Since they were continuing onward, Kvec decided to move ahead and take the lead, mainly to try and beat Vani to the punch, as she was heading out into the dark station fearlessly. Did Syshahi ever get scared? He was beginning to wonder if they were even equipped for such a thing. Maybe their fear was different – not every beings reaction had to be exactly the same.

It was so dark they might as well have been inside a black hole. His HUD light didn’t penetrate the gloom, nor did anyone else’s. Normally being unable to see beyond several inches in front of his face wouldn’t bother him – he could sense any threat before it manifested itself – but of course that weird “”static” continued, and pretty much neutered his ability to sense anything except his immediate companions. It was a horrible feeling, one that made him feel … normal. It wasn’t a feeling he liked.

There were noises inside the station, strange groaning sounds of metal under stress, and it seemed wrong. If there were gravitational forces pulling this station apart, there’d be more instability, not to mention the fact that Dar just might have said something about it. “You have twenty minutes before the place shakes itself to pieces. Good luck.”

Come to think of it, it was just the sort of thing she wouldn’t mention.

The darkness was almost total, with all interior features rendered to amorphic black blobs, and hand spotlights didn’t help much. It was like wading into ink, the shadows clinging to them aggressively, like the security response of this station was total darkness.

After a minute or two, where Gen proclaimed this “sucked ass”, they all paused as they heard a noise. It was soft and regular, almost mechanical … no, definitely mechanical. A machine was on, and was coming towards them.

Kvec moved in front of all of them, going into his programmed “inhuman shield” mode, while they attempted to use the spots to find whatever it was that was coming towards them. The walls were the same faintly glittery black metal as the outer hull, as was the floor and ceiling, stark in its austerity. There were no features that he could make out, save for what looked like exposed conduits and bracing, metal brackets that would have looked more natural in a rustic replica wooden home on some Human backwater colony than here, in a mysterious space station.

Actually, the more he looked at it, the more he wondered if this was a space station. Maybe this was some kind of mining drone, just larger than anything they were used to.

“Shit,” Gen groaned, holding her rack gun tight across her chest. “I should have brought the fill gun.” A “rack gun” was designed to be used in space stations and enclosed space habitats; it fired a special enzymatic type of fluid that instantly began to harden and shrink on contact with any source of water (and since most humanoids were majority water, that meant just about any biological organism, save for Cryers), and it shrunk at such a fantastic and incredible rate it could rip your skin off, break bones. A dose of “rack” (what the fluid was called, for reasons that Khal didn’t know) could kill you if it hit you in the right place. But at least your hull would still be intact. A “fill gun” was a portable version of a monofilament cannon, that would fire monofils virtually invisible to the naked eye, that would cut through fucking everything – people, hulls, machinery, Cryers, layers and layers of depleted cobol-uranium and cerasteel. Hell, it was theorized that if you could get enough monofilament together, you could shred a planet. It was that nasty, and that impossible to stop.

Wait a minute – Cryers? Is that what killed them on that moon? No, they didn’t look neatly sliced, like they would have if hit with monofil; they looked shattered, broken like glass. No, nothing as cleanly lethal as a fill burst had taken them down. Whatever killed them was somehow even nastier than being sliced to ribbons by gossamer threads of the sharpest, strongest engineered substance in the known universe.

The noise was so close now they had all bunched together instinctively behind Kvec, sweeping the floor with their seemingly insignificant lights, and finally movement was caught in a scudding beam, a dark, low movement against the floor. It was something round, like a ball made of black metal, only it had recesses, small depressions in its glittering ebony surface, and moved of its own accord. A type of robot, probably a type of scutter, although Khal couldn’t remember ever seeing one that looked so round and ball like.

Kvec must have guessed the same thing, as he suddenly stamped down on it, smashing the robot into a hundred separate pieces. It was possible it had scanned them all and sent information back to wherever its central hub was; they wouldn’t really know until a response team showed up with guns blazing, or an internal security program electrified the deck plating. “We should really get outta here,” Gen said, still gripping the gun tight.

Khal was of two minds. He still wanted to find out what this place was, and he was loathe to ever agree with Gen about anything … but she did have a point. If they’d been scanned and put in somebody’s database, they could be in serious trouble on several different levels.

Vani cocked her head, as if listening to music in another room, and said, “We ssshould be fffine. We have Kivech.” She had a difficult time with the hard consonant sounds in Kvec’s name, so she always pronounced it a little bit wrong. As it was, though, he couldn’t blame her; after all, his name was derived purely from an engineering batch code. It wasn’t really a name more than it was a shorthand filing system.

Kvec held his thumb up, what he took to mean a “we’re all cool” gesture, and continued onward. Khal sent him a telepathic image of a dozen or so plasma cannons springing to life from the shadows around them and spewing hot, bloody red death. Kvec sent back a scene of darkness as just that – darkness. He imagined turning on a light, filling an empty space with harsh yellow light, showing curved interior walls leading up to a domed ceiling crosshatched with conduits and decorative brackets. Cryers didn’t have better than average night vision, so, he knew he was guessing. He thought the place was deserted, the station an empty husk save for programmed automatons.

