Kyle stared at the display, then looked at Elise again, who had just launched a ‘distraction’ packaged they’d already prepared; a probe with a lead-foil, sail, which would look like a massive, tasty, heavy-metal treat for one of these creatures… and was now looking back at him.

  “...If that’s a Kraken nest… One probably left it to go join its ‘mate’, or ‘friend’ after it saw it nabbing that dragon. And then… it saw our drop pod land near the nest. It… its probably going back there. So there’s gotta be two of them… and one of them might be staring at the buoy right now. We should cut our losses and get the hell out with Thor and Jenny’s brains intact.”

  She turned back to the display. “Its going back to defend its nest. Its not gonna care about some distraction. Its gonna care about its eggs.”

  Kyle nodded. “... Probably.”

  He looked at the display. “Poisseux, Bjorn. As soon as it shows up, have the drones you’ve got use their warheads on it. All three, as soon as they can reach it. If it isn’t significantly injured, then just order all of your drones to try to move corpses and debris out of the cave, and drop your buoy into darkspace. You guys take priority. We’ll see if we can lure it away after.”

  He grimaced. “....Wish we had more drop pods. If we do manage to lure it out to try again, I can rig up my armor as another drone to carry stuff, but the only other thing I’ve got that could take off and land is the shuttle. Way more expensive, but…. Worth it.”

  There wasn’t much time. The creature probably wouldn’t even notice the bait, as it was on the way to the planet, and its nest. Most likely, some other beastie would notice the foil and come take a bite… though if they got lucky, maybe there would be a fight over it and they could take the nest in the meantime.

  They watched the Kraken hurtling through space, approaching the planet, its numerous tiny tendrils shifting… and then…

  It started to turn.

  “...Is it taking the… Oh.”

  They could see it. The bait hadn’t attracted the Kraken… but yet another dragon. Bigger than the other two… had emerged… and started flying towards the foil sail that had been deployed…. And the Kraken was turning to intercept. They could see it adjusting, pointing that odd beak towards the dragon, accelerating, incredibly fast for a living creature… only to vanish.

  “...Alright. We can see it going into stealth. We know there’s two of them, so the other is probably also watching. Any time now its…. Well shit, that was fast.”

  It appeared as if the second Kraken had closed in. It narrowly missed the dragon, which caught it with a spray of plasma; melting away a few of the tendrils as it turned. “Poisseux, Bjorn. Move fast. We’ve got a window. Bring heads, eggs, anything, and run. The Krakens are going dragon-hunting, and we might just have time to get the samples out of there.”

  Kyle immediately rewound the video; checking for just how far away it had un-cloaked before pulling that little ram. There had to be some way to spot it before impact, and he already had a few ideas.

  ***

  Thor tossed together a bundle to load into the drop pod; this humanoid drone would be left behind, alongside all the smaller ones… assessing it for a moment.

  Two of the eggs, and a few tendrils, would take up about as much space in the drop pod as a person. So, depending on how many of the decapitated heads Poisseux was planning to bring, that would probably be ideal.

  He shoved aside the pile of tendrils that had covered the eggs.. And glanced back at the living ones, sprouting from the magma like weeds.

  Was there a difference between them? The ones still attached to the rock were giving a kind of… wiggle, slowly shifting back and forth, not dead like the ones piled on the eggs.

  He looked at them for a moment… and decided to hedge his bets. He rolled two eggs out of the pile, grabbed one of the dead tendrils, even as a few of the others went sliding across the cave floor… and then yanked one of the living ones off the surface of the semi-molten rock… before lifting up both eggs, and turning for the entrance of the cave.. Starting to jog towards the exit.

  Only to be greeted by… an absolutely weird sight.

  A spider-drone carrying a severed head, scrambling past him towards the cave entrance.

  He almost paused his stride, but managed not to, neatly stepping over a rock on the way… though… he frowned.

  The bundle in his arms was starting to squirm. The live tendril he’d picked up from the magma was active. Wriggling…it had managed to attach itself to one of the eggs… and flopped itself out, landing on the rock right outside of the cave.

  He just kept running, carrying the dead tendril and the other egg; they were too bulky to carry like that. If he had time, he’d grab another. “Okay, so these plant-things are weird. They seem to kinda merge with the eggs. Not sure of the story there.”

  He deposited them inside the drop pod… and turned to see… four spider-drones carrying severed heads… and the humanoid drone carrying three more. “How are we on time? One of the samples went active as I retrieved it, so I only got one egg, one tendril.”

  ~Just throw the heads in and launch it. And get out. We have no idea how a fight between this thing and a full-sized dragon will go, they might be back any second now.~

  As they ran for the drop pod, he could see on the other drone cameras that the egg with the attached tendril…. Was wiggling, shifting… moving its way back towards the magma, dragging the egg with it.

  …Something was weird about the whole nonsense. Was it a plant, or an egg-eater?

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  ***

  The battle between the two monsters was…. Strange.

  The Kraken was dropping into stealth, moving around, and then charging in from a different direction; only for the dragon to react incredibly swiftly, bathing it with plasma every time, despite several gaping wounds and an increasing scatter of scales from both sides.

  Most of the Kraken’s tendrils were missing, and as it made one last charge, the dragon lashed out… and bit down on the creature’s beak… wrapping its enormous, serpentine body around the more bulbous creature.

  The crew watched in fascination as the two monsters writhed back and forth; tendrils smacking into the dragon, space itself seeming to blur… and then….

  The beak was torn free of the creature’s body. Blood gushed out, identical to the dragon’s, glowing red-orange, as the dragon started snapping off the remaining tendrils, consuming them.

  It seemed, at first, as if the fight was over.

