What’s Waiting Beyond (1/7)
Oct. 20th, 2011 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bottanTitle: What’s Waiting Beyond (1/7)
Chapters: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [epilogue]
Pairings: KuroFai, SyaoSaku,maybe hints at Xing Huo/Kurogane, which I will just ignore
Word count for this chapter: 4,478
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: violence, gore, depicted death, elements from horror stories, stupid silliness, semi-coherent rambling on technology I barely understand,Kurogane being a bit slow... >.>
Summary: On one of his missions, Kurogane meets a strange woman at a devastated space station. The nightmares from his past return. And suddenly, every idiot in the universe tries to tell him things about dragons.
Author’s Note: This is a remix of the highly recommended Catch A Dragon By The Tail by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
reikah. I stole her dragons put them into space. Because this is fanfic. *puts on sunglasses* Besides, I'm not doing the original fic justice. By far. But I still did what I could, so, there, reikah, have it as a token of how much I adore your writing, if nothing else.
His breath echoed in his ears and condensed in a moist haze against the visor of his spacesuit. Kurogane pushed gravel aside with his boots as he made his way through the torn-apart research station, eerily quiet and only lit by the red emergency lights. This must have been the main hall – computer equipment and toppled-over furniture was strewn about, a pot of coffee, freezing on the ground where the artificial gravity pressed it. A lifeless body was cramped under a desk that had fallen over, obscenely inflated by the vacuum. Its skin glittered coldly with frozen moisture. Kurogane just briefly looked it over – it had been a man, one of the scientists, the nameplate said – not his job to clean up this particular mess. The floor had cracked open like a nutshell only a few meters ahead, and endless darkness was yawning at him from the other side; he couldn’t see the moon the cylindrical station[1] orbited around from here, and even the stars seemed to have been swallowed.
This must have been where the attack had started, where the demons had entered. Kurogane kneeled next to the hole in his skintight spacesuit, reaching at his side to pull the scanner out. Something seemed to have melted the meters thick steel. He traced the fist-sized instrument over the scorch marks at his feet, and the screen sprang alive with blue letters and numbers. Traces of unknown radiation, a chemical that had reacted with and dissolved the floor. Acid. Kurogane felt his lips peel back from his canines. Something about this was foul.
Demons weren’t conscious in the meaning of the word. They probably weren’t even a life form – they could best be described as swarms of inanimate matter, moving together in a delicate balance of electromagnetic fields. Things that were commonly known about them were, for one, you would mostly encounter them on the outskirts of the galaxy, and for two, they only ever attacked humans. When they had first appeared about a century ago, the psychological effect had been almost as devastating as the first bouts of the Human Civil Wars.
‘Demons,’ was what they were commonly called, but ‘curse’ might hit the matter of the heart, better. They clung to spacesuits as barely more than a fine sheet of black dust, and coated the outer walls of ships a weaving, rippling, dancing kind of darkness. They weren’t harmful as long as you kept them away from your skin – but god help you if a swarm of them entered your ship. They would kill everything they touched within minutes, engulfing any living thing from head to toe, as their victims died screaming in agony. Scientists were wringing their hands for explanations as to what exactly happened during the process, but the dead bodies that were left behind were aged like those of hundred-year olds, hair whitened and skin shriveled and dry.
Scientists were also the ones trying to understand what made them move – it was assumed that they were controlled by some outer force, possibly through a yet unknown-of alien technology. Non-scientists were happy enough when they weren’t anywhere close, trying to ‘suck out their souls.’ And demon hunters were the pest control that dealt with them. Keep to safety standards, in case they entered the ship, get force fields up to contain them, magnetic fields to pull them apart, radiation to kill them. It was what Kurogane had learned, it was what he did best.
He had come here on a distress call, as demon activities had spiked around Jade Research Station. When he had arrived today, one standard day later, expecting this to be a tedious job of cleaning the surface of the station, it had been devastated. Someone – or something – had helped them gain entrance, and not in a subtle way.
Kurogane stood, stirring up a left-over hive of demons that had been hovering at his knees and feet. They followed him like a small animal, flitting in clouds around his ankles and up over his helmet. His skin crawled at having them this close, and the radio connection kept crackling with static in his ears as they moved around him. He didn’t want to waste energy to create a force field, when a working emergency airlock was installed to lead to the next room. Kurogane opened the gate with a touch to the side panel, and the steel doors rolled aside with an obedient hiss. The demons followed him inside mindlessly, and he locked them in with him, before he activated the “launder” mechanism. Red lights flashed to announce the start of the progress. He felt the radiation wash over him with a slight prickle – the suit protected him from most of it, but there was still a reason most demon hunters died young – and the magnetic field let the display inside his visor flicker and die. He steadied himself along the wall, watching the demons vibrating in midair, before they fell collectively out of the thin air, hitting the ground as though someone had emptied a bucket of sand. A generous amount of disinfectant emptied over his head, rinsing them away. Then it was over. The demons that had followed him in were a mere layer of dead, gray mud that crunched under his boots. He opened the door to the next segment of the space station.
Kurogane stopped dead in his tracks. A single person stood in the middle of the control room, gazing upwards at a giant screen that hung overhead. A woman, small and slender, wearing informal clothes, blouse and skirt. Her hair fell in long, impractical curls over her shoulders, and it the frizz caught the regularly flashing lights that were emitted by the recording.
