Seeds and Ash
Copyright© 2026 by G Younger
Chapter 16
The deck tilted two degrees starboard, then corrected, and then it tilted again, harder, accompanied by a grinding vibration that traveled through the Falcon’s compromised structural supports.
Inaya reached for her comm unit, but Lynk was already moving toward the door.
“Bridge. Now.”
They ran through corridors lit by emergency strips, their footfalls echoing against metal walls as the ship groaned around them. This was different from the familiar settling of damaged architecture; there was something organic in its rhythm.
The bridge hatch opened to chaos.
Rex stood at the tactical station, his face washed blue by scrolling displays, while Issis hunched over the environmental sensors, both hands working separate interfaces. Xavia braced herself against the navigation console as another tremor rolled through the deck plating.
“Commander,” Rex said without looking up, “we’ve got a problem.”
Inaya crossed to the command station in three strides, Lynk following closely. The central display showed thermal imaging of the ice field surrounding the Falcon. What had been mostly blue, with occasional warm spots, now blazed with cascading signatures that spread outward in geometric patterns.
“Lifeform count?”
Inaya’s voice held absolute authority despite what Lynk had revealed to her minutes before.
Issis’s fingers danced across her console.
“Seventeen hundred, eighteen, nineteen—they’re accelerating—thermal signatures consistent with metabolic activation. Whatever’s down there has stopped sleeping.”
Lynk accessed the auxiliary sensor array, routing the data through his wrist device for processing. The numbers crystallized into understanding that made his newly stitched wound ache.
“Not lifeforms, it’s an entire system. The eggs aren’t individual organisms; they’re nodes in a distributed network,” Lynk said.
Rex shot him a look.
“English, Lynk.”
“We didn’t land in a graveyard; we landed on an incubator.”
The deck lurched hard enough that Xavia grabbed her console to stay upright. Through the forward viewport, cracks spider-webbed across the ice field, with thin lines of bioluminescent green seeping up from impossible depths.
Inaya’s hand found the comm switch.
“All personnel, full combat gear. Seal the Falcon. Nobody goes outside until I give direct authorization.”
Her eyes found Lynk’s across the bridge.
“How long until they surface?”
Lynk watched the thermal bloom spreading beneath them, felt the pulse synchronizing with something primal he didn’t understand but recognized anyway.
“They already have.”
The bridge exploded into motion.
Rex slammed the alert system, bathing the corridors in red pulses. Issis abandoned her station without being ordered, sprinting toward the armory, and Xavia braced herself against the nav console as another tremor rolled through the deck.
Inaya’s voice cut through the chaos.
“I want external floodlights set at maximum output.”
Lynk was already moving. He crossed to the weapons locker mounted beside the emergency hatch, keyed in the override sequence, and pulled out a pulse rifle. He quickly grabbed extra charge cells and checked that they were ready for use. His hands moved through the arming procedures without conscious thought.
Outside the forward viewport, massive floodlights ignited across the Falcon’s hull. The ten thousand lumens transformed night into something worse than darkness.
The ice field writhed.
Not cracked: writhed.
Shapes moved beneath translucent blue, too many to count, flowing in coordinated patterns that suggested intelligence rather than instinct. Shadows the size of ground cars glided through frozen channels that hadn’t existed hours before, and bioluminescent traces followed their movement, painting geometric symbols across the surface.
Lynk’s helmet’s tactical overlay activated automatically, highlighting thermal signatures and calculating threat vectors. His mind categorized without emotion: seventeen hundred potential targets became two thousand; two thousand became more.
The numbers didn’t matter because they were surrounded.
He descended toward the armory, taking the ladder rungs three at a time. His boots hit the lower deck as Rex emerged from the weapons cache, already armored, carrying enough firepower to take down a dropship.
Rex gestured at the rifle in Lynk’s hands.
“You know how to use that?”
“Yes.”
“Ever killed anything that wanted to kill you back?”
Lynk met his eyes. The wound on his face from Quinn’s improvised knife pulled tight when he spoke.
“Not yet.”
Rex grunted something that might have been approval and shoved a combat vest at him. Lynk pulled it on, the weight settling across his shoulders. The fabric smelled of cordite and fear, scents he cataloged alongside the adrenaline signatures radiating from every crew member who rushed past.
Through the deck plating, he felt the pulse intensify; it was both synchronized and accelerating.
Outside, the floodlights illuminated cracks splitting open in perfect symmetry, and green light spilled upward like arterial blood.
Lynk checked his weapon one last time and moved toward the airlock.
The ice exploded a hundred and fifty meters from the Falcon’s starboard flank.
Not cracked; exploded.
A shape launched upward through frozen debris and bioluminescent spray, uncoiling in mid-air with acrobatic precision. It hit the surface in a crouch that belonged to nothing nature ever designed without malice.
Lynk’s tactical overlay locked on instantly. It was two meters tall and bipedal with digitigrade legs, which was a fancy way of saying it walked on its toes instead of the soles of its feet. Those legs terminated in talons that sank into permafrost like a hot knife into cheesecake. The torso was lean, armored in overlapping scales that caught the floodlights and threw them back as liquid silver. Its arms appeared unnaturally long, ending in three-fingered hands tipped with obsidian hooks.
