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Screams pierced the darkness that had suddenly enveloped the repair bay. Roger grunted and rubbed his forehead, wondering if the darkness was caused by a power outage or the impact of his head against his workbench a few seconds ago.

Lights flared up a few yards away and he squinted. Okay, power outage, then. Those look like Lopez's headlights.

The four beams drifted around as the car-size, vaguely spider-shaped robot tumbled slowly in the air, giving Roger fleeting glimpses of the rest of the maintenance crew floating around him.

"Is everybody okay?" the robot said as the startled screams faded into a confused background mumble.

A few affirmative replies came out of the darkness.

"I dunno," Kamala muttered from somewhere behind Roger. "I can't see shit."

"I can." Lopez held up one of his pincers, giving his version of a thumbs-up. "I've got my cameras on light-amp mode; I don't see any open wounds."

"Same here." Asuka's voice, off to the left. "Plenty of bruises, I bet. Maybe some broken bones. That was a hell of an impact."

Lopez's headlights flitted over Kamala's four-meter-long, snake-like body. Roger flailed, trying to grasp something to turn himself toward her.

"Kamala, you okay?"

"I think so. What the hell was that? Did something hit the station? Or..." Her yellow eyes widened. "Could it have been a bomb?"

"The way things have been going lately, it wouldn't surprise me. The centrifuges have obviously stopped, so..."

"I've just tried to contact someone on my internal comlink," Asuka said. "There's nothing--can't even establish a connection."

The muttering in the background grew more panicked.

"I can't get anyone, either," Lopez said.

Lights appeared around Roger, popping up at random, as the roughly two dozen people in the bay dug flashlights or lamps attached to headbands out of their toolboxes. Kamala appeared briefly in several of the beams, glancing around, brushing back the long, thick tentacles that she had instead of hair. She found whatever she was looking for, flicked her tail to spin herself in the right direction, and coiled the tip around the leg of her workbench. She pulled herself over to it, grabbed her toolbox, held it in two of her hands and opened it with the other two.

The lights moved off her and she faded into the blackness for a moment. A new light appeared on her forehead, partially illuminating her face. She found Roger and extended herself toward him while keeping her tail wrapped around the workbench leg. She grasped his ankle and tugged him gently toward the floor, and he grabbed the edge of his bench.

"Hey," Lopez said, "can you get me to the floor?"

"Hold on." Kamala held onto Roger's shoulders, let go of her bench and curled her tail around his bench leg. She floated out toward Lopez, clamped all four hands onto one of his legs, pulled on him and twisted her body, trying to fling him at the floor. He drifted toward it, activating his magnetic footpads when he was close enough, and secured himself.

"Thanks."

Roger looked around the room again, and frowned. Red light appeared to be coming through the viewports set into the floor at the edge of the bay. He braced his feet against his workbench, aimed himself at one of the ports, and pushed off. When he reached the port, he clamped his hands onto the edge and looked through it, unsure what to expect.

"What...?" Depending on the station's rotation, he should have found himself staring at either empty space or Io, with Jupiter in the distance yet dominating the sky.

The vista before him was not even close. The sky was red and appeared to be made of gas and dust. A nebula, maybe.

Kamala floated over to him, put one of her left hands on the edge of the viewport and slipped both right arms around his waist and shoulders. He moved aside to let her take a look through it.

She gasped.

"Where the hell are we?" he mumbled. "Where's Jupiter and Io?"

"Never mind that." Her voice was barely above a whisper as she turned her head, looking out at various angles. "Where's the rest of the station?"

He pushed in for another look. Oh, hell. The repair bay appeared to be tumbling through space on its own; after watching the sky do two full orbits without spotting the rest of the cylindrical, O'Neill-class station or the nearby jumpgate construction station, a cold surge rushed up from Roger's guts.

What he could see, however, was a lot of debris--and bodies floating in the void.

"It's gone." Kamala shook her head slowly. "The station's gone." She turned to face him and put her other arms around him. "Oh, shit."

