Inspired by focus farming on Adaro, Sedna

Spoilers

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Tyre considered himself moderately intelligent. He knew his numbers and could count to a sum of eighty – ninety, if he'd been keeping track with his fingers. He knew mechanisms well enough not to stick a coolant cell in backwards, and could clean and maintain his rifle without discharging the power pack into the floor, unlike so many of his tube brothers. As such, Tyre been given a greater share of responsibilities aboard the cargo barge Scarab, responsibilities like seeing that the cargo was properly loaded and making sure that the aft loading doors were sealed before they launched into the hard vacuum of space. Gedge had held the job before him. Gedge had gone floating out in the belt along with last quarter's payload. Tyre was determined not to make the same mistake.

Beneath his feet, the Scarab's engines were decelerating. They'd passed the fourth planet and were heading into the belt, slowing thrusters, making sure they were on course for Eunomia Station. It was an old word, Tyre mused, leftover from the time of the Creators and as alien to his tongue as the terms the bridge crew spoke amongst themselves. Words like trajectory and gimbals and synchronous orbit. These things were not for him, but he liked to hear them anyway. He would often come up to the bridge when not on duty and simply stand near the back, watching the stars flicker by. And as long as he stayed out of the way, Jea would not throw him out. They'd been birthed from the same batch, he and her, deep in the watery womb of the eighth planet. When she'd been given the Scarab to command, Tyre had followed her. When he'd proven himself marginally less likely to space the crew by confusing the decompression lever for the docking handle, he'd gotten a good position, too.

And now Tyre watched the stars, trying to expand his mind enough to contemplate them properly. It never worked – they were too abstract a concept, and the distances involved too great – but he kept on staring. The stars were pretty things, untouched by the grease which often smeared his hands and coated the Scarab in a thin, oily film that no amount of mopping could scrub away. Tyre liked shiny things, and so he liked the stars most of all. His hand absently strayed into his pocket.

"Eunomia Station ahead, ma'am," the navigator announced in a gruff cough.

"Open a channel. Let's see if they remembered the schedule this time," Jea responded, standing behind the navigator's chair with one hand on the headrest. She insisted on being addressed by the archaic title, eschewing the more common "Captain" for any and all shreds of dignity she could pick from the bones of a forgotten empire. As always, there was irritation in her voice, irritation at having been sent to haul ore instead of being sent to the front lines. Tyre had never understood the problem. The Scarab was a simple ship with a simple job. And simple things were good.

"Eunomia Station, this is the cargo barge Scarab requesting clearance to dock," the navigator complied, keying up the comms with a heavy burst of static. Tyre was impressed; the man had pronounced the station's name not once, but twice in as many minutes. He rolled the syllables across his own tongue, silently trying to mouth them, but as always they tangled in his lips and burbled forth as gibberish. The language of the Golden Lords was too hard for him to speak, so Tyre made do with listening to others pronounce it instead.

"Eunomia Station, I repeat: this is the cargo barge Scarab requesting clearance to dock," the navigator repeated when the silence from the comms began to stretch, but there was no response that time, either.

A deep pucker appeared on the sagging flesh of Jea's brow. Her skin there was pale and mottled, the Decay setting in at an early age, but not yet advanced enough to steal the lucid sparkle of her eyes. Her lips twisted, showing far too many brown, crooked teeth for the motion to be an entirely unhappy one. Tyre knew why. If the station had forgotten the pickup schedule again, Jea would enjoy slacking her own frustrations by ordering the docking crew whipped. If they'd forgotten to prepare the cargo on top of forgotting the schedule, she'd toss a few out into the black for her gunnery crew to take potshots at. No doubt it would almost make up for the delay.

"Barge Scarab, this Eunomia Station," the comms squelched. "You cleared for dock."

Jea leaned back, disappointed. The Scarab angled slightly as they came around, slowing thrusters even further. Eunomia Station was built inside an asteroid, tunneling through its iron-rich guts in search of ferrite and other mineral wealth, hollowing out the center and leaving behind a thick carapace of rock to serve as both protection and camouflage. Tyre saw the docking bay up ahead, a warm square of light against the comparative blackness of space. A rusted gun boat chugged by to starboard, turrets swiveling like eye stalks. Jea saluted it mockingly.

