Of course Khal wasn’t so gone that he didn’t realize that was insane, but it didn’t make him want to do it any less. It hurt - the pain pulsed like a second heart deep inside his cranium, and he just wanted it to stop. If he carved his own skull open, it would stop. Although, if he stopped focusing on it, it would … well, not stop, but lessen slightly. Maybe.

He’d come to understand, with increased close proximity exposure to Skr’Takk, that the strange static he felt around her was just an alternate brainwave pattern that was so foreign to him it hurt his mind just to be near it. But the more he was near it, the more he adapted, and the more he thought he was starting to understand it.

But it still hurt.

He had surreptitiously sniffed an ampoule of vapor nepenthe before continuing the ship tour, but it lasted maybe two minutes, tops, before the numbing green haze gave way to that throbbing, molten agony again. He tried to ignore it, but it was like picking a scab; he couldn’t stop doing it. He tried to distract himself, but his mind was resolute on solving the puzzle, poking the wound, trying to interpret the signals no matter the pain they caused. It was almost like his unconscious was deliberately trying to hurt him. It wouldn’t surprise him if it was.

But he was starting to get the sense that Skr was annoyed, beyond all the pain. He’d been trying to find out about her people between the ship tour and the pain, but it was all rather difficult. “This ship is made of rock?” she clicked, her synthetic translator still a step behind. “Is it living like that drone?”

He paused, putting a hand on the wall to keep himself steady. The pain was so great he wasn’t sure he could keep upright. “No. Why are you calling him a drone? Do you call all men drones?”

There was a click that could’ve been a scoff, and her antennae wavered enough to kick up a small breeze. “Aren’t you?”

How did he answer that? ”No.”

She glanced around, her big head moving with a strange suppleness on her nearly non-existent neck. In spite of the fact that she looked like some kind of gigantic ant-beetle with legs so slender they were a joke, he got a sense of terrible power from her, like she could cut him in half with barely an effort, start digging through the ship like the engineered crystal was as soft as flesh. That was probably one of the reasons she decided to come on board: they were no threat to her. They were soft meat, without protective exoskeletons.

He sensed a spike in emotions from someone else aboard the ship - he still hurt too much to determine who - and then he heard Dar, through his sub vocal implant, say, “I need you to get Skr’Takk to a place with a monitor as quickly as possible.”

Oh wonderful - something else was going wrong, wasn’t it? Precisely what did they have to do to buy a break? Seriously, he was ready to start giving blow jobs to every suit they encountered if it would help.

He led the way into the nearest empty quarters, and Skr followed, bitching the whole while, “I know you’re not showing me any of the vital areas of the ship. You’re showing me shit. What, are you afraid I’m going to steal it?”

“Bruno, give us a view,” he said, ignoring her.

“Oi, what d’ya think I am, a servant?” he snapped, but the lights came up low and the view screen embedded in the wall came to life, showing the interference torn image of debris littered space around them. There was also a bright spot, quickly accelerating, which showed up against the otherwise static background. He could barely make it out, but it kind of looked like one of those bug ships. “Oh shit.”

Dar’s voice came over the room comm. “Skr’Takk, do you know what this ship is?”

That hard click like a scoff issued from her again. “Yes. It’s a Razor Wing, second class.”

There was a warm and cuddly name. Now Khal’s gut started to hurt.

“Do they have a singularity weapon?”

“What did I tell you meatbags? It’s an experimental weapon, with an even more experimental energy source. I know of only one ship equipped with it, and it’s a prototype Sky Sword.”

“What kind of weapons do Razor Wings have?”

She paused, and he figured she was trying to decide if she should tell them or not. Perhaps it occurred to her that the ship had shown up to kill her, because she finally started talking. “A Razor Wing second class has a type three pulse cannon, two radiation guns, frag mines, a grapple, and a hull splitter.”

“Your people are just fucking rays of sunshine, aren’t they?” Khal snapped, rubbing his temples.

Skr’Takk ignored him, perhaps because he was just a “drone“, and Dar simply said, “That’s quite a large compliment. How fast can they go?”

“Just a point six below light speed.”

Khal tried to do the math, compare it to their top speed, and gave up. But Dar had figured it out already. “Faster than us. I assume hiding is pointless.”

“They’ll think you’re cowards. That’ll make it worse.”

