They'd gotten a bottle of Doohan 12-Year at the Hub. Brant considered this a good omen, as it was generally held to be one of the finest and smoothest of the dirt-cheap scotches available on the wider galactic market. Seated at the long table in the briefing room with a double on the rocks, she didn't read it as such a good omen anymore.

She took another sip and screwed up her face. "This stuff's nasty," she muttered to 78.

"Warned you," 78 said. "References on human culture all concur: scotch, very much an acquired taste." His speech was garbled and faster than usual, but that wasn't unexpected. He was mildly high on toxchips, tiny data drives containing engi intoxicant programs. As Brant understood them, they were basically computer viruses that interfered with 78's social and cognitive functions until his antivirus systems could neutralize them. They'd been developed expressly for moments like these: getting intoxicated with someone was a popular bonding experience throughout the galactic community, and the engi had devised a way to join in.

They sat in silence for a minute after that, Brant taking intermittent sips, 78 occasionally picking up a chip from the small tray in front of him and placing it on his arm to interface.

It had been an act. Mostly. She hoped. She'd worked out the game plan with Ahab and 78 before they talked to the prisoners. It had apparently been a good game plan: she'd emphasized the fact that the Kestrel was doomed and so the intel wouldn't even make a difference; that it was the men who would suffer than McRee herself; and that Brant was unstable and vicious enough to make them suffer brutally. It was seriously all an act.

Brant took another sip. The crew would join her and 78 later for a briefing on the whole situation, but they were both too shaken up at the moment. Brant had asked Ahab if he needed a breather, too, but the zoltan had just thanked her politely and gone off, whistling, to his post.

"Could offer scotch as gift to prisoners. Might…smooth things over?"

Brant cocked an eyebrow at this suggestion.

78 shrugged. "Yes…but, whole goal of Rebellion was a sovereign human state, casting off control of non-humans over human destiny. Realization that whole enterprise is controlled by non-human intelligence may have forced prisoners to reevaluate allegiance."

"Yeah, that's true. But, we also broke that guy's knees." Brant chased the memory away by gulping down the rest of the Doohan. "Ugh, God damn…no, she hates us worse than she'll ever hate this AI. I mean, could you ever work with someone who did that to me?"

78 hummed softly, and sat there nodding to himself. "Probably." He noticed the shock and hurt on Brant's face and chuckled, his laughter glitching and looping with toxchip interference. "Not joking. Would have to take most sensible course, Charlotte. Play meek and unfeeling engi. Convince enemy of my subservience, get them used to my presence. Assess vulnerabilities. Then…bide time."

"Oh, man, you've thought about this."

78 flashed red with embarrassment. "Full intoxicated confession: avenging an injury to you or coming to your rescue is occasional daydream of mine. You saved my life, after all. Dramatic repayment of debt: natural fantasy. Either slow creeping vengeance as just described, or even better, fly in on shuttle, guns blazing, slay enemies in open combat. Then we fly off, or ideally, this happens planetside and we ride off together on tall white equid."

Against her better judgment, Brant gave herself another pour of the Doohan. "Sheesh. You've really thought about this. Am I going to be mad when I hear what we do next in this fantasy?"

"That, as far as daydream goes. But…probably go for frozen yogurt."

Brant laughed hard at that. She punched 78 in the shoulder a little harder than she intended. "My goddam hero."

A quiet moment passed then. By the time it passed, Brant found she'd taken 8's claw in her hand and held on to it.

"When I daydream, you know what I think of?" she asked.

78 wheezed out a sigh. "Dying in blaze of glory?"

"…yeah, actually."

"Frequently imagine same. When death seems so certain, 'How to die best' becomes pressing question. Wrapping dire situation in noble, romanticized imagery has been coping strategy for me."

"Yeah. Yeah! That's it! Until we got this intel, I didn't realize how much I saw this mission as just finding the best time to make a last stand. Now it's like…damn, this really could win the war for us. We really have to find a way to pull this off…" She paused, searching for the words through the haze of scotch. "I didn't realize how much it helped to write myself off as a goner until I realized I couldn't anymore. I'm almost angry that I have to find a way to survive now. Does that make sense?"

"Perfectly. Odds of survival are lower than ever, only with more pressure, fewer coping mechanisms. Still…not all bad."

Another quiet moment. They looked at each other for a long breath, their hands linked. 78 blinked bright blue, whirred, and slid another chip off his tray.

"…still have intoxicants, after all!" he chirped.

"Amen, Mr. 78!" Brant raised her glass.

