Seeds and Ash
Copyright© 2026 by G Younger
Chapter 21: The Exodus
The Falcon screamed.
Not metaphorically; the hull emitted a high-frequency vibration as structural supports sheared under torsional stress. Metal shrieked against metal, bulkheads buckled, and somewhere deep in the ship’s belly, something vital collapsed with a sound like thunder compressed into a confined space.
Lynk braced against the corridor wall as the deck tilted three degrees to starboard.
The ship was dying.
He moved toward engineering, but the route had changed because the passageway was compromised. Emergency lighting strobed across the buckled plating where the corridor had been; the ceiling drooped; the walls bowed inward. The familiar geometry had been transformed into an angular wound.
Lynk dropped to his knees and crawled.
Behind him, something massive struck the Falcon’s port quarter, and the entire vessel shuddered. Plasma turrets fired in sporadic bursts, their distinctive whine cutting through the ambient roar of failing systems. They were burning through ammunition reserves, targeting threats faster than tactical algorithms could prioritize.
It wouldn’t matter.
The Griss weren’t attacking to breach anymore.
They were dismantling the Falcon.
Lynk emerged into a junction corridor and found it had collapsed entirely; deck plating had buckled upward, creating a ramp of twisted metal that blocked access to the reactor levels. He checked his internal map and determined that three alternate routes remained, but two terminated at sections already exposed to the outside and could very well have Griss lurking.
The third led through Chyna’s lab.
Lynk changed direction, moving quickly now while the deck continued its slow tilt as the Falcon settled deeper into compromised ice. He passed through the med bay and reached the lab entrance.
The door hung half-open, jammed in its track, and he squeezed through the gap.
Inside, the lab had been wrecked, not by the Griss but by system failure. The bio-printer had vented its gel reservoir across the floor in a viscous pool that reflected the emergency lighting in amber patterns. Specimen containers lay shattered, and research terminals flickered with corrupted data streams, cycling through fragments of Chyna’s work.
Lynk moved to her primary workstation.
The screen displayed her final analysis, still running despite the power fluctuations. Gene maps scrolled past in cascading columns. He saw that Griss’ DNA sequences were cross-referenced with protein markers from the vault samples Quinn had retrieved.
Her conclusions waited at the bottom of the file.
Lynk read them twice.
The Griss aren’t apex predators; they’re TOOLS engineered to be shock troops designed for pacification and conquest. They’re not autonomous; every biological system contains embedded receptors for external command protocols.
They were built to SERVE.
Question: To serve what?
Analysis of vault fragments suggests a hierarchical species structure. The Griss we’ve encountered are Worker/Warrior class. Vault records reference a ‘Builder’ caste and something designated as ‘Architects.’
We haven’t met their creators yet.
We’re not at the top of the chain.
Lynk stared at the words.
The implications assembled themselves with terrible clarity. The eggs beneath Oblivion’s ice weren’t an invasion force waiting to deploy.
They were a garrison left behind, but to guard what?
Another impact rocked the Falcon, and the lab’s emergency lighting failed, replaced by dim illumination from Lynk’s wrist device. He accessed Chyna’s research core—a crystalline data module mounted in the workstation’s housing—and ejected it with a sharp twist.
The small module fit easily in the palm of his hand, but it contained everything she’d learned about the Griss, the vault, and the planet’s purpose.
He was glad he could save her legacy.
Not frozen in death like Quinn’s, but preserved for discovery.
Lynk pocketed the core and turned toward the engineering passage.
The Falcon listed another two degrees.
Somewhere above, the hull finally surrendered.
Blood left a trail.
Inaya didn’t look back to confirm. She felt the wet warmth soaking through her uniform sleeve, dripping from her fingertips with each uneven step. The gash along her ribs pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat, demanding attention she couldn’t afford.
The corridor tilted.
She braced against the wall, waiting for the deck to stabilize, but it didn’t. The Falcon settled deeper into the compromised ice with a groan that resonated through every bulkhead.
“Echo-9.”
Nothing.
“Echo, status report.”
Silence answered—not the clean absence of sound, but the hollow void where something essential used to be. The AI had stopped before she left the bridge, but she had hoped that was a temporary outage.
It wasn’t; Echo was gone.
Like the captain, like the colonists, like everyone she’d failed to save.
Inaya pushed forward despite dragging her left leg, the knee refusing to fully flex after something had slammed into her during the cargo bay collapse. It had been chaos as structural beams and debris flew, and a Griss claw came out of nowhere. Details blurred together in the chaos.
She’d managed to seal the breach.
“Echo-9, I need environmental status for Deck Three.”
Meaningless static briefly crackled through the overhead speakers, then cut out.
