Vathis cursed the cold and cursed this dead planet and cursed the Captain who’d led them here. Led them to die out here. He didn’t curse the thing they’d found, no. That might call it.
He tightened his mask and listened to the wind, but now it whispered of prey and the chase, and the stories were not his. Once the hunt had been theirs, the search across the icy gulfs of space to fall upon some fallow world, but these mournful songs belonged to the pack hunters, the scavengers in this wasteland.
Vathis redoubled his pace, and clutched his prize against his chest.
Through the flying ice his four eyes made out a steep-sloped hill. He scrabbled towards it and hauled himself up the side, the baying creatures closer now. Over his shoulder he saw them flowing liquidly across the ground, yellow eyes glittering.
The wind sang of the scent on the wind, of reckless hate and burning hunger.
Captain Skelsi had been so proud. A touchstar, he had said, hidden within this forgotten corner of a nowhere system, once home to some nothing race that had devoured itself. A touchstar, far from the scrabblings of the other Houses, a thing to raise their shoddy clan to glory. The prize would be theirs.
“Grave-robbing?” Vathis had muttered to himself. He’d been against this from the start. Not that Skelsi had listened.
“This isn’t theft. You cannot steal from the dead,” Skelsi had said, and dismissed him with a wave of one of his upper arms.
Look what that arrogance had brought them.
They’d pawed through the brittle remains of blasted cities—Skelsi in the lead of course, a reluctant Vathis at the rear—burrowed into the cold corpse of a long-dead civilization, until they’d found it, found the touchstar. Brushing aside the spiky, trefoil warning signs posted about a concrete and steel sarcophagus, they’d found this glowing echo, this faint reflection of the sun’s life-giving rays.
Found the thing which kept it, too, as old and bitter as the winter wind.
Skelsi had brushed Vathis aside, rushing forward to claim his prize. Instead, it claimed his life. Skelsi had died first, and the others, all save Vathis—last and least—who had fled with this one fragment.
Vathis clambered over the sharp, cutting rocks with all four hands, until he stood at the top of the hill, crested by a snow-capped boulder. He placed his back against it, drew his pistol with an upper hand, a knife in each of his lower two. The animals drew closer, circling, fangs bared. The wind crowed of red joy and white bones.
And then they drew back, turned and fled. The wind stilled. The touchstar in his hand throbbed, like something alive.
Vathis turned. Skelsi wrapped his cold, dead hands about Vathis’ neck. “You cannot steal from the dead,” he hissed.
His fingers bit like ten thousand cold claws.
