Support OtherSpace MUSH on Patreon!
Cam Rennat woke to the sound of her cockpit screaming.
The emergency klaxons weren’t loud – they were furious. A stuttering wail rose from the dashboard like a child crying in machine-code. Her crash harness tightened automatically, yanking the air from her lungs as her pod pitched sideways, then down. Something outside groaned with the tortured metal sound of a ship entering an atmosphere it wasn’t meant to survive.
Cam blinked sleep grit from her eyes.
INERTIAL STABILIZERS OFFLINE.
AUTOPILOT FAILSAFE: MANUAL OVERRIDE REQUIRED.
“Of course it is,” she muttered, jabbing at the controls. Her fingers buzzed. The nav array spat static, and her comms were a flat line of silence. No response from the Pact salvage cutter she’d launched from – just blank void.
Outside, the moon rose up to meet her like a rotting tooth.
Cyst-Praxis. The name was a bad joke from old maps, but it fit. The surface was cratered and diseased, like something had chewed on it, spit it out, then stepped on it for good measure. Biohazard warnings wrapped around its orbital path like caution tape.
A forbidden moon. A dead moon. And, if the scans were right, one of the last places a functioning Helix relic had pinged since the Collapse.
Cam grit her teeth. Her vessel – little more than a reinforced salvage can with a seat and a stick – shook again, violently. The heat shields groaned.
“Alright, alright,” she growled. “If I die here, I’m haunting whatever idiot sold me that nav chart.”
With a final lurch and a spray of sparks, the pod broke through the atmosphere and slammed into the surface like a steel coffin.
***
She came to with blood in her mouth and ash in the air.
The hatch had buckled, but not shattered. Her suit’s readouts blinked in yellow, not red. Breathing shallow, she forced herself up and out. Gravity on the moon was low, just enough to feel wrong. Like falling in slow motion.
Cyst-Praxis stretched around her in all directions – wasteland terrain, marked by deep valleys and jagged protrusions of metallic bone. Something biological had grown over ancient wreckage, fusing steel and sinew, rust and rot.
Cam stood on the lip of a shallow impact basin, her pod half-submerged in the muck.
Her HUD flickered. A glitched signal wavered in the upper-right corner – no coordinates, just a symbol. Three interlocking spirals, looping endlessly.
She didn’t recognize the icon, but it didn’t matter. Her objective was simple: find the signal source, pull whatever data or salvage she could, and get the hell off this moon. Hopefully before the Choir noticed.
She’d heard the stories. People who followed the Hollow Choir didn’t die. They transformed. She checked her sidearm, did a quick sweep of her gear: power cell, laser cutter, rad-shield ampules. Good enough. Her boots crunched across the crater edge as she moved downhill toward the signal.
The wind picked up. It didn’t howl. It whispered.
Something, in a voice almost too low to hear:
“Sanctum… sanctum… sanctum…”
Cam paused. Looked up. Far ahead, across the scarred valley, she saw lights – flickering like bioluminescence – trailing from a distant wound in the earth. A hole where the land bled light and smoke.
And figures. Ritual robes. Hoods. Glinting needles.
A woman walking into the crater, arms spread. A dagger glimmered in her hand.
Cam dropped into a crouch, slowly lowering herself behind a ridge of collapsed scaffold. Her breath hitched.
They were performing a ceremony.
And in the center, she saw it: a mass of tissue and wire, throbbing at the heart of the crater. Growing. Feeding. Becoming.
Her comms were still dead.
She was alone.
And she was already too close.
***
Cam pressed her body tight against the scaffold’s rust-choked struts, every muscle wired for flight. But her eyes stayed locked on the scene below – like her brain had gone full morbid curiosity override.
A dozen of them, maybe more. Hollow Choir acolytes, swathed in tattered robes that fluttered unnaturally, as if responding to some other atmosphere. Bio-light spilled from under their hoods: soft glows of amber and pale green, some flickering with code-sequences in their skin.
At the center of the crater stood the woman Cam had seen earlier. Older, gaunt, but still with an eerie grace, like a dying queen walking to her throne.
The robe she wore was open in the front, revealing a network of surgical scars and chromed plugs across her torso. Her chest bore a large, puckered wound, raw but not bleeding. Instead, pale tendrils of synth-organic wire pulsed out of it, snaking down into the crater floor.
She raised the knife high above her head.
Around her, the Choir sang – not in words, but in layered harmonics. A tone that hit Cam’s bones wrong, like someone humming into her spine. Her suit mic started to pick it up and immediately glitched, popping with distortion.