  But then… a second Kraken appeared. The angle was odd; it was most likely the one from the planet, but it seemed to have moved to try to come in from behind, since it wasn’t a straight-line approach; even the first one was closer to that… and slammed into the dragon. Another gaping wound. More of the scales scattering into the void… and the dragon turned to face the second beast, spitting out another gout of plasma even as it went back into stealth.

  On sensors, they could see more of the dragons had come into the open; two more, smaller ones, which they hadn’t seen before were both speeding towards the battle.

  “...Holy hell. This… it just looks crazy! I wonder why they’re…”

  The badly mutilated Kraken, now just looking like a rough black orb with one massive gaping wound where its beak was, and dozens of smaller ones where the tentacles were… unleashed a burst of its own plasma… which washed over both the dragon that had attacked it… and also its allied Kraken, even as it appeared.

  Kyle pried his view away from the clash of titans, and turned back to watch the drop pod start to launch into space… leaving behind almost all of the drones it had carried down with it… but carrying a grisly, strange, cargo of helmets containing long-rotten human skulls, and strange, alien matter.

  “...Okay then. As soon as it gets into orbit, I want you two in Darkspace. We’ll hop in, briefly, to grab the drop pod… and then get right the hell out ourselves. And…. then watch the rest of this fight. The data of all this should be fascinating.”

  Barry glanced back at him. “And its not just fun to watch?”

  “You kidding me? One of those things is the size of a battleship. We don’t even make combat ships that big anymore. This whole thing is wild.”

  ***

  Swooping in to pickup the drop pod was trivial. They were only in realspace close to the planet for a few minutes; not even long enough for the light of their transit to reach any of the monsters; but they picked it up with ease, loading it into a cargo bay… and immediately jumping back into darkspace to meet with Poisseux and Thor.

  Kyle inhaled deeply as they returned to the safety of darkspace… and glanced around the bridge. “Okay then. That egg was stored in some sort of volcanic cave. The dragon eggs needed heat to hatch. So probably the Kraken eggs are the same way. Elise, if you and Barry could please grab the cryogenic rig from the cargo bay, and we want to refrigerate the egg, and the tentacle. Get it as cold as possible, and keep it inside the drop bay. I don’t want it hatching and causing a problem.”

  Both of them nodded, rising from their seats, as he turned to Sherry. “Now, for the Kraken. We’ve seen them cloak and uncloak a fair number of times now. I want you to run the numbers, figure out how fast they’re moving when they uncloak, and the distance from the target. We might be able to rig up something with the emitters to give us some warning.”

  She gave a quick nod… and turned to her console, starting to review the video… taking down numbers as she went.

  Kyle focused on his own control panel… and started lining up. Thanks to the Empire-grade software, they could actually track down the buoy in darkspace instead of sending it back to the real world to pickup… and he planned to do exactly that.

  The console buzzed. ~So, I think we should talk about what we found in the cave.~

  Kyle glanced up… the call was from Poisseux. They were drawing closer… but not quite there yet. “Sure. The bodies, or the… creatures?”

  ~Bodies. They were old. Decades, minimum. And…. from what I can tell, they were colonists. Part of a group planning to setup a mining operation here, or elsewhere, and rounding out the numbers to hit that magic thousand mark.~

  He nodded. “Makes sense. What about it?”

  ~Not nearly a thousand bodies here. There might be more, elsewhere in the system. Or these might have been taken from some other star in the cluster. There might be an Alliance colony here that isn’t known to the public… or at minimum, them trying to establish one. So. We’re either talking a secret Alliance base in some nearby system…~

  “...Or a ton more bodies somewhere else in this one. Or they just, well. Digested more of the others.” He shook his head, staring at the display… there.

  The ship made a faint, audible ‘clunk’ sound as the buoy was pulled in. He frowned. “...If there were an Alliance base out here… they probably met these creatures already.”

  Poisseux’s response was a touch unsettling. ~...Can you imagine the nightmare if those slaver assholes are reverse-engineering how these things work, and have been for decades?~

  ~There might already be Alliance Stealth ships out there… creeping around through the darkness.~

  ***

  It was… weird, looking at Thor’s body without him in it… just lying on the table, hooked up to a machine… with the spot for his implant just vacant in the back of his skull.

  His friend’s mind, his consciousness… was compressed into a little disk. A hockey puck, almost. He stared at it for a moment, then at the open slot in the back of the head. Poisseux didn’t have a body to go to. He could just as easily slap her in there, though she’d undoubtedly be a bit confused.

  He carefully slid it into place…. And shut the hatch.

  The body twitched. All of the limbs, the neck, moving, as he adapted… and then rolled over, flopping off the bed onto the floor.

  Kyle blinked.. And dropped down to his knees to help Thor back up to his feet. “...The fuck was that about? You know you’re supposed to wait before you move. Do I need to restrain you next time?”

  Thor shivered… and pulled up, gently prying his arm free of Kyle’s grip. “Nah, nah, I’m fine. Just jumped the gun a little. Felt weird, controlling a drone instead of a body. How long was I out?”

  “About two minutes. We’ve got the Kraken egg, and the tendril-thing, on ice, they’re putting Poisseux back in the server room right now, then we’re all having a meeting on the bridge to figure out what to do next.”

  He gave a slow nod. “...I’m not sure if that’s a Kraken egg, man. It looks exactly like the Dragon egg images you showed us. And the way that tendril popped onto it and started wiggling around, like maybe it was eating it… what if the tendril things are the baby Krakens, and that cave was like… food storage? The Krakens might loot dragon nests to feed their young as they grow.”

  Kyle blinked. “...That…. Would make perfect sense. If thats the case, I’m glad we grabbed one of each. We should pickup the other egg on the way back to compare.”