And he could be right, but the fact that he was blocked from using his empathy was too damned suspicious. If the place was abandoned, why couldn’t he confirm that?

They’d advanced another few meters into the general darkness when they heard another new noise. This was very faint, and very odd; the best Khal could compare it to was a type of skittering noise, faint light clicks on metal. It was relatively rhythmic, although not enough to be considered mechanical. They all paused, and Gen whispered harshly, “What the hell is that?”

No one answered, because nobody knew. On a different topic, Vani reported, “Dar has infiltrated a secondary system. Attempting to access station systems.”

“Tell her to turn the lights on,” Khal said. The fact that it took Dar so long to infiltrate the system was a troubling sign. Did they have that good a firewall, or was the system just that alien? They were probably fucking with people they shouldn’t be fucking with. Just how long they’d be alive to regret it was the only question left.

The lights actually started to come on, but they were dim red spots at about thigh height on either side of the wall. Emergency lights? Their placement was weird, unless these people were on the short side.

There was movement in the bloody shadows, and Gen stepped around Kvec and aimed the rack gun at it, bracing the thick stock against her right hip, shouting, “Stop right there! Identity yourself!”

“What the hell happened to “We come in peace”?” Khal snapped. Was there such a need for immediate hostility? They were the interlopers here! But Gen was terrified; the fear was so acrid he could feel himself sweating right along with her. His heart was doing that thing again where it felt like it was on the verge of exploding.

The thing moved into the more immediate puddle of crimson light, and Khal suddenly wished that it hadn’t – mainly because it was a bug; the most big ass bug he’d ever had the misfortune to see.

It was almost waist height, but longer than it was tall, and resembled an ant with some beetles in its gene pool. It had six thin, stalk like black legs holding up its thick, segmented body, with a carapace that gleamed like wet oil even in this dim light. The body was basically bulbous, although it wore what looked like a silver metal brace that went across its back and flowed down its legs, and something that looked like a chunky gold collar ringing … did bugs have throats? If it did, that’s where it was. The head was basically shaped like an arrowhead, although the two bulging, grapefruit sized segmented black eyes threw off the analogy, as did the curving mandibles that almost looked like claws (and also looked like they could snip off your arm as neat as you pleased). They gaped wide, opening horizontally, and it suddenly spat a yellowish liquid towards them. It landed short, splashing on the deck an inch from Kvec, and it began to bubble and hiss. Holy shit, was it acid?

It made clicking and high pitched noises that wasn’t quite a squeak (but close), and after it was done making noises, a smooth, synthetic female voice kicked in. “Meatbags! You’re here to finish the job, are you? Do your worst. I’ll feast on your entrails and make jewels of your bones.” The voice seemed to be coming from her collar. A translator?

Gen leveled the rack gun at it but didn’t fire, probably because she didn’t know if rack would work on an insectoidal carapace. Or maybe she was just scared of big, big bugs. Khal felt like running screaming from the station, just like almost everyone else, but Vani stepped forward, hands held up to show they were empty, and said, “Fffinisssh the job? We don’t know what you mean. We’ve never encountered your kind beffore.”

It clicked and squeaked once more, its two long, slender antennae moving in a manner that suggested stalks in a breeze. After the strange pause, the translator kicked in. “Liar! All you meatbags lie! It’s all you apes are good for. Apes and whatever you are.”

Vani continued attempting to be soothing, but there was no telling how the big bug was taking it all. It must have had another translating unit in its ear … if it had ears. Oh, weird, where were its ears? “We are not who you ssseem to think we are. We are trying to dissscover who runs this ssstation, and if they know anything about a weapon that ssseems to open wormholess. We sssaw it desstroy a MoSssysss ssship.”

The bug’s roughly triangular head canted to the side, almost a mirror image of the gesture Vani had made before it showed up, its antennae wavering, seemingly twisting around to point behind it. There were more clicks and squeaks, then the translation: “She’s used the weapon? On the meatbags? I thought the bitch was your ally.”

Kvec glanced back at him, but all Khal could do was shake his head. He could read mammals in general, but he was getting absolutely nothing from the bug, and he was obscurely glad. Did he really want to tune into the feelings of a giant talking ant? (Then again, why did he think this was weird? He shared a ship with an empathic squid and a quasi-telepathic hunk of crystal. A bug seemed almost normal by comparison.) “We don’t know who you’re talking about,” Vani replied, keeping her voice in that level, even tone. It was an aural sedative, and if it wasn’t for the general terror of being around a giant acid spitting bug with a voice like screaming metal, it might have put them all to sleep.

The bug made a noise that didn’t translate (so presumably it wasn’t actually a word), and its antennae seemed to briefly thrashed, as if distressed. It then clicked in a manner that seemed rapid, punctuated by sharp screeches that were nearly whistles. “I’m talking about Kr’Tk’Re, that traitorous, drone sucking bitch the Queen. My sister.”

