Kali drifted through the airlock, her finger against the trigger guard. The chamber was dark, but her suit’s sensors wasted no time populating her heads-up display with faint wireframe details. The space was immense, hundreds of meters across, and roughly spherical. She eased forward, tiny maneuvering jets firing.

 

The chamber was a vacuum and only a few degrees Kelvin above the infinite darkness outside. The suit’s combat advisory system advised her to leave her helmet on and proceed with caution.

 

No shit. She toggled off any further distractions.

 

Vacuum made sense since the medusas didn’t breathe. Soon the one she was chasing wouldn’t exhibit any other characteristic of life either. She’d blasted it again and again as it tried to scurry away, mortally wounding it. Unfortunately, it had mustered enough energy to blink out, though not enough to cloak its destination. Hell, the medusan ability to self-teleport had been what had interested humanity in them to begin with. Discussions had gone poorly and sparked a conflict across a thousand battlegrounds on a hundred worlds.

 

Physically, they were a helmet-sized mass of tentacles, leathery skinned and encrusted with glassy sapphire-like secretions. How was it eluding her? Her sensors couldn’t distinguish it from the chamber’s ambient, so it must be void cold.

 

That’s what you want me to think, isn’t it?

 

A quick active scan would answer all her questions, but the medusa retreated here for a reason. Passively gaining more data as the seconds ticked off, the heads-up now rendered the inner surface of the chamber as rough arcs and angles that fractalled off in every direction. The patterns reminded her of tree branches and the horrible, twisted remains of her comrades from battlefields she wished she could forget.

 

Kali’s suit had fully self-repaired and as soon as the medusa began to coalesce energies for a discharge, it’d ping hot as a firecracker in her targeting system. A microsecond later, she’d light it up like a supernova.

 

Come on, where are you?

 

Her namesake was not lost on her. Kali, the goddess of destruction. Her squad had never missed the opportunity to give her a fair ration of crap about it, but always with a laugh. Now they were only memories, immobile crystalized victims of this monster and she didn’t need a reminder.

 

Vengeance was hers.

 

HQ had ordered her back. The war was over, they'd said, and other units could clean up the stragglers. She was to stand and report as sole survivor from her unit after which she’d be awarded an honorable discharge and a modest pension. She might have listened, but then they’d called her a hero.

Tentacles flashed across her path.

 

She opened fire. Her suit used the light from the discharges to further populate her display. The object spiraled away. It was not the medusa, but a sculpture of interlaced, glassy filaments. Those she knew all too well.

 

She had no reason to hide. “Active scan.” Her suit deployed a swarm of battlefield illuminators, painting the chamber in strobes of visible light.

 

In every direction floated clumps of interwoven crystal. Not all had been human, but all had been victims of a medusa. The creatures emitted intense bursts of energy tuned to vaporize metal, plastics, synthetics, and, worst of all, flesh. Sometimes the victims only partially disintegrated, leaving behind the disturbingly beautiful remnants of their veins and arteries, or their nervous systems, all crystallized.

 

Thousands of bodies drifted before her, but more still encrusted the inner surface of the chamber like an Escher-inspired bas-relief from Hell.

 

Images of her fellow soldiers, abandoned on countless battlefields, came flooding back and she gritted her teeth to contain her voice. The illuminators, now at equidistant positions, went active on every band.

 

The medusa hung centered in the chamber, as dead as the reliquary surrounding it. A single tentacle clung to a wispy ball of glass fibers that looked more dandelion than medusa. One of its own.

 

Had that one been a friend or a comrade? A mate, perhaps?

 

Kali had come for justice, but there would be none. Her sisters and brothers stood crystallized on a hundred battlefields, only some shattered but all broken.

She snapped the already hardened tentacle joining the medusas. It would not get the privilege of lying with its own, or with these honored legions.

 

She could destroy this diamond abattoir with a single nuke from her ship, but that would only honor the thing. She could, and should, tell HQ, but the testament of this place would be lost on bureaucrats, wouldn’t it?

 

No, she’d return to base with this thing’s head in a sack, a modern-day Perseus, and quietly accept her discharge.

 

And when the dust of war settled, she’d revisit those battlefields, collect the forgotten souls, and bring them here.