Captain James Stevenson sat in his ready room aboard Penumbra’s Eye quietly watching the various holo-screens arrayed on his desk. They displayed various ship data critical to running in stealth mode. On the opposite wall, a floor to ceiling holo-display showed a tactical map of the H48948 system, so far with the only indicators being the natural astronomical objects, the Eye and the mysterious alien space station his crew had been sent here to keep an eye on.

  So far it had been the usual surveillance mission: a whole lot of doing nothing but watching readouts and analyzing data. And there wasn’t a whole lot of data to analyze either! There were absolutely no signals coming from the station that they could detect, no maintenance drone activity, and their sensors couldn’t seem to penetrate the station’s hull to obtain any life sign data.

  The only part of their mission here that seemed to have any point was watching for the alien vessel, the giobhioni vessel, which long range scans had reported seeing dock with the station two days ago. Stevenson fervently hoped that this mission did not become too extended, or it would push his patience to the limit.

  He was about to pull out a stranma stick from his secret stash - being commanding officer had some advantages when it came to contraband - when the shipwide alert sounded.

  “Captain, we have a new sensor contact in the system!” a young voice said over his ready room's PA. “Sensors are working on the data now, but first indications are that it is quite large sir. Battlecruiser mass at least.”

  Stevenson glanced up at the tactical map and saw the red marker blinking at the outer rim of the star system, about thirty degrees spinward from their position. “Hold position Ensign Connor, and maintain stealth running. Keep working on identifying that new contact. When we have a window of opportunity, we'll send a burst packet off to Pieces Command.”

  “Aye Captain.”

  He stared hard at the blip on the tactical screen before loading up the sensor feeds for it. “What the hell are you, and what are you doing here?” he asked, wondering if things were about to get interesting at H48948.

  “Will you please sit down!”

  I was pacing a circuit around the inside of the spherical tramcar the Keeper had hurried us into after it had announced the presence of the ktonshi in the system. It had waved one of its immense tentacles over the table we'd been standing on, and a hole had opened up, followed immediately after by this transparent bubble with a floor and flat floor and several chairs inside. Once we'd been ushered inside, myself objecting because we had not had a chance to ask about the hidden chambers below yet, the tram had accelerated away from the control room.

  “I knew there was something fishy about this whole thing! they had this kind of transportation system all along! Why did they make us take the slow boat in getting to the control room!” I exclaimed, for the I-don't-knowth time. “If we'd been brought there using this, I wouldn't have been subjected to that…”

  “I know Thomas!” Jophixa growled at me, reaching out to snag my tool belt as I stalked past her again. Holding on to her seat at the same time, she hauled me closer, and then tried leveraging me toward a seat. “I'm not happy about it either, and I'm pissed for what you had to go through for their little run around as well, but stomping around like that is just getting on my nerves. SIT. DOWN. That is an order.”

  “Just do it Thomas.” Tindron interjected from the other side of her. “There’s no use in antagonizing a lady, especially not if they are your commanding officer. You can rant and rave all you want in your quarters when we're back on the Elegance.”

  I growled to myself, but dropped into my seat. I hated this. I hated the fact that I'd gone through all that terror unnecessary! And I wasn't even getting a chance to rake the slimy bastard over the coals for the whys about it! I also didn't like the convenient timing of this emergency, when I'd only just informed Jo about my discovery on the lower level. It just seemed too coincidental.

  Once I was sitting down, however, I felt a small hand slip into mine and squeeze. I looked down to find Jo’s hand holding my hand tightly, and when I looked up, saw her looking at me intently with startling violet eyes. “I told you Thomas, I want answers too. And if this is a run around, I'll be just as pissed. But if there are ktonshi in the system, we need to think about the others first. Survival of our crew is most important.”

  I felt another hand on my shoulder and looked over to find Tindron nodding at me. “We can always track the Keeper down later and give him hell if this is fakery. But we both have loved ones back on the ship. Let's make sure they are safe, eh?”

  Forcing myself to relax, I nodded. They were right. And wasn't so much of the hell in my life caused by Barstol's selfishly overlooking the safety of his crew for his ambition and greed? This might not be the same thing, but the last thing I wanted to be was anything like Jonathan Barstol.

  “Alright, but if this is fakery, we're coming back for answers, and I'm getting them if I have to take a plasma cutter to that eldritch son of a pintasa's weird ass eyeball!” I grumbled, squeezing Jo's hand back.

  “I'll carry the spare plasma tanks.” She said, smiling at me.

  The speed the tram was going was infinitely faster than the transport drone that we rode on the way in. We couldn't feel it from the inside, but from the few instances of it passing through viewing sections on the outer hull, I estimated it was clocking hundreds of kilometers an hour.

