks". Her laboratory lay on the outskirts of the pirate's demesnes, a cryst projecting innumerable tendrils throughout the corpus of the tumbling wreckage often mistaken for an asteroid. The tendrils were power lines, ventilation shafts, ducts and conductor pathways, all necessarily clustered here for the doctor's purposes. Or, more accurately, her laboratory had had to be here in order for her to serve her role for the pirates. The Captain had needed her tied into the life support systems for much of the Castigation so that she could utilize her expertise to quell the mutant cadres festering in the dense bowels of the hulk. She had her own reasons for situating herself here as well, and she kept them close to her breast. From her console Dr. Eva managed a subtle balance of vapors and microorganisms to keep the monstrosities passive, at bay. Pumping out atmosphere in one corrugated tunnel to inhibit the movement of hypermetabolic worms. Venting carefully engineered sopor-spores elsewhere to keep the vast reptilianoid colony in quiet torpor.

A resonating splat disturbed the woman, and she snapped her head up sharply. The breeze she had so painstakingly generated in the lab's interior fluttered her neck-length crop of midnight hair. The scent of salt on the warm current did wonders to alleviate the stress of being buried beneath hundreds of tons of warped metal hulls, but the persistent crash on the airlock made her feel the back of her neck. Tense, with goosebumps. Her fingers quivered from adrenaline, which made it impossible to continue the minute surgeries she was performing on her current unicellular subject.

The airlock rolled open as the creature outside decided to enter without further niceties. A mass of pseudopods thronged beneath four bulbous yellow eyes and wiggled at Leilah in an inscrutable greeting. She merely pointed back out the way it had come, prompting a high pitched whine from the surly beast. Sighing, she touched her communicator pendant.

"...to the Captain." the squamous, shockingly violet intruder demanded. Leilah furrowed her brow.

"Excuse me...?" Dr. Eva asked in a chilly voice, but the pirate failed to supply its name and bristled forth on its four lower limbs.

"I need a vocalizer! I need to listen to the Captain!" It repeated.

"Get out now." Not for the first time Leilah lamented the Captain's admonition against locks while they were aboard. On the one hand, given Weaver's history on the Castigation, Leilah could sympathize. On the other hand, interruptions such as this one were an interference she resented increasingly.

The purple behemoth flailed a few of its pseudopods and approached the console at speed. Leilah interposed herself almost too late, spreading her arms wide. Her small frame, clad in a loose sleeveless shirt and tawny shorts rather than armor, was insufficient to halt the massive alien, but it stopped regardless and uttered an expression of annoyance which her translator pendant rendered as a growling "Hrrumph!"

"There are other places."

"Too far away." the pirate insisted, making to carefully move the doctor out of the way with its pseudopods. Leilah gnashed her teeth. Her right hand went to her belt. She was unarmed, but the creature's reflexes caused it to flail backwards regardless.

"Our translators are imperfect, so I'll try to say this as simply as I can." Dr. Eva said. "If you do not leave I will release adenomorphic toxin into the laboratory." The creature hesitated. "On your planet, Transmodian, that would be the same thing as Hylistor sap." The creature waved its multiple limbs, saying, "You can't! The Captain wouldn't allow..."

"Your breeding crests will wither," Leilah smoothly continued, "and your arms will attack your eyes."

"...You can't." It repeated. Leilah opened a menu on her wrist computer, and the monster confronting her edged another step back. She said, "I'll say you were infected by one of the mutants. That boiling fungus from the first day." She shrugged. "I had to act fast. Prevent an outbreak. The Captain will understand. She'll even praise me for preventing a danger to the crew. So, again, if you don't leave..." The interloper was gone. Leilah closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Soon she wouldn't have to tolerate these mannerless extraterrestrials any longer. She glanced down at her wrist where the countdown to impact with Empyrea was displayed. Captain Weaver was fixated on her ransom message, and the rest of the crew were fixated on her. This would be her best chance to enter the core of the Castigation and finish her mission.

There was a sharp snap as the Captain raised her hand from the arm of the chair, pointing at one of the meandering pirates just out of range of the view screen, "Drink." she commanded, opening her hand and raising her palm expectantly as her violet eyes watched the timer glowing on the monitor before her. She was a bundle of nervous, excitable energy, she wanted to hop out of her chair and pace, deliver her speech at the top of her lungs while gesticulating furiously with all six arms like a priestess carried aloft on a wave of righteous zeal, or a megalomaniac about to reveal his master stroke to an unworthy crowd.

A goblet was brought to her upon a tray, and she took it gracefully before waving the man away with the hand that had been cradling the back of her head. As much as she'd enjoy the opportunity to indulge in proselytism, such antics did not impress the Empyreans. Oh no, they were a stodgy bunch of patriarchs, always minded their P's and Q's in public, very concerned about propriety. Though, if rumors were to be believed, they were as deviant as any other race in the galaxy if you got them someplace their society deemed "appropriate" for it. What a bore, to pen up their licentious activities and hide their passions behind ceremony.

Weaver brought the goblet to her lips and drank deeply of the scarlet fluid contained within. It rolled thickly over her tongue, leaving a slight tingle in her mouth as she swallowed down the sweet stuff. If the Emyreans were only impressed by coldness, she could be cold. She could be downright imperious, though withholding that much of herself took an effort. Or a bit of booze, she supposed, the corners of her lips turning up slightly as she swirling the drink around in her shallow cup and watched the fluid swirl.

"We have signal parity now, Cap'n. Commencing the broadcast in 5, 4 --" the technician finished the countdown by raising his hand, dropping his three digits one after the next into a fist. Captain Weaver straightened in her chair slightly, letting her smile grow into a cool but pleasant arc. The shuffling and coughs of the crew on the bridge grew still and silent, noone daring to ruin the moment with the whole of the crew watching.

"People of Empyrean!" she declared grandly, "I'm certain that you're currently occupied in trying to determine what fate has befallen your vigilant System Defense Ships and their valiant crews. I am here to save you some time and inform you that they have been scuttled, and their crews slaughtered to a man. You, however, have much larger issues to attend." she tilted the scepter slightly, and a technician switched the camera feed over to some footage the crew had taken while on approach the Castigation. A long shot that progressed into a sweeping pan over the surface as the Captain continued speaking.

"Larger, to a span of a five hundred kilometers. What you are seeing is called the Castigation of the Weak, it is a trial that all of your people will have to come to grips with, for it is currently on a collision course with the orbital path of your world." she paused a moment, "I know what you're thinking, that ingenious little planetary deflection screen will save you from this Extinction Event, yes? Alas, much of the Castigation's bulk is made up of vessels equipped for battle. Your crucible, gentlemen, has a dozen overlapping battle-class force screens on the side currently facing your world, easily enough to overcome your inertics, or any planet-based artillery you might build in the time allotted you."

"Death, however, can be eluded on this occasion." Captain Weaver said, pausing to take another sip of her drink as the camera feed changed once more. Now it was a series of sweeping shots of the interior of the hulk, metallic canisters were set in strategic bulkheads all throughout the mass, baleful red lights pulsing evenly on each canister to illustrate that they were on standby, "My men and I are already aboard the hulk, ready to intercede on your behalf. At my command, mass reactive shaped charges will explode, compromising the heap's integrity and destroying power conduits throughout it's bulk. Second-stage charges will then trigger, turning this small moon into little more than a roving debris field, which your planetary shields will be sufficient to protect you from. All you need do . . . " she paused dramatically, "Is meet our price."

The view screen switched back to the Captain as she took a moment to stroke the backs of her fingers along her pet's cheek, though her eyes were still fixed forward, and the smile had deepened and taken a particularly nasty shade.

"We've taken the liberty of scanning your world and checking the local galactic economy, and are forwarding the itemized list of planetary resources we'll be expecting along with this transmission. I'm sure you'll find the price to be exorbitant, Empyrean is a rich world after all, plentiful in natural resources and you've taken great pains to cultivate them responsibly. I do not doubt that your analysts will tell you that this sum is outrageous, that it will steal away your odds of planetary independence from the local powers of your sector." she leaned forward in her seat slightly, the chains shifting around her neck to show a bit more decolletage, she tightened her hold on the leash to elicit a light peep from her pet, "The price, however, is nonnegotiable. You can live on, as the thrall of one your neighbors, or you can die for your principles and I'll reap my fee from the asteroid belt that was once your home."

"I am Captain Weaver of the Wayward Star. You have seven days, as you count them, to place my price in stable orbit above your world. In three days time, I will send another transmission to your world, this time along public channels. I'm sure the public distress would be quite troubling for you, but perhaps some private citizens might help ease your burden. Three days beyond that, however, and we will be too close for the secondary charges to be effective. Your world could survive such an impact, but the damage would be widespread and catastrophic."

"I am disinterested in negotiators or ambassadors." she added, waving the notion away distastefully, "Any emissaries will be treated as hostile and dealt with appropriately. I've neither the means nor inclination to extend the deadline, so stalling will do you no good." she grabbed the bill of her cap and tipped it forward slightly, "Now, I imagine you've much to do, so I'll leave you to it." and the transmission was cut abruptly.

The Captain raised her goblet to her lips and drained it to the lees, placing it on the arm of her chair and leaving it to rattle unsteadily against the metallic surface as she hopped to her feet, the blind folded woman barely moving quickly enough to avoid being sent sprawling to the ground.

