TLUS.1.3. The painter flares

TLUS/1/3

A single ship appeared from nowhere.

Its teeth are bared and its talons raised to the small collection of defences which stared it down, with some surprise, as it drew closer. A planet paints them all, both the destination and the defended, as a great, churning mass of oil and milk in water, to create curling images to capture minds of both the advance, their ship vast and lurching, and those who watched, in pivoting capsules, like a sunken gun turret torn from the ground, to float as a thin and stretched rind around their salvage.

To stare from those guns, as people bustle and prepare, is to see but black, and then find all attentions hung on a speck, caught in light, foreign to this canvas, and pause, eyes wide. It is looking from a window and seeing a face. It is looking from a window into night, seeing nothing, yet knowing the same.

The captain of this ship stares back, framed by his squint, allegation flung to the arc. He is patient, and the crew which works behind him does so in silence, eyes twitching and fingers splayed over commands which run from all elements of the craft, their features sharp in colour against black, illuminated either by their screens or the shades from beyond, in catalogues of amber and white, to create a world of distorted colour within the bridge, which is crossed by a man who keeps his gaze to the front port, even if his address is to the captain, eyes trailing the ring.

A man ordered, on appearance to the planet, to relay the captains word that their manoeuvre was successful. That the taunt from the opposite side has drawn the defences, and that the dormant fleet in waiting, quiet and glaring at the dark, can appear alongside, to create a thousand eyes, leering through at those with safety at heart, behind their thin glass sheet. A scene to be relayed as little more than a description, of one and two. The darkness, and then the planet.

The captain scowls, and stares at three. Or maybe twenty, as the ranks of guns disappear into the endless night to the curve of their world.

The nightmares have been left to stutter, as the thing in bed turns, to draw a gun to their face.

The captain doesn't know. He keeps the obvious and tells his messenger he doesn't know. If there were more guns here before the taunt or none have moved, of his answer, he may as well turn the ship and stare at the black. So it is the messenger, in a voice of flinching disinterest, who asks why the guns haven't fired.

The captain blinked at a waiting volley, his skin shifting with the light of the planet. No point having guns if his ship beat them in range, the Fools would know, as the captain observed a whole world within his scope, let alone that ring of shooters. As he watched, the messenger took a slot of cables and screens from his side, to hold it to his ear as they both stare, figures swirling in cosmic camouflages, toward the line. His face is straight but not fearful as he listens, a smile and bright eyes bursting suddenly when he finds connection.

Their conversation was cut with abbreviations, as the messenger voiced that the scheme had worked, but some points had been left, just to be sure. An insecure line, maybe, the captain thought, as the speaker said nothing specific, and nothing detailed. What returned, in the voice of a commander the pilot recognised, was the question he was considering.

Why he was still alive. To that, the messenger had nothing.

The captain didn't look up as the messenger receding down the bridge, leaving without word to pass the panel hosting the true readings, inscribed into a lexicon of specific machine thought, to read the statistics of their quandary to the fleet, and the man, in a suite built for the beyond, who would hook these readings manually into a radio outside, to keep the message unseen. This deliverer glanced at the messenger as he passed but neither made contact, the man in the suites expressions concealed by his apparatus, hands working over the device. As he finished, to look down the hall toward the exit, the messenger paused, eyes caught on a reading from a wide screen, attention twitching for a second over an image of questions, that unemotional face now flecked with uncertainty.

The messenger called, speaking with little effort as the silence carried his voice, and asked the captain what the panel by the door showed. The captain mumbled that it was just a camera, to act as a window. The messenger should have known that.

The captain blinked.

He did.

The captain reached and pulled up the image onto his panel, to the attention of the crew, who saw him jerk after the call and now faced his screen.

Stars. He thinks they're stars, for a moment, but then he knows that this corelation isn't here. There isn't one; to his left, there should be but space.

Rocks.

They are rocks. Millions of them, flaring in the glow of the planet. Invisible from afar, and then a mist as they approach, although approach at speeds impossible. He's staring at a storm of stones.

He blinks, and sees the reason in the silent, observing guns.

They observe with a sneer.

He has wandered into a storm.

If there is anything to think, it becomes a sun in his mind, as all thought becomes consumed. To move forward, or to try to retreat. Take the hit maybe, but then to spare his bridge in advance or his main hull in retreat. To charge forward, and at least know which Foolish gun takes him.

But then, in those moments, he feels the fabled effect of death, which halts all presumed action, as things slow and things halt, his crew frozen with reaching hands and forming frowns, as in the halted time his head spins right, to look over at his people, himself then caught in the pause.

In his skull he twitches, unable to act. His thoughts are slow, read as though through a mist

He is cumbersome and slow, despite all of his work. A lifetime of devotion, swallowed to the constraints of his strength.

He cannot describe the feeling, as all who have felt it are torn.

His mouth is stone, and his eyes so wide they hurt.

Will it hurt?

He looks within the constraints of a caught stare, at faces and forms of looming fear.

Dread, painted as art out of reach. Unable to look away.

His eyelids ripped.

The colours. They are surely painted. The artwork of his morality, to the music he hears as all things collapse, and the fray falls to the fated end of his craft and crew, and he sways among the utensils of this violent portrayal. Curling shapes and arcs, done so delicately, as to make this image great, standing tall over all forced to look.

Made to stare, without choice.

He has no humour. He thinks nothing, but sees and hears things made poetic by the one true truth, who places skeletal fingers against the back of his head, to comfort as shapes swell.

He doesn't cry, but something bleeds from him through one eye.

His tear is exempt from death, and rolls to leave his face.

He looks down, and feels something in his head, rolling and splitting.

Through the stain on his cheek his skin bulges, pierced from the other side.

For a second, he sees bony fingers through his skull, moving to split his head in two.

And then it is a stone, caught in his observation, red trailing it as a comet so that all in existence is him and the rock, wide eyes following its advance.

He is cold.

He, and the stone.

The black, and the planet.

And the guns.

He and the rock, they are not alone.

As he stares, he fells something above him.

He knows death, and forces his eyes up. The motion causes the hole through him to tear, and his is cleaved.

It reaches down for him, vast and cosmic, skeletal hand as a cage.

Kneeling upon the dark, staring at the planet, his hand clutching the bloody stone, the framework of a vast grasp surrounds him.

Like bullets through paper. Glass and gunshots. Skin and meat, placed before the bomb. Things tear and shatter, and there are no screams or shouts among the black, as the ship is made that undead form, torn of its skin and its innards, which are splayed in their beautiful shades.

The captain holds the stone close, and closes his eyes.

He is made fragments. Alive, then sunken and decomposed to the motion of his drowning vision, in a moment, as the Fools watch, unable to draw away.

All things gutted. The painter flares, his skeletal hand carrying the colours across the canvas, and on, past the reaches.