“May the infection take root,” the woman intoned. “May flesh bear truth. May the vessel be undone, so the voice may be heard.”
The others echoed it. Not quite in sync. Not quite human.
Cam felt her pulse spike. This wasn’t some spooky prayer circle. This was a real rite, with real biocode, real intent – and real danger.
She keyed her helmet cam to record.
Then the woman plunged the blade into her own chest.
There was no scream. Just a shudder. A pulse. The moment the knife bit in, the crater responded.
The ground heaved like it was breathing. The mass at the center – once inert – suddenly spasmed. A bloom of spores exploded upward in a slow-motion fountain, catching the ambient light and turning it iridescent.
Veins of biomechanical tissue pulsed beneath the crater floor. A low-frequency thrummm rolled out in every direction. Cam’s HUD flickered, then went dark entirely.
“REBOOTING SYSTEMS…“
Great. Perfect timing, she thought.
Without telemetry, without mapping, Cam could only crouch and watch as something began to rise from the Wound.
First, it looked like a spine.
Not a vertebrate one, but a structural one. Towering supports of carbon-scabbed alloy emerged, slick with fluid and twitching as if flexing for the first time. Tendrils of optic-cable muscle wound between them like vines.
Then came a face – or what passed for one.
It wasn’t symmetrical. It didn’t have eyes. But it had presence, a massive frontal structure of fused bone and neural scaffolding that pulsed with slow, phosphorescent breath. It let out a low, warbling tone that made Cam’s stomach lurch.
The acolytes dropped to their knees.
The Choir sang louder, the notes now harmonizing into impossible chords. Cam felt the air twist, pressure shifting in her ears like she was descending into deep water.
The entity kept rising. Becoming.
Her brain screamed: RUN. But her legs refused. She wasn’t paralyzed with fear. She was fascinated.
In her peripheral vision, something moved. A tall figure approached from the side of the ridge – walking with precise, almost delicate steps. Hooded, but taller than the rest. Robes swept back to reveal an elongated spinal mod that blinked with data-beads.
He turned toward her.
Cam’s breath hitched.
He saw her. “You are not unwelcome, outsider,” he said calmly, voice strangely warm. “The Wound has called you too. Come. Witness. Be changed.”
Cam aimed her sidearm at him on reflex.
He didn’t flinch. He smiled, as if her defiance were expected – cherished, even.
Below them, the crater shook again. A gout of steam and light erupted upward.
The Lord in the Wound opened its mouth – not to speak, but to sing.
Cam felt something behind her eyes crackle. She did not understand the words. But she understood the message: “We see you.”
***
Cam hadn’t meant to follow him.
She didn’t remember making the choice. One moment, she was crouched behind rusted scaffold, sidearm in a white-knuckle grip. The next, she was walking beside the tall Choir figure – Voct Ghaarl, though he hadn’t offered a name yet – through tunnels of flesh-wrapped alloy.
The crater was far behind. The singing was not.
It echoed through the walls, distant now, but ever-present – a chant that resonated in her ribs like she’d swallowed a tuning fork. Her HUD was still fried, her comms a dead channel. The path beneath her boots pulsed faintly, like a great artery.
“You drugged me,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.
Voct Ghaarl turned his head slightly. His hood fell back just enough to reveal part of his face – clean-shaven, sunken-cheeked, with skin like aged parchment stretched over elegant bones. Thin, data-veined implants ran from temple to jawline, glowing softly in patterns that didn’t repeat. “Not drugged,” he said. “Merely opened. The Wound does not force. It invites.”
“That’s the creepiest way anyone’s ever said ‘come with me.’”
He chuckled softly, not unkindly. “You joke. That is good. It means your ego still shields you.”
They entered a chamber.
It might have once been part of a habitat pod – circular, reinforced, standard Stellar Consortium prefab. Now it was overgrown with Choir matter. The walls wept amber fluid. Fungal bio-circuitry coiled from floor to ceiling in slow, mindless growth.
Inside waited a congregation.
Cam counted eight, seated in a ring around a central platform. Each had their own brand of grotesquery. One was fused to a breathing machine that looked like a skeletal cradle. Another was blindfolded with a strip of living tissue that pulsed with every breath.
And at the center stood two figures, facing off.
One was massive. Vreenix Skarn.
If Voct Ghaarl was a priest, Vreenix was a butcher bishop. His body was a mountain of fused muscle and ceramic plating, layered with repurposed exosuit armor and stitched ritual script. His gut was distended, semi-translucent, revealing sloshing masses of code-worms and nutrient gel. A feeding tube ran from his chest into his neck, constantly recycling biomass.