#

"Okay, calm down, everybody!" All the flashlights in the bay flicked around toward the sound of Asuka's voice, spotlighting her as she turned slowly, trying to make eye contact with everyone. "Try not to panic."

Oh, sure. Kamala's hearts pounded harder moment by moment. We've got no air, no power, and the whole station's gone--there's no way out. She tightened her grip on Roger and tried to stop her trembling before she shook herself apart. Damn it! She'd spent the last several months trying to get him interested in her, and now that he had finally started to respond, they were going to die.

Someone nearby sobbed and Kamala glanced over her shoulder. Her friends Seth and Marissa hovered above her workbench, holding one another. Seth's face had turned grim and ashen, and Marissa was weeping uncontrollably.

"Boiler..." She tried to choke back more tears, but they burst through anyway.

"Try to remain calm," Asuka said, raising her voice enough to drown out all the other sounds in the bay. Even though she appeared to be a teenager, she was at least eighty years old, an adult brain installed in a cybernetic body that looked no older than fourteen. Despite her youthful appearance, she was on the station's security crew; she'd recently been involved in a fight with several assassins who'd boarded the station, and had come here for a few repairs.

If she'd still been on her way here when...whatever the hell it was happened...

Kamala wasn't sure which was the luckier group--she and the rest, or those on the station...wherever the hell it was.

"We have some pilots here, right?" Asuka continued.

"Over here," a voice on the far end of the bay called out. The flashlights whirled around to illuminate her for a moment. Lydia Tilman, callsign "Tits." The reason for which was obvious enough.

"Here, too," a male voice came from behind her, and the flashlights moved again. Donny Quaid, callsign "T-Bone."

Asuka waited for someone else to speak up; when no one did, she said, "Any others?"

Silence, except for low murmurs rippling around the bay.

"Okay, then. We've got four shuttles here; any of 'em working?"

"Just two," T-Bone said. "One needs a few upgrades, but is functional as-is, and the other was waiting to ferry a repair team over to the construction station."

"The air in here won't last long. How about the shuttles?"

"Well, with a pilot and a half-dozen passengers, about thirty-six hours." He looked around and ran a hand through his hair. "We've got, what, a couple dozen people in here?"

"We're fucked," someone behind Kamala whimpered.

"Squeezing that many people onto the shuttles," Tits muttered, shaking her head. "It'll cut us down to almost nothing. An hour or two. Maybe three."

A new voice spoke--Omega, another security guy, basically a human brain in a charcoal-colored, robotic body. "We should go out and take a look. Maybe we've just broken off from the station, and it's still nearby. Out there, we can at least see what's really going on."

Silence again.

Kamala frowned. Not quite silence. There was a faint rattling, pinging from the walls and floor. "Hey, do you hear that? Sounds like debris bouncing off the hull."

"Yeah, that's probably parts of the station that got torn off. And who knows what else we might be drifting through--dust, rocks, asteroids."

Something struck the hull with a resounding clang. Kamala twitched and almost let out a yelp. Roger put his hands on her upper shoulders.

"Okay, that's not good." Asuka pointed at the two pilots. "Alright, everybody, if there's anything you absolutely need, grab it now, and head for the shuttles. If we're lucky, the station will be nearby--or at least a habitable part of it."

"And if it's not?" Seth muttered.

"Well, we'll have an hour or two to figure something else out." Asuka shrugged. "We won't have nearly that long if we stay here."

Roger patted Kamala's shoulder. "Come on. Let's get going before we hit something big enough to kill us all."

#

"Well. Goddamn." Asuka stared out the front viewport and shook her head slowly. Once both shuttles had launched, the crew had found themselves surrounded by a cloud of debris that seemed to stretch on for miles. The repair bay loomed directly in front of the shuttles, its severed edges still glowing faintly, as if the hull had been vaporized. But the rest of the debris...

"That doesn't look like it could've come from the station," Kamala said, her voice quivering. She pulled herself closer to one of the side viewports.

