You'd think it would be easier to grasp the size of 'space', the emptiness between the solid jewels and burning lights that dotted the barest fraction of an unfathomable canvas. It was in the name. 'Space'. But problems with exact comprehensions were hardly the sole domain of subpar minds.
Space was big. Really, really, big. One could attach dozens of more uses of the word 'really', and it still would undersell the reality. Mapping it took far, far more than the metaphorical boots on the ground and some tools on a blank piece of paper to draw a map. If you didn't know where you were going, nor did you know how to slip from the bounds of basic physics, you could wander until every star burned out and never see more than the void.
Maybe it was a safety measure, being unable to really grasp it. Maybe it was just better not to understand, or filter it solely through massive numerical calculations that computers put into effect.
Some had called it the final frontier, but others had discovered that even its vastness was but a subset of even greater ones, and greater ones beyond that. But such concepts were best left to the philosophers and the insane. The pragmatic had enough trouble with just how BIG the 'here and now' was when it came to space.
Like, for example, how hard it was to just FIND things. Oh, you could just stumble over planets, stars, and whatnot, but you were just as likely to keep going and going and just finding more nothing. In the bounds of what was basically known, scanners had their work cut out for them. Endless vacuum in every direction was not as easy to investigate as planes in the air, as submersibles in the water, as motion on the land, as it innately was on a planet, and as plenty of workers in many arts, including war, would tell you, getting an idea of what and where on those fields could be hard enough. In space, in the void...
It required more, a lot more, than a scaled up GPS. It required you to slip the bounds of what you conceived of as absolute. Not that thinking minds were not up to that task. Men fell from the sky and drowned underwater. They found workarounds there.
You couldn't exactly 'smell-track' in space. Oh, space had been assessed to have some sort of odor, mostly in the vein of burning hydrocarbons, not that many species could actually step out into the hard vacuum and check firsthand. The idea of something tracking 'a scent' across space was simply impossible.
In what was known. In what was done, well...
Space was often compared to a body of water, an ocean of another stripe. One could track scents through water, if you had the right tools. And if you had the right tools, even if those tools defied the basic concepts of how such tools should have worked and how they shouldn't have worked in the environment they existed in...
Then again, it wasn't a 'smell-track' in the same way a bloodhound might seek a missing person after checking an item of their clothing. It was the closest approximation of a process that would crack the average brain in two before they understood it. Sometimes, you had to feel more than think.
And so through space, the Maw drifted.
Hunted.
----
-Galactic Federation Base Pallas-14. Operation: Deep Core Mining And Smelting-
If you'd asked Jac Archer, he'd have told you there was nothing worth stealing here.
Really, who broke into basically a giant hole slash furnace?
There was so much more valuable locations that were out there, across space. Lush planets. Clusters of vice and pleasure. A thousand thousand locations with a thousand thousand treasures. This was a place of raw material, a place of basic hard work, countless generations of evolution into building houses out of stones and wood, but still the same at its prime core. At best, some nasty folks might have wanted to use it as a secret base of operations. But ever since the Space Pirates had finally, FINALLY (by any and all hopes) been rendered extinct as an organization, there wasn't really anyone that someone like Jac could think of that would mean harm for his place of work and more or less home, for now. And even if something bad came stumbling around with less than kind attentions, well...that was why the Cinyras was in orbit. One Olympus-class would be more than enough to handle any random trouble.
Oh yes, there was always the possibility of something coming out of the void. Perhaps in other realms the question of life beyond the sky of what one saw was an ever-present question, fear, hope, and dream, but here, the vastness of space meant vastness of scope in what could be found. The Galactic Federation was barely a dot on a canvass that stretched from horizon to horizon. And if space could be said to be a sea, it had its sailors. And old sailor tales, stories of monsters from the dark and impossible discoveries, told by old, broken down men and women who'd be happy to share their amazing experience if you paid for another drink, or a dozen other rough equivalents. So yes, something COULD show up. But someone like Jac never expected anything to come of it except some brief moments of entertainment.
So when his workplace began shaking, and then violently quaking, which was impossible because this was an asteroid, it was large but not large enough to have tectonic plates, and as he went out to see the Encompass-Ment Shield rippling like someone was dropping the mother of all pebbles into the mildly sky-simulating pond the shield presented itself as, and the ship finally coming in from the right angle so the nearby star caught it, he was surprised that he knew what it was.
Maybe it was just some buried primal instinct, an animal confronted with the most apex of predators.
"Holy fuck, it's the Maw."
----
"Begin conversion. Go for the main generator complex first."
