Spoilers

NONE

In the Infested Ship tileset on Eris, there is an infrequent room featuring a trapped Corpus Crewmen desperately trying to escape the biomass. He does not speak, and the player is unable to interact with him in any way – except to put a merciful end to his suffering.

This is his story.

My name is Canto Denarii.

I was navigator aboard the Juno Moneta, a Corpus freighter of the line.

And I was a fool.

I could make excuses, of course, but that's all they would be. Excuses. Whether this account serves to condemn or exonerate me, I will catalog the incident as faithfully as am I able to recall. I have already been judged, not in any court of my peers, but by a remnant of the Orokin Empire-that-was... and I have been found wanting. I think it knew that even as it saved me.

These Tenno… their kindness is often an altogether different sort of cruelty.

In any case, it is my hope that these memoirs will shed some light on the fate on the Juno Moneta and her crew. Where I go from here remains uncertain, but at least my part in those events will be accounted for.

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I will start at the beginning.

According to the Company Calendar, in keeping with Orokin Standard, these events took place between the 15th and 17th of the month of Martius in the year 10,191. By the Ostron Lua-Count, which we were often compelled to use in our dealings with their floating markets, it was the 28th of Nagpa, Year of the Golden Mergoo.

I was stationed out of Valhalla Basin on Callisto, where the Company maintains the largest metropolitan colony in the sector. From the lowest prefab homes on the outermost trough zone to the great, glitter-glass manses located at its center, seeing it from low orbit is quite the sight. To those unfortunate masses that have neither the funds nor means to travel the System, I tell you that there are few things that compare the majesty of Jupiter hanging low in the midnight sky.

It is not impossible to mine a star. It is possible to mine anything if margins are profitable, and Jupiter was nothing if not profitable. Day and night, helium and metallic hydrogen is mined from the upper atmosphere of the planet, while rich silicate deposits and purple Gracilarian kelp are farmed from Callisto's vast subsurface ocean. The former goes into everything there is to manufacture, while the latter is a favorite ingredient in salads and jellied condiments.

The Juno Moneta was a freighter by trade and not a particularly big one at that, running loads of commodities to the colonies out on Pluto, where we'd usually dock at Thanatos Station – by far the biggest speck of civilization on that tiny, misbegotten rock. I was standing second watch as wemade the bimonthly trip, our holds stocked with routine supplies, when a flicker came across my board.

The signal was very faint, coming from well beyond the Outer Terminus. If we hadn't adjusted trajectory to avoid a comet shower the previous afternoon, I doubt the Juno's instrumentation would have picked it up at all. I managed to identify the garbled wavelength as an emergency transponder registered to a deep-ore mining hauler by the name of Lira. A subsequent review of the registry database told me that the vessel had been listed as MIA approximately four months previous.

It is rare that a man can track his downfall back to a single moment in time.

That moment on the Juno Moneta was mine.

Company protocol dictated that I report the distress beacon to the nearest military vessel or installation – in this case, Thanatos Station – and hand over all pertinent data, including any logs or transmissions that might have been acquired.

I did not.

There is a rich tradition of salvage rights within the Company. Dedicated salvage teams often make a hefty profit by stripping Grineer vessels, Orokin-era derelicts, and failed mining colonies for every copper wire their holds could carry. The returns on a Stanchion-class mining hauler, to say nothing of potential cargo, would double or even triple my current portfolio, far more than a ship's navigator could hope to see in a year.

I downloaded the coordinates to a holotab and erased the logs. With the only copy in my hand, I then went to see the Juno Moneta's captain, a man by the name of Zebedee Cassel. For the record, Cassel was close to six foot six and lanky as an Eidolon, with a neatly sculpted beard that hid a chin sharp enough to puncture a bulkhead. He was a fair man, and occasionally my friend.

After some effort on my part, he was quite convinced. We agreed to split the profit, and he ordered the ship diverted to the coordinates I'd acquired. There are no Golden Rails beyond the Jovian system, as you well know, but with some clever bookkeeping to account for fuel costs, it took us approximately 32 hours to reach our destination.

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The Kuiper Belt is an empty, desolate place filled with the icy corpses of stillborn planets. As I set a vector toward Eris, I wondered if the Lira had crash-landed on its surface. I am ashamed to admit that I hadn't considered the possibility of survivors, but after a moment's reflection, I concluded there weren't likely to be any. At the time of our arrival, the tiny planetoid's orbit had taken it so far from the sun that its atmosphere had frozen and was falling to the surface as snow.

We found the Lira in a decaying orbit around Eris' solitary moon, Dysnomia. Structurally speaking the hauler looked perfectly intact, and sensor beams indicated that the engines still had power, but repeated hails elicited no response. We followed standard docking procedures.