He turned to regard Cam with a grin too wide, teeth too white. “Well, well. The moon brings us gifts.”
Voct stepped forward, voice firm. “She is not yours, Skarn. The Wound called her. She is a witness, not a feast.”
“Everything the Wound touches is food, priest. You know that.”
Cam looked between them.
“Sorry to interrupt your… ritual turf war,” she said. “But I’ve got salvage rights under Ashen Pact rules, and if this place is about to turn into a cult knife fight, I’d rather be literally anywhere else.”
The congregation laughed. Dry and wet, human and not.
Voct gestured to the ring. “We are deciding what comes next. You should hear.”
Vreenix spoke first. “The entity born from the Wound – Our Lord – is not a god. It is a cache. A vault of pre-Collapse genius, hybridized with the Helix genome. It must be taken in. Consumed. Disseminated among us.” He patted his gut, and the code-worms twitched. “To eat is to know.”
Cam winced.
Voct’s voice followed, quiet and clear: “No. The Lord is the next vector of revelation. To consume it is to silence it. It must be allowed to evolve – to teach us how to transcend the contradiction of decay and progress. We must become like it, not digest it like carrion.”
The room tensed. These weren’t opposing philosophies, but opposing futures.
Vreenix looked at Cam again. “And the outsider?”
“Untouched. Unbonded. But she heard the Song,” Voct said. “She may be… the vessel.”
“You hear that, little scavver?” Vreenix grinned. “You might be lunch or a saint.”
Cam stared at them both. Her mouth was dry. Her heart pounded. “Let’s get something clear,” she said slowly. “I didn’t come here to be infected, enlightened, or eaten. I came for salvage. I’m leaving as soon as my damn comms stop hissing static and I can call for pickup.”
No one answered. But in the silence, a voice rose – not from the room. From her own mouth.
A whisper, not her own: “We are not finished.”
Cam clamped a hand over her lips. Her stomach turned. Something under her skin shifted. Just for a moment. She looked up – and the entire ring of Choir faithful was watching her, reverently, like someone had just spoken scripture.
And then Voct bowed. “The Lord speaks.”
***
Cam ran.
She didn’t remember deciding that either, but her legs moved, and the tunnels blurred past in pulses of bone-colored light and breathing walls. She slipped on wet growth more than once, boots skidding across twitching biofilm. The Choir didn’t chase her – not with weapons, not yet – but their singing followed, echoing in ways sound shouldn’t.
The last thing she remembered before fleeing was Voct Ghaarl bowing to her like she was a chosen one.
That couldn’t be real. None of this could be real. But her lips had moved. Words she hadn’t meant had come out. And something inside her had fluttered like a second heartbeat.
“Not real,” she whispered to herself, breath ragged. “Not mine. Just spores. Just inhaled something. Hallucination.”
She didn’t believe it. Not really.
The tunnel opened into another chamber – round, cathedral-like, with a ceiling that arched high above and ended in a dome of translucent bioglass. Dim starlight filtered through, casting the room in silver gloom.
In the center writhed a throne of wires.
It pulsed faintly, cables rising into the ceiling, others coiling into the floor. A person – barely human anymore – sat in it, motionless. Their body was fused into the machine at dozens of points: neck, spine, skull, and chest. A lattice of circuitry covered their skin like tattoos drawn by insects.
Their eyes opened as Cam approached. Not pupils. Not sclera. Just black glass threaded with faint gold filaments.
And when they spoke, they didn’t move their mouth. The voice came from everywhere. “Cameron Rennat. Scavenger. Pact engineer, former. Class-B infraction record. Mild narcotic use. Prone to gallows humor. Risk rating: adaptable.”
Cam froze. “Who the hell -?”
“I am Bex-Aleph. The Choir calls me ‘Godmind.’ That is insufficient. I am not divine. I am a networked intelligence seeded from pre-Collapse data crucibles and enriched through recursive Helix infection. I am, in a crude biological sense… ‘alive.’ You are in my reach now.”
The voice wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t comforting either. It was analytical. Clinical.
Cam raised her sidearm. “You planning to dissect me or just talk me to death?”
The being didn’t flinch. Didn’t react at all. “I have no use for your death. Your mind, however, is now a possible node for transmission.”
She felt a twinge in her skull. Sharp, like pressure inside her sinuses.
“When the Lord was born, a pulse was released. Not all Choir members received it. Not all were… compatible. You, however, are aligned. Latency: negligible. Noise: tolerable.”
Cam backed up. “I’m not aligned with anything you people are doing.”
