Sunny woke very suddenly. She didn't know why she had, and at first assumed that Adam had shifted in his sleep. She reached out her lower left hand to where he usually lay curled up against her side, but felt nothing. She sat up then, a little confused as to his absence and looked around blearily in the dim lighting which emanated from the climate controlled armor case beside her bed, its pearly white sheen reflecting a delicate rainbow of colors out into the room, giving the impression that she slept inside a cave made of crystal.

It was then she remembered.

Adam wasn't here.

She wasn't with Adam.

She had approached him earlier with the somewhat bashful confession that she would like to sleep alone for the night, quickly tagging on that it had nothing to do with him, and that she loved his company, but she simply needed her time and space alone to spend in her own solitude for the night. She chided herself later for being worried considering that he had simply smiled at her and said that he understood.

In the end she felt worse about assuming he would be upset, than the actual act of avoiding him, which she wasn't, she reminded herself. She just needed some time alone.

But now, she could admit to herself that she had been wrong. Not about needing time alone, that was a fact she still maintained, but being alone at night was not the time for it. She could hardly enjoy her solitude if she was too asleep to notice.

Sunny sighed and tried to lean back into her cushions, but found sleep illusive, sitting up again and finally admitting defeat. Adam probably wouldn't mind if she interrupted his sleep, in fact he would probably be happy to see her, like a golden retriever waiting at the door for its master to return home. He wouldn't ask any questions and he certainly wouldn't make her feel guilty for her mistake. He would be annoyingly accepting of her.

She stretched once and walked over to the door rubbing at the carapace on her head.

The door didn't open.

She frowned and tried again.

Nothing.

"Open door." She commanded

"Access denied, lockdown sequence engaged."

Sunny frowned again, "Lockdown sequence." She said aloud reaching towards the intercom. She called up to Adam's room first. There was no response. She tried one or two more times hoping that maybe he was simply asleep, but after the third time of trying, she knew something had to be off. Adam was a light sleeper in general, he said he always had been, though she was convinced that some of that was a side effect of his moderately reoccurring Post Traumatic Stress and the symptom of hypervigilance.

So clearly he wasn't in the room.

She tried up to the bridge next, but when no one answered, she felt her heart skip a beat or two.

There was always supposed to be someone on the bridge.

The skeleton crew was supposed to make sure of that.

If someone wasn't on the bridge.

Something was wrong.

"Open Door!" she commanded again.

"Access denied, lockdown sequence engaged."

She huffed, "Command override, Sunny."

"Access denied."

She slammed her fist against the wall. That could only mean one thing. Adam had initiated the lockdown. If it had been anyone else, she would have been able to override the system, but this was a command directive, and the computer wouldn't allow anyone of a lower rank to override the access.

She was trapped here.

"Sunny."

She turned her head sharply to her left hand flying to a spear on the nearby wall, finding it in her hand in milliseconds, her feet planted on the floor as she turned to he open door of the bathroom.

The opening maw of the room was dark, a bit of blackness cut in the side of the room, and as she stared into it, she saw nothing.

It seemed unusually black.

Her heart pounded in her chest.

Had she heard soemthing.

Her name?

She advanced on the bathroom her spear raised, "Is someone there/'

She thought she had seen this in a horror movie once. Adam didn't like horror movies, but she had watched a few with Ramirez, and she always wondered why the people went in to the scary room when they knew there might be soemthing there, but then again those people were generally not armed, and they didn't have the training that she did, and they weren't stuck in the single bedroom while the ship was locked down.

She reached out and slammed her hand into the light, flicking on the sterile white light from above. The light illuminated grey slate floors and a grey wall, a mirror and a sink, and a shower. There was nothing there otherwise.

She looked around finding no place for anything or anyone to have hidden itself. She even looked up at the ceiling, wondering if soemthing could have concealed itself above her, but she found nothing there either. She stepped even further into the room, and as she did, she felt soemthing, rather odd. She glanced over into the mirror, and was surprised to find soemthing was off about her reflection.