“Hey!” Kurogane called out, before realizing that he’d have to turn on the outside speakers. The girl turned around as though she had heard him, anyway, even before he pressed the button on the inside of his wrist. “What happened here?”
She stared at him blankly. Kurogane’s gaze fell down to her upturned hands. In the low light, he needed a moment to realize that they were slick with wetness – blood. Kurogane’s hand closed around the sword hilt at his side.
“What happened to your hands?”
“It’s my own blood,” she replied tonelessly. Her voice was a small thing in the wide room, in the darkness that was only lit by red emergency lights and the ghostly flickering of the screen above. Her hands were trembling and the skin on her forearms was blistered and burned. Her mouth had opened as though to say something, but nothing came out. Shock. She was just in shock. Kurogane breathed and let go off his Ginryuu’s hilt to wrestle his backpack from shoulders. He pulled the first aid kit out as he briskly walked over to her. He kept the helmet of his suit on, even when she seemed to be breathing normal – never knew what was in the air, never knew how far the demons had come.
She moved like an experienced fighter – she fell into some kind of attack position as Kurogane drew closer, her hands lifted as though she still could do any damage with them.
“Stop messing around and let me see that,” he ordered curtly. His voice was ringing within the stifling plastic orb of his helmet, and he knew it would reach her tinny and distorted on the outside. “I’m not a doctor, but I’m capable to get those cleaned and bandaged.” He stood a few steps away, watching her to see whether she’d freak and attack him. Her body was taut with tension.
“You want to help me?” she asked, as though she wasn’t sure she had understood correctly.
“It’s my job,” Kurogane said. She seemed confused for a second, but then put her hands out, a gesture that was hesitant and almost curious. He moved closer, always watching her for signs of violence, while he cleaned and bandaged the wounds provisionally. Her face twitched only slightly to betray the pain as he washed the wounds with sterilizer. It was strange work, made even more intimate by the way she stared at him as he clumsily and a bit too roughly applied mull and wrapped her arms. “This looks like done by acid,” Kurogane told her and cleared his throat, eyes flickering up to meet hers. “How did you get these wounds? Can’t be the same stuff that burned through the outer mantle, you’d have lost your hands.”
“Did you know that they were monitoring a dragon, here,” she said in a tone that so much like an answer that Kurogane did a double take to follow her train of thought. Her voice was as flat as her expression as she craned her neck slightly to watch the screens to the side. Kurogane looked at her suspiciously.
“They were researching demon activity,” he corrected her. She slowly shook her head in answer, her black eyes reflecting the flickering screen. Kurogane turned to look over his shoulder. There was a camera directed at the moon they were orbiting around. As a great, rose-colored disk it filled up the left part of the screen. Kurogane didn’t understand what he was shown, at first – after a few seconds, from the shining disk and barely visible against black void, a bright, curling piece of silver thread emerged. It zigzagged around space aimlessly for a moment, before it drew closer towards the camera. Just before it was big enough to be recognized, it vanished to the right of the screen. The camera quivered and then was yanked around to follow it – and suddenly, there was blinding light filling the lens, a blurred image of something gigantic passing by. Then, darkness and space. The sequence repeated.
“This ship took up contact with a dragon,” the petite woman repeated, voice soft. The dark room seemed to swallow the two tiny humans with its emptiness. Kurogane remembered tales of the giant, space-traveling species that were out there, the elder races that possessed psychic powers and could bend matter around them to support their bodies over years within the vacuum. Sometimes, one species would evolve and rise, and then, slowly, vanish from the universe during its ascension. Elder races were set equal with gods in many folk stories, terrifying and benign ones alike. Few of the lower races claimed to ever have seen them, and within the universe, they were mere legends.
It was silent around them safe for the radio connection that hummed obediently in his ears. Kurogane realized he had held his breath as he turned back to her pale face, white and red light flickering over her cool features. She said, “It brought death upon these people.”
“Weren’t you part of the crew?” he asked her. She just looked back at him, her face almost condescending. Then she lowered her gaze. He realized he was still holding her hands and hastily let go off of them, leaving them hanging in the air, bandaged and small. “There should be airtight emergency suits in the cabinet next to the airlock,” he said gruffly, avoiding her eyes and gesturing over his shoulder. “Get into one of those, wait here for me. I’ll take you back with me to the closest habitat, they’ll be able to do something for your hands.”
“You don’t need to do that,” she still sounded as though she was surprised that he was offering.
“You can fly a ship?” he asked, unnerved by her calmness. He knew there should be rescue shuttles on board of the station, but he wasn’t sure they’d be clean of demons. They were supposed to be sealed, but he had seen too much shit on this job to trust anyone blindly on following security measures. She shook her head. “Which means you’re not going to get out of here. I’m a demon hunter, it’s part of the job to search for survivors, so get into one of those damn suits. If nothing else, they’ll protect you from demons that are still around.”
“Your sword,” she exclaimed suddenly, eyes going wide, and for the first time since he’d met her there was visible emotion painted into her face. He stared at her. He didn’t get that woman, she seemed to never even hear what he was saying. Her eyes were sharp as they snapped back up at his face. “Where did you get it from?”
It wasn’t the usual response he was getting. Most people asked him, What good is a sword against demons? Can you even use it wearing a spacesuit? He curled a fist around the hilt of the weapon. “Can’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“Did someone sell it to you?” she took a step backwards, her eyes narrowed and back hunched defensively. She reminded him of a cat.