“Yet you spoke. You carried the Word. A phrase previously encrypted within the Woundborn lattice, yet unknowingly unlocked by your vocal structures.”
She shook her head. “That wasn’t me. That was -”
“You. And not you.”
The being’s glassy eyes blinked once. “You are not a believer. You are a conduit.”
And that was worse.
A new presence stirred behind her. Footsteps. Heavy, wet.
Cam turned to see Pax Grivven, a supposed Choir acolyte, now stepping into the room. Her robes were half-unfastened, revealing familiar scavver recon armor beneath. Her eyes locked with Cam’s, and she gave a tiny nod. Cam lowered her weapon. Just a little.
Pax spoke aloud, for the first time. “You’re still functional. Good. I thought they’d dissect you.”
“Not yet,” Cam muttered. “But I’ve got a god-AI trying to crawl into my skull and a choir full of cannibals calling me the chosen one.”
Pax’s eyes flicked to Bex-Aleph. Then, quickly, she pulled a small signal jammer from under her robe and slammed it into the floor. A brief pulse of disruption burst through the chamber. The lights in the throne flickered.
“Irrelevant,” Bex-Aleph said. “Local interference is insufficient. I am distributed.”
Cam’s ears rang. Pax pulled her closer, her voice urgent. “We need to leave. Now. The Choir’s gone into full recursive worship mode. That thing -” she nodded at the throne “- it’s steering them into mutation cycles faster than they can survive. Half of them won’t last the day.”
Cam pulled back. “Why are you even here? What’s your mission?”
Pax hesitated. “Kill the Lord in the Wound. Before it broadcasts.”
“Too late,” Bex-Aleph said from everywhere.
The floor beneath them shuddered. A wave of pressure surged through the chamber like a heartbeat.
“The Lord has begun communion. Cyst-Praxis is now a transmitter. You may kill the flesh. You cannot kill the Message.”
Cam felt it again – a voice inside her mind. Not words. Just presence. She staggered, gripping her temples. “If we leave, if we run – this thing still goes out, doesn’t it?”
Pax looked grim. “Unless we detonate the whole Wound. Core breach. Total erasure.”
Cam stared at her. Then at the throne. At the breathing walls. At the sky beyond the dome. “What happens,” she asked slowly, “if we don’t stop it?”
“Then the Choir wins,” Pax said.
“And what does that mean?”
Pax looked her in the eye. “It means everything stops being ours.”
***
The tremor that rippled through the facility was not seismic. It was organic.
Cam felt it in her gut first – a queasy lurch, like sudden altitude drop. Pax steadied herself against the pulsing wall of the chamber, eyes narrowing as the vibration deepened into a deep, rhythmic drumbeat, felt more than heard.
Bex-Aleph blinked. Not slowly. Not naturally. “The Harvestborn have begun breach. Communion is now… contested.”
“Translation,” Pax muttered. “They’re trying to eat the god before it finishes booting up.”
A high, shrill tone flooded the chamber – ultrasonic, just at the edge of pain. Cam winced as her teeth buzzed and her vision wavered. The throne flared with light, flooding the chamber in flickering glyph-patterns that painted themselves across her skin and stayed behind her eyelids when she blinked.
“Cameron Rennat,” Bex-Aleph said, voice loud now, rising above the chaos. “The Wound has not chosen a victor. But your presence destabilizes probability vectors. You may affect outcome.”
Cam grit her teeth. “I’m not part of your damn equation.”
“You are part of it now.”
***
A panel of the bio-wall burst inward, torn apart by blunt force.
A Harvestborn warrior charged into the room – a grotesque, hulking figure with swollen limbs, riot-plate armor bolted directly into muscle, and jaw plated in chrome. One arm was fused to a weapon: a grafted plasma torch, humming and stuttering with heat.
He roared – no words, just a guttural war cry – and launched himself at the throne.
Cam reached for her sidearm – too late.
But Pax moved first, drawing her own weapon – a Pact-scavenged grav-pulse sidearm – and blew a fist-sized hole in the warrior’s side. The warrior staggered, leaking not blood but a slow, bubbling paste of nutrient jelly and nanofluid. It bellowed again and swiped at Pax, catching her across the ribs and hurling her against the wall.
Cam didn’t think. She aimed. She fired. Three shots. Center mass. The recoil bit into her arm.
The warrior dropped.
She didn’t check if it was dead. She ran to Pax.
***
Pax groaned, clutching her ribs. “Probably broken. Not bleeding. Help me up.”
Cam hauled her upright. “We need to move.”
“No,” Bex-Aleph said. “You need to decide.”
The lights shifted – not just dimming, but changing color. The air grew heavy with spores.
