Worlds of the Ascended Ones

Dreks walked onto the bridge with a mug of warm coffee, sweeping the ship’s status monitors with a practiced glance.

“How long?”

“Just a couple of minutes, sir. The course is stable, the exit vector is set.” Ran replied.

“Good job.” Having praised the navigator, the captain approached the pilot. “A reminder of the objective: we emerge on the far side of Shelton VII’s moon and begin recharging the subspace drive, then jump before the colony’s tracking stations spot us. Is everything ready to shut down active systems?”

“Affirmative, sir,” the tigress nodded, casting a glance at the console to her left and flipping open the protective caps on the toggles.

“Excellent.” Dreks returned to his seat and drained his mug in one gulp. “Let’s begin.”

On the lizard’s monitor, the timer counted down the final seconds before the exit from subspace. Having verified the exit coordinates one more time, Ran snorted with satisfaction and transferred control of Polaris to Fry.

“Six… five…” the lizard monotonously counted down the seconds, his gaze fixed on the monitor displaying exit vector data. He carefully rested one paw on the abort lever, which would interrupt the jump sequence in case of unforeseen circumstances. A few moments later the drive released a burst of energy to breach the barrier between two different dimensions, and shut down. The corvette shot out of the subspace vortex into real space several thousand kilometers from a moon entirely covered in ice.

PLANETARY DEFENSE FORCES CORVETTE “POLARIS”

SHELTON SYSTEM, 16062480/1605 SGT

As soon as Polaris settled onto the designated course and the engines fell silent, Fry began shutting down the ship’s active systems one after another. The main lighting throughout the corvette went off as well, replaced by sparse emergency lamps. The quiet hum and vibration vanished, and the ship plunged into complete, unsettling silence.

“Attention, crew! Polaris has entered silent mode!” Fry announced over the intercom.

“We’ve emerged at the designated point, deviation is zero point zero zero two percent,” the lizard reported.

“Passive scanners detect nothing, the near-lunar space is clear, starting the timer. Three hours and five minutes until the subspace drive is recharged, three hours and forty minutes until we enter the line of sight of the Gates and the tracking stations,” the tigress added.

“Ran, Fry. Rest while you can,” Dreks ordered. “I’m taking over the controls.”

“Thank you, sir,” the tigress smiled as she climbed out of her seat. The lizard needed no convincing either — the seven-hour flight had worn him out “a little”: after the battle, the course and the ship’s systems had to be kept under constant watch, and another equally grueling interstellar voyage lay ahead. Disconnecting his neurointerface, Ran rose from his seat and stretched.

“Want to grab a bite?” Fry nodded to the lizard.

“Yes, I wouldn’t mind.” Ran followed the tigress.

Left alone, Dreks walked to the observation windows and leaned against the navigator’s chair, fixing his gaze on the moon. From this distance one could see multiple long, dark lines on the surface where the kilometer-deep ice had once cracked under internal water pressure. This moon bore a strong resemblance to one of Jupiter’s moons in the Solar System — before a heap of processing stations had been erected on it. For hundreds of years now, Earth’s resources have been unable to sustain the exponentially growing industry and population needs. Observing the surface, Dreks tried to relax and distract himself, if only briefly, from the thoughts swirling in his head. He was nearly certain who stood behind the attacks and how to search for new clues regarding the location of the Keeper, but common sense told him the problem would not be solved so easily… Not just yet, at any rate.

***

The lizard and the tigress walked toward the mess hall through the dimly lit first-level corridor, past crew quarters, conversing quietly about the upcoming visit to the barely explored star systems. In the total silence, it seemed their voices could be heard at least two compartments ahead.

“…I think the scanners will manage, but if anything comes up, we can always deploy surface probes to survey the planets. If the colonizer ship crashed, we’ll find it,” the tigress said thoughtfully, swaying slightly, but immediately clenching her teeth — the wound on her back still made itself known.

“You should have stayed in the cybermed longer,” Akrongi Ran scolded her with a hiss. He walked across the floor, moving his feet like a large bird, his claws clicking against the deck. “Well, the probes are our best hope. The one who arrived on the Sun Spire can sense more than any probe, but she may choose not to tell.”

The lizard stepped through the door and glanced sidelong at the whole company: the wolf and the lynx were chewing juicy synthetic meat, Devora had graced a cup of rice with her attention and was eating with thin sticks, for some reason.

“Keep sleeping like that and you’ll miss everything,” the tigress snorted, entering behind Ran and giving a friendly nod to Omela, who had looked up.

“I think you’re right about the Mystic, but honestly, she seems way too suspicious of a character to me,” Fry whispered at the edge of audibility and headed to the drinks dispenser. Taking the largest cup, she filled it to the brim with plain hot water, simultaneously producing a vacuum-sealed packet that, judging by the image on it, contained some sort of green leaves. The lizard grabbed his portion of synth-meat and sat down next to Fry, deep in thought.

“Among some races,” he rustled, “secrecy is considered a great courtesy. It is dear to my heart, though I myself do not know where I came from. Sometimes it seems to me that I am older than what is recorded in my chip, and sometimes… that I am still in the eggshell and have not truly hatched, and my eyes have not yet opened. Shandaris hatched long ago, and perhaps she is older than all of us.”

Akrongi Ran had heard only one mental call from Shandaris, and had written it off as fatigue, yet something in the contact with the ship and something in the stranger’s appearance had touched him to the depths of his soul. Ran’s cold blood ran faster, and his thoughts flowed with unusual speed — he wanted to understand and to remember.

Meanwhile, Hioni’s thoughts were flowing in an entirely different direction. He had recently completed a calculation showing that Polaris could be very significantly upgraded. Slightly nervous, the wolf was making final adjustments before presenting the matter to Dreks. Devora was keeping Omela entertained with stories about her destroyed homeworld — its customs and history — and about how she had met the wolf and what races they had won.

“And I barely managed to buy him out — first of all, it was expensive, and second, he resisted… To come up with the money, we ran off to the Ring Races, you know what kind of prizes they have…”

“Oh, freakin’ awesome ones, I remember, I remember!” The lynx even licked her lips.

“And we won, and that’s how Hioni gained his freedom. His freedom is literally the work of his own hands.”

Omela broke into the widest grin. The story about Hioni finally convinced her that many humans — the creators of The Ascended Ones — truly do see them as more than just a labor force.

“Do you like racing?” Devora asked.

“I love it!!! And not just on the Elemental! I took second place in bike competitions two years in a row!”

“Tell you what, Omela, if you want, sign up for my crew… when all this is over. We’ll enter the Red Cup — they have paired ship teams there — we’ll repaint the Gitche Gumee and make one team. What do you say?”

“For real!? Yes, I want to!!!” Omela jumped up. Then she thought for a moment and added: “But for the while we’re flying with Dreks, so that no more worlds die! And I’ll obey the captain without question!”

“Yes,” Devora approved.

Listening to the lizard, the tigress tore the packet open with her fangs and shook a small handful of leaves into the cup. They slowly swirled, settling to the bottom and tinting the water a golden green.

“Is that tea?” Ran asked, indicating the leaves in the boiling water with his eye. “Pleasant smell.”

“It is! I got hooked on it about ten years ago… And every year it gets harder to find…” The tigress thoughtfully touched the cup, checking whether it was too hot. “I wanted to ask you something, if you don’t mind, of course. To be honest, until recently I had never encountered anyone like you. I only heard about your kind a couple of times from space fleet officers. Tell me, do you not remember your childhood at all? Your youth?” Fry raised her eyes to the lizard.

“No, unfortunately I only remember myself as a fully grown adult. I have heard that there are certain techniques, mostly telepathic, that help recover memories, but I have never found the opportunity to seek them out. I have never encountered others of my kind, but that does happen — for instance, there are Ascended Ones created from very unusual animals; I even heard of an Ascended hawk — also one in a million. What do you think — should I ask Shandaris about all of this?”

“You know, about telepathy… First of all, to be honest, I personally wouldn’t like someone rummaging around in my head, and second, science is only just approaching this area: research in the field of mental data transmission will remain in its infancy for a good decade, if not hundreds of years.”

“Forgive me for going on and on about myself — actually, I’m far more curious to hear about you: what planet are you from, how long has your kind been ascended, and why did you choose space?” About Shandaris, Ran understood and decided not to approach her for now — unless she herself gave him some reason to.

“Hmm… As I’ve heard, our kind was among the first to be ascended, very long ago. Around several millennia before the Long Night. When I was little…” Fry took a small sip, thoughtfully watching the movement of the leaves in the cup. “Basically, my older sister and I were born on Earth, but we barely knew our parents — we only saw them a handful of times. As we were told, they served in the Earth Alliance fleet and weren’t able to visit us often. From an early age, we grew up under the care of foster parents who were not of a pleasant disposition. My sister and I wanted to understand why we had been left behind. Very often we tried to find a building tall enough that from the top we could see the stars we’d heard about in school. Time passed, and my sister got a job at a corporation headquartered in one of the tallest buildings in City-27, and one day she called and got me up to the flyer landing pad on the roof. That hot evening, I saw for the first time how, against the nearly clear evening sky, one star after another burned. As they said, such beauty had not been visible from Earth’s surface for a very long time. At that moment I simply wanted to be there — to travel among new worlds, just like my parents. It was only when I grew up and enrolled in the Academy that I learned why our parents never visited. The ship on which they served — the carrier Retribution — had been lost in a battle for a remote colony that had come under raider attack.”

For a few moments the tigress fell silent, staring at a single point.

“Pfft, that came out a bit too romantic and sappy, didn’t it?” the tigress smirked at her own words.

“No,” Ran rustled in an even voice, half-closing his eyelids, “as you speak, and I see through your eyes. It is beautiful and worthy. Once, I spent four days on a station, trying to capture it. Those who built it had forgotten the grandeur of space. They thought only of ships, but one cannot think of machines and forget what they are used for. I sat without food or water and watched the same stars you saw that day. The machine could not endure — it broke down. I survived and captured it. Such visions make us stronger…”

The transparent film of the lizard’s third eyelid slid across his eye; he blinked and looked at the tigress.

“I would like to try the tea as well,” Ran admitted, “it is interesting. I have been on almost no planets. It is a great pity that yet another one was destroyed — now it can never be visited.”

“We will avenge Avalon, I promise,” the tigress said darkly, pouring hot water into another cup and adding leaves. “Here. The taste might seem a bit bitter — to tell the truth, I didn’t take to it right away myself,” handing it to Ran, she asked in passing: “So you’ve spent little time on planetary surfaces? Have you been traveling with Devora and Hioni lately?”

“Those two?” The lizard studied the tea carefully, then extended his long forked tongue and cautiously touched the hot surface. “Cosmic vagabonds, Devora and Hioni. Yes, I was with them; before that, on large and small ships of the star fleet. I’ve long lost count of my flights, but the landings on planets I can enumerate on my fingers.”

Ran raised a four-fingered hand.

“Ma’Kaga in the Scorpio system. And its moon. The third planet from the alpha of Sagittarius. With a methane atmosphere, a small world… sand dunes. Iberia-145 — technoworld… you probably know about that. Kunthu, Malone-400. And that’s all; the rest are military installations, of which there are countless. Not much.”

Ran licked the tea again and suddenly sucked it all in, like a python swallowing a rabbit.

“Exotic,” he smirked, “and though I won’t become a devotee… I thank you for the experience — it is always interesting to try something new.”

“You’re always welcome, Ran,” Fry chuckled. “Don’t worry, I have a feeling we’ll yet have the chance to set foot on some planet’s surface.”

“I would be glad,” the lizard replied in a voice dry as sand and plucked several spent leaves from the cup for analysis — the plant had piqued his interest. “It will not be difficult to impress me, because I have seen very little, Fry. Bon appetit, everyone.”

With those words the navigator rose — he intended to sleep for a few hours before his watch. As soon as Ran left the room, Hioni approached the tigress, carrying a stack of papers covered in schematics.

“Lieutenant? Excuse me, I may be interrupting… But may I ask you a question?” the wolf asked uncertainly.

“Of course, go ahead,” Fry smiled.

“There’s something I was going to show the captain… But first I want to show it to you,” with those words Hioni dropped the stack of schematics right on the table.

“Whoa…” The tigress raised her eyebrows meaningfully, grabbing her cup at the last second and lifting it above the table as the avalanche of papers spread across its entire surface. “And what is all this?” Fry picked up one sheet showing a printed schematic of sensor electronics wiring to the ship’s central processor. In several places the schematic had been corrected in pencil, with new branches and designations for some additional devices.

“This is… This is my own design. While researching Gitche Gumee, I investigated certain characteristics of its cloaking field and figured out how to recreate it on other ships, albeit not at the same flawless quality.”

“Now then, let’s hear more about that,” Fry moved closer to the table. “Have a seat, Hioni.”

***

Twenty minutes before the subspace drive recharge cycle completed, the doors leading to the bridge swung open, admitting the tigress and the wolf. Dreks, who had been making adjustments to the surveillance systems, looked up from the screen:

“Lieutenant! On time, as always.”

“Affirmative,” she replied cheerfully, pointing a paw toward Hioni. “Sir, this genius wants to share something with you.”

“Is that so? And what might that be?” Dreks asked with curiosity in his voice, turning to the wolf as he approached. Hioni held out a stack of printed sheets.

“I believe I could build a cloaking field generator for your ship, sir. It won’t be the same kind of cloaking as on the Gitche Gumee, but making Polaris temporarily disappear from enemy scanner screens is entirely feasible.”

Dreks took the papers and began quickly scanning through them. Hioni was proposing the installation of several devices on the ship that would completely block scanner beams, thereby making it impossible to target the ship using the standard means available to the Confederation.

“As I understand it, this is an analogue of the ‘Darkness’ system used by the Confed intel department,” the captain remarked without looking up from the schematics. “Except that system uses a swarm of small fourth-class probes that generate interference.”

“Correct, but this is a more advanced form of cloaking,” Hioni nodded, expecting the captain to be versed in technology of this level. “‘Darkness’ uses the interference principle, whereas this will fully absorb the signal; furthermore, I’ll try to make the ship partially concealed in the visual spectrum as well.”

“And how exactly?”

“Right here,” the wolf indicated with a claw on the schematic, “we’ll install a couple of enhanced antennas and emitters that will deflect the signal… We’ll be inside a kind of cocoon that electromagnetic radiation will surround. The generator can be installed close to the ship’s reactor; the device itself will be small. We’ll also need to work on your scanner array electronics so they can at least function in passive mode with the cloaking field active.”

“Reactor load?” Dreks raised his gaze to Hioni.

“No more than ten percent of the operational baseline.”

“Meaning that while the field is active, we’re also not very capable of any active operations…” The tigress stepped closer, thoughtfully running a paw through her mane.

“Unfortunately, yes. I’m only just starting to work on this,” Hioni nodded.

Dreks shifted his gaze to his pilot.

“Well, in certain situations it will come in very handy. How much time do you need, Hioni?”

“Well… About forty hours to assemble the generator, plus I’ll need to go outside a couple of times for the installation…” The wolf paused briefly, estimating it all in his head. “About a week, sir.”

Fry nodded in agreement and settled into her station, powering up the control console. The timer continued counting down to the jump window; less than seven minutes remained. The tigress began the routine pre-launch preparations and propulsion system checks.