The orange forcefield parted over the Scarab's nose as they edged into the docking bay, engines chuffing noisily, and settled into the drab, painted square designating their usual space. They were facing the wrong way for Tyre to see much of the hanger, but there wasn't much to see. He trumped down to the cargo hanger and shouted to a few of his fellow tube brothers because that's what important people did; they shouted at other, less important people. He walked to the aft loading doors and opened them wide, hydraulics grinding. Tyre frowned at them. They weren't supposed to sound like that. He thought of Gedge and the spaced cargo, of the airlock failing to seal. Maybe it was grime or space dust. He resolved to lubricate them before they left – before Jea was taking potshots at him.

Outside on the docking concourse, lift loaders rumbled past hauling trailers of pale, dirty ore, no doubt on their way to the mills and primitive refineries located deep in the belly of the facility. Yes, that was the word, Tyre decided, and was proud of his vocabulary. Grineer things were primitive – not the gleaming, golden things left behind by the Creators. Tyre wondered about them just as he wondered about the stars, at least until his poor head began to hurt. They had lived so long ago, further back than Tyre had the numbers to reckon. They made shiny things, he thought. Not like Grineer.

Just outside the Scarab, crates had been piled on the docking floor to await loading. It was a big shipment this time, Tyre noted. Thirty to forty crates at least. Jea would be happy. As happy as she ever got, anyway. Tyre sidestepped a lift loader as it thundered past on a cushion of air. His tube brothers swarmed over the crates like bees, slinging them onto the loader with a crash. Tyre checked the manifest, but decided it would be a waste of time trying to count while everything was moving around and before it had been properly stowed. He lifted his voice to shout over the noise, ordering the others to put the crates against the back wall of the Scarab. Yes, you could pile them up, but no more than three high – Tyre held as many fingers up to illustrate, repeating the gesture several times – and no, the middle of the floor wouldn't work, they had to go inside the lines he'd so painstakingly chalked out on the floor.

Though he never touched any of the crates, it was exhausting work getting them into place. By the time all of them had been stowed, Tyre was thinking of his pod and a mug of hot grog, if the galley cook was in a mood to be generous. He tested the straps holding down their cargo and grunted, satisfied. Forty crates had been logged on the manifest, but only thirty two had made it onto the Scarab. Jea was nowhere to be found, no doubt wringing the foreman's neck over the whereabouts of the missing eight. An error in the numbers was an error on her record, and that simply would not do – not if she wanted to captain a galleon at some point. Tyre suspected that his ambitious tube sister would be awhile. "Business negotiations" were always a fun distraction, or so she'd told him once, fondling the scaling knife she'd acquired from a dead Ostron. The thin, flexible blade was meant for pulling the bones from fish. Imagine what else it can do, she'd said, grinning at him.

Tyre grimaced internally. Blood was shiny, but it was not pretty. And it left a nasty mess.

He checked the crates one more time, then decided there was ample time to oil the loading door, too. Tyre didn't bother checking the maintenance lockers onboard the Scarab. Jea was a decent captain, but she was also cheap; the lubricants on hand were thin and poorly refined, filled with nearly as much grit as the oil sands from which they'd been sucked. Eunomia Station had better supplies, and no one was going to mind if he helped himself to an unattended canister. He wandered the concourse, dodging an incoming skiff whose mush-brained pilot almost smeared him against the wall, and angling his course towards the far end of the docking bay, where the grease jockeys kept their tools kits and heaps of spare parts. Five minutes later, Tyre found the half empty can of 30-weight exactly where he'd figured.

He didn't pick it up right away, however. Finding himself alone, he put his hand into his pocket again. He'd picked up the small, flinty chunk of Azurite during a stopover on the Plains of Eidolon some cycles back. Jea had been arguing with someone whose name he'd forgotten, if indeed he ever known it to begin with, and Tyre had slipped outside. After the oily, humid air of the Scarab, the crisp wind had entered his lungs like crystalline shards of glass. Far in the distance, he could hear the mournful, unnatural howls of the Lost One carried to him on the wind, and so he was mindful not to stray too far. The vein had been exposed halfway up a rocky knoll, gleaming softly in the moonlight – moonlight that had not always been there, but now shone bright and cold and pale, casting woolly shadows across the Plains.

