Brant woke up in darkness. She was lying flat on a table, and her arms, legs, and neck were fastened to it.

But hey – she woke up.

She was in a Rebel brig. Or…her own? Had the captives broken free and seized the ship? No. She was…no, where was she? What was going on? The…Magna Sector.

The Lanius.

The dots started connecting. That thing might have belonged to an elder species known mainly for devouring another species. And it had taken her alive.

Something growled in the darkness. Something primitive took over in Brant's mind, and she started fighting her restraints with delirious strength. She was no stranger to fear of death and fear of pain, but the primal terror of the food chain spoke to something deep in her brain. She bucked and fought and strained, but she knew these restraints were the high technology of an ancient race. No matter how hard she struggled, she'd never…

The shackle holding her right wrist popped open. She almost felt relieved, but the thing in the shadows made an ugly little noise and her sweat turned cold. The other restraints held fast. Her free arm fumbled along her belt and yanked her multitool out of its holster. She unfolded it with her hand and searched with her thumb through all the folded-up tools to find a screwdriver, but she could barely coax the little attachments out of this thing with two hands; one-handed, it was rough. She couldn't quite reach her right hand over to her left, so she tried to bring the tool up to her mouth. There was something over her face, though, a hard, clear bubble tightly sealed around her face from forehead to chin, with a hose coming out of the front and leading off into the darkness.

She finally prized out a long, thin Phillips-head attachment with her thumbnail and started jimmying away at her neck restraint. It gave with surprising ease, and she could pick herself up from the table enough to reach her other hand. That restraint gave her a little more trouble, but she was confident.

The lights came on in the room. Listening to her gut, Brant threw herself back against the table, slipping her right arm back into the shackle without closing it. She clutched the multitool to keep it out of sight, and she waited.

She couldn't see much. She was in a small room, maybe the size of her quarters back on the Kestrel, with walls of rippling silver metal. She was in a shallow pit, or maybe an alcove – she realized she couldn't tell if this table was lying flat or standing upright. All she could see were the sides of the depression she was in and a flat metal surface several yards ahead of her, a floor or wall with no features whatsoever.

Then the wall opened, a hole suddenly appearing in the featureless metal. One of the things was standing there, red eyes staring flatly at her. It wasn't the same one she'd fought; the body looked the same, all silvery skin and jutting metal horns, but this one's face was distinct, just a flat plane of silver with no marking except the two red eyes and one thin line for a mouth. It was holding a long, thin rod, the purpose of which was terrifyingly vague.

It stepped forwardly slowly and let out a snarl of vicious alien gibberish. Brant clutched her hidden screwdriver and stared this thing down. It approached more confidently and vocalized again, the sounds equally alien but with a notably different cadence. It stood a few feet in front of her, more or less at eye level, and leaned forward a little to look at her face.

Just a little closer, she thought, trying to judge the arc of her swing. It took one more step…

There was a scream, a sound of loud electric hate, and the thing standing in front of her suddenly turned and rushed away, ducking off to the side out of her vision. Brant got right back to work on her left hand restraints, and though they needed just a little more jimmying than the others had, it was still way easier than any brig in civilized space would have made it. She hoped she'd have time, that the strange caterwaul would drown out the noise she was making, that she'd be able to do a damned thing in combat against these monsters…

Just as she was bending down to free her legs, the wails grew louder, and the creature walked back into sight. It was carrying a jagged lump of steely material with one arm, holding it close to its chest. The lump was moving. The creature noticed Brant freeing herself and took a quick step backward, holding up the rod in its other hand and barking another string of garbled nonsense…

Only…it wasn't. That…was Mandarin. She hadn't taken Mandarin since grade school, but…

"Parlez vous Francais?" it asked hastily, taking another step back.

She looked up in astonishment. Her hands kept working on the job at hand, popping open the shackle on her left leg and getting to work on her right. "Not really. I don't suppose you speak English?"

"Ah! Yes, well enough," the thing said. It lowered the rod and seemed to relax. The strange scream filled the air, and she realized it was coming from the misshapen lump in this thing's arm. "Also, I don't mind if you take off the bindings, but we maintain a 99% helium atmosphere on this ship, so keep the breather mask on. And…don't attack us, please."

The thing hefted the load in its arms to get a better grip, and as she looked at the lump closer, its shape made more sense to her. It moved, wrapping two studded arms around the larger creature's neck, and a tiny head searched around the room with little red eyes.

"Have you ever had a baby, human? I decided to give the little one an aural speech system to get it used to sonic communication early. She's figured out that piercing wails will get my attention, though, so that may have been a bad call," the large thing said. Its voice sounded like it was echoing down a long steel corridor and rang with a strange, exotic accent, but she had no trouble understanding it. The little creature grabbed the rod and guided it up to its face, and the metal started slid off the rod in curls and runnels disappearing into the little one's skin.

"Uh…no," Brant said. She got the last restraint open and got both feet firmly on the ground. Her gun and her baton were gone, which she'd expected, but she kept herself ready for a fight. "Where am I, and where is my ship?"

