The Following is a recollection of events given by an anonymous informant:
Coalition interceptors broke off pursuit the exact second the Starsetter crossed the orbital boundary line of Sector 3-Blue. Captain Rax, the lean, digitigrade mammalian with tufted ears and a coat of bristling auburn fur, stared at the rear-view sensors in disbelief.
"They’re turning back. The Enforcers are actually turning back," he stated in astonishment.
"Don't celebrate yet, Captain," burped Nyssa from the engineering console. Her smooth, iridescent blue skin was glistening with stress-induced mucus beneath her hydration suit. Her four ocular orbs blinked independently at the flashing red warnings on her screen. "We both caught a plasma torpedo to the starboard thruster and by the planet's gravity well. Impact is imminent."
"Where are we landing?" rumbled Gorv, the hulking enforcer whose thick, grey hide could resist energy weapons. He racked the slide of a heavy scatter-blaster, his dual hearts thumping audibly in his chest.
"Coordinates indicate a proper landing spot in the northern hemisphere," Nyssa said, her prehensile tentacles flying across the keyboard. "Brace for impact!"
The Starsetter screamed through the atmosphere, tearing through heavy, unnatural storm clouds before violently slamming into a dense, forested peak. The ship carved a trench through ancient, black-barked trees and crashed into the crumbled, moss-covered remains of a massive stone fortress. Alarms wailed in the darkened cockpit.
Rax groaned, unbuckling his crash webbing. "Nyssa. Damage report."
"Starboard engine is offline. Hull integrity compromised, but holding," the engineer wheezed, adjusting the flow of oxygenated water in her breathing apparatus. "I've initiated the auto-repair matrix. The nanites need exactly fourteen minutes to patch the thruster relays. Until then, we are grounded."
"Fourteen minutes," Rax growled, his sensitive ears pivoting. "We can hold out. But why did the Coalition let us go? We had three million credits of stolen isotope in the hold."
"I sliced into their local comms right before we crossed the boundary," Nyssa said, her voice trembling slightly. "The fleet commander flagged this entire star system with a Level-Omega Quarantine. Put in place by the Kl'ra'on Science Department just a few cycles ago. The Commander chasing us ordered the others to let us fall. He said we were 'as good as dead'."
Gorv snorted, a plume of steam escaping his broad snout. "Superstitious core-worlders wouldn't even survive any frontier living without thinking some specter haunts it. The scans show zero energy signatures. This world itself is dead."
"Not exactly dead," Rax whispered. His hackles suddenly raised, the fur along his spine standing on end. His lupine nose twitched. "Smell that?"
Gorv sniffed the air venting in from the breached hull. "Smells like... old dirt and rust."
"Blood," Rax corrected, his feline eyes widening to take in the gloom outside the viewport. "Centuries of dried blood. And something else."
Thump.
Something landed on the roof of the Starsetter. It wasn't the heavy, mechanical thud of an Enforcer drone. It was soft. Organic.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
More of them.
"Nyssa," Rax said, drawing his twin thermal-cutters. "Turn on the exterior floodlights."
The ship’s halogen beams cut through the thick, swirling fog outside. The ancient stone walls of the ruined fortress were covered in them.
They looked vaguely bipedal, but their physiology was horribly wrong. They were gaunt, their skin a translucent, sickly alabaster that revealed black, sluggish veins underneath. They wore the rotting rags of ancient garments, but their faces were devoid of humanity. Their jaws were unhinged, revealing rows of needle-like teeth, and their eyes were solid, lightless pools of pitch.
But the most terrifying aspect was how they moved. They didn't walk. They crawled down the vertical stone walls like insects, completely defying the planet's gravity. Some simply hovered a few inches off the ground, their limbs hanging limply as an unseen, supernatural force propelled them forward.
"Scans are reading them as biological, but there's no heartbeat!" Nyssa shrieked, her tentacles wrapping defensively around her sonic emitter. "They're dead! Captain, they're dead tissue!"
One of the creatures pressed its pale face against the cracked glass of the viewport. It opened its maw, and a long, prehensile tongue, tipped with a hollow bone spur, lashed against the reinforced glass, leaving a smear of black bile.
It hissed. The sound bypassed the crew's ears and resonated directly in their minds—a psychic frequency of pure, starving malice. It smelled the rich, mammalian blood of Rax and Gorv, and the briny, mineral-rich fluids of Nyssa.
"They're trying to breach the airlock!" Gorv roared.
The heavy exterior door groaned under immense, unnatural pressure. The metal warped inward.
"Defend the breach!" Rax ordered. "Ten minutes left! We just need to buy ten minutes!"
With a screech of tearing metal, the airlock door was ripped away, not by tools, but by pale, bony hands.
Gorv opened fire. The scatter-blaster roared, filling the tight corridor with kinetic shrapnel. The lead creature was shredded, its chest cavity exploding outward. But it didn't fall. It simply kept floating forward, black ichor dripping from its ruined torso, and lunged at the hulking taurine.
"They don't feel pain!" Gorv bellowed, swinging the heavy stock of his weapon to crush a skull. The bone shattered, but the creature’s body continued to thrash, its claws tearing deep into Gorv's thick hide.
Nyssa fired her sonic emitter. The high-frequency blast, designed to rupture organs, hit a cluster of the hovering fiends. The soundwaves visibly distorted the air, and three of the creatures violently exploded into dust and dried viscera.
"Sonic vibrations disrupt their physical cohesion!" Nyssa yelled, a rare moment of triumph in her voice.
But there were too many. They swarmed the cargo bay, crawling over the ceiling and dropping down. Rax was a blur of motion, his thermal cutters slicing through limbs and decapitating the undead horrors. Yet, the severed heads still snapped their jaws on the deck, trying to bite his ankles.
One of the creatures bypassed Gorv and dropped onto Nyssa. Its bone-tipped tongue punched straight through her hydration suit, sinking into her shoulder.
Nyssa screamed a bubbling, aquatic shriek as her blue blood was siphoned out at terrifying speed. The creature’s pale skin visibly flushed with bioluminescent blue as it fed.
"Get off her!" Rax snarled, leaping off a bulkhead and driving both glowing thermal blades into the creature's back, severing its spine. It hissed and dissolved into a pile of foul-smelling ash, dropping Nyssa to the floor.
"Auto-repair complete," the ship's computer chimed, a beautifully synthetic voice cutting through the nightmare. "Thrusters online."
"Punch it!" Rax screamed, hauling Nyssa up by her harness.
"Gorv! Come on!"
The heavy mammalian was covered in the biting, tearing creatures. He roared, a sound of pure defiance, and triggered a localized thermal grenade point-blank. The explosion incinerated the creatures clinging to him, but the blast heavily scorched his own armor and fur.
Gorv threw himself through the blast doors before they shut and into the cockpit just as Rax slammed the emergency launch sequence.
The Starsetter violently lurched. The repulsor lifts engaged, crushing the remaining necrotic organisms in the cargo bay under immense artificial gravity, while the main thrusters ignited, melting the stone ruins of the fortress into glass.
They shot into the sky, breaking through the storm clouds and tearing out of the atmosphere, leaving the quarantined world behind.
In the cockpit, the silence was deafening, broken only by Nyssa’s ragged breathing and the dripping of Gorv’s blood onto the deck.
Rax slumped into the pilot's chair, staring at the diminishing blue marble on the nav-screen. The Coalition Enforcers hadn't been lazy nor merciful. They simply let a death sentence unfold