On Eunomia Station, Tyre fingered the lumpy geode in his palm, angling it so that the dingy light shone through the rock and caught, scintillating, somewhere deep inside. There was an iridescent blue flash spackled with pinpricks of silver. Tyre moved the gemstone back and forth, enchanted by the play of light and thinking of stars. Shiny, shiny stars.

He was so distracted, he almost didn't notice the change in the air. Almost. A prickle ran the length of Tyre spine and bunched between his shoulder blades, a primeval warning that he was being watched, that something was not quite right. Clamping the gemstone in his fist, he whirled to face the threat, expecting Jea to be creeping towards him with that misshapen grin on her face. The docking bay was not empty… but it was too still. Too quiet. Tyre looked around, unable to shake the feeling on the back of his neck. The ham-fisted pilot, the skin of his face uneven and sagging with advanced Decay, was standing near his skiff and a knot of dock workers were clumped by the Scarab. There were more, but none of them seemed to be reacting to the danger Tyre felt.

Tyre squinted, watching them. His tube brothers had gone unnaturally still. Not talking, not moving. Not doing anything but standing in place, slumping forward over their rifles and loaders, even slumped on each other. A nasally snore erupted from the skiff pilot, his hands swaying limply at his sides, and Tyre gawped at him in confusion. They were all asleep, he realized. But that didn't seem possible. One or two certainly, but the whole docking bay? At the same time? What was more confusing is that they all seemed to be doing so upright. Tyre looked closer and thought he saw thin, glistening filaments propping up their bodies, each one the color of spilled blood.

Tyre was about to shout, but then he saw it drop from an overhead vent. It was tall, slender, and quite obviously female – but that was about all Tyre was certain of. He couldn't tell if the fleshy sleeves and skirt were the clothes it was wearing or if they were part of the thing itself. Dark horns crowned its visored head, like the wild beasts that stalked the overgrown jungles of old Earth, or the demons that prowled at the edges of nightmares. Quiet as a shadow, it straightened and moved towards the nearest of the sleepers. In one hand, it held a long blade.

In one quick motion, it – she, Tyre's brain babbled senselessly – flicked the sharpened tip across the pilot's neck. Blood spurted silently, fountaining from his open jugular, and he collapsed without ever waking up. No screams, no startled cry. Nothing. The only sound in the entire hanger was the solid flump of his body going to the floor. Tyre clapped both hands over his mouth to muffle the noise of his scream, nearly breaking his teeth against the azurite clutched tightly in his fist. The horned devil swept towards the Scarab and the cluster of his tube mates, all of them woefully oblivious to the peril they were in. The sword arced, a prismatic curving moon, and the sleepers went tumbling to the floor.

Tyre wanted to cry out, but the noise stayed glued in his throat. He was unarmed; he'd left his rifle atop some crates inside the Scarab's cargo bay. And even if he hadn't, it was doubtful he'd be able to unsling it. Fear drenched his senses like a cold bath. He couldn't move. He could barely breathe past the moist, greasy press of his hands. Above on the gantry, Tyre saw movement. A group of soldiers came into the docking bay, chatting in guttural voices. The dark thing went very still. Tyre was certain they were going to see it, certain they were going to snap their rifles to their shoulders and-

-the dark thing lifted a hand and waved it, almost as if caressing the air. Blood-red sparks cascaded softly from her fingertips, expanding around her hand like a cloud of dancing, alien fireflies. The soldiers came slowly to a halt. Their chins drooped, their eyes closed. In seconds they were asleep as well, their shoulders propped together for support. The demon gathered herself and leapt up onto the gantry, easily clearing the ten-meter distance. Tyre's squeal of dismay suffocated in his palms as two more of his tube brothers went tumbling to the floor. Blood pattered rhythmically to the floor, dripping from the metal lattice of the gantry as the demon hurried through the door and out of sight, heading deeper into Eunomia Station.