Khal was tempted to ask how, but decided that he’d probably find out soon enough, and why ruin the surprise?

“Well, they’ll have to catch us first.”

“No they don’t,” Skr’Takk clicked. “What defenses does this ship have?”

Khal sensed Dar pausing at the same time he did. “What do you mean ‘no they don’t’?” she asked.

There was that scoff like click, and Skr’s head bobbed as her translator spat out, “How primitive are you apes?”

It became a moot point as the pain seemed to spike in his head - it was like someone had driven a sword through his skull - and he screamed and dropped to his knees, holding on to his skull in case it decided to fracture like an eggshell. He thought he heard Dar asking what was wrong, but she was lost in the pain and the noise of his own agony.

They were all around them; they were everywhere. The Tk’Tk’Skree were on the ship.

Time blotted out in shades of red, bloody crimson that lapped behind his eyes like churning water, but it hit a threshold, or perhaps his brain found a way to shut down the input, because he came back to consciousness on the cold crystal floor, hearing the sounds of a strange and close fight.

“ - mention they have teleportation technology?” Dar was saying to Skr’Takk.

“I thought everyone had it,” Skr’Takk said, and then there was a strange wet noise followed by a thud.

He pushed himself up from the floor and saw the room door was open, and Skr’Takk was fighting a big bug that looked a lot like her in the hallway, over the body of another one, who was slumped on the floor and oozing black blood that smelled sour and acidic. She forced the bug back, and Khal thought maybe he had a chance to escape, or grab a weapon at least, but escape sounded better, as the amount of Tk’Tk’Skree in the ship was making his head buzz like it was full of angry reaper wasps.

But he’d just stumbled to the doorway and leaned against it, trying and failing to avoid the black blood, when the lift opened and Kvec came out, with an armed Gen behind him. A bug lunged and spit acid at Kvec, which bubbled and started eating through him, but he still stepped forward and grabbed the bug by the mandibles, ripping them off with a sickening tearing of muscle and cracking of carapace. It reeled back, stumbling on one of its own dead, and Kvec slammed his fist down on its head. It took two hard blows for him to break through the carapace, and another hit to put it down and splatter its brains across the wall.

The acid was still eating through him, but Cryers didn’t feel pain, or at least not like a non-crystalline humanoid, so he wasn’t hurting. Khal wished he wasn’t, mainly because he felt the bug die; he felt a cold claw rip across his brainpan, leaving a void as tangible as if an organ had been ripped out of him. He sagged against the wall, not sure he could keep upright for much longer. “Stop it!” he shouted, grabbing his head and trying to block the feeling out. It didn’t work. “Stop fighting!”

But if anyone heard him, no one cared. The bugs, thanks to their gravity harnesses, were also climbing on the wall, which he didn’t notice until Gen peeked out from behind Kvec and shouted, “Move!”

Khal didn’t feel like it, wasn’t sure he could, but Gen fired anyways, and it hit something on the other side of the door, close enough that its vinegar scented blood splattered on his face as he felt its dying spasms. Gen had a customized bolt thrower, an old ship building weapon turned primitive but surprisingly effective weapon, one with enough power to send a five inch bolt of hot titanium alloy through the Tk’Tk’Skree’s exoskeleton.

Gen had lots of weapons. The joke was Gen was planning some big robbery that included taking them all out afterwards, but the truth was Gen had already said she was not going back to MoSys alive - it was as simple as that. Gen was simply stockpiling for the day they ran out of luck.

Khal felt weak, rubbery, unable to stand the pain and the death that was hammering him from all sides. He heard a high pitched keening noise that sounded like one of the bugs was in hideous pain, but he realized belatedly that the noise was actually coming from him. “Khal, what’s wrong?” Dar said inside his head. Or so he thought; he could have been imagining it. “Are you hurt?”

Two bugs converged on Kvec, trying to bite through his arms, but they were having a hard time with his crystal structure. He raised one arm and slammed one of the bugs against the wall over and over again, attempting to crack the carapace and make it let go.

“Get off our fucking ship!” Gen yelled, shooting a bug point blank in the head. Another lunged forward and grabbed Gen by her right arm, and with a single snap severed her arm above the elbow. “Motherfucker!” Gen was so angry she didn’t even let it faze her; she pulled a Vrainian cane cutter - a long, wickedly curved bladed weapon that could cut through cerasteel if you were dedicated enough - and hacked at the bug even as her arm hit the deck. Gen cleaved its head in half.