As I've said, the Juno Moneta is not a particularly large ship, and I have never been aboard a military vessel for comparison, so I admit to being taken aback by the cavernous size of the Lira's docking bay. It needed to be big to hold all that monstrous equipment, the earth-movers and stone-haulers with caterpillar tracks higher than my head. I remember how warm the air felt, how it tasted like metal and dirt, and smelled like the rotten mud they haul up on Callisto.

Fifteen of us boarded the Lira and split into three groups; one to check the medbays for the survivors I'd selfishly hoped we'd not find, another to check engineering, and one to investigate the bridge. Captain Cassel and I were amongst the latter, accompanied by Miri X, ship's tactical officer, and Julian Verge, comms specialist. I don't know if any my crewmates caught on to the real reason we'd come aboard the Lira, that under the pretense of searching for answers, the Captain and I only wanted to check the logs to see how much mineral wealth had already been stowed in the hold.

By the time our group had reached the bridge, the vacancy of the ship had become nerve-racking. Soon were we all sweating in the muggy air and Cassel was getting antsy. While Verge checked the logs, we checked the manifest. I was excited to find the holds brimming with several metric tons of ferrite, nickel-iron, and rare asterite crystals. The Lira had been just a few weeks short of surpassing their quota.

Given this information, we were all wondering the same thing. A ship this size would have retained a crew of nearly 200 Company men and women, so where in the hell was the crew? If there had been some kind of hostile boarding action, we would have seen blood or bodies, or the telltale punctures left by ramsleds. Instead we'd been greeted low lights, rancid odors, and empty corridors creaking against the hollow void of space. It was if the crew had vanished into thin air.

Down in the medbay, our CMO – a severe woman by the name of Lenora who, through every fault of her own, had the misfortune to remind me of the negligent mother I'd left as soon as I'd turned sixteen – described unidentified fungal growths that'd taken over the empty beds and biocapsules (a report echoed by our teams in engineering). Without any visual reference to fuel my imagination, I found myself thinking of the loathsome slime molds and mutant fungi that carpet the Orb Vallis. Disgusting, but ultimately harmless. None of us grasped the implications of the horror we'd unwittingly entered upon.

Neither had the Lira's crew.

According to the logs, the Lira – having ranged much further than any commercial hauler in the sector – had discovered a rich seam of ore approximately five months ago. (Her captain had stricken the exact location from the record.) Subsequent mining operations had been immensely profitable, and they'd evidently thought to return several times before the seam played itself out. The promise of a massive payday had only increased with the discovery of an authentic Orokin derelict approximately seven klicks from their brand-new strip mine. The corvette's disastrous planetfall, a perfectly straight avenue gouged deep into the icy surface of Dysnomia, had apparently exposed the vein of ferrite that'd drawn the Lira's attention in the first place.

Golden detritus had splattered for kilometers in all directions, but the ship was reported as being largely intact – and the Lira's hold contained more than just valuable minerals. The cargo manifests I read that day also listed Orokin computing devices, kesslers, fresnels, rare aboroflora trees and decorative knickknacks of every shape and kind.

I was going to be a very rich man.

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Using the hoverlifts and maglev dollies normally used to offload our own cargo, we immediately delved into the Lira's pregnant belly and began transferring everything she held onto the Moneta. We soon realized that even with our own shipments pushed out into the corridors to free up space, we could take less than a quarter of the Lira's spoils. Naturally, we decided to start with the most valuable items.

We were in high spirits. The worst part was the growths.

As we worked, it became apparent that the pulsating mats of fungus weren't merely growing on everything… but somehow growing out of it, as if they had fused directly to the metal and fiberplastic. Luminous orange pustules would burst as we worked, showering us in embered spores like cinders swept up from a fire. I wasn't worried. My suit was atmospherically sealed. Everyone's was.

But it got in anyway.

Symon was the first to show signs. Within a few hours he was mentally disoriented and, according to what news trickled up from Lenora's tyrannical little kingdom, running an unusually high fever. He was sent back to his quarters with a medpatch slapped to his arm and orders to get some sleep. There'd been the usual hibernal outbreak of flu back on Callisto and nobody thought anything of it – other than to wonder if poor Symon had breathed on any of us before he'd turned symptomatic.

I remember resolving to take a handful of zinc supplements when I got off shift.

Meanwhile, the growths bedeviling our attempts at pillaging had become so thick that progress came to a standstill. Captain Cassel ordered several acetylene torches up from maintenance, and with full tanks we turned those bright geysers of burning gas towards the tumors. The quivering mass convulsed as though we'd prodded a living thing and incandescent trails raced through the aggregate like electrical signals along exposed nerves. Something shuddered in the depths of the vessel. Not the cry of a beast or the shriek of anything human, but a subsonic rumble, like the grinding of gristle in an arthritic knee, whose sound almost contained the shape of words.