She stepped forward for a better look into the mirror, and was surprised to find that.

That the carapace of her head was..... pealing at the side.

In concern, sunny reached her hand up to feel at the plate on her head, and as her fingers touched it, she found, to her horror, that the plate of carapace shifted. She staggered bac running into the wall, staring at herself as the carapace plate on her head pulled to the side detaching from the purple connective tissue underneath it with a sort of ripping sound.

She clapped a hand to her head trying to pin it down, and screamed once in shock as the carapace of her forearm completely detached and plunged towards the bathroom floor with a sickening thud, leaving her forearm bare and glistening under the sharp white light. Sunny looked up at the mirror.

And screamed.

Screamed as she watched her carapace pulling away from her skin and hanging towards the floor, stringy masses of purple tissue splitting and clinging to the pieces before they dropped towards the ground with a clatter, littering the bathroom floor at her feat and leaving the skin wrinkled and glistening underneath.

The bathroom floor was spattered with orange blood,

Her spear clattered to the floor as she reached up desperately trying to hold her carapace on her body as it continued to detach and fall towards the floor. She looked up into the mirror eyes wild with terror as she felt a trembling in her fingers and limbs, watching as her joints began to bend.

Slowly.

Backward.

***

Conn was lurking in engineering. He liked to lurk, especially in places where no one expected him, and where he might cause the most distress. He liked to pick dark hallways, or tight corners where he could leer at any unsuspecting passerbys. He would not have made that his hobby if he hadn't discovered that many of the humans found him to be surprisingly unnerving.

It was soemthing they called the, Uncanny valley, which was a phenomenon where humanoid things at a certain stage tended to cause distress in other humans because it was too human but not quite human enough. It was a complex topic that he found he rather enjoyed exploiting. Of course that wasn't soemthing he was likely to exploit tonight considering that the admiral had strictly forbidden him from scaring the night crew. He did his best to pretend that he didn't care what the admiral thought, though he had to admit that it was much less fun to scare someone who was already on edge.

The night crew had been left alone.

But he maintained it had nothing to do with the admiral's instructions.

It was time for him to sleep anyway.

And yes, Starborn could sleep. In fact Starborn could hibernate for thousands of years without much issue to preserve their life through long periods of traveling through the darkness of space. He had even heard that some Starborn made journeys between stars, though he had never attempted one himself. For a starborn he was relatively young.

He used this ability to hibernate to his advantage, synchronizing himself with the needs of the humans, hibernating in sharp bursts that other Starborn would have found odd, as he did it for a maximum of eight hours following the circadian rhythms of the humans. It wouldn't do to be bored for hours on end while the humans slept, and besides, while he hibernated he could open his mind further and take in the ship, wrap himself in the dreams of the sleeping humans as if he was watching a movie. Some dreams scary, some dreams happy, some colorful , and one or two completely in black and white.

He liked watching them try to run but fail at it, it gave him the most scintillating of pleasure to watch them struggle.

He was just coming out of a rather entertaining dream of a marine who found himself without his pants in front of an entire room of classmates, when soemthing happened. He was awoken by a sudden cold, a sharp piercing spear straight into the back of his mind like an icy probe. The attack was so sudden and so unexpected that he barely had time to bat it away. The tendril withdrew, and he was suddenly filled with an overwhelming sense of dread.

He couldn't tell easily whose fear it was, his or someone else, but it was enough to wake him from his slumber, alone in a dark corridor crammed between two pipes. His mind shrunk in on itself closing off and keeping a guarded eye on the ship around him.

Something was wrong.

He could feel it.

Conn was the only one on the ship he knew who could wheedle his way into the minds of others. That's why he liked it. In a way he was one of the most powerful creatures here as he knew every secret thought, every shame and every desire of everyone on this ship, not that he would ever divulge those things.

He loved secrets even more than he loved chaos, which is why he was so unused to something else sneaking into his head.

He shook himself off and peered down the hallway into the dark.

Something was here.

***
Maverick knelt in the chapel in front of the pulpit, her head down.

She didn't dare to look behind her.

