The surface of Aegis II wasn't as marred as it should have been. The tell-tale signs of an Etruscan presence was missing; there was not a single shred of evidence that any amount of destruction had taken place, not recently anyway. The purple haze of the atmosphere loomed overhead as Bonechill exited his starskipper. The star of this system was a giant omniscient eye staring down at the planet, watching his every move. If he had skin, his exposed face would have tanned.

The ground was a mixture of partially emulsified dirt and methane. Hardly the type of underfoot to build the foundation of any kind of building on. And yet, about a kilometer from his location, there was a structure standing stout against the horizon. It was a large building, more flat than it was tall, and tiny shapes moved in an out of it. Through his binoculars, Bonechill could see the silhouettes of humans loading the crates of pythereum onto their starskippers. 

The starskippers themselves weren't anything like what dissenter organizations usually got their hands on. Most of the time dissenters were scurrying around the Outer Rim in garbage barges that were barely held together by spit and duct tape. The refuse of the System Collective, or the shoddily repaired remnants of ships left over from space warfare, were barely space-faring to begin with. They flew ships even the Elysium could chase down on her worst days, and she's had plenty of worst days.

But those starskippers were new.

From where he stood, Bonechill could see two starskippers, painted in black and blue with an insignia he didn't recognize. Couldn't have belonged to one of the Royal Families, unless someone changed a family emblem in the last two hundred years. They were certainly too new to belong to Earth Gov, the starskippers barely had a scratch on them. Even ships fresh off the line gained a few dents and scratches from space debris on their maiden voyage. Shielding never kicked until a few seconds after you flipped the switch, and any number of tiny bits of asteroid could make an impact on your hull in that time.

He needed to get to that building. If dissenter groups were capable of building starskippers out here, there was a non-zero chance that they were starting mobilize together. 

Priorities; destroy the signal jammer, then the pythereum. Bonechill put his binoculars away and made the trek to the building, staying as low as he could. 

When he arrived, he spotted one of the structural insecurities that Pythia told him about; a hole in the wall about the size of an average humanoid. More than enough space for him to slip through. He pressed his back against the wall, making himself as flat as possible, before peering his head around the corner. 

It was clear from the mountains of barrels that this room was used for storage. The radiation alone was enough to make the space unlivable, and certainly unusable for anything other than radioactive materials like pythereum. LEDs flickered on and off overhead, as if the place was losing power and about to go dark. As he overheard people talking down a hallway, Bonechill hid in-between several of the barrels, trying to hear better.

"--and we're going to make it back in one piece. After this haul you can relax, okay?" said one voice, a female.

"What about when SysCo catches on? What if they send the Reaper?" replied the other voice, a male. 

"Try to stop worrying so much, honey. Everything's going to be okay, alright? I promise."

"You don't know that!" There was sound of metal scrapping against the floor, before hydraulics activated. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to yell."

"It's okay, it's stressful, I get it. But no one will know we were ever here, and when we get back home we can relax. Help me with this?"

Bonechill placed his hand on his plasma pistol and steadied himself. He heard the pair's footsteps as they approached his hiding spot; the woman whispering reassurances to the man while the man voiced his concerns. Together they loaded a few more barrels one after the other onto their machine, unaware of his presence. Bonechill melted into the shadows of the barrels behind him, placed his arm on top of one to steady his aim, and took the shot. 

The man looked back at his partner, mouth agape. Both of them were wearing standard radiation suits, yellow and black in color, with a clear visor and the emblem of Lushious colonists on the right breast. Bonechill was already on him before he could scream. 

He tackled the man to the ground, shattering his visor with the butt of his plasma pistol before aiming it at the man's head. The man was bleeding from the shrapnel in his face and babbling. 

Bonechill leaned in close, so close that his nose hole was nearly touching the man's face as he whispered, "Where's your signal jammer?"

