Orange light flooded in through his visor caressing his skin with a sickly pallor. Blue light from behind him filtered in through the very edges of his helmet, attempting to chase away the orange rot, but instead grew muddy and green as it too was contaminated by the orange light. Before them, the darkborn void mother lifted her hands and the Darkborn hive came swarming inward. Thousands upon thousands of darkborn clustered around her linking their arms together to create a lattice of bodies that stretched and heaved. Overhead the crystalline structure of glass and ice glittered with flecks of orange light.

"What are they doing." Adam muttered.

He didn't expect an answer, and no one offered it. Instead they sat, clustered together hidden against the prismatic backdrop of reflected glass and watched as the darkborn continued to circle their queen.. They circled and she twitched her body contorting this way and that with every movement. Against a backdrop of stars and light she was simply a cavorting silhouette against a backdrop of stars and ice.

Her back arched, her arms contorted into a rictus, and above her head, the orange halo flared.

The two twisted horns which protruded from her brow curved upwards into the sky, a dark crown of thorns with twenty or more points. And inside this crown was the halo, a ball of orange light that flared and waned with the twitching movements of her body. Sometimes it was simply a ball of light, a small pinprick positioned at the center of the antler's branching points, points which Adam now realized pointed directly at the small pinprick of light. But as her body convulsed, the pinprick of light flared and split shooting into a horizontal line of orange that flared open and closed like cat eye pupil.

For a rather disconcerting moment it reminded Adam of the eye of Sauron.

The darkborn continued to dance around their queen in earnest, and following every few minutes the orange light would flare again, and the strange halo would grow with size and intensity, until it was almost breaking from the boundaries of her antlers.

"Shit." Conn thought

And all of them agreed.

Even the starborn, who until recently had no concept of shit, had to agree.

"Whatever this is, "Adam said, "We have to stop it."

It was before that thought had even had time to fully form that the glass shattered. One moment they were sitting in the near silence watching the strange ritual go ahead before them, and the next moment the world around them was awash with silent shards of glass bursting away from a point just to their right. The Starbon scattered and incredible speeds, and Adam engaged his jetpack not wishing to be left behind.

The ritual was interrupted and the darkbron mother flailed her colossal arms as the flaring orange light on her head continued to pulse, though it did not die. Shards of glass peppered her massive body and she contorted with agony only causing the strange halo to flare brighter. Billions if not trillions of shards caught the light reflecting and refracting it in all directions until the field before them was a sinister disco of void energy, and not the kind of disco you break out your dance moves for.

And then they appeared.

A dozen or so sleek white ships glittering with internal golden light burst through the haze of glass and began to open fire on the void queen. They scored one or two hits before two dozen or more void ships cut them off from below pulsing with that same orange energy. They scattered in all directions shattering more glass and turning the world around him into a proverbial meat grinder.

Adam's radio crackled as he spun mid air attempting to avoid a chunk of glass bigger than himself , "Admiral, incoming Maker and void ships!"

No shit.

"I see them." he said

And then the Makers showed themselves, appearing I the dark as small streaks of light that when halted briefly seared burning golden silhouettes into his vision. They came in from all angels attacking the darkborn with single minded intensity. Above them the void mother continued to pulse and contort with the growing energy of her dark halo.

"Coming to you." He heard Ramirez say, and he simply grunted in response spinning left and right. He had been split from the others somewhere in the chaos, and was now simply rying not to get plastered into a glass shard like a bug against a windshield. The engine of his jetpack flared with the same golden light as the makers marking him as an open target to two darkborn who rushed at him from the darkness.

Adam shouted as one of the darkborn latched onto the front of his armor its wide circular mouth latching onto the front of his helmet like a leech. Adam didn't wait for it to try anything further and sent his hand straight through the thing's ribcage. It was almost sickening hos easy it was, and he tried not to think about it as he withdrew his hand and the creature began boiling fluid off into the vacume of space.

Another clawed at the outer side of his suit leaving gashes in the metal that luckily didn't penetrate.

A third was coming in from his other side just as he finished off the second, its arms outstretched.

And then.

It was simply gone in a burst of orange light.

Adam looked up, surprised and relieved when he saw who floated there before him, Captain Everette, the Maker who had been assigned to keep him safe. In just a brief moment, the man had him by the arm and was dragging him through the field of battle, blasting chunks of ice apart with bursts of bright orange energy hauling Adam through the chaos.

Orange and golden light glittered off his blond hair, and in the near dimness of space Adam couldn't help but remember the last time he had seen the man's face alive, marred by sickness and twisted with madness.

Adam had killed Captain Everette in self defense after finding his ship derelict and his crew dead. Many had turned to cannibalism as a result of mass hysteria including Everette himself, but since his death the Maker had been watching over Adam. It was only strange that he would appear here now.