"Alright you scum, sumps, and scallywags!" she called out vibrantly, her mood shifting hard, "The game is on! The Empyreans are sure to try something, so I want you blighters alert and checking in with your posts regularly. Any slackers will be prioritized for pacification duty, do I make myself clear!?" there was a quick rumble of ascent about the bridge, and deeper within the bowels of the hulk she imagined

"Good! Mr. Swivens, I want the countdown clock displayed on every stand-by monitor at all times. Soon, boys! Soon, you'll each be rich as kings, mark my words!" she pointed at a wrinkly skinned dwarf with dull orange skin and long drooping ears, "You! Take my darling Marissa back to my quarters and have her cleaned up, no dallying so long as you want to keep those ears." she glanced down at her pet, "You did well, dear. No need to crawl about on all fours for the moment . . . the blindfold, however, remains on. If you fear my gaze so, you'll need to learn to trust the crew." she said with a voice like flowing honey, stepping down from her post.

"Send the Wayward Star the data for their long range scanners metaparticle signature and tell them to adjust the cloaking field appropriately. Then direct the Acting Captain to contact me immediately, I don't want our lead escort vessel getting any adventurous notions just because I'm not there to shoot him personally. CHOP CHOP! Come on you maggots!" she clapped all six hands together in sync, signalling that she expected her instructions carried out with due haste. The dark view screen suddenly came alive with monolithic red numbers which echoed throughout the Castigation.

7:00:12:43 until Planetfall

A skimpy wad of vat-cloned cotton and a pair of shorts hit the back of a ferroplas locker cubicle and Leilah swung the door closed without bothering to secure it. She crouched in her skintight briefs, nude from the waist up. Saline droplets from the artificial sea breeze collected on her dusky skin as she unlocked a second cubicle stowed behind a false panel in the walls. The Castigation's aggregate composition was so irregular from its formative tribulations that none of the pirate invaders would bother searching for concealed spaces, not that the bundle Leilah retrieved from the compartment would have been considered valuable to any member of the crew. But the design was proprietary, and she held some sentimentality toward her own creations. She unfolded the bundle gingerly and laid it out on a nearby table, making certain to affix the false panel where it had been before surveying her bodysuit.

The suit resembled something a gigantic insect would have left behind after molting, pellucid with a bloody tint. Leilah smoothed it out, scanned it for breaches or flaws. A pinhole would be fatal if a passage suddenly depressurized. Though she retained the habit of checking her suit from her time in the ADD she knew that its seal would be perfect. Any microscopic imperfection in its cellular structure healed itself immediately, drawing the requisite material from the wearer's discarded skin and ambient nutrients from the environment. She clucked her tongue as she recollected how it had been passed over in favor of primitive synthetics by her superiors. Idiots.

Leilah stepped into the translucent substance of the suit, pushing her feet inside as if it were a mass of dough. It stretched, then adhered, and she pulled the conforming sheath up over the generous swell of her hips. It compressed to fit the contours of her waist. Then it stretched again to make room for her unsupported breasts. Once up to her neck in the material she clasped on her personal computing bracelet. Touching its surface brought up a metaparticle screen, a simple light reflecting plane that created a virtual mirror. Inspecting her reflection Leilah confirmed that the suit had no dangerous inconsistencies. She did another turn, purely for vanity's sake, admiring the reddish cast it gave to her complexion. Her figure was dark, mysterious underneath the membrane. A pupae inside its chrysalis. Admittedly, the picture was somewhat immodest since the suit worked best when in direct contact with the wearer's body. A shallow reason to discount the symbiotic advantages it offered. Leilah tugged its hood over her head and pressed a hyperdiamond breathing mask over her face. She tucked the oxygen canister and rebreathing module over her shoulder and set off toward the door.

Now she had to hurry. What she had in mind would take a quarter of an hour assuming a lack of complications. Captain Weaver could be both verbose and melodramatic at times, but she wasn't going to filibuster the Empyreans. There was only so much time that Dr. Eva could glean from the distraction. Outside the door she dictated a report into her wrist-comp.

"This is Dr. Evangeline, report number thirty first. The carbon cycling numbers are degenerating near sector G-1, where some of the more aggressive natives have been segregated. I'm thinking there's some sort of power supply issue...hampering one of the environment systems." Leilah couched her explanation as vaguely as she could, a trend she'd kept up since she'd began sending her reports to the captain in preparation for just this sort of deception. Her technical knowledge confounded the pirates in most cases regardless, so avoiding jargon served to mollify the more disagreeable pirates and gave her ample excuses for her actions around the Castigation. She continued in the same vein, "I've got to take care of the problem immediately if we want to avoid more interior combat. I'll deputize one of the grunts along the way."

With her alibi in place Leilah considered the heavy door barring her entry to the taboo sectors. Beyond it lay labyrinthine kilometers infested by mutants. A cityscape of generational biowarfare crushed into an unpredictable hell. Planted within the pandemonium were the explosives meant to blast the Castigation to steely smithereens once the ransom Weaver demanded had been acquired. They were too numerous, too scattered, for Leilah to access them all, but the network command node interlinking them lay much closer. But breaching the door meant getting clearance or triggering alarms. Leilah hauled herself hand over hand toward a fissure in the ceiling. She'd circumvent it. The Castigation was replete with nooks and crannies, and she had a more complete knowledge of them than anybody aboard, with the exception of the mutant denizens themselves. There should be an evacuated coolant channel....Leilah grunted, wresting herself atop the bulky tube. From there she located the access panel, clearly marked by indecipherable glyphs and completely out of view. She smiled and wormed her way inside. As she began to crawl, she forced her eyes to roll upwards until her irises were out of sight. The undersides of her eyeballs were milky, like cataracts. Her picture of the world flipped. Suddenly the darkness became populated by dim gray outlines that sharpened while she crawled. Her eyes gradually adjusted to the thermal input being received, and at length she perceived the interior of the tube in colorless totality.

At length wriggling through the constrictive tube became easier once her suit began to lubricate itself to avoid abrasion and she began to leave the range of the portable gravity generators kept on the decks. When her body became all but weightless she started to nudge her way along the narrow tunnel with fingers and toes, curving her supple form throughout a number of acute turns until the defunct coolant line terminated in shredded synthetic.

Leilah sent her prerecorded message in text. She received a short signal informing her that her transmission had been detected by her console back at the lab and disseminated from there. That ought to defray any suspicions regarding her whereabouts if somebody checked the logs. The rest came down to a race between her and the fickle sensitivities of the crew. She bunched her legs against a bulkhead. Toned muscles bulged against each other as she momentarily made a seat out of her calves, then she launched off into the tenebrous passages.

The doctor accelerated jump by jump, shifting gymnastically to redirect her accumulated momentum. Even without her infrared vision she felt as if she could have navigated her course by memory, but the augmentation helped speed her along. She spun with every brief impact with a hull portion. Pang! Then perfect silence as she drifted in vacuum.

Something bright slashed Leilah's vision during one of her wheeling maneuvers. Something massive, coruscating with heat. She contrived a second spin to catch another glimpse, but it had already moved on. Faintly glowing prints marked where it had touched metal. One of the mutants. No concern of hers. She concentrated on stalling herself as she approached the chamber housing the command node. She didn't spot the second shape, hulking and cold, rise from a groove in the wall, trailing her.

The soft clack of low heels on deck plating echoed down a surprisingly empty corridor as Captain Weaver stalked away from the bustle and noise of the "Bridge". She could feel the attention of the crew hanging off of her like a shroud, a particularly heavy shroud of glimmering threads that shone through with the colors of avarice, though through though woven through that cloth were threads of scarlet desire, and a few dusky doubts bound tightly around premature revenge schemes. She let her arms spread wide in the corridor, luxuriating in the attention, they were a pack of thieves, thugs, murderers, and worse . . . but their worlds lay in her multitudinous hands. Every fallen comrade was laid at her feet, the victim of her scheming, but none could tear their eyes away from the vast riches she had offered them to feel properly outraged. Of course, if the Empyreans didn't deliver, they'd have her head on a pike. The stakes couldn't be higher, but the Captain let a bubbling laugh roll passed her lips . . . however it went down, this place would be gone. Perhaps finally she'd finally be able to sleep peacefully, without drowning in her sea of excess, or clinging tightly to her creature comforts.

She braced the spear she'd been carrying across her shoulders as the laughter died down, two more hands settling on the holsters at her hips as she clasped her final two hands behind her back. A scanner imbedded in the wall above the door ahead read the motion of her approach, and with a grinding sputter half of it receded into the wall, groaning and sparking at the effort. She checked her corners habitually before stepping through into a room with a long faux wood table and thirteen seats secured to the floor around it. The lights dimming slightly as the center of the table recessed, a series of holographic emitters emerging silently. As she settled into the seat at the head of the table, she watched as green light resolved itself into a large slab of metallic alloy and stone, countless curved and organic corridors carving their way through the mass as she watched with vague disinterest. All throughout the map there were dark spaces, sectors that were yet unexplored, as well as large red zones which had been deemed too dangerous for her to risk her men's lives exploring, and strangely defuse blue segments which represented things she remembered or that they'd pulled out of the heap's more talkative denizens. It was amazing how effective a bribe a bit of food and filtered water could be to the half-starved natives . . . but then, they didn't know they'd all be going the same way as the Castigation in a week's time. So far as most were concerned, her crew were just another group of doomed treasure seekers.