"Nope. The colors don't match, the shapes aren't right, and what little I can see in the way of lettering isn't even familiar." Asuka's eyes zoomed in on some of the larger hunks and she raised an eyebrow. "And I've just spotted one that appears to be semi-organic. Definitely not one of ours."

Kamala looked over her shoulder at Asuka. "You mean...alien?"

"Could be. No way to tell without a closer look, and we don't have any spacesuits or scanning equipment." She shrugged. "Oh, well, we've got more important things to worry about."

Kamala nodded, sniffed, and wiped away a tear in the corner of her eye. "Yeah. My brother's still on the station. If it hasn't blown up, that is." She sobbed and clamped a hand over her mouth.

Roger put an arm around her and rubbed her back.

Asuka nodded. "I've got a lot of friends there, too, particularly on the security team."

Another sob came from behind her. She turned and looked at Marissa, crammed into the passenger compartment with Seth and the rest of the maintenance crew. Seth put his arms around Marissa and glanced around at the others.

"Our girlfriend is there, too, if she's still al--" He cut himself off and winced.

"Take it easy." Asuka zoomed in on the repair bay again. "Look at the edges. That wasn't an explosion; it's a clean cut. Like someone used an enormous blowtorch to cut a section out. And I don't see the rest of the hull anywhere near us."

T-Bone, sitting in the pilot's seat, waved a hand at the nebula that dominated half the sky. "Whatever dropped us here is probably the same thing that sliced us off from the station."

"So all the people we got separated from are most likely still alive. I bet they're thinking we're dead."

"I hope not," Marissa muttered, and sniffed again. "I hope they keep looking for us."

"If we're even close enough to find." T-Bone tapped a button on his console, opening a link to Lopez, who'd clamped his magnetic footpads onto the roof of the shuttle. "See anything familiar out there?"

"Nah," the robot replied. "I don't recognize any of the constellations. None of the hull fragments match anything in my files. Not that we had any ships farther out than Jupiter, except a few automated probes and the deep-space explorer Carl Sagan. And none of the pieces here resemble any part of the Sagan or the probes."

Asuka nodded. More ships would've been launched on exploration missions once the jumpgate was finished, but until then, the Sagan was the only Earth ship out there. And it had only gone as far as Alpha Centauri; humanity and its progeny--AI mechs like Lopez and bioengineered anthros like Kamala--had only barely begun to explore the galaxy.

Wherever the hell we are, it definitely isn't Alpha Centauri.

"Whoa," Roger said under his breath. He pointed at something off to the left. "Take a look at that."

T-Bone tapped the directional thrusters, turning the shuttle enough to bring the object into the main viewport, and Asuka's jaw dropped. She was looking at what appeared to be the front half of a large sailing ship tumbling slowly amid the rest of the debris.

She zoomed in again. "What the hell? That's a Spanish galleon. Well, half of one." She swept her eyes over the hull and spotted several bodies floating around the wreckage. "Oh, damn, I just found some of its crew."

Kamala shivered.

"How the hell did that get way out here?" one of the people in the rear of the compartment said.

"Same way we did." Kamala flicked her eyes downward. "Oh, man. We're lucky we got out of there when we did."

Asuka followed the direction of her gaze just in time to see a gigantic chunk of metal smash into the repair bay. Whatever the thing had been, it was so big that the bay looked like a bug hitting a car's windshield.

Everyone was silent for a long, long moment. Then T-Bone sighed.

"Well, what now?"

Kamala took a slow look around at the debris field. "Well, we've seen parts of possibly alien ships and one from Earth hundreds of years ago; who knows what else might be out here? How about we look around and see if we find a ship that's at least mostly intact?"

Asuka smiled. "Works for me."

"It's better than sitting here and waiting for our oxygen to run out." T-Bone nodded and put his hands back on the controls. "Okay, let's see what we can find."