Within moments the first of the horrors appeared.

The Lira's cargo hold was neither the deepest nor the lowest part of the ship; that designation belonged to the sumps, to the baffles and crowded spaces where the vessel stored the engines and machinery that propelled it through space. The creatures came up from there.

I say creatures, but a better term would have been monsters, twisted abominations that resembled living things only as a grotesque sum of parts. The first one I saw came at me along the ground, pulling itself along using two palpitating appendages which terminated in bloated hands.

It was human. Had been human. Beneath it's sickly flesh I could see the outline of shoulders, the boxy and elongated helmet worn by all Corpus representatives. It had no legs, no lower body whatsoever – yet it came at me with a frightening speed. I was unarmed, but I grabbed my acetylene tank by the nozzle and swung it at the monster just as it reached me. I can't say I killed the thing, for surely it must have been already dead… but I got it to stop, motionless in puddle of clotted orange fluid whose malodor reached my nose even through the seals. You cannot imagine such a smell. It spoke of rot and pulsating flesh, but also something seductively wet and infinitely harder to describe. If bees could somehow extract nectar from the fluids of a corpse, I imagine this is how their fecund honey might smell.

More came soon after the first, until there was no doubt what had befallen the Lira's crew. Quadruped horrors arrived with tumors sprouting from chest cavities rotated so far from center, their ruptured sternum faced the ceiling while their lolling heads hung beneath like an udder or a single, swaying testicle. More often than not, they still showed a recognizable human face. Waxy skin and sunken eyes frozen in perpetual horror. The entire mass… the hive of growths that'd taken over the Lira's bowels like intestinal worms… had awakened.

As they came loping towards us, these horrors birthed from reconstituted human flesh, something flitted across the back of my mind… stories of a handcrafted disease created long before the Old War. I denied it at first. Of course I did. In all my thirty eight years there had been only one, single, unsubstantiated rumor of an outbreak on some floating Ostron market, and even then, no one really believed it. Knowing those backwater yokels drink the fluids that seep from that techno-organic Tower they venerate like some kind of god, I couldn't help but think that contracting some rare Orokin cancer seemed par for the course.

The Infestation is much worse. Somewhere in the depths of that golden derelict, broken against the barren surface of a moon drifting in an expanse of space so vast, even planets become grains of sand, the star-scourge of the Orokin had survived. And the Lira's hapless crew had brought it back to life. Or perhaps they'd merely been its latest meal.

Armed with mother-wrenches and blazing acetylene torches, we tried to hold out against the onslaught, but we were not a military vessel. Our complement of weapons consisted of only a few Detron pulse rifles and personal sidearms. After numerous casualties were incurred, we eventually retreated to the Moneta and attempted to seal ourselves off, but it was too late. When two ships dock together, regardless of size, there is an exchange of oxygen via the airlock as the two vessels match pressure. Standard filtration procedures usually provide enough of a barrier to prevent the spread of mold or any of the usual illnesses. They weren't designed to filter out a plague even the Orokin had feared.

A glance out a starboard window revealed inky black tendrils, like the root system of rotten tree, snaking out from between the Lira's hull plates and latching onto the Moneta via the umbilical, worming its way into critical mechanisms. Even now, it was not the speed at which the tendrils grew that alarmed me; it was how intelligently they'd seemed to do it.

Unable to decouple from the Lira, we could only drift along with her.

Naturally we tried to comm Thanatos Station for help, but our distress beacon went no further than that of the unfortunate Lira. Hysteria began to set in amongst the crew. Cassel dispatched a team onto the hull to try and cut us loose, but where us pitiful humans need oxygen to breathe and insulated suits to protect us against the merciless cold, the Infested have no such qualms. They attacked us in vacuum, claiming several more victims, including poor Mira X, before the group managed to retreat to the airlock. She and I were not the best of friends. In fact we often fought, but we were crewmates and I… recall her having two children somewhere in the colonies.

We brought the bodies inside, and I personally helped CMO Lenora zip them into storage bags. At that point the Moneta's tiny morgue (four refrigerated drawers meant for transient use) was already full, so we had to pile them in the auxiliary airlock, close to the chill of the outer hull. Our respect for the dead only accelerated our downfall. We should have thrown the bodies out into space.

They did not… well, they did not come after us like the reanimated dead worn ragged by every holodrama in the System… but they did come back. Later, as I peered into the narrow window that afforded me a view of the airlock, it was if the bodies had melted… leaving their gore-smeared bags deflated and empty… while something of roughly equal mass writhed and pulsated in the corner between wall and ceiling. Patchwork horrors arose, and although we spaced the airlock, it did little to purge its contents.

