Zenith (ESS Space Marines Book 1)
Author: Victor, James David
Date: 2017-06-30
Rights: Copyright 2017 James David Victor. All rights reserved.

Zenith

ESS Space Marines, Book 1

James David Victor

Fairfield Publishing

Contents

Copyright

Message to Readers

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Epilogue

Thank You

Free Story

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Copyright © 2017 Fairfield Publishing

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This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

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Chapter 1

Red alert lights flashed, filling the shuttle bay with a harsh, almost violent glow. Was it a sign of things to come?

She hoped not.

Sergeant Andrea “Andy” Dolan didn’t know what was ahead of them, but she knew her team could face it. They always had, no matter the challenge.

Hanging on at the rear of the shuttle craft, half in and half out, she waited for the final clearance from the bridge. Her four marines sat inside, strapped in and ready to go, while the pilot prepped for take-off. One word and the shuttle would head out.

Andy rolled her shoulders impatiently. The Star Chaser was slowly approaching Starbase Zenith, running every scan their ESS starship was capable of to try and figure out what they were heading into. The distress call they received was automated; there was no way to know when it had been activated.

Who knew what they would find when they boarded?

If they ever boarded, that was. Five shuttles were sitting in the bay just waiting on word from up top, each bearing a squad of the 33rd ESS Marine Detachment stationed on the Star Chaser. She was sure that every marine and every squad leader was just as impatient as she. They were geared up and revved up, ready to tackle whatever was there, but right now, they were just waiting.

Hurry up and wait. That was the life of a space marine.

“Sergeant, are they just going to keep us on this baby boat forever?” A voice called from the front of the shuttle. “I mean, I know they don’t trust us to keep the rec room intact half the time, but I think this is extreme even for them.”

Lance Corporal Dan Thomas was a stereotypical ESS Marine. Large, heavily muscled, and seemingly always ready for battle. He had less patience than Andy.

“You think we’re being made to wait too long if you have time to breathe without things happening,” Andy replied easily.

“What?” he returned without missing a beat, or waiting for a breath. “I just like to keep busy. You know what they say about idle hands...”

Andy looked back into the shuttle, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t need to know what you do with your idle hands.”

Everyone laughed, just as she had intended.

Andy just shook her head and looked back through the rear hatch. Not that there was much to look at in the shuttle bay, unless she wanted to glance at the shuttle opposite hers and nod at the leader of beta squad, who was doing the same thing. It kept her squad from seeing that she was just as impatient as them.

The shuttle’s comm system chirped twice, then the voice of the captain filled the small space. “Captain Wallace to all Marine squads,” he said. “We have confirmed that the station’s life support and artificial gravity systems are functioning. You are safe to board the station without the suits.”

Well, that was a good thing. Andy listened to alpha and beta squads confirm before she added her voice to the sequence.

She stepped back from the hatch and the door hissed as it closed. It latched with a click as she moved to the front and took her seat next to the pilot, fastening her restraints.

“Well, we’re on the move now, Thomas. You happy?” Andy called behind her, exchanging a smirk with her pilot. Dan’s chatter usually kept the group both grounded and amused, so she encouraged him. Despite her teasing, he knew when to lock it down.

She looked through the view screen at the other side of the bay.

The shuttle bay doors opened and revealed space beyond. Two shuttles lifted up and hovered above the ground for a moment before flying forward, out of the ship. Her shuttle followed moments later. Andy took a deep breath and felt her adrenaline surge as she shifted her thoughts from the waiting and onto the mission ahead.

As they exited the back of the ship, they couldn’t see the station yet. She wondered what kind of state it was going to be in. What were they going to find there? The Star Chaser had done its best, but the results that weren’t ambiguous were instead disheartening. Was everyone dead? And if so, for how long? What could kill a fully staffed station without anyone else knowing about it until now?

The shuttles spun around the Star Chaser and the station came into view. There was no obvious sign of damage from the outside, but it was also...dark. That was the first word that came to Andy’s mind as she examined every part that she could see. There were no blinking lights on the exterior; no lights showing through the viewports from inside.

“What the hell happened?” she asked quietly, mostly to herself.

“I haven’t the foggiest idea,” the pilot replied anyway. “Get ready to find out, though, because we’re about to dock.”

There was a sinking feeling in Andy’s stomach at the idea of connecting their ship to the eerily dark space station and going on board, but she knew it was their job. They were here to find out what happened and see if there was anyone who needed their help. Something told her that there wasn’t, but they had to go on board to find out for sure.

“Alright, folks, get ready for the freak show,” she called back, not letting any of her doubts enter her voice as she became the sergeant her team needed.

Every shuttle spaced out, spinning slowly and backing up to an individual port. Zenith was something of a hub, so there were plenty of places for ship-to-station shuttles to park and let people disembark. Each pilot knew what they were doing and the process went smoothly.

“The ship’s automated systems aren’t engaging, so we’re going to have to complete the lock cycle ourselves,” the pilot said. Andy balked at the extra time it would take. She knew the craft would remain stationary while they were docking, though, so she unfastened her safety restraints.

As soon as they heard the click of hers releasing, the others unfastened themselves and got to their feet. She squeezed past her squad to get to the rear hatch and ordered an equipment check. Everything checked out once and then it checked out again as they waited tensely for the pilot to give them the green light.

Eventually, he called out to them. “Cycle is complete. Lock initiated. Another moment more and you’ll all get just what you’ve been wishing for.”

Andy wasn’t so sure about that, but she nodded, not looking away from the shuttle hatch.

She rolled her shoulder once and then turned on the light on the top of her pulse rifle. Four other lights popped on just before the hatch system hissed and the door opened. Beyond the dark metal frame was...more darkness. Andy led the way off the shuttle, keeping her rifle up.

She advanced slowly, swinging her light from side to side to check for danger. There was nothing. Inside the darkness, there was only silence. They moved further down the docking ramp until they neared the end when Andy’s light lifted and hit the wall of the station corridor just in front of them.

All five paused.

“Well, that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence,” Dan quipped in a low, uneasy voice.

Illuminated in the giant circle of Andy’s rifle light was a dark, bloody handprint.

Chapter 2

No one moved for several heartbeats. Andy took a deep breath and shoved down her apprehension. There was no time for that now. She moved forward and led her team into the corridor, lights swinging one way and then the other.

“I’m not feeling anything,” Roxanna reported, her voice low.

“Well, you’re just not trying hard enough, clearly,” Dan retorted, although his voice didn’t quite have its usual sarcastic edge.

Corporal Roxanna made an annoyed sound low in her throat. It wasn’t the Selerid’s real name, but her real name wasn’t pronounceable by the human tongue. Roxanna was close, though, so she adopted the name. Her empathic abilities were useful when exploring… until they found nothing. That just made the situation creepier.

“Let us know the moment that changes, Roxanna,” Andy said, ignoring Dan.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Roxanna replied immediately. Andy thought she could hear a tremor in the woman’s voice.

There was no indication that one direction would be better than another, so Andy chose at random and led them to the right. They entered a long hallway with no doors. Viewports looked out into the emptiness of space. Andy wondered how the life support and gravity were working but the lights weren’t, but that was someone else’s problem.

They continued in silence until they reached another intersection. All Andy could hear was the low, steady breathing of her squad. She looked both directions. Everything was still dark…and silent.

Andy jerked her head to the left, indicating that they would continue in that direction. It would lead them deeper into the station, which was more likely to lead them to some sort of clue; some sort of anything.

This corridor, unlike the last, had doors.

Andy paused at the first door they came to. The others covered her while she tried opening the door using the panel. As expected, the door didn’t open. She stepped back and nodded Dan forward. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and pulled a micro press out of his vest pocket and pressed it to the seam of the door.

He moved back and took up his rifle, returning to his place with the rest of the group as the micro press slowly pushed the door open then dropped to the floor with a thud that echoed down the empty corridor.

The squad cautiously stepped into what appeared to be a large storage room. Shelves lined the walls on either side. The wall opposite the door was now empty, the shelving unit that used to be there had been ripped from the wall. The items that had been stored there were all over the floor, some in neat piles and others scattered haphazardly.

Andy noted a big dent in the shelf. Given the material, it would have taken a a lot of force to do that. She didn’t know what would have caused it but was sure she didn’t want to come across whatever it was unaware.

Lance Corporal Anallin, the other non-human member of her squad, a Hanaran and thus by-species without gender, was standing on the other side of the shelf. Its pale blue, iris-less eyes were making that clicking sound they made when focusing intensely or disconcerted. “There are scorch marks on the floor. I think a laser pistol or pulse rifle was fired. I would need to scan to be sure.” Click. Click. Click. Definitely agitated. “And there are scratch marks on the lower portion of the wall. They are short. Deep there and lighter there, like something was dragged from this room.”

Click. Click.

“I guess they...” Dan began, then hesitated. There was a long moment before he forced a breathless laugh. “Well. I guess they didn’t find the storage room accommodations to be to their liking, eh? Spacious and all, but not very good ambience.” The sound of his swallowing was almost audible in the silence. “Or, well, maybe they just didn’t pay the bill.”

“We’ll go with that,” Andy said without much humor, despite the attempt, as she glanced back at him before moving to the still-upright shelves. She reviewed the materials on them, but nothing seemed out of place there. “I don’t see anything that tells me what happened here. Let’s scan it.”

Anallin slung down its rifle and pulled a scanner from its thigh holster. A quiet whirring noise filled the silence as the squad continued to search. Even when they had looked at everything that could be looked at with the naked eye, they kept looking because to stop would be to allow too much time for thought.

“The scorch marks are from a laser pistol,” Anallin finally declared. “I doubt whoever was in here was a soldier. Perhaps personnel from one of the other station departments or a civilian.”