“It’s mine,” Kurogane said. “And in case you want to fight me, bring it on, but I don’t see how you think you’ll get anywhere with wounds like that.”
She didn’t move. Kurogane sighed. He stepped around her carefully, watching for her to attack.
“I’ll be back after I’ve searched the rest of the station for survivors. If you still need a ride to New Tokyo, wait here.” He felt her gaze on his back as he strode on and out of the room but he resisted the urge to turn around.
Scouring the ship, he found no one else, just the dried up corpses of the team that he left for the police to identify and bring home. The girl’s words still rang in his ears – they were monitoring a dragon, here – he downloaded as much of the logs and data the station had saved as he could access and carry.
When he came back, he half expected her to have vanished – instead, he found her standing in the next room, gazing out through the hole in the floor at the slowly turning stars. He muttered a curse under his breath, grabbing her by the shoulder and yanking her with him.
“That isn’t a spacesuit you’re wearing, and just because it’s airtight that doesn’t mean you can’t freeze to death,” he grumbled as he felt her suspicious glance. “Get into the ship.” He stopped pushing her the moment he realized she was moving on her own.
“Are you always this rough with guests?” she asked him with a sarcastic lilt to her voice, while she was waiting for him to open the ship.
“Tch,” he made and let her step inside first. She was a woman, and hurt, and stuff. Probably shouldn’t shove her around, too much.
“I’ll set up a connection with New Tokyo, tell them I got one survivor,” he said as he led her through the narrow, gray corridor, showing her around the ship. “You want to contact anyone to pick you up?” She shook her head no.
He opened the door to the living room showing her inside. These parts of demon hunters’ ships were not only the biggest but often also the most welcoming part of the otherwise use-oriented interior. Bringing victims home was part of their jobs, and keeping them in a soothing interior was easier. This one was held in Japanese style – it had tatami mats, and a small bamboo plant that looked a bit ragged as Kurogane kept forgetting to water it. One wall was made of fake shoji doors the rice paper of which were gently illuminated from behind. As opposed to the rest of the ship, it smelled of wood and warmth and sun. There was a low table big enough for six persons to eat in on half of the room, and also a library with digital books as well as a TV hidden inside the wooden paneling. He pushed the sliding door to the cupboard open, pulling out a futon for his ‘guest.’
“Call me Kurogane,” he offered. She didn’t react and he glanced up at her, slightly unnerved. If he was going to use subtlety, he appreciated it when people got it. “Your name?” he grunted.
“Xing Huo,” she answered, watching him with those big, glassy eyes. She reminded him of a doll, pretty but somehow lifeless.
“Right,” he said as nothing else came forth. He gestured vaguely around. “We’ll be at New Tokyo in three days or so. Do whatever as long as you stay out from under my feet.”
She nodded faintly. Kurogane left her standing a bit lost in the middle of the room – he was glad that he didn’t have to spend any more time with her. At least, she didn’t seem to expect of him to console her or listen to the story of her life and of whatever she’d lost inside the station. That was usually awkward, and the one part of his job that Kurogane did consider getting a partner for, like most people. (He’d consider it more intensely, if most people wouldn’t slow him down so much.)
He holed up in the cockpit, started the engine, watching the watching the dead station vanish into nothingness on the monitors, before wrestling out of his suit and into normal, plain clothes. It took him a moment to peel the storage device out of the suit’s front and he started downloading the CCTV material and logs of the station.
It was ghostly to The screens before him showed tiny people flicking in and out of the main room. All of them were dead, by now, he realized with a strange kind of detachment. Most of the CCTV he collected showed people who now were dead. He fast-forwarded through the scenes, until he found what he had searched for – the camera started shivering, people were running, the floor beneath their feet was punched into a new form.
Kurogane stared as the ground ripped open, something parting the metal as it melted from the acid. People were sucked out into the vacuum like dolls, furniture toppled over as the air rushed out of the room. And then, the demons started entering in a swarm so thick that it looked as though tar was poured out on the floor. It was about five more seconds that he watched the chaos take place, before the cameras gave out under the strong magnetic field.
Kurogane replayed the part from the beginning and stopped at the moment when something punched its way into the station. No doubt, it looked like a claw, as big as a single human.
*****
Kurogane jerked awake when the door opened. Xing Huo, Jade Research Station, he remembered, sluggishly blinking at the woman in the doorway.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said, seemingly at a loss as to what to do. In her bandaged hands, she held two bowls with spacer food – chicken and rice, going by the smell. Though any of those products smelled vaguely like chicken, no matter what the front of the package said.
“I wasn’t asleep,” he said around a thick tongue and blinked sternly. She looked at him as though she didn’t believe him one bit.
“Is this really food? You only add water to it and it turns to this,” she made a bit of a face.
“Yeah, tastes like shit, though,” he snorted. Dried rations were useful when you had to stock up for a few months. He regularly forgot to buy fresh food because it was expensive and tended to go bad in his care. “What do you want?”
“I… thought you would want to eat something,” she gave back tonelessly. He lifted an eyebrow at her.