  So it was with no surprise at all that the trip that had taken us the better part of an entire day, took us a mere hour in returning.

  The bubble popped out of a wall just outside the hangar bay where the Elegance was berthed, and we quickly disembarked from it, and made our way back to our ship. When we got to the loading ramp, we found Boudya waiting for us, a PPG in her hand and wearing an armored EVA suit. “The preflight check has already been completed Commander,” she announced, “And Toftri has the engines spun up and ready for us to launch as soon as the Keeper gives us clearance.”

  “Let’s not wait around then!” Jo exclaimed, and hurried up the ramp, “I’d rather not be in the neighborhood when the ktonshi attacks the station.”

  As Jo took off towards the bridge, I made to hustle off towards engineering. Boudya caught me by the arm as I moved past her, however, and yanked me into a rib cracking, desperate hug, and a moment later, I felt Tindron’s arms around both of us. “If you ever scare me like that again, Thomas, I am going to punish you so harshly, you would be wishing you were facing Dean Arnod instead!”

  “Ooo.” Stacy chimed in, “Sexy Headmistress and naughty student roleplay? Kinky!”

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  Tindron’s laughter was so loud the audio safety protocols on the comms cut in, to protect my ears. “Alright you two!” Tindron let us go, and gave us a shove, “get to engineering before the Commander reems you both out! And no, Stacy, I do not mean in a fun way!”

  We both gave a chuckle, knowing he was right, and hustled off to engineering where we belonged in any tense situation such as this. While the view would be so much better from the bridge, we were both engineers, which meant keeping our hands on the actual heart of the ship and keeping it running no matter what happened.

  True to Boudya’s report, the Elegance’s conventional engines were spun up and ready to, as my mom’s friend Mr. Hennison used to say, “Give ‘er” at a moment's notice, and the Tunnel Drive - or more accurately the Gate Projector, since giobhioni drives didn’t actually form a hyperspace tunnel like the commonly used drives of today do. - were prepped and ready to get us into hyperspace the moment the command was given.

  “How’s our emissions Stacy?” I asked, heading right for the main engineering console, “I’m laying odds the Commander is going to want us running as close to stealth equivalence as possible.”

  “We’ve been working on that the whole time you were fucking around in the station, Thomas.” The reply came from Boudya, from a secondary console, where she was already tapping away at inputs, “I might not have the advantage of that implant you have in your head, but I caught on quick. We won’t get a full acceleration curve out of her, but if the Commander wants us running dark, we can do it and still get up to about 89% of our max conventional space velocity.”

  “Great!” I glanced over at the shield status, noting they were also in low emissions mode and ready to be brought up to protect the ship within mere fractions of a second from activation. Weapons systems were in much the same state. “We always were on the same wavelength when it came to procedures Boudya! Now it’s just a matter of hearing from-”

  “Bridge to Engineering,” Jophixa’s voice echoed over the deck’s PA. “We’re buttoned up and about to leave the station. The Keeper is opening the landing bay doors now. I want us to be running dark, but I’d like to put some distance between us and the station as quickly as possible. How much can you give us?”

  Shooting Boudya a smile, I hit the intercom to reply, “Boudya and Stacy were running some tweaks in anticipation Commander. We can achieve the standard dark running emissions profile with a 15% loss to our acceleration curve, and an 11% loss to our max velocity. We also have the Gate Projector in standby, as well as the shields. Everything is waiting on your command Ma’am.”

  “Very well. Rig for Dark Running, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  The harmony of the engines shifted as the Elegance lifted off its landing struts and moved out of the hangar bay and into the open void of space. I kept my eyes glued to the engine emission readouts to make sure they were staying in the range that kept us as undetectable as possible. After all the horrors that played out in my mind over the past few days, the last thing I wanted was to test their reality, so keeping on top of any performance shifts was almost an obsession at that moment.

  “Take us into the Oort cloud Be’tsar.” I heard Jophixa order over a comms channel. It seemed Boudya had patched into an observation protocol to allow us to listen in on what was happening on the command deck. “Then take us into the Ecliptic deeps. We’ll hold there and observe. I’m not taking my eyes off that station until I know why we have our people in stasis. The Keeper owes us an explanation for that!”

  “Sepaq, Commander, setting course.”

  The journey to the Oort cloud was uneventful, if tense. Boudya and Stacy had tuned the engines expertly to ensure such a minimum of emissions, that we didn’t need to make any adjustments along the way. Our acceleration curve even exceeded original estimates, getting us to the Oort cloud a full fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.

