The center of the Milky Way — the Maelstrom. It was named for an ocean whirlpool in a short story by Edgar Allen Poe. It worked the same as the whirlpool when you pull the plug in a bath. The massive gravitational pull at the center of the galaxy pulled matter into a spiral, growing faster and faster, the friction generating energy. Near the center were zones where the law of universal gravitation applied and examining the objects in orbit around the maelstrom indicated that force applied to the center of the disk — in other words, the sides of the disk — was nonexistent. Gravity and centrifugal force cancel each other out. However, the gravity of the orbiting gases themselves created a disk of gas around the maelstrom. This was called the accretion disk. The sides of any disk have a gravitational pull towards the disk’s equator.
Six months had passed since the Moby-Dick went rogue. The whale plunged into the Turbulent Sector, met up with a bunch of other whales, and together they controlled the aether flow. The school of space whales flew through the galactic center like a flock of migratory birds.
By eating the flesh off the interior of the space whale, they had enough food and water, but that didn’t help the insurmountable boredom. The aether flow was too unstable in the Turbulent Sector for the aethernet to function. Akane and Sachii made a deck of cards out of whale flesh, trying to while away the time.
Eat, sleep, play cards. Six meaningless months. And all that while, Akane could hear the voice. The closer they got to the center, the louder and more insistent the voice echoing on the aether became, until it was a constant presence in her ears.
She still couldn’t understand what the voice was telling her, but she was beginning to feel like there was definitely someone behind the voice.
But their journey was nearing its end. The whales were bound for the central accretion disk in the maelstrom. Like salmon swimming upstream, the whales crossed the dangers of the Turbulent Sector to reach it.
In the distance, they could see a tower of light. Gases pulled into the maelstrom headed up, and that heat generated jets. Space jets. The school of whales swam across fountains belching light on a galactic scale. The whales formed a number of V-shaped squads, riding each other’s slipstreams, reducing the aether resistance.
The whales landed on the accretion disk.
While the accretion disk had been assumed to be composed of gas, it did actually have land. On the outskirts, where the revolution wasn’t that fast yet, the heat wasn’t so high it vaporized all solids. Gravity gathered matter there, creating a flat donut-shaped celestial body. At a glance, it looked like a harsh environment, but since the aether was rotating with it, it was quite peaceful to anyone inside.
The whales clustered together, their shapes changing until they could hardly be described as whales any more. Their sides grew translucent wings, like mayflies. They used these wings to glide about and land. Soft pseudopods, midway between a caterpillar and a centipede, grew from their bellies.
The Moby-Dick, too, was drawing close to land. When Akane glanced at the beacon receiver, she realized the Dark Seiyuu was less than 100 kilometers away. When they’d lost control of the Moby-Dick, Akane had been sure she would never catch up with the Dark Seiyuu. Despite her fears, the gap between them had grown steadily closer as they neared the galactic center. It seemed like the Dark Seiyuu was headed there, too.
The Moby-Dick’s instincts had led it to follow a comparatively gentle path through the turbulence, bringing Akane and the Dark Seiyuu together again.
Sadly, she had no way of launching an assault. She would have to wait for the Dark Seiyuu to come to her.
There was a sound of wind, and an impact. The Moby-Dick had landed. Akane and Sachii donned spacesuits and tried to go outside. But this proved impossible. Stimulating the rectum should have opened the anal hatch immediately, but the changes to the physical construction meant it no longer worked like it had when they boarded.
As they stimulated the rectum in any way they could think of, the entire ship began shaking violently. They hurried back to the studio and checked their surroundings. Fortunately, the external cameras were still functional.
The spectacle on screen made Akane whistle.
The Moby-Dick was mating.
The partner space whale’s long copulatory organ was inserted into the Moby-Dick’s body, its many legs scurrying, attempting to keep it mounted. The pliant pseudopods gained purchase, secreting viscous fluids and sliding up and down. The other space whales were all mating, too. This appeared to be the space whale’s breeding grounds.
The violent motion continued for an hour before stopping abruptly. It lay so still it seemed almost dead, making it hard to believe it had been so full of life a moment before.
The view through the cameras was no longer available. Some white fibrous material had completely covered them. It seemed like the Moby-Dick had wrapped itself in some sort of cocoon.
The interior flesh began changing color, too. It was getting softer, like it was rotting rapidly.
The aether transceiver indicated it had caught a video transmission. They opened a connection and the Dark Seiyuu’s face came on screen. Despite the turbulence, in this area the aether flow was subdued enough that transmissions were possible.
“Akane Yomokura! It’s been a while.”
“You again! I’ll kill you this time!”
Six months had done little to ease Akane’s rage. If anything, it had distilled it down to murder in its purest form.
The Dark Seiyuu ignored this entirely. “Are you hearing the voice?” she asked.
“Yeah, been getting stronger and stronger the last six months. Still makes no damn sense, though. So fucking what?”
“If that’s the case, try to understand it well enough to survive.” The Dark Seiyuu sounded oddly disappointed.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
But Akane’s question was cut off by Sachii’s scream.
She turned around to see small shadows pouring out of the flesh walls. They were creatures about the size of puppies. They had six spider-like legs, and their bodies were split into three sections, a heart shaped piece at the bottom, and a pair of sharp scissors sticking out of their mouths. No eyes, but the hair covering the front of them seemed to be feelers. The hundreds of spiders pouring out of the walls seemed to be extremely hungry. They were devouring the flesh walls they’d emerged from. And their appetites were soon directed at the two seiyuu.
“Shit!”
Akane fired heat rays, setting the spiders on fire. They burned easily enough, but there were too many of them. She burned them and burned them and more just kept spilling out. They did not seem to have been equipped with any instinctual fear. All they had was a desire to consume flesh. They were extremely efficient flesh-devouring machines.
“Senpai! We’re surrounded!”
Black wriggling things covered the walls in all directions. Akane stomped on a spider as it tried to take a bite of her leg. Using her full Seiyuu Karate training, she covered her body in blue plasma, firing it at the spiders. Eleven spots on her body, where the laryngeal sacs were implanted, all writhed painfully. Her strength faded, as if she’d wrung herself out.
Then she heard the voice, for once quite clearly. As if water stuck in her ear had suddenly come out, the muffled, distorted voice suddenly showed its true self.
This was the clearest the voice had ever been. Once understood, she was left wondering why she had even been unable to make sense of it.
It felt like falling down a deep dark hole, with no food, a frigid wind stealing her body’s warmth. There was a hollow in her heart, an emptiness that made her body turn to rust and crumble away. Fear, like she was drowning in muddy water, struggling desperately, yet being pulled further and further down. Her life draining away like water through a sieve. Despair like a heavy ashen weight coming from all directions, from the sky above, from the ground below. The relentless encroach of death. The voice was thin, desperate, and filled with all of those emotions.