“Agreed, you may begin,” Dreks smirked, returning the schematics. “When we get back, I’ll find a way to repay you.”

“Oh, don’t bother. For me, the hands-on experience is far more valuable than any reward,” with those words Hioni hurried toward the exit, nearly crashing into the lizard who was entering the bridge. Ran snorted in surprise and stepped aside to let Hioni pass.

“Commendable eagerness,” Ran remarked afterward, once he had settled into his seat and activated his neurointerface.

“Yeah, he’s genuinely obsessed with his research,” the tigress giggled, reading the self-diagnostic readouts of Polaris.

“Lieutenant, exit silent mode! Prepare to jump!” the captain ordered, watching the timer as it hit zero — the drive was fully charged.

“Aye, sir.” Fry began activating the ship’s active systems. Lighting returned across all compartments; the quiet, familiar hum of the reactor, now bearing its load, could be heard again. Ran, meanwhile, was verifying coordinates and preparing to take the controls. Flipping the last toggles, the tigress shot a glance at the system status monitor. Not believing her eyes, she checked the activation sequence again.

“Sir, we have a problem!” Fry exclaimed, punching diagnostic commands into the terminal.

“What kind exactly?” Dreks replied calmly, walking over to the pilot.

“The engines aren’t responding to activation, the distribution circuit isn’t registering power supply input.”

“This is most likely a consequence of the last battle; I can’t say more at this point,” Ran added with a frown, his eyes closed.

“Localize the problem. Engage the onboard AI.”

“Trying.” Fry activated the holographic projection of Polaris, which filled the entire bridge. On the display, all major nodes and critical systems began flashing brightly at one-second intervals — the artificial intelligence had begun its step-by-step diagnostic. The engine power distribution zone turned red — neither the primary nor the backup circuit was responding to test impulses.

“Based on the readings, it appears to be near the fourth engine,” Fry suggested. “I’ve already dispatched repair bots to the area.”

“Time to restore?” Dreks asked impatiently.

“About an hour, maybe two,” the tigress replied, checking the console.

“We don’t have that kind of time,” Dreks rose from his seat and strode swiftly toward the exit. “In half an hour we will emerge from the moon’s shadow. Hioni and I will check it out personally.”

***

Moving through the lower engineering compartments, which had been virtually destroyed by the explosion, proved quite difficult. Having put combat exosuits on — some of them were still left on Polaris — Dreks and Hioni carefully picked their way across the mangled deck alongside the torn outer hull. The wolf cautiously climbed over a support beam blocking the path and, pushing aside dangling severed cables, approached yet another deformed door that was locked shut. Now, in addition to his own breathing, the captain could hear through the communicator the wolf muttering with a certain respect about the safety systems — they had completely sealed off access to the damaged zones.

“No, this won’t do,” the wolf concluded matter-of-factly, stepping back from the access console. “There’s an airlock further in, but beyond it there’s apparently another destroyed compartment, and from our damaged side we won’t be able to open this door.”

“We’re short on time, so we’ll have to do this differently. Step back.”

Hioni took several more steps toward the breach in the hull and, seeing the captain raise his assault rifle, grabbed hold of a protruding beam firmly. Dreks pulled the trigger, and though he could not hear the shots, the vibration jolted his suit as the rifle unleashed a burst of armor-piercing rounds at the locking mechanism. Air began rushing from the small punctures, and a moment later the door was forced open by the internal pressure, nearly tearing off its hinges. The brief vortex was so powerful that Hioni lost his grip and would have been blown out through the breach if Dreks had not caught him mid-flight.

“Captain? Decompression in airlock 23-A! Is everything all right?” Fry’s voice came through the earpiece.

“Yes, everything’s fine,” Dreks exhaled, looking at the wolf’s frightened face behind the visor of his helmet, “we’re just trying to reach our objective. So far, so good. Right, Hioni?”

The wolf nodded in reply and immediately fell into step behind the captain. Before long they reached the target compartment and opened its door. After the pressure equalization procedure, the captain removed his helmet and swept his gaze across the dimly lit space, cluttered with piles of crates full of spare parts, shattered equipment, and collapsed upper sections. Several repair bots were trying to clear the debris, but the process was taking far too long.

“We made it. The power distribution panels are on the opposite side.”

“Let’s try to get across…” Hioni said thoughtfully, leaping onto the first crate. In addition to their solid protection, capable of withstanding the cold of space and total vacuum, the servo-drives and numerous force amplifiers in the combat exosuits increased a human’s or Ascended One’s speed and strength several times. Having reached the top of the debris pile, the wolf began moving slowly and carefully, testing the reliability of the collapsed catwalks. After several minutes, Dreks and Hioni reached the panels, packed with wires and various mechanisms. Many of the conduits were destroyed, but the wolf showed no particular concern about that.

“Sir, we’re coming out of the shadow in ten minutes, but something’s not right,” came the uncertain voice of the tigress.

“What exactly? Be specific!” Dreks barked, pressing the communicator to his ear.

“Sensors have detected an anomalous pulse at a frequency of two point zero seven kilohertz, lasting zero point zero five seconds. Based on its position, the source is a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away from us — the same distance as the Subspace Gates, which will soon appear over the lunar horizon.”

“Sir, go ahead, I can handle this myself,” Hioni assured, pulling out his repair kit. “I’ll need about twenty minutes, no more.”

“No, this doesn’t even remotely resemble a subspace jump flash,” Devora said, shaking her head. She came to the bridge looking for Hioni, but as it turned out, it now depended on him whether Polaris could fire up her engines and move on to the next search point undetected.

“Then what is it? Ran insists it’s a ship,” the tigress nodded toward the lizard and fixed her gaze once more on the sensor grid readings. A white spot glowed there, captured by the instruments in the visual spectrum at the moment of the anomalous burst.

“Lieutenant, in my lifetime I have witnessed entry and exit procedures into subspace many thousands of times. That is not it. Beyond this flash, there is nothing. There is no ship.”

“Unless it is behind a cloaking field,” Ran whispered, looking up from the data processing. Fry and Nokomis turned to him in silence. “I can state with approximately seventy percent probability that there is a ship out there, but we simply cannot detect it in any frequency range.”

“Correct.” The opening doors admitted Dreks onto the bridge. “Lieutenant, are we still operating in silent mode?”

“Affirmative, and I’ve decided to minimize the emission from Polaris’s active sensors until we determine the source of the anomaly.”

“Good call,” the captain approved, clipping his helmet to his belt.

“The Gates station is entering our direct line of sight,” Fry reported, checking the timer. “Strange — I’m not observing any activity near it. There should be at least patrol ships…”

“Hioni, how much longer?” Dreks asked through the communicator.

“About ten minutes, maybe a bit more,” the wolf’s voice came through the roar of a cutting torch.

“Ships detected,” Ran said monotonously.

“Confirmed, five transport ships, Spirit-class.” Fry entered a couple of commands, and on one of the projection screens appeared a greatly magnified image from which it became clear that the transports were heading straight for the Gates. Some of them were trailing debris from their hulls and constantly deviating from their course. “We’re receiving a signal on the emergency frequency!”

The bridge filled with the noise of static, through which the voice of the lead vessel’s captain broke:

“…The evacuation flotilla is under attack by an unknown…” the voice cut in and out through the hissing interference, “…repeat, escort forces destroyed, requesting assistance… seventh has been hit…”

“They’re being pursued by drones, which means the carrier is somewhere nearby,” Ran stated with certainty, casting a glance at the sensor grid, where nothing besides the transports themselves was displayed.

“You’re sure? I don’t see any…”

The transport ship bringing up the rear erupted in flame and flew apart. Now the projection clearly showed three hostile ships leisurely pursuing the convoy.

“…Another one! Can anyone hear us?.. For heaven’s sake…” The broadcast filled with cries for help, contradicting orders, and the screams of dying crews.

“Cut the transmission!” Dreks understood perfectly well the demoralizing effect those voices could have on his crew.

“Captain, I suggest we immediately launch the Sun Spire and the Elemental to support the convoy,” the tigress reached for the intercom but was stopped by Dreks.

“Belay that order! I forbid any launches. Continue monitoring the convoy; as soon as the engines are online, execute the jump to the next waypoint.”

Fry was so stunned by this order that for a couple of moments she felt speechless. Exchanging a glance with the lizard, she turned to Dreks. He stood holding an impulse rifle in one hand, barrel pointed down, looking directly into the tigress’s eyes with a piercing gaze.

“Sir, we can’t just abandon them?!” Fry exclaimed, pointing at the screen where the slaughter was unfolding.

“The Spire and the Elemental wouldn’t make it in time anyway,” Nokomis shook her head.

“But we’re obligated to at least try! We could try to draw the drones’ attention while Hioni finishes the repairs…”

“Enough!” the captain raised his voice. “You have been given a direct order, Lieutenant. Carry it out!”

The lizard continued tracking the convoy’s movement as it came under enemy fire. What confused Ran was that the drones, instead of destroying the entire convoy, seemed to be herding it toward the Gates. The corvette’s sophisticated sensors once again detected a powerful electromagnetic burst, and Ran immediately focused his attention on it. Yes, it was definitely a ship, slightly larger than the drones, and it was unquestionably using a cloaking field — which the lizard reported at once.

“How long until the convoy reaches jump range?” Dreks asked, studying the incoming data intently.

“Mere seconds, sir.”

“It seems they’ll make it,” Nokomis said calmly.

All five transports approached jump acceleration distance and began the subspace entry procedure, synchronizing their drives. The Gates spawned a vortex, tearing open space-time. The lead transport poured power into its main engines and surged forward, but something went wrong. The subspace vortex began to dissipate, and gravitational disturbances tore the lead ship and the three transports behind it to pieces. Evidently the pilot of the last transport had managed to switch to manual control, and the ship began veering off course, attempting to avoid entering the unstable zone, but its speed was too great — the ship rammed the Gates station ring and broke in half. One half was instantly shredded by the subspace vortices, while the other continued on by inertia, leaving behind a trail of wreckage and dead crew.

The silence on the bridge was broken by Hioni’s voice over the intercom:

“Power supply restored.”

“Switch the ship to active mode, engines to maximum. Execute jump to the next target immediately.” Dreks walked heavily toward the exit.

“In peaceful times, we would be court-martialed for failing to render aid, but this is war, and it has different laws,” Nokomis said, maintaining an outward calm — even coldness. “By no calculation could we have saved them and survived ourselves, and right now we have no right to dispose of our own lives as we please — we are a crew, and our captain is Dreks.”

She gestured toward the departing commander with the scabbard of her sword. The tigress said nothing, her expression vacant as she began preparations for the jump.

***

“Right here.” Dreks paused the playback at the frame where the silhouette of a ship, its outlines very similar to the frigate Gitche Gumee, had distinctly appeared against the backdrop of dark space. “This was the moment the second anomalous flash was recorded.”

“A f-flas-s-sh… I see it,” the manticore moved closer to the projection, carefully studying the readings Polaris’s sensors had captured.

While the corvette raced toward the next objective under Ran’s attentive guidance, the conference room buzzed with an active discussion of the data gathered in the Shelton system. Standing beside Shandaris, Omela passionately voiced everything she thought about those who had slaughtered the evacuation flotilla in such a diabolical manner. Fry, her eyes lowered, listened in silence to the hypotheses being voiced.

“Not like us-s-sual… This ship did s-s-something to the trans-s-sition point of the Gates,” Shandaris turned her head toward the displayed spectrogram.

“I share that opinion,” Dreks nodded, rewinding the recording.

“Excuse me, I don’t quite get the operating principle of the Gates…” Omela looked questioningly at the captain. “And anyway… Is it even possible to do something to a transition point that’s already open?”

“Theoretically, yes,” the captain nodded. “In a nutshell, the principle is as follows: opening a transition into subspace requires enormous energy expenditure, which the reactors on the Gates provide. A ship transmits a signal containing authorization codes and jump coordinates to the control station, which then opens a stable tunnel from one set of Gates to another, though typically not over large distances — no more than ten to twenty light-years, meaning these are inter-system transits. For longer voyages, ships use their own drives, which allow them to enter subspace at any point and exit it the same way, navigating by beacons that correspond to the real-space positions of the Gates.”

“Holy crap,” Omela scratched her nose, thinking about how little she — a small craft’s pilot — knew in this field.

“In both cases, a transition point into subspace that has been opened for a brief period can be destabilized in two ways,” Dreks continued. “Either open a second transition point right in the center of the first, or… do what we saw today for the first time. Effectively ‘switch off’ the transition point. But the question still remains how exactly this was accomplished,” Dreks shifted his gaze to the manticore. She shrugged.

“No living being has seen anything like this. It looks as though that ship momentarily s-s-shut down the Gates s-s-station’s reactors. All reactors at once. Or acted upon the already open point with a gravitational dis-s-sturbance. In any case, this recording will be useful both to Mys-s-stic intelligence and to Confederation intelligence. I would like to us-s-se your subspace communication systems to transmit this data. May I?”

“Of course. I am already preparing a report for the Planetary Defense Forces command and will send you a copy within half an hour,” Dreks nodded, switching off the projector. “Any more questions? No? Then let us continue carrying out our priority mission.”

***

After removing his exosuit and changing back into his officer’s uniform, Dreks dimmed the lights to a minimum and, sitting on the edge of the couch, covered his eyes with his fingers. He was too exhausted from the past several days — the lack of sleep was now beginning to affect even simple, mechanical actions. Nevertheless, his thoughts were still occupied by pressing matters: although transmitting message packets could give away the corvette’s exact position, the report to command and the copy for the Mystics’ representative had to be sent as soon as possible, since this data might help resolve the problem of the Subspace Gates failures. At least now it was clear why no changes had been detected in the logical and physical structure of the malfunctioning Gates — the cause was a third party that had somehow acted upon the open transition point. In any case, intelligence would have to determine how exactly…

The doorbell chimed, and the captain involuntarily flinched, turning his head toward the monitor that showed the visitor. Yet another small problem — his first pilot. Fry was excellent at flying, but she had had no real combat experience until recent days and could not fathom that in certain situations one must sacrifice something to achieve objectives.

“Open,” Dreks said wearily, without even trying to get up from the couch. The tigress entered the cabin and looked around in search of the captain. She was used to him sitting at his workstation.

“Is something wrong, Lieutenant?” Dreks spoke up, massaging his temple with one hand. Fry turned sharply in his direction and came closer.

“Captain. I wanted to… No. I still cannot understand why we didn’t help and left those ships’ crews to certain death.”

Several moments passed in silence, then Dreks nodded toward the adjacent seat.

“Take a seat, El.”

The tigress silently settled on the opposite end of the couch, trying not to look the captain in the eyes.

“I know it’s useless right now to appeal to your reason and logic,” Dreks began, closing his eyes. “But you want to understand why we…”

“Didn’t even try to help. Yes, sir. That’s exactly what I want to know. According to clause twenty-seven of the fourth paragraph of the Confederation space navy code, any vessel that receives a distress signal must respond to it using all available means.”

Fry raised her gaze to the captain, but he didn’t even turn toward her — he merely stood up and walked over to his desk, fixing his eyes on the chessboard.