The Falcon shuddered as plasma turrets fired in bursts overhead, their discharge vibrating through the hull plating beneath her boots. She wondered what they were targeting and how many remained operational. The tactical display in her mind had gone dark at some point.
She was commanding ghosts.
Inaya reached a junction and stopped.
Both corridors ahead had collapsed, the metal warped inward, creating jagged apertures too narrow for passage. Emergency lighting strobed across the wreckage in red pulses, making the shadows twitch with phantom movement.
No route forward.
She pulled up the ship schematic on her wrist device. The screen flickered a low-power warning, but displayed long enough to confirm what she already knew.
Engineering lay three decks down and two sections aft.
She’d never reach it through standard passages.
The maintenance shafts remained.
Inaya turned toward the nearest access panel, leaving fresh blood on the release mechanism as she pried it open. The shaft descended into darkness, lit only by emergency strips that had failed at irregular intervals.
She climbed inside.
The Falcon screamed again, and somewhere distant, another section gave way.
The maintenance shaft swallowed sound.
Inaya descended hand over hand, her boots scraping against metal rungs slick with condensation. Her breath came shallow and fast, each inhale scraping against broken ribs she hadn’t yet acknowledged. The blood had stopped flowing freely, coagulating into tacky patches across her uniform, but the warmth spreading through her abdomen suggested internal bleeding.
The shaft terminated at Deck Four. Inaya kicked open the access panel and dropped into a corridor she didn’t immediately recognize. Emergency lighting had failed here; only the crimson glow of failing containment fields illuminated the passage, casting everything in shades of arterial red.
Inaya took three steps before her knee gave out.
She caught herself against the wall, gasping, as the corridor tilted—or she did, geometry refusing to settle into a reliable orientation. Her wrist device reported stable gravity, but her inner ear insisted otherwise.
Inaya pushed off the wall and limped forward, following the corridor’s curve toward...
Toward where? Engineering or the reactor?
She remembered the overload sequence that would turn the Falcon into a funeral pyre hot enough to sterilize Oblivion’s surface and every Griss egg chamber beneath its ice.
The plan.
What had been the plan?
Inaya stopped, pressing her palm against cold metal to anchor herself as the Falcon shuddered around her, groaning as structural supports failed in a cascading sequence. Somewhere overhead, the plasma turrets had gone silent.
Out of ammunition.
Or targets.
Or both.
“Inaya.”
The voice cut through her disorientation. She turned, slower than tactical sense demanded, and found Lynk emerging from a side corridor.
He looked wrong.
Blood streaked his face—probably not his, given replicants bled differently—and his left arm hung at an unnatural angle, either broken or dislocated. His uniform had been shredded across the chest, revealing a deep scratch that bled freely.
His eyes found her wound immediately.
“You’re bleeding.”
“Noticed that, did you?”
Her voice sounded distant in her own ears, so she tried to get herself together.
“Status?”
Lynk crossed the distance between them in three strides, catching her elbow when she swayed.
“The Falcon is well on its way to structural collapse. Engineering is unreachable, and the reactor’s containment field has degraded beyond manual access.”
“Then we rig it remotely.”
He shifted his grip, supporting more of her weight.
“I already have; the detonation sequence is loaded. I can trigger it from the shuttle bay.”
Shuttle bay?
The words filtered through her consciousness like data through corrupted processors. She’d forgotten about the shuttles. All crew had been accounted for, dead or dying, except her and Lynk. There was no reason to consider evacuation when martyrdom was the mission.
But Lynk had considered it because he thought differently.
“How many shuttles remain?” Inaya asked.
“One, it’s partially fueled. I jury-rigged the launch systems while you were...” He paused, searching for the right words. “While you were bleeding in the maintenance shafts.”
The Falcon tilted another degree, and Lynk adjusted his stance, keeping her upright as the deck settled.
“Can you walk?”
“I’m walking now.”
“You’re leaning; there’s a distinction.”
Despite the dying ship, the approaching detonation, and the thousand-plus deaths weighing on her conscience, Inaya almost smiled.
“Semantics from a replicant. Chyna would’ve loved that.”
Something flickered across Lynk’s face.
“She did,” he said quietly. “Love it, I mean, when I questioned definitions.”
They moved together through the red-lit corridor, with Lynk bearing most of her weight. Each step sent fresh pain lancing through Inaya’s ribs, but she kept pace, stopping only when another tremor ran through the Falcon’s frame.
“The Griss have stopped attacking the hull directly. Instead, they’re excavating beneath us, destabilizing the ice field,” Lynk reported.
“Letting physics and gravity do their work.”
“Yes. They’re efficient.”
They reached a junction where three corridors converged, and Lynk chose the leftmost passage without hesitation, following a route Inaya’s failing mental map couldn’t verify.
The shuttle bay lay two decks up.