Of course the area existed. But it was just beyond what was considered a properly mapped area, so in official techno-speak, it was a “potential territory”, not yet exploited by the system or mass marketers. But on the good chance that that would encourage people to go looking around before they could stake a claim, these “potential territories” were usually flagged as dangerous for some reason. This one actually had a couple of good reasons to be flagged dangerous: it was the home of a blue giant star – lots of radiation, intense heat – and the neighboring system contained a rather large pulsar, and pulsars were never any good; they always fucked things up.

But it was all suspiciously convenient, wasn’t it? A strange area of space with just enough wrong with it to keep everyone away; a place where these mysterious “others” cropped up. Hardly seemed like a coincidence.

It was a long trip, so Dar ignored everyone else, and stuck to the chores she had to do. Keeping the ship going, and decrypting the messages they had intercepted. The communication from the others (and that’s what she was calling them, in lieu of any other name) was more encrypted than that from the MoSys ship, although even they were using a non-standard encryption system. So far, all she had was one sentence of the MoSys transmission – “We didn’t break the deal.” Interesting. So whoever the others were, they knew them well enough to have some kind of contract with them. She mentally ran through a list of all aliens that had treaties and contracts with MoSys, but none had the technological level necessary to do that.

That she knew of. Ah, now there was a spanner in the works. Was there anyone even potentially capable of such a thing? The list was incredibly small, and purely speculative. The problem was, most races had a very specific way of constructing ships, and as such there was a general species uniformity to the design. No one had a vaguely bug shaped ship of those particular dimensions, or any bug shaped ships at all. So there was a new structural design … or a new player on the field. But not so new that MoSys didn’t know about them.

She would have talked this over with everyone, but depending on who they were, they’d hyperventilate and panic, or start screaming that they should get the fuck out of here and leave it, which was honestly just a variation on the original theme. She just wasn’t in the mood for it. As it was, they were complaining enough anyways.

There were many puzzling anomalies before they entered the system. Mainly it was a radiation blast furnace, screwing with the frequencies all across the range; it was like a deliberate communication dead zone, although there was a good chance ansible communication could work here … if it was set up for ansible. Which it wasn’t, of course.

The system also seemed to be a big nothing, with the vast, swollen blue-white orb of the system’s star taking up such an inordinate amount of space she picked up its gravity as soon as they hit the system. No, it was no singularity, but you didn’t want to be an underpowered skiff in this zone.

The system may have had planets at one point, but the star’s gravity had probably made their orbits unstable, and that was probably why there was a huge debris belt around the blue giant, a vast ring of disintegrated rock and dust that seemed to spread out like a fog inexplicably existing in raw vacuum. It would have been a natural mining site, only most of the rocks had been pulverized, meaning that any ore that potentially existed in them was nothing more than little fiddly bits that might acne scar your hull, but do little else.

She was scanning it for metal when she picked up the blip.

It was quite funny, actually, and if it hadn’t been so odd, she might have ignored it. It nearly registered as something, then didn’t; when she ran a scan over the quadrant once more, it came up clean. Maybe if she was a computer, she’d have accepted it as a scan error and moved on, but she didn’t make scan errors. Something had picked up her scan, and adjusted to mask itself. There was something in the debris belt, beyond rocks and dust, that really didn’t want to be seen. Too bad.

She moved the ship under the worst of the debris field, calculating that most people would come from above on a direct intercept vector, which she didn’t want. They could be armed for all she knew, and she didn’t want to give them a free shot – especially if they were the singularity firing people. Of course if they were, they’d be totally screwed, but what could you do?

The crystalline composite that made up the ship was well suited to taking micro meteor impacts, as well as being pelted by dust and pebbles at speeds that could actually do some damage. The radiation and heat was more of a potential problem, although they were good for a little while. Still, they’d eventually start to roast, beyond the ability of the cooling system to handle it.

As far as she could discern, the approach set off no alarms or automated weapons systems. She still couldn’t pick it up on scans (good cloak), but she could eventually see it, even though it wasn’t all that easy to find with the naked eye. It was black, pitch black, appearing as a mote among a hundred ones against the bright backdrop of the star. Except this one was much bigger than every other one, and was a strange ovoid shape that almost looked familiar.

As soon as Bruno was able to process the scene, he asked, “Is this wise?”

“I doubt it. But we’ll never know what’s going on if we don’t investigate.”

“Ya know, I could live wit’ that.”

“I couldn’t.” She opened up an internal channel, and said, “Khal?”

A quick glimpse inside his room showed him asleep – or perhaps passed out – his limbs akimbo, mouth open, lights on and Blue in her tank. If he was still on the drugs he had been earlier, he wouldn’t be of any use. But it was worth a shot. “Khal!” He didn’t stir, so she sent a burst of a very loud emergency klaxon throughout his room. He started, almost sitting up, but was unable to and in his general disorientation fell off the bed and hit the deck with a muffled thump. “Fuck!”

“Are you sufficiently awake now?”