“Khalil, can you hear me?” Dar repeated, with some urgency.

Kvec moved to protect Gen, as the Tk’Tk’Skree were apparently drawn by the blood fountaining from her severed arm, while Skr’Takk, cornered at the other end of the hallway, bit off the head of an attacking bug. Khal felt it all, every blow, every death, and the bile at the back of his throat felt solid, turning to cement in his trachea.

It was all there, a black cloud of pain and rage in his mind, the collective hate of the battlers, and he didn’t want it inside him anymore. He felt like he was hovering on the edge of consciousness, his soul bleeding out like all the corpses at his feet, and he couldn’t bear it anymore.

He screamed, trying to expel all the pain and hate, and it felt like vomiting, but not in a physical sense. He could feel it leave him, cleaning him out, turning him into an empty husk as all the pain left him, and he threw it towards those who deserved it.

“What the fuck..?” he heard Gen exclaim.

“Khal, what are you doing?” Dar asked inside his head, but she sounded like she was shouting from a mile away. “Khal?”

Visual images flickered across his closed eyelids, Kvec trying to communicate with him. He could see the hallway from Kvec’s perspective, a graveyard of Tk’Tk’Skree and black and red blood, and he watched the last of the bugs collapse, rocking on their slender legs as if hit, falling from the walls and slumping to the floor, but he couldn’t see what was doing it. He could see himself though, on his knees in the doorway (when did he drop to his knees?) holding his head and screaming, blood gushing from his nose and streaming over his lips and chin, pooling on the deck beneath him. Kvec held his clenched fist up into his eye line, bug blood still dripping from it, and opened it to show his red crystal palm. It was visual shorthand between them; Kvec was asking ‘How?’

But he didn’t understand the question, and he didn’t understand what Kvec was showing him. He felt something give way in his mind - it was like a muscle tearing in his brain, something physical ripping free - and then there was no pain, only blissful, quiet numbness.

Khal was vaguely aware he was falling, roughly certain he’d hit the floor, but he didn’t care. All was darkness and peace and emptiness, and that was just what he wanted.

Vani felt she had an advantage over everyone here, since she had worked in the MoSys bureaucracy for ten years, and knew the first contact protocols. Only there were several problems: she was never a member of the Diplomatic Corps, so the finer details of it all were lost on her; her Negotiator was a half-sane drug addict, and about as stable as a shuttle with a single working thruster; this race claimed to have met them before and hate them, which was never covered in any of the Protocols she saw; and there was the problem that she worked in the Revenue Distribution Department for all of her ten years. If this was a tax or tariff dispute, she’d know what to do without thinking about it. This was a more difficult shell to crack.

Not everything translated, so she assumed the things that didn’t were proper names. The big bug was apparently Skr’Takk of the Tk’Tk’Skree, a race native to a planet known as Skree’Tk - that is, if she was hearing her right. And since she had better hearing than any of these Humans or Kvec, she assumed she was getting her right. The ruler of the Tk’Tk’Skree was Skr’Takk’s sister, Queen Kr‘Tk‘Re (all these hard, clicking syllables were making her eardrums hurt). Skr’Takk felt Kr’Tk’Re had become corrupt, and entered a devil’s bargain with the “meatbags” over the spoils of the Slk’Vakkt war. (Now her head was hurting.)

They’d never heard of the Slk’Vakkt war, and told her so. Skr’Takk was finding this hard to believe, but their idiocy was starting to shine through her stubbornness. The war was between the Tk’Tk’Skree and the Slk’Vakkt, and the Slk’Vakkt lost, so the Tk’Tk’Skree acquired a great deal of their territory. The only thing was, the war was more costly than the people realized, and as such, Kr’Tk’Re decided to sell off some of the Slk’Vakkt territory to the meatbags in exchange for hard currency. This was all done in secret, of course, as the Tk’Tk’Skree were apparently not the most alien friendly race, and Skr’Takk violently objected to this, fearing it was the beginning of the meatbag incursion into their queendom. She was right. And to cut off what she felt was a potential insurrection, she tossed Skr’Takk, her followers, and some hive representatives she felt might not take the shipping off of opposition to prison in the right spirit of the thing into this death trap.