And the Maw unfolded, a mass of knives that could pierce atmospheres and hard rock to reach the sweet molten heat beneath, both horns and teeth that drove into Pallas-14, tearing through the constructs of man and space like it was rotten cheese. Buildings shattered. Voids cracked open as mines were torn asunder. Hundreds upon hundreds of tendrils extended out, seeking the smaller targets, the moving targets that pulsed with air and blood instead of fire, rock, and steel, the Maw opening up like a nightmare starfish as the primary power and forging complexes were ripped free and brought to crushing teeth the size of Kuwahawi islands.
Behind the Maw, the Cinvras burned in the void, breaking apart as it finished its destruction, dozens upon dozens of fighter ships, no two alike, picking off the last possible defenses, even as others fired off tractor beams, gathering up desirable parts of the debris...and the many escape pods. The powerful ship hadn't stood a chance, sliced to pieces even before the Maw had finished passing by to latch onto and consume Pallas-14.
"Getting more clingwork than expected."
"Compensate. Let's not lose the primary kinetic eruption."
---
"THE SHIPS! GET TO THE SHIPS! IT'S OUR ONLY CHANCE!"
Maybe it was fate that the main escape ships were in a position that could actually get around the Maw's clutching knives, that the tendrils hadn't seized them or the ships themselves, and Jac could hear the screams as those who were not so lucky were carried off into the nightmare above that was eating Pallas-14 like it was a finely ripe piece of fruit.
Jac kept expecting to be seized up. When he made it to the pair of ships and boarded one, he expected it to suddenly lurch and then be torn apart, or drawn up into whatever black fate had awaited those already caught. And when the ships launched, he expected to be caught up by the arms slash teeth that were closing in tighter, consuming the base whole, like a snake unhinging its jaw to swallow prey.
He finally had some hope when they were clear.
And then it sank as the ship behind them, caught in a sudden gravity well, yells and screams coming over a coms link that was unfortunately stuck open, stopped its escape, and then was carried back into the consuming black that was swallowing up the last of Pallas-14.
It distracted him long enough so that when he turned and saw the secondary wall of fighters waiting for them, more dozens, maybe even more hundreds, he really had no more shock to feel. Just numb inevitbility.
It was true. The Maw was real. Its fleet of 'teeth' were real.
And they were just another meal.
----
And so the caught escape ship spun into the roiling maelstrom of the consumption. Like a tiny seed dancing amongst a greater morsel, it somehow avoided blazing white pits of impossible heat, massive crunching mechanisms that smashed material into compact masses to feed into the pits, spiraling THINGS flying around and seizing choice unbroken bits; a large generator there, a mostly intact ship here. But they were not unnoticed, no. Sooner or later, the Maw wasted nothing.
"We can probably get another score of fighters out of this haul, Ms. Rose. Or, if you wish to take my suggestion into account...
"We can probably put together three quality freighters."
"Mmmmm. What say you, Abel?"
"We should...put guns on them...anyway. I dunno, Wreck, unless it's how to shoot I'm not so good at it. You got an opinion, big guy?"
The face barely changed, but the slight tilt of the head of the utterly massive form sitting next to the captain's chair was enough.
"Okay! Glad we had this talk!"
"Knock it off, Abel. DO you have any opinion, Nibiru?"
The giant shook his head.
"Ma'am? We're just about finished rounding up the clingers. Quite a few."
"Well, you know the process. See if any of them would rather seek their fortunes with us. Dispose of the rest in the usual fashion."
"Affirmative, ma'am. Do you wish to define the future schedule?"
"Actually, yes. I do, for once."
Abel made a gesture that comically indicated that this blew his mind. A white blade poked him in response, having previously been over the lap of the woman in the captain's chair, the black twin of said blade at the side of the semi-throne.
"We've been out here a while. I think we're overdue for some shore leave."
"It MAY be difficult to find a location that would accommodate both our numbers, our types, and well..." Syde gestured with one of her mechanical apparatus arms at the drifting debris that was still being gathered up. "Our reputation."
"Not to worry. I've heard of a new location that's due to have its own dose of madness injected directly into it. We'll fit right in. Raise a little hell, have a little fun, spend some coin. We'll behave."
"And what's this place called?"
"Olympia."
And so, when all was said and done, the Maw and its teeth, the Ravage, growing by the day, turned to once again sail the blackness, leaving naught but traces of what once was in its wake.
And tales.
The daughter of the sea, Requiem Rose.
----
It wasn't until a few days later that her good mood was dampened, as she looked at the alarm and the message from the incoming ship that had triggered it.
"...Who in all the colors of hell is Samus Aran?"
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