“Can you run a deep scan on those scratches and see if there is any biological matter left behind? It could help identify who it was,” Andy said.

“I will see,” Anallin replied, kneeling down to run the scanner over the marks in slow sweeps.

“This is just weird, Sergeant,” Dan said a few moments later, uncharacteristically sedate.

“It is, but we didn’t sign up for the ESS Marines to look at normal things now did we?” Andy replied. He didn’t reply right away. “Did we, Thomas?” she repeated, her voice rising slightly although not too much. They couldn’t be sure who or what was nearby and she wasn’t going to draw any more attention to them than they already had.

“No, Sergeant,” he finally replied, although he didn’t meet her gaze.

She let it go at that because she knew this was a situation unlike other ones they had been in, particularly as a team. She couldn’t remember anything quite like this before, but space was a big place and who knew what you could find?

Before she had a chance to consider saying anything else, Anallin chimed in again. “There is a trace of bio-matter. My scanner isn’t equipped to analyze it, but I can collect a sample for the science department to review.”

“Good,” Andy said with a nod. “Go ahead and do that. We’ll take samples of anything else we find along the way, and then let the science geeks sort it out.”

A few moments later, Anallin gave a nod to Andy that it was finished. She returned the gesture and moved back to the door into the corridor. “Let’s keep moving.”

She had no idea what they’d find there, but frankly, she wasn’t going to place any bets that it would be a happy thing.

Chapter 3

The sinking feeling that had opened in Andy’s gut was turning into a gaping maw of ‘what in the stars is going on here?’ Their lights swung from one wall to the other, moving in sequence to light up most of the corridor ahead as they left the storage room and moved further down the hall.

It was another long stretch without any door on either side, but now they were also without any viewports. Even though the vastness of space and spattering of stars didn’t do much to provide light, there was some comfort in being able to see them. A space station could be particularly claustrophobic in the inner sanctum, both without sight of the stars and the lack of movement beneath the deck plates.

Andy wasn’t going to let it get to her. She was there because they had a job to do, and she was going to make sure they did it.

They came to another junction and she brought them to a halt. She looked both directions, seeing as far as her light let her. She saw more doors to the left so she ordered them to continue that way.

At the next door, Andy nodded at Dan to open this door like he had the last.

While waiting for that, Andy looked at the fifth member of her five-man squad: Private, First Class Jade Martin, the third human on the team. It was a quick look, at first, but then she noticed how Jade kept snapping her head from side to side, and it didn’t look like she was just keeping an eye on their surroundings. Her eyes never focused on either side of the hallway; they looked like they were looking at things that...weren’t there?

“Martin,” Andy called in a low voice just as the micro jack completed its job and dropped the floor with a thud. Jade’s head snapped in her direction, and Andy could see that her eyes were dilated and she was breathing harder than any exertion on their part could explain. She frowned slightly. “What is it?”

“Nothing, Sergeant,” Jade said with a short shake of her head.

Andy wasn’t convinced, but the door was open to another room that needed to be searched. She decided not to push the issue...for the moment.

The squad turned into the room and searched it the same way they had the last one. The flashlight beams were swinging from side to side when there was a slight hum and the lights blinked twice before finally coming on. The three humans and Roxanna blinked against the sudden light, while Anallin’s eyes just clicked.

“It looks like alpha squad found engineering,” Andy commented. “Leave your lights on, though, just in case it doesn’t last.” She didn’t trust anything about the station right then and didn’t want to get caught in the dark, even for a minute.

She expected some sort of comment from Dan about alpha squad, jesting about their ability to find things, but it didn’t come. It was a wide open door and she knew it was the type of thing he’d roll right into, but he didn’t say anything. She glanced at him, better able to see him now in the full lights of the room. He wasn’t looking in her direction, though, and it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t about to say anything. The station was really getting under everyone’s skin in a way Andy hadn’t seen before.

What was it about this place, about what had happened here, that had them like this? She knew she wasn’t feeling particularly comfortable, but they seemed beyond that.

With the lights on now, however, it would be easier to search the rooms. Andy turned and took a quick visual survey of this one, finding that it was much larger than the previous one. The room extended around a corner into an apparent ‘L’ shape, which they would need to clear next.

“Everyone,” she said in a low voice, nodding to the corner.

“There’s nothing alive there,” Roxanna said in an equally low voice. “I...” She paused and her purple eyes were intense while her pale purple skin seemed to turn pearlescent and shimmer. “There may be bodies.”

“Keep alert, folks,” Andy said, moving them forward. Corpses were never things that she wanted to find, but to find anything would be promising. She had found that you could learn a lot from a dead body and she desperately needed to know more.

Andy moved along the visible wall, sliding around the corner with her gun up. But as she came around the wall, she didn’t see any obvious enemies. What she did see was a blockade of furniture. It looked just like it had in the other room, although this seemed larger and more fortified than the other one had been.

Holding up her hand, she brought the group to a halt. Aside from their own breathing, there was no sound. Nothing moved, just the flickering of the artificial light. She motioned for them to move forward again and the group split around the wall of furniture.

“Sergeant,” Roxanna said, coming around the right-hand side and stopping. “Bodies.”

Andy’s trip around the left took longer because of the vague J-shape to the blockade, but then she saw them.

“Anallin, scan them,” she said, lowering her weapon slightly to take a better visual inspection.

There were three. They all appeared to be human and had clearly been dead longer than a couple of days. Sitting on the floor and leaning back against the wall, two of them had long rifles in hand. Andy didn’t see any burn marks on the blockade or walls which suggested that the weapons had not been discharged.

The bodies seemed intact, with no sign of blood or injury, but they were sunken in and she couldn’t tell if it was an effect of how long they had been here or something else. Andy really needed more information.

There was a bag open on the floor beside the body furthest from her. “Roxanna,” Andy said across the space between them, “would you see what’s in that bag?”

The Selerid woman nodded and shouldered her rifle, kneeling next to the bag. She moved cautiously as she looked inside. After a moment of digging around, she said, “It’s a medical bag, Sergeant. Pretty basic, and not very organized. If I had to guess, I would say it was something thrown together rather than a standard medical complement.”

Andy nodded, not feeling at all surprised by this theory. She was aware that it was all just hypothetical, but it was the best guess they could make based off the information at hand. She hoped that Anallin would have more as she turned toward the Hanaran.

“One died of dehydration,” Anallin reported. “The other two died of an overdose of Atenolol. It's a medical compound normally administered to calm a rapid heart rate, but at overdose levels, it can kill you.” The Hanaran nodded at the device in the middle corpse’s hand. “I would presume that it was self-administered.”

Andy thought that would’ve been obvious, since how else would it have happened with the bodies like this? The one that died of dehydration, though... How long had they been in here? If she had to guess, it looked like they had holed up here to protect themselves from something, but from what?

Chapter 4

While the rest of the team did a full visual and scanner investigation of the room, Andy moved away and pressed the button on the earpiece around and in her left ear. “Sergeant Dolan to alpha team lead,” she called. “Major Carson, come in.” She waited a few moments, but there was no response. Frowning, she gave it a few moments more before she repeated her hail.

Finally, his voice filled her ear. “Yes. Sergeant. Report.”

It was her turn to hesitate, wondering if there was something different about his tone.

“Yes, sir,” she finally replied. “We have worked our way through two rooms. In the second room, we found three bodies.”

“We, uh, yes. We found a couple of bodies too. It’s...it’s not pretty.” His voice almost seemed to shake at points, which was something she had never heard from him before. In fact, she almost didn’t recognize the uncertain voice, it was so foreign coming from her detachment commander. “I...I don’t really know what to make of it.”

“What did alpha team find, sir?” Andy asked carefully, turning her back on her team so they couldn’t hear her or the worry creeping into her tone.

“It’s, uh,” he stammered. She thought she heard some kind of shifting in the background, like someone was moving boxes or something. “I don’t really know if that’s something I want to talk about, Andy.” Her eyes widened at the use of not just her first name but her nickname, over a channel, while on a mission. “I, yeah, that’s not something anyone should talk about.”

“The bodies we found here died of apparent dehydration and self-inflicted drug overdose,” she said, determining that she still needed to report on what she had found and hoping maybe to bring him back into focus.

“These folks didn’t die of anything so peaceful.” It was the first thing he’d said without stammering, which made it all the more chilling. She didn’t say anything right away, waiting to see if anything more was forthcoming.

Nothing was.

“Do you want us to do anything special here?” she asked cautiously.

“No... No, uh, just, you know, finish looking over the room and then mark it off for the forensic medical team to check out after we’ve cleared the station.” She could hear something clicking, like boot heels while a person is pacing.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Dolan out.” She let go of the open-channel button.

If she had been hoping for some kind of reassurance from him, that certainly hadn’t happened. She wondered if her unease was something she should follow up on, but what would she do? Major Carson was the next in her chain of command and if she was that worried, then she had to go over him to the ship’s ESS crew—to the first officer and captain. To do that was a quagmire and only for desperation measures...

Was this enough? Carson certainly hadn’t sounded like himself, he had sounded distracted and concerned, but so was everyone, it seemed. The situation was unnerving and she had no reason to believe that there was anything more than that. She had no reason to suspect there was any dereliction of duty that deserved to be chased down.

No. For now, she would keep her concerns to herself.

“Sergeant,” Anallin said, appearing suddenly behind Andy, eyes clicking more frequently than usual. “I have completed full scans of the three bodies and recorded their DNA profiles, as well as taken samples of each and stored them for transport back to the Star Chaser. I would imagine that the science department can do a better job analyzing it than we can right now.”

“Yes, I would imagine so,” Andy agreed with a slow nod.

Hanarans were a notoriously difficult species to read, emotionally speaking. It wasn’t that they didn’t have emotions or particularly tried to keep them to themselves, but all the cues that humans used to recognize them were absent in the Hanaran species—vocal tone and expression being all but absent.