“Enough to kick your metal ass,” he snapped, grabbing on to the bed and hauling himself up to his unsteady feet. “You want me to read something again, don’t cha?”

“I didn’t realize you were a telepath.”

“Ha,” he stumbled off to his bathroom and made an obnoxious hand gesture at one of the camera nodes as he went into his bathroom to urinate. It was the smart waste disposal units that were keeping track of all the drugs in his system and his declining health; it analyzed all the waste products for any pressing health or nutrition concerns, although she was fairly certain everyone ignored their alerts.

She waited until he stumbled out of the bathroom, wiping sleep drool from the side of the mouth, before briefing him on the situation. He looked at the camera node in disbelief, then started digging around in a cabinet for what she presumed was new clothes. “Great. Get us sucked into a black hole, Dar. That oughta be a learning experience.”

“So far the object has been dormant. I’m unable to scan the interior at the moment.”

“You’re hoping I can.”

“If they’re going to kill us, best to know ahead of time.”

He paused while changing his shirt. His torso was a chilling thing, narrow and pale for his ethnicity, the ribs clearly etched in relief. His veins were dark lines under his skin, placid snakes running down the line of his chest cavity and disappearing into his concave stomach. If he wasn’t an advertisement for taking better care of yourself, nothing was. “Yeah, okay, that’s a point.” He pulled his shirt on and closed his eyes, clearly trying to reach out with his mind.

She gave him a moment, watching a vein pulse in his temple, and a worry line furrow his brow. Finally, he said, “That’s weird.”

“Good weird or bad weird?”

He shook his head, opening his eyes and looking off to the middle distance, looking troubled. “Bad, I think. I’m getting nothing but white noise.”

“So it’s empty of biological organisms?”

“Er, I can’t tell. When I say white noise, I mean it. It’s like … static. I can’t get through.”

She had to parse that for meaning, as he wasn’t making sense. Or was he? “Wait. You’re saying that something’s actually blocking you from sensing whether or not there are higher organisms over there?”

He gave the nearest camera node an exasperated look. “That’s what I said!”

“The interesting thing is that’s impossible.”

He shrugged, rubbing his eyes and opening a drawer in his night table, where an entire pharmacy awaited him. He started to paw through it, knowing what he was looking for. “I know, but it’s happening. Don’t ask me to explain.”

That was troubling, but it was also curious. Okay, so perhaps he had a point that her curiosity was reckless, but honestly, if you couldn’t aspire to knowledge, you might as well be a data dump.

The Nyorai was made to be a “defensive” ship, since war was a negative word with bad approval numbers. What that meant was it had many capabilities commercial ships only wished they had, such as what was referred to as an “airlock facilitator” – translated from the corporate weasel speak, that meant they could force dock and open anyone’s airlock from their side. And if what they approached did not have an airlock, they could create one by biting right through their hull.

No armaments or defensive systems were triggered by their approach – as far as she and Khal could tell, which meant not at all – and while she found what looked to be an airlock on the stern side (?) of the station (she assumed it was a small station of unknown configuration; it also seemed to be made of an unclear black metal that seemed to have metallic flecks deep within it, like oil sprinkled with diamond dust), attempts at communication were met with dead silence. So she snugged the ship up to the stern, and engaged forced docking. Although it took a moment, she got the airlock in the station to respond and start cycling, so she didn’t have to send cerasteel monofilaments through its hull.

As she was having Bruno analyze the atmosphere, pressure, and gravity inside the station, Vani came out of her sleep cycle, and just in time. Vani was a Syshahi, a type of mammalian reptiloid (which seemed like a contradiction in terms, but wasn’t) that was known – somewhat derisively – as the accountants of the galaxy.

The reptilians in fiction were always more interesting. They were depicted as savage warriors or flesh eating cannibals or something along those lines, but the truth was more pedestrian. The Syshahi evolved pretty much like all other mammals, only their distant ancestors were a type of warm blooded reptile that had more than iguana level intelligence. They were standard bipeds, used to a slightly warmer, more humid climate (their planet was almost totally water – really all they had was the one large continent, and a smattering of small and insignificant islands), with almost no history of war or violence whatsoever. In spite of the popular prevailing theory, that only conflict could bring about scientific advancement, they advanced faster than Humans, having launched something into orbit by the Human equivalent of the twelfth century. Of course, the occasionally violent weather systems that plagued the planet during certain seasons, and the rather ferocious nature of many of their sea creatures probably spurred them on to think of some defensive measures.

The Syshahi were even vegetarians, if you didn’t count insects; they had no teeth, only a hard keratinous layer that allowed them to masticate vegetation and bugs. It didn’t make them the greatest chefs in the galaxy, but they were an intensely patient and curious people, and were the first to contact Humans. That was lucky, as they had no interest in conquest, at least in a physical sense – they took the old axiom “knowledge is power” quite literally, and made it a point to know everything there was to know. Sharing it was quite another thing. If they weren’t so perversely non-violent, Dar might have suspected them of being behind that singularity ship.