  Along the way we watched the ktonshi vessel speed towards the station with a velocity that kept my sphincter clenched tighter than an antimatter containment field. That thing moved faster in conventional space than anything I’d ever seen, especially for something its size. And it was massive, much larger than the one we’d seen on the flight recorder footage. So massive it looked as if it might be able to wrap itself around the station and simply crush it as if it were a space born boa constrictor.

  How the fuck could these things get so big? I thought to myself, mind racing through thoughts of how we could possibly fight against it if we were detected. Thankfully it only had eyes for the station, keeping its course set invariably towards H48948 with horrible, malicious intent.

  The station, meanwhile, had started to undergo some changes as we raced away from it.

  It began with the harvesting field going down to H48948c cutting off with a sputter, and the long spindly column that was emitting it began to shorten. It grew thicker as it shortened, until the gland-like bottom tip extended no further than the ends of three crystalline spires that surrounded it. Cerulean blue light began pulsing from the upper points of said spires, cascading down their length and then bursting out into a sphere. The result surrounded the station in an orb of coruscating, pale blue light that seemed to distort reality around it.

  By the time the ktonshi was within firing range, we could hardly make out any details of the station itself. It was simply a brighter bit of brilliant blue light in the center of the globe.

  The ktonshi vessel let loose with a cascade of venomous green lightning weapon like we’d seen the smaller vessel use on the Enigma Osiris flotilla, only to see it crackle over the surface of the cerulean sphere with no effect. It simply faded away like lightning grounding through a lightning rod. In reaction to its repelled attack, the ktonshi let loose one of those monstrous shrieks that defied the vacuum of space, reverberating through the consciousness of anyone in range.

  I swore it had to be telepathic: The way felt like it seemed to reach right into the very core of your soul and threatened to crush it!

  But it seemed to have absolutely no effect on the station. The pulsing merely sped up to a rate that began to hurt the eyes. If Dad had been here, he’d likely have been being hauled off to the infirmary for the seizure it would have induced. Thank the stars neither Jesse or I had inherited his epilepsy.

  The ktonshi vessel closed further, continuing barrage after barrage with its plasma weapon, but still doing no apparent damage at all. But when it was finally in close, it abandoned its energy weapon completely, and attempted physical violence, wrapping its body around the sphere of energy and attempting to break through it as if crushing a shell to get to the tasty sea creature inside.

  The orb crackled in response, stressed by the ktonshi’s actions. It seemed that perhaps the physical attack might break through where the energy weapons had no effect. “Bugger!” I heard Jophixa curse, “Mr Aacen, prepare to drop dark running protocols and give all speed back to the station. There are thousands of giobhioni aboard that station. We cannot abandon them if the keeper cannot defend itself against the ktonshi. We have to help.”

  “Aye, Commander, I-”

  But I never got to finish. Our comms were suddenly taken over by the Keeper’s voice. “Negative, risk not yourselves.” it said in its strange chilling intonation, “Your lives you will only be throwing away. Your people are safe, explained we would have done if there had been time. Transmitting data, keep searching, ktonshi must be stopped.”

  With that, the furious pulsing emanating from the station passed beyond what my eyes could differentiate, becoming a solid brilliant blue. The ktonshi shrieked again, but the sound that reverberated down into my core sounded of its own pain and confusion as the holo-monitor I was watching washed out from the intense light. And when the light finally faded, the station was gone, and of the ktonshi, we could only see bits of hull plating, or maybe carapace? Whatever the hell their ships were made of.

  “Ms. Aacen,” Jophixa barked out, “are we picking up any signs of debris from the station?”

  “Negative Commander.” I heard my sister reply, I could tell she was shaken from her tone, though she was putting up a strong effort at sounding unperturbed. “Only debris sensors are detecting match readings of the ktonshi hull.” Her voice paused, “Commander, we are, however, detecting a massive spatial anomaly at the coordinates of the Keeper Station. Readings are fading rapidly and will cease to be more than a blip in no more than ninety seconds.”

  “A spatial anomaly?”

  “Sepaq, Commander,” Stacy interrupted, “I have cross referenced the readings with all scientific databases available. Our closest match relates to an experimental FTL drive that the Ventzandi were testing 122 years pre-stasis. They referred to it as the P2P drive, or the Point-to-point drive. The project was cancelled due to catastrophic results during their last test. Commander, it was a space-fold drive! It would allow the vessel to transition from one point in space to another instantaneously!”

  “Space Fold technology?” I heard Boudya gasp out breathlessly, “They have Space Fold technology!? By the Goddess!”

  The Salvager’s Plague.

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