1.20-Strands of Shrikes

Get the Soundtrack here: [Transcript]Ether-shrike commission target was along the underbelly of Nadir. Not my home galaxy but I’m familiar. Long ancient home to humanoids this side of the Chasm though that was almost 8 billion years ago.Coordinates park us below the galactic disk on a moon without craters. We wait for the sands in the Pore Glass to stop moving. Zero kelvin at the top of the hour, we jettison the pod. Ether-shrike didn’t say what’s inside. Hamark revealed EMF readings, nothing else. Time’s up. Pod is sucked into vacuum, catches on the dorsal vent of the metaphysic diaphragm. Work to get it free when a shape breaks from the moon below. Aperiodic tiling like a Werslegosh honeycomb, front grid radiating heat high enough to trip environmental alarms. The comb closes over the pod, descends to the surface, takin’ us with it.Sands in a helitical funnel transition us from orbit to subterranean. Dark. I switch visual to infrared. Epsio-alloy scaffolding. It’s everywhere. Mounted in recesses are spools of a white ethereal silk as big as the ship, thread being fed from where we’re being dragged-the center of the moon.The strands pass through sieves splitten’ ‘em apart, sowing something else between ‘em, then sewing the whole thing up again. Needles threading tens of strings at once shift in right angles from one sieve to the next. Above us, below, on both sides, it’s all one mechanism spooling from a source at the center. A furnace or Nimian Arachnid are my guesses. Only I’m dead wrong.Ether-shrikes have small homes. Most gaseous, they take refuge in pressurized mercer tanks to reconstitute. They like music, humming by vibrating their tanks. Am fond of those immortal bastards. They’re almost as coveted as humanoids on the slave markets so we have common ground. Earned their trust dearly and didn’t question this job. Now I’m not so sure.At the center of the moon was a house. Dislodged the pod but was close enough to peer through a window. Arms of a machine crack the casing on our former cargo. Ether-shrike drifts out, lays out on a table next to another who’s older, ancient, the silk strands bleeding from its mouth as it sings a final note before the song and strand are siphoned from their replacement, the thread seamless in the transition.