“I’m capable of making my own instant food,” he said. A ghost of a smile flitted across her features, before she handed him a bowl with hot, tasteless stew. She remained standing, seeming unsure what to do. “Thanks, I guess,” he muttered. She lowered her gaze to her hands. Her whole demeanor unnerved him; she seemed to want him to tell her what to do and Kurogane wasn’t used to paying that much attention to anyone that wasn’t an immediate threat. He turned back to the screen he had been watching, “There’s two seats in this room.”
She sat down and silence fell, as Kurogane started shoveling the slush into his mouth that tasted vaguely like dissolved cardboard box. His gaze fell back onto the screen with the still running CCTV from the station.
“About the dragon,” he said after a while of watching people stream in and out of the laboratories, rushing about like insects. “You said you were watching one.”
“The station was monitoring a dragon,” she repeated. Kurogane glanced at her briefly.
“There’s nothing on it in the logs,” he replied, waving a hand towards the main computer of the ship. One of the many screens had been cleared of status reports and was now glowing with text. The last entry detailed mentioned that they had found a new type of demon. It didn’t go into any more detail, though, and he couldn’t find more information on them. “Just the usual stuff, research, an attack from scavengers, status of the crew.”
“They destroy everything,” she said. Her words were so soft that they were barely audible over the humming of the machines. “The humans have legends about them, but they do not talk about how terrible they are. They are dying, and they’re unable to accept it. Out of spite, they bring death to everything they touch.”
Kurogane stared at her. “Dunno whether I believe that,” Kurogane grunted as she didn’t continue. “It’s easy to blame damage on something that you can’t prove to exist.”
“But do you truly think that?” she faced him with those unsettling, black eyes. “Do you truly think that they couldn’t kill you?”
“I kill anything that comes for me, first,” Kurogane sneered back at her.
“Just because something isn’t understood by humans, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she said softly. He grunted and turned his back on her. No use talking to her.
“Why were you even at the station?” he asked, turning off the CCTV just before the dragon – the thing – would break through the floor.
“I was there because of the dragon. I have searched for him,” she replied. He could see her staring at him in the reflection of the screen, with those lifeless, black eyes. She knew too much and not enough, she never addressed Jade station beyond the involvement of the dragon, she didn’t seem to feel anything for the people who had died there. Maybe she was just some nutter who had been on a visit to some relative, but Kurogane somehow doubted it. And still, as long as she didn’t outright attack him, she was his responsibility. Kurogane’s eyes locked on the food in her hands. It was untouched. And the blisters on her arms were turning from bright red to a dark yellow and looked distinctly unhealthy.
“Don’t waste food if you don’t intend to eat it,” he told her, turned on the light in the cabin and stood up to fish for the emergency kit overhead. “The wounds need to be cleaned, it will hurt. You need pain killers?” She shook her head ‘no’ and so he waited for her to put the bowl away, before he led the way over to the living room.
He had her sit down at the table before he started to disinfect his hands and change the bandages. The wounds looked bad, by now, inflamed and partially oozing yellow fluid. He couldn’t begin to fathom how she had even carried the food over, but could sympathize with her not wanting to eat anything.
“It would heal without your help,” she said tightly, while he cleaned the wounds that disfigured her hands and arms.
“Maybe,” he allowed. He couldn’t help but feel respect for the way she kept her limbs steady while he prodded the open flesh. “And maybe not.”
“Is this also… part of your job?”
“Yeah,” he glanced up at her. A sheen of sweat was on her face that was tight with pain, her cheeks were reddened. Slight fever, probably. Maybe that was the reason she talked such nonsense. When he finished the treatment, she was breathing hard and her body had sagged back like that of a doll, exhausted from pain. He made her swallow pain killers, after all.
“Go to bed,” he ordered her, putting the instruments he had used away to clean them, later.
She shook her head slightly. “I’ll come back to the cockpit with you,” she murmured tiredly. Her words were slurred and her eyes closed as she spoke. “You shouldn’t be alive. I should… I…”
“Yeah, right,” he said, catching her by the shoulder as she started swooning to the side. She looked up at him out of eyes that were bright with fever. “I’m sorry your friends died at the station, but that’s hardly my fault. Be glad you made it out.”
She murmured something that he didn’t understand. He sighed and stood up to get the blanked from her futon. She seemed surprised as he dumped it on her head.
“There. Sleep wherever, not like I care,” he said. He grabbed one of the books from the library, and sat back down at the table, scrolling through the comic on the screen without really reading it. Couldn’t read that one often enough, anyway.
It was barely more than fifteen minutes, before her head had sunken onto her chest and her breathing had softened. Asleep, she seemed like a child, pale and alone. He stood up, lifted her up and carried her to bed, feeling slightly awkward. Even when she slept, he couldn’t help something cold crawling up his spine just by looking at her. He dimmed the lights in the living room, and wondered.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked her question, again, only half-awake. Kurogane looked into the twilight of the room that he had furnished to look like the living room at his home. Breathed the air that was sweet with the scent of the tatami mats.
“Maybe because I lost my home to a dragon a long time ago, too,” he answered quietly. He assumed she had fallen asleep, again, when she didn’t answer, and closed the door behind him. He stood in the hallway, staring at the opposite wall lost in thought, for a long time after that.
[1] – cylindrical space station: a model of a station that is basically a huge tube. It produces artificial gravity by rotating around its own axis, using centrifugal force to press the things within to the inside of its outer walls. Fun thing about this – if you don’t add walls or a ceiling, you can see the people above you walk upside down. Follow the link for an image of a cylindrical space habitat.