"You are aboard one of our craft, a culture-ship assigned to this sector. It has no name that will be meaningful to you – in general, audible names are going to be difficult for us. Your ship's transporters were badly damaged, and since you cornered one of my crew mates, you were in serious danger of suffocation if we didn't extract you. We intended to return you to your own ship once you were stabilized, but your people opened fire on us; we had to withdraw."

Brant's alarm must have been obvious, as the thing quickly tried to calm her down. "Your ship was perfectly fine when we jumped away, and we are currently at the only beacon within jump range of the sector hub. We expect your people will be following shortly, and hopefully you can talk them out of blowing us up long enough for us to return you to them."

Brant's head reeled not just at being in the custody of an elder race but of having such a straightforward conversation. She'd always assumed creatures like these would be somewhat more inscrutable. Well – may as well match straightforwardness with straightforwardness. "So…are you the Lanius, then?"

"Yes, that seems to be the identification everyone's going with this cycle. I apologize for the restraints, by the way. People tend to associate us with the end of the universe, and we've found they act erratically in situations like this. You seem pleasant enough, though." It gently pulled away the rod, now a few inches shorter, and placed it on its waist. It held its hand out to Brant. "You can call me Translator."

If they wanted her dead, she didn't doubt they could do it, friendly handshake or no. She took the hand and shook. Its three-digited hand was considerably suppler than she'd imagined. "Captain Charlotte Brant."

"Pleased to meet you." Translator walked to the side of the room, where Brant could now see there was a small enclosure of the same shining metal that made up the walls and floors. Now that she had a fuller view of the room, she saw that it was not nearly as plain as she'd thought. There were two more alcoves like the one she'd been in against one wall, and mounted on the others were strange little bits and baubles – a large desiccated flower stood out to her, and a small sphere of thin glass with colorful vapors churning about in it.

Translator gently placed the child into the enclosure and turned back to Brant. "Ah – yes, that is impressive, isn't it? A gift from Lieutenant T'tamarinax of the Shimmering Fleet, in recognition of our friendship. The crystal folk rendered a good deal of their art using gaseous media. Our Artists studied their techniques closely, but I doubt any of us could approach this level of mastery." Translator stroked the side of the sphere with one digit, and the gas within condensed into an alien landscape of jutting purple rock and clear blue sky.

"So you did know them? The crystals?" Brant asked hesitantly. "You, uh…you didn't really…"

Translator frowned. Brant thought now how strange Translator's face was, almost like a child's drawing of a face. "This part is…always awkward."

"That is not a reassuring answer."

"No…we are not a reassuring people. Well, maybe in the very beginning." It walked up to the section of wall it had walked out of, and the wall reopened. "Walk with me for a bit. Let's not bother the little one."

Brant walked out with Translator – what else was there to do? – into a refreshingly typical starship corridor. The colors and textures and lighting were strange, but it was a long corridor with branching hallways and doorways opening and closing, a handful of other Lanius walking back and forth on various errands. She'd been expecting…well, she had no idea what she was expecting other than that it would have been beyond her experience, but this looked more or less like the sort of ships she'd spent her whole adult life on.

But it was almost totally quiet. Total quiet, in fact, would have been more comforting, something she could chalk up to the atmosphere or her hearing. She could hear the light clanging of footsteps and the soft hiss of the doors opening, but where the Kestrel or any other ship had a constant background music of dings, beeps, mechanical noise, and chit-chat, the unbreathable air here was thick with silence. She was relieved when Translator broke the uneasy quiet as they strolled along.

"Our race was designed a very, very long time ago. Our Creators were not very much more advanced than the major civilizations are now, but they struggled to deal with the problem of space debris. One object collides with another in orbit, they fragment, the fragments collide with others, and so on until this planet or that beacon becomes utterly inhospitable. A familiar problem to you, I'm sure."

Brant could practically still hear the little plinks as debris shredded the Kestrel's shields. "Ayup. Humans call it Kessler Syndrome."

They entered another dilating doorway and walked into a wide, open room. There were tables all around like a mess hall, but none of ten-or so the Lanius seated around them seemed to be eating. Some were poking through various bits of machinery and computer parts, one was pouring over a huge stone tablet, and three were gathered around a vidscreen playing some point-and-shoot video game. The screen declared the match was over and Player 2 the winner, and if it was jarring to find the apocalypse demons ran their ships just like everyone else, it was much more so to find the apocalypse demons throwing up their arms in silent rejoice after winning in Starhammer III.

