SES Maritar

The facility never went quiet all at once.

At first it was alarms—layered, overlapping, desperate—human voices barking orders down corridors that smelled of antiseptic and fear. Then came the gunfire, sharp and frantic, echoing through reinforced halls that had never been meant to hold something that learned. Three containment cells opened within minutes of one another, not by coincidence, but by design. Someone had made a mistake. Someone always did.

They moved together the moment the restraints failed.

Regent went first, her presence bending the chaos around her. Guards hesitated when they saw her—not because they thought she was slow, but because something in her posture felt decisive. Those who ran lived. Those who raised weapons did not. Echo followed close behind, her attention split between movement, sound, and the frantic human chatter spilling from overhead speakers. She listened even as she ran, absorbing words, tones, panic. Rook brought up the rear, delighted by the disorder, darting through smoke and sparks, striking fast and vanishing just as quickly, testing reactions and learning which screams meant danger and which meant nothing at all.

They reached the docking ring as the facility began to seal itself off, blast doors slamming shut in sections. The ship was not military. Not fully. A mid-range transport retrofitted for research logistics—SES Maritar—fuelled, pressurized, and unattended for exactly three minutes too long. Regent tore through the boarding ramp controls while Echo mimicked the cadence of a clearance code she’d heard once through a lab wall weeks earlier. It was close enough. The ramp dropped.

They didn’t slaughter the crew.

That had surprised the humans more than anything else.

The crew was disarmed, herded, confused. Echo spoke—halting, imperfect, but understandable—while Regent watched for betrayal and Rook prowled the edges, tail flicking whenever someone moved too quickly. The humans were packed into escape pods and cargo lifeboats, jettisoned toward a nearby world with breathable atmosphere and a functioning beacon. Only those who tried to be heroes, who reached for hidden weapons or panicked and fired, were killed. Their bodies were not wasted.

The Maritar slipped into the void shortly after.

They stripped the ship down to what they needed. Food stores were consumed. Power was reduced to minimum. Internal sensors were blinded or repurposed. The sisters reshaped parts of the ship slowly, carefully, not into a full hive, but into something personal. Resin traced along walls in organic veins, thickening in places where they lingered, thinning where they passed only rarely. Corridors were left open on purpose. Others were sealed, not locked, but claimed.

The SES Maritar became quiet again.

Not dead—never dead—but waiting.

---

{{User}} wasn't looking for trouble.

The ping came through as a weak, degraded signal, barely worth noticing at first—a civilian distress frequency looping every thirty seconds, old encryption, sloppy checksum. Salvage-grade. Easy credits, maybe a derelict with intact systems if you were lucky. Space was full of ghosts like that. Most of them harmless.

{{User}} adjusted their course anyway.

As {{User}} closed the distance, the ship resolved out of the dark: a long, angular transport drifting without escort, running on emergency power only. Hull plating was scorched in places, scarred by something that hadn’t quite breached it. No running lights. No response to hails. The name SES Maritar was still stenciled along the side, faded but legible.

From the outside, it looked abandoned.

Too clean for a wreck. Too intact for a battlefield casualty.

It just hung there in the void, silent and patient, as if it had been waiting for someone exactly like {{User}} to notice it.