#

Roger stared out the window, watching the shuttle's floodlights playing over the debris field. So far, very few of the pieces of wreckage surrounding them appeared to have originated on Earth, and many of those were like the galleon--seagoing vessels from long ago.

Their search had turned up nothing that wasn't in pieces or riddled with holes from impacts with other debris, micrometeorites, or even dust.

"How long have we got?" he said to T-Bone, keeping his voice low.

"Under an hour."

Roger winced and flicked a quick glance at Kamala; she was still beside him, gazing out the same window. Her lower-left hand still had a firm grip on his right, and he wasn't about to pull away from her. Not now.

I'm such an idiot. He'd suspected since the beginning that she had feelings for him, but he hadn't taken it seriously until recently. It had just seemed too weird. And he'd egged her on every now and then, flashing that brilliant smile that always made her blush, chuckling on the inside whenever she became flustered around him.

Then she had risked her life to save his, and had almost died. And after recovering from that, she'd stayed by his side. Even then, one of their friends had to practically beat it into his head that she was in love with him. And now...

Okay, so, she's a thirteen-foot snake with four arms and three digits on each hand. Big deal. She's one of the sweetest people I've ever met. I should've been more open-minded. Not that it wouldn't still be weird--it absolutely would--but...

He leaned closer to her and whispered, "I'm sorry."

"Huh?" She glanced at him and made a visible effort to shift her mental gears. "Uh, sorry, I was just looking at all the stuff out there and got kinda lost in thought." She turned back to the window and grinned. "This is fascinating!" The smile faded quickly. "I wish we had time to investigate. And, y'know, not die sometime in the next couple hours."

"Yeah. Me, too." He couldn't help smiling. Even now, waiting for their lives to end, the sight of what might be alien starships out there kept drawing her attention. It was one of the things about her that, he now realized, he'd always found kind of endearing--she was a bit of a nerd, and was easily distracted by new gadgets.

And, another one on the plus side--she has four breasts. As one of his friends had said a while back, you can't go wrong with that.

He almost chuckled. I'm still trying to talk myself into it. Oy. He cleared his throat and plowed ahead. "Anyway, a moment ago I just said I was sorry. For, you know, stringing you along. If I'd known it'd end like this..."

She gave his hand a squeeze. "There was no way you could know this would happen."

"Still, I should've--"

She pressed a talon to his mouth and shook her head. "Don't worry about it. At least now I know I've landed you."

He laughed softly and put his arms around her. "I just wish I'd said it sooner."

"Well, I'm sure everyone on these shuttles has their share of regrets. I've got a few of my own." She winked at him. "Like not getting you into my bed a long time ago."

T-Bone cut in before Roger could say anything. "Is your plumbing actually compatible?"

Kamala raised a brow ridge at him.

He shrugged. "Just wondering."

"Yeah, I have the right parts. One of 'em is even placed properly, though the other is under it instead of being, y'know, in the rear." She chuckled, then aimed a wistful look at Roger. "If we were in a more private location, I'd let you take a look for yourself."

"You two are making all the blood rush from my head." T-Bone cleared his throat and nodded at a line of text on one of his console screens. "You might be interested in this, by the way. I just got a message from the other shuttle; seems they've found something promising."

Kamala's eyes widened and she turned to face him, but kept her arms around Roger. "Oh! What is it?"

T-Bone rotated the shuttle until its sister ship appeared at the edge of the front viewport. A few seconds later, a huge, dark object moved into view. A ship, long and kind of blocky, with four sections that might be centrifuges to provide gravity for a crew, and the hull bristled in spots with antennae and other devices.

"Huh." Kamala stared wide-eyed at the ship. "That looks kinda similar to the Sagan and the Enterprise, but a lot bigger. And more advanced, I think."

"I wonder..." Roger furrowed his brow. "We've seen ships from the past; maybe this one's from the future? Or maybe we've been shot into the future, somehow?"

"Either possibility is just goddamned intriguing!" Kamala grinned, but it faded a few seconds later. "But if it's the latter, that'd pretty much flush our chances of getting back home right down the toilet."