A few minutes and a tiny bit more intoxication later, the briefing room door slid open, and Toh entered. The Federation-issue chairs were modular in design, and could be modified to better suit the different member races. Toh sat in one that had been broadened to accommodate his massive frame.

"How'd your research go?" Brant asked. Rock scriptures were just about the only literature with references to the Lanius, and she'd tasked him with boning up on what the texts actually said. The hope was that some sort of useful intel might be gleaned.

"Oh, great," he said flatly. "According to a close reading of the Tablets of Hof, Lanius craft have a fatal flaw in their weakness to ion weaponry. They favor heavy laser weapons and boarding with teams of four."

"Whoa – really?" Brant asked, excited.

"Frack, no," Toh said. "What did you expect? All we've got is folklore, fifteenth-hand accounts told by people who had no idea what a spaceship was. Even a lot of our faithful think the Lanius are just a metaphor, not literal demons."

"And you?" 78 asked. Ordinarily 78 was fairly sensitive about the concept of faith, but he was high now and Brant thought she could hear a sneer in his voice.

"Well…" Toh took a long moment before continuing. Brant read it as embarrassment. "See, it's complicated. In scripture, they devoured the crystal race and all their wealth because the crystals got too warlike, and they're prophesied to return for the rest of us if we can't learn peace. And here's the thing: we know there really was a crystal race from a few sites on our home world, even a tomb with one of them preserved in it. We just thought they were omens from the Shaper for our first few millennia, but once we got advanced enough, we realized it was old aliens with high tech. We expected that when we got up into space, we'd find evidence of a whole galactic civilization destroyed by war. And you know what we found?"

The strange, complete lack of evidence of older spacefaring peoples was common knowledge. "Diddly?" said Brant.

Toh nodded. "Diddly. Not one derelict ship, not one ruin, not one bit of unknown debris to be found in the whole fracking galaxy – not a single physical record of the crystals or any other elder species."

78 whirred. "Wait – wait – rock home world has preserved corpse of crystal organism?"

Brant shook her booze-addled head. That actually was pretty astonishing. This was the first hard evidence of any elder race she'd ever heard of.

"Oh, yeah. No faith required: they were real, most certainly. We might even be their descendants or their experiments or something, but testing confirms they're a different species. So where'd they go? That's what no one can figure. There's a dozen and a half ways a galactic civilization could collapse, sure, but for all their stuff to vanish? That boggles the mind. If these really are the Lanius we're facing here, then I believe the stories that they're eating ships if nothing else. It's the only explanation that rings true for me where all the elder races went."

"Hm. Can work with that, perhaps," 78 said. "Perhaps cover ship in foul-tasting coating? Some sort of old aggressive cheese, perhaps." Toh stared quietly at 78 and Brant stifled a laugh. "Joking! Joking. Predilections unknown. Coating might only make ship more delicious to Lanius palette. No. Still joking. Nevermind." 78's face screen scrambled for a moment, and he slumped forward a bit. "Erm. Too many toxchips."

The door opened again, and Ahab and Karl walked in.

"You a scotch guy, Karl?" Brant asked.

"The Fleet Admiral's a fracking machine?" Karl demanded.

Toh nearly fell out of his chair, his gaze shifting from Karl to Brant. "The Fleet Admiral is a fracking MACHINE?"

Brant looked in front of her on the table, where she had a little checklist of the things they had to discuss at this meeting. She crossed off "Tell everyone the Rebel Fleet Admiral is a machine," and got down to business.

There was only death there.

The Kestrel phased out of jump state, and immediately klaxons blared an alert on the bridge. It was just Brant and Toh there, all other hands at their stations.

"Debris field, captain!" Toh shouted.

"Here?" Brant shouted back. As if in answer to her question, a soft plink chimed through the ship as some large piece of metal collided with the shields and bounced off. Debris at a hub, though? That was practically unheard-of. They were critical to the entire galactic community, and the countless pacts and treaties protecting them had to be respected for at least one reason: every major power in the galaxy would come after you if you damaged one.

The initial scans started coming in, popping up as holo-images in front of Brant.

"Christ almighty…" Brant whispered.

It was a graveyard. A dozen, two dozen, three dozen ships, drifting lifeless in the space around the hub. Freighters, civilian ships, light warships, all of various design and markings. Even after the Rebels moved in, there had been a lot of diversity in the Magna Sector, including some zoltan heritage sites, a lesser engi hive, a few interspecies colonies. And all that diversity was reflected in the wrecks around them.