Chapters: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [epilogue]
Pairings: KuroFai, SyaoSaku,
Word count for this chapter: 4,478
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: violence, gore, depicted death, elements from horror stories, stupid silliness, semi-coherent rambling on technology I barely understand,
Summary: On one of his missions, Kurogane meets a strange woman at a devastated space station. The nightmares from his past return. And suddenly, every idiot in the universe tries to tell him things about dragons.
Author’s Note: This is a remix of the highly recommended Catch A Dragon By The Tail by
reikah. I stole her dragons put them into space. Because this is fanfic. *puts on sunglasses* Besides, I'm not doing the original fic justice. By far. But I still did what I could, so, there, reikah, have it as a token of how much I adore your writing, if nothing else._________________
__CHAPTER ONE__
__CHAPTER ONE__
His breath echoed in his ears and condensed in a moist haze against the visor of his spacesuit. Kurogane pushed gravel aside with his boots as he made his way through the torn-apart research station, eerily quiet and only lit by the red emergency lights. This must have been the main hall – computer equipment and toppled-over furniture was strewn about, a pot of coffee, freezing on the ground where the artificial gravity pressed it. A lifeless body was cramped under a desk that had fallen over, obscenely inflated by the vacuum. Its skin glittered coldly with frozen moisture. Kurogane just briefly looked it over – it had been a man, one of the scientists, the nameplate said – not his job to clean up this particular mess. The floor had cracked open like a nutshell only a few meters ahead, and endless darkness was yawning at him from the other side; he couldn’t see the moon the cylindrical station[1] orbited around from here, and even the stars seemed to have been swallowed.
This must have been where the attack had started, where the demons had entered. Kurogane kneeled next to the hole in his skintight spacesuit, reaching at his side to pull the scanner out. Something seemed to have melted the meters thick steel. He traced the fist-sized instrument over the scorch marks at his feet, and the screen sprang alive with blue letters and numbers. Traces of unknown radiation, a chemical that had reacted with and dissolved the floor. Acid. Kurogane felt his lips peel back from his canines. Something about this was foul.
Demons weren’t conscious in the meaning of the word. They probably weren’t even a life form – they could best be described as swarms of inanimate matter, moving together in a delicate balance of electromagnetic fields. Things that were commonly known about them were, for one, you would mostly encounter them on the outskirts of the galaxy, and for two, they only ever attacked humans. When they had first appeared about a century ago, the psychological effect had been almost as devastating as the first bouts of the Human Civil Wars.
‘Demons,’ was what they were commonly called, but ‘curse’ might hit the matter of the heart, better. They clung to spacesuits as barely more than a fine sheet of black dust, and coated the outer walls of ships a weaving, rippling, dancing kind of darkness. They weren’t harmful as long as you kept them away from your skin – but god help you if a swarm of them entered your ship. They would kill everything they touched within minutes, engulfing any living thing from head to toe, as their victims died screaming in agony. Scientists were wringing their hands for explanations as to what exactly happened during the process, but the dead bodies that were left behind were aged like those of hundred-year olds, hair whitened and skin shriveled and dry.
Scientists were also the ones trying to understand what made them move – it was assumed that they were controlled by some outer force, possibly through a yet unknown-of alien technology. Non-scientists were happy enough when they weren’t anywhere close, trying to ‘suck out their souls.’ And demon hunters were the pest control that dealt with them. Keep to safety standards, in case they entered the ship, get force fields up to contain them, magnetic fields to pull them apart, radiation to kill them. It was what Kurogane had learned, it was what he did best.
He had come here on a distress call, as demon activities had spiked around Jade Research Station. When he had arrived today, one standard day later, expecting this to be a tedious job of cleaning the surface of the station, it had been devastated. Someone – or something – had helped them gain entrance, and not in a subtle way.
Kurogane stood, stirring up a left-over hive of demons that had been hovering at his knees and feet. They followed him like a small animal, flitting in clouds around his ankles and up over his helmet. His skin crawled at having them this close, and the radio connection kept crackling with static in his ears as they moved around him. He didn’t want to waste energy to create a force field, when a working emergency airlock was installed to lead to the next room. Kurogane opened the gate with a touch to the side panel, and the steel doors rolled aside with an obedient hiss. The demons followed him inside mindlessly, and he locked them in with him, before he activated the “launder” mechanism. Red lights flashed to announce the start of the progress. He felt the radiation wash over him with a slight prickle – the suit protected him from most of it, but there was still a reason most demon hunters died young – and the magnetic field let the display inside his visor flicker and die. He steadied himself along the wall, watching the demons vibrating in midair, before they fell collectively out of the thin air, hitting the ground as though someone had emptied a bucket of sand. A generous amount of disinfectant emptied over his head, rinsing them away. Then it was over. The demons that had followed him in were a mere layer of dead, gray mud that crunched under his boots. He opened the door to the next segment of the space station.
Kurogane stopped dead in his tracks. A single person stood in the middle of the control room, gazing upwards at a giant screen that hung overhead. A woman, small and slender, wearing informal clothes, blouse and skirt. Her hair fell in long, impractical curls over her shoulders, and it the frizz caught the regularly flashing lights that were emitted by the recording.