Andy had been working with Anallin long enough now to be able to read some Hanaran-specific cues, however. and She searched its face and body language now to try to read it and understand what she could. The increased frequency of the clicking noises was one thing and easily noticed. That spoke to a heightened emotional state, as did the excess words and stating of the obvious.

Anallin was just as unnerved as everyone else, if she had to guess. A part of Andy wanted to just pack up and get back to the ship, but she knew they had a mission and they had to carry it out. She wasn’t going to abandon it, even if that part of her brain was getting bigger and louder with each passing moment—not so much because she was feeling it, but because she saw what it was doing to everyone else.

“Good work,” she said simply but sincerely. “It will be very important for us to know everything we can about these people.”

The lance corporal nodded once, but the clicking sound decreased in frequency for a few moments before the Hanaran turned away and returned to the bodies. Andy moved back that way as well and saw Dan leaning against the wall, white knuckles around his rifle, while Jade was still looking around in quick glances. It looked like she was listening to something, but to what? Andy didn’t hear anything aside from them, but maybe it was the clicking.

“Did we find anything else?” she asked as she rejoined them.

“What did the major have to say?” Dan asked in an uncharacteristically flat voice, not answering her question as he asked his own.

She looked at him for a long moment. “Did we find anything else, Thomas?” she repeated her question, speaking a little more slowly and enunciating each word a little more. Okay, so they were all disconcerted, but that was no reason to forget themselves entirely. She’d give them some slack, but they had a job to do.

His brows drew together with a small frown in a way she wasn’t used to, but he didn’t say anything further. Instead, he straightened up slightly. “No, Sergeant,” he said soberly. “Anallin has continued to examine the bodies, while Roxanna has tried to see if her empathic abilities could pick up on anything around us. She hasn’t. The room was obviously built as a barricade against something, but there are no signs of an attack in this room. Nothing like what we found in the last room, although one...” He blinked, and the frowning expression turned more uncertain. “I mean, these folks were walling themselves up against someone or something, and it looked like whoever was in the other room did too—just not as well. I would guess that whatever they were scared of was what found the people in that first room and, literally, dragged them out.”

Andy watched his shoulders hitch up suddenly. If she had to guess, he was suppressing a shudder, and she couldn’t blame him.

“It’s all right, Thomas,” she said in a slightly less commanding tone than what she had used just a couple of minutes ago. “We’ll find out what happened here and keep our eyes open so nothing happens to us.”

He stared at her for a long moment before nodding shakily. “Yes, Sergeant,” he said.

In other circumstances, she may have been inclined to tell them about her conversation with the major, but she didn’t think it would serve any purpose to let them know they weren’t the only ones freaking out.

“Alright, pack it up,” she ordered. “If you have something to finish, then finish it. We have to get back on the move so we can check out the rest of these rooms. Keep your eyes open. We don’t know what else we’ll find.”

Chapter 5

Anallin finished the last of the scans and then packed up the equipment. After that, they placed a marker that would lead the forensic team to the bodies. They didn’t have the equipment to put up a proper quarantine, so this would have to do. Once that was set, they gathered themselves together and then headed back into the corridor.

Andy struggled to keep her mind on everything around them, thinking back to how unnerving that call with Carson had been. What had he found that had him so unsettled? What they had found had definitely been unsettling, but still, it was Carson. Their leader. He wasn’t supposed to give in to the sort of things that they did.

He had to lead them, but how could he when he could barely keep himself together?

Overhead, the light panels flashed once, then twice. The lights stayed on after that, but now a strange buzzing followed, coming and going without any pattern or regularity. There was something about that which set already frayed nerves on edge, but she forced herself to drown it out and keep her grip secure on her pulse rifle as they rounded another corner.

As they swung around, Andy heard a new strange noise. It took a moment for her to recognize what it was and when she did, she spun around to look behind her. The sound was the increasingly ragged breathing of Jade hyperventilating. The sergeant just stared at her for a moment. Andy seemed to be the only one keeping it together at the moment.

Talking didn’t seem to be helping so Andy chose a sharper tactic.

“Martin!” Andy snapped, her voice half-hissing. “You need to pull yourself together this instant, Private. We are on a mission and we have a job to do, Marine! Haul it in!” She kept her voice low and tight, but forceful. She needed her squad to keep themselves together and she did get Jade’s attention, but the woman’s eyes remained wide and her breathing didn’t seem to get that much more even, although it was a little quieter.

Andy snorted with frustration. What was it going to take?

The lights flickered again and Andy sighed.

“Keep it moving,” she finally said, and the five of them started down the corridor again to the discordant cadence of the strange buzzing.

The section of the corridor they were in didn’t have any other rooms, so they took another turn and headed deeper into the station. This one was long, and the light panels at the far end weren’t working, neither did their lights reach that far. Andy wondered what was down in the darkness, but she didn’t let it stop them and she kept her team moving forward.

“Sergeant,” Roxanna said abruptly, her voice harsh against the silence. “I...”

After a moment, Andy prompted, “What is it, Corporal?”

Another long moment, and then Roxanna said, “I think I may sense people. Not a lot of them, but I can feel something.”

“Something? Maybe?” Andy repeated tightly. She wasn’t used to the Selerid woman being so...unclear. Usually she was at least sure whether she was sensing people or not. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” the other admitted with a sigh. “It’s like there’s some kind of fog around my senses and I can’t feel anything clearly. I can’t recall a time I felt this way before, except perhaps when I had that case of Ferillin Virus. I know I don’t have it now, so I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“You...you can’t tell?” Dan asked, his voice shaking audibly.

Roxanna inhaled slowly. “No. No, I can’t. I can sense something, but I can’t tell as much as I usually can.”

He laughed. The sound was thin and high. “Well, that’s just great! Great!” he exclaimed, his voice rising to a pitch that made Andy almost wince. It was made worse by the fact everything else was so quiet.

“Thomas!” she snapped. “Bring it back in.”

“No!” he replied shrilly.

Andy opened her mouth to say something else, but she didn’t have the chance. Dan turned around and took off. For a moment, all she could do was stare after him. He had never done anything like that before, although she had never seen him so outright afraid before either. It was almost too hard to process; it was so out of the ordinary.

What is wrong with my team?

She looked at the other three. None of them looked like they were doing very well, but at least they weren’t shrieking or running away. She would have to take what small victories she could get while they were there.

No one left behind...

“We’ll find the ‘something’ later. For now, we have to go get his lunatic self and drag him back. I don’t know what’s going on, but we can’t abandon him in this station,” Andy said. “Anallin, locate his tracker.”

Every uniform had an embedded tracking device that could be pulled up on their handheld scanners, although Andy didn’t think it was meant to be used when a marine ran away.

She knew that Anallin would have to do it while on the run because she didn’t want to waste any more time. She nodded for the others to follow her and she started in the direction Dan had gone, although at a far more cautious pace. As she moved, she touched the comm-piece in her ear. She had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t do her much good, but she knew she had to call it in.

“I have it,” she heard Anallin say just before she spoke.

“Dolan to Carson,” Andy said, nodding for Anallin to take point beside her and lead the way.

There was no reply.

“Dolan to Carson,” she repeated, this time more emphatically, just in case the extra urgency in her voice would make a piece of equipment work better.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t. There was still no reply.

That sinking pit in her stomach opened up again and she swallowed back a sigh and a couple of creative curses she hadn’t known existed until she’d enlisted.

“Dolan to Carson, alpha squad lead, come in,” she said, even more urgently than the time before, trying to not let her feelings get the better of her while they moved back down the corridor in the direction they had come.

“Sergeant?” Jade asked timidly.

Andy grunted. “They’re not replying.”

Chapter 6

“He got a lot further than I would’ve expected in that amount of time,” Anallin commented, although it sounded more irritated than concerned. Andy recognized that as unusual, but didn’t have time to think it through.

They were entering a part of the station they hadn’t explored yet. Andy pressed her comm-piece again, her dark brows knitting as she tried to split her attention between the call and the searching. “Dolan to Nalir’a, beta squad lead,” she called, hoping for better luck with this call than the last, although the concern from the first wasn’t gone at all.

When she didn’t get a reply, she gritted her teeth and exhaled forcefully.

“Dolan to Nalir’a,” she tried again.

This time there was a beeping sound to accompany the buzzing of the lights and the clicking from Anallin that had become their constant companions.

“He’s close,” Roxanna said from behind her just as someone shouted over the now open communication line.

Andy’s head jerked almost uncontrollably in an instinctive movement to get away from the source of the sudden, loud sound. Since the sound was coming from a device right inside her ear, she rationally knew that it would do no good but she couldn’t help it. Forcing herself to focus again, she pressed the comm and listened to the yelling.

She tried to disseminate what it was that she was hearing, but there were multiple people shouting at once. Part of her wanted to shout right back, but it was still quiet in the hall where they walked and instinct said not to attract whatever it was that Roxanna had sensed earlier.

Andy focused on the sounds in her earpiece and was able to detect some sort of growling sound and then her fellows in beta squad shouting back. Guns started blazing. Some kind of firefight? But with what?

No one was talking to her. She needed to get to them, but she needed to take care of her squad first.

“Here,” Anallin and Roxanna said in chorus, tinges of annoyance and fear mingled together in the word.

Andy had to forget about beta team now and focus on her own people. Until she had her own situation under control and was able to talk to the other teams, she was going to have to accept the fact that she was, for all intents and purposes, on her own now.

They came around a curve and found Dan huddled in a corner with his rifle on the floor and his hands over his head. It was odd to see a man of his size and age curled up on the floor like a child, rocking back and forth. He was making sounds and some of them seemed to be words, but it wasn’t anything that Andy could make out. The lights flickered again and as if on cue, he shouted at the ceiling.

