Nathan Hurrica was in a dark forest clearing, the crescent moon overhead shining coldly like death’s grin. He realized he wasn’t alone.

The stranger, a jackal, wore the rich garb of an emperor. A silken, embroidered robe of vivid violet clung to the jackal’s lithe, muscular frame and the cloak of golden samite around his shoulders rippled in the breeze that sighed through the trees, the steady and gentle wind teasing a million leaves into a susurrus of maddening whispers.

“I’m glad you came,” the jackal said to him, the diamond studded coronet he wore flashing in the moonlight. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“You…you have?” the frightened fox asked. His heart started to pound and claws of ice and fire crawled up his spine.

“Yes. You’ve kept me searching for far too long,” said the jackal. His paw slid under the beautiful golden cloak with infinite slowness, easing back the regal cloth and revealing an exquisite silver scimitar with a hilt made of the purest ivory.

He watched entranced as the jackal lazily slid the scimitar from its scabbard, the soft sigh of its honed edge a promise of eternity against the supple leather. The jackal’s smile was all fangs, his dark, liquid eyes striking into Nathan’s own like daggers and piercing his soul.

“What are you going to do?” the fox whimpered.

“Come now, pup,” said the jackal. “It’s time for the truth. You know you want this. It’s why you’re here. Isn’t it?”

No please, not again! It’s not true, it’s not! I don’t want it, I don’t want this! Won’t anyone help me?

Even as these thoughts crossed his mind the jackal stepped forward with such amazing and awe inspiring grace that it stole his very breath. The scimitar became akin to a moonbeam as it flashed upwards, almost too quick for his eyes to follow. Then its arc reversed, the blade burying itself in his flesh and carving through his heart.

***

He ripped into wakefulness screaming, his chest heaving and the rasp of his breath echoing in the confines of his quarters. Frantically he clawed at his pillow and fumbled for his journal. The reddened leather of the book was smooth and cool, it’s covering drinking in the light of the guttering candles he had placed around his bed. He pulled a pen from its crimson pages. Clutching the pen in one trembling paw he began to write.

A jackal slew me in my dreams tonight, he scribbled, the dark ink barely legible on the blood caked paper. He insisted that I wanted to die, like all the others have. I was going to tell him it wasn’t true but before I could speak or even fight back I was dead. I must find the source of these dreams! I have to find a way to stop them! A possible origin is a psychologist I met on level ten recently. That he too is a jackal can hardly be coincidence. Have I finally found the one behind it all? Is he experimenting on me?

As a familiar rage filled him he hurled the pen aside, heard it clatter on the plating of the station’s floor and watched it roll into the dancing shadows. Rising, he padded over to his wardrobe, opened a hidden compartment he had built into its back. Behind the secret titanium panel was a wickedly curved knife and a grim beast mask.

Nathan felt better once the knife was in his paw, the residual terror of his dream melting away like rotten ice in the glare of the sun. He slipped the mask over his face and went to the nightstand, retrieving his PDA. He had reprogrammed the device with a modification that both scrambled the station’s motion detectors and disabled the algorithms capable of recording his movements.

Cold Station Six, as a standalone complex whose daily operations required an enormous amount of power, was designed to conserve energy in any way possible. Its creators had ordered the installation of lighting that activated and deactivated automatically, responding to the presence of personnel. Miles of corridors, offices and laboratories were engulfed in blackness until someone entered them and triggered the sensors which would dispel it. Even then the zone of illumination was usually a traveling island of light twenty feet long. Before and behind that boundary complete darkness would always reign supreme.

With the altered PDA he was invisible to the sensors which activated the lights, could stalk that darkness unsuspected and undetected. The cancerous, atomic glow of the planet and that of the stars, which spilled through the station’s myriad windows, was more than enough for the night vision lenses of his mask to grant him perfect sight.

He slipped quietly out of his quarters and stole into the impenetrable shadows of the hall beyond, clutching his blade tightly. He headed for level ten and the jackal he had become obsessed with. Someone would die tonight. It wouldn’t be Nathan Hurrica.