Roger winced again. Oh, hell...

"These shuttles are just taxis," T-Bone said. "All they did was take people back and forth between the habitat station and the jumpgate construction site, so we've got no scanners or anything like that. No way to tell what condition that ship is in, whether any of its crew are still alive, whether it's got an atmosphere onboard, and all that stuff." He shrugged. "But the hull looks mostly intact, so this is probably the only shot we're gonna have before we run out of air."

Kamala smiled. "Well, I'd already applied for a position on the Enterprise's engineering crew once they finished building it because I just wanted to see what's out here. So I can't think of a better way to go out than exploring an unknown derelict ship." She winked at Roger and gave his ass a playful swat. "Other than, y'know..."

He grinned. "Sounds good to me. If we stay here, we're dead for sure."

"Okay, then." T-Bone typed a message and sent it to the other shuttle. "Let's go take a look."

#

"Here, let me make sure you've got it sealed properly." Roger grinned.

"Ha-ha. Never gonna let me forget that, eh?" Kamala waited for him to check her breather pack one last time.

"Well, I can't give you too much shit about it, since you were saving my life when you didn't get your mask all the way on." He gave her a thumbs-up. "You're okay to go."

She nodded and gave him a hug. "This should only take a few minutes."

"Good. See you soon." He gave himself a gentle push and floated from the cockpit to the passenger compartment.

Kamala closed the hatch and locked it down, turned and ran her gaze over the pilot's console. In case of emergency, the cockpit had its own hatch; this would allow her to go outside without decompressing the entire shuttle.

Though, if she didn't find a breathable atmosphere on the newly-discovered ship, they'd all be dead in about twenty minutes, anyway.

Gah, stop that! She shuddered and took a moment to steady her breathing. "Okay, I'm popping the hatch." She pushed a sequence of buttons beside the hatch, turned away, and waited for the explosive bolts to blow the hatch off.

A gunshot-like bang made her nearly jump out of her skin, and the hatch flew across the room. Kamala took another moment to let her heartbeat return to something approaching normal, grasped the edge of the doorway and pulled herself outside.

At least T-Bone had found what appeared to be an open hangar door on the forward section of the derelict ship. The bus-shaped shuttle hung in midair; its spotlights illuminated the wall directly ahead of it, but the rest of the "hangar" was shrouded in darkness.

"Okay, I'm outside." She reached into one of the pouches on her toolbelt and took out a flashlight and her new ultratool. "First thing I need to do is find a way to close the doors. If there's air on this ship, we don't want it venting out through here."

"Right," Roger's voice came through the breather mask's built-in comlink. "Hey, would you link your ultratool with mine so we can see what's going on out there?"

"Sure." She switched the cylindrical device on and linked it up with the cybernetic interface she'd had implanted a few days ago. The typical ultratool interface was a customized hard-light projection that floated above the 'tool, but Kamala's "upgrade" let her operate the device simply by thinking, and receive information from it directly into her brain. Quite handy, though she often set it to give her data in the form of a heads-up display simply because it wasn't as weird as having said data just appear in her mind.

She found Roger's ultratool and set up a link while shining her flashlight around. Its beam passed over a series of small vehicles parked along the wall. "Huh. Some of those aren't too different from our shuttles, only sleeker. More...badass. There's a two-tier docking system, kinda like shelves, with the ships parked on them." She grasped the doorway with her lower-right hand and turned around. "The ones on the other side of the hangar look different; fighters, maybe. Even if we can't get this ship up and running, maybe we can use some of these."

"Sounds good. But, uh, the door...?"

"Oh! Right! Sorry." She coiled her tail up, braced it against the side of her shuttle, and launched across the hangar. When she reached the parked ships, she propelled herself along them until she reached the outer wall. She swept her flashlight over it. "Hmm. I think I've found a manual control. Gonna need help with it, though. Is Lopez nearby?"