“Lieutenant, perhaps you haven’t noticed, but the Confederation is bursting at the seams under the strikes of an external enemy. Thousands are dying,” Dreks picked up one of his pieces from the board and turned it thoughtfully in his hand. “First of all, we have clear orders and we must carry them out. I answer to Admiral Wilford, and all of you answer to me. A soldier must not question orders during combat operations, Lieutenant — he must carry them out, otherwise he risks at the very least the lives of his comrades, if not greater losses. And if I have orders to find the Keeper without attracting unnecessary attention, then that is what I will do, even if I desperately want to do the opposite. I have no right to risk our crew — the stakes are too high, and we have virtually nothing to match the enemy’s firepower. And second, you should understand yourself that the observations we gathered of the enemy’s actions near the Subspace Gates are vitally important for our intelligence.”

“What?! I can’t believe my ears! Refugees have now become expendable material for intelligence research? And what about the code… Has it become a bunch of empty words?” the tigress objected, leaping to her feet in fury.

“Damn it, do you really think this decision came easy to me?” Dreks raised his voice, knocking one white piece off the board and placing his own black one in its place. “Sometimes you have to make choices like this, and sometimes you have to sacrifice hundreds for the possible salvation of millions. It was my decision, and I will bear the responsibility for it — at the very least, before myself for the rest of my days!”

“I think you know far more than you’re telling us, sir. I don’t understand why our ship was chosen for this mission? Is our corvette meant for some kind of covert operations? How did you know that the ships that attacked us in the Avalon system were unmanned?” Fry understood perfectly well that she had overstepped the boundaries of subordination and was asking too many questions, but she could no longer stop herself.

The captain turned and approached the tigress, looking her in the eyes.

“El, we’ve been working together for almost five years. You’re a good pilot, and I’m sure you’ll make an excellent captain. But you still have much to learn and need to look at certain things from a different angle. Tell me, do you trust me?”

Fry was silent for several moments, not tearing her gaze from the captain.

“Yes, sir. Of course,” she sighed, trying to calm herself.

“Then understand this: I can’t answer all your questions right now, but there are reasons for that. I can only promise that the time will come when you will certainly get those answers,” Dreks said, placing his hand on the tigress’s shoulder. “Like you, everything I do while I stand on the deck of this ship — I do for the sake of the Confederation. Don’t forget that, please.”

Stepping out of the captain’s cabin, Fry leaned her back against the cold metal of the wall and closed her eyes. Never in her life she would have thought she would object to or challenge her captain’s orders. The tigress had hoped that after the conversation she would be able to understand the commander’s actions, perhaps driven by some hidden motives, and then she could convince herself that she had acted rightfully — but that hadn’t happened. Her conscience still tormented her, and now anxiety about the future of the mission was added. An inner voice insisted: something about this whole business of looking for the Keeper was not right.

***

HELION SYSTEM, OUTSKIRTS OF THE BRADBURY-7 SPACEPORT, 23062480/0015 SGT.

A solitary tall black lion, dressed in the uniform of an ordinary regular army soldier, sat at a table in the back of the Seven Seas bar, located on the border of the Helion Prime spaceport. He was intently watching the room.

The dimly lit space was saturated with cigarette smoke and the smell of alcohol — it was always packed with people, mostly pilots, both civilian and military, who had returned from long hauls and were unwinding over a bottle of something strong.

At the next table, three wolves discussed the latest exchange rate fluctuations with smirks. The two tables beyond had been pushed together into one, and a company of weary tigers in Planetary Defense Forces uniforms settled around it — they ate and quietly exchanged a word or two.

At the bar, in complete solitude, sat a young female representative of a very rare species of the Ascended Ones — a snow leopard. Twirling an untouched glass of wine in her paw, she gazed sadly at the info panel on the wall, which displayed the latest Confederation bulletins. The snow leopardess’s eyes were blue, like mountain ice.

“Heh. A beauty, that one!” thought the lion. “But overall, this dump doesn’t hold a candle to the Den back on good old Earth…” Almost immediately the lion’s pleasant memories of the Den were cut short as he sensed a fixed gaze upon him.

It turned out that a short stranger in a gray cloak lurked nearby. He was peering from under his hood but did not approach.

The lion, as if nothing were amiss, poured himself another glass of a synthetic drink that once, very long ago, even before the time of the Long Night, had been called “cognac” and was made from natural ingredients. Downing the contents in one gulp, the lion discreetly gripped a pistol loaded with capsules of lethal poison, and addressed the stranger.

“Hey. How may I help you?”

The observer came closer and said, without raising his voice:

“A wanderer from distant lands wishes to share tidings.”

This phrase was somewhat of a password for the meeting, and the lion lowered the fuse, returning the pistol to its holster on his belt with an inconspicuous motion.

“Hola, amigo,” the lion smirked.

“Hello, Wanderer,” the guest whispered, sitting down on the opposite side of the table and pushing back his hood. Looking at the lion was a ferret — a genuine, bona fide representative of the Mystic faction, a native Mercurian. “I see you’ve picked up work for the Confederation? Or are you playing the fool again, for old times’ sake? What kind of getup have you chosen for yourself?”

“Aye, amigo, I know, I know,” the lion’s eyes, which looked very much bionic, flashed. “The Confederation is a lousy employer, I’d sooner see them in the grave, and the disguise… well, after all the recent messes, this is the only one I’ve got left.”

As he said this, he turned his head slightly, and his mane for an instant seemed to dissolve into thin air. Only the ferret saw it. “I’m sick of this artificial mug — my own is better. Anyway, enough about the gloomy stuff — let’s talk about something fun. Come on, lay out what you’ve brought me.”

“I always have something to share. But those around me aren’t always ready to receive the information,” the ferret said thoughtfully, handing over a small printout.

“No worries, amigo, I’m always more than ready,” the lion assured him, and fixed his gaze on the papers, causing tiny scarlet beams to dart across them.

“You’re looking for the Skunk’s apprentice…”

“Yep, that’s the deal — the black winged one… So where is she?”

“She is already far from fallen Avalon. Nearly a week ago we received a brief message from her. Thanks to it, we may soon solve yet another small mystery — in collaboration with the Confederation’s intelligence.”

“Is she all right?” the lion asked, betraying no emotion.

“The coordinates of the signal source are in your paw… As well as the course they’re holding.”

“How much do I owe you for the intel?” the lion asked matter-of-factly.

“To render the Wanderer a service is a reward in itself,” the ferret bowed his head respectfully. For an instant he froze, his gaze fixed somewhere far away. “Don’t worry — she won’t disappear. And tell her that the Skunk expects the Sun Spire for maintenance in eight months. Good luck, Wanderer.”

“Wait! Do you think I should introduce myself?” the lion grinned broadly, nodding toward the bar counter.

The ferret, who had already taken a couple of steps, looked carefully at the snow leopardess and pulled his hood back over his head.

“Don’t you even think about dragging her into your dubious escapades! You have your path, she has hers.”

“Bummer, then…” the lion grumbled under his breath, grabbed the bottle and poured himself more synthe-cognac. “Some amigo you are.”

The lion did not linger long: he still needed to speak with a very high-ranking High One before they left the planet’s surface. By all appearances, only he could shed a light on certain inconsistencies in the biography of Captain Richard Dreks…

***

SYSTEM LV-1746, UNEXPLORED BY CONFEDERATION EXPEDITIONARY FLOTILLAS.

26062480/1132 SGT.

The corvette emerged into normal space on the outskirts of a planetary system that marked the boundary of explored space at the “western” galactic edge, and began scanning the surrounding space. Almost a week and a half the Polaris had been exploring one star system after another in search of the Keeper, but aside from automated beacons and communication relays left behind long ago by reconnaissance vessels, it had found nothing.

System LV-1746 had a relatively young star and consisted of six planets, one of which lay in the habitable zone and had an atmosphere. This was the location where contact had been lost with a colonizer ship, which had launched a beacon and a communications satellite into orbit around the second planet from the sun, so that subsequent expeditions could reach it for further exploration of this world, which was potentially suitable for the first settlements. The corvette’s scanners within a one-light-minute radius showed nothing that resembled artificial objects, so the Polaris performed a series of short intersystem jumps between planets, launching several dozen probes toward the surface of each. They were to attempt to find at least something that could point to the current location of the missing colonizer or to traces of the Keeper.

While data from the probes was received by the corvette and processed by the AI’s powerful logic processors, Dreks constantly conducted drills, keeping Ran and Fry on their toes, engaged in hand-to-hand combat training sessions with Devora, and also put Shandaris and Omela to work. Each in her own ship, they practiced maneuvers and target shooting under various conditions, from low planetary orbits to asteroid belts.

Meanwhile, Hioni had finished the camouflage system for the corvette, and now all that remained was to test it — which he personally reported to the captain.

“So it’s ready to try?” Dreks confirmed, holding the report on the completed work.

“Yes, sir,” Hioni nodded with satisfaction. “I’m certain it will all work.”

“Lieutenant, he’s certain,” Dreks announced with a smirk, turning to the tigress, who along with Captain Nokomis was monitoring the training maneuvers of the Elemental and the Sun Spire.

“Is that so? Hioni, let me take a look at the command sequences…” Fry said thoughtfully, turning away from the viewport. Before Hioni arrived, she had been watching with envy the magnificently coordinated pair of ships flown by Omela and Shandaris. Long ago, at the Academy, she had wanted to enter the fighter pilot program, but failed to meet several criteria and the only remaining option had been to train as a pilot of medium-class military vessels.

The wolf handed over the printout and also began watching the ships’ movements — outwardly chaotic, but in reality calculated down to the finest detail.

“Captain, I have a suggestion,” Devora spoke up. “We could make the camouflage trial part of the exercises.”

“Yes, that thought crossed my mind as well,” Dreks smiled slightly, returning to his chair. “Midshipman Ran! Prepare for an emergency short-range jump!”

“Aye, sir. Coordinates?”

“Two-zero-seven, marker four,” Dreks replied, glancing at the tactical map. “Notify the Sun Spire and the Elemental. We’ll give them one hour.”

Omela was flying her ship, trying to lock onto the Sun Spire, whose task was to reach a designated point without coming under fire. Of course, the lynx had no intention of actually opening fire: it had been agreed that if her targeting systems achieved a lock on the Mystics’ fighter, the victory would be hers. Omela stuck out her tongue from the strain and gripped the wheel with both paws as the frigate was running at near maximum permissible rate and still barely kept up with the Spire, which effortlessly veered one way and then the other, never allowing the Elemental to get a target lock.

“Fuel level!” the lynx meowed, not taking her eyes off the heavy fighter’s tail.

“Seventy-six percent,” the onboard computer answered in a flat tone.

“Yee-haw, excellent! Disengage the automatic speed limiter!” A pair of indicators next to the afterburner lever changed from green to red, and the lynx pulled the lever toward herself. The engines roared at the limit of their capacity, and the frigate surged forward.

For an instant, Omela thought Shandaris had faltered slightly, as the Spire had even stopped maneuvering — but a moment later, when the approaching silhouette of the fighter was almost in the crosshairs, it engaged its afterburner as well and executed a dead loop, coming around behind the Elemental’s tail.

“Oh no way, Shandaris!”

The lynx sharply cut speed to minimum, letting the fighter shoot past.

“And now — just a touch more…” Omela lunged after the Spire again, taking aim.

Shandaris pulled the Spire sharply to the left and leveled out. The fighter shot past the frigate within meters; she tried to dodge to the side, but the Elemental’s tracking systems had already locked onto the target and were following it, automatically adjusting the guns.

“Not bad at all, Omela,” Shandaris praised, mentally replaying her actions and trying to understand where she had made a mistake.

Should have taken a wider angle of divergence — and then…

“Oh, thanks, but I nearly wet my— I mean, that was tough!” The tousled face of the lynx appeared on the screen. “Shandaris, how much of your ship’s capability were you using just now?”

“It’s-s-s still got plenty left,” the manticore smirked, bringing the fighter to a stop. “Could have doubled the speed I was at.”

“Holy crap! That ship of yours is something else…”

“Polaris here,” Fry’s voice cut into the channel. “Hioni reports we are ready to test the new camouflage system. Updating the task: the Sun Spire and the Elemental are to determine our position within one hour; search area — forty thousand kilometers from our last location.”

The corvette fired its engines and executed a subspace jump, vanishing from the Sun Spire’s scanners.

“So how are we supposed to find them now?..” the lynx’s tired voice sounded in the cockpit.

“Don’t worry. Firs-s-st of all, they’ll activate the camouflage outside our visual range — that is, beyond the horizon of this planet,” the manticore said with a squint, thoughtfully engaging the artificial intelligence analytical modules of her ship.

“Hey! That works!” Omela responded, her enthusiasm apparently returning.

“And s-s-second, nothing vanishes without a trace.” Shandaris turned to the data captured by the Spire’s sensitive instruments in the couple of seconds before the Polaris had jumped. Within a minute, the data had been analyzed and projected onto a holographic display, where the faint outline of the corvette’s presumed intersystem jump trajectory was hazily visible, calculated from the last readings of the subspace drive’s emissions.

“Would you look at that…” Lowering the viewport shutters, Fry watched as the entire planetary surface beyond them rippled like the water surface struck by a stone. “He really is a genius…”

Devora nodded silently.

“I’m on engineering deck 3-A. The field is stable, everything’s nominal,” Hioni’s voice came through on the bridge.

“How much longer?” Dreks stared without looking away at the empty sensor grid mounted on the wall.

“They have ten minutes left,” Nokomis walked over to Dreks and, standing beside his chair, whispered: “Do you think they’ll manage? How will they find us if we have activated the field after we’d already disappeared from their view?”

Instead of answering, the captain silently pointed at the holographic projection of the surrounding space in the center of the bridge, which mirrored the sensor grid but displayed it in three dimensions. At the edge of the sphere, two marks appeared, flickering in and out.

“Sir! Two contacts, distance four thousand kilometers, bearing seven-zero-one, on an approach vector, but it appears they can’t see us,” the tigress reported, double-checking the faint readings.

“Yes… I see, I see…” Dreks grunted and turned to Nokomis, answering in a low voice: “Intersystem jumps can be tracked using the latest technologies, which could very well be integrated into the Sun Spire. I was counting on that. The question is what happens next.”

“They’re s-s-somewhere here,” Shandaris engaged the autopilot, reduced speed to minimum, rose from the pilot’s seat, and walked over to the observation viewport. Beyond it was the close surface of an Earth-type planet lit by sunlight — according to the Spire’s calculations, the corvette was currently in low orbit, somewhere at the boundary of the ionosphere.

“Nothing so far…” Omela’s voice came through the speakers behind her. “Although… Wait a second. Hold on!” The lynx suddenly laughed. “The field may fool our radars, but look at two o’clock? What do you think that is?”

Shandaris shifted her gaze slightly to the right and saw what Omela was talking about. A very small section of the planet’s surface seemed to be passing through some sort of gravitational lens and was distorted.

“The captain decided to hide among s-s-scenic backdrops,” the manticore smirked, returning to her seat and engaging the engines. “Thank him for that. I’m afraid that against the starfield, we’d have been searching ‘s-s-slightly’ longer.”

“Well, well… Let’s find out just how ‘invisible’ we really are from the outside…” Dreks muttered, watching as both dots changed course and began rapidly closing on the Polaris. “Deactivate the field! Open the main hangar!”