Vani was like most of her species: a smidge over five feet tall with a round, bald head (they had no hair at all), and mottled green skin that was lightly scaled, with a wide, lipless slash of a mouth and huge gold eyes that was each the size of her fist. She had no nose, just two small slits in the center of her face, and her ears were also flush against her head, crescent moon shapes partially covered with a small flap of flesh. Visually the Syshahi were hard to tell apart (by others), and this extended to genders too, unless they were naked. The women had small breasts and wider hips, but that was it beyond genitalia; they could all be rendered androgynous quite easily.

But they had a unique ability that could be quite helpful. First of all, they saw best in low light levels – their world was humid and warm, but not all that bright. Also, taste and smell were heightened and entwined in ways that Humans and other species couldn’t compete with. They could taste the air, judge gender by scenting pheromones, and tell you if any living being was in a place by tasting sweat, respiration, and skin flakes in the air. If Khal couldn’t tell them if this place was inhabited, Vani surely could.

At the airlock, she met with Gen (now female, thanks to his latest hormone treatments), Kvec, and Khal. Dar had no choice but to stay jacked in to the ship since a quick exit might be called for, but Vani had a MoSys standard cortical-optical node – she was one of their functionaries for several years – but they had used nanites to alter it, so it could only pick up Dar’s wavelength. She’d be with them in spirit if nothing else.

“Would you put that away?” Khal snapped at Gen. They were in their smart suits already, but Gen was cradling a rack gun like her life depended on it.

Gen glared at Khal through her faceplate. “No. These fuckos just killed a whole shipload of jackbooted MoSys PR people, remember? I’m not being caught short.”

“Iff you’re ssso ssscared, why are coming at all?” Vani asked. She couldn’t help the lisp, even with the implant that allowed her to speak alien languages. The way their mouths and throats worked, all the Syshahi lisped terribly. In fact to most people, their language seemed like nothing but a series of hisses and clicks.

Gen almost denied being scared, but couldn’t, because Vani had probably tasted it in spite of the smart suit. “If there’s something over there worth something, I’m not having you freaks cut me out.” As always, the promise of riches outweighed any sense of self-preservation with Gen. At least she was consistent.

The airlocks pressurized, and it irised open into the station. Through Vani’s eyes, she could see that the alien airlock was unlit, to the point that Vani’s eyes saw it as if through a grey veil. According to her HUD, it had an oxygen rich atmosphere, perfectly breathable to everyone on the team, and the gravity was within parameters, although a bit on the light side. Lights pierced the gloom as Khal and Gen turned them on, and it illuminated some kind of paint splashed on the interior airlock door. “Get closer,” Dar told Vani, and she obeyed. Vani was agreeable to a fault, but when she refused to do something, there was no making her do it; this was true of all the Syshahi. They’d only humor you for so long, then come to a complete and dead stop.

Vani retracted her helmet, which caused Gen to exclaim, “Germs, Vani! You could get alien syphilis or something!”

“My ssyssstem isss unique,” she said, and Dar heard her lips (mouth) smack as she tasted the air. It wasn’t arrogance; Syshahi had such odd immune systems as reptiloid mammals that it was difficult to infect them with anything that didn’t originate from their own planet. Humans keeled over and died when they sniffed an alien flower, but Syshahi could munch alien bugs all day and take a dip in a sewage pit and be perfectly fine.

Kvec leaned forward for a closer look, and Khal asked (probably for him), “What is that? It kinda looks like vomit. Someone toss their dried sushi?” With the light on it, it was purplish-black and slightly lumpy, like a bad attempt at stucco.

After clearly considering the taste of the air, Vani said in that inflectionless Syshahi tone that brooked no argument, “It’s blood, I believe. Blood of an alien with a high copper content.”

Dar saw, from Vani’s point of view, everyone staring at her in abject shock. Yes, they found the connection between the strange moon, the alien ship, and this bizarre station: death.

This was all set up so incorrectly he would have thought it was a frame job, only that didn’t really make sense either. For what? And who would do this anyways? MoSys was the governmental version of a sexually transmitted flesh eating disease, but they didn’t kill people without some sort of reason, no matter how meager.

The emotions from the others were crowding him, but he did his best to focus on Dar, who was simply feeling curiosity. Gen seemed to be secretly convinced they were all going to die – not an irrational fear, actually – and was preparing to ditch them, while Kvec gave off an oddly strong feeling (for him anyways), one of a strange sort of abandonment. He wasn’t the last Cryer in the universe, but he felt like one right at the moment, and he couldn’t blame him. Cryers were built to be nearly indestructible, and yet outside were Cryers that had been shattered like so much spider glass. It was wrong on so many different levels that Kvec didn’t know how to handle it, and Khal had no comfort to give him.

Dar was good; he had to focus on her. It wasn’t just that she was about eighty percent machine that made her so emotionally sterile, although he knew most of the “crew” thought that. No, ‘Facers were specially picked before birth, given traits that made them emotionally dead anyways, so a life spent mostly living through machines would seem not only natural, but desirable, as much as they could desire anything. If they felt things like normal people, they might resent a life spent as a glorified data compiler and sensor relay system.