A group of darkborn approached them, but then split and flowed around them to join the rest of the battle.

Adam was surprised but relieved.

"Where are we going." He said, trying to project his thoughts outward in the confusion and mass chaos. He was having trouble thinking as others minds battered against his own consciousness.

"Getting you out of here."

***

Maverick didn't like being left behind , none of the marines did, but she especially felt rather useless. Ever since the revelation about her past, she felt a poignant desire to make up for what she had done, and the things she had been involved in. She didn't remember it, but once upon a time she had hated Adam and the rest, been jealous of them in some way, and in her bitterness she had sold them out to the void.

The thought made her sick, weighed on her heart like a cement brick at the bottom of a river. She had always seen herself as a loyal person, but now she was beginning to wonder if that was the case. And then there was the thing inside her, the void creature that had been attached to her throughout her life, a whispering, sniveling, simpering thing that chattered in the back of her head, poked through her thoughts and tried to isolate her, tug at her bitterness.

She wondered if this is what is was like for those people with auditory hallucinations . She briefly wondered if she had simply experienced some sort of psychotic break and this was all a construction of her mind. She had even gone to see Dr. Adric about it. he was a good psychiatrist, and listened to her story intently . It was his professional opinion that, fortunately or unfortunately, this was not a product of her own mind.

This was real.

She did her best to ignore it all and hid herself away in the chapel where she was most comfortable. Yes the empyrean had soemthing that resembled a chapel and weather it was that or not, she liked to think it was. Perhaps this is where the Makers gathered to heard broadcast from the architect or soemthing similar, she couldn't know and she had no real desire to find out.

Ever since the creature had bonded with her back in that church basement, Maverick had felt uneasy. It wasn't with her all the time, in fact it had been mostly dormant for the most part. But ever since returning to sunny and Adam and the others, she had been uneasy. It was a similar feeling to the one that had followed her since her childhood, a sensation she now knew was a finely tuned void radar. And of course it would be going off right now, one of those creatures was inside her.

But.

Still she couldn't shake the feeling.

They were waiting for word from Adam, and maverick, all dressed up and ready in her battle gear was wandering around the ship waiting for the call over the comms that would draw them into action. She was wandering aimlessly lost in her own thoughts when she felt it.

A deepening sense of her unease.

She paused glancing up from her unease. She was in the administrative corridor, nowhere special, not far from Adam and Sunny's rooms.

And that is when the thing inside her lifted its head, and she imagined it sniffing the air like a dog.

Its voice was smug when it spoke softly to her.

"Looks like we aren't the only ones here."

Maverick frowned, "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean." The creature gloated, "Perhaps we can join forces." It mused.

Despite all the time Mavrick spent trying to convince the thing she wasn't interested in continuing the work from her previous life, it still like to plot like she was. It seemed convinced she would chose the void when the time came, and its surety made her nervous.

She glanced anxiously around her.

Even so, if there was something on this ship, wasn't it her duty to get rid of it?

If she wanted to prove that she was one of them, and not a puppet of the void, she had to figure out what it was. So she turned and made her way up the dark little hallway feeling herself grow more and more uneasy with every step as she headed directly towards the captain's quarters. She didn't like where this was going. Adam was Impetus after all the Architects golden son. If something was this close to him, that certainly didn't bode well.

The closer she got the more uneasy she got until a cold sweat had broken out across her back, and her entire body was standing on end.

The door was unlocked and hissed open sharply as she stepped within range.

The room was dark absent of occupants.

Even waffles was gone.

Or so it seemed.

But as the door open a wave of terror washed over her, to the point she almost ran in the opposite direction. The creature inside her swelled, filling her body with its presence, and as it did.

She could finally see.

The Dark silhouette standing before the bed ringed in pulsing orange voidlight. Its meline presence was one of pure evil, and maverick briefly wondered how she had missed it. She stared at it, and the creature stared at her its head cocked to one side at an angle that somehow seemed incredibly wrong. As soon as maverick began to move, it was already on her, knocking her back onto the floor and crouching over her. Her head hit the ground hard leaving her vision dancing with stars, but still she saw its face as it coalesced into being.

A face that was pleasant and seemed to be full of golden maker light.

Simply an illusion.

She had never met the man herself, only seen him in pictures.

Captain Everette Malaney

He reached back a fist, and then she was gone, her last thoughts filled with rage at herself. How had she not seen it before, come to the conclusion. She had felt the void presence on that derelict ship she just didn't know what it was and the memory had skipped her mind until now.

That ship.

Had been overtaken by the void.

And when Captain Everette died.....

His soul had not gone uncontaminated.