As the recruit made contact panic set in immediately. It was one thing to explore uncharted worlds and encounter the occasional piece of antiquated alien technology, architecture, or even a random fossil, but coming face to face with something so anatomically foreign from even the most modified Ultramarines or cybernetically altered humans was something else entirely. In all of the solar systems visited and planets explored never had there been any indication that humans were anything other than utterly alone in the universe.
The environment inside the object was as strange as the entity currently observing her. With a concerted effort, the recruit managed to slow her breathing enough to start thinking straight and attempted to engage a diagnostic scan of her suit. Nothing. No indication that the suit was even being powered, which meant that life support systems were offline, but raised even more questions when realizing that she was hovering in place inside the vortex without thrust.
The entity drew close enough that it's face was nearly pressed against the flash visor of the suit's helmet. As it's eyes started to glow, the recruit felt a pressure building inside of her head and suddenly images started flooding her consciousness of stars being ripped apart and planets shredded while the fragments were hurled out of their systems into interstellar space. Star maps flashed quickly burning themselves into the crevices of her mind. The recruit started to convulse and felt her limbs twitching against the inside of the unmoving walls of her suit.
One last image was burned into her mind of machines weaving streams of raw matter from the destroyed celestial bodies, refining the materials into their base elements before reorganizing them into an unfathomably large structure in the middle of empty vacuum so remote that no stars were visible in any direction. Existence itself seemed to bend and warp around the monolithic creation as if the sheer gravity of it could not be contained on a three dimensional plane, but somehow it wasn't collapsing under it's own weight.
As quickly as it had begun, the recruit felt herself expelled from the structure and could no longer see the entity contained within it. The word 'nexus' seemed to come to mind when looking at the device, but she was unsure why or how she knew that. The safeguards on the suit kicked in and restarted life support functions. While still trying to process what had just happened and determine whether the experience was real or if she had been knocked unconscious and summoned up some sort of twisted apparition in a semi lucid state, a direct com link from the ship overrode the visual field of the flash visor. The captain himself was staring at her impatiently.
Read more