For a long moment, Tyre did not move. Grineer were grown and birthed from their tubes fully developed, and did not experience childhood in the literal sense of the term, but Tyre remembered stories from his first few years of life – when his older tube siblings would taunt and bully, keeping him awake and sweating in his pod long after the rest of the galleon had gone to sleep. They'd told stories of the Void, that dreaded place beyond reality, and exotic ships where feral, starving Kavats roamed the empty halls. They'd told stories of the Lost Ones, wisps of pale evil that floated about the Plains at night, desperately searching.

When Tyre's body finally jerked into action, it was only to open the nearby maintenance locker and hurl himself inside. His breath filled the damp interior, inhaling the thick odor of rust, oil and spilled fuel. There was no light and no slats to peer through. Tyre's heart pounded against his ribs, counting out the seconds. He'd hadn't thought himself a coward, but the idea of the dark thing slinking through the station, slaughtering the inhabitants while they dozed in a sudden, unnatural sleep was too much. He could not face it. To face it would be to die. And so Tyre clutched his precious fragment of ore and waited.

He did not move, not even when it returned ten minutes later and opened the locker where he hid. A breathless noise of fear escaped Tyre's lips when he saw it standing there, that bloodied, darkly prismatic blade held loosely in one hand. Its tall, curving horns framed the yellow light of the hanger bay, giving it an almost otherworldly halo. And it was otherworldly. Black and shiny as obsidian with thin, winding insets of bone white, Tyre could feel it staring at him thought the polarized lenses of its helmet. He stared back, mesmerized. Every curve of its armor was weirdly organic, the dark, deadly, fleshy thing. A word danced through the cold morass of his mind, a word in the language of the Golden Lords, a statement of both reverence and fear. He reached for it, but it skittered away. It didn't matter what the thing was called, Tyre decided. It was going to kill him and that was all there was to it. He hoped it would put him to sleep, too, so he didn't feel the pain.

The thing moved slightly. Its hands, Tyre noticed, were the deep blue of a moonless night and as the fireflies began to gather, he thought again of the stars. The blade tilted, shedding droplets of blood onto the dirty floor, and Tyre held out his hand, fingers uncurling to reveal the lump of azurite.

"Shiny," he said simply. "Like you."

The dark thing paused. Its horned head tilted, regarding him in silence. The moment stretched. The fireflies winked out of existence. Tyre did not move as it- as she reached out with her empty hand and held it over his, not touching the gemstone, merely hovering over it. Their fingertips brushed. Hers were cold, but not frozen. Not cruel. The underside of her palm was shot through with gold, the gilding of a forgotten age.

The word came to him clearly then.

Tenno.

The dark thing mutely turned away. Tyre watched her go, watched her walk through the forcefield at the far end of the docking bay and simply float out into the vacuum, where she was picked up by an odd looking little ship. After that, he was left alone in Eunomia Station with only the dead for company. He did not bother looking for survivors, knowing there wouldn't be any. Tyre sat down on the floor of the locker and held the piece of azurite to his chest. Exhausted and shaking with adrenaline, he tried to ponder what was left for him to do. He could not pilot the Scarab. The words and numbers needed to run the navigation consoles were beyond his ken. The neatly stacked crates of ferrite seemed so pointless now. He dozed and woke, and waited for something to change.

When the small, beetle-like skiff pulled into the dock an hour or so later, Tyre did not move from his seat. The ship was unmarked; he wondered if its crew would beat him, either to test his fortitude before accepting him as one of their own, or to extract whatever information they needed from the station's lone survivor. Tyre wondered what he would tell them either way.

The Grineer female approached him slowly, a pistol at her hip, obviously wondering if he was dead, too. When Tyre blinked at her, the female walked straight up to him and looked down into his face. Her pewter-colored lips were edged with the mottled brown of Decay, but her one good eye sparkled with good humor. She cracked a grin and stuck out her hand.

"Hey, there," she said cheerfully. "A friend of mine said you might be lookin' fer a lift?"