You recall I mentioned Symon. After some hours had passed, and we collectively seemed to remember him (or rather, to finally recall the reason for his absence) someone was sent to rouse him from his bunk. She came back white and shaking, telling us how Infested growths had filled his quarters, while Symon himself – what was left of his half-assimilated body – hung from pulsating sinews and organic cordage, a gory picture she likened to that ancient, near-forgotten sect of religion where Divinity hung from a cruciform.

We sealed the door – sealed the entire section! The Moneta had escape pods, of course, and after 32 hours of trying to everything we could think of, anything we could do to save both ourselves and our cargo, Captain Cassel ordered us to abandon ship. But the pods did not deploy. I don't know why. Maybe there hadn't been enough reserve power. Maybe if we'd rebooted the OS… maybe then they would have deployed. Maybe the Infested had wormed its way into those systems, too. Hell, maybe it was even smart enough to plan it that way!

At that point, nightmare and reality blurred together in my head. I remember losing the Captain as we forced our way back to Deck 3. At that point, I hadn't seen Verge in over two hours. I don't know how or when he met his fate. I remember slipping in sticky-sweet, tar-like excretions as I scrambled towards the medbay. There I found Lenora dead next to an open bottle of Scotch, an eruption of blood painting the wall behind her in a dazzling rooster tail of crimson. My foot kicked at her Plinx as I staggered away, the telltales along the side of the weapon indicating that a single charge had been expelled from the battery. Of all those who perished onboard the Moneta, she was only one who'd done so on her own terms.

Alone and half-mad, I fled across the umbilical back into the Lira. In my panic I thought to try one of the hauler's escape pods, or failing that, to attempt to open the hold and cast some piece of mining equipment out into the black, a life raft without food or water, and only a low band emergency beacon meant to draw rescuers to the sight of cave-in, or other such disaster.

The main route was plugged by Infested, so I squeezed myself into the maintenance shafts – the latest in my series of stupid plans. I had only the vaguest idea of how these passageways fit together, and if some Infested spawn had come upon me while I was on my hands and knees, I'd have been eaten right there. As it was, however, I somehow made it down three decks before finding my way blocked by a clot of organic matter.

The tube I'd descended had been pushed up by the force of its growth, and there was a narrow gap at the bottom that I thought to squeeze through and escape. In my infinite wisdom, I removed my helmet and got down on my stomach, using fingers and toes to try and lever myself through the opening.

I'd pulled myself halfway out when the aperture closed against my hips. Perhaps the Infested tissue had swelled as I agitated it, or perhaps the damn thing was just sentient enough to be cruel.

I thrashed and contorted, but the pulsating tissue only seemed to engorge itself further, so I dug my fingers into everything I could reach and tried to twist myself out instead. I later found out that I had sprained my back and bruised both kidneys, but at the time my desperation to survive was so intense, I don't recall even feeling the pain. Slowly I realized that the tissue wasn't just swelling; it was winding around my legs. The movement was slow and thick. I might have held it off for hours had I conserved my energy.

Exhausted and drenched in several liters of my own sweat, I could barely kick either of my legs.

To make matters worse, I'd caught my ankle against some flange of exposed chitin buried inside the mass and a dull, writhing ache now pulsed up my calf in time with my heart. My lungs burned as though I'd inhaled thorns. Liquid heat pooled in my boot, squelching hot around my toes. Every so often I'd struggle for a moment, then lie forward on the deck with my weight braced against shaking arms. I didn't scream. There was no one to scream for, and I was too afraid the sound would attract unwanted attention.

Certain that I was soon to die, I should have been thinking about home, about my pristine apartment back on Callisto with its view of the River Vimur – a magnificent artificial canal built not for traffic, but to be admired for the way it reflected the incandescent Jovian auras and glittering Company offices. I should have been thinking about a past lover, or my elder sister's home-cooked meals. Sari had all but raised me while our mother was lying somewhere with a needle in her arm. I hadn't seen her in years.

None of these things crossed my mind.

All I could think about was the undeniable certainty that the Moneta would never have come here if it hadn't been for me. We never would have passed the Outer Terminus, beyond the reach of all help, if I'd just reported the Lira's distress beacon to the proper authorities. The agony tunneling up my leg grew with the guilt and self-recriminating grief. My head filled with impulses that were almost words, urges that scratched and mingled with the ragged sob of my own breath, the suggestion of speech hidden in every malignant noise.

Hunger/

Kill/

Feed/

I couldn't hear the words. I felt them.

We hunger/

We… expand. We absorb.