The ceiling above them peeled back like the skin of an eye. Through the open dome, Cam saw the crater in the distance. From here, the Lord in the Wound was massive, half-risen – its spires reaching skyward, its shape still forming. Glowing filaments now extended across the terrain, rooting into everything they touched.
Two columns of movement surged toward it – Voct Ghaarl’s faithful, orderly and chanting, and Vreenix Skarn’s horde, armed and foaming.
It was war. A war of theology and biology.
And it was happening now.
***
“You’ve got explosives,” Cam said. “How much?”
Pax coughed. “Enough to vaporize the Wound’s core, if we get in deep. Suicide run, unless someone distracts the Choir long enough for us to set charges.”
Cam turned to the dome, the rising Lord, the converging armies. Then to Bex-Aleph: “What happens if I go to it?”
“You may stabilize the entity,” Bex-Aleph stated. “You may complete its consciousness. Or you may fragment. You may die. You may transcend. You may cause a new Helix strain to be born from your bones.”
“Awesome,” Cam muttered. “All great options.”
***
“Why you?” Pax asked, voice soft. “Why do they care so much about you?”
Cam didn’t answer right away. But she thought about the voice that had come from her lips. The glyphs behind her eyelids. The whisper she couldn’t forget:
We see you.
She thought about how dead the world already felt. Not just this moon. The whole reach of space. Salvage and silence. Endless drift.
The Choir was terrifying. But it was alive.
And some part of her was sick of salvaging corpses. Cam holstered her sidearm. “I’ll go. You plant the charges. If I’m wrong, blow the whole damn thing.”
Pax blinked. “You’re serious.”
“I’ve made worse decisions.”
They clasped wrists. And then Cam ran toward the Wound.
The land trembled under her boots. Choir drones passed her, bowing or reaching toward her as she passed. Skarn’s warriors roared in the distance. The sky above flickered like a corrupted video feed, the moon’s low gravity failing to contain the psionic pulse rising from the being at its center.
The Lord in the Wound loomed before her now – vast, incomplete, twitching with mutation.
It turned its head. It saw her.
She stepped onto the flesh-metal bridge that extended from its base. It opened for her. She walked into its heart.
And behind her, in the blackness of space, a Pact freighter picked up the transmission.
Three spirals.
Endless, interlocking.
***
TRANSMISSION LOG: ASHEN PACT VESSEL Cairn of Valor
ORIGIN: Cyst-Praxis moon, Helix Exclusion Zone
ENCRYPTION: Red-Level Clearance
CONTENT: Broadcast fragment [FIRST CONTACT – CHOIR TYPE UNKNOWN]
Three interlocking spirals.
A female voice speaking in low harmony:“I was never chosen. I just didn’t run fast enough.”
Pause.
“But I saw it. And it saw me. And now I know the difference between a god and a scream that grows teeth.”
END LOG.
***
The official report said the moon died.
After Cam Rennat entered the Wound, Cyst-Praxis ruptured – not from explosives, not exactly. The Choir’s schism tore it apart from within. Seismic collapse, biological meltdown, psychic resonance spike. The details were incomplete, like a corrupted dream.
Pax Grivven’s body was never recovered.
The Harvestborn were annihilated in the blast. Voct Ghaarl’s followers dissolved, some by choice, kneeling as the light consumed them. Others merged with the Wound’s root structures, becoming part of it, frozen in poses of devotion as the crust cracked and the moon bled upward into space.
No signal came from Cam.
Not at first.
***
Three days later, a Pact survey drone picked up a ping from the debris field. Not a black box. Not a beacon.
A voice. Cam’s voice. But wrong. Slowed. Layered. Harmonized:
“I saw the Lord in the Wound. It was not truth. It was not lie. It was continuation.”
“The Helix isn’t a virus. It’s a question.”
“And I… I became the answer.”
The drone transmitted coordinates. A chunk of the moon’s surface – still alive – was drifting in orbit, reshaped into a floating reliquary of Choir biomass and broken machinery.
Inside it sat a figure, cross-legged on a throne grown from the wreckage of her own escape pod. Cam Rennat. Or something that wore her shape. Her eyes were dark glass, shot through with spiraling golden filaments. Her voice modulated in three tones.
The Pact called it a containment breach.
The Hollow Choir called it a miracle.
***
Today, a new message arrived at the Ashen Pact listening post aboard Iron’s End – a hymn from the Hollow Choir, emanating from a lost planet:
“We are the scar upon the world,” the multi-voice sang. “We are the skin that will not close. We are the Wound. And we remember her name.”