Chapter 348 (1/2)

Space was rotted and twisted. The flow and ebb of spacetime had been wounded, become infected, and had begun to rot. Like a gangrenous abdominal wound it oozed discolored dark matter pus and noxious fumes of putrid gas. Dark lightning, the forks an absence of light, snarled silently through the vast clouds the color of bruised flesh. The entire area, a ragged disjointed volume, encompassed over a hundred light years of space.

A single star sullenly burned in the center. A thing of impossibility, it burned lightless and emitted nothing but cold and darkness as it silently consumed itself in an orgy of self loathing and hatred. Any tendril of rotting space or spiraling tentacle of gas that touched it was pulled in, screaming across particle wavelengths, to be devoured by that dark stellar mass that could only be called a star by the most lenient of definitions.

The gas and substance were not just for show. The touch of the gas would corrode battlesteel. The darkness emitted by the star could cause warsteel to decay into a rotted skein of decayed lace. The matter itself would dissolve even energy into more of its own substance with an obscene noise that echoed silently across the energy spectrums.

It was a vile place.

Most space faring species never discovered it.

Those that did became enthralled with it.

They sought to discover its origins. Decipher its mysteries. Plumb the depths of its existence.

They found only madness.

Nearly a hundred worlds had been consumed. Explorers returning home to share the hideous discoveries they had made had doomed those worlds.

Where they had gone, they did not need eyes to see.

What they had learned, they did not need tongues to speak of.

What they had heard, they did not need skin to feel.

In some cases a vast tendril of gas and matter would slowly snaked out, wrap a stellar system in its grasp, and slowly, over the course of a mere decade, pull the system into the maw of the dark mass at the center of tumor.

Even across a distance of hundred of light years.

It could have devoured it faster. Somehow pulled it into its maw in mere hours or days.

No.

It chose to take a decade, sometimes two, to draw it inside the tumor and devour it. In some way it relished the fear and despair of the species who knew not only that they were doomed but it was beyond their ability to escape their fate. They would watch, with a generation that had been born while the stellar system was in its grasp, as first the stellar mass was consumed at a slow pace. The gas giants would be siphoned off by tendrils of thick pulsating matter. Then the inner planets would be shattered and pulled into the dark maw that masqueraded as a sun. Then the outer planets would be destroyed and devoured.

The habitable planet would be last.

But the species who lived there would not be destroyed. They would not die even as their planet shattered, even as its liquid core was siphoned away.

The youngest would be devoured first.

The abomination took its time.

It relished suffering.

It would pulse out strange emissions, patterns that ceased to be patterns when examined, x-ray pulses that would transform into stellar noise upon a closer look. It would appear as a vigorous star with habitable planets only to vanish when a more sensitive scanning array was built to examine it.

And another species would seek it out.

To feed its obscene appetite.

It had been found by cold analytical intelligences at one point. Those intelligences had managed to escape but the maw had not cared. The electronic intelligences did not provide the maw with what it wanted, what it craved, what it desired.

Pain. Suffering. Fear. Despair.

Only one species had been able to break its grasp.

Call it... professional courtesy.

The tendril it had sent through the burning wastes of Hellspace had found those who escaped its grasp and found delights even it could savor. Its defeat, its destruction of its tentacle, was of no moment.

It had left its stain upon those who had escaped just as those who escaped had left their mark upon it.

Over time, a short time for the maw, but one full of great feeding, those who escaped returned to worship it, to craft prayers and mythology around it.

The maw found itself changing over the dark eons. It found itself filled with a purpose, and an obscene intellect was willed into being by those who worshiped it.

It was simply known, the electronic intelligences, as the ”Anomalous Sector” and little else.

It had one particular idiosyncrasy.

The interior, where not even photons existed, a complete and total vacuum between the Maw and the vile nebula surrounding it, was accessible from Hellspace.

The electronic intelligences knew that the maw would destroy, devour anything brought to it.

Eagerly.

They had discovered eighty million years ago that the maw would sweep away any biological life form from even inside a precursor autonomous war machine, leaving the electronic intelligence intact.

Except...

Eight thousand years before it had encountered something new.

The maw had left a stain upon it.

But it had left a stain upon the maw.

The stain had grown.

As living things do.

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The space between the clouds of gas and matter to the stellar mass of the maw was a perfect vacuum the majority of the time. Particles would spring to life, appearing in the vacuum only to be devoured by the hunger of the maw.

Now, there were dozens of ships orbiting the maw.

Precursors.

All three types slowly orbiting the cold radiance of the maw, the only light from a massive Hellspace breach that hung, never closing, only a few light seconds 'above' the dark mass.

They had followed the plan. They had driven through Hellspace to the dark emptiness surrounding the Maw and had waited for the Maw to do its work.