Hunger/HUNGER

The door across from me gave a thunderous bang. I swallowed a scream and raised myself to my elbows. The heavy door quaked again, bending inwards off its track as something powerful hammered on it from the other side. A hand punched through the seam between bulkheads. Fingers clenched hard enough to crumple alloyed steel, widening the gap enough for a second hand to join the first. Pneumatics hissed and burst as they levered the door apart. Infested spores dusted from the ceiling, fiery hot in the sudden, staccato flicker of light.

The thing on the other side of the door was no Infested, but it was a monstrosity. Two and half meters of restrained violence and armored plates trimmed in scintillating Orokin gold, it moved with remarkable grace for something so heavy and imposing. It stepped through the gap in the door, snapping bits of metal beneath its heel, and regarded me lying there – not with any eyes that I could see – but with a force of presence that nearly loosened my bowels.

I'd never laid eyes upon it in my life… but I knew what it was.

Nothing in this universe or the next, none but the vanished Orokin could have created something so marvelous… and so terrible. There was something gnarled about its body, something grown instead of built, like the contortions of some antediluvian bristlecone pine, and indeed its limbs were thick enough to have passed for tree trunks. Blast damage pockmarked its massive chest, leaving splintered craters that pulsed with metallic golden light. Our most advanced MOAs and Jackals and bipedal proxies were science fair novelties compared to the Tenno, those knights of a fallen empire.

It continued to stare me down without speaking, perhaps as surprised as I was. I reached for it with one hand. Please, I begged. Fervently. Desperately. Please. I was so mad with terror and exhaustion, my tongue glued inside my mouth like a desiccated slab of meat, I don't even know if the sounds I uttered were identifiable as words. Heat coiled in my leg. Something in my head hissed with anger… and fear.

Flesh of our flesh/

Enemy/

/Get away. GetawaygetawaygetAWAY!

Movement twitched near the ceiling, and something leapt from the puckered opening of a vent. I'd been right not to scream before. The noise had attracted attention. The Tenno barely reacted. Its massive hand shot out and grabbed the thing midair, holding it out by the throat. Armored fingers tightened and its esophagus burst in a torrent of luminescent gore. The abomination continued to writhe and contort, trying to wrap itself around the Tenno's arm.

With an echoing roar, the Tenno slammed the monster against the ground. The floor cratered. Chips of epoxy glaze flew into the air. The creature shrieked and hissed. The Tenno slammed it down again. And again. With a final crunch of bone the monster lay still, and the Tenno dropped the pulped remains as if ridding itself of dirty laundry.

It seemed to consider me again.

Seconds elongated into forever, but when the Tenno moved, it moved suddenly. Standing so near that I could have rested my cheek on its enormous gore-spattered boot, it made a fist and struck the conduit I'd wedged myself under. Hundreds of pebbled shards rained down on my back as it exploded. A hand fisted in the back of my suit, and I was tugged free with a grisly pop. The snare I'd exhausted myself against, loosened as easily as the lid of an annoying pickle jar.

Whatever had pierced my ankle must have been stoppering the wound, because as soon as it was gone, blood began oozing steadily. The Tenno dumped me onto my stomach, thick fingers probing at my ankle. Distracted by the slither in my skull, I felt rather than saw the blade. A moment later, I knew the razored heat of it.

I screamed obscenities mingled with the wordless screech of terror and betrayal.

I must have passed out because the next thing I remember, I was moving. I peeled my eyes open. Nausea clawed at my belly, but my head was empty. No slithering. No animal urges in the shape of words. It took me a long moment to realize that the waterfall of shifting color billowing against my face was actually the cloak falling from the Tenno's wide shoulders, its ragged edge whipping over the deckplate a meter below.

The Tenno had thrown me over it's shoulder like a disobedient child, one arm across the back of my knees, it's every stride impacting my stomach as I bounced against its armored pauldron… hauling ass to wherever it was so hellbent to go.

I slipped unconscious again.

When my eyes opened again… oh, the things I saw.

I was surrounded by polished alloys, by curving panels and consoles and shimmering glass, a bubble of serenity drifting out in the black. The merciless clarity of space hung so close that for a moment I thought I'd been tossed from the airlock – but I was alive, viewing the scintillating ice of the Kuiper Belt through a viewscreen as big as the tiny room I occupied. The Tenno stood next to me, its big hand fisted in my utility belt. I was once again struck by how huge it was, easily reaching seven feet. I was an insect in its shadow.

I also got the feeling that it'd roused me for a purpose, slapped my cheeks like a fainting debutante and filled my spine with whatever sorcerous narcotic was keeping the pain at bay. Despite the febrile exhaustion, my senses were painfully clear. I swear that I knew colors for which there is no name.

I also knew that I had only one leg.