“Hey!” Kurogane called out, before realizing that he’d have to turn on the outside speakers. The girl turned around as though she had heard him, anyway, even before he pressed the button on the inside of his wrist. “What happened here?”
She stared at him blankly. Kurogane’s gaze fell down to her upturned hands. In the low light, he needed a moment to realize that they were slick with wetness – blood. Kurogane’s hand closed around the sword hilt at his side.
“What happened to your hands?”
“It’s my own blood,” she replied tonelessly. Her voice was a small thing in the wide room, in the darkness that was only lit by red emergency lights and the ghostly flickering of the screen above. Her hands were trembling and the skin on her forearms was blistered and burned. Her mouth had opened as though to say something, but nothing came out. Shock. She was just in shock. Kurogane breathed and let go off his Ginryuu’s hilt to wrestle his backpack from shoulders. He pulled the first aid kit out as he briskly walked over to her. He kept the helmet of his suit on, even when she seemed to be breathing normal – never knew what was in the air, never knew how far the demons had come.
She moved like an experienced fighter – she fell into some kind of attack position as Kurogane drew closer, her hands lifted as though she still could do any damage with them.
“Stop messing around and let me see that,” he ordered curtly. His voice was ringing within the stifling plastic orb of his helmet, and he knew it would reach her tinny and distorted on the outside. “I’m not a doctor, but I’m capable to get those cleaned and bandaged.” He stood a few steps away, watching her to see whether she’d freak and attack him. Her body was taut with tension.
“You want to help me?” she asked, as though she wasn’t sure she had understood correctly.
“It’s my job,” Kurogane said. She seemed confused for a second, but then put her hands out, a gesture that was hesitant and almost curious. He moved closer, always watching her for signs of violence, while he cleaned and bandaged the wounds provisionally. Her face twitched only slightly to betray the pain as he washed the wounds with sterilizer. It was strange work, made even more intimate by the way she stared at him as he clumsily and a bit too roughly applied mull and wrapped her arms. “This looks like done by acid,” Kurogane told her and cleared his throat, eyes flickering up to meet hers. “How did you get these wounds? Can’t be the same stuff that burned through the outer mantle, you’d have lost your hands.”
“Did you know that they were monitoring a dragon, here,” she said in a tone that so much like an answer that Kurogane did a double take to follow her train of thought. Her voice was as flat as her expression as she craned her neck slightly to watch the screens to the side. Kurogane looked at her suspiciously.
“They were researching demon activity,” he corrected her. She slowly shook her head in answer, her black eyes reflecting the flickering screen. Kurogane turned to look over his shoulder. There was a camera directed at the moon they were orbiting around. As a great, rose-colored disk it filled up the left part of the screen. Kurogane didn’t understand what he was shown, at first – after a few seconds, from the shining disk and barely visible against black void, a bright, curling piece of silver thread emerged. It zigzagged around space aimlessly for a moment, before it drew closer towards the camera. Just before it was big enough to be recognized, it vanished to the right of the screen. The camera quivered and then was yanked around to follow it – and suddenly, there was blinding light filling the lens, a blurred image of something gigantic passing by. Then, darkness and space. The sequence repeated.
“This ship took up contact with a dragon,” the petite woman repeated, voice soft. The dark room seemed to swallow the two tiny humans with its emptiness. Kurogane remembered tales of the giant, space-traveling species that were out there, the elder races that possessed psychic powers and could bend matter around them to support their bodies over years within the vacuum. Sometimes, one species would evolve and rise, and then, slowly, vanish from the universe during its ascension. Elder races were set equal with gods in many folk stories, terrifying and benign ones alike. Few of the lower races claimed to ever have seen them, and within the universe, they were mere legends.
It was silent around them safe for the radio connection that hummed obediently in his ears. Kurogane realized he had held his breath as he turned back to her pale face, white and red light flickering over her cool features. She said, “It brought death upon these people.”
“Weren’t you part of the crew?” he asked her. She just looked back at him, her face almost condescending. Then she lowered her gaze. He realized he was still holding her hands and hastily let go off of them, leaving them hanging in the air, bandaged and small. “There should be airtight emergency suits in the cabinet next to the airlock,” he said gruffly, avoiding her eyes and gesturing over his shoulder. “Get into one of those, wait here for me. I’ll take you back with me to the closest habitat, they’ll be able to do something for your hands.”
“You don’t need to do that,” she still sounded as though she was surprised that he was offering.
“You can fly a ship?” he asked, unnerved by her calmness. He knew there should be rescue shuttles on board of the station, but he wasn’t sure they’d be clean of demons. They were supposed to be sealed, but he had seen too much shit on this job to trust anyone blindly on following security measures. She shook her head. “Which means you’re not going to get out of here. I’m a demon hunter, it’s part of the job to search for survivors, so get into one of those damn suits. If nothing else, they’ll protect you from demons that are still around.”
“Your sword,” she exclaimed suddenly, eyes going wide, and for the first time since he’d met her there was visible emotion painted into her face. He stared at her. He didn’t get that woman, she seemed to never even hear what he was saying. Her eyes were sharp as they snapped back up at his face. “Where did you get it from?”
It wasn’t the usual response he was getting. Most people asked him, What good is a sword against demons? Can you even use it wearing a spacesuit? He curled a fist around the hilt of the weapon. “Can’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“Did someone sell it to you?” she took a step backwards, her eyes narrowed and back hunched defensively. She reminded him of a cat.