This time, the entire crew was present in the conference room, including Ran, who had handed control of the corvette to the automated systems; only Shandaris was absent. The projection displayed two video feeds from the training flight — one from the Elemental, the other from the Sun Spire. Below, alongside a heap of technical data, the scanner readings from each ship were displayed, and the Polaris was still not visible on them.

“Slow it down… There!” Omela, who still didn’t have time to take off her flight suit, pointed a paw at the image: “That’s when I noticed this.”

“As I said, the camouflage wouldn’t be perfect…” The wolf looked down abashedly.

Dreks shifted his gaze to the recorder data pulled from the ships, but they still showed nothing in the area where the ground surface had been distorted. Nodding with satisfaction, the captain turned to Hioni.

“Well done. This system is truly far superior to the Darkness. A round of applause for our engineer!”

“Perhaps you’ll reconsider and stay on with our crew permanently?” Fry said to the sound of cheers from everyone present, which only embarrassed the wolf further. Smiling, the captain raised his hands, calling for silence.

“And now, back to business. In the last processed data packet from the probe still surveying the planet below, the computer detected an anomaly, and I asked Shandaris to fly over the area where it was recorded. Open channel three-one,” Dreks addressed Ran.

The lizard walked up to the terminal and entered a command. The projection of the recording gave way to a live feed from the Sun Spire, which was circling the designated area at low altitude. These were highlands completely covered with forests and deep valleys.

“We’re on the line, Spire,” Dreks moved closer to the projection.

“Altitude one and a half kilometers, speed — three hundred. Approaching,” the manticore responded. “I s-s-see traces… Possibly from the impact of some object.”

Banking into a turn, Shandaris flew over the slope of one of the mountains, where downed trees and a trench were clearly visible, with metallic fragments discernible along its sides. Directing the Spire onward — toward where the treetops appeared to have been sheared off — Shandaris reduced speed to minimum and said:

“Looks like we have a lead. Here’s the crash s-s-site,” the image zoomed in, showing the silhouette of a small vessel — most likely an escape pod or transport — among the trees in the valley. By all appearances, the ship had clipped its belly on a rock during braking and lost control. Only the forward section was more or less intact; the rest had been reduced to debris scattered across dozens of kilometers. “No reactor radiation signatures-s-s. No signs of life… either.”

“Thank you, Shandaris. Do we have a landing site?” Dreks raised his gaze to the topographical map of the terrain compiled by the Sun Spire.

“There is-s-s a spot. Head south — there’s a small plateau. I’m also detecting powerful turbulent currents at altitudes from three to s-s-seven kilometers; they’re intensifying with each passing hour.”

“We need to extract the flight data as quickly as possible — or at least read it. If it belonged to the colonizer, then perhaps we can determine where it is now,” Dreks swept his gaze over everyone present, resting it on the lizard. “If it’s an escape pod, it should contain a complete copy of the carrier ship’s flight record. Ran, I’ll need your expertise. The shuttle will be piloted by…”

“I’m ready, sir,” the tigress stepped forward, placing her paws behind her back.

Dreks pondered for a moment. Though he had been thinking of putting Omela in the shuttle pilot’s seat, Fry and Ran had already worked well together and understood each other without a word. Considering that no enemy presence in the system had been detected so far, and that data retrieval by a professional navigator would take minutes, the captain nodded.

“All right. Shandaris will guide you and provide air cover.”

***

Fry, clad in a combat spacesuit, fired up the engines and ran through the shuttle’s onboard systems, casting a glance into the passenger compartment where the lizard had settled. Unlike the tigress, he had chosen not to use protection, assuring the lieutenant that his natural armor was no worse.

“It’s been so long since I’ve flown anything this light…” Fry murmured, flicking the communication tuning toggles.

“You’ll do fine,” a calm voice came from behind her.

“Well then, let’s go,” the tigress placed her paw on the control console and increased the engine load. “Polaris, this is Aurora One, ready for launch.”

“The main hangar is open. You are cleared for launch, Lieutenant,” the captain’s voice came through the communicator. Lifting the shuttle, Fry noticed on the hangar’s maintenance catwalks a figure whose cloak billowed in the gusts of wind created by the engines. Dreks was personally observing the launch.

Flying beyond the corvette’s gravitational field, Fry turned the shuttle around, plotted a descent trajectory to the Sun Spire’s beacon, and engaged the main engines, beginning her descent. The first part of the flight proceeded in automatic mode — the onboard computer had calculated the atmospheric entry vector and held course; the tigress only needed to monitor the primary systems. But as soon as the shuttle passed through the upper atmospheric layers and entered denser air currents, the autopilot had to be disengaged. At the altitude of ten kilometers, a storm was raging: turbulence set in, visibility dropped sharply to zero, and for a moment the tigress thought it would have been better to let Omela — more experienced with light crafts — take the controls. However, Fry immediately dismissed the thought, focusing on the instrument readings — the target was still roughly two thousand kilometers away.

Despite the rapid loss of altitude and the landing site drawing nearer, the shuttle — fighting its way through a barrage of lightning and sheets of rain — was no longer merely shaking, but being hurled from side to side, and the navigation systems kept losing the beacon signal. Fry gripped the control stick with both paws, refusing to let the hurricane gusts send the craft into a dive. After a couple of minutes, the storm front was behind them, along with the hurricane winds, and the tigress allowed herself to relax. Mountain ranges loomed ahead of the descending shuttle, illuminated by the setting sun.

“Shuttle Aurora One, I s-s-see you,” Shandaris’s voice appeared on the channel. “Veer left three degrees and start braking.”

Soon the shuttle hovered over the plateau alongside the Spire and began a vertical descent. A gentle jolt of the hull announced contact with the surface, and Fry shut down the craft, deploying the ramp and opening the hatch. The shuttle’s passenger compartment instantly filled with crystalline fresh evening air.

Unfastening her harness and leaving the cockpit, Fry followed the lizard down the ramp as he looked around in amazement. Even Avalon and its beauty had not impressed Ran as much as the wild landscapes of this still-uncolonized planet. As far as the eye could see, mountain ranges stretched out, the tallest of which, far on the horizon, gleamed with caps of snow. And their objective lay in an immense valley, covered with untouched forest that began right at the plateau where the shuttle had landed.

“It’s remarkable — all of this, in the vastness of space, looks so small, but in reality the mountains are enormous, and the upper atmosphere is many kilometers away, and as for those cliffs over there…” Ran said in a husky voice, gazing around with eager attention.

“Though I’d expected the opportunity to go to the planetside would come — I didn’t think it would be so soon… And in such a beautiful place, at that,” the tigress said softly, stepping out of the shuttle and standing slightly behind the lizard. “I’ve heard that Earth was once just as lush…”

The lizard nodded pensively.

“I’ve heard that story too, and I’ve always wondered,” Ran strode along the rocky ground with a stately, birdlike gait, “always wondered where their beautiful homeworld had gone. Traded it for billions of distant worlds? I wonder if humans regret that exchange? It’s too late now for them to regret, and too late to rejoice. Perhaps the Ancient Ones will grant them and us new knowledge. Perhaps they will teach us how to bring planets back to life. Omela would love that!”

He kept surveying the surroundings again and again, as if trying to memorize every detail, though the analyzer in his clawed hands was recording everything around them — video, still frames, audio, and the faint, dry scents.

***

Dreks stepped onto the unusually empty bridge, wearily scanning a couple of monitors showing the readings of his pilot and navigator, who were approaching the designated point. Judging by their radio chatter, the tigress and the lizard had already found the first fragments of wreckage and were expected to reach the crash site shortly. A signal relay was provided by the Sun Spire, which circled the ground team in a radius of several kilometers to provide support in case the local fauna proved excessively aggressive — but, by all appearances, its rare representatives were herbivores and quickly hid whenever Shandaris flew over the treetops. The captain settled into the pilot’s chair and switched on an additional screen, which displayed the feed from the camera built into the tigress’s spacesuit. Silently monitoring the progress of the operation, he began to think through the next steps. If nothing could be determined now, the chances of the mission’s overall success would drop to a minimum. He was also still troubled by Fry — or more precisely, by her reaction to his order. Dreks wondered what would happen if she… And not only she… What might happen if it became known who he had been and whom he had worked for? Whatever scenarios he considered, unfortunately, nothing good came to mind.

“Search team to Polaris, come in! Are you seeing this, sir?” Fry’s voice sounded on the bridge, pulling Dreks back to the pressing matters at hand.

“Polaris here, confirmed,” the captain leaned toward the screen, which showed a destroyed and almost completely burned down fuselage on the ground amid fallen branches and trees. Despite the gathering dusk, the Sun Spire’s powerful floodlights illuminated the crash site, allowing details to be made out in full. Now Dreks was certain that this vessel was a new-model Confederation escape pod. “Are the bioscanners picking up anything?”

“No, it appears there’s no one there, sir,” Ran’s voice came through after a few moments; he was not visible in the transmitted image — he was walking behind the tigress.

“Good, go inside. And be careful.”

The assault rifle Fry had unslung from her shoulder appeared in the camera’s field of view, its flashlight now switched on. Passing through a breach in the hull and pushing aside vines of wiring that dangled from the ceiling, the tigress silently entered the wrecked pod. The beam of light fell upon a mangled compartment with empty cryogenic units, in which the crew of a distressed vessel could remain until the ship was recovered by a rescue team. But most of the units were missing along with the rear section of the ship, which had been destroyed even before the crash. When they passed through the shattered doors into the next compartment, the tigress’s pulse quickened, which was immediately reflected on the diagram below the camera feed.

“Careful, there’s debris here.”

“Yes, I see it.”

“That way. Keep moving forward.”

“There are traces of dried blood here. Leading toward the bow.”

Ahead, through a doorway, part of the control console and the shattered observation windows of the command deck came into view. The tigress quickly but carefully entered, sweeping her gaze sharply in all directions.

“I think that’s all—” The signal dissolved into static from a sudden movement and impact, followed by a startled growl from the lizard. “What the hell!”

“Fry, respond,” Dreks said, alarm in his voice, watching his pilot’s pulse spike off the charts.

“Yes!.. Yes, I’m here,” the image showed the deck plating of the bridge, torn open in several places, on which lay a decomposing body — apparently what the tigress had tripped over.

“In Heaven’s name, it’s a High One!” Fry said, notes of fear in her voice.

“Fry, he can’t do anything to you. Stay focused — time is precious,” Dreks said, frowning at what he had seen. Though the body had been in frame for only a couple of seconds, the captain had managed to spot a wound in the chest cavity that looked nothing like damage from a crash.

“Yes… Sorry, sir,” getting back on her feet, the tigress approached the dead control console, examining it and trying to catch her breath.

“Think you can bring it back to life for even a couple of minutes?” the lizard’s voice came through; he had taken up position at the navigation console.

“I think so. There should be backup power cells somewhere here, completely independent of the main power source,” Fry was gradually calming down, returning to her element.

Several minutes passed, during which the tigress rummaged under the main console searching for the correct sealed compartments, breathing heavily and cursing. The wait was rewarded by indicator lights coming on across several instrument panels, including the navigation one.

“All right, while we have power, transmit a copy of the flight data and pull everything related to the carrier ship.”

“Already on it, sir,” Ran reported, entering search and copy commands into the flight computer with fantastic speed.

“Lieutenant, as soon as Ran is done — carefully examine the body and get out of there, understood?” Dreks stared tensely at the screen, which displayed the progress of data copying and decryption.

***

>ESCAPE POD 07-113 TYPE 2

>VESSEL FLIGHT DATA [ 2 records ]

>FLIGHT DATA COPY OF CONFEDERATION COLONIZER “WESTINGHOUSE” [ 107 records ]

These lines were displayed on the main projection next to the galactic map, which showed Polaris’s current location and the route it had traveled from the Helion system. Ran and Fry sat at their stations, not distracted by what was happening behind them — a copy of the projection was displayed on each of their terminal screens. Dreks, as usual, had not strayed far from the captain’s seat, conversing with Nokomis and Shandaris.

“Here is entry one hundred and six,” Ran brought up the coordinates on the projection; they matched the coordinates of the LV-1746 system, where Polaris was still located. “And here is entry one hundred and seven.”

A row of numbers appeared, scrolling from bottom to top — pre-loaded coordinates for the next jump. As soon as Polaris’s navigation systems processed the information, a star appeared in the crosshairs on the projection, unmarked on the map of the Confederation’s explored space. According to preliminary data, it was an old red giant star located between the Perseus Arm and the Sagittarius Arm, but far above the galactic plane, in the halo, where stars were spaced much farther apart than in the spiral arms.

“That is apparently where they headed next…”

“And what the hell possessed them to go there…” the tigress grumbled, voicing what everyone present was thinking.

“It seems we got lucky,” the manticore narrowed her eyes.

“It would appear so, provided they are still in that system,” Dreks nodded thoughtfully. “Ran, what is in the shuttle’s flight data?”

“Only two values. The point of departure and the landing coordinates calculated by the autopilot. No records of a switch to manual control or any crew entries.”

“An escape pod launched — and no crew entries about what happened?” Nokomis asked.

“None! The lieutenant and I concluded that the man was dead even before the shuttle crashed. The recording clearly shows he was shot — possibly with explosive rounds. Blood trails clearly ran from the hatch to the command cabin, and beyond that — no signs of other crew members’ presence.”

“Could he have been killed after the cras-s-sh?” Shandaris suggested.

“Unlikely. Why kill someone twice? I certainly wouldn’t have survived that kind of landing,” Dreks replied, nodding toward Fry, “besides, they found no traces of the actual shooting aboard the craft.”

“The logical conclusion is that this poor fellow received an almost fatal wound just seconds before boarding the shuttle,” Nokomis frowned.

“So it would seem,” Dreks nodded.

“And there is-s-s also the logical conclusion that a mutiny took place aboard the Westinghouse, one entirely unrelated to the search for the Keeper,” the manticore remarked snidely.

“Now that is where it gets interesting!” Dreks snapped his fingers. “The colonizer Westinghouse was launched a year ago as one of the projects to revive humanity. Their target was systems in this exact region of space, near the outer arm, at the edge of explored space. Do not look at me like that, this information surfaced in the news from time to time. Put yourself in the shoes of a colonizer ship’s captain. Here is an ideal planet for settlement! Why would you so radically change course and cover nearly five thousand light-years in the opposite direction, and into an area where the number of planetary systems approaches zero?”

“Apparently that there must have been serious grounds for such a course change,” Devora agreed.

“But until we find the colonizer, we can only guess about those reasons. Either way, it is the only lead we have.”

“Absolutely right. Ran, how long will it take to reach the target?”

“Hard to say,” the lizard said uncertainly, mentally conferring with Polaris’s artificial intelligence. “There are no beacons or any other reference points there… The ship’s passage through subspace would need constant monitoring… Approximately four days.”

“Then we should depart immediately,” Dreks raised his gaze to Devora and Shandaris.

***

The captain opened his eyes and woke up fully. Sitting up on his bunk, Dreks ran a hand over his face and glanced at the clock hanging on the wall. By ship time, it was three in the morning.

Still Fry’s watch. Damn brain — why is it that when you have a chance to sleep, you suddenly do not need it?..