The other ended in a cauterized stump just below the knee.

Too overwhelmed to process the revelation as anything more than data, I straightened and swayed, and turned my gaze back out into space. Eris and Dysnomia hung below us in perpetual twilight. Some kilometers closer, I could see the Lira and the Moneta drifting along with them. Even I watched, fire bloomed in the Lira's lower decks, bursting through viewports and hull-plates rapidly ballooning outward under the force of some internal explosion. The hauler shuddered and buckled as shockwaves tore it apart at the seams. Half the vessel cleaved away in a gout of flash-frozen oxygen, burning fuel, and chunks of organic matter. With a navigator's trained eye, I saw it's orbital trajectory wobble. The Moneta sank away with it, chained to the doomed hauler like a cancerous lover. Silhouetted against the stark white of the moon, I also saw half a dozen tiny, tumbling specks that I suddenly realized were bodies.

Hot bile rose in my throat. I wondered if any of them were Lenora, with her sour face that reminded me of my mother and the drinking habit she tried to hide, or the mouthy Miri X, who often commed her sons and the long-suffering sister who took care of them with snapshots of Jupiter's moons. Symon, Verge… the dozen or so other men and women who offloaded our cargo and scrubbed the grease from our engines. Our chief engineer had been a former debt-slave of Fortuna. As an enlisted navigator who'd graduated from the flight schools of Triton, I'd thought him so beneath me, I couldn't even recall the man's name.

The crew I'd murdered for my greed.

I tried to avert my gaze from the spectacle, but the Tenno – who had remained motionless up until this point – suddenly reached up and seized the back of my neck, preventing my head from turning. My heart was pounding so hard, I could feel my pulse hammering against the vise-like grip of his fingers. Almost as if he could read my thoughts, the Tenno flexed each of them in turn, slowly and one by one, so that I could feel them individually tighten against my spine. He gave me a little shake. The message was crystal clear.

WATCH.

I stared out the viewscreen as the pair of ships tumbled through Dysnomia's thin atmosphere, ten billion tons of twisted metal slamming into the surface with enough force to hurl snow into orbit. A thin ring formed around the moon as gravity carried the particles along. I'll never forget the words that husked from my mouth, not an apology, but a shameful desire to know how he'd been able to accuse me.

"How did you know?"

The Tenno held up a holotab, laughably small against its massive hand, and flicked it to land incriminatingly at my feet.

I stared at it for a long moment before I recognized it.

It was the holotab I'd loaded with the Lira's coordinates and distress beacon. The holotab digitally signed with my name and rank the moment I'd inserted it into the computer. Even a mundane court could have sentenced me with such evidence.

I nodded bleakly.

After a long moment, the Tenno released his grip on my neck and deposited me into the corner. I was a nonentity to him, a scolded dog being ignored after it urinated on the carpet. I curled up as best I could and laid my blistering forehead against the glass of the viewscreen, where the cold of space formed delicate fractals of ice.

Possessing of a wyrm drive far in advance of our own, it only took the Tenno craft a mere handful of hours to reach the edge of civilized space. I was not allowed to descend the aft ramp into the rest of the ship – if indeed where was anything back there to explore – and stayed huddled in my corner, my downcast eyes on the floor. I did not try to look around, not wanting to test the boundaries of the Tenno's patience by looking as though I was committing his secrets to memory. A female Cephalon once inquired after our destination. I deliberately forgot what was said.

He left me amidst a sea of rover tracks two klicks outside of Thanatos Station, next to an automated mining outpost that marked the outer limits of the settlement. I assume it must have paged the station with a distress beacon, because within the hour, I was being hustled off by a team of surprised rescuers.

There was an inquiry, of course.

I told them what I knew, and what I decided to reveal about my involvement. I told them about the Tenno, but in those days their presence was much lesser-known, and many of my attending physicians thought I'd gone mad. I never told them the coordinates which mark the grave of the Lira and the Moneta, or the dreaded star-scourge that might still lie awake in their coffin.

It is now the 19th of Iunis.

Recovery has been slow. I'd been a fool to remove my helmet on the Lira. Irritated from exposure to the Infested spores, my lungs began to fill with fluid, becoming swollen and blocked. The medics couldn't understand how I'd been breathing on my own, even for a few hours. The Tenno had been merciful – but the effects had long since worn off, and I was given two options. Tether myself to an oxygen bottle, or undergo partial augmentation. I opted for the latter. Now I resemble any other rig jockey out of Fortuna, or any of the Company's orbital mining subsidiaries.

I've been fitted with a prosthetic leg, too, a very good Diane-Herbin model, but the stump aches fiercely, forcing me to walk with a twisting limp. I like it that way. I don't want to forget. I petitioned the Company for partial access to Miri's records, enough to wire half my portfolio to her sons.