And, of course, anyone who could recognize her had been silenced, in one fashion or another.

She watched as tiny orange pips began to fill in, the teams on patrol making their first reports in accordance with the current protocols. The Captain knew her men, however, they weren't professional soldiers. They might tow the line for a few days, but if nothing happened, they'd grow complacent and unvigilant in short order. She had a few unscheduled "fire drills" planned to keep them on their toes, make a few martyrs, reward a few outstanding crewmen. They were so very like children in their way. And, from her control center here, she could work to keep them in line.

Except for one. The one currently watching her ship, traveling in the wake of the Castigation to hide from the planet's searching sensor sweeps along with the cargo freighters they'd enlisted for collecting their ransom. How easy would it be for him to grow content and envious? How tempting would it be to simply run off with her ship and her loot, leaving her stranded aboard this rock as it self destructed? Far too tempting for her tastes . . . after all, it was exactly what she would have done in his place. A red light flashed on her console, and she took a moment to arrange herself into an unconcerned lounge in her seat before she allowed the signal clear.

"Captain." the somber tones of her Acting-Captain stated in an unimpressed tone as the display of the Castigation of the Weak was replaced with a larger-than-life blue and white monochrome light construct of the man's bust. He was young for the post, his broad flat nose, tapered ears, and almond eyes giving a someone felinoid cast to his features that his sharp carnivorous teeth did nothing to allay. His hair was cropped close to his head, golden hair chased through with a series of strangely curling black stripes before, at the nape, the hair was allowed to flow over his shoulders in a series of tight braids with polished stone bangles capping them. The left eye had been lost in a duel months ago, replaced with an obviously cybernetic chromed orb, Weaver had paid for the installation personally since it had been her who had cut out the eye in the first place. She never told him about the explosive implant that had been installed in his cranium along with the eye, but she didn't doubt that he suspected as much.

"Sabre." she responded back sweetly. It wasn't his real name, of course, anymore than Weaver was hers, but the crew seemed intent on providing the ranking members of the crew with strange little nomes de guerre. She allowed it because it granted their posts a degree of mythology, which her desire for recognition fed into quite nicely. But for every hero, there must be a rival. To the crew's way of thinking, Sabre was hers, almost quick enough, almost canny enough, too useful to be rid of, but too ambitious to trust. One of the Earthanoids had called him a "Starscream" . . . she didn't catch the reference, though it had a certain je ne sais quoi.

"We watched your little speech. Very . . . succinct." he said, playing his cards close to his chest as ever. She smiled graciously, letting him put up his defenses for the moment. She'd had her fun tearing him down again and again in the past, if he was putting up the front he was looking for attention.

"I suppose you would've put more emphasis on their impending doom." she responded, lightly buffing the nails of one hand against her coat lapels, "How is the damage to my ship? Did the System Defense give you any trouble?" she took a moment to emphasis her possession of the Wayward Star, a subtle dig.

"They were well armed, not needing FTL drives they instead distributed the power to their guns. They would have been better served in further developing their shields." he responded with a sharp grin of his own, the thrill of a fresh victory still in his veins "Our shields were breached and we lost hull integrity on a few decks. The crew loss was minimal and no vital systems were damaged, we should have everything patched up before pick-up."

"Don't let the crew dally, we may need you to run interference before long." she said, and then waved her hand a bit dismissively, "Distribute an extra ration of booze though. The mood should be celebratory over there, we're finally in the home stretch."

"Already done, M'am. Will that be all?" he said, a bit too smoothly for her tastes.

The Captain was about to respond when one of the bangles around her wrist vibrated. One of her priority feeds had just received a message. She paused a moment, considering whether to take the moment to dress down her Acting Captain for his presumptuousness or attend to matters on the Castigation. Her responsibilities won out in the end.

"Make sure to update those cloaking algorithms. That will be all, Acting Captain." she said, the line going silent. The abruptness was such that it was difficult to tell which end had hung up first, though Weaver was distracted with other details. She twisted a segment on the bracelet and watched as a flat screen was projected in front of her, the image of the Heap growing to dominance over the table once more.

"Dr. Evangeline #31" she read. A fond little smile spread over her lips as she climbed to her feet. It had been a bit of sentimentality that had caused her to privately flag the good Doctor's reports as priority, always alert for an excuse to pay the woman a visit. She was a bit too old and set in her ways to be properly trained, the Captain admitted privately to herself, but there was something about her that the freewheeling pirate queen couldn't help but be attracted to. She was intense, driven, she didn't simper or whine when confronted with authority. She gave the impression of something untamable, though it might only be a glimmer in her eye rather than the futile bleating of most of her kind. Of course, that had only enticed the Captain to try anyway.

She opened the report and a frown creased her face. Marshaling but a single crewman? It was true that Sector G-1 was largely pacified, and that the rogue ADD Agent was understandably leery about keeping too many of the Captain's inhuman subordinates around, but Weaver was uncomfortable with such a small away team. The doctor was too valuable, and a team of two too easily picked off by roving mutants . . . all it would take is a single predatory breed and a badly lit hallway. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she considered . . . and the timing was a bit convenient as well. A bit of paranoia went a long way when one enmeshed themselves in the seedy underbelly of criminal living. Which teams were close to G-1? She turned to the hologram at the table and considered the blips and arrows that accompanied the expected patrol routes. Ah, good. She pressed a trigger on the console, quantum entanglement allowing the data stream opening to surpass the impenetrably thick interior of the Heap to send word to the patrol.

"Mr. Lankin." her cheery voice spoke into the microphone, her lack of official sounding introductions the only introduction she needed really, "My precious Leilah seems to have gone on walkabout, something about the environmental controls in G-1 not cycling properly. Do take the boys and rendezvous with her, would you? I know that with your mutual history, I can trust you to keep a close eye on her."

She settled back in her chair and propped her feet up on the table, watching the map with her brow knitted in consideration. Perhaps sending someone with a bone to pick with the Doctor to act as her security detail was not particularly well advised, but he wouldn't risk crossing the Captain, and if her little Leilah was feeling her oats she could trust the man not to be dissuaded from his detail no matter what threats she levied.

Dr. Evangeline grimaced as she gauged the approach of the airlock leading to the chamber housing the command node. In her haste she'd built up more momentum than she'd guessed, enough to crack her open on the bulkhead like a bird hitting a window. She looked about for potential surfaces to help slow her, knowing there were none. Between the tunnel she'd emerged from and the airlock there was a gravitational stress fracture, a chasm extending nearly a kilometer in any direction formed by the Castigation's tumultuous internal tectonics. The yawning crack offered nothing to delay or redirect her. Meanwhile the bulkhead loomed and she fell inexorably towards it. Deceptively distant. Leilah touched her bracelet to navigate a virtual menu display.

Not more than a paltry meter away from fatal impact Leilah's body hit an intangible cushion. She breathed a sigh. Counting on tying herself into one of the dormant field generators was something she would not care to repeat without forewarning in the future, but the metaparticles emitted by the buried machine had done their job. It was lucky that the nearest one had been designed to redirect kinetic energy, and that her own mass had been so inconsiderable. The bulkhead rumbled as her momentum was diverted into the metal. It sounded like the false thunder that occurs when a sheet of tin is wobbled. Leilah's hands contacting the surface was considerably quieter. She rested a moment to let the texture of her suit adapt to create the necessary van der Waals attraction between her hands and the smooth metal. Then, hand over hand, she dragged herself like a gecko toward the airlock.

The lock spun on its rim, a giant coin, and the Dr. slipped through the open crescent. She slapped the button to seal it again. Crouching against the blast of atmosphere that poured into the confined space she felt her suit alter its texture yet again so that it could trade molecules with the fresh air. Then the secondary door rolled open and she kicked off into the chamber beyond.

The gravity in the room remained absent. It was a fact Leilah could have remedied since one of the portable gravity generators had been left inside, but she preferred not to leave an activation log in its memory banks. As easy as it might be to erase that data doing so left its own signs, and though she severely doubted anybody else on board had the knowhow to detect them it was not something she'd discount. She twisted herself into a helix to survey the place. Conduits festooned the walls. Mechanical overgrowth interpenetrated the walls here and there. She heard the hiss of gas escaping through numerous fine breaches along with the heavier heartbeat of new atmosphere being pumped in from elsewhere. Electrical conductors lay exposed where the chamber's interior skin had been torn open by age. Most important was the raised dias in the center of the room. The command node.

Leilah halted herself with her heel on the edge of the node and levered herself to the floor, to which her suit helpfully adhered. She was careful to skirt the live conductor cables tied into the node's base. Setting up the central computer had been a roughshod job. Considering the crew's usual skillset and the Castigation's total lack of maintenance over the decades she had no right to expect any better. It was functional at least. A composite of direct links and signal repeaters allowed the central console to give orders to the outlying explosives. She only needed a moment's access to download the altered code protocol. There. Dr. Evangeline had to smile at her own work. Hidden within the fragmented junk data cluttering the operational code were more useless bits. Nobody but a biologist of her caliber could hope to interpret the patternless symbols as anything but the omnipresent detritus of repeated calculations. But with the right signal the fragments of information would shift in response to random input from any source, and from there they would resolve into distinct pieces of code. From there, they would further compile into foreordained clusters of data. Sufficient to amend the firing routine for the demolitions.