“Watch my back,” Andy ordered. She slung her rifle over her shoulder and held her hands up, unsure of what was going on in Dan’s mind. She wanted to seem as non-threatening as possible, just in case.

She really didn’t feel like being attacked by her own man today. The day was going badly enough as it was, wasn’t it?

Andy approached him as a friend, not as his squad leader. “Dan,” she said, keeping her voice level, even as she heard that rough breathing behind her that said Jade was on the verge of hyperventilating again. “Dan, it’s me. It’s Andy.” They had been serving together for a couple of years now, and she hoped he would remember that, amid whatever was going on in his head. “You know what I was thinking about the other day? Do you remember that time we docked at Starbase One-Ten and found that terrible dive bar down in the lower levels?”

Pausing, she studied him to see if anything she said was getting through. He didn’t say anything, nor did he look at her, but the rocking seemed to be a little less...intense, so she was going to call that a good sign.

“You hit on that Xattallian woman with the red beads in her hair until you realized that the beads were actually bugs?” Even in this dire a situation, the memory still made her smile a little. “I thought you were going to break your leg you tried to get away from her so fast.”

Her words seemed to calm him so she kept taking slow steps closer and closer. Every time she put one foot down, she’d pause and wait to see if there was any adverse reaction. Her training in de-escalation tactics was paying off, although she’d never expected to have to use it on a member of her own squad.

“Or how about the last time we were on Earth? You took me to meet your mother and she spent half of the meal not willing to believe that you and I weren’t dating? Although once I tasted her cooking, I was almost willing to let her keep believing it so she’d feed me that well,” Andy went on. She would have said that one could never go wrong bringing up mom, but she knew from her own experience that that wasn’t true. At least, it wouldn’t be as successful a tactic with herself, but she knew it had a better shot with Dan.

She remembered his mother better than she remembered her own. The woman was almost as broad as her son, and one might say she was overbearing, but it was all with care. Andy probably gained five pounds on that one night visit, but she certainly hadn’t been complaining. Mrs. Thomas was an amazing cook, and had even sent Andy and Dan back to the ship with a storage-dried container of meals.

Thinking of Dan’s mother was enough to soothe her, hopefully it would him too.

“I also remember when we went rock climbing and there was that one point, where you had to trust me to hold you up?” Now she was almost to him. She was doing her best to drown out Jade’s heavy breathing, Anallin’s clicking, and Roxanna’s quiet murmuring. She just had to trust that they would watch her back, like she was about to try to get Dan to trust her. “You weren’t sure if I could, given that I’m smaller than you.” She kneeled slowly before him, her dark eyes studying him and trying to catch his eye. “But you trusted me, and it was all fine in the end.”

He stopped rocking and the quiet stream of gibberish ceased, for the moment at least, but his arms were still over his head so she couldn’t see his face. She felt like if she could just get him to look at her, then she could get through to him. Not that she understood why she was so certain of that, but she was.

Andy considered trying to reach out and touch him, but was far less certain about that idea. She didn’t want to undo whatever calm she had brought him by doing something rash.

“Dan,” she went on soothingly, “you trusted me then and you can trust me now. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I know that we are going to figure out what’s going on and get out of here. I can’t do that without you, though, so I need you to try to pull yourself back together and come with the rest of the team.”

After a moment that probably wasn’t more than a heartbeat or two but felt like it might as well have been a year, she watched his arms slowly begin to shift away from his head...

Then, Roxanna screamed.

Chapter 7

The sound was nearly eardrum-piercing, and that was not figurative. The Selerid’s voice reached an inhuman pitch, but was fortunately short-lived.

Andy spun around, forgetting Dan for an instant as she had clutched her hands over her ears against the auditory intrusion. Her dark eyes stared at Roxanna for an instant, but Roxanna wasn’t looking at her. She was looking down the corridor that they hadn’t explored yet.

“Not...right...” Roxanna gasped, shaking her head almost violently. Her skin suddenly swirled with purple and pearl white. “Coming... They’re...”

“Not right, I got that,” Andy said, lowering her hands.

Now Roxanna focused on her, and her skin only swirled harder. Andy was almost motion sick from looking at it. “They’re coming...” she managed to say before she started speaking so fast that her translator couldn’t keep up and there was simply a steady stream of the Selerid tongue with barely a single breath. If there were separate words, Andy could never have guessed what they were.

“Get it together!” Andy snapped, to no avail. If there were enemies incoming, she couldn’t be dealing with this. She surged forward and gave a short shove against Roxanna’s shoulders, driving her back a step. It had the desired effect, however, and the rolling stream of sounds came to a stop with a quiet gasp as Roxanna clamped her lips shut.

Andy inhaled through her teeth and turned to see that Dan had gone back to exactly how he’d been when they first found him. She let out a frustrated grunt and turned to Anallin, who was watching Dan with an expression she couldn’t read. Of course, picking up on anything was impressive with a Hanaran, but she was picking up on something and didn’t know what it was because she hadn’t seen it from it before.

“Anallin,” she said, trying to snap the Hanaran out of the moment. “Be prepared to pick him up if we have to. I don’t think we’re going to get him out of here under his own power.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Anallin replied in a flat voice.

Andy had doubts she could count on her orders being followed. There wasn’t time to worry about that. She just had to trust that her directives were clear. “Stay near him in case it comes to that.”

There was nothing else she could do so she turned back to Roxanna, who was thankfully still quiet. “Corporal,” she said sternly, “is that the direction they’re coming from?” She pointed down the corridor.

The Selerid nodded in a jerky sort of way, but it was enough.

“Weapons up, keep your eyes down that way but your ears behind us,” she ordered. “I don’t want to be snuck up on while focusing on this way. Don’t let yourself get boxed into that corner.” With Dan pressing himself into the aforementioned corner, of course, she worried that they wouldn’t have much of a choice without simply abandoning him, which she wasn’t going to do.

They moved into formation, sort of, to wait for whatever was coming down the corridor.

They waited...

With Roxanna’s ability, she couldn’t always tell distances and sometimes sensed people further out and sometimes closer. There was no way to know for sure, and Andy for a moment even wondered if Roxanna’s empathic senses had been corrupted by whatever was driving everyone on this station insane.

And they waited... Andy began wondering if there really was someone, or something, coming, but wouldn’t let them bring their guns down. She believed that what Roxanna had sensed was real. It was just further away than they expected.

Eventually a new sound joined Jade’s shallow breathing, Anallin’s clicking, and Dan’s murmuring. It was a combination of heavy thuds, like indelicate footfalls. It started quiet, coming from just beyond the curve where even the light couldn’t show what was coming, and then grew steadily louder. As it did, other sounds mingled with it—more loud, heavy breathing and dull mumbling.

Andy kept herself steady, body tense with readiness but loose enough to move as she needed to. “Steady,” she told the others, wanting to remind them that she was there and who they were.

Finally, the source of the sound came around the curve and into the flickering light. She was able to count three of them, humanoid. They did not run but they did not move slowly either, their pace steady as they came on. All of them seemed to be in one piece, but with each step closer, Andy could make out more detail.

All three of them had blood on them, in various places. Some even had it on their face, although she wasn’t sure she could pick out any obvious sign of injury. They all moved forward under their own power and all body parts seemed to be in place. Did that mean that the blood wasn’t their own?

“Hold your fire,” she ordered. The three were moving toward them, but they hadn’t made any aggressive moves...yet. They simply were there, walking toward her squad, looking—in Roxanna’s words—“not right.”

After a few more moments of examining the closest of them, she realized that beneath the uncertainty that hung around them like a fog and the blood, they were wearing uniforms. Once she made this connection, the dark blue and the gold patch over the left side of the chest jumped out at her in recognition. The uniforms were from Starbase Zenith.

Of course they were. She didn’t know why that surprised her, but it did. Had she thought them some unknown intruder that just happened to be wandering through the halls?

The group obviously saw them, moving straight for them at their unwavering pace.

“Halt!” Andy called, wanting to give one chance for them to stop on their own. They hadn’t chosen to do so at the sight of four armed marines with guns trained on them, but she had to try once more. Maybe if they could get through to them and get them to stop, they would have a shot at finding out what had happened here. These people were witnesses to the obvious decline of the station. She had to try.

They just kept coming.

“I’m not going to tell you again,” Andy said, knowing that this was their last chance. She would give them one more moment, but any more than that would put her and her team at risk and she wasn’t going to do that any more than she already had. This could only go so far. “I need you to stop right where you are. If you don’t, we will open fire. I don’t want to have to do that, folks, so I’ll say again, halt!”

They did not stop. Andy was disappointed, but not surprised. Suddenly, one of them surged ahead and came straight at them with a burst of speed that far exceeded what they had been moving at before.

No more warnings. “Fire,” Andy ordered.

Chapter 8

Andy’s aim was true. The pulses from the other three weapons were slightly more haphazard. In the part of her mind beyond the task at hand, Andy knew that her people were better trained than that. She had been on the firing range with them many a time and their focus and aim were true.

They were falling apart bit by bit. However, despite this, the field of fire was enough to cover all the marks.

It was only a few moments before all three bodies were on the ground with faint traces of smoke rising from where each one had been hit. “Hold,” Andy ordered and the firing stopped, but no one lowered a rifle. At least they remembered that much, she thought cynically. They stood in silence for several moments, waiting to make sure that the three ahead of them wouldn’t somehow rise again.

After that amount of weapons fire, it was nearly impossible that anyone could, but Andy wasn’t going to take any chances at this point.

However, none of the three moved. They were all just piles upon the deck plates, the lights still flickering and buzzing as if in agreement—or protest—over what had just happened. She took a long breath and then nodded to herself. “Weapons down,” she ordered, lowering hers last among the four of them. “Move in slowly. I want as complete a scan as we can get. I want to know what the hell is going on here.”