I've been offered a navigator's position aboard the hydrogen barge Helios, and at greatly increased pay, but I won't take it. The Company reps treat me like a hero, a survivor. I refuse to be rewarded for what I've done. Instead I've used what was left in my account, got in touch with a few acquaintances, and set myself up as the middleman for a salvage and technology trader.

And so I came to Cetus instead.

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Clutching a worn datapad close to his face, Canto Denarii had been writing for several hours in the flickering glow of an oil lamp. Electricity was scarce in Cetus, whose denizens preferred the gentle light of candles or Eidolon breath-globes. With the exception of small refrigeration units many households didn't even possess appliances, preferring to cook and eat their meals in large communal kitchens.

It had been difficult to adjust at first.

When he'd steered freighters and dropships between planets, his domain had been numbers and parabolas and complex holographs etched over the viewscreen in realtime. Now the texture of Denarii's world consisted of handmade ceramics, of silk and boiled wool overlaid with the musky, bloody scent of temple kuva wafting up from the flaying beaches, his Calisitian apartment traded for a modest hut on the outskirts of Cetus.

The locals had been welcoming of him, something that had surprised Denarii. He'd expected to be ostracized, or been at the receiving end of more than a few suspicious looks, but the Ostrons had shown him nothing but hospitality. A guarded kindness perhaps, but kindness nonetheless. Some days it made him feel irrepressibly guilty, knowing the dark secret he kept hidden from them.

Every morning he woke with the dawn and limped the short distance to the markets. Slowly he came to enjoy their alchemy of scent and sound, each voice trying to outdo their neighbor in volume. Everything in the System, be it people, news or goods, eventually made their way to Cetus. From the poorest colonist to those rich enough to own a moon – all felt the pull of the Unum. Even the Tenno.

Denarii saw them from time to time, always at a furtive distance and never face-to-face, but saw them he did. They came more often now, never making a spectacle of themselves, and he gradually came to recognize several individuals, the most frequent of which was the smaller one with the trailing red ribbons. They usually came to trade for information and occasionally for supplies – mostly auron and coprun, and sometimes the lotus silk made by clades of old women down by the shore. Despite their warrior's code, the Tenno were also as vain and elegant as the Golden Lords they'd once served.

Or so the whispers said.

Denarii knew who he was really waiting for-

-but he never saw the one who'd rescued him from the Lira.

His fingers, which had grown strong and calloused from months of lifting salvage, hesitated over his datapad. He wondered if he should add something else to his memoir. To his confession. The subject of it haunted his nights, when the steady drone of manual labor could no longer crowd out his thoughts. He'd grown content here on Earth. There was even a woman – a rug-weaver by the name of Aidana, who manned her stall directly across from him in the market – who had begun to take an interest in him despite his physical deformities. Denarii couldn't help but wonder. Who was he to deserve a good life, when he'd robbed over a dozen others of their chance at the same?

He turned the datapad over in his hands. Despair lapped the tired shores of his thoughts. He could always end his own life… atone for his crime once and for all… but something about it stuck in his craw. He thought of the Tenno again. If it'd found him so contemptible, why save him at all? Rumor insisted that the Tenno valued honor above all else… but what justice was there to be found in sparing a sinner like him? If it could not, would not, commit an act of deliberate cruelty by simply leaving him to his fate, a simple execution would not have violated their code. A quick death would still have been a mercy compared to the alternative. What was he missing?

A breeze sighed through his window, carrying a gale of laughter and phony squeals of pain. Denarii stood up and took his dark thoughts out onto the porch. Outside, the sun was just beginning to set. The fading light was warm on his skin. Earth's sky was a translucent shade of carnelian banded with columns of gold. Rock shadows blended sensuously with the outflung silhouette of the Unum thrown across the water. Looking down from his hut, Denarii watched a group of children chase each other along the beach. Several tumbled to the kuva-soaked gravel, then picked themselves up with a laugh.

They were playing Tenno.

A game of wooden swords and papier-mâché masks in crude likeness of their heroes.

There was never an argument of who was to be Tenno, and who was to be Grineer. These children had been born in Cetus, raised with the virtues of community. They took turns without fuss. Denarii sat down on a stool by the door, fingers absently massaging the half inch of intact flesh below his knee. A thin haze of smoke hung over the village, heavy with the scent of cardamom and grilled fish.

What was he missing?

It was important.

He watched Forgemaster Hok pause on his way somewhere else, listened to him holler at the children. Not for running, or for being too loud. As the little would-be Tenno raced past, Hok snagged her with a brawny hand, shoved the kid's elbows tighter to her sides, lifted her sword out further, and pressed her into a partial squat. She gave the new stance a few experimental swings. Hok grunted in satisfaction. Denarii rubbed his aching joint.