It was already the third day since Polaris had set off for its destination, and in all that time the captain had slept roughly ten hours in total, spending as much time as possible on the bridge, monitoring the course and the ship’s systems during the moments when Ran took breaks for quick naps lasting about two hours. Although the lizard’s body was adapted to such strains, Dreks noticed that he too was growing weary from the constant exertion required for such a long subspace transit. Unlike a corvette, larger vessels and explorer ships had three to six navigators who relieved one another during long voyages. Here, all responsibility fell on Ran, and Dreks and Fry had divided the watch schedule so that one of them was always present on the bridge — but on top of that, there was still a pile of matters to deal with. The corvette was flying with its subspace communication systems disabled to maintain anonymity, but a day ago Dreks had ordered a brief connection to the Planetary Defense Forces network in hopes of receiving answers to his queries. His expectations were not in vain: a response had come to his search query about the transit of the Sun Spire or any ships with similar characteristics through Confederation-controlled space. In addition, Polaris’s AI had found certain matches in the databases suggesting that Gitche Gumee, or a ship very similar to Gitche Gumee, had been partially researched in the Pleiades Federation forty years ago, though the information was incomplete. Despite the enormous volume of data, the captain had spent nearly all his free time searching for answers.

Glancing at the clock once more, Dreks realized he would not fall back asleep. After a quick shower, he dressed and stepped into the dimmed corridor, in which only the familiar hum of the corvette could be heard — throughout the ship, with the exception of the hangar, the lights were dimmed, creating the illusion of night. Passing Hioni’s cabin, Dreks noticed that its door was ajar and the wolf himself was sitting at a desk, muttering something under his breath while closely examining some module apparently removed from Gitche.

Though it could just as easily have been removed from Polaris — the captain smiled at his own thought and walked on, not distracting Hioni from his work.

Entering the mess hall, where only the kitchen with its auto-chef and bar counter were softly lit, the captain noticed that near one of the far tables by the observation window — tightly shut for the duration of the subspace transit — Omela was sleeping. She half-lay on the sofa with her nose buried in her paw, and on the table before her stood a half-empty bottle. The captain quietly approached and glanced at the label.

“What tastes you have, little lynx… I never understood this sickly sweet ‘Triple Mint,’” he whispered with a smirk. In her sleep, Omela let out a soft mew, her whole body twitching. The captain carefully set the bottle back.

“But I understand the purpose of drinking perfectly well, even if I do not approve,” taking a warm flight jacket from the back of a nearby chair, Dreks carefully draped it over the lynx. Without waking, she purred something indistinct and burrowed into the jacket as though it were a blanket.

“Do not be angry with her, Richard. She still cannot forget, though she tries not to show it,” the captain heard a quiet voice from the dark corner. The captain mentally noted Devora’s remarkable ability to remain unnoticed even here, on his own ship.

“Something has to be done about this…” Dreks mused aloud, walking over and sitting down beside her. “Have you talked to her about her loss?”

Nokomis sighed and shook her head.

“I told her about myself, that very day, and nothing more. As if it is any consolation… And I remember well enough that in the early days no words could help — you wrap yourself in a black blanket, shutting everyone out, and just wait for the moment you can lose yourself. I am keeping an eye on her so she does not do anything truly foolish.”

“I cannot imagine what kind of character one must have to not lose their mind,” Dreks shook his head. “I looked into it — her brother was on Avalon that day. Some say time heals. In my opinion, that is a lie.”

“Of course it is a lie,” Devora readily agreed. “Other people heal, not some abstract notion of time. Imagine — an eternity alone with your loss. Brr.” The former resident of a former planet looked almost peaceful at that moment. “And meaningful work heals too, yes. I am not sure it has to do with the character, Richard; it is more likely an interplay of factors, with one’s surroundings,people being the pivotal one. If only anyone knew how grateful I am to every person I have met,” Nokomis suddenly smiled, then turned serious again. “We need to keep her busier: that helped me in my time. You would not believe it — I worked on a sub-loader at a residential station, you know, the kind you wear like a suit, and then off you go into open space — all thoughts simply vanish. It is a pity there are no stations along our route, or we could hand her over to a team of psychologists for good measure. Although… of course it is better if she manages on her own.”

“Yes, you are right. I need to involve her in our work more often… I think, once we return to headquarters on Helion, I will suggest she apply to the Planetary Defense Forces Academy and eventually become a pilot on some carrier. They always have openings, and with abilities like hers, she will quickly make squadron commander.”

“She would make a wonderful military pilot — all the makings are there, and the temperament is just right,” Devora agreed.

The captain reflected for a moment, then rose from the table and glanced at the clock.

“Forgive me — my courtesy evidently sleeps longer than I do. Despite the late hour, let me ask: would you care for something to drink or a bite to eat?”

“I would be delighted to have dinner with you,” Devora agreed, walking over to the auto-chef and studying the menu pensively, as though trying to solve a riddle there as well.

“I happen to have something for a change of pace… I hope you eat fish. I overheard that the standard auto-chef fare is not quite to your liking,” Dreks winked and stepped behind the bar counter, where there was a small food preparation area. Opening the freezer, he pulled out several pieces of frozen inkulant fillet — a fish found in the oceans of Helion Prime — and tossed them in to thaw.

Ideally, a ship of this class should have had a chef for the officers, but these days that position was only filled on the Phoenix — the flagship of Admiral Wilford, aboard which Dreks had spent a good deal of time in the past. It was there, taking advantage of certain connections, that he had supplemented Polaris’s food stores with a few exotic items.

“Damned machine, can never do anything properly,” the captain grumbled, finally managing to get the auto-chef simply to warm the fillet to room temperature.

“Oh yes,” Devora nodded unhurriedly, “and the auto-chef also cannot do this.”

She caught one freshly thawed piece on the blade of a very wide knife — she had lifted the knife from the counter with nearly the same motion she would use to draw a sword. A few seconds — and the fish was sliced into thin, almost translucent pieces. Devora inspected them critically and flicked them onto a plate with the same sharp motion, so they fanned out like a blossoming flower.

“Shall I make some for you?” Devora asked. “Not everyone appreciates this dish, but in my opinion it is quite good.”

“Yes, that would be wonderful. Tell me, is there any sharp weapon in existence that you can’t handle professionally?” Dreks smiled, taking out a pair of glasses and a bottle of twenty-year-old wine from Eridan Prime (also a trophy from the Planetary Defense Forces flagship).

“Oh yes, such a weapon exists,” a smile completely transformed Devora’s usually haughty face. “Here it is.”

Nokomis raised a gleaming fork, set it on the table, and with relief produced a pair of chopsticks.

“I very much doubt that,” Dreks laughed softly in response. Filling the glasses, he offered one to Devora, and she presented the plate of finished sashimi in return.

“By the way, I wanted to ask how our research is progressing,” Nokomis sat down across from Dreks. “First and foremost, I am interested in Gitche — at least until we arrive somewhere. You mentioned yesterday that you received answers to your search query, and I am curious what data the Pleiades Federation had — if it is not classified, of course. Hioni keeps muttering about information fields and mental matrix concentration inside a cyberoid mechanism, and in his mind all of this somehow coexists with the Mystics’ teachings. Ever since he saw the Sun Spire, he became quite obsessed. In the good sense, of course.”

“I still have doubts whether the former Pleiades Federation actually studied Gitche herself or if it was a similar vessel… From the various data I have, only one thing is clear — the ship’s age is between five hundred thousand and a million years. The most interesting part is that all the components on the vessel that look as though they were crafted by human hands are the same age as the exterior hull, whose structure remains a mystery to this day. Rather thought-provoking… I think I could learn more by digging through the Confederation Navy archives, but I do not know whether I could obtain clearance for that kind of information.”

“A million years…” Devora repeated after Dreks with fascination. “Yes, I am prepared to believe it. None of our analyses revealed Gitche’s age — we simply do not have that kind of capability. Lord, a million years — human ships… I hope Hioni will unearth something before anyone grants access to the fleet archives.”

“Yes, I have thought about it a great deal too… We know that Homo sapiens appeared on Earth approximately sixty thousand years ago and has been moving forward ever since, constantly evolving. Then, after The Ascended Ones were created, humans came to believe that their Empire would never simply vanish. But after the Long Night, The Ascended Ones became effectively autonomous and independent and a new era began. An era in which humans receded into the background, yet those who remain are still worshipped almost as gods for having created The Ascended Ones. It is interesting to consider what would happen if it turned out that humans already existed millions of years ago…” Dreks said pensively, spearing another piece of inkulant on his fork.

“And yet I find it pleasing that humanity created The Ascended Ones,” Devora mused, slowly savoring the golden liquid. “In children’s books of past eras, one can plainly see this dream: that animals would speak. Humanity left childhood behind and fulfilled its dream, and here they are, among us. I think that Man created not merely bipedal beasts. Man also gave them writing, technology, language, and transport — all of this had already been invented by the time The Ascended Ones appeared. But to be honest, sometimes their intellect and abilities are downright frightening, and where this road will take us further…”

Devora shuddered at a sudden thought, drained her wine in one gulp, and looked at Dreks, her eyes glittering.

“Richard, what if Man is also someone’s Ascended One? What if someone took a proto-human, an ape or some other prehistoric creature — and ascended it? And we simply forgot about it — over the course of a million years — and became autonomous?”

Dreks felt slightly uneasy at Nokomis’s conclusions. Certain individuals he had come to know recently held precisely the same opinion…

“Long before the Long Night, there was a hypothesis that we didn’t descend from apes,” Dreks said uncertainly, sipping from his glass. “Not a single piece of evidence of an intermediate link was ever found. As though someone had forced evolution… In those times, some people still believed that humanity had been brought into existence by a higher power.”

“A very ancient power, I would say,” Nokomis answered with excitement. “Something that surpasses us to the same degree that we surpass the beasts from which beings like Omela, Hioni, Fry, and the rest were made… To the same degree, or greater. That is interesting. Who knows, Richard — perhaps in our search we will find the answer to that question as well. Or at least come closer to it.”

“The irony,” Dreks shook his head. “We need to find the Keeper for answers to the question of how to stop an unknown vessel wreaking havoc in the Border Worlds, not for answers about our past and origins…”

“It happens that you search for one thing and find a lot more along the way,” Devora said pensively. “When I first set foot aboard Gitche, I thought it was merely an abandoned ship. And it turned out there was no end to what she contained. And perhaps our past and the means to stop the chaos are somehow interconnected — who knows, perhaps there, in the depths of the ages, lies a way to maintain harmony in the Universe. And the Keeper guards precisely that. I do not know, but it truly sounds interesting,” Devora repeated, and placed the empty plate into the tray that obligingly slid out from the bar panel.

“Tell me, Devora,” the captain asked, refilling the glasses. “Do you believe in that? Do you believe that harmony in the Universe is possible?”

Nokomis thought for a moment.

“I know that it exists in small things,” she said at last. “In the play of light on a honed blade, in my soul, in a working mechanism that propels great ships across great expanses. If harmony exists in small things, then perhaps it exists in great things too, and in the infinite? I am no philosopher, but without such a belief my life would be more sorrowful. And you? What do you believe in?”

“I once believed in myself. In my own rightness,” for a moment Dreks allowed himself to return to the past. “And my faith was shaken when I realized I had been wrong and had not been doing what needed to be done. And humanity. With each passing year I grow more convinced that it has never known harmony… It could not even coexist with itself on a small planet called Earth. Three world wars, the Martian Incident, the Long Night, the Border Wars… And where have we ended up? Practically — at extinction. A downfall.”

“It is good, at least, that we know we are capable of falling. It is good that we can be prepared for our own mistakes. And it is good that we can be wrong — otherwise we would be unbearable,” Devora raised the wine to the light. “We have never known harmony, but we know the longing for it, and that is probably why we cannot even get along among ourselves. It seems to me that The Ascended Ones are made simpler than Man and do not ponder such things. You are a good captain and a valiant warrior. You bear your measure of responsibility, and in my world that is enough. When I said I was grateful to everyone I have met, I meant you as well. Cheers, Richard.”

“Cheers, Devora,” Dreks raised his glass, slightly embarrassed by her words.

For the first time in a long while, the clink of glasses rang out in the silence of the mess hall.

***

PLANETARY DEFENSE FORCES CORVETTE “POLARIS”

OUTSKIRTS OF STAR SYSTEM FG-708, 31062480/0721 SGT.

“Jump complete, recharge cycle — ten hours,” the lizard said, opening his eyes and drawing a deep breath.

The bridge was dimly illuminated by a red giant star nearing the end of its life cycle, soon — in astronomical terms — to shed its outer shell and collapse into a white dwarf. But that would not happen for another half-million years, and for now the star filled nearly the entire visible expanse in the forward observation windows. The corvette had just emerged from subspace and shut down its engines, beginning a thorough scan of the surrounding space.

“Bridge reporting. Destination reached, switching to silent mode,” Fry announced over the intercom.

Dreks paced back and forth, his gaze fixed on the old, dying star.

“Anything out there?”

“I sent one pulse the moment we exited subspace,” the lizard replied wearily. “It bounced off the surface of a small planet — a planetoid, I would even say — orbiting this star. Analysis of the received data is underway.”

“Perhaps there were more planets here once, before the star began swallowing them as it expanded,” the tigress said, rising from her seat and bracing her paws on the instrument panel. “Where is it, anyway?”

Ran touched the observation screen control console and reduced their light transmission. The star’s brightness slowly faded, and against the black backdrop to the left of the star, a crescent of the planetoid appeared.

“There. It appears to be solid rock,” Ran cross-referenced the data arriving through the neurointerface. “No atmosphere.”

“Any traces of the Westinghouse?”

“No, sir. Not yet.”

“I have nothing either,” Fry grumbled. She did not like this place. Despite the apparent absence of contacts, it all felt far too much like a trap about to spring shut.

“Very well,” Dreks was beginning to get the impression that the colonizer had moved on. And if that were truly the case, the search for it could be called off. “Fry, take over observation. Ran, disconnect and rest. That is an order.”

The lizard nodded silently, deactivated his link with Polaris, and disconnected the neurointerface, carefully extracting the cable containing thousands of the finest optical filaments from the port on his skull. Rising from the chair, Ran walked unsteadily toward the exit. As soon as the lizard left the bridge, Dreks approached the holographic projection displaying the approximate structure of this system based on the initial data. A solitary planet orbiting an old star, and nothing more. Where could the colonizer have gone? What had it been chasing?..

“Sir. While scanning frequencies, Polaris has just picked up a powerful broadcast on an open wideband channel!” Fry reported with excitement.

“What? From where?” Dreks strode quickly to the tigress, leaning one hand on her control panel.

“Pinpointing now. There,” Fry pointed a paw at a small dot on the screen, positioned far behind the corvette. “Behind us, at a distance of one and a half astronomical units, there is an asteroid belt.”

“The source of the broadcast?”

“Polaris’s AI identifies it as the Westinghouse, but… aside from the authorization code in the transmission header, it is just a meaningless stream of binary code!”

“Interesting,” the captain glanced at the communications module, which was analyzing the incoming transmission, unsuccessfully attempting to apply various decryption algorithms. “Then we will sort it out on site.”

“Sir, there are nearly ten hours left until the subspace drive recharges,” the tigress reminded him.

“I know. That is why I am going to ask Captain Nokomis to give us a lift aboard the Gitche Gumee,” Dreks headed for the exit. “We will set up a directional link between Polaris and Gitche in case an emergency evacuation is needed. You are in command. Keep the corvette in silent mode and maintain radio silence.”