"On my way," the robot answered. A moment later, he appeared at the edge of the hangar door, his magnetic footpads holding him down. He crawled inside and secured himself to the floor.

"I think this is the door control. At least, I hope it is." Kamala waved her ultratool at the handle. "I need you to turn this."

"Sure." Lopez scampered over to her, clamped his pincers onto the handle, and rotated his "wrist". Slowly, inch by inch, thick doors on each side of the opening slid toward the center. Finally, they met with a thud that reverberated through the hull and into the hand Kamala had placed on the manual control housing.

"Thanks." Kamala aimed her flashlight at the far end of the chamber. "Now, to find a door leading deeper into the ship."

Lopez turned around and switched on his floodlights. He clomped forward, and Kamala drifted along beside him. When they arrived at the wall, they moved along it until they came to another hatch. After pushing and tugging on several nearby panels, Kamala found one that revealed a manual control when it popped open. This one was similar to the one Lopez had used, but smaller.

Kamala stuck her ultratool into her belt pouch, clamped the flashlight in her teeth, and cranked the handle. The thing was probably designed to be operated by a tool of some sort, but fortunately Kamala--like most anthros--was quite a bit stronger than any human.

The hatch cracked open and a puff of wind escaped. Kamala grinned. "We have air!" She clamped all four hands onto the handle and kept turning it until the hatch was open completely. She grabbed her ultratool and scanned the air.

"Is it breathable?" Roger said. "Please tell me it's not an alien atmosphere."

"Well, it's kinda thin, since it's had to spread itself into this huge hangar, but it's safe for us to breathe. It's butt-clenchingly cold, though. I'm thinking this ship has been here for a while." She raised her upper-left hand to her breather mask. "I'm gonna sample the air."

She pulled the mask off and took a slow, careful breath. "It's...kinda stale." Steam puffed out of her mouth and nose. She took a few more breaths before she allowed herself to relax. "Okay. I'm breathing without much effort. I think it's safe for the rest of you to come out."

"Yes! I'll be right there!"

The hatch in the side of the shuttle slid open and Roger emerged, looked around, and pushed off toward her.

She sniffed again, frowned, and stared down the corridor on the other side of the door she'd just opened. "Smells weird. Rotten, like..." There was a definite stench, but not nearby. Somewhere in the distance, but she figured it'd be overpowering if she were any closer to the source.

It wasn't hard to guess what that source was.

"Oh, fuck me." She clamped two of her hands over her nose and mouth. "It smells like rotting bodies!"

#

"Ugh. Here's another one."

Seth grasped the edge of the doorway to stop his forward motion long enough to glance into the room. Kamala floated in the middle of the crew quarters, holding her ultratool in her upper-right hand and covering her nose and mouth with her upper-left. Near the wall, above one of the bunk beds, was yet another decaying corpse.

Seth shuddered and turned away. They'd been at it for over an hour, dividing into teams and spreading out through the ship, and all they'd found was one body after another, some human and some anthros of various species. Every now and then, they'd come across disabled mechs as well.

The air was saturated with the stench of rotting flesh.

"Nothing we can do for them now." He moved on down the corridor, not bothering to check any of the other doors or move his flashlight around as he caught up with Marissa, Hitomi, and Asuka. "Find anything?"

"More of the same." Marissa rubbed her bare arms and Seth hugged her.

"Some of them are so far gone, it's impossible to tell what killed them." Asuka shined her flashlight into another room, shook her head, and moved on to the next. "Others looked like something had chewed on them. Though I couldn't tell whether that happened before or after they died."

"Jesus Christ," Marissa grumbled. "Thanks for putting that in my head."

"Sorry, kiddo." Asuka shrugged. "I've been in varying sorts of police work for over sixty years, and in that time I've seen people killed in more horrible ways than I can count. After a while, you get used to it, or you lose your fucking mind."

"Unless getting used to it is the same thing as losing your mind," Hitomi said, prompting a chuckle from Asuka.