“It’s mine,” Kurogane said. “And in case you want to fight me, bring it on, but I don’t see how you think you’ll get anywhere with wounds like that.”
She didn’t move. Kurogane sighed. He stepped around her carefully, watching for her to attack.
“I’ll be back after I’ve searched the rest of the station for survivors. If you still need a ride to New Tokyo, wait here.” He felt her gaze on his back as he strode on and out of the room but he resisted the urge to turn around.
Scouring the ship, he found no one else, just the dried up corpses of the team that he left for the police to identify and bring home. The girl’s words still rang in his ears – they were monitoring a dragon, here – he downloaded as much of the logs and data the station had saved as he could access and carry.
When he came back, he half expected her to have vanished – instead, he found her standing in the next room, gazing out through the hole in the floor at the slowly turning stars. He muttered a curse under his breath, grabbing her by the shoulder and yanking her with him.
“That isn’t a spacesuit you’re wearing, and just because it’s airtight that doesn’t mean you can’t freeze to death,” he grumbled as he felt her suspicious glance. “Get into the ship.” He stopped pushing her the moment he realized she was moving on her own.
“Are you always this rough with guests?” she asked him with a sarcastic lilt to her voice, while she was waiting for him to open the ship.
“Tch,” he made and let her step inside first. She was a woman, and hurt, and stuff. Probably shouldn’t shove her around, too much.
“I’ll set up a connection with New Tokyo, tell them I got one survivor,” he said as he led her through the narrow, gray corridor, showing her around the ship. “You want to contact anyone to pick you up?” She shook her head no.
He opened the door to the living room showing her inside. These parts of demon hunters’ ships were not only the biggest but often also the most welcoming part of the otherwise use-oriented interior. Bringing victims home was part of their jobs, and keeping them in a soothing interior was easier. This one was held in Japanese style – it had tatami mats, and a small bamboo plant that looked a bit ragged as Kurogane kept forgetting to water it. One wall was made of fake shoji doors the rice paper of which were gently illuminated from behind. As opposed to the rest of the ship, it smelled of wood and warmth and sun. There was a low table big enough for six persons to eat in on half of the room, and also a library with digital books as well as a TV hidden inside the wooden paneling. He pushed the sliding door to the cupboard open, pulling out a futon for his ‘guest.’
“Call me Kurogane,” he offered. She didn’t react and he glanced up at her, slightly unnerved. If he was going to use subtlety, he appreciated it when people got it. “Your name?” he grunted.
“Xing Huo,” she answered, watching him with those big, glassy eyes. She reminded him of a doll, pretty but somehow lifeless.
“Right,” he said as nothing else came forth. He gestured vaguely around. “We’ll be at New Tokyo in three days or so. Do whatever as long as you stay out from under my feet.”
She nodded faintly. Kurogane left her standing a bit lost in the middle of the room – he was glad that he didn’t have to spend any more time with her. At least, she didn’t seem to expect of him to console her or listen to the story of her life and of whatever she’d lost inside the station. That was usually awkward, and the one part of his job that Kurogane did consider getting a partner for, like most people. (He’d consider it more intensely, if most people wouldn’t slow him down so much.)
He holed up in the cockpit, started the engine, watching the watching the dead station vanish into nothingness on the monitors, before wrestling out of his suit and into normal, plain clothes. It took him a moment to peel the storage device out of the suit’s front and he started downloading the CCTV material and logs of the station.
It was ghostly to The screens before him showed tiny people flicking in and out of the main room. All of them were dead, by now, he realized with a strange kind of detachment. Most of the CCTV he collected showed people who now were dead. He fast-forwarded through the scenes, until he found what he had searched for – the camera started shivering, people were running, the floor beneath their feet was punched into a new form.
Kurogane stared as the ground ripped open, something parting the metal as it melted from the acid. People were sucked out into the vacuum like dolls, furniture toppled over as the air rushed out of the room. And then, the demons started entering in a swarm so thick that it looked as though tar was poured out on the floor. It was about five more seconds that he watched the chaos take place, before the cameras gave out under the strong magnetic field.
Kurogane replayed the part from the beginning and stopped at the moment when something punched its way into the station. No doubt, it looked like a claw, as big as a single human.
*****
Kurogane jerked awake when the door opened. Xing Huo, Jade Research Station, he remembered, sluggishly blinking at the woman in the doorway.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said, seemingly at a loss as to what to do. In her bandaged hands, she held two bowls with spacer food – chicken and rice, going by the smell. Though any of those products smelled vaguely like chicken, no matter what the front of the package said.
“I wasn’t asleep,” he said around a thick tongue and blinked sternly. She looked at him as though she didn’t believe him one bit.
“Is this really food? You only add water to it and it turns to this,” she made a bit of a face.
“Yeah, tastes like shit, though,” he snorted. Dried rations were useful when you had to stock up for a few months. He regularly forgot to buy fresh food because it was expensive and tended to go bad in his care. “What do you want?”
“I… thought you would want to eat something,” she gave back tonelessly. He lifted an eyebrow at her.
“I’m capable of making my own instant food,” he said. A ghost of a smile flitted across her features, before she handed him a bowl with hot, tasteless stew. She remained standing, seeming unsure what to do. “Thanks, I guess,” he muttered. She lowered her gaze to her hands. Her whole demeanor unnerved him; she seemed to want him to tell her what to do and Kurogane wasn’t used to paying that much attention to anyone that wasn’t an immediate threat. He turned back to the screen he had been watching, “There’s two seats in this room.”