The Ostron people had a strong warrior tradition, and protected their own with the strength of hand-forged blades. Ever since their mysterious awakening, the Tenno had become Cetus' most stalwart defenders – but there were hundreds of Grineer, legions of Grineer, and even Warframes couldn't be everywhere at once. Those who lived here dwelled on the brink, and Cetus never truly slept. Even when the markets were closed there were meals to cook, laundry to do, ointments to prepare, new warriors to train, old warriors to mend.

The breeze picked up, ruffling the placid inland sea. A flock of coastal Mergoos wheeled overhead with a screech. Many fisherman regularly fed them. The ridiculous-looking creatures were supposed to be lucky. But it was more than that… it was a cycle of kindness, of service to other living creatures.

Someone called his name, and Denarii looked up towards the village. Aidana was standing on the stairs leading down to the beach, a massive copper pot braced against one hip. It was her turn to help in the kitchen tonight, and Denarii knew it would be filled with tubers or slabs of Tower flesh. There was a smile on her tanned face. She beckoned to him with her free hand.

When he didn't move right away, she affected an exaggerated pout, lips twisting into a frown meant to be visible at a distance. She beckoned more deliberately, this time using her finger in an obvious come-hither motion. The children laughed again and went pelting off down the shore. Voices drifted down from the market, hawking powdered dyes and half-priced jugs of kuva. Denarii's heart gave a lurch so fierce it bordered on pain.

Suddenly he understood.

The Tenno had condemned him to live… to atone for his mistake every time he made someone laugh, every hungry Mergoo he fed on the back porch… every bloodied warrior he helped carry to the healer, because he was the only one who could get that ancient hoverlift to work. He was used to transporting delicate cargo, after all.

His penance was earned every time he helped Aidana set up her brightly colored rugs, and every time he helped someone free of charge, because an old man had once gifted a lost ex-navigator several dozen fresh persimmons (including the homespun wicker basket) when Denarii had first come to Cetus.

It was early in his relationship with the rug-weaver… but if it continued… if in some distant future he was blessed enough to father children with her… his redemption was earned in seeing them raised with the simple honor he'd been forced to learn the hard way.

Denarii stiffly got to his feet. Aidana waited patiently for him to shuffle his way to her, alternating between teasing and encouragement. She called him a crotchety old man, knowing perfectly well he was still years from middle-age, and he called her a withered old shrew, knowing perfectly well she was younger than him. He tried to take the pot from her. She swatted his hands away. They linked arms and set off towards the kitchen area at the rear of the market.

Weather permitting, meals were always an outdoor affair in Cetus, warmed by the glow of a central fire and surrounded by the smell of food and fragrant bundles of vetiver grass to keep the mosquitoes away. Denarii had not planned to come to Old Earth, but as he chopped lotus roots and added them to the peanuts and red dates browning at the bottom of the kettle, he was glad it'd turned out that way.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxx-O-xxxxxxxxxxxxX

My name is Canto Denarii.

I am a merchant and huckster of Cetus, a settlement unique among the stars.

And I am going to live.

NOTES:

-o- In Roman mythology, Juno Moneta was an epithet of Juno (the wife of Jupiter) in her aspect as the protectress of funds. Coins were minted in her temple, and the word moneta is where we get the words "money" and "monetize". Her name also derives from the Latin monēre, which is taken to mean a warning or an admonishment.

-o- The Italian word canto(from the Latin cantus, meaning "song" or "singing") is a long subdivision of a narration, usually an epic poem. Denarii is the plural form of denarius, an ancient Roman silver coin. It was in circulation for only a couple of decades, but its legacy continues in the Italian word for money: denaro.

Canto Denarii – Song of Silver and/or Money.

-o- Aidana is a Kazakh girl's name meaning "Wise like the Moon" – because Cetus looks as though it is located on the north shore of the Caspian Sea in modern-day Kazakhstan.

-o- Before the adoption of the Euro in 2002, the lira was the standard unit of money in Italy. It remains so in Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria.

-o- Anyone catch the little Easter Egg from Dune? *chuckle* I cast the hairy eyeball in the direction of the new remake. The book and the 1984 cult classic are my bedrock. Lots of fond memories. The Tenno are absolutely Bene Gesserit children like Alia! Do not get me started on the parallels with Requiem Mods (Fass, Vome, Lohk) and the Weirding Way as it was adapted for the movie.

"Some thoughts have a certain sound, that being the equivalent to a form. Through sound and motion, you will be able to paralyze nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs…

…My name is a killing Word."

I will explore this in later fragments.

Carry on.