The man's eyes darted back and forth, searching for some means of escape or perhaps a way to call for help, but he found no respite. Bonechill grabbed him by the scruff of his broken visor and dragged him over to his partner. 

He'd shot her right through the back of the head. There was a dinner plate sized hole where her face used to be, and a mixture of plasma and blood pooling around her head, forming a chunky brown sludge. Her body hadn't quite realized what had happened yet, as the muscles in her fingers and legs spasmed without rhyme or reason. Bonechill dug his knee into the man's back, pushing his face close to the meaty, gelatinous hole. 

"Where's your signal jammer?" Bonechill repeated. 

He heard the man hyperventilate and sob, begging some unintelligible nonsense about wanting to live, or how could the Reaper do this to them. Nothing important. And he likely wouldn't have said anything important either. The intense radiation would have started to rot his brain by now. 

Bonechill rose to his feet and shot the man, leaving him and his partner where they lay. 

The mechanical handtruck the pair were using was left half-loaded with three barrels of pythereum on its bay. With an effort he pried open one of the lids and dipped his hand inside, scooping out a bit of the pythereum. It was warm to the touch and glowed a faint orange. He'd seen even this much cause fatal hemorrhaging in most sentient life, and humans were among the most fragile species in the galaxy. 

He coated the exterior of his suit with the stuff and started down the hallway. Twenty left, counting the Etruscan. Shouldn't be too much work, all things considered. If he didn't get to them first, the radiation would claim them in time. All he had to do was get close. 

Bonechill stalked through the corridors of the building, checking his six every now and then to avoid being snuck up on. He had tried to find some kind of pattern in the pipes that lined the ceiling, something that would lead him to the signal jammer instead of fiddling around in the maze-like structure. But every line of pipes led him to a dead end, or another room with absolutely nothing in it. 

Just as he was about to round another corner, he noticed something glowing just beyond a cracked door. He inched closer, plasma pistols drawn and ready to fire at a moment's notice.

He crept toward the door, nudging it open with one of his plasma pistols. Bonechill couldn't detect any movement through the crack before he stepped through himself. He closed the door behind himself, not making a sound. 

What he found inside was not the signal jammer. Bonechill wasn't entirely sure what he was looking at, either. 

The creature in the stasis chamber wasn't humanoid at all. It wasn't fourth dimensional, nor was it quite three dimensional either. It was somehow... less than that, but more than that at the same time. Where the eyes on most species would be, there were four hollow pits of inky blue, each showing Bonechill visions that he couldn't comprehend in their glossy, reflective surfaces. What had presumably once been a mouth was now sealed shut, either through radiation joining the flesh together or they were welded shut. Two sets of arms extended from the thing in four different directions, making a cross shape with the main body as its center. The hands, seven digits on each, reached out and grasped at nothing, like maws trying to satiate a ceaseless hunger.

Bonechill could feel the twang of radiation hitting his skeleton. The thing that sat before him opened the top of its head, and from the wound emerged a prehensile tongue. The tongue flailed in the stasis chamber wildly for just a moment before it stopped and receded back into the skull. The eyes, glossy and unfocused just a moment ago, were now all trained on Bonechill. 

The feelings that struck him was pandemonium. A horrid darkness wraps its snaky tendrils around the very fiber of his soul, and he was torn asunder a thousand thousand times over a million lifetimes all at once. Bonechill called out, but his voice found no wind to travel on. He screamed, but the sound was snatched out of his throat. He reached into the ether, clawing at nothing, tearing apart infinity just to find something to latch on to. Something to ground him.

But he found no purchase. 

Bonechill fell. He wasn't sure for how long, he wasn't even sure if he was falling to begin with. But he drifted downward for centuries, sinking deeper and deeper into the blackness that engulfed him. For a moment he was weightless. For an infinitesimal moment, he was an abstract concept floating through the universe.

Then he heard the sound of a laser pistol arming, and then he felt the bones on the back of his head disintegrate.