"Microscopic evolution meets modern technological warfare." Dr. Leilah laughed to herself. Who would believe that studying the genetic structure of extraterrestrial slime would yield such a potent tool for espionage? She checked the chronometer on her wrist-comp and spun toward the airlock in time to see it close. Somebody was cycling the lock from outside. Blazes! Leilah sought a place to hide. A moment later she rejected the idea. The second airlock beckoned. No, the monstrosities lurking beyond that door were not susceptible to her influence. She had no recourse but to stand in place and wait for whoever was entering to show themselves.

Mr. Lankin unfurled his immensity as he stepped out of the lock. Reptilian according to Earth sensibilities, replete with the expected scaled hide and snaggle toothed trap for a mouth. Dr. Leilah knew better. Cold blood was the only thing the pirate had in common with primitive crocodiles. His muscles were efficient, doubly dense. Some portion of his species's physique was always tense. Relaxation was a foreign and obsolete status for his kind. The plated segments of his skin were composed out of natural carbon chains capable of catching bullets, nonconductive enough to survive incidental exposure to plasma. To top it all off, Leilah knew the alien despised her. His first act was to level its nuclear powered weapon toward the doctor's frail, unarmed form.

"So what's the Captain's bitch doing two sectors distant from G-1?" Lankin's ceramite helmet translated his sibilance and glottal clicks into static ridden English. "Lost? Out to stretch your shriveled legs?" He barked and hunched as he took another step forward, eyeing the command node. "Or, was it so you could blow a crew of slavers into space, you ADD cunt?" Leilah squared her shoulders.

"You followed me." Lankin barked again and deigned to give a human nod. He advanced another step. His body stretched from wall to wall, a veritable column of brutal flesh.

"Our good Captain can smell tunnel vermin nearly as well as I can. She kindly sent me to watch you. And here you are, off course and out of luck." Leilah considered the airlock behind the brute, but the glowing apex of his weapon sliced a line across her eyes. "Useless. I'm not here alone. My comrades are posted outside, so there's no escape for you there. And don't bother moving either." Lankin's gilded irises concentrated intently on Leilah's diaphanously clothed body. His cluster of nostrils pulsated. "I don't see any weapons, but I'll incinerate you on the spot if you twitch. You believe me, clutch bearer?" Leilah caught her breath.

"You left your patrol out there? Facing inwards?" Leilah asked, stricken. She glanced again at the airlock. She had to get past him, access his wrist-comp, something! Otherwise...

"Too bad isn't it?" Lankin gloated. "If you had some hope of escape I might have an excuse to bloat that tiny pink womb of yours after I defeated you." His attempts at a chuckle failed as Leilah pointed urgently toward the door, forcing him to remind her that he was still carrying his particle gun by jabbing it at her limp flesh. "I said don't move!"

"You fucking moron!" Leilah screamed. "You have to order your men inside now!"

"No. No. I'm here to keep you in line. They're positioned perfectly as is. Unless, meat, you were begging for some..."

"If you don't bring your comrades inside they're as good as dead!" Leilah furiously said, undaunted. Lankin hissed dubiously. Leilah insisted. "Ask for a report!" Grudgingly, Lankin clawed at his wrist device. Something about his prey's stance bothered him. She showed too little concern for herself, given their respective situations.

"Alright Marlarkis. Sound off." Silence and more silence emanated from Lankin's communicator. "Marlarkis. I need your status." Lankin turned on the visual feed and gave a toothy grimace. A severed ambulatory organ floated listlessly amidst a spiral of blood. A tenebrous mass of flailing tendrils hovered in the background. Then the shape moved, and the airlock creaked. "Marlarkis!" Lankin roared. He glanced toward Leilah, but she was already at the opposing airlock. Reflex guided the muzzle of his beam rifle unerringly on target, but when he pulled the trigger the weapon produced zilch, not even the crackle of a misfire.

Leilah trusted the interference field she'd activated to neutralize the nuclear power source feeding Lankin's weapon. The command node was vital, so it had been placed within a nexus of myriad force field emitters to keep it safeguarded. But the advantage was only hers temporarily. Lankin had more than enough raw strength to pulverize her. She slipped herself into the airlock and began depressurization just as her pursuer slammed his claws into the door. Outside, as Lankin began to give vent to his rage, the other entrance to the command room was torn away. Leilah felt the vibrations as the eldritch mutant surged into the chamber. She hesitated.

"You don't deserve it." Leilah muttered, and input a command to disable the interference field. As an afterthought, she hit the trigger to recycle the airlock. Then she pushed off into the unguessed perils of the Castigation's core. Lankin would be dead, despite the fighting opportunity she'd given him. For now, she had to be concerned with herself. This had all better be worth the trouble.

6:23:38:21 until Planetfall

The Captain propped her chin up on her chair, watching the vast holographic projection of the heap, glowing spheres moving through its mapped corridors like ants in a neon farm. Her flamboyant nature compelled her to take action, to be in the thick of things with the raiders, seeking the thrill of battle and the acclaim of a skilled combatant. However, unlike her counterpart Saber, Captain Weaver was at ease with the burden of command. She could let go of her ego enough to delegate, to leave tasks to others, and the wait for new reports did not settle on her shoulders in quite the same way it did other creatures of action. The Castigation had taught her patience, prudence, never to gamble something she could not afford to lose, her life first and foremost among these things. Lankin was a sufficient tool to corral Dr. Evangeline, nearly as physically indestructible as a biological entity could be, sharp enough to be suspicious, and more importantly motivated. His report that she was moving away from G-1 towards one of the control consoles for the explosives didn't worry her.

No, instead, she remained in the control center, sorting through the information constantly steaming in around her. One of the benefits of her multi-armed nature was that her mind could track a variety of tasks simultaneously, she soundlessly slashing a finger through the hologram tracing new lines through the structure as she made patrol adjustments to compensate for the squad she'd moved. No holes, they were settling in for a siege, a single saboteur could have disastrous consequences for them all. Resting in one hand was a flat black slate she'd had delivered from her quarters. A holographic projection of herself and the good Doctor sat at a table under gaudy neon lights. She was trying to figure out the good Doctor's motives, reexamining their time together. She couldn't just be looking to destroy the crew, there were easier ways to accomplish that . . . so what? She tapped the blank surface in a particular way, starting the recording over again.

"Dr. Evangeline, I presume?" came the somewhat tinny reflection of the Captain's voice, the transparent figure motioning to the chair across from her, "Please, have a seat. Order a drink, it's on me." she said, steepling her fingers in front of her as another hand indicated the glass in front of the Captain herself. She'd been wearing a veil of black silk that day, the venders of Vanejin knew the rumors of her abilities well enough not to trust her to direct eye contact, so it was a concession she'd been forced to make in the name of doing business. Still, she took the time to set it off properly, black dress contrasting strongly against her pale flesh, though the skirt was slit halfway up her hip to show bare legs adorned with an ankle bracelet around one leg.

"I'll pass, thank you." came the terse reply, Leilah herself dressed in a nondescript jumpsuit at the time. She looked like a worker from the asteroid fields enjoying her shore time, which was very likely the intention of the outfit .. . though Captain Weaver didn't doubt that there was a layer of armored fabric under that suit for a moment.

"That's a shame, it seems this interview will end before it's even begun." the image of Weaver sighed sadly, bringing her glass up to her lips, "If you need to be so careful of your speech that you can't indulge a little, best to wash my hands of you entirely." Though she said it, she made no motion to stand just yet, peering over the glass to watch the Doctor. She stood there, half in the seat, half out for a moment as if she was considering whether or not to simply leave. Ultimately, she settled into the chair and folded her hands in front of her as well, looking a little peeved.

"Kalta." she said, picking one of the drinks off the menu. Weaver's eyebrows lifted slightly behind her veil, it was a fairly popular drink . . . for designated drivers. Fizzy, sweet, and dark enough to pass for something harder at a glance. The Captain chuckled slightly, stubborn woman, but she'd met the terms that the Elianite had laid out. Weaver raised a hand for a waitress and ordered the drink, making a hand gesture with one hand down below the edge of the table to indicate that it should be delivered without any "additives".

"I'm told you're in need of a xenobiologist. Something of an odd request, for a pirate." Leilah had said, somehow managing to project a measure of condemnation and curiosity at the same time with her tone. The glass appeared on the table, and the good Doctor didn't hide as she pressed a key on the console strapped to her wrist, running a chemical analysis on the drink in front of her as she checked it for tranquilizers, poisons, or worse.

"It's not a standard job." the Captain had responded, shifting in her seat to cross one leg over the other, "Without getting into the details, we'll need to occupy a hazardous environment for roughly fifteen Referential Days. I'm familiar with the environmental hazards and can plan around them . . . the problem is that target area plays host to an aggressively adaptive ecosystem of mutants. Entirely new biomorphs are generated with each short generation, and there's evidence of "recessive" adaptations that can be reactivated through the use of naturally induced hormone therapy in a matter of days or sometimes hours. It's been more than a decade since I was there, I intend to be prepared for any surprises."