“Captain! Wait!” Fry called after Dreks, rising from her seat. “In my opinion, this reeks far too much of a trap. Think about it — judging by the distance to the signal’s source, the Westinghouse must have sent the signal at approximately the moment we exited subspace. Whoever is there, they seem to have known we were approaching this star system!”

“Yes, that is the soundest logical conclusion, lieutenant,” Dreks said with a nod of agreement as he left the bridge. “And yet we came here to find answers to our questions, not to run from them. Call assembly in ten minutes.”

After the assembly and briefing in the conference room aboard Polaris, it was decided to attempt contact with the colonizer from a vessel other than the corvette, and if no response was received — to board and retrieve the flight data. Now Gitche, at Dreks’s request having assumed the guise of a light Confederation search vessel, had been flying toward the Westinghouse on conventional engines for the past eight hours, maneuvering through dense clusters of asteroids and blocks of ice that reflected the grim light of the dying star. The cargo hold, which began immediately past the central airlock, was rather cramped — crates and containers full of provisions and spare parts stood everywhere. Dreks got the impression they had been loaded in haste, with little concern for ergonomics. Then again, right now that worked in the captain’s favor. Clad in combat armor without a helmet, Dreks shoved  a couple of meters aside one of the metal crates — weighing several hundred kilograms — that stood in the way.

“…As you can see, it amplifies your abilities many times over,” he said, turning and resting a hand on his sword hilt as he watched with a smile while Omela adjusted to her new armor, making her first attempts at walking across the deck.

Stumbling, the lynx let out a loud mew but managed to keep her balance.

“Ow!”

“Do not think about it. Just move as you normally would. Imagine you are not wearing it,” a voice came from above. The lynx raised her head. On top of one of the tallest containers, several meters above the deck, Shandaris was perched, cleaning her weapon — something resembling a standard assault rifle of the marines, but with minor modifications to the design.

“Easy for you to say…” The lynx paused, took a deep breath, and tried walking again. After several attempts, it went better. Ten minutes later, Omela had adjusted, and having calmly walked up to the captain, she looked up with pride and squinted.

“Is that really a Mark IV you have there?” she asked the manticore.

“What I have here is a Mark III from the Earth Alliance era, military issue, enhanced,” Shandaris said without looking up from her work, replacing the grip and checking the sights. After a moment’s thought, the manticore looked at Omela and, grinning, winked. “Come take a closer look if you are interested.”

She suddenly spread and then snapped her black wings shut with a clap, raising a small gust.

“Um… That is five meters and change up there… How am I supposed to get up,” the lynx frowned, scanning the massive container with a skeptical eye in search of a ladder or at least a smaller crate.

“It seems to me that our esteemed Mystic feels perfectly safe at that height,” Dreks whispered in Omela’s ear. “Can you jump? Try a running start.”

Silently backing up, Omela tilted her head, gauging the distance. Crouching and taking aim, she licked her lips and hurled herself at the container with all her might, leaping when she was about six meters away. The armor vastly amplified the lynx’s natural abilities, and she slammed into the container with a clang, grabbing hold of the edge. All the force of the impact was absorbed by the exoskeleton, and the lynx, not even suspecting she had left a sizable dent in the container, pulled herself up and climbed on top. Shandaris hissed approvingly.

“Wow,” Omela exclaimed with delight, examining her paws encased in metal that bore not a single scratch. “I love it! I love it! I am never taking this off!!! I will sleep in it!”

“And here I had offered our most esteemed ladies, Shandaris and Captain Nokomis, to seize the opportunity and try on a similar little suit, but they both declined my offer,” Dreks’s cheerful voice drifted up from below. “I think you can manage from here without me, Omela.”

“Becaus-s-se it is a tin can. Stinky and useless, like a sardine can. And I am not getting in one,” Shandaris replied, rolling her eyes, and held the rifle out to Omela. The lynx accepted the weapon and frowned with a sense of responsibility.

“Did you say something? I cannot hear from up here,” came the retreating laughter. Dreks had left toward Gitche’s living quarters.

“Yes, this is one of the finest examples I have seen in the last fifteen years. The Mark III had excellent grouping…” Omela said, examining the weapon from every angle. “It is a bit unusual right here and here… And what does this say? ‘Lexington’… Is that a ship?”

“Probably,” Shandaris shrugged, not intending to enlighten the lynx about the rifle’s “peculiarities” or its history. “An old acquaintance of mine loaned it to me.”

“Must be a good acquaintance,” Omela handed the weapon back to its owner.

“Not a very good one,” Shandaris said with a frown, snapping in the magazine and racking the bolt as she turned toward the sound of the doors to the living quarters opening.

Captain Nokomis emerged. She said something to Dreks, but even the manticore’s keen ears could not catch what it was. The captain nodded in reply, turned, and called out to Omela and Shandaris:

“We are nearly at the target!”

Hioni turned to the sound of the opening door — the small bridge of Gitche had never seen this many visitors. Nokomis took the co-pilot’s seat and flipped the switches controlling the external protective screens on the observation windows. Dreks, Shandaris, and Omela were greeted by the sight of one of the largest ships ever built by human hands — colonizer-class vessels were about five kilometers long and could carry more than two thousand crew members, from officers to the engineers and repair teams who maintained the ship. The primary cargo was tens of thousands of colonists held in cryogenic sleep.

Gitche Gumee, under Hioni’s control, unhurriedly circled the scattered asteroids as she closed on the Westinghouse, whose hull gleamed in the rays of the red sun. In the crimson, blurred by screen reflections, the colossal ship looked sinister — a cosmic leviathan, washed up on the shore of the Universe, frozen beneath an eternal sunset. Nokomis, who perceived a grotesque, somnambulant beauty in the scene, tried to memorize everything she saw. This place repelled and attracted her simultaneously, and she thought that perhaps this was how warriors looked upon death. Dreks turned his attention to the colonizer’s main engines — they were shut down and their nozzles were partially destroyed.

“Hioni, open a channel to them,” Dreks asked, reaching for the microphone. Flipping a couple of switches and tuning the frequency, the wolf opened the communication channel.

“Confederation search-and-rescue ship Arcadia calling Westinghouse! Come in!”

The only answer was the hiss of static.

“Arcadia calling Westinghouse! We are receiving your signal on the emergency frequency. Please respond,” Dreks slowly returned the microphone to Hioni’s paw.

“Looks like they are not going to answer us,” Omela stated.

“What’s on the bioscanners?”

The wolf checked the data streaming into the analytical units.

“Weird,” the wolf shook his head. “The atmosphere is present, the pressure is normal, but no definitive signs of life are detected… On the other hand, I am registering an extremely powerful energy emission in the area of the colonizer’s engineering sections! Damn — it is severely interfering with the bioscanners. I cannot give a definitive answer.”

“Must be their reactor,” Shandaris suggested.

“No, no! It cannot be the reactor, because I have also located that. Two decks below. This is something else — something that both consumes and produces a tremendous amount of energy.”

Dreks frowned but said nothing. Destroyed engine nozzles, a powerful energy source… If he had a choice, he would not board without at least a few soldiers, or better yet an entire platoon — he had been convinced far too many times in his life that boarding unfamiliar vessels without proper escort and firepower was ill-advised. But the colonizer’s flight data and an understanding of what had caused it to change course were essential here and now.

“Captain Nokomis, we are landing in their third hangar bay. As I can see, it is open,” Dreks said, cross-referencing the data Hioni was examining.

Wonderful. An open outer airlock as well. “Welcome aboard.”

The frigate, still maintaining its disguise as a Confederation vessel, touched down on the hangar deck. The outer airlock closed automatically, and the pressure equalization procedure began. Meanwhile, in Gitche’s cargo hold, everyone made final checks of their communications gear and weapons. Omela had brought along a pair of semi-automatic pistols from the Elemental that had served her faithfully for many years. Hioni initially refused a weapon, arguing that he would be occupied with motion sensors. But when Devora calmly told him that in that case he would have to stay aboard the frigate, the wolf reluctantly accepted a pistol from her hands. Dreks clicked a magazine into his assault rifle — identical to the one Shandaris held as she stood a short distance away, already prepared to disembark.

“The armor on myself, Hioni, and Omela has a built-in navigational computer that records the trajectory of our movements, so we should not get lost,” Dreks swept everyone with his gaze. “We are heading for the bridge to try to extract the flight data, or at least the ship’s log. We move quickly and quietly, keeping each other in line of sight. Although no definitive signs of life were detected, I do not think the entire crew simply vanished into thin air. Stay sharp. At the first sign of a threat, report to me immediately. Move out.”

The outer airlock of Gitche’s cargo hold opened, admitting a fresh, cool stream of air from the Westinghouse’s hangar. The team exited the frigate, glancing in every direction. The dimly lit third hangar of the colonizer was nearly twice the size of the main hangar on Polaris, but aside from automated loaders and several emergency kits for repair crews, it was completely empty. Twenty meters ahead stood the sealed inner airlock, beyond which should have been high-speed lifts and transit hubs providing access to the Westinghouse’s decks. Their footsteps echoed in near-total silence — the only sound was the quiet, barely audible hum of the air circulation systems.

“Hioni, please seal Gitche,” Nokomis said in a quiet voice.

“Of course,” Hioni touched several keys on his portable computer, and the frigate’s outer airlock doors closed.

“No nasty creatures will get aboard your ship while we are away?” Omela asked cheerfully.

“Of course not!” Hioni assured her. “Nothing will slip past me and my surveillance systems.”

Reaching the massive inner airlock doors, Dreks approached the control panel and pressed the green-lit open button. Powerful hydraulic mechanisms engaged, rumbling as they parted the ten-centimeter-thick metal doors. Beyond them lay a dark cargo control zone, illuminated only by emergency lamps. The air felt stale, with a trace of burnt wiring. Beams of light from the flashlights mounted on the rifles of Dreks and Shandaris carved images of devastation from the darkness: papers and equipment fragments were strewn everywhere, crates and chairs mangled and overturned. On the wall hung a screen displaying an interactive map of the Westinghouse. Dreks quickly memorized the layout of the main compartments and decks. Their route lay through the high-speed lifts leading from deck seven to deck one, and then on foot through the habitation sections. Shandaris gave a questioning glance toward the passage above which hung the sign “transit hub.” Dreks nodded in return and raised a clenched fist, signaling Nokomis to hold position for now. Despite his armor, Dreks moved no louder than the manticore, who slipped like a shadow to the left and pressed against the wall beside the open doors, weapon at the ready.

“Ready?” the captain whispered, adjusting his grip on the rifle.

The manticore nodded silently, and they swept into the room, aiming their sights to the right side. Then, after they had checked the half-open shaft of one of the lifts and a mangled communications terminal, Shandaris slipped into the left section, surveying a loading platform with a small pneumatic freight train and the dark corridor stretching into the distance.

“Clear,” she reported, lowering her rifle but keeping it cocked. Nokomis entered with Omela and Hioni, looking around. Something crunched beneath Omela’s paws — she looked down and instantly jumped back.

Dreks came closer and shone his light: on the floor, a trail of long-dried blood was clearly visible, stretching away into the darkness of the corridor.

“Hioni, can you get the lifts running?” the captain asked.

Not wasting words, Hioni dashed to the terminal, connected his computer, and entered several commands.

“I am afraid not,” he said a moment later. “Everything is functional, but there is no power on decks seven, four, and one. Including all transit hubs. Even if we make it to the bridge, the data cannot be extracted from there — it also has no power.”

“Options?”

“From what I can tell, we simply need to redirect the electrical flow from that thing on engineering deck 2-D back to the fifth and sixth mains,” the wolf said pensively, consulting his computer. “Right now, most of the energy generated by the reactor is going straight to it.”

“Do we have to go near it? We do not even know what it is yet,” Omela said with doubt in her voice.

“Not at all. There is a distribution circuit in the adjacent compartment, 2-C. I can do it all from there,” Hioni shrugged.

“But what if…”

While the others conferred, Shandaris stepped aside and closed her eyes, listening to the ship. She thought she heard a lift descending, automated loaders working in the hangar, someone discussing plans for the evening. Now the lighting was working. Several people in work uniforms were loading containers onto a pneumatic train platform. Suddenly the lights flickered and went out. Alarmed voices rang out. One of the workers headed toward the light streaming in from the hangar, but something large burst suddenly from the darkness of the corridor and seized him. It looked like a mass of darkness without any form… A deafening scream rang out, blood sprayed. It was like…

“…Shandaris. Are you all right?”

No. What happened here was definitely not a mutiny. The manticore opened her eyes and turned her head.

“I am fine, I was-s-s just lost in thought.”

“We cannot waste time. You and I are heading for deck one. Devora,” Dreks turned to the warrior woman, “can you take Hioni down to the engineering sections with Omela?”

“Yes, let’s go!” Devora beckoned both of The Ascended Ones with an authoritative gesture and set off swiftly down the corridor.

***

Fry paced the bridge, glancing periodically at the sun through the observation windows. She recalled the dream she had seen before waking after her injury — in it, the sun had looked exactly like this one. Along with this, she involuntarily recalled the sensation of someone else’s presence aboard the corvette and shuddered.

“Any word from them?” Fry asked, casting yet another glance at the navigator’s screens. Though she tried not to show her worry, the twitching tip of her tail betrayed her. Nearly ten hours had passed since Gitche’s departure, and with each hour the tension grew.

“Nothing so far,” answered Ran, who had returned half an hour ago after resting and was mildly surprised by the crew’s absence. Having listened to the lieutenant’s account of intercepting the Westinghouse’s signal, the lizard connected to Polaris’s AI and enthusiastically set to work on the decryption, despite Fry’s assurances that the signal had already been processed by every available method and contained no information.

“Would you just give up searching for deep meaning in that pile of ones and zeroes already,” the tigress grumbled, rubbing her eye with a paw.

The lizard slowly turned his head and, pausing from his work, smiled slightly.

“Throughout all the time I have spent in space, I have listened to it. In some systems, only noise could be heard, indicating that no intelligent life existed within them. In others, the ether was packed with transmissions from our ships — news broadcasts, orders, and encrypted signals. It was especially interesting to decipher what those last ones carried. All I can say so far is that a similar binary cipher — and it is a cipher, I believe — I intercepted several times in one of the systems in the Epsilon sector.”

“Seriously? And you managed to decrypt it?”

“No,” the lizard shook his head. “At the time, I too assumed the meaningless stream of code was most likely a communications test.”

“And its source?..”

“As I recall, it was a heavy strike cruiser undergoing repairs in an orbital station’s dock… What was it called… Lexington, I think.”

“That name means nothing to me…” the tigress yawned, drawling. “Fine, keep working… I’ll try to get some sleep. Wake me if you find anything or the captain gets in touch.”

“Of course,” Ran refocused on the transmission recording, directing the computer on the fly to apply new decryption algorithms and discard unsuitable ones.

***

In near-total darkness, Dreks moved forward at a brisk pace, maintaining a lock on every open door and every suspicious corner. Shandaris stayed behind at a distance of five paces, occasionally glancing over her shoulder into the dark corridor of the residential modules. On both sides of the corridor were officers’ quarters, some of which stood open, but not a single living soul inside.