Anallin made a reply that Andy would’ve called a grunt. She hadn’t thought Hanalan vocal chords even capable of making a sound like that. Andy let the lack of protocol slide as Anallin slung her weapon over her shoulder and approached the bodies to scan them.

She noted how slowly the Lance Corporal approached the bodies, but was glad her orders were still being followed, mostly.

Anallin shuffled forward until the bodies were in range and began the scan. Andy watched for a moment and then turned to look at the rest of her team. Jade was pressed back against the wall, her eyes still wide and pupils dilated. There wasn’t much of their original green color left, or so it seemed to Andy. Roxanna seemed calmer than she had been earlier, at least, now that the “not right” minds were quieted.

Andy glanced back at Dan and saw there was no change in his status, so she focused on Roxanna first.

“Can you tell me anything about what you felt from them?” she asked, hoping that the quieter empathic atmosphere would help the other woman focus better and answer the question, rather than launching into another stream of incoherent Selerid.

“I...don’t know there’s much,” Roxanna replied, at least confirming Andy’s hope for a start. She still didn’t sound like herself, but it was better than she’d been before. “I know ‘not right’ is not...It’s not much to go on, Sergeant, but I don’t know how else to describe what I felt. I have felt many minds from many races, and have felt insanity even, but this felt like something beyond that.” She paused, blinking at Andy. Her skin calmed again. “Or rather it was like madness, or madness that I have felt before, but something far beyond that. I...I don’t know how else to say it. It just... It was... I...” She stammered for a few moments before looking away and stopping.

Madness? Was that indicative of what had happened to the entire station? If so, how? Could it have been some sort of virus? But wouldn’t the station’s environmental systems have detected that and filtered it out before it got to absolutely everyone on board?

“Thank you, Corporal,” Andy said quietly. She wanted to ask more, but figured she already learned all she was going to.

She glanced back at Anallin, who was still kneeling to scan but had moved onto another body. Although Andy knew they needed to move on, she wanted all the information they could get from the bodies. Hopefully, one of them would have some kind of clue as to what was going on.

Leaving Anallin to it, Andy moved back to Dan’s side. She didn’t have the same time to pussyfoot around as she had before. With her rifle lowered to her side, she kneeled beside him again. It was clear that he wasn’t going to do anything to her, she determined, so she was just going to have to force the issue.

“Dan,” she said, still angling for the ‘friend’ approach, “we don’t have time for this. It is all going to hell and we can’t sit here trying to talk ourselves off ledges. We have to get up on our feet and move.” She put her hand on his shoulder. His whole body jerked at the touch, but he didn’t move much otherwise or speak to her directly or get up. “Well, Thomas, are you a marine or aren’t you?” she demanded, making her voice harsher. “Or aren’t you?!”

Now he lifted his head just enough for his wild eyes to meet hers, and she was actually a little nervous for just a moment. She was not going to give into that feeling, however, and she steeled herself against it.

She would not give in. If not for herself, then for her team. She owed it to them to see them back out of this mental melee.

“All is ashes,” he whispered cryptically and then turned his face from her again.

Andy suppressed a shiver and was about to try to draw more out of him when she heard Anallin calling her. For the moment, she had to forego this task and see what the Hanaran had found. She hoped the scans had been fruitful.

“I have no idea, Sergeant,” Anallin said as Andy approached, eyes clicking rapidly now. “I ran every scan I am capable of, focusing on overall physiology, and more specifically, neurological, looking for any sign or hint at what might have caused them to become like this. I sought out all abnormalities that I am aware of.”

“And?” Andy prompted after the pause went on too long.

“Nothing.” The delivery was flat, but Andy thought she sensed a hint of frustration in Anallin’s voice. Or maybe she was projecting, because that answer certainly frustrated her.

“What do you mean ‘nothing’?” she asked, barely suppressing most of her aggravation. “That wasn’t normal, even Roxanna could sense that, so how could you not find anything to explain it?”

“If I had the answer to that, Sergeant, I would tell you,” Anallin said. “I am not saying that there are not abnormalities, there does not exist a human without them, but there are none that would explain what we saw here.”

Andy took a deep breath. She wanted to scream, but she would not let her team see her break down. They were all breaking down on their own, so she couldn’t let her own weakness show through. That wasn’t who she was. That wasn’t being a marine.

Collecting herself, she nodded once. “Log the scans and we’ll have medical look at them once we’re back on the ship.”

Anallin nodded and turned away. Andy noted the lack of proper acknowledgement yet again, but decided that now wasn’t the time to make an issue of that. There were, as one might say, bigger fish to fry. Or maybe they were the fish being fried.

Suddenly, her earpiece exploded with communication bursts. She winced and turned her head sharply, but there was no escaping the sound.

“Fire! Fire!”

“Dear gods, what are they doing?”

“What am I supposed to do?!”

“Halt!”

“Fire at will!”

“No! No! No! Stop there!”

The panic in every voice coming across the communication system made it nearly impossible to determine whose voice was whose, but she felt sure that every other team was facing what her team had. In fact, they sounded much worse off.

“Retreat,” Andy finally ordered tensely. “Anallin, get Thomas. We’re going back to the ship, ASAP.”

Chapter 9

“What’s going on? What’s going on?” Jade said, over and over. She barely kept her rifle up while she pressed her other hand against her head.

Unfortunately for Andy and her team, those burst comms had been full team. They had all heard it, and it certainly did nothing to help their own states of mind. Dan was wailing steadily now. He was so distracted by his panic that he didn’t even seem to notice when Anallin pulled him over a broad shoulder and carried him like that.

Roxanna was back to her steady stream of Selerid, but at least it was quiet. Jade was straight up panicking. Her eyes were so wide, Andy worried that she was going to tear apart her eyelids and let her eyeballs just fall out.

“We cannot fall apart,” Andy said harshly. They just didn’t have the time. “Move out!”

She spoke with more confidence than she felt, not that she lacked confidence in the decision to get the heck out of there. Andy knew that they couldn’t stay out in the station like this and the only chance to recoup some from what was going on was to get back onto that shuttle and then get their butts back onto the Star Chaser. Sometimes, retreat was the only option and she determined that to be the case now. She had full confidence in that fact.

However, it was an act to make it look like she was not affected. It was there, an emotion burrowing deep into her core as she watched what was happening to her team, but she just had to ignore it. She could deal with it later.

As they started to move again, Andy found that her sense of direction was skewed. The corridors all looked the same, and the heightened tension combined with the flickering lights and the constant stream of noise was simply not good at helping one keep a mental map going.

She got them down one corridor before calling for a halt to pull out her scanner. There was a schematic of the station loaded into it, which she hadn’t needed before since her orders had simply been “check everywhere.” She needed it now, however, just to make sure she found the right way back to the shuttle.

Doing her best to drown out the noise from her team, she looked at the map and oriented herself to where they were and where they had to go. Snapping the scanner shut, she put it away and then gestured for them to follow.

They moved with even more caution and awareness than they had on the way into the station, but with as much speed as possible. She didn’t want them to be there any longer than they had to be at this point, but she knew that they couldn’t run. They couldn’t be stupid, and she had the strong feeling that the others would do just that if she let them go on their own.

The more they traveled, the urge to just bolt for the finish line grew stronger, but she resisted.

As the minutes dragged on, she began to regret her restraint...or maybe she was grateful for it. She couldn’t decide which.

Suddenly, Roxanna’s stream of sound stopped with a gasp of what Andy could only think of as horror. Turning back to look at her corporal, she brought the group to a stop. She knew this wasn’t good.

“There’s more,” was all the Selerid said, her skin shimmering again. She wasn’t looking at Andy, but down the corridor they were walking through.

“How many?” Andy asked, hoping that maybe she could give them some sort of hint.

“I don’t know...I don’t...know...I...” Her comprehensible language trailed off and the incoherence returned, along with a shaking of her head so violent that she was in very real danger of getting whiplash.

Could Selerid get whiplash? Andy had never asked.

“Keep your eyes open, and keep it together,” Andy ordered, hoping that her team was still capable of that. She risked a quick glance to either side and behind to see that Jade had her rifle up, though she still looked like a terrified rabbit. Anallin still had a muttering Dan over a shoulder but the other hand had a rifle ready to fire, though probably not very accurately. Roxanna had managed to stop shaking her head, but her rifle still shook.

Her squad did not inspire confidence, but she had no choice but to hope for the best.

It was another group that emerged from the shadows. They were all human or humanoid, and all wearing the starbase’s uniform. They looked much like the ones they had already encountered, though some bore obvious injuries.

There was no mistaking the fact that the new group was fully aware of them. Andy never had the chance to tell them to stop or give them a chance to back off. This group saw her and her marines and they simply rushed forward with an incoherent, half-screaming war cry.

Andy grit her teeth. “Fire,” she commanded.

The pulses arced forward with the same slightly haphazard paths that they had followed before, but at least they were lined up in such a way that they couldn’t shoot each other. Small mercies, that. The first few took hits, but only Andy’s were on target enough to bring them down and the group crossed the space between them far more quickly than she would have expected.

“Back up,” she ordered. “Keep firing. Stay in formation.”

Her muscles tensed, but she forced herself to stay loose enough to follow her own directives. They shifted back carefully, but Jade had started crying, or that was what it sounded like. Andy tuned it out as best she could to focus on the problem before her, but the enemy group kept advancing and her focused fire was not enough to stop them.

The narrow corridor was the only thing that saved them. There just wasn’t enough room for more than two or three crazed crew members to attack at a time. Unfortunately, every time one went down another was there to take its place. It made the enemy seem never-ending. Andy was beginning to wonder just how many of them there were and how many more would be coming when Roxanna cried out again.