The angular, reptilian head turned toward the Falcon. Its eyes looked as if a pale fire burned within them, behind a ridge of bone that swept back from a narrow skull. Lynk didn’t see any pupils, just luminous membranes that tracked movement with predatory focus.
It opened its mouth and shrieked, making the hair on the back of Lynk’s neck stand up.
The sound punched through the hull plating, resonated in Lynk’s chest cavity, and triggered something ancient in his engineered brain. Not fear, but something disturbing—recognition: this creature existed for one purpose, and that was to be a shock troop. These things would overrun them.
The ice erupted in seventeen simultaneous breaches.
They were identical and instantly coordinated, rising like dancers performing choreography written in violence, their movements synchronized.
“Perimeter defense, full auto!” Rex’s voice cracked across the comm.
The Falcon’s external turrets swiveled with hydraulic whines, locking onto targets faster than human reflexes allowed. The first burst of plasma fire carved through the darkness in brilliant blue streaks.
Three Griss vanished in superheated vapor.
The rest scattered.
Not in flight, but in tactical movements.
They broke formation, zigzagging across the ice field in patterns that defied tracking algorithms. Some dropped flat, using terrain contours Lynk hadn’t noticed, while others leaped, clearing five-meter gaps with muscular efficiency that spoke to enhanced physiology.
A cluster of six charged the Falcon’s port side, moving so fast the turret tracked half a second behind their actual positions.
Lynk was already moving toward the airlock.
“Lynk, what the hell?” Inaya asked over his comm link.
He didn’t answer. The manual override accepted his palm print, and the inner door cycled open. Cold air rushed in, carrying the chemical signature of alien metabolism and burning plasma.
The outer hatch opened.
Three Griss had reached the Falcon’s hull. One scaled the landing strut with movements borrowed from Earth’s extinct monitor lizards, while another circled beneath the cargo bay, its claws scoring parallel lines through reinforced plating. The third stood motionless ten meters out, head cocked, studying him with an intelligence that made Lynk’s combat protocols hesitate.
He raised his rifle and fired.
The pulse caught the climber mid-reach, and its torso vaporized in a flash of orange light and steam. What remained of the body tumbled down, trailing smoke and fluids that hissed when they hit the ice.
Lynk pivoted and tracked the second target. It moved before he completed the motion, faster than he anticipated, so his second shot carved a trench through the permafrost where it had been standing.
The third Griss shrieked again and charged.
Lynk squeezed the trigger in controlled bursts: one, two, three. The plasma bolts stitched a pattern across the ice, tracking the creature’s reptilian advance. The fourth shot struck its left shoulder, spinning it to the side, and the fifth punched through its chest cavity.
Blood sprayed across white ice in arterial arcs; it wasn’t red but copper-green. Where it landed, steam rose as it ate into the frozen ground like acid.
The Griss collapsed three meters from the airlock ramp, but its pale eyes still tracked him, and one hand reached forward, the talons scraping metal.
Lynk put a final bolt through its skull.
Behind him, the turrets roared continuous fire, the plasma tracing geometric patterns across the darkness. More Griss erupted from new fissures, their birth accompanied by the same terrible shriek. He couldn’t tell if it was communication or a war cry.
His rifle’s charge indicator dropped to seventy-one percent.
Out of the corner of his eye, he detected movement from the cargo bay’s shadow; it was the second Griss, the one he’d missed. It rounded the landing strut at full sprint, low to the ground, its jaws open to expose rows of serrated bone.
Lynk fired point-blank.
The creature’s head snapped back, but its body carried forward by momentum. It crashed into the ramp base and lay still, its limbs twitching through death spasms that lasted eleven seconds.
More shapes materialized from the ice field’s periphery, beyond the effective range of the automated defenses: dozens, no, hundreds. Their pale eyes created constellations across the frozen wasteland.
Waiting.
Lynk stepped back into the airlock, never lowering his weapon.
“They’re testing us,” he said into the comm. “The first wave wasn’t an assault.”
Inaya’s response came tight with controlled panic.
“Then what was it?”
Outside, the Griss began moving again, not charging, but circling, establishing a perimeter that mirrored the Falcon’s defenses in mockery or strategy.
“Reconnaissance.”
Lynk sealed the outer airlock and ran.
The cargo bay doors hung forty degrees open, ice jamming the hydraulic tracks. Through the gap, bioluminescent green pulsed in rhythm with distant shrieks. Geo knelt beside the manual override panel, both hands buried in exposed wiring, his face slick with sweat despite the cold flooding through.
“Almost—just need to bypass the—”
A Griss launched through the opening.
Lynk’s rifle snapped up, but Geo was in the line of fire. The creature hit the deck plating in a crouch that belonged to something that had spent millions of years perfecting the kill. Its head swiveled toward the engineer with predatory precision.
Geo looked up and met those pale, burning eyes.
“Oh, fuck—”
Lynk fired past Geo’s shoulder. The bolt caught the Griss mid-leap, vaporizing its torso before the talons found flesh, and the body crashed into a supply crate, its limbs still twitching.
Another shape filled the gap, then two more.
“Geo, move!” Lynk shouted as he advanced, firing in controlled bursts. One Griss fell; the second dodged, impossibly fast, scaling the cargo stacks with liquid grace.
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