She sat on her knees with her hands resting against her thighs and kept he eyes tight shut.

She had been sitting in the pews when it happened, keeping night vigil in her quiet, and mostly unvisited chapel, when it happened. It began with the greatest sense of mild unease, like she was trying to remember an errand she had forgotten, or perhaps a memory of an embarrassing moment in her life, but as she sat the feeling swelled, and the walls around her seemed to grow dimmer.

A cold feeling crept up the back of her spine and crawled it's way into her heart where jagged little veins began to spread, curling outward until they wrapped their way around her neck in an attempt to choke off her breath. The feeling had come so slowly that she hadn't realized it, until the full feeling of terror had gripped around her heart.

Her heart pounded.

No

No this couldn't be.

It couldn't have found her here.

A cold chill ran up her spine, a feeling so profound that she felt tears of terror springing to her eyes, and bringing her to her knees on the floor.

She felt the presence behind her.

Felt it like she had known it so many years ago.

The dim light faded around her as darkness crawled up the walls.

This couldn't be.

She closed her eyes.

This place, this chapel was protected, it was hallowed. It hadn't fallen into ruin like those long, dark places from her childhood, there were no holy symbols for it to corrupt. There was no darkness for it to hold onto, but she knew this feeling better than she knew the feeling of friendship or even the feeling of love.

She knelt on the floor in total crushing blackness, feeling its presence all around her, choking, stifling, burning.

She felt herself shaking, felt her body tightening.

She knew she had to turn around, to face the thing behind her, but it felt like a weight of darkness was crushing her, falling in from all sides.

She had to do it.

One

Two

Three.

She spun around eyes wide on one knee ready to jump and run, ready to lift her hand and banish the creature when.

When she saw something standing before the door.

The shape was simply a shadow, no more than five feet tall, a few inches shorter than her nothing more than a black silhouette in the darkness. She blinked once or twice attempting to blink the shadow from her vision, sure that it was no more than a spot against her retina, but when she blinked it was till there, standing hunched before the doors.

At first it was hard to make out the shape.

It jolted to the side its contorted limbs finding distinction in the shadow. A twisted leg, a twisted arm, long....dark.... hair.

Maverick stepped back running her back into the pulpit.

The creature lurched forward again, taking another step towards her.

Maverick scrambled back behind the podium raising her right arm to begin the chant that would banish the creature.

The words trembled from her mouth and spilled to the floor as the creature continued to lurch forward over the floor, its hair swinging in front of it's lowered face its body crooked, dragging across the floor in great jolting lurches.

Maverick continued to repeat the phrase over and over again, growing sick as.

Nothing happened.

Then the creature stopped a few feet away from her.

The room was impossibly silent.

A buzzing screamed in her ears.

The creature looked up.

Maverick's hand fell as the twisted face came into view, eyes hollow, mouth impossibly wide, and with a deep rasping voice it said.

"He can't save you."

And it lurched forward spidering up onto the pulpit hand reaching for Maverick's face.

***

Conn floated hurriedly down the hallway ribbons billowing out behind him.

Something was wrong.

Soemthing was wrong.

Darkness curled around him like a cloak, visions assaulted him from all angles. Darkness, corpses, and the rearing head of an immense creature ready to open up and swallow him whole , but he pushed them back and his ribbons billowed out behind him.

That was when he heard the rattling.

He turned on the spot, following the sound upwards to the vents above his head where he knew the engineering corridor ran. The rattling intensified, and he wafted backwards just as the ceiling opened up and a black shape began to slither it's way out of the opening. It was so dark he could hardly make it out, a head, and a torso, and one grasping arm, dragging the body from the opening like the aborted idea of a birth gone horribly wrong. It squirmed and wriggled, drawing itself from the opening like a maggot from rotting flesh.

It dropped from above and hit the floor with a loud rattle, and levered itself upright, crawling on its hands and forearms across the ground towards Conn, reaching out with a claw-like hand .

Conn was almost startled, until, his closed off mind was finally able to sense.

"Admiral!"