“Side!” she managed to get out clear enough for Andy to be warned. She snapped her head around to a side corridor they happened to be shuffling back past and saw that there was another group coming. This one looked far smaller, but it was still a second threat when they had their hands full with the one they were already facing.

A stream of colorful curses bounced around inside her brain as she ordered them to move back a little quicker, but still keep up fire. Their shots had managed to take down enough of the opposition to start to stem the tide with a barrier of bodies, but the ones staggering over the top and the ones coming from the side were still going to be too much.

Andy just had to hope that none were coming up behind her, and take a chance. “Into the next room,” she commanded, firing once more before looking over her shoulder to see when the next door was coming up. “There!”

Jade stopped firing first, racing for the door and scrambling for the button. Their one piece of luck of the day was that it opened without having to use the micro press to force it open; that would have been their doom. It opened and Andy shouted at them all to get inside while she kept firing until she backed in and shut the door before any of the deranged star base crew could get in. A shot to the interior control panel disabled the door, or at least she hoped it did.

She just hoped that she wouldn’t turn around and see something worse behind them.

Chapter 10

It was another tiny bit of luck that the room was empty.

Anallin all but dropped Dan onto the floor, but instead of rolling back into a near fetal position, the he remained upright. Andy thought she saw a shift in his posture, but she didn’t have time to think about it.

“Move that against the door!” she barked, gesturing at the short, ESS regulation sofa against the back wall. Dan and Jade didn’t move despite the rather pointed look she gave them, so Anallin and Roxanna made their way over. They had the piece of furniture moved in a moment, and for the best, since thudding came at the door just moments later.

The door seemed to be keeping the deranged mob out of the room, but Andy wasn’t going to take any chances. She had already crossed to another corner to find whatever wasn’t bolted to the floor or wall and drag it over. Between the three of them, they had a high enough pile that no one coming in from the outside would be able to get to them.

“Oh no!” Jade wailed. “This is exactly what the others did! This is what they did! Don’t you remember?!” She ran up to Andy and grabbed her by the front of her uniform. “Didn’t you see? Didn’t you see?! They put up the furniture and they locked the doors and they barricaded themselves in, but you saw what happened to them! YOU SAW WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM!”

Jade was all but shaking Andy now. Before she could shake herself free, someone else pulled Jade off her.

Big hands grabbed Jade by the back of the shoulders and ripped her away, screaming. It was Dan! He spun around and threw the smaller woman into the wall, where she hit with a loud thud and cry of pain. He was on her in a moment, punching her in the face. It was just once, but hard enough that blood spurted and she shrieked.

Andy and Anallin were onto him a heartbeat later. She grabbed one shoulder and Anallin the other, pulling him away. He fought against them, trying to get back at Jade with a roar that didn’t sound like it should have come from a human’s vocal chords but it did. There was a ferocity in his motions as he tried to pull away from them.

This was not the sort of professional violence they were trained to let free when the situation called for it, but something wild and unhinged. She had never seen it from one of her own people, and she had never imagined it possible from Dan, who was always so jovial and easygoing. She had seen him do his duty, but never exhibit such rampant violence.

“Thomas!” she shouted, but he just growled and jerked his shoulder out of Anallin’s grip for a moment before whirling on Andy.

Her rifle was down, but she would not have wanted to shoot him in the first place. Her weapon did not shoot to stun. As soon as she felt his shoulder pulled from her grasp, she jumped back and brought her hands up. Dan swung a wild haymaker from her left. She crossed her right hand to catch his wrist before he could connect, spinning her back into him and using his momentum to throw him to the floor.

Dan landed with an angry grunt and was already trying to get back up, but Anallin had recovered and was on the floor, holding Dan down.

“Off!” Dan shouted, amidst a few other words that seemed more like inarticulate curses that Andy didn’t bother trying to decipher.

Roxanna was muttering at high speed again and Jade was crying outright with her hands over her face. Andy was looking around for something to restrain him with when she heard Anallin shout and turned to see Dan shake free. Dan surged back to his feet and Andy shifted back fast, the idea flashing through her mind that she might actually have to shoot her own teammate.

She wasn’t given a chance to decide. Anallin was already back up. With one leap forward, thick blue arms were wrapped around Dan’s neck. The Hanaran was smaller, but incredibly strong and did not let go as Dan flailed around trying to break free. Anallin was able to get him to the ground and was attempting to keep him down, but Dan was using his superior size to twist free of the choker hold.

“Filthy human, be still!” Anallin said with a growl as Dan landed an elbow to the head.

For a moment, it was all too much. Jade’s wailing and Roxanna’s chattering; Dan attempting to tear apart anyone in the room and Anallin on the verge of strangling him; the sounds of the unruly mob outside pounding on the door. Andy could, for that instant, hear everything in such clear and precise detail that she thought she might be having some kind of breakdown herself.

They couldn’t fight a battle from within and without.

When the instant ended, it all snapped back into her and she remembered who she was. She surged into motion. Dan had just thrown Anallin over his shoulder where the Hanaran landed with a thud and a grunt. Dan looked like he was about to go for Hanaran again but Andy inserted herself between them and slammed the heel of her hand against his chest.

His breath rushed out of his body in a gush as he staggered back several steps.

Dan recovered fast, though, and came at her again, but she was ready for him. She had her rifle up. He obviously saw it, but didn’t stop in time.

Andy did not, however, fire.

Instead, she brought it up as she shifted to the side and then drove the butt of it into his temple. He grunted, staggered to the side, and then she hit him again. With the second strike, he collapsed to the ground. She gasped softly, looking down at the crumpled form of her friend and squad-mate. No time for that, she reminded herself, as she crossed the room and sought out something to restrain him with.

She found a length of industrial rope and returned to Dan’s side, kneeling down and securely tying his hands. “I’m sorry, Dan,” she murmured as she did it. It would have been an extra measure of peace to tie his legs as well, but she didn’t know what was going to happen and she hoped he’d be more cooperative when he came to and be able to flee under his own power.

Anallin was pacing like some sort of caged animal while she worked. The Hanaran’s breathing was normally so level that she couldn’t hear it but now it came out ragged in a way she had never heard before, even when they had been pushing themselves past physical endurance. Now, it somehow almost drowned out the rapid clicking.

She watched the Hanaran warily, but then moved away to check on Roxanna and Jade. The latter was on her knees, leaning against the wall. Blood was still flowing from her nose. Instead of trying to block it, she had both bloody hands over her ears and was rocking back and forth like Dan had been earlier.

How long would it be before she lost it and attacked them too?

Chapter 11

The only one that seemed to still have a shred of coherence, beside herself, was Roxanna. Blowing out a breath of aggravation—and a little fear that she stalwartly ignored—Andy moved in front of Roxanna and put her hands on the woman’s shoulders. Roxanna was more slender than Andy, but slightly taller. The sergeant looked up to meet the purple gaze with as much sobriety as she could muster.

“Roxanna,” she said levelly. “You have got to stick with me. This is bad and I’m running out of both allies and ideas. Stay with me!”

The Selerid pressed her thin lips together, but she stopped talking. She stared into Andy’s dark eyes and then nodded jerkily, lifting her chin shakily. “Yes, Sergeant!” she replied, obviously trying to make a firm tone but not completely succeeding. Still, her gaze was clear and she was looking at her sergeant like a marine.

Andy nodded in return and then pulled her hands away, stepping back with a resolute breath. “We need a plan. We need to make a guess. What’s going on here?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Roxanna said again with a small nod. Her breathing was still rough and shallow, but Andy could see that she was thinking now.

“The situation,” Andy began, looking around to the other three and seeing that they were all exactly as they had been before, “is not good. Understatement. Everyone is coming apart at the seams and if the calls over the comms are any indication, we aren’t as bad off as the other squads. Everyone who is banging on that door is wearing a station uniform, so I feel safe to assume that whatever is happening to us is what happened to them. Yet they are obviously still alive, so how is it that we didn’t pick them up on sensors?” She stared at the other woman. “Think, Corporal. Push past it.”

“Our sensors were blocked somehow,” she said uncertainly, but then the wheels were obviously picking up speed in her thoughts because she frowned. “Somehow, so were my empathic senses. I didn’t pick up anything when we were on the ship, or even when we came into the station. It wasn’t until we were almost on top of them that I felt anything at all.”

“Okay, so, the ship’s sensors and your senses were blocked. Have you ever encountered something that was able to do that?” Andy pressed her, sensing an opening in the insanity and making full use of it. “I’ve heard of a lot of technology that could block or obscure the sensors, but to block you must have taken something else entirely.”

“Agreed,” Roxanna said, eyes flickering side to side. “There was a race of beings that came from a planet in my own system that had evolved a defense to our empathic abilities,” she went on, thinking out loud. “But they had to be within visual range of us. They could only block us when they could see us. It was like a battle of wills. They rarely left the system, either, and I don’t recall any on this station. Or even in the ESS, as far as I know.”

Andy nodded slowly. “We’ll rule them out for now.” She had to keep them both focused and on task. They couldn’t let themselves wander too far. “Let’s look at what else is going on, because it’s more than just us not picking up the life signs.”

The Selerid nodded again, rapidly. “Yes!” she said, as if she had just remembered it. “There is obviously something affecting us, and it’s station-wide. It must be something in the air?”

“It seems unlikely,” Andy countered. “There were no toxins in the air.”

“But...” Roxanna seemed clearer with her focus, although the skin around her eyes and mouth were tight. She was struggling. “If we didn’t pick up on the life signs, then maybe we wouldn’t have picked that up on sensors either.”

Andy tilted her head. She looked at Anallin, who was staring at Dan’s still unconscious form in a way that made her nervous. She kept on. “Fair point,” she agreed. “It seems unlikely that some sort of airborne toxin could also have been hidden from the scans that Anallin did, however. The scans didn’t find any abnormalities in the bodies and those three were human, so recognizing what was abnormal or not would have been straight forward.”