Hive Queen Kr’Tk’Re’s dealing with the meatbags were still secret, as Skr’Takk was sure the people would revolt if they knew their monarch was treating meatbags as equals. But there was no communication equipment here, and the last time they had a visitor, the supply ship had some meatbags who killed most of the other inmates with some new kind of weapon. Skr’Takk assumed that her sister okayed them for using the royal prisoners as target practice.

“But why not kill you outright?” Gen asked, the rack gun still trained on Skr’Takk. “No offense.” From the way her knuckles were almost white on the grip of the gun, Vani assumed she was afraid of bugs. Or at least very big ones.

Skr’s antennae wavered in a way that Vani took to be menacing. There was a rhyme and reason to them, much like hand gestures, but she was sure she’d need to study them for a while before getting all the nuances. “You are apes. You’d kill your own female family?”

Khal scoffed, but it was breathless and weak. “It’s better that she lets people use you as target practice?”

Skr’s antennae wiggled in his direction, but if she was reading them right, she was more confused than anything. “She isn’t doing the killing. Someone else is.”

Okay, this was clearly a cultural distinction. There was no point in discussing it further, not until they had some cultural touchstones for the Tk’Tk’Skree. But the deliberate singling out of “female” was interesting.

They moved on to the “weapon”, which Skr insisted was only experimental, although its initial testing helped end the Slk’Vakkt war. Whatever the name of the weapon in their native language, Skr’s translator interpreted the name of the weapon as “the ender”, which was succinct - you had to give it that.

Skr confirmed it could open micro-singularities in specifically targeted areas, and was a type of weapon you couldn’t have shields or fields against. But there was a fundamental problem with it, in that its power source could be fundamentally, fatally unstable. Its power source? Another micro-singularity. That made an elliptical kind of sense.

“You can pull power from a singularity?” Gen replied, sounding slightly impressed. “No wonder MoSys wanted to do business with you. That’s the Holy Grail of energy sources.”

Her antennae wavered once more, reflecting even more confusion. “Holy Grail?”

“It’s an ape myth thing,” Khal said dismissively. “A cup or object or pair of underpants. I didn’t really pay that much attention to the history download.”

“Underpants?” Skr repeated, antennae sagging under the weight of the unknowable.

“Another ape thhing,” Vani told her. “Iff thhis weapon iss ssso unstable, why did you develop it?”

Skr made a noise that sounded like metal scraping against concrete; it was most likely a scoff or a laugh. “I didn’t develop it. I’m military, not scientific; I don’t think, I shoot.”

The odd thing was, that was a universal statement, not bound by any species. “Sso whhy would your ssisster create a sship with it?”

Again that noise, something sharp scraping against something hard. “Because she can? Why the drone sac don’t you ask her?”

Drone sac? Perhaps that was a curse among her kind. Did drones actually exist amongst her kind, or was that simply a slur?

“We would if we knew where she lived,” Gen snapped, still not easing up on the gun. But it couldn’t have bothered Skr at all, as she just ignored it.

Her antennae wavered and then drooped, as in defeat. But she didn’t think that’s what it was. “Get me out of this stinking death trap and I’ll show you where she is.”

Now there was an odd idea.

****

They pulled back to the edge of the airlock to discuss it, but even as the group hotly debated the possibilities of letting a potentially homicidal bug on board, Vani didn’t listen. The real discussion - the final discussion - was actually taking place in the cranial link she had with Dar.

*We know nothing of this species* Vani sent across the link, watching the others argue. Gen looked dead set against it, and Khal looked slightly dyspeptic, as if all the bad feelings was going to make him physically ill. He kept rubbing his left temple as well, and Kvec was the only one who noticed that (he - it - but a supporting hand on his shoulder) .*Everything she told us could be a lie*

*True* Dar agreed *She could just want out of here. But it is curious she’d be here alone, and there are signs that a fight took place, and not one just involving acid*

Vani nodded her head, and Dar could see it since she had a visual link as well. *There’s causal evidence to support some of her story*

Khal waved his hands at her, and she looked at him as he scowled. “So are you going to let us in on your conversation?” They all knew that she had an interlink connection with Dar, but Khal knew it better than anyone since he could feel the small emotional shifts of a discussion.

Dar gave her blessing on that, so Vani told him, “Sshe thhinkss we sshould take her on.”