Dar seemed to be staring at a blank wall, but her curiosity was notching ever upward. “Kvec, would you please punch that wall?” Kvec looked at her and made a hand gesture that was his equivalent of “why”. “I’m getting strange density variations, and I would like to confirm a hypothesis.”

“Density variations?” Gen repeated, growing increasingly twitchy. “What? Is this cave gonna fall on us?”

“I’d hardly be asking him to punch it if I thought that was a concern,” Dar replied, taking him much more seriously than he deserved to be.

Still, Gen stepped back towards the entrance as Kvec went over to the wall she indicated and started punching. The smooth surface cracked, fine lines spider webbing out from point of impact, then chunks of rock began falling away as Kvec continued driving his fist into the same spot, making a gaping hole. He was almost wrist deep in the wall when dark liquid started oozing down the side.

“What the hell is that?” Gen exclaimed.

Dar remained as serene as only a person with a genetically stunted amygdala could. “It’s blood. The bodies are inside the wall. In pieces, which is even odder.”

Gen’s fear spiked, and both he and Kvec felt instant revulsion. Khal tried not to let it carry him away, although he felt a little nauseous himself. None of this made any sense! How did people end up in pieces embedded inside a wall? Why were the Cryers shattered, and by what? Was it the same thing that did them both? How?

Gen turned and walked away. “Where are you going?” Dar inquired.

“Back to the ship. This is fucked up.”

“Dickshit,” Khal called after him, even though it didn’t make him feel any better. Also, Gen was probably doing the wisest thing, and he loathed it when he/she was right. It seemed like a crime against nature somehow.

Kvec sent him a visual image, this time of a ceiling breaking and a whole bunch of sewage sluicing down on top of them, burying them up to their knees in gray-brown sludge. He nodded, grimacing at the crystal guy – yeah, they were in deep shit indeed.

And it was about to get worse.

“Oi, guys, bit of a problem,” Bruno said, breaking through the comm.

“What is it?” Dar asked.

“The system gate just activated, and on a MoSys command frequency too.”

The three of them stared at each other for a moment, almost awestruck by their own shitty luck. What would a MoSys command ship be doing coming to the ass end of nowhere … unless it was after them? “Power up the engines,” Dar ordered, as they all started to file out of the mystery cave of death. It would have been nice to run, but in low gravity it wasn’t advisable, unless you didn’t mind going a tad airborne, or being unable to stop when you actually wanted to. So they had to settle for a brisk walk, which didn’t seem fast enough, especially considering how far away the ship seemed to be from them.

A gash suddenly broke open in the bottom of the ship as they approached, the semi-organic crystal opening its belly to them, as Dar asked, as calmly as always, “Estimated time of emergence?”

“Anywhere between five seconds and ‘alf an ‘our. You know the gate’s time dilation plays ‘ell on my scanners.”

Even before they cycled through the airlock and got used to the blood pounding rush of heavier gravity, Khal could feel the ratcheting anxiety of Gen and Vani, and even Kvec and his own, which was getting mixed up with everyone else’s. He tried to focus on Dar, who was physically incapable of panic. He wondered if he should try and mentally reach out, see if he could “feel” the MoSys crew from here, and nervously fingered his pre-loaded dose of cholopanazine thirteen in his pocket as his smart metal suit retracted back into its belt. The “chol-13” would knock him out almost the instant it hit his system, but even better than that, it would keep him from picking up other people while unconscious. He could do that sometimes, sadly, but this was a monster drug that would numb him from the outside in. In miniscule doses, he’d heard that it was used as a chemical lobotomizer. When he was back in the rehab, he overheard the doctors saying that a lobotomy was the only thing that could stop his out of control empathy. Would they do that to him if they caught him, or just kill him? Which would be better?

As soon as they took off their smart suits and the airlock opened, Gen was there, anxiety oozing out of every pore. He was almost sure he could smell it, something like vinegar and sea salt. “I told you this was a trap! Didn’t I say this was a trap?”

Dar ignored him, sliding past as she broke out in a dead run towards the pit. “Bruno, emergency lift-off procedure; get us into orbit.”

“I said this was a trap!” Gen shouted after her, his voice rebounding off the crystal walls. “If we get killed, it’s all your fault!”

“Would you shut the fuck up?” Khal snapped, unable to take his rising sense of panic and strident voice. The world seemed to tilt on its axis, and he slid straight off his feet, heading for the wall, until Kvec reached out and snagged him with one cold, hard hand. His other hand had literally dug itself into the near wall, so Kvec wasn’t going anywhere.

The same couldn’t be said of Gen, who lost his footing and went sliding down the hall until he vanished, cursing Bruno all the way. Bruno could function as “auto-pilot”, but he was extremely limited, and had none of Dar’s grace or finesse with the ship, so he moved it like it was a blunt instrument, with no thought for the passengers whatsoever.