“Fair point,” Roxanna echoed. She pressed her lips together again and looked on the verge of emotional collapse again. Andy put her hand on her shoulder and the Selerid snapped back to focus. “That’s it!”

“What’s it?” Andy asked, blinking at the sudden change. Roxanna had gone from looking upset to looking inspired.

“The Colirnoid,” Roxanna said, this time gripping Andy’s shoulders amid her flash of inspiration in a way that Andy knew she had never done before. The Selerid normally avoided physical contact, because it increased the intensity of her empathic senses and made it harder to “shield” herself from someone’s feelings.

Andy stared back. ”The Colirnoid?” she repeated. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them.”

Now Roxanna was talking fast again, but at least not too fast for her translator to keep up, which allowed Andy to follow her. “Almost no one has! It’s to the point where they are barely more than rumor, although my people have encountered them occasionally over the course of our history. It’s enough that we’re told of them, but they are almost never spoken of because they are almost never seen.”

“They exist in a system far from here and even in the scattered stories of my people, I have never heard of them being this far out and yet... Yet they can do everything that we are talking about here! They feed off of chaos. It’s like...” She gasped softly. “It’s like a drug and they can’t get enough. Like an addict. But have only done so closer to their own system.”

Andy nodded slowly. “If one of these Colirnoid have ended up this far from their home system, we need to know more. We have to know how to stop this sort of neurological trauma.” She wasn’t sure if ‘trauma’ was the right word, but it was the best she had.

Roxanna nodded, and the fear was back in her eyes, but she was still focused. “It has to be a Colirnoid! They are telepathic, and with telepathic damage, it won’t show up on any scans until it’s been long-term, so nothing they’ve done will show up on our scans for months. Fear and anger and violence is the chaos they like best, which has made my people stay as far from their system as possible.”

“Could they obscure sensors?” Andy asked.

“Yes!” Roxanna cried, bringing her arms back to wrap around her waist. “Sort of. It’s part of their telepathy to have obscured my abilities. And a powerful enough telepath could obscure the minds of people reading the scans, so it’s not the sensors that are wrong but the brain of the person reading it.”

So they were being driven mad by a rumor. Great. “Okay. So. We have a good theory. We need to know what to do about it now.”

“The Colirnoid are a hive species, if I remember the stories correctly. A hive species, so each unit has...has one, you know, one at the top who links with the others. They would be driving the others. They would...” Her breathing grew rapid and her eyes began to lose focus again.

“Roxanna!” Andy snapped. “If there is one leader with other...satellite aliens, then they are going to want to be somewhere where they can direct the others. The most central location of the station, the core.”

The Selerid gasped for breath, but she nodded. “You humans have that phrase, you know, about cutting the head off a snake?” She paused, waiting for Andy to agree, and then went on, “It’s just like that. Kill the center and the rest will flee or die. They will lose their power.”

“Are you sure about this?” Andy asked urgently.

Selerid did not cry, but Roxanna had either been around humans too much or was feeding off Jade’s muted wailing because she looked like she was going to. “No, but it’s all I’ve got, Sergeant. Sorry.”

Andy patted her on the shoulder. “You did well, Corporal. So, now we just have to figure out how to cut the head off the snake.”

“Not ‘we,’ Sergeant,” Roxanna said. “You.”

Chapter 12

“Sergeant,” Roxanna said to Andy’s shocked expression. “You are the one who isn’t coming apart, can’t you see? There is something about you that is resisting their power.” Before Andy could say anything, Roxanna went on. “I don’t know what it is! I just know that it is so. There is only one of us that can do it and that’s you.”

Andy wanted to argue, but she knew that she couldn’t. “Can you handle these three alone?” she did ask.

Roxanna smiled weakly. “I don’t know, but there’s no choice. We’re all going to end up like them, or we’re going to die.”

Again, she wanted to argue, but she couldn’t.

“Do your best, Corporal.” There wasn’t anything else that needed to be said. Roxanna nodded and brought up her rifle. For the first time, her own eyes moved toward the three other members of the team in the room with her.

Andy turned to survey the space around her and figure out how she was going to do this. She knew she couldn’t go through the door, they were still there. Her dark eyes swiftly surveyed the room and then lifted, spotting a panel near the ceiling.

Air ducts.

Damn.

She slung her rifle to her back and hurried across the room, climbing on a table and just barely reaching the edge of the panel. She pulled a utility blade from her uniform holster and jammed it into the seam. If any engineer saw her, they would have a fit, but she couldn’t care about that just then.

Wedging the panel up, she put away the blade and then dug her finger under it to pull it off and let it clatter to the floor. She glanced back quickly, but no one seemed to notice except Roxanna. All for the better, then. She curled her fingers around the newly found ledge, finding a groove where the pieces were welded together. With a grunt, she pulled herself up, finding other grooves to pull her frame up into the duct. Once inside, she started crawling forward.

This was definitely not where she had expected this mission to end up, but when did things go as expected?

She thought back to the schematic of the station that she’d read and tried to place the room where they had found themselves just now. The central most part of the station would be an engineering area called the core, and she knew that it was at least two decks down.

There was no time to waste thinking about it so she pushed forward. The duct was barely large enough for her to crawl through. In some places it wasn’t even large enough for that. She ignored the way the hard floor felt against her hands and knees, the scrapes on her torso from where she pulled herself through tight spaces. She ignored how worried she was about her team back in that room, her uncertainty about whether this was even the right course and whether she would actually be able to make any difference.

She ignored the whispers at the edge of her thoughts telling her she would fail...

All she could do was keep her head down and move forward. She almost crawled into the stations core before noticing the duct ended. A ladder extended in both directions as far as she could see.

Andy climbed down until she reached the engineering level. Before going back into the ductwork, she checked the schematic on her scanner to see where she was. Then, she moved off again.

The whispers grew louder as she got closer and she had to stop, squeezing her eyes shut against the mental intrusion. Andy breathed deeply, forcing the whispers away. She had to focus on the task at hand.

Despite her best efforts, questions filled her mind. What was a Colirnoid? What sort of fight would she have before her? Could she win that fight?. And if she won that fight, what would happen then to the others? She was crawling through this duct based on rumors of the Selerid race, or at least one Selerid who might be crazy.

Andy pushed through the doubts and kept going until she reached the panel that she knew would let her into the core. There could be no stealth and a very limited amount of guns blazing. She grunted as she twisted in the narrow duct and turned herself so her feet were toward the panel, then she kicked and followed through as fast as she could.

She hit the deck and immediately rolled forward to avoid potential fire, but there wasn’t any. Rolling back up to her knees, she swung her rifle, searching for the enemy. No attack materialized.

Instead, there was a single alien standing in front of a glowing, pale-blue column. It was over seven feet tall with glistening, smooth mottled skin. There was no nose or mouth that she could see and...three eyes. Some silly part of her brain wondered if that was where the “third eye” phrase came from. Had ancient humans met the Colirnoid?

The three eyes, all pure silver without a pupil or separate iris, seemed to focus on her. If there was any emotion, Andy couldn’t read it. There was no weapon that Andy could see. The head rose and fell, like it was looking her up and down. The alien held up one of its hands.

As she stared at it, she felt a wave of fear brush over her. Sweat broke out over her entire body and she began to tremble; her stomach clench with terror. Still kneeling, she bowed her head and inhaled slowly. It’s just their power. It’s not real. You have nothing to fear.

The terror began to subside and she opened her eyes again, feeling anger take over, but this was her own. This creature had infected her team and made them nearly kill each other. Who knew how many of the detachment were still alive? And they had destroyed the people of this station!

What gave them the right?

Gritting her teeth, she rose to her feet and trained her rifle on the alien. It lifted its head and then stepped back, bumping into the railing around the core.

A fresh wave of horror washed over her and she felt her knees weaken. The rifle began to lower. But then she focused on the anger. Used it to take back control. Andy lifted the rifle again.

What are you?

The words echoed in her mind and she knew that they were not her own. She felt fear, but it was not her own and it was not being projected at her.

The alien was afraid. It didn’t understand why its overwhelming power wasn’t sending her to her knees or making her flee in terror. She now knew that it had no fight in it if its powers to sow fear and chaos had no effect. It had no defense...against her.

“I am Sergeant Andrea Dolan and you messed with the wrong marine,” she whispered and squeezed the trigger.

* * *

Andy only looked at the body once and knew that the alien was dead. She had felt a psychic wail fly through her brain as it died and knew that it had filled the whole station. Did the others die or flee, she didn’t know. She just knew that her job was done.

She left the core through the door this time and walked through the corridors. Along the way, she saw people in station uniforms. They were either unconscious, maybe dead, or were waking up like from a bad dream. She stopped to explain what she could, but she needed to get back to her team.

On the way, she heard from the other teams. Everyone was in the same state, but they all agreed: get back to the ship.

When Andy finally got back to the room, she stood outside the door and pressed her earpiece to tell them she was outside. Moments later, a confused and embarrassed looking Dan along with a...Hanaran looking Anallin were opening the door with the furniture pushed to either side.

“What happened?” Dan asked.

“It’s a long story,” Andy said wearily.

Epilogue

An emergency medical team was dispatched to Starbase Zenith, while the marines returned home and were subjected to extensive medical texts. The doctor insisted on a thorough workup on all of them. The captain himself sought out Andy while she was waiting for her turn to be scanned, poked, and prodded.

“Why didn’t you go crazy like the rest of them?” the captain asked, not accusatorily but earnestly perplexed.

“Sir, if I knew, I would tell you,” she replied tiredly. “All tests have shown me as totally normal, but...I don’t know who my father is. My mother never would tell me, so who knows what might be going on?” The topic of her parents was normally exhausting on its own, and now, even more so.