"A sexbot getting philosophical." She shrugged again. "Guess that's almost normal compared to recent events."

"I started out with very simple programming, but once I started installing new software to help deal with one crisis after another, I couldn't help evolving a little." Hitomi shrugged. "Then Sledge modified my software even further, so I'm much more now than I was a few months ago." She closed her eyes and ran a hand through her hair. "That's one of the reasons I miss him so much. He helped me 'awaken.'"

"We know how you feel." Marissa patted Hitomi's shoulder. "Seth and I fell in love with Sledge's sister, so...yeah." She squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath for a few seconds.

"She's okay." Seth put his arms around her and rubbed her back. "Everyone we know back home is okay. We've got to believe that."

"I want to. But something cut off a huge piece of the station."

"Take it easy." Asuka smiled. "That place was built with numerous failsafe systems. Losing a big chunk of its mass would throw the rest of it off-balance, but its centrifuges stop rotating automatically when something catastrophic happens. And it's got thrusters all over the hull to prevent it from deorbiting."

The soft click of claws on the wall drew Seth's attention and he looked over his shoulder. Kamala was pulling herself toward them, waving her ultratool around. Roger followed close behind her.

"I'm still not detecting any life signs." She sucked in a quick breath, almost let it out in a sob, but reigned herself in.

"We scanned a few of the bodies," Roger said softly. "The ones that hadn't rotted away, that is. Some of them had teeth marks on them, others appeared to be partially eaten."

Marissa shuddered again, and Seth gave her hand a squeeze.

"At least that's better than a plague. Because if it were that, we'd all be exposed by now." He kissed her forehead. "And if we're lucky, whatever chewed on them died a long time ago."

She nodded, but didn't look reassured. "So, uh...what kind of ship do you think this is? I didn't recognize any of the uniforms, but a lot of them looked sort of military."

"Last time Omega reported in," Asuka said, tugging on a door frame to propel herself forward, "he said he saw some people in lab coats and 'sciencey'-looking garb. So it could be a military ship with a small research staff, or a science or exploration ship with military support."

"Since the design is sort of a more advanced version of the ship being built along with the jumpgate," Kamala said, "it might be an explorer ship."

Seth almost smiled. "If that's what it is, I wonder what kinds of things they found out here."

"It's starting to look like one of the things they found ended up killing them all." Asuka peeked into another room, grimaced, and kept drifting forward. She cocked her head, smiled, and glanced over her shoulder. "Just got a message from Omega on my comm implant. His team has reached the medical bay. If we can restore the ship's power, they might find records that tell us what happened to the crew."

"Restoring power," Marissa said under her breath. "That'd be good. Thaw this place out."

"Yeah." Seth managed to chuckle. "It's so cold in here, my nipples are like pencil erasers."

She snickered, but reverted to her previous morose state. "Asuka, can we skip the rest of the corpses and head straight for Engineering?"

"Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Okay, let's haul ass. The sooner we can get the power and heat turned on, the sooner we can move on to other critical needs--like food and water."

Oh, lovely. Seth sighed. Survive all this shit only to die from starvation or dehydration--or get gnawed to death by some horrifying space critter. That'd be the perfect end to a day like today.

#

"Even if we ever get away from this goddamned stench, I'm afraid it'll be stuck permanently in the back of my nose." Morrison wrinkled his snout as he swept his flashlight over the bank of monitors and control panels in front of him.

"Me, too." One of the maintenance crew, Luana Phillips, drifted past his left shoulder, aiming her light at the empty beds lining two of the walls. "Between that and the stale air..."

"At least we have air, now," another tech--Sparky something-or-other--said as he hovered a few feet away, waving his ultratool around. "Of course, if we can't get the power turned back on, we'll run out sooner or later. Not for a while, given how big this ship is, but still..."

"Well, as ahead of our technology as this ship appears to be, it's not all that different from the stuff we used back home. And since we've got a couple dozen tech experts here, if we can't figure out how it all works, nobody can." Steam puffed out of Luana's mouth and she shivered. "If we don't freeze to death first. I bet my nipples could cut glass right now."

