As it came close, its leathery scales brushed up against Rechs and pushed him down into a mass of silt and rotting bones.
Rechs could feel its mind. It was an ancient mind, or so it told the bounty hunter, revealing to him its unpronounceable name that hurt to even think of. It claimed to have sailed across the Void of a Thousand Years to feed upon his soul.
Then it swam off into the shadows of the depths, caressing him with promised death.
Rechs could hear his own breathing within his helmet. It came fast and rapid. He wasn’t in the best fighting environment for a human. Underwater was worse to him than zero-gee. The two millennia he’d spent traveling through space had made him more adept in that sphere than he was underwater. Here it was like swimming through sucking gravy, the weight of his armor forcing him to move his limbs at absurd speeds just to gain locomotion.
It was coming back. It had made its testing pass. It had tasted his mind. And it would have it, it screamed insanely, bellowing its message like some war cry on a forgotten world that had never known grace, mercy, or love. It was alien. In every sense of the word. It was animal in all the worst ways. Hunt, feed, procreate. But it was something… not more… but other.
Rechs’s mind tried to slip off its keel, its anchors, or its understanding of what was possible and real, when it reached out for that… other.
The bounty hunter pushed all that away as the thing in the lake, the dreaming Watcher that had come for his soul, rushed through the murk along the bottom for him. It was easily the size of a bullitar. And as its bass mouth opened wide, he could see the million needle-sharp points glistening from within the darkness beyond. A darkness blacker than the lightless depths down here. A blackness of other voids worse than the known.
Rechs pushed off hard from the murk and got out of the way of its gaping mouth, trailing his machete as he did. Trailing it along the horrible thing’s scaly side.
Blind milky eyes seemed to see him. It understood it had missed its prey. And fatally so.
The razor-sharp carbon-forged edge of the blade drew a gaping slit along the corpulent, liver-spotted belly of the thing. A second later entrails and viscera bloomed into the black waters all around.
Enraged that it had been offended thus, the beast whip-tailed around, surging through the water and coming right back at Rechs in a fury.
In his mind, Rechs could hear its pain-filled roar and promise of torments unending. And there was nowhere and no direction for him to go. Not quickly enough, anyway. It had cost him everything just to avoid being bitten the first time.
The thing came in fast and Rechs slammed both boots into the muddy bottom, looking for purchase and finding none as he pushed the blade into the gaping alien mouth and up into the thing’s skull where surely a brain must be.
Hot orange light exploded across Rechs’s mind and he suddenly saw a world no human had ever known. A world of hot swamps and a red sun that burned like an eye in the sky. A world beyond the embrace of the galaxy.
The Dreamer had eaten everything.
The rivers and swamps were dead.
Nothing moved. And even the waters were sluggish.
This was its kingdom. Its home. And it had done this to every world it had visited. Taking control of the minds of explorers who’d trodden the star lanes long before humanity. Making them take it to new worlds to feed. To dream.
“You’ve ruined me!” it screamed.
And then…
“Meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
That cry seemed to go on forever. For so long that Rechs still felt he could hear its dying cry late at night when the ship was silent and lying in the shadow of some outer world where no one ever went. As though it had never ended. As though he were listening through a transom into oblivion.
Rechs pushed hard and cut through the thing’s bony spine, making sure the job was done as gore and ichor surrounded him. He couldn’t see his blade, just felt its easy passage through flesh, muscle, and pulpy sacs that must be organs, then the bare resistance of bone for just a second as the sharpness of the blade driven by Savage armor never minded even that obstacle and continued on out the other side of the Dreamer from Beyond the Void.
That was its name. The meaning of the unpronounceable word.
Later…
Later in the dark under the lake, Rechs switched over to sensors and mapping. He was close to the bridge.
He turned and trudged off through the murky gloom toward a pylon, and began to climb. He wondered what all the moktaar up there would do when he emerged from the water. He was pretty sure they were still there. They’d been held in thrall by the monster that called itself a Dreamer.
He pulled himself up to the surface of the railway bridge, water and muck streaming off his armor. Machete in hand. Daring them to come for him like some surrounded Savage warlord that wasn’t yet defeated.
The moktaar were everywhere. All along the rails. Along the bridge. Watching with wide and silent eyes as he stumbled over to his abandoned tactical bag and scatterblaster. He kept the machete ready. But they just stared at him, not in a trance,