The captain nodded. “I’m just glad you’re okay, Sergeant,” he said sincerely. “And thank you for your hard work and getting this taken care of. We now know more about this race and what they can do. We’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

She sat up as straight as she could. “Thank you, sir.” She paused. “Sir? May I ask what happened to the other Colirnoid that were around the station?”

“As far as we can tell, they fled when you killed the leader,” he replied. “Head off the snake and all that.”

That brought a faint smile to Andy’s face.

“That they were even here is worrisome, though. Who knows where else they may have been and the results blamed on other things? It will all be in my report up the chain, though, that we may have a new threat.”

“Lucky us,” Andy said mirthlessly. Just then, she saw the doctor making a beeline for her and the captain nodded, heading off. The chief medical officer was the only one that could make the captain flee. As he left and she waited for the doctor, she looked toward the space station she had just liberated.

In her heart, she knew this was just the beginning of something bigger.

* * *

THANK YOU

Thank you so much for reading Zenith, the first book in the ESS Space Marines series. I am so excited you took the chance to read it and I really hope you liked it. If you could leave a review for me, that would be awesome because it helps me tell others about my books.

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I have also included a preview of Discovery which is the first book in the Niakrim War series. After you read the preview, you can download the book on Amazon.

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Preview: Discovery

Space is so boring!

This was certainly not what Violet had expected space travel to be like. She had dreamed of this since the first time she looked up at the stars in the sky, but none of those dreams had included endless days of nothingness. The only excitement she had experienced during the first days of the journey was when an occasional piece of space debris penetrated the warp field forcing the pilot to take evasive action. Even those potentially deadly encounters were brushed aside, as if they were no more bothersome than a fly buzzing around the room, by the Krim Sprinter's legendary pilot, Cyrus Jones, who was as much machine as man.

The captain had assured her that the Krim Sprinter was the fastest ship in the fleet, which made it the fastest ship in the known universe, when he reluctantly brought her on board the week before. The problem with space travel was the incomprehensible distances between planets. Even at three hundred times the speed of light, the travel time to Proxima was listed as seven days. The captain had assured her that they would be there in five. When she asked what they would do on the Proxima outpost for two days while they waited for the rest of the crew to arrive, Captain Mitch Cooper had just smiled and walked away.

After four days of watching countless specks of light stream past in a blur, Violet wished her childhood dream had involved something less monotonous...like being an accountant. She was wondering if it was possible to actually die of boredom when the ship violently lurched, throwing her from her chair. She froze in the air momentarily as the warp drive was forcibly shut down, dropping the ship back into real time, before being slammed into the navigation console. Everything went black.

When she came to, the ship’s bridge was in total chaos. Warning sirens were going off. Red lights were flashing. Captain Cooper was rushing from station to station, assessing damage and muttering to himself. She had a pretty good idea of what he was saying.

"What the hell just happened, Cyrus?"

"We were hit by a photon torpedo, Captain," he answered calmly as he stared at the seemingly empty space in front of the ship.

"That's impossible!"

"Yet here we are."

Captain Cooper looked ready to explode. Instead, he took a calming breath as he ran both hands through his grey hair. "Did you drop us out of warp before we tore the ship apart?"

"Of course," Cyrus replied without taking his eyes off the still empty space in front of the ship. "Belzaire's not gonna be happy, though. There's no telling how much of the warp system we tore up shutting it down that quickly."

Violet had pulled herself to her feet and was using the navigation console to steady herself. "So what just happened?"

"Somehow, we were hit by a photon torpedo while traveling at warp three," the captain muttered.

"How is that possible?"

"It's not."

The captain raised his hand to head off further questions. "We'll talk later. Can you find your way to engineering?"

"I think so."

"Get down there and help Belzaire. There's bound to be damage of some sort."

She was leaving the bridge when Cyrus quietly said, "There's something out there, Captain."

"Where?"

"Right in front of us."

"What is it?"

"I don't know," Cyrus answered. "I can't see it."

"If you can't see anything, how the hell do know something's there?"

Cyrus just shrugged.

The captain pointed at Violet. "Get to engineering. Tell Belzaire to get that warp drive back online."

"I'll do what I can."

The last thing Violet heard as she headed to engineering with a renewed sense of urgency was Captain Cooper telling Cyrus to put everything they had into the shields. All their lives might depend on it.

* * *

As Violet rushed into the warp room, she was confronted with a scene straight out of her nightmares. Glowing green warp fluid squirted everywhere. Steam leaks sprouted like geysers. Blinking red and yellow beacons were the only discernible source of light. When a huge man with deep red skin and jet black hair rounded the corner screaming curses, she thought, just for a moment, that she had been transported to Hell and was facing the devil himself.

"What are you doing here?" the large, angry man growled through gritted teeth.

"I...I...I'm here to help," she managed. "Captain said to help you get the warp system back online."

"Oh," he said with a sudden smile. "Glad to have you. I'm Belzaire. Come with me. We've got a lot of work to do."

Belzaire turned and walked straight into the chaos, not even bothering to avoid the steam blasts or leaking warp fluid. Violet followed tentatively, doing her best to avoid both. When she caught up to him, he was in the process of sliding a very heavy looking cabinet to the side, revealing a trapdoor in the floor.

"What's in there?"

"Warp fluid," he replied nonchalantly.

Before Violet could ask why the warp fluid was stored behind a hidden trapdoor, Belzaire pulled the door open to reveal a deep chamber with hundreds of clear cylinders full of glowing green fluid. There was easily ten times the legal limit of warp fluid in there.

Belzaire answered her unasked question with a mischievous smile and started pulling out cylinders. "We lost almost two hundred liters before I got the system shut down," he said. "I'll fix the leaks while you refill the system."

"Two hundred liters is more than a ship this size needs for the entire system," Violet sputtered, finally coming to terms with what she was seeing. "Not to mention twice the legal limit of reserves allowed on a ship like this."

"I've made some modifications," was all he said while he continued to pull out more cylinders of the precious liquid.

When he had retrieved twenty-five cylinders, Belzaire stood up and looked at Violet, who was staring at him with wide eyes, trying to comprehend what was going on. "Now, look," he said firmly. "If the captain sent you down here to help, something is seriously wrong. We need to get this ship back up and running. You deserve an explanation, but now is not the time."

Sensing the gravity of the situation, if not the cause, Violet nodded slowly. "What do you need me to do?"

Belzaire smiled reassuringly and pointed across the warp room to the half-empty tank of warp fluid. "We need to refill the reservoir. Can you do that while I fix the leaks?"

"I think so."

"Good. Just put a cylinder on the fill pad and hit the green button."

Those were the only instructions he gave before turning away and heading to a pipe leaking warp fluid on the far wall. Violet looked around the room briefly, wondering what she had gotten herself into, then started transporting the cylinders to the reservoir.

It took far longer than she had anticipated because she was constantly stepping over debris and around puddles of warp fluid, which she learned the hard way were very slippery. By the time the last cylinder had been sucked into the tank, Belzaire had finished repairing the leaks and was gathering the empty cylinders and putting them back in the hidden compartment. When she attempted to ask about them, Belzaire simply said, "Later," and closed the trap door and slid the cabinet back into place.

With the compartment of warp fluid again hidden, Belzaire turned to Violet and smiled warmly. "Thank you for your help," he said. "You should head back to the bridge. If something goes wrong, that's the best place to be."

She wanted so say something, ask questions, or try to figure out what exactly was going on. Instead, Violet simply said, "Okay," and headed out of the warp room, back to the bridge.

As soon as she turned to leave, Belzaire hurried to the control console and pushed the intercom button for the bridge. "Captain, we've got the system ready to power back up. We should be ready for warp travel in about five minutes, but we won't have full capacity until I can do a more thorough repair."

"Got it," came the captain’s disembodied reply. "Call me when you're ready."

* * *

Back on the bridge, Violet sat in the chair she had previously been thrown from, looking out into space. She was trying to piece together everything she had seen. Did the captain know there was enough illegal warp fluid hidden on his ship to get everyone on the ship executed? She thought it was likely that he did. And what did Belzaire mean by modifications? Nobody knew how warp travel really worked, it just did. Making modifications to something you didn't understand, and could kill you, was crazy. But then again, much of what she had seen and heard since coming aboard the Krim Sprinter was a bit bizarre.

The captain's voice brought her back to the apparently tense situation. "Is it still there, whatever it is?"

"Yes, it is, Captain."

"And you still don't know what it is?"

"Nope."

Violet expected the captain to be angry, but he simply nodded, seeming to accept that there was something invisible, and possibly dangerous, just outside. Yep, things were definitely a bit crazy aboard the Krim Sprinter.

"Captain, the warp system is online and ready to go," the intercom suddenly blared. "Tell Cyrus to keep it to warp one, one point five max. But preferably warp one."

"You heard him, Cyrus. Warp speed one point eight."

Cyrus looked at him with a disapproving glare, but simply asked, "Where to, Captain?"

"Anywhere but here."

A moment later, Cyrus reported, "We're ready when you are, Captain."

"Drop the shields and engage the warp field as fast as your robotic arm possibly can," the captain said as he leaned forward in his chair, staring intently at the still empty space in front of the ship. "Three, two, one, go."

Everything happened so fast; Violet could barely comprehend what she was seeing. She could hear the click of the shields dropping and feel time freeze momentarily as the warp field formed and the ship jumped into warp speed. And in the same instant, she saw three photon blasts appear out of nowhere, heading straight for them. She squeezed her eyes shut and grabbed the chair, bracing for an impact that never came. When she managed to pry her eyes open, all she could see was the emptiness of space streaking past.

Maybe space wasn't going to be so boring after all.

* * *

Read the rest of the story here:

amazon.com/dp/B071NJBNH4