Kvec held on to him and the wall until the ship’s severe upward trajectory leveled out, indicating Dar had jacked in and took over. Kvec let him go, and he tried to tamp down his own fear, which was starting to taste like bile in his throat. Kvec patted him on the shoulder, his way of asking if he was all right. “I’m okay. Bruno’s driving just plays hell on my digestive system.”

Down the hall, he could hear Gen’s rant continuing. “ – kill you, you stupid waste of code -”

When he was certain he wasn’t going to dry heave all over the floor, he started down the hall, desperate to get to Blue before … well, whatever happened happened. “Have they emerged yet?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Dar reported emotionlessly. “But radiation levels from the gate are increasing on an exponential level every five seconds, which indicates emergence is immanent.”

He flung himself into the lift, and asked what he knew to be a stupid question. “We’re doomed, aren’t we?”

“We don’t have time to run, but we can hide.”

“Huh?” But even as he said that, he figured out what she meant. The high radiation around the gas giant, the one that they suspected could harbor a MoSys ship – now it was their destination. It would have been ironic if it wasn’t so fucking desperate. Maybe he should just call it perfect symmetry; maybe that would make it easier to swallow. “Oh, right. How long can we take exposure before we start getting sick?”

“Our radiation shielding is more than adequate. We shouldn’t be here long enough to worry about that – unless they’re coming to construct a space station or something.”

As the lift disgorged him on his level, he stumbled to his room, trying to recall all the drugs he had with him. It was hard to remember what he’d managed to shove in his pockets, and what was still scattered on his floor. “If they have a Negotiator, we’re dead.”

“A problem we’ll deal with if it arises,” she replied, as if they could. There was nothing they could do, except die horribly. Perhaps not as horribly as the people on that blasted moon below them, but close.

Once in his room, he had the lights adjust to half, and told it to display any visual feed. There was none at the moment that Dar was letting through, which made him nervous. Was she keeping them in the dark so they wouldn’t panic? That was actually a wise idea.

He was sifting through his drug ampoules still on the floor as Blue got of the tank and came over to him, wrapping a tentacle around his ankle. The colors of alarm and fear screamed across his brainpan, and he hated to make it worse, but he saw little recourse. He told her about the MoSys ship about to enter the system, and how they were hiding in a radiation “shadow” and hoping it worked. She hated the idea of that, but she was more concerned about him than her. Then again, he was the only “civilized” one among the brutes, the only one who could speak their language. He wondered what the others would think of Blue if they realized she was actually a bit of a snob.

He found a hit of cephalycholine and collapsed on his bed, preparing to shoot himself up. He was waiting though, just in case he was needed, but he was still considering it anyways. That’s when Dar announced, “We’re in position. I launched an eye. Telemetry should be incoming shortly.”

An “eye” was a type of passive camera/sensor that got most of its energy from a low level radiation source, so it was unlikely to register as anything but normal background “noise”. Certainly around a gas giant this radioactive and surrounded by debris, it’d be nearly impossible to spot. It was also likely to get busted to shit by orbiting dust and ice, but it didn’t have to last that long. Most “eyes” were considered disposable anyways, because they were limited. Blue crawled up on the bed and watched with him, careful not to touch him in case she caught his fear, or vice versa.

The wall opposite his bed darkened, and after a few distortion lines from the radiation, he was treated to space as a red backdrop, a curtain of crimson velvet as seen through a layer of dust (one of the debris rings around the planet). The eye was set to low infrared, possibly because they wouldn’t be able to see anything otherwise, The gate was a blur of whitish energy, a semi-circle of hot energy, and he was so riveted in watching it, waiting for the MoSys ship to come through and seal their fates, that he didn’t notice the weird thing until Dar said, almost conversationally, “What is that?”

“What is it what?” Gen’s anxious voice replied over the open comm. But after quickly scouring the image, Khal saw it – a bright white gash of energy opposite the ring. It was probably hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the ring, but it looked rather close from their vantage point. Space distances were so vast, almost everything was relative. As the gate amped up to a terrible brilliance, the gash got wider, and did much the same thing.

“Is it a glitch?” Gen asked hopefully. “Some kind of interference?”

There was a long pause from Dar, which could only mean she was checking something. “No. It seems to be … I’m not sure what to call it.”

That wasn’t a good sign. “Speculate,” Khal urged.

Another pause. Now his stomach was churning, and he was sure he was going to vomit. “It’s a hole,” she finally said. “A rift in space.”

“A wormhole?” Gen replied in disbelief.

“No. Perhaps similar, but the reading are wrong. Everything’s constant and symmetrical, and there’s almost no gravitational variant.”

“So what the hell is it?” Gen demanded.

There was such a long pause that Khal had assumed that Dar wouldn’t answer, but as the dark bulk of the MoSys ship emerged (and holy shit, it was a heavy cruiser; they were so fucking dead he couldn’t believe he was still sucking air) from the gate, she suddenly said, “It’s a gateway without the gate.”