From time to time, the captain and the manticore found themselves at an unlit junction, where the wide corridor intersected with other branches — leading to technical sectors or utility rooms. The command compartments and the bridge itself were still about a kilometer away, and with every step it became harder for Shandaris to keep going — but not physically. As if something was creating a heaviness in her head, forcing her to concentrate at the very limits of her abilities just to keep from stumbling and falling. Breathing hard, the manticore stopped, lowered her rifle, and, bracing a paw against the wall, tried to focus on Dreks’s slowly receding flashlight beam.

Taking a deep breath and counting to three, Shandaris was about to take a few more steps when she suddenly stopped short. Turning slowly, she aimed the beam of light into the nearest open cabin. A distinct whispering was coming from inside. The manticore slowly approached the doorway and stepped in, her tail stinger raised for a swift strike and her rifle held out before her. The whispering stopped.

Inside the cabin, everything was wrecked — the table overturned, belongings strewn about. The bunk and the wall beside it were covered in dried blood. Shandaris spotted a half-open door to the shower and started toward it — but then, behind her, came the sound of heavy breathing, almost deafening in the oppressive silence. Shandaris spun around, and in the trembling pool of light from her rifle she saw a human silhouette on the previously empty bunk. A face, filled with terror, turned toward the manticore and contorted in a scream, and then something tall, humanoid but not human, lunged at the prone figure from the doorway, tearing into them. The flashlight on the rifle flared and went out.

Shandaris fired, for a split second illuminating the attacker’s form — she couldn’t make out details, but she was glad of it.

The vision gradually dissipated, and the manticore realized she was on her knees, wings spread limply, her trembling paws searching for the rifle in the pitch darkness.

“Dreks!” she cried out. Unlike the ghostly vision in the transport hub, this time everything had been far too realistic.

In less than half a minute — though it felt like an eternity — a rapidly approaching beam of light appeared in the doorway, sweeping the corridor in search of her.

“Shandaris! Respond!” the captain’s voice rang out.

“Here,” she answered hoarsely.

Dreks rushed into the cabin, his light falling on the bunk with its long-dried blood, then swinging the beam to the manticore, who, spotting her weapon, scooped it off the floor and tried to switch the flashlight on. A second beam of light illuminated the cabin.

“What happened?” the captain ran over to the manticore. “Are you alright?”

“I’m alright,” she said, still catching her breath. Then she raised her head and looked Dreks in the eyes. For the first time, he saw in her fathomless eyes the dark shadow of fear. “We need to get out of here. And the s-s-sooner — the better!”

“Why? What happened here?” Dreks looked around, feeling a chill run down his spine.

“I don’t know what happened! I…”

“You possess some kind of mental abilities…” It came out not as a question, but as a statement. Shandaris only nodded in silence, her eyes flashing.

“What did you see?” Dreks asked with a puzzled look, and the manticore noted that this was not the first time he had shown genuine respect for Mystics and their abilities.

“I c-c-can’t say…” the manticore shuddered involuntarily. “I don’t know what I saw… but it was evil. And it’s still somewhere nearby. I can feel it with my s-s-skin!”

“Eight hundred meters to the bridge,” Dreks said in a confident, measured tone as he offered his hand and helped her up, though inside him everything had gone cold, and it felt as if his gut had been hit with a sledgehammer. “We grab what we came here for, and we leave immediately. This is our last chance to find the Keeper, right?”

“Yes,” Shandaris sighed.

“We go together. If you sense anything — let me know at once. Try to calm down, breathe deeply,” the captain said.

“C-calm down…” she grumbled, drawing a deep breath.

“You can’t read my thoughts, can you?” Dreks asked with a smile.

“I can’t,” the manticore shook her head, with a sly smirk, “not yet, at leas-s-st.”

“Well, you see — at the very least, you’ve already calmed me down,” Shandaris laughed along with Dreks, who deep inside was genuinely relieved by that answer. “Alright, let’s keep going.”

Continuing on, the captain activated the communicator:

“Captain Nokomis, come in. Status.”

***

“Approaching the med bays, no contacts,” Devora reported briefly, not slowing her pace. She walked ahead of Hioni and Omela, who nervously glanced around at every dark junction. Her team had already covered more than a kilometer, passing several more branches leading to landing hangars, and had ascended to the second deck, where, though it was somewhat brighter, the lighting worked intermittently, switching off for a minute or two with no discernible pattern, intensifying the already oppressive atmosphere of the ghost ship. Despite encountering scattered personal belongings of the crew and, occasionally, old traces of blood along the way, they had yet to find a single body — human or Ascended One. Along their route, they had discovered that access to the secondary transport system was also blocked due to lack of power, and now their path to the engineering compartments, located closer to the stern of the ship, ran through the medical laboratory and the storage facility with the cryochambers, where the sleeping colonists were supposed to be.

Soon, Devora approached the doors behind which, according to a flickering sign, the first med bay was located. The panels slid apart just as obediently as everywhere else. Only this time, the doors released a revolting stench of rotting flesh. Recoiling from the stench, Omela and Hioni put on their helmets in unison, while Devora briefly regretted not having her combat suit on, even at the cost of reduced sensation and agility. The white walls in the reception area were smeared with blood, but unlike the rest of the ship, this blood was fairly fresh. Nokomis slowly approached the half-open doors of one of the two main medical laboratories — enormous chambers, each capable of holding several hundred patients. What she saw when she looked inside shattered even her nerves of steel. Hundreds of operating tables equipped no worse than a military cybermed… And on them and around them — dismembered human bodies. Some organs had been placed in specialized vessels where cellular activity could be maintained. In many of the more or less intact bodies, life was being artificially sustained, but one glance was enough to see that their owners would never be able to return to a normal existence.

Enormous reservoirs in the right corner of the laboratory were filled with a translucent liquid in which floated creatures that now only vaguely resembled humans. The most horrifying thing was that they were alive, and they turned their heads toward the newcomers. Omela and Hioni stared in mute horror, unable to utter a word.

“Richard, come in,” Devora said, her voice faltering slightly.

***

The captain had already spotted the open blast doors ahead that separated the officers’ quarters from the command section. The bridge was only minutes away when through the static in both Shandaris’s and Dreks’s communicators came the voice of Nokomis. Both slowed their pace, exchanging glances. Right now, the warrior woman’s voice lacked the steely tones everyone had grown accustomed to.

“I’m here, what happened?”

“We found.The crew…”

“What? Repeat, what did you say?” Dreks stopped, pressing the communicator to his ear with a finger.

***

The lighting in the laboratory was, unlike on the deck, continuous, far too sharp and harsh, as if deliberately designed to reveal every detail; the lamps emitted a constant thin hum, and all around, things moved, twitched, suffered, drowning in saline solution and blood… what were they?… Now their distorted, sagging faces stared from every direction. They were dying, but they were continuously dying, eternally. One specimen was particularly horrifying — it was impossible to even say which organs it was made from — just something in the form of a red web with clots, long and stretched out — and so alive that it seemed the entire cosmos was merely a mirage, and it alone was real. It writhed and shuddered, and it, too, was suffering. Devora noticed that Hioni was doubled over as if about to retch. Omela had long since slumped against a wall somewhere, staring ahead with a glazed expression.

Dreks’s voice and the Ascended Ones’ reactions spurred Devora to act. She gave herself a mental slap — a very hard one — and tore her gaze from the bloody bodies. Ignoring the smells, she forced herself to breathe shallowly but steadily, restored the rhythm of her heart, and answered, now firmly:

“We found the crew, in the med bay — I believe they are entirely incapacitated. They were simply dismembered and… left like that, but someone forgot to let them die. The sight is… somewhat unsettling, I would say.”

“But not quite that riveting,” she added mentally, deliberately cynical, and gave the wolf a hard slap on the back. He turned around in surprise.

“Throwing up inside a suit is bad luck,” said Devora, “you can’t take sedatives right now, they’ll lower your alertness, so kindly pull yourselves together, both of you, Hioni, Omela. Captain,” she addressed Dreks again, “if you find it expedient to cut power to the med bay and disconnect life support for the… specimens… Hioni can do it. Omela,” Devora approached the lynx, “come on, peel yourself off that wall, let’s go. We can’t afford distractions. We need the engineering decks, remember?”

The lynx looked at Nokomis with an uncomprehending gaze, shaking from what she had seen, weeping silently. Instead of answering, she merely nodded.

“Good girl,” Devora approved.

“I’ve switched to a secure channel,” came Dreks’s voice through the communicator. “Devora, listen carefully. After Hioni is done, return to the Gitche Gumee immediately and wait for us there, understood?”

“Understood, we finish here, return to the Gitche Gumee, and wait for you.” Orders were something Devora never questioned.

She signed off.

“Hioni, go ahead, shut the systems down. We have to end their suffering, and the sooner the better. Enough of this.”

“I can’t do it from here… The entire circuit needs to be killed off…” the wolf forced out, breathing hard. “Only from the engineering decks…”

The cryogenic compartments were adjacent to the medical laboratories, since colonists were brought here first for examination after defrosting. Passing through the first laboratory complex, Devora approached a large sealed hatch, at least half a meter thick and over four meters in diameter. Without a word, Hioni slowly walked up to the access control console, trying not to look around. Plugging in, he began cracking the security systems and threw himself into the work. After several minutes, the massive locking mechanisms disengaged with a dull thud, and the hatch opened into a dark chamber along whose walls red LEDs glowed, stretching into the distance, and part of a wide metal walkway with guard railings was visible. Nokomis stepped over the threshold, and the lights came on automatically.

This was the most protected place on the ship. The walls of the cylindrical chamber were reinforced with meters of armor and jammed any electromagnetic field — all three of their communicators clicked softly, confirming that the communication channel with Dreks had been lost and they could now hear only one another. Running directly through the center of the storage facility, at a height of roughly twelve meters above the floor, was a suspended bridge, at the beginning of which Devora now stood. From it, maintenance personnel could monitor the operation of the cryochambers, which hung on the walls like cradles in ten rows on each side. The bridge itself stretched to the far side of the storage facility, with an identical hatch at its end.

The wolf and the lynx slowly followed the High One. Coming up to the first rows of cryochambers, Hioni glanced at the nearest system control panel. It displayed a red indicator reporting equipment failure, and the wolf realized with horror that the life support system in the storage facility had been shut down — on absolutely every panel the warning red signal was lit, which he had initially mistaken for ambient lighting. Glancing up to the nearest cryochamber, Hioni recoiled in horror — through the translucent glass, a decomposing human body was visible. The storage facility had become a crypt in which all colonists had perished — nine thousand people in total.

“How? How???” the wolf howled. “There had to be backup systems!!! What happened here? What the hell happened to this ship?!”

“Calm down, Hugo,” said Devora, who knew that in such a situation a calm voice worked better than shouting, “we’re here to shut down the med bays and restore power to at least the first deck, and then we’re leaving. We’ve learned enough; the second team will also gather data, we’ll feed everything into the analyzer, and perhaps the computer will be able to model what happened here. This is not what matters right now. What matters is completing the mission. Look me in the eyes, that’s right. Calm down, take a breath. Now get to work. Omela, you’re doing great, keep your eyes on Hioni.”

The lynx nodded again, wiping away tears.

Devora turned away and looked ahead, at the bridge, where the little lights looked like large drops of blood. Would Omela and Hioni hold up? One more outburst like that, and she would have to use force. Devora herself remained as if behind a glass wall — on one side were Dreks’s orders and the Ascended Ones, and on the other — only that which was permitted to act on her senses but not to resonate in her heart — all the horrors of the dead ship. Thousands of deaths were like a headline in the news. Devora knew how to detach, otherwise her own past would have long since robbed her of her sanity. She walked step by step past the ghastly transparent coffins, tinted pale red by the emergency lighting, and each step produced a hollow, reverberating metallic echo. Everything else — including their communicators — was silent on this ship of death.

***

The spacious bridge was illuminated by two flashlight beams, gliding slowly across the backs of the pilots’ and captain’s chairs, the control panel, and the niche with navigation equipment. Several minutes earlier, having inspected the communications and astro-navigation rooms, Dreks and Shandaris had reached their objective. The bridge’s observation windows were sealed, so the usual lifeless darkness reigned. The manticore found and switched on a dusty backup power unit. Warning indicators lit up on the control panels, and an emergency light came on in the ceiling.

“Excellent, romantic-c-c half-light… If only we could power up the main computer,” said Shandaris, looking around for at least one active terminal.

“Captain Nokomis, come in!” Dreks said. The only response was the crackling of static.

“They’re probably near the s-s-storage facility,” Shandaris guessed, shrugging. “According to the map — it’s a s-sterile zone. Fully shielded. We’ll have to wait for them to come out.”

***

Hioni trudged behind Devora on legs that felt like cotton, keeping a distance of about ten meters and periodically glancing nervously over his shoulder to make sure Omela was following. The poor lynx continued in silence, swaying on her feet. Reaching the end of the chamber, Nokomis smashed the glass on the emergency exit box and pulled the lever down. The hatch opened with the loud sound of shifting locks, and they stepped into a low-ceilinged utility room filled with cooling system pipes and hundreds of power cables that snaked across the ceiling in tangled clusters. On the wall, the deck number and compartment letter were painted in orange — “2-A.”

“W-w-we made it,” Omela squeaked, removing her helmet.

“Remind me, which compartment do we need?” Nokomis asked the wolf, who was beginning to recover from what he had seen.

“2-C…” he answered, also removing his helmet for convenience, studying the conduits overhead. “See, all these conduits feed into the storage facility, and judging by the readouts on those control instruments, the life support systems should be operational… But someone shut them down remotely…”

In five minutes, they passed through another compartment and descended through the maintenance passages into a small room with power distribution columns. Behind open panels, cables were visible — both high-voltage and low-current — branching out from here to the rest of the ship. The doors leading to the next compartment bore yellow markings reading “2-D,” but they were locked from the other side.

Having circled all the columns, Devora signaled that all was clear and Hioni could begin the work. The wolf approached the control terminal and, with trembling paws, input standard diagnostic commands. The screen displayed a diagram of connections and power distribution across the entire ship.

“See?” Hioni peered at the diagram, typing on the keyboard at the same time. “Nearly seventy percent of the power is going to the adjacent compartment, through that door there, into 2-D… Rerouting has been activated from several decks and some critical systems…”

“I don’t want to know what’s in there,” Devora remarked. “I see no reason why we would need that information. Get back to our task, Hioni.”

“Hioni, please, just do what needs to be done, and let’s get out of here,” Omela pleaded, tensely listening to the hum of electricity.

“Activating manual override. Restoring power to deck seven.”

The transport hub near the hangars lit up, the monorail motors hummed back to life. Lighting came on in the tunnel and the high-speed lifts.

“Deck four… Deck one,” the last command brought the bridge back to life, where Dreks and Shandaris should already be. “Done.”

“No,” Devora said heavily. “Not done. Those laboratory tables and the people suffering on them…”

“Yes,” Hioni groaned. “Yes, we have to, I know. But it’s so hard, Devora!”

“Then let me do it, Hugo.”

“No, I’ve already… here… Cutting the supply…” Hioni drew air in through his teeth and pressed the button.

A moment later came the hum of turbines pumping fresh air throughout the ship. Hioni stepped back several paces, sweeping his gaze across the screen displaying the changes in the colonizer’s status. A series of messages confirmed the successful restoration of critical systems to normal operation. And the medical laboratory showed black on the schematic, henceforth lifeless for all eternity.