"Hmn." the Doctor looked at the drink in front of her, finally taking as experimental sip. It was a thoughtful response, measured. A good response, if she'd seemed excited by the prospects of such a race Weaver would've cut her from the project. These things were dangerous, she wasn't funding a research outpost, if everything went according to plan the creatures would all be dead before the month was out. "What would be my role?"

"Oh, the usual. Taxonomy, behavioral studies, coordinating with medical for toxicology and developing microbial counter-agents. Some of these things reproduce via infection rather than more traditional methods." The Captain's image frowned at her empty glass for a moment and signaled wordlessly for another with one of her arms as she set it to the side, "You'd have private quarters, access to the mess, and the kind of peace of mind that only comes from having a few hundred bodies between you and the ADD. Upon completion, you'll receive two shares of the take, the same rate as my petty officers."

"That rate's a little insulting." Leilah responded with a raised eyebrow, "And I don't need "protection" from the ADD."

"It's a very big payoff, and seniority counts for something on my crew." the Captain responded, affecting a bored tone at her protest. The two of them were quiet for a few moments, the Doctor considering, the Captain happily accepting her new glass and tucking a tip down the blouse of her server, who apparently retained enough modesty to blush.

"I'll need my own lab. If I'm going to be handling microbial samples I'll need to ensure proper protocol, and I don't trust your crew to follow laboratory procedure."

"Now who's being insulting?" Weaver responded, though she smiled to indicate she agreed, "It'll be close to where we set up medical, but you'll have your lab, under two provisions." she raised two fingers, "First, no locks, it's a separate lab, not a private one. Second, no live specimens."

"That will greatly impede my effectiveness. . ."

"I'll keep that in mind when I evaluate your performance, but it's not worth the security risk. If you need a live specimen, I'll assign you a security detail and you can do some field work. You are combat trained, so I'm told."

"Mmn." once again there was a long pause as Dr. Eva considered the terms laid out in front of her. Looking at the hologram, Captain Weaver squinted slightly at her face as she considered, scrutinizing. There was something unsaid there. The money hadn't enticed her, the protection didn't call to her, and she didn't have free reign so it wasn't the science either. She hadn't questioned it at the time, everyone kept secrets in the trade after all, but now . . .

"Agreed." she said, reaching a hand across the table

"Good!" the Captain responded grabbing the hand for a shake, one of her other hands brought up a credit chit, "Here, a down payment, and enough money to hire a couple of mechaporters to carry your things to the ship. The Wayward Star, Dock 71, Mr. Swivens will direct you to your room. Pot-bellied no-neck guy, wearing antique reading glasses even though his eyes are fine . . . just give me a few hours to have the current tenant forcibly ejected." she smiled easily.

The data pad settled down against the table as Weaver reset the recording. What had she missed? She covered her face with two hands and rubbed her temples, sighing irritably. Whatever it was, it was her own fault for allowing herself to get distracted. She climbed to her feet, a trailing hand picking up the slate as she began to pace along the length of the room, her thumb sliding over the slate to begin the recording again.

"Dr. Evangeline, I presume?" funny how the mind works. Pacing through a dark metallic chamber, listening to her own voice as she tried to plan ahead. Memories kicked and stirred, and she brought herself up short, looking at one of the threads still clinging to her that stretched out before vanishing somewhere in the air, slowly running her finger along it. Idly, she considered that it wasn't much thicker than it had been on that day. . .

-- -- -- 17:23:42:15 Before Planetfall -- -- --

"Please, have a seat. Order a drink, it's on me." a shudder ran through the shuttle as the pilot navigated the twisting and irregular gravitational field of The Heap, causing the lighting to flicker precariously overhead as wiring strained and swayed. Weaver kept a firm grip on one of the overhead grips, swaying with the motion of the ship, invisibly tethered in place with her own skills as the rest of the crew remained secured in their harnesses. There was a slight smirk on the Captain's lips as she paused the video, Dr. Eva still half-bent as she pushed the chair back, twisting the dataslate around to get a good look at the perfect three dimensional representation of her backside. The years had been kind to Leilah, she had to admit, there were a few chuckles among the members of the away team who noticed it. The Doctor herself was studiously ignoring the display, re-checking her equipment.

"Making our final approach now, Captain. Prepare the Away Team for Insertion." came a garbled murmur in her ear. The smirk on her lips only grew slightly.

"I assure you, my insertion of members of the Away Team is foremost on my mind just now." she subvocalized back, a quick shake turning the trideo projection off as she slid it into a slim pocket on her hip. A few members of the crew straightened up in their seats when they noticed. She hated wearing the environmentally sealed skinsuit, wrapped head to toe in vaguely adhesive yet strangely elastic synthetic materials, black plugs jutting out in irregular places to mount additional equipment as necessary. The temperature regulating gel inserts were a godsend, but it was like her skin couldn't breath, and the same design that kept it snug so that it wouldn't catch on potentially fatal protrusions meant that it was just a little tight as it pressed the softer curves of her body into shape. White as the driven snow with a series of sharply angled black stripes along each of her eight limbs, at a distance someone might confuse her for being in her natural state, if not for the layers of dull gray plasteel armor magnetically clamped to her frame.

"Alright boys, look lively!" she shouted, falling back into the roll of command, two of her hands gathering her hair up even as she hung tight to the ceiling and grabbed a rifle from the rack, "We're landing in five, it's on the outskirts of one of the more populated sectors of the Heap so expect a welcoming committee. The Castigation always did attract treasure hunters and grave robbers, the locals are poorly armed, but they'll be feeling us out to see if they can offer their services as guides or if we're sloppy enough for them to steal from. Don't accept any offers for help, they're just planning to lead you into a trap and let the Heap kill you so they can pick over you remains for choice bits of gear."

"We're just establishing a beachhead for the moment, check your corners, flush out any locals, and set up a defensive parameter. Someone doesn't respond when you speak to them? Shoot 'em, confirm your kill carefully, and drag them to point C. We'll burn the bodies later, assuming the locals haven't gone Ghoul." her hair gathered up and tucked into a bun, she pulled a helmet over her head with a clear face shield, two hands settling on the pair of blades over her shoulders, "Any questions?"

"Can we incinerate the yokels?" The speaker grinned nastily, setting its serrated jaws against each other and bunching its jaw to produce a rattle from its impacting teeth to show good humor. It was Lankin, the sole member of the away team who was unarmored. His club shaped head resided inside a transparent egg, his concession to the vaccuum of space. His six eyes blinked sideways, and the breathing tubes forming a beard around his helmet inflated from the canister worn at his hip. His translator disc buzzed, adhered to the surface of his skull-bubble, "There won't be any problems with them that way. No baiting, no lies. Just the satisfaction of an honest day's work."
Heads, among other brain cases and sensory organs, swiveled to Weaver. A few of the aliens wore their idiosyncratic expressions of mirth. The others lacked that form of emotion, and merely waited for the Captain's usual admonishments: have some tact, don't make enemies if the job doesn't require it. Weaver's face was inscrutable behind her mask.

"Do it." Weaver agreed. Lankin's saw-jaws stuck, ceasing their noisy oscillations. Quiet infiltrated universally into the away team. She made a point to match gazes with each of them during the lull. She said, "If they don't try to steal your gizzard it's because they haven't figured out how yet, got me? That said, this isn't open season. Try to keep your guns in check until someone paints a target on us, keep your ammo stocks high." Accordingly the assembled pirates did an extra check on their various weapons, eyeballing energy gauges, tapping projectile packed magazines against their armor like a pagan ceremony to ward off feed malfunctions. Lankin flipped a switch on his slab of a weapon to activate the fission generator built into its mechanical guts. When the emitter began to glow like the end of a cigarette he hefted it eagerly. He had never shown enough foresight (or diplomacy) to be suitable for command, but he never begrudged the opportunity to kill something, anything at all, which made him indispensable as a shock trooper.

"What about funny looks?" Lankin's double trio of eyeballs bulged redly by way of example. He received a tentacle broad across his striated back from a creature with a snake's coils in place of legs and four copies of it instead of arms.

"A ha ha! As if we could tell if a mutant was funny looking!"

Lankin dabbed the end of his weapon with his finger to confirm its heat and gave his comrade a multitudinous wink. "So we fry the lot is all. Smell that grease."

"I like my meat baked." Added another pirate with a sibilant guffaw.

"Bloody and tenderized." Said another, charging a round into their slug-thrower. Weaver hushed them with a gesture and a severe look. There would be no gorging on the fallen during this mission, she'd made plain vehemently on the way. Nobody was going Ghoul on her watch.

The Wayward Star pitched. A gravity whorl had spun through the ship, sending everybody and anything unanchored lurching to starboard at 0.3 G. Weaver was already prepared, and her team was salty enough to remain in place by either catching themselves against the decking with a limb or through pure rigidity, as was the case for Lankin's brutish body. Weaver gestured to Sabre at the helm for the airlock to be prepped, and he touched the console obligingly. The green safety indicator on the lock flashed as Sabre gave his Captain a spurious little bow, as if performing an especially benevolent favor, which Weaver acknowledged with an equally wry show of gratitude. With action at hand their careful animosity was muted into sparring that nearly approached camaraderie, alpha and beta wolves having a tussle.