That sounded absurd, but they could see it now, a shape coming out of the gap. The gash disappeared as if winking out, leaving behind a dark object that seemed to radiate a cool blue energy. It was shaped oddly, an oblong that was taller than it was long, almost like a capsule viewed from above. The MoSys heavy cruiser was shape like a long, wide gunmetal gray knife blade, form following function.

“There’s communication traffic between the two ships,” Dar reported. “It’s encrypted. Attempting decryption now.”

“Whose ship is that?” Gen asked. “I don’t recognize that design.”

“No wonder,” Bruno interjected. “It’s not on file.”

“It’s a new form of ship?” Gen asked. Which seemed like a stupid question on the face of it, but it wasn’t really. There was only two things it could be: a new ship, or a new life form’s ship. Somehow a new ship alone sounded a bit more appealing.

Khal knew it was coming, so he swallowed hard and braced himself. “Khal – “ Dar began.

“Yeah, I know,” he interrupted, closing his eyes and focusing, casting his mind out across the great divide.

There were a lot of people out there, and it was hard to separate them all, who was on what ship, but one emotion started coming through so loud and clear it started burying all others, and it was easy to pinpoint. “Oh shit, they’re dead.” he muttered, pressing the hypo to his neck. All the feelings ebbed away, leaving him alone with blissful numbness.

“Dead?” Gen repeated. “You’re not saying that’s a ship full of dead people, are you?”

“It’s about to be. They may be aliens, I don’t know, but they hate the MoSys ship so much it was like gargling acid. It’s gone.”

Gen scoffed. Why did he always have to scoff? “A heavy cruiser against that … that sleeping pill? I don’t even see any weapon ports on it.”

“There is an energy surge from the unknown ship,” Dar reported, but save for a brighter blue glow in the rear quarter of the ship, they saw nothing else. After a moment, Dar reported, “I’m reading gravitational anomalies inside the MoSys cruiser.”

“What the hell does that me -” Gen began, but stopped dead, as two things happened almost simultaneously. First, the space gash yawned open once more, and seemed to swallow the oblong ship, pulling it back into total darkness.

The second thing that happened was the MoSys ship started to implode.

There was no explosion, nothing but the occasional bright flare of something from the drive systems rupturing, as the ship seemed to shrink within itself, the hull rippling like it was water being pulled inexorably down a drain. The rear section of the ship began to pull in towards its center, and when debris broke off, hull plating popping like warped heat tiles, it was all pulled back in towards the center.

“What the fuck..?” Gen gasped, settling on a brand new question.

Suddenly the large ship was reduced to a ball of metal no bigger than a shuttle, and it seemed to be being crumpled, as if in a giant invisible fist. When Dar’s voice came back, she sounded almost wistful. “Astounding. They opened up a singularity inside the heavy cruiser.”

“A singularity?” Khal repeated, feeling both tired and giddy at the absurdity of it all. How many people had just died on that cruiser? Good thing he numbed up first. “You mean a black hole? They opened a black hole on that ship? How is that even possible?”

“I don’t know. I do believe it’s some form of micro-singularity, not a true black hole, and from the readings I’m getting from it, it’s extremely unstable.”

“Which means what precisely?” Gen asked, sounding not so much skeptical as sure they were totally fucked.

“It should collapse in on itself within the next sixteen hours.”

“You mean disappear?”

“That’s what I said.”

The ship was now completely gone, without even a single rivet to show that it had ever existed. There was a small, pale glow where it had been, though, not bleeding a lot of radiation, just enough to show there was something there. “We’re safe?” Gen asked for confirmation.

“It has stopped expanding,” she confirmed. “We are safe; its gravitational pull will only be felt within one thousand kilometers of its event horizon.”

“That is small,” Gen noted. “And yet it just ate a heavy cruiser.”

“The size of it was irrelevant,” Dar needlessly replied. “When the singularity opened inside the ship, the ship was all within its event horizon. They never had a chance.”

“No one has the kind of technology we’re even talking about,” Khal interjected. “No one can create a micro singularity, not to mention harness it in use as a weapon.” It was a weapon of incalculable power, the most dangerous thing to ever exist if what they were saying was true. What kind of defense could you have against a weapon like that? It could eat a planet as easily as a ship. “Who the fuck are these things?”

“I don’t know, but there may be a way to find out,” Dar said. “When their ship was emerging, I was able to ping what seemed to be a locator beacon left behind from wherever they came from. I have coordinates.”

“What?” Gen shouted, sounding equal parts panicked and furious. “You pinged them?! What if they traced it back -”

“They didn’t. Even if they detected it, they would probably have ascribed it to the MoSys ship.”

Khal rubbed his eyes, which felt like sandpaper. Drying was a side effect of the drugs, but one much better than having to feel anything else. ”You can’t seriously be thinking of trying to follow aliens as deadly as that, Dar.”

“It’s suicide,” Gen agreed. “If you wanna die, fine, but leave us out of it.”

“If they hate MoSys, and have the ability to do something about it, it’s in our best interest to get to know them, is it not?”

Dar almost made it sound like a rhetorical question, but he knew it wasn’t. She was planning on trying to find them, whether they agreed or not.