***

The control panels and screens came alive with a soft greenish glow, banishing the half-darkness from the bridge.

“Hioni’s-s-s good,” Shandaris sighed, slinging the rifle onto her shoulder and approaching the navigator’s station. The captain, casting a satisfied glance across the bridge, walked up to the main control console.

“I’ll copy the flight records, and you try to find the ship’s log. Pull any data that might seem important,” Dreks requested, entering the boot commands for the navigation and shipboard computers.

“S-s-ship’s log,” the manticore nodded, settling into the chair.

Once the logic modules finished loading, Dreks accessed the flight records database. The last date had been entered a month ago, when the Westinghouse had made its jump into this system. Opening the detailed event description, the captain leaned toward the screen, studying the information recorded by the automated systems — from sensor array data shortly before the jump to the status of the colonizer’s systems.

“It can’t be,” Dreks whispered, and the manticore turned her head. “The storage facility with the sleeping colonists. It was shut down manually from the bridge about a month ago.”

Shandaris understood what that meant: all the colonists were dead. She lowered her head in sorrow.

“Captain Dreks-s-s. There’s something else here…” Shandaris said a bit later. “I’m checking the comm system logs, take a look at this.”

Shandaris transferred the information to Dreks’s monitor. Lines scrolled across the screen showing dates and data up to the point of transmission via subspace comms. The data itself consisted of a list of numbers, and the captain noted the transmission dates of dozens of entries, the last of which had been sent approximately eleven hours ago and was a dead ringer for the signal intercepted on the Polaris.

“Copy everything, we’ll try to decrypt it,” the captain said grimly. He tried once more to reach Devora via the communicator and the ship’s intercom, but to no avail. The ship’s internal comms would not respond to activation, and the communicator still picked up nothing but interference.

“I’ll c-c-copy it right n…” the manticore could not finish the phrase.

“Attention, anomalous energy discharge in compartment D, deck two,” announced the dispassionate voice of the shipboard computer.

A sudden spasm of pain doubled Shandaris over, and her consciousness blurred. She could make out Dreks, teeth clenched, gripping the armrest of the captain’s chair in a white-knuckled fury, trying to keep his balance. From the intercom came a rising, drilling scream. The pain intensified, and the manticore heard someone to her right say nervously:

“They’re breaking through to the first deck!”

“There’s nothing more we can do. I will not allow our cargo to be used this way,” someone answered from behind.

Barely comprehending anything, the manticore turned her head toward the source of the voice and saw the blurred silhouettes of several people standing behind her. Something large and indistinct was approaching the bridge from the corridor. The people, noticing it, grabbed their weapons. Fear returned, paralyzing her already unresponsive body — she had seen something similar recently, in the cabin. The pain receded as abruptly as it had come, and Shandaris shook her head, trying to rid herself of the dissolving images.

“Devora, can you hear me? Finally! What the hell is going on over there?” Shandaris heard through the ringing in her ears.

But the creature still lingered before her eyes. It had clearly once been human, but then it had been cut to pieces and reassembled — only in a different order. Contorting its entire body with every unhurried step and swiveling its mutilated, eyeless head from side to side — a head from which dozens of cables protruded — the three-meter-tall creature silently stepped onto the bridge.

And only then did the manticore realize that this time it was not a psionic echo — the thing was entirely real.

***

“Alright, I’m done here. At least the power supply on this ship is working properly now,” the wolf said, running diagnostics one more time, more as a precaution than out of any real necessity.

“Well done, Hioni,” Omela patted the wolf on the shoulder with her paw. “Without you we’d be—”

A metallic screech from the doors leading to compartment “2-D” made everyone turn their heads. Beyond the opening doors was a large, spacious room with far more technical equipment and conduits. In the reddish haze of warning lights, the outline of some enormous mechanism took shape, the sight of which struck Hioni dumb with awe.

“Back,” said Devora, “we’ve done what was needed. Fall back! Hioni, I understand, truly, but we have orders — to return as soon as the job is done. And you’ve done it.”

Devora’s instinct told her that going in there — to the very center, to the nexus — was a bad idea, and that far more emanated from it than met the eye, and that perhaps all the nightmares they had witnessed were born in this place, red from within, like a dragon’s cave. Or like its maw.

“No, no, don’t you see?.. It’s… it’s a…” The wolf took a couple of steps toward the passage, pointing at the structure whose outline was becoming clearer through the haze. “That’s the same material! It looks exactly like what I found on our ship, apparently just as ancient…”

The sight of the alien technology in such perfect condition sent Hioni into indescribable rapture, eclipsing everything he had experienced over the past several hours. The cylindrical structure stood on a broad platform, to which power cables snaked from open energy racks. The platform itself, covered with numerous markings in an unknown language, pulsed in the reddish glow of mobile terminals through which the Westinghouse’s logic modules were connected. The tall construction barely fit in the compartment, parts of it dissolving into the misty murk: the alien mechanism seemed to have grown into the standard architecture of a line ship.

Omela approached Nokomis, feeling her paws and head growing heavy. Hioni had already passed through the opening and was nearing the alien structure. The lynx thought that this mechanism had probably been brought from the alien ship in disassembled form, and then, apparently… assembled… given full freedom… Her thoughts drifted away, refusing to let her consciousness latch on to them.

“Orders, Hioni,” Devora reminded him sternly, “and you, Omela, stay where you are! Hioni, get back!.. Honestly, are you a child or what!”

She lunged after him in fury, intending to drag Hioni back by force if necessary, but a sudden attack of pain stopped her — and everyone else. Hioni took the worst of it, already some five meters from the mechanism. It was akin to a blow to the solar plexus, but not a physical blow — a mental one. The haze cleared, and in the middle of the mechanism a transparent pane of glass became visible. Behind it, in a murky solution, floated the corpse of a High One. Dozens of cables led to its back and head. The face of charred flesh bore an expression of infinite agony, and the mouth was open in a soundless scream.

Omela fell to her knees, pressing her paws to her ears and squeezing her eyes shut. A thin trickle of blood ran from her nose. Nokomis felt a maddening noise begin to sound inside her head, growing with each passing moment. For nearly a minute she was completely disoriented — there was only the drone, steady and blank, like a white field. This whiteness obscured her vision, shut down her brain — it simply ate it away, reduced it to nothing. Devora plugged her ears, tried to duck, but there was no escape from this nightmare. With one final effort of will, she pushed her own body forward toward the wolf, still hoping to drag him away from the terrible man behind the glass. She may have been screaming, but she could not hear herself.

Hugo Hioni.

Through the pain, Hioni realized that the man’s eyes were looking at him. And they knew everything about him, reading his …rather curious… thoughts and memories like an open book. The man knew the wolf’s name. He knew that the wolf had been …merely a slave… an engineer who had striven to understand everything unknown. Where he had been and …where he would never be… whom he had met …what he had felt… how he had ended up here and …who had led him… how it had happened.

To the motionless wolf, teetering on the brink of madness, it seemed that the mutilated man’s eyes flared red, burning through him with a gaze in which he saw the reflection of his own …not yours!.. life.

Summoning the last scraps of his will, Hioni tried to step backward with all his remaining strength, but something was already controlling his movements. Instead of retreating, the wolf took several sharp steps forward and screamed from the excruciating agony, unable to tear his gaze from the eyes with their dilating pupils — black and bottomless as the night itself. He felt something alien touch his mind, his memories, and everything that he was. The ship’s intercom came alive, and from loudspeakers in every compartment an inhuman scream rang out. The wolf plunged into an abyss of madness where the concepts of time and space did not exist. A sudden explosion in the mechanism cut the scream short and hurled the already unconscious Hioni sideways, scorching his muzzle and slamming him into one of the energy racks, which sparked and shorted the circuit, cutting off power to the alien structure. The drone faded, along with the headache in Omela and Nokomis. In the reservoir, the lifeless remains of the man floated on.

Nokomis shook her head — the wolf lay motionless off to the side. Barely grasping her bearings, she rushed to Hioni and, gathering her strength, lifted him and dragged him toward the exit.

“We’ll figure it out later,” she muttered, “later.”

She looked neither at the corpse, nor at the instruments, nor at the walls. Omela shook herself off and rushed to help. Together they hauled the wolf, who reeked of singed fur, away from the dreadful compartment. Devora told Omela to wipe the blood from under her nose, then pressed a portable med-scanner to Hioni’s neck, noting that the suit’s automated life support systems had already administered a dose of painkiller. Based on the preliminary readings, the wolf was alive, but his pulse was weak and fading with each passing minute. They needed to get back to the Gitche Gumee, where first aid supplies were available. Or better yet — to the military-grade cybermed aboard the Polaris.

“Devora, can you hear me? Finally! What the hell is going on over there?” Dreks’s voice crackled through the static in the communicator.

“Hioni is injured, the rest of us are fine,” Devora answered without pausing the scan, “we were in a room shielded from communications for a while. Hioni did his job, but then we encountered something incomprehensible — it affected our perception, created an interference field — I’d say it acted directly on the brain. Hioni was thrown into an electrical circuit, he needs urgent help — we’re heading toward the Gitche Gumee now. That’s the short version. The two of us can carry him. Are you in position?”

“Get out of there fast! We found the data we need, and we’re preparing to leave the bridge. We’ll meet at the Gitche Gumee in…” The communicator erupted with the sound of an impact, an inhuman scream, and the deafening bursts of assault rifle fire.

Devora spun around sharply — it was as though the shots had been fired right here. Her sword flashed, then vanished just as quickly, lightning-fast like a snake’s tongue. All was calm, and from around the corner slid a flat shadow: Omela, seizing the moment while Devora was talking, had gone and found a small gravity cart. And Devora thought that this might be the best news all day.

“You’re wonderful,” she praised the lynx once more. “Load Hioni and let’s run. Something happened over there, but we’re heading for the Gitche Gumee. That was the last thing the captain managed to say.”

***

Dreks and Shandaris, glancing nervously in every direction, dashed into the hangar with rifles at the ready, where the Gitche Gumee waited for them with landing engines running hot, ready to lift off at any second — the engines had apparently just been fired up. Omela, standing in the frigate’s open airlock, started to turn at the noise, raising her pistol, but breathed a sigh of relief when she saw who was approaching.

“Where’s Nokomis?” Dreks asked without breaking stride, ushering the manticore ahead of him and slamming his fist on the red button to close the outer hatch.

“She’s in her cabin…” Omela answered, her voice trembling, adding: “Trying to help Hioni…”

Nodding wordlessly, the captain headed for the living quarters. When he stepped through the half-open door of Devora’s cabin, he saw her leaning heavily on the desk, sitting before a monitor that displayed data from the med bay.

“The cybermed kicked me out,” Devora reported to Dreks in an even tone, “said I might introduce microorganisms or something of that sort. I’m monitoring from here. I think he’ll pull through. I mean — Hioni will pull through. Here are his current readings, not great, but he’s an Ascended One. They’re tougher than us… And here — the launch readiness indicator. And I’ll be glad to leave this place, honestly. It would be good to put Omela into therapeutic sleep after all of this… How are you and Shandaris?”

For a few moments, the captain remained silent, watching the wolf’s parameter readings — brain activity was depressed, and pulse was slightly below normal. Everything indicated that Hioni was in an unconscious state closely resembling a coma.

“Some spawn of hell decided to have us for lunch,” Dreks replied with a joyless smirk. “But it turned out to be quite mortal. We’ll sort out what it was later.”

The captain turned away from the monitor and met the warrior woman’s gaze.

“Devora. I need you on the bridge — it’s your ship, after all,” Dreks paused for a moment. “I’m confident Omela can fill in for Hioni as pilot. Once we’re airborne, I’ll signal the Polaris to pick us up.”

“Of course, Richard,” Devora agreed, “the controls here are no more complicated than on Omela’s ship.”

She nodded toward the monitor, as if Hioni could sense the support, and followed Dreks out.

When Nokomis arrived on the bridge, the commanding tone had returned to her voice — and once again Dreks marveled at how she managed to maintain her composure in such extreme situations.

“Pre-launch preparations!”

Omela, seated in Hioni’s chair, flipped the switches and entered standard engine system check commands into the terminal. The deck vibrated, and the rising hum of the Gitche Gumee’s maneuvering engines was heard as they gently lifted the ship above the hangar floor. The manticore watched the lynx’s actions with calm detachment, unlike Dreks, who was scrutinizing every detail and instrument reading on the ship’s control panel.

“Open the outer airlock, five percent on main engines!” Devora took her place in front of the observation windows.

The lynx sent a departure request to the Westinghouse’s automated systems, and after half a minute during which the oxygen was evacuated from the hangar, the outer airlock doors slowly began to slide apart, revealing the blackness of outer space in which the crimson shimmer of relatively nearby asteroids, reflecting their star’s light, could be discerned.

“Alter course to 0-7-2, move one kilometer away from the colonizer!”

The frigate departed the Westinghouse’s hangar, charting a path through the nearest clusters of rocks.

“Devora, we need to clear the asteroid belt so the Polaris can make a jump to our position,” said Dreks, addressing Devora directly rather than Omela. This was her vessel, and ultimately she made the final decisions. Even now, newly commissioned captains in the Confederation’s star fleet learned one simple rule from their very first sorties: you can advise and discuss all you want, but as long as there’s a captain in the chair, don’t board someone else’s ship with your own orders — unless you’re a fleet commander.

“Omela, activate lateral maneuvering thrusters, engage anti-collision shields, twenty percent,” Devora ordered, “course correction factoring in the asteroid trajectory analyzer readings. Don’t worry, the bow protrusion doesn’t actually exist — it’s our camouflage.”

“Oh, right, of course,” Omela began tapping away rapidly at the control panel.

“Projected trajectory… Excellent, at this point we can rendezvous with the Polaris — Synchro system coordinates loaded, time — five point zero seven.”

The scarlet light continued to flood the cosmos. It had grown slightly dimmer, as part of the star had drifted beyond the edge of visibility. Asteroids spun lazily in the crimson glow, while on the screens they were colorless three-dimensional objects. Devora had tuned herself the same way: no emotions, only facts — otherwise she would harm everyone, jeopardize the mission. The gnawing worry for Hioni and the nerve-shattering memories — all of that later, all of that — far away and gone. Nokomis nodded to Dreks to indicate he could signal the Polaris: the Gitche Gumee was ready.

“Omela, switch to standard Planetary Defense Forces frequency, transmit coordinates, encrypted…”

“Eek!!! Captain Nokomis! Captain Dreks!” Omela exclaimed, at the same instant as the proximity alert triggered.

Dreks raised his eyes to the observation windows, beyond which — some fifty kilometers from the Gitche Gumee — the asteroids were bathed in a brilliant radiance emanating from an enormous subspace vortex, from which the silhouette of an alien ship emerged. Dreks’s breath was taken away  — it was the same vessel that had destroyed the colony on Avalon and was wreaking havoc in the Border Worlds. It flashed through the captain’s mind that this could not be mere coincidence — there was a direct link between the signal from the Westinghouse twelve hours ago and the arrival of this ship, and it meant that… Shaking his head, Dreks pushed aside the extraneous thoughts. If they didn’t come up with something right now, in a few minutes there would be no one left to think at all.

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