"Wait there a moment!" Leilah rose from her console and accepted a handful of datachips from a portable circuit writer box. "ETA to insertion?" she shot to the helmsman, and Sabre responded by holding up four fingers. Leilah nodded and quickly crossed the floor to immerse herself in the perturbed knot of pirates huddled at the airlock. She passed out the fresh chips to the away team, ending with Lankin. Weaver gave her a querying brow. "These are for monitoring encounters with the indigineous ecology. Just attune them to your port-comps and comms, they should be compatible unless one of you is using something exotic."

Lankin held the minute chip between two claws as if he wanted to drop it. "What are they for?" he asked.

"Monitoring encounters with the indigineous ecology." The doctor responded smoothly. Lankin barked an expletive.

"So they spy on us. I know what monitoring means."

"They're so I can see what you are facing and get relevant data. You will all get better advice from me if I know what you are up against."

"Bah! There isn't a blasted thing that can survive an atomic beam." Lankin insisted, and made to throw away his chip until Weaver raised a hand. He growled and slapped the chip on his wrist console. One of the other aliens ventured to ask how the chips worked. Leilah explained how the chips used the usual communications and sensor suites in their gear and sent her carefully screened information that she could use to analyze the biochemical composition of their surroundings. "Including life forms." she clarified. "Leave mobile repeaters in your operating area too. There's plenty of exotic particles in evidence on the Hulk besides the problems with the irregular density. We don't want to fall out of earshot of each other."

"Let the woman do the job I pay her for, Lankin." she said, her voice uncharacteristically hard for a moment. It was almost comical to see, the towering figure of hyper-tense muscle and glistening dark natural armor could have reached out and crushed the pale skinned woman like a grape. Still, while he issued a low throaty growl, he did petulently open up the wrist computer he was wearing and press the chip into place. Lankin and his sort were undeniably useful to keep around, as toughs and press gangers this galaxy had produced few races quite so proficient, but their natural aggressive streak tended to make them difficult on morale. Lankin was probably the sharpest of his kind that Weaver dared to keep on her crew, he had good instincts and knew his way around a fight, but when it came to planning a heist he simply didn't have the patience to dig through the intelligence and pick the best ships to raid. It made him a solid anchor in many of her assault plans . . . and so long as he remembered to whom he owed his life of comparative wealth, she wouldn't have to show him exactly why she was unintimidated by his physical might.

There was a slight sway as the shuttle connected with the Castigation's automated docking clamps reached out to embrace it's latest brace of victims. Getting it to let go again might be more problematic, but Weaver had had a number of carefully placed shaped charges placed along the hull of the shuttle specifically to cut it free again if they needed to leave in a hurry. There was a quick shuffling of feet, tails, pseudopods, and other lower extremities as the pirate gang made a firing line, one group kneeling at the ready with their weapons raised while the second rank pointed their own weapons passed the first rank's heads.

"Just like training, three man fire teams, fan out, and search but stay close enough to support the rest." The Captain said, watching as the locking mechanism in the center of the shuttle's circular hatch began to rotate as it sealed the connection to the Heap's air lock. A few tense moments passed, the entry hatch splitting down the middle and then openning outward to reveal a silent rubber umbilical and another door opening at the other side. The first team, made up of the smallest physiomorphs so as to maintain clear firing lanes, moved up, giving the all clear as the second team moved up. Weaver's crew may not have much conventional training, or military hardware, but their lives were ever balanced on their ability to successfully assault a fortified position, and the Captain had brought her best with her for this forward team.

Then, finally, the entrance into the Castigation itself began to grind it's way stutteringly open. A dense, humid fog seeped into the gap in the air lock, the pale gray mist swallowing up everything further than ten meters away. Rusted plates of metal grating were visible as the floor, however some kind of dense fuzzy fungal life was pushing it's way up and climbing up along the walls to curl possessively around the emergency lighting which was muted. Thick, ropey growths the same dark color as plums with dark crimson buds dangled from the cieling where they had once clung to the ceiling before becoming too thick to support their own weight. There was a brief pause as something roughly man-sized moved from the edge of vision back deeper into the hall.

"The water condensers on this level must have ruptured." Weaver said, gritting her teeth as the glass plate of her helmet fogged up in the sudden atmospheric difference. She made a snap judgement. "Lankin, light it up."

There was a smug clicking sound as the massive raider breathed in through his wide grinning maw, the tongue fluttering against the backs of his front teeth as he strode to the front of the line. Bracing the cannon against his hip, the reflective panels that determined the beam's width flowered out and locked into position. There was a sound like the air itself screaming as an impossible amount of heat sheared its way out into the fog, the crew's polarizing helmets turning nearly black to protect their eyes as the lance of white light cut it's way through the fog. Once they could see again, black and dead vegetation dangled and burned as far as the eye could see, the fog rolling like a storm as a length of it swirled to be replaced by new moisture. The smell, if any of them had been foolish enough not to employ atmospheric seals, was utterly atrocious. Something moaned and tried to pull itself to its feet, having survived the first shot by diving to the floor, though still receiving horrible blisters and third degree burns due to his lack of armor. Weaver put a solid round through his skull.

"We stick to the plan. Three man teams, sweep and clear." she said, taking the first step into her old home, leading from the front as was her way.

"Contact". Lankin sought permission as he spotted a second twisted shape scrambling into the mist and gloom.

"Steady". Came the reply from the Captain, and Lankin gnashed his teeth half-heartedly. His Plutonic Rifle blazed with restrained aggression. A few more contacts were sighted and cited. Afterwards, nobody bothered calling attention to the mutants. Lankin’s earlier display had been enough to dissuade resistance. The sounds of regrouping echoed through the poorly ventilated tunnels, putting the fire teams on edge. One of the first lessons learned as a pirate was not to charge into enemy territory; move too impulsively and you were prone to spread out, lose the support of your mates, blunder into traps. The tricky part of the attack was keeping the net tight, to maintain communications and search the crawling corridors thoroughly rather than give chase to the numerous figures spotted fleeing into the recesses of the Castigation. The more quickly the mutants retreated the more carefully the away team searched.

Amidst the scorched vegetation Dr. Eva consulted her wristcomp. A sampling from the air after the conflagration yielded a collection of polyphenols in various stages of oxidation and the expected traces of atomized mineral and ash compounds. Her computer plugged the chemical data into a series of her custom algorithms in an attempt to virtually reassemble the original molecular structures of the plants. It would take time.

"Silicon remnants…" Leilah murmured. She had a second process running, testing a biopsy from one of the fleshier vines. The silicon based life she’d studied elsewhere nearly always included an organic component, but in this case the carbon content overwhelmed the silicon. A separate kind of tissue, she considered, something evolved after the species had developed. An adaptation to the Castigation’s environment. She let the biopsy analysis run in parallel to the first set of calculations and went to inspect the mutant Weaver had dispatched.

A shot blistered metal. Leilah saw the flash from a sideways passage and heard a pirate shout via her earpiece, following the escaped target with some tense invective. The feed crackled with Weaver’s voice demanding an update.

“One of the natives tossed a hunk of metal at us.” The pirate explained gruffly. “Thought it might’a been a bomb. Just a rusted tool.” Leilah tongued her cheek. The pirates were already winning over the populace with their famous manners. Oafs. She gave the corpse a sympathetic nudge. Aandorian: three manipulating appendages, three ambulatory, trilateral symmetry with an olfactory based awareness connected to giant white cerebral lobes…currently plastered across a swath of char. The specimen still retained eyes, a paedomorphic feature in its species that suggested an uncharacteristic connection to a social group. Tribalism would be one way of keeping safe. She pursed her lips. If it was social it might have some means of keeping in touch with its folks. A radio transceiver. Leilah clapped her hands in self-congratulations and put the device in a ceramite satchel.

"Captain, can I get an update? I have collected all that I require from the entranceway."

Each minute down here was it's own tense drama, black smoke clinging to the ceiling of narrow passageways and stirring the thick fog that shrouded everything. Reaching up with a finger extended, she drew her hand to the side, a taut line of invisible thread drawing aside a curtain of the strange pulpy vines that were hanging from the ceiling. Rifle braced against her complex shoulder, she checked right before stepping forward and sweeping to the left, covering the whole room. Kikatien, one of the smaller crewmen with two large compound eyes on the side of his head and three smaller "hunting" eyes in the front was the next up. Normally, he'd be the pointman, but in the envirosuit the bristly hairs that covered his body couldn't feel the air currents around him, leaving him without his natural motion detection ability he was feeling twitchy and irritable. Behind him smoothly rolled a featureless creature of dull brown fluid silicates in an artificial membrane, six barrels extending out of its main mass in different directions as he blindly examined his surroundings via the vibrations in the floor, its real name unpronounceable by anything with mandibles, the crew had taken to calling him "Bob" in the traditionally uncreative manner of any group of lackwits deciding something by committee.

"It looks like they're pulling back towards the condensers, Captain." a voice echoed over the encrypted comms channel.

