Drift black

The Argonaut V drifted at the edge of the Charybdis Void, a black slit in the universe where stars went to die. No comms. No telemetry. Just static and silence.Drift Black

Commander Rhys activated the docking clamps of the survey ship Lazareth, sweat beading under her helmet despite the coolant still flow. The Argonaut V had been silent for twelve days. A science vessel, last tasked with probing a dark matter anomaly. Routine. Clinical.

Until it vanished.

Now it hung in space like a corpse with its ribs cracked open. Hull breaches. Scorch marks. A message repeating once every 47 minutes:

> “THE LIGHT IS A LIE. DO NOT OPEN THE FLESH.”

The Lazareth crew ignored the warning. Orders were orders.

Rhys floated into the Argonaut’s central corridor, flanked by Dr. Eli Mannix, xenobiologist, and Reyes, a twitchy engineer with eyes like boiled eggs.

The Inside of the ship was wrong.

The bulkheads looked melted, sagging like flesh over bone. The lights pulsed faintly red. Organic. Breathing. The smell hit next—iron and rot, like a slaughterhouse left in the sun.

Rhys’s HUD pinged: LIFE SIGNS DETECTED. CREW: UNKNOWN QUANTITY.

They moved deeper, boots clanging wetly. Blood pooled in zero-G globs, clinging to ceiling and walls. Reyes gagged when he found the first body.

No not a body—a skin. Peeled whole like a wet suit, floating in the medbay. Hollow eye sockets stared at nothing. Its owner was nowhere to be found. who's was it actually?

“God,” Reyes whispered. “They flayed him. They flayed him clean.”

“Something’s living in here,” Rhys said. “We stick to mission protocol. Tag survivors. Get the data core.”

In the command deck, they found three more bodies. Mutilated. Torn. One impaled through the mouth with a length of surgical tubing. Another’s jaw was missing, the teeth embedded into the glass walls as if spat out with force.

But someone had carved a message on the main console in blood:

> “WE FED IT. WE THOUGHT IT WAS AN ANGEL.”

Reyes began sobbing quietly. Dr. Mannix stared blankly.

“It’s not random. These wounds. Look…” he said, pointing. “The cuts are methodical. Almost ritualistic.”

Rhys didn’t like that word.

The ship's logs were corrupted, overwritten by looping visual static—brief frames of the crew smiling too widely, eyes black, twitching like marionettes. The sound behind it was flesh tearing.

Suddenly, the lights flickered and screamed.

It wasn’t metal. It was voices. A thousand voices screaming at once from the walls.

The doors slammed shut. Sealed.

Reyes pounded the exit panel. “We gotta get out—SOMETHING’S MOVING IN THE VENTS!”

The vent behind him burst open.

Something long and glistening slid out—thin as wire, glistening like a worm made of veins. It struck Reyes across the face. He shrieked, clawing at his helmet, trying to dig out his eyes.

Too late.

His visor shattered. The worm burrowed into his mouth, down his throat. He spasmed violently, then went still.

A heartbeat later, he stood.

Eyes black. Skin bubbling. Grinning.

He spoke with three voices layered over his own.

> “IT WEARS THEM TO STAY WARM.”

Rhys fired. Plasma rounds tore Reyes in half, but the thing inside him crawled free—a bundle of glistening intestines with claws.

They ran. Down blood-slick halls echoing with whispers. The Argonaut V was alive. Or rather—infested. Mannix was hyperventilating.

“I think it’s a symbiote. A consciousness. Something ancient. The crew—fed it. Worshipped it. Let it inside. The dark matter anomaly—it wasn’t inert.”

Rhys stopped, panting. “Then how do we kill it?”

“You don’t. You survive.”

He didn’t.

Mannix screamed as the ceiling above him collapsed, dragging him upward into a vent. The sounds that followed were wet and endless. His voice broke into laughter just before it cut out.

Rhys kept moving.

She reached the core chamber. Her only chance. Upload the data. Burn this place.

As she approached, she heard her name spoken—not through the radio, but inside her mind.

“Rhyyyysss… you already opened the flesh.”

She looked down.

A slash across her stomach. Not deep. Barely a nick. But something writhed beneath the skin. Moving.

“No. No. No—”

She reached the console. Initiated purge protocol. Fire would wash the ship. She typed through tears.

> “This is Cmdr. Rhys. Argonaut compromised. Biological threat—parasitic, memetic. Do not retrieve. Repeat—do not open the retrieve."

Behind her, it slithered in. A mass of limbs and eyes and teeth wearing Reyes’s face like a hood. It laughed with three voices.

“You’ll burn with us.”

Rhys smiled bitterly, blood in her teeth.

“I already lit the match.”

She slammed her hand on the ignition.

The ship screamed one last time.

EPILOGUE

Six months later, salvage drones found the Argonaut V. Blackened. Adrift. No life signs.

The wreck was quarantined.

Until one engineer, curious, touched the black mass at the core—cracked it open.

And heard whispering from inside:

> “WELCOME HOME.”