Morrison grinned. "The image you just put in my mind is warming me up already." Luana was kind of easy on the eyes, for a human, and she did have a nice rack. He hadn't met her before his routine patrol had taken him through the repair bay at just the wrong moment, but now he kind of wondered if she was available.

She laughed. "You offering to keep these warm for me?"

"Well, if you insist."

"How sweet," Sparky muttered distractedly, still keeping most of his attention on the various parts of the med-bay that appeared briefly in his flashlight beam. "I'll keep that image in mind next time I whack--"

A faint skittering from off to the right shut them all up. Moving almost as one, everyone in the med-bay swung their flashlights toward the sound.

"I hope that was one of us making that noise." The tip of Morrison's tail lashed back and forth.

Even as the words left his mouth, the eight beams of light landed on a writhing mass of...

"What the fuck is that?" one of the techs behind Morrison whispered.

Morrison shook his head slowly, unable to wrap his mind completely around what he was seeing. Each of the things looked like an unholy cross between a spider and a centipede--and each of them was easily the size of his arm. They had appeared from behind the bed in the far corner.

"Everybody, get behind me and head for the door," he whispered, easing his sidearm out of his hip holster. Naturally, we run into these things after Omega leaves us here to keep exploring. His mechanical body would probably be immune to whatever these fuckers can dish out.

"I can't," Luana squeaked, trembling and staring wide-eyed at the creatures. "I'm not close enough to anything to grab onto."

Morrison reached out slowly with his free hand and grasped her ankle. He pulled her toward him--but also ended up pulling himself toward the oozing mass of alien critters on the wall.

"Oh, shit!"

The mass surged forward, flowing over the walls like liquid.

"That's it, I'm outta here!" Sparky flailed around until he got hold of Morrison's right horn, yanked on it and launched himself toward the door.

"What--Christ!" Morrison tumbled toward the onrushing whatever-the-hell-they-were--but stopped when a hand clamped onto his left ankle. He glanced down and found Luana holding onto him while one of the other techs gripped her ankle in one hand and the door frame in the other.

The guy pulled them into the hallway and Morrison grabbed the manual control. He glanced into the room to be sure everyone else had gotten out, and began turning the handle.

The door slid across the opening inch by agonizing inch.

The swarm reached the door a split-second before it closed.

One of the spider-centipedes squeezed through just before its locks closed with a solid clunk.

It turned toward Morrison and snarled.

A cold shiver rushed up and down his spine.

Its front end lifted, bent, tightening like a spring, and it leaped at him. He screamed and kicked at the wall, pushing himself away--but not fast enough. The thing landed on his left leg, gripping his short fur and the cuff of his cargo shorts.

"Fuck!" He cocked his right leg back and drove his hoof into the creature. "Fuck!"

The blow dislodged it, sending it tumbling down the hall.

"Keep away from it!" He grabbed the manual-control handle to steady his aim, pointed his gun at the centipede, and took a moment to make sure the others were clear. He pulled the trigger, hoping the shatter-round would punch through the thing's exoskeleton.

The bullet ripped through the middle of the creature and burst apart on impact with the wall behind it. Trying not to shake as he adjusted his aim, he pumped three more rounds through it just to be sure.

A sickly yellow-green fluid poured from the holes he'd just blasted through it. It hissed and twitched for a few more seconds before it bled out.

He kept watching it. Once a good thirty seconds had gone by without it moving, he sighed and shoved the gun back into his holster. "Everybody okay?"

A few of them nodded, others muttered something under their breath.

Morrison looked around and found Luana. "Hey...are you--?"

"I...guess." She shuddered, pushed against the wall, and turned away from the critter.

Morrison reached out to hold her hand and activated his comm implant. <Asuka? Morrison.>

<Hey, Henry. Your team making any progress yet?>

<Well...I think we might've found what killed the crew.>