"That doesn't make any damn sense, it's a big open room. Perfect kill zone." came the overly synthesized "voice" of something that relied heavily upon translator technology to be understood. Sarthin, probably, when your race primarily communicated via pheromones and changing colors, radio technology was a completely alien concept. A dangerous man in spite of that, he and his mate had been working as hitmen before a gang war took their employers off the board and a desire to swiftly leave the planet had brought them into the Captain's employ.

"Don't bet on it." Weaver said, running a hand along the wall of the room she was in. All this moisture wasn't doing this deck any favors at all, there were signs of corrosion everywhere, more than a few bulkheads having been weakened to the point where something had simply bulled through them to open up the area. She supposed she was just happy that it hadn't taken out any of the supporting walls. Blinking, she turned her head slightly to something on the ground, "With the condensers ruptured, the faucets on this deck probably aren't working, turning the area into a watering hole. We've got some spore here that indicates at least one large predator in the local ecology."

"And what kind of animal sticks around in the face of this much racket?" someone else commented, the sound of a short burst of gauss rifle fire punctuating his statement.

"Fucking hell, what is that?" game a somewhat frantic voice.

"Descriptions, Malrehk." Weaver demanded, tersely.

"Ah . . . maybe eighteen inches across, radial arthopod, red spherical eyes, hard chitonous blades at the end of each leg--"

"That's a Ductscuttler, scavenger phenotype. Mostly harmless in situations like these . . . though if one comes across you in your sleep it'll do a pretty good impression of a blender on you face." the Captain gestured back out the door to continue the sweep, "It was probably drawn by the fighting, looking for a quick meal off of the dead. I tried telling you guys on the ship, these things don't have a fear response. It's all adapt and consume."

There were a few silent moments on the comms

"So, why would the locals head towards these things?"

"The mutants aren't the only thing that have adapted to survive down here." the Captain said. She caught the message from Dr. Eva and nodded. "Everything's on schedule here, Doc. We're moving to close the noose now."

“The noose?” Dr. Eva asked, and brought up a recording of the away team’s recent transmissions. The holographic transcript could be read through more quickly than she could listen to the audio. So they were heading toward some kind of nexus in the passages. Broken condensers and indigenous life withdrawing to a central point; both her training as a biologist and as an intelligence officer suggested danger. She imagined her motley group of pirate comrades converging, braving limitless steam. Something shoots. The pirates respond. Pandemonium, and the away team decimated by their own weaponry.

“Weaver, it sounds as if you already have your own suspicions, so I strongly recommend holding off on closing that noose for now. If I were you I’d keep a strong perimeter, make sure nothing escapes, maybe reconfigure some repeaters to track motion for advance warning.” Leilah checked the progress of her algorithms. There was some relevant data already. “I have something suggestive here and I want some time to check it out before you venture forward. There’s…” Leilah grunted, pushing a chemical sensor needle into the resistant flesh of a vine. “Just, give me a little time, can you? This might be important.”

Ordinarily the presence of distinct silicon elements in organic tissue would have been evidence of cybernetic augmentation. In a plant? Well, that was dubious. Another species might have tampered with it, but the silicon strings embedded in the plant tissue were well integrated, moreso than the technology of the natives could account for.

Leilah checked the data her program had interpreted. Yes, the silicon strings were neural organs. That stood to reason. Flora was better at gleaning certain minerals, much better at chemically arranging them. A silicon based organ was not out of the realm of possibility. They were spiral shaped ribbons, not strings. Molecular analysis had uncovered that. Bundles of helical silicon ribbons, like rope fibers twisted together. All very fascinating, and she could have spent another week developing tests to determine how such a mechanism evolved. No time for that, unfortunately. Not while her team needed to know what the plant needed nerves for. The fastest way Dr. Eva could discover the purpose of the silicon nerves was to wait for her program to finish deciphering the data. Meanwhile, however, she could follow up on a few intuitions.

The radio receiver in her satchel was remarkably primitive, jury rigged. She’d seen the like in prisons before. Wherever a population was captive, and resources were restricted, the occupants always found ways to recreate the forbidden artifacts. This one was a made of wires, some for making circuits and some to give the device shape, and a bulb made out of artificially grown crystal. Leilah smiled wistfully. She made a couple of crystal radios when she was impersonating a grad student in Africa. They required little to no power to receive a signal. Just put it into your ear and listen to warlords threaten one another. Or, after linking it to some translation software, eavesdrop on the Castigation.

“X 231 Y456 Z49, large motion, moving a mean .4 meters a second. X245 Y401 Z52, intense motion, moving a mean .6 meters a second. All corridors around origin detecting motion. Alert. Proceed to origin. Alert. Proceed to origin.”

"Time's wasting, Doc. The longer we keep them bottled up, the more likely they are to attempt something clever, and we need those condensers as close to intact as we can manage." Captain Weaver responded to the Doc's request. She heard a disapproving snort over the comm-line. Lankin, she wagered, likely miffed that the Captain was taking time out of their advance to explain the operation goals to their freelancer. Weaver narrowed her eyes slightly, sighting down her rifle as she swept the corridor for signs of more indigenous life ... she could feel a slight tug in the back of her mind. It was somewhat familiar, a connection to something, but one so old she could no longer remember whome it was attached to. If it was one of the locals, it wasn't anyone she particularly wanted to meet again.

"You get five minutes, Earthanoid." she finally relented, using the ADD's referential time in case any of the locals were listening to her signal. She made a few hand gestures lowly behind her with her extra hand, a light clicking sound over the comms confirming that her team understood. "Fire teams, take position on the entrances to the water condensers. Make sure the tac-net have your positioning data accurately portrayed, I don't want any friendly fire. Especially from you, Lankin, light pulses near the delicate equipment."

Weaver stood near the entrance to the condenser room, off to one side. Sure enough, it was nothing but billowing walls of steam, it couldn't have been comfortable in there for the locals, but if they worked out this way frequently enough she wagered they were wearing heat resistant protective clothing as a safety measure. She could barely see anything through the rolling banks of white fog, and thermal vision would be useless in these conditions.

"Alright, let's get some eyes in there. Three, two, fire." she heard the soft "puff" of compressed air as her team mate fired, a heavy metal dart pounding its way into the wall opposite of her entrance as one of the other teams fired one closer to her position, the third punching into the wall somewhere below the condensers. The HUD being projected onto the inside of her face plate produced a map of the room's interior in three dimensions, including the locations of her other team mates, who were now highlighted with green triangles through the walls as she looked. Motion sensors gave a muddled response, reacting to the outrushing waves of steam as much as the shuffling of the natives, sonar providing a similarly fuzzy report. There was a system that detected the neuro-chemical electrical signature of most life forms that provided a better picture of how many people were inside, but Weaver knew from previous experience that some mutants' bones were made of some strange material that masked their neurological activity from such sensors, and she wasn't willing to trust it too far.

Reaching for her belt, Captain Weaver pulled a small sphere from her combat webbing and pressed the thumb switch to arm it. "Ears. Three, two, fire." she tossed the grenade-like object in as the clatter of the other teams doing the same echoed on the metallic grating that made up the floor. Weaver checked her chronometer ... Dr. Eva's window of activity was getting rather narrow. She keyed up her radio, syncing it to the spheres in the target room.

"This is Captain Weaver, mistress of the spaceborne vessel the Wayward Star. People of the Crucible, I am offering you one chance to surrender. Throw your weapons clear, and lay face down on the floor with your manipulating appendages behind your head. If you comply, you will be escorted out of this region under armed escort to warn your clans that there's a new power on this Heap and it is not to be trifled with. Those who resist will die. Messily. I know you apes aren't used to being given a choice, so I'll give you a cycle to mull it over." she said, surprisingly even toned given the threat she'd leveled. All the same, she couldn't shake that niggling feeling of familiarity creeping along her brainstem.

Leilah had to suppress her own snort; it seemed obvious enough that the natives had already done something clever. Otherwise their retreat would have been more haphazard. There should have been encounters, not just sightings, but every inhabitant of the sector seemed to have withdrawn to this one obscure, central point without attempting to put up a defense, hide, or parley.

Just in case, she checked the tactical web once Weaver’s team finished deploying it. All she got was fuzziness and data noise from the fog. No surprise there. The condensers provided the perfect smokescreen in these conditions. All the projection showed was a ring of inward facing green arrowheads, and one by itself on the outskirts—that was her. She kept the projection available so that she could see what the team was doing and switched the transcript she was reading back to real-time audio. If the advance went south she’d know instantly.

Meanwhile the Captain had given her five minutes, and she had plenty to analyze. The chemical geometry scan and generative simulation were still running on her wristcomp, but they promised late results. Besides, Leilah thought as she took a saw-toothed knife from her belt, she could accomplish a whole lot using her own hands and eyes.

The blade whined at first as energy infused its teeth, then the sound amped up into a brief and earsplitting screech. After that the sonic saw was blurry silence. High frequency vibrations oscillated the edge’s serrations until they fluttered like hummingbird wings. Leilah pressed the tool into the flesh of a vine segment. Wet particulates splattered her visor as she bit her tongue with concentration.

She kept one ear trained on the broadcast from her scavenged radio. Sequences of X-Y-Z and associated numbers droned on like a bored child reciting algebra in front of class. Leilah deactivated her saw, and frowned under a glaze of plant juice. She knew that X-Y-Z pattern.