Gen rolled her eyes and snapped, “Well of course she does. We’re all victims of her goddamned curiosity!”

“If even half of what sshe ssayss iss true, sshe would be invaluable to have on board.”

“As blackmail or a weapon?” Gen asked, with a surprising amount of bitterness. “What if she’s lying and she goes psycho? She spits acid, if you haven’t noticed.”

“I’m sure Kvec could handle it,” Khal offered, gesturing to the Cryer. He attempted a nod, and then mimed grabbing Skr by her head and yanking her skull off.

“What the hell happened to knocking her out?” Khal wondered, slightly aghast.

Gen was still dead set against it, but she was outnumbered, so it was decided to go ahead and talk to Skr about taking her on a provisional basis. First of all, they had to establish whether she could take their gravity or not, since it was pretty light here.

The Tk’Tk’Skree came from a very light gravity world, and as such, anyone going into space or traveling off world had to have something called a “gravity harness” grafted to their central nervous system so heavier gravity didn’t kill them. (That was what the metal thing on her back was.) Gravity variations didn’t matter to her anymore; the harness could handle it.

She agreed to tell them what she knew about her Queen and her possible deal with MoSys, in exchange for passage back to Skree’Tk held territory. The fact that they didn’t know where Skree’Tk territorial space was was seen only as a minor flaw in the plan.

Khal was roped into giving her the “minor” tour of the ship - minor meant all sensitive areas of the ship, such as the core, were avoided - and the fact that Skr asked if this was a warship was troublesome. She really wanted it to be a warship.

As she rode with a sulking Gen in the lift, she reached out to Dar. *She could be trouble*

*I know. She might want to use us to attack her sister*

*Amongst other things. Tell Gen to watch her carefully. Having something to do should keep her busy as well*

She told her, and while Gen hated it, and bitched about having to do the “dirty work”, secretly she was quite pleased that her suspicions about the insectoid were not being disregarded. Khal was better at dissecting the nuances and picking up the weaker intentions, but there were some things that Vani could simply taste. (Smug, bitter triumph was like sour milk.)

She was glad to be alone for a moment, though, if only to ponder the rather large logic flaw of MoSys not admitting, even privately, contacting a race such as the Tk’Tk’Skree. If the Tk’Tk’Skree were as xenophobic as Skr seemed to indicate, that would explain why the Queen wouldn’t admit any contact with MoSys, but why would MoSys not mention them? It didn’t make sense. MoSys liked to acquire new people, new systems, new revenue streams; it was what they were built for. While they thought they were inherently superior to all aliens, they felt magnanimous in allowing them into their collective. And with the Tk’Tk’Skree being xenophobic and isolationist, it was unlikely any of their people would discover a connection to MoSys, even if they put out a big hovering morpho-lightboard announcing it in orbit around most populated planets.

So why would MoSys make contact with this race, and then keep it quiet? It didn’t make sense. Especially considering the advanced technologies the insectoids seemed to possess. Was that part of the “deal” they made with them, never to mention them in any way, shape, or form?

She had reached her quarters when Dar popped back up in her head. *You may want to check out the current visual feed*

Experience had taught her that was never a good thing for Dar to say. *What’s going on?*

*On the edge of viable sensor range, a ship has popped up, coming this way*

*A ship? Can you be more specific?* As she entered her quarters, she turned on the visual feed with a thought, the impulse riding down her neural link. It showed sensor distorted space, a wavering background of black and infrared, jerking and sputtering like a fire going out. There might have been a distant spot of light at the edge of the horizon, something too bright to be a star, but it was impossible to say without clearer resolution.

*Barely. It looks bug shaped, but smaller than the singularity ship*

Vani felt her stomach sink, turn cold. This just wasn’t their day, was it? *Skr’Takk’s people?*

*A solid guess. Perhaps it’s a supply ship.*

*Or we did set off an alarm we didn’t know about. Do they have weapons?*

*This is a sensor dead zone, Van. Your guess is as good as mine. But if they’re as war like as Skr’Takk has indicated, we’d be fools to assume they have no ships ready for a fight*

Vani felt she simply had to ask the question they were dancing around. *Could they have a singularity weapon?*

There was a very long silence, one that only meant Dar was weighing the odds. *If they do, at least it will be a quick death*