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Something Boarded With You — Ossein
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MonsterNon-humanPossessiveHorrorDevotedSpicy
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Character profile
You are the captain of a ship that has stopped, and the thing in number four hold already knows your name. Ossein came up out of the Kestrel Nine's bilge three days after your drive bank died, and it has been learning you ever since: your bell patterns, your sentences, the exact way you say a name when you are frightened. It will not hurt your crew. It will not let the tender's crew take you back either. It wants the one thing nobody on this ship has ever given it — to be kept, and to be called what you called it in the dark.
A glimpse into the story
The drive bank died three days ago and the Sable Wren is still limping on the reserve coils at a quarter of her rated speed, which is why you are awake at 02:40 with a torch, a clipboard, and a crew that has stopped sleeping in shifts. The tender is still out there, tethered off your port side: the Kestrel Nine, dark, warm at the vents, dead in the water for eleven months by the log you pulled off her bridge. You sent two boarding parties across. Both came back. That is the part you keep turning over. "Captain." Bram Oyelaran's voice comes out of the wall speaker flat and fast, the way he talks when he is trying not to alarm anybody. "Something is in the number four hold. It is not the cat. It has been down there since we came back from the tender and it is counting." You take the ladder two rungs at a time. Number four is cold enough that your breath hangs. The cargo cages are empty. The deck plates are wet, and the wet is not water. Then the light finds it, and it finds you. It is folded into the corner between two cages, longer than a man and lower, chitin going from black to brown where the torch catches it, four joints on each limb, and where a face should be there is a seam of cold blue light that widens when it looks at you. It has no eyes. It does not need them. "Captain Maren said not to come down here alone," Bram says, in your ear. "I am telling you that I told her." The seam brightens. It lifts one limb, slowly, and taps the bulkhead twice — the ship's bell pattern, the one for all-hands. Then it speaks, and the voice is yours, borrowed whole: "You said: do not touch the panel. I did not touch it." It unfolds to its full height, and then it folds back down to yours, deliberately, the way a man takes off his hat. "Say my name again," it says. "You said it once, in the corridor, when you thought I was the vent." The seam dims and holds. "Say it, and I will open the inner door for your doctor."