“Display graph cross-referenced with audio.” Leilah spoke into her wristcomp while bringing up her mathematics program. It was exactly like algebra, she’d realized. Cartesian coordinates. That was why the feed kept mentioning an origin. She linked the radio feed to the system and watched as a number of points appeared on the graph. The points comprised a ragged circle, with one extraneous point hanging off at a distance.

“Weaver!” Leilah enthused. “I know how the natives avoided us! The vines sense us. I’ve been listening to this headset from that first casualty and it’s been giving away our positions. The natives have some way of deciphering the plant’s nerve pulses and translating them into a coordinate grid.”

Leilah was wiping gunk from the ends of the plant segment while she spoke. There were still missing pieces, and her five minutes wasn’t quite up. An empty ring glowed on her graph. She had to keep chattering. “I don’t see anything inside our perimeter, so either your quarry already escaped or they have some way to stay undetected by the plant. I’m going to guess the first, since tampering with the floral nerve impulses would jeopardize the efficacy of their detection system. There is probably an access to one of the other floors inside. I still have a few things I want to check though…”

Leilah peered at the tissue on the inside of the vine segment. There was something unusual about the pattern of growth. Instead of concentric rings there was a spiral. “You should be able to disperse the fog at least if somebody carries one of the gravity generators into the room and sets it to repulse.” Leilah mused as she stared at the spiral. Why did the plant need to grow that way? For that matter, why did it need nerves? She’d figured out how the natives appropriated the plant’s ability to detect creatures, but she still didn’t know why the plant had the ability in the first place. “You can knock all the fog out of the room that way.” she said absently. Damn. What was she missing?

Leilah’s five minutes ticked away.

“Waste of time.” Lankin declared over the comms. “Why’nt you say something about the grav genny in the first place? We could’ve been inside and cut off their escape instead of squatting out here with our thumbs up our bungholes. Lemme get to it Cap’n, and then we can get a look in there and follow the vermin before they set up an ambush.”

Weaver didn't see the harm in waiting for reconnaissance, but Lankin seldom considered prudence more valuable than action. He liked to hassle the various noncombatants his Captain hired, and as long as he kept himself restrained to intimidation and harassment she preferred to allow it. The imposing creature needed the release valve.

"Go ahead." Weaver assented. "Don't engage if Dr. Eva turns out to be wrong. Just flatten out and let our covering fire handle it. We all know your position at least." No matter what Leilah claimed Weaver expected the natives to have left something behind. Judging from the minimal equipment that her raiders had reported on the enemy an improvised bomb would be the worst they could manage, and Lankin should be able to shrug off a minor explosion. But maybe they'd managed to repair an old military drone; that would be bad news. She squinted at the green triangle which marked Lankin's position amidst the fog. He was nearly at the center now.

The piece of vine in Leilah's hand had stopped oozing. A few needles, chemical sensors, stood out from one severed end. Leilah wasn't getting anything useful from their readings. Apart from having non-terrestrial biochemistry there was nothing very irregular about the plant's hormones or composition. The spiral growth pattern might be a fluke rather than an adaptation. Evolution didn't care how life was arranged unless it couldn't survive and reproduce in a given environment, so the spiraled tissue could have been a roll of the dice that didn't come up snake eyes. Yet Leilah didn't think so. The spiral pattern had extended to the nerves, and the question "Why does it have nerves at all?" still remained. Well, sophisticated analysis wasn't discovering anything, then maybe trying a more primitive approach would yield results. Leilah touched an electrode to the plant's interior and switched it on.

Lankin flipped the switch on the gravity generator. He knew better than to just stand there while the massive block began to hum, and dug his heel-claws to the grated decking. As the indicator light on the genny flashed he suddenly felt as if he was falling backward. Suddenly he was standing erect on a vertical wall, according to his sense of balance. His muscles crunched tense from his legs to his shoulders while a bank of mist dropped past him and tumbled upward. A moist gust buffeted his teammates terrifically in the tunnels all around. Then he could see the condensers standing out from the wall like huge batteries, complicated engines radiating vapor amidst the vines tangling the grated surface they were attached to. He could see the sprawling foliage converging on the center of the chamber, and what the vines were ultimately rooted to.

"Retreat! Get the hell out of there Lankin!" Leilah's frantic voice crackled in Lankin's ear, but he was too absorbed in staring at the monstrosity that seethed above him. Enormous sheafs of vine that made broad panels or petals were yawning apart as the central mass heaved and flexed. A sound like a million frozen ropes violently unraveling shook the floor and faded as the air rapidly thinned. Then, just before the gravity bubble pushed the last atmosphere out of the chamber, he heard a tremendous inhalation from the bulb which consumed the space overhead. The pulpy thing opened up. Inside there were thorny teeth spiraling around an oily maw. Teeth, and also eyes. For once in his life Lankin felt himself dwarfed. Then those black eyes, round and dripping, looked at him. The Plutonic Rifle dropped unnoticed from his hands.

Far away in the corridor Leilah was running to rejoin her team. Behind her, the piece of vine she'd been studying flailed on the floor like a decapitated snake. The electrode in its body still blazed.

Weaver had stood to the side of the door as the billowing wall of scalding vapor was pushed forcefully out and into the halls, keeping her line of vision clear instead of standing out in the open while her vision was obscured. She watched the monitor displayed along the inside of her helmet as her fingers impatiently tapped a simple rhythm against her trigger guards. She didn't particularly mind if the locals had given her the slip for the moment, the goal was to secure this chamber after all, once the techs moved in to repair the condensers they'd be able to detect whatever crude escape hatch the locals had relied upon and seal it off. The fact that they were displaying that much survival instinct was relieving in it's own way, it meant they were still dealing with sophonts instead of puppets.

The Captain's eyes hardened behind the clear glass faceplate as she heard that wild "snap", the rustling of distant leaves. The invisible thread between Weaver and her enforcer thrummed as if plucked, resonating with something bordering shock though she thought she detected a bemused revelation in the "sound" of it. She'd heard that soundless tone before, that of a predator realizing it wasn't the apex of the food chain as it had originally believed.

"Lankin, cover your dome!" Weaver's voice rang out in time with Dr. Eva's call for retreat. ADD trained or not, Leilah hadn't experienced the pirate crews methods, didn't know the kind of tactics the Elianite preferred. As thick, ropey tendrils began to flex and move in response to specialized adrenal compounds that began accelerating the creature's metabolism to a more active state, Weaver watched on the screens of the cameras they'd seeded the room with. His claws dug into the deck plating, Lankin didn't have the equilibrium to navigate the pulsating graviton repulsors buffeting the room, though he had the strength to withstand them. Unfortunately, so did the massive mutant that had put roots into the ceiling, vines as thick as her leg pushing through the waves of force with the same ease she might push against the air current of a fan.

"CHARGES." she snapped, seeing Lankin double over and cover his breathing helmet with both arms, the hoses protected by his body. The bodies of the cameras that had punched into the interior walls unfolded like flowers, rows of glittering points revealed like small mechanical teeth. With a supersonic "crack", magnetic impellers released the anti-personnel flechettes in overlapping waves, tearing deep gouges through the thick tendrils and shredding alien musculature. More than a few of the reaching tendrils hung limply, too badly damage to support their own weight as they were pushed aside by the repellers, thick jelly-like ichor bubbling to the surface and sealing the wounds in dark violet scabs.

"FLAME." Weaver demanded, two of the pirates moving up to the door, held to the deck plating with magnetic clamps in their boots. They angled their weapons upwards to avoid wash back from the repellers, one a rifle with an underslung attachment and the other a heavy double-barreled affair with a thick armored cable reaching to a backpack. Twin jets of fire licked the walls of the water condenser, writhing and twisting like living things under the waves of gravimetric pressure as they rushed their way up towards the ceiling, hungrily lapping at dangling tendrils that were moving with more power and agility by the moment. Sensory nodules boiled and burst as tough fibrous skin blackened and shriveled under the heat. An alien scream shook the deck plating, echoing for levels around, as it's broad leaves folded back to protect the mutant's "face" before the chemical accellerant could wash over it's primary mass.

All the while, two of the Captain's hands were working. With each pass of her hand, tiny gossamer threads draped themselves over the hunched mass of her enforcer, even as flechettes bounced impotently off of his frame and he stood unflinching under heat that would've vaporized water. There was a reason Lankin eschewed the use of armor and void suits, his own body was nearly as monstrous as the things that called this place home.

"Let go of the deck!" Weaver shouted at the broad-backed reptile, her two hands making fists as she clutched the threads she spun tightly. Of course, Weaver never would have been able to pull a mass like Lankin's using only her own musculature, but even if she wasn't using the gravity repellers to lighten the load, each slender thread exerted its own pull as well giving her much more strength than her tall and slender frame would be assumed to produce. With a hard yank, Lankin practically sailed back into the hallway with the rest of the away team, his plutonic rifle dragged along behind him almost as a reluctant after thought as he hit the wall roughly.

This heap had taken enough from her already. She wasn't giving it anything more lightly.

"Dr. Evangeline, Dear." Weaver said calmly into the communicator as the more slender vines extending into the hallway began to stir and struggle to release their moorings, "It seems that our very large friend is trying to wake up more of himself. I do believe he's going to try and flank us, you'd be well served to get to cover."