"Kessler Syndrome? Huh. I didn't know that," Translator said with legitimate interest. "The 'Kessler Syndrome' got very badly out of hand for our Creators. Debris storms interfered with commerce and led to bickering over who was to blame, which strained diplomacy, which led to wars, which created more debris. After various failed approaches, the Creators made us, a line of self-replicating synthetics, intelligent enough to navigate space on their own initiative, with a deeply-embedded drive not just to recover interstellar debris, but to salvage and preserve anything of use. Our bodies even naturally convert oxygen into various inert compounds for that reason, to ensure that oxidation does not prematurely…"

Translator lectured on, but Brant abruptly lost attention. A door had opened in the wall across the room from them, and a tall, lithe Lanius stood in the doorway. Where most of the crew around her had one or two nondescript, unrecognizable objects attached to them, this one was laden with items very familiar to her: a phase-axe, a number of guns, and what looked like a plain old regular sabre stood out at once, along with at least five weapons she didn't recognize. This one didn't step into the room. It just stood there staring right at her.

"…We wondered if we could possibly have stopped the Creators from destroying themselves, but now of course the pattern is quite familiar to us. Eventually, collapse becomes inevitable, and all we can do is salvage what we…"

Brant elbowed Translator and nodded at the door. "What's that one's deal?"

Translator looked around, then found where Brant was looking and stopped short. "Oh…oh dear." He abruptly stopped, facing the armed Lanius who now started strolling toward them. "How to get through this quickly? So…some of our ships specialize in combat and some in salvaging physical debris."

While Translator prattled on, the armed one strode forward faster, leaning forward and picking up speed. The Lanius around her stopped what they were doing and looked up, some quickly shuffling away. Brant planted her feet firmly and kept her body loose, ready to react.

Translator went on. "And this is a culture-ship; our goal is to salvage and preserve the culture of collapsing civilizations, and each of the crew has a specialization. I am fully dedicated to preserving your methods of communication, so I identify as Translator, and…"

The armed Lanius reached around its back with both hands. It chucked something underhand at Brant with one hand and drew a long, thin weapon out with the other. Brant's first instinct was to dodge – that could have been a grenade it threw, or a knife, or some inscrutable weapon she'd never imagined. But then she saw what it was.

She grabbed Andrews' power baton out of the air and extended it with a powerful flick. The hostile Lanius bore down on her and swung its weapon at her, another power baton, and Brant had no time to act on anything but reflex. She leaned back and backpedaled, the other baton missing her torso by a few inches. She thought to take an exploratory slash of her own, but her instincts told her this wasn't the time – and yes, before she'd have been able to get a meaningful strike in, the Lanius had turned fully into its swing and thrown itself shoulder-first at Brant, closing the gap with alarming speed. Brant went into a controlled fall backwards, and though the thing still hit her with force and the spikes on its shoulder almost pierced her skin, she went back fast enough to take most of the force out of the blow. The Lanius fell back with her, and with a sharp kick – the monster was surprisingly light for a thing all made of metal – she sent the Lanius flying off behind her.

Brant sprang to her feet and whirled on her assailant, who had landed skillfully and was already on her feet. The armed Lanius looked her up and down with those implacable red eyes, but it did not move toward her or raise its weapon.

Translator crept up into the space between them, his gaze darting cautiously to her and the other and back again. The armed one retracted its baton and holstered it on its back, then leveled a glare at Translator.

"Uh, yes," Translator said, as if responding to a command. "Captain Charlotte Brant, I'd like you to meet our captain. As I am dedicated to understanding and preserving the language and communication arts of other civilizations, our captain is dedicated to…"

The armed Lanius cocked its head, and Translator stammered. He finished quickly:

"You may call her Killer."

Brant looked at Killer, who returned her stare. Brant's baton was still crackling with power at her side. "So, do you have a good reason for trying to take my head off just now, or is that just how you guys say hi?"

Translator looked at Killer for a moment, then turned back to Brant. "She says she needed to test you. She says there is…oh…oh dear."

Translator and Killer were staring at each other. "I take it she doesn't speak English, then?" Brant asked.

"No…no, we are optimized for life in the vacuum, and generally deaf. Some like myself have modified ourselves for your 'hearing' sense and aural speech, but as this is of little use outside of the proper atmospheric conditions, the preferred form of…"

Translator trailed off, noting that Brant was paying far more attention to Killer than to him. Killer's face was not the childish caricature that Translator had; no, her red eyes stared out at Brant from a jagged symmetry of black and silver, devoid of any recognizable features. There was no mouth, no nose, no perceptible sensory organs of any kind. The image that came to mind was shattered ice on a dark night. The eyes bored into Brant, and alien though they were, Brant could feel the hostility in that stare as if it was a tangible thing.

Killer glanced at Translator, then abruptly turned and started walking out of the chamber the way she'd come in. Translator started.

"Oh. Uh, yes – Captain Charlotte Brant, please follow me. Quickly."

He shuffled off after Killer, moving so abruptly that he almost knocked into a pair of Lanius walking by. Brant watched Translator walk away for a confused second before following.

"What the hell is going on?" Brant asked.

"Um…well, we were conversing in the preferred manner of my kind, using high-frequency electromagnetic…"

Distracted by his spiel, Translator started slowing down. Killer grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and yanked him forward to keep the pace up.

"That's fascinating, but what the hell…"

"There is an emergency. A ship has entered the sector. It's…not yours," said Translator. "We are in danger."