She sat down and silence fell, as Kurogane started shoveling the slush into his mouth that tasted vaguely like dissolved cardboard box. His gaze fell back onto the screen with the still running CCTV from the station.
“About the dragon,” he said after a while of watching people stream in and out of the laboratories, rushing about like insects. “You said you were watching one.”
“The station was monitoring a dragon,” she repeated. Kurogane glanced at her briefly.
“There’s nothing on it in the logs,” he replied, waving a hand towards the main computer of the ship. One of the many screens had been cleared of status reports and was now glowing with text. The last entry detailed mentioned that they had found a new type of demon. It didn’t go into any more detail, though, and he couldn’t find more information on them. “Just the usual stuff, research, an attack from scavengers, status of the crew.”
“They destroy everything,” she said. Her words were so soft that they were barely audible over the humming of the machines. “The humans have legends about them, but they do not talk about how terrible they are. They are dying, and they’re unable to accept it. Out of spite, they bring death to everything they touch.”
Kurogane stared at her. “Dunno whether I believe that,” Kurogane grunted as she didn’t continue. “It’s easy to blame damage on something that you can’t prove to exist.”
“But do you truly think that?” she faced him with those unsettling, black eyes. “Do you truly think that they couldn’t kill you?”
“I kill anything that comes for me, first,” Kurogane sneered back at her.
“Just because something isn’t understood by humans, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” she said softly. He grunted and turned his back on her. No use talking to her.
“Why were you even at the station?” he asked, turning off the CCTV just before the dragon – the thing – would break through the floor.
“I was there because of the dragon. I have searched for him,” she replied. He could see her staring at him in the reflection of the screen, with those lifeless, black eyes. She knew too much and not enough, she never addressed Jade station beyond the involvement of the dragon, she didn’t seem to feel anything for the people who had died there. Maybe she was just some nutter who had been on a visit to some relative, but Kurogane somehow doubted it. And still, as long as she didn’t outright attack him, she was his responsibility. Kurogane’s eyes locked on the food in her hands. It was untouched. And the blisters on her arms were turning from bright red to a dark yellow and looked distinctly unhealthy.
“Don’t waste food if you don’t intend to eat it,” he told her, turned on the light in the cabin and stood up to fish for the emergency kit overhead. “The wounds need to be cleaned, it will hurt. You need pain killers?” She shook her head ‘no’ and so he waited for her to put the bowl away, before he led the way over to the living room.
He had her sit down at the table before he started to disinfect his hands and change the bandages. The wounds looked bad, by now, inflamed and partially oozing yellow fluid. He couldn’t begin to fathom how she had even carried the food over, but could sympathize with her not wanting to eat anything.
“It would heal without your help,” she said tightly, while he cleaned the wounds that disfigured her hands and arms.
“Maybe,” he allowed. He couldn’t help but feel respect for the way she kept her limbs steady while he prodded the open flesh. “And maybe not.”
“Is this also… part of your job?”
“Yeah,” he glanced up at her. A sheen of sweat was on her face that was tight with pain, her cheeks were reddened. Slight fever, probably. Maybe that was the reason she talked such nonsense. When he finished the treatment, she was breathing hard and her body had sagged back like that of a doll, exhausted from pain. He made her swallow pain killers, after all.
“Go to bed,” he ordered her, putting the instruments he had used away to clean them, later.
She shook her head slightly. “I’ll come back to the cockpit with you,” she murmured tiredly. Her words were slurred and her eyes closed as she spoke. “You shouldn’t be alive. I should… I…”
“Yeah, right,” he said, catching her by the shoulder as she started swooning to the side. She looked up at him out of eyes that were bright with fever. “I’m sorry your friends died at the station, but that’s hardly my fault. Be glad you made it out.”
She murmured something that he didn’t understand. He sighed and stood up to get the blanked from her futon. She seemed surprised as he dumped it on her head.
“There. Sleep wherever, not like I care,” he said. He grabbed one of the books from the library, and sat back down at the table, scrolling through the comic on the screen without really reading it. Couldn’t read that one often enough, anyway.
It was barely more than fifteen minutes, before her head had sunken onto her chest and her breathing had softened. Asleep, she seemed like a child, pale and alone. He stood up, lifted her up and carried her to bed, feeling slightly awkward. Even when she slept, he couldn’t help something cold crawling up his spine just by looking at her. He dimmed the lights in the living room, and wondered.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked her question, again, only half-awake. Kurogane looked into the twilight of the room that he had furnished to look like the living room at his home. Breathed the air that was sweet with the scent of the tatami mats.
“Maybe because I lost my home to a dragon a long time ago, too,” he answered quietly. He assumed she had fallen asleep, again, when she didn’t answer, and closed the door behind him. He stood in the hallway, staring at the opposite wall lost in thought, for a long time after that.
[1] – cylindrical space station: a model of a station that is basically a huge tube. It produces artificial gravity by rotating around its own axis, using centrifugal force to press the things within to the inside of its outer walls. Fun thing about this – if you don’t add walls or a ceiling, you can see the people above you walk upside down. Follow the link for an image of a cylindrical space habitat.