Ozzog was right: there had still been a few people left alive in the sector. It looked like they'd made a run for it. And they hadn't made it.

Brant had seen her share of ship wreckage in her day, of course. But…this was a lot of dead ships at a site that was supposed to be a sanctuary. She felt chills.

"Charge engines to get us the frack out of here," she said through intercom to 78.

"If I may, captain, I don't think there's reason for undue concern," Ahab keyed in. Another plink against the shields.

"If I crap my pants at the thought of the things that did this, I'd hardly call that undue concern," Brant said.

"I surmise we're looking at the fleet that did this," Ahab said. "Look at the Torus wreckage…yes, note the scar running up its side, how it starts at a uniform shallowness and then suddenly deepens? It pierced shields enough to knock them out, then ran unhindered up the hull. If I didn't find gambling degenerate and wasteful, I'd bet my coat that that a standard-model Halberd did that."

Brant magnified the image of the Torus, and found herself agreeing with the assessment.

"And ah – the Judicator over there has a Halberd!" Ahab declared.

"And it's peppered randomly with laser bursts, like from that Torus's attack drones…" Brant trailed off.

Karl keyed in. "I DON'T GET IT. I…"

Brant cringed and snatched her earpiece out. She saw Toh spasm in his seat. She shook her head and held the piece a few inches from here ear.

"Karl, turn your goddam volume down!" Toh shouted.

There was static over the line as Karl fiddled with his earpiece. "Sorry, still getting used to this thing…uh, I don't get it. Why fight each other this close to escape?"

"This is a low-traffic hub, only able to accommodate a few ships a day," Brant explained. "And when you force heavily-armed people to stand in line in high-stress situations…"

"…ah," Karl said. "Yeah, I think I get it now. How does that change the plan from 'get the hell out of here,' though? A debris field's a pretty dangerous place to hang around, with or without apocalypse demons."

Another plink against the shield, as if in agreement.

"Right you are, and your top priority is still getting that engine ready to jump as soon as it's able. But we can hold out here for a while, and we've got to make the most of it…" Brant entered some commands into her chair console, and began scanning through the wrecks around her to see if any still had life signs. She didn't expect any: this had most likely been a desperate fight to get out of the sector quickly, and any survivors would have made repairs or crowded into shuttles and done just that. She was so sure of this assumption, in fact, that she almost missed the one little blip that did come up.

Plink, plink. An alert sounded; shields were down.

Brant cursed. "Brace for impact! And can we please try not to hit every fracking piece of…"

The ship rocked as Toh took it through some drastic maneuvers. The grav compensators kept everyone from becoming stains on the wall as the Kestrel careened about and made sudden changes at thousands of kilometers an hour, but they weren't perfect.

"You want to take over, captain?" Toh asked. He remained focused completely on his piloting, but Brant could hear the frustration in his voice. A second later, the shields regenerated and Brant breathed in. She double-checked the life signs she'd detected and thought the situation over.

"8, take a look at that freighter. Am I seeing this wrong, or is there a survivor over there?"

The commander didn't need to think it over. "Most certainly. Signs are synthetic, and atypical. Assessment: wounded engi."

Brant nodded. She pressed a button on her chair to open a hailing frequency. "Attention, freighter – this is the Aquila-4 of the Galactic Federation. If you require aid, we can assist you in evacuating this space. Please respond."

Plink.

"Oh, Shaper's balls…" Toh muttered.

Nothing from the ship. Brant drummed her fingers against her chair, then stood and started walking off the bridge.

"No answer. Its shields and life support are still active, but that ship is dead in the water. Might have comm troubles. New plan. 8, keep hailing them and see if they respond. Toh and Karl, keep us out of the way of this debris. Ahab, hit the tractor beam and grab whatever worthwhile scrap you can from this field."

"Have bad feeling where you're going with this," the commander said over the line.

Brant broke into a jog down the corridor. "I'm going over there."

"Bad feeling: justified!" 78 squealed. "Requesting permission to board with you, or instead of you! Fellow engi might…

"Denied. The transport can only handle two, and I need you on shields."

Ahab chimed in. "I'm inclined to agree with the commander, captain. The risk seems hard to justify just to save one unknown sailor."

"If you've got a more reliable source on what the Lanius are capable of, I'd love to hear it," Brant shot back. "All those refugees we talked to had cleared out before these things had become much more than rumors. Our guy over there has survived longer in the sector, and we may not have another chance to learn what we're actually up against. That justification enough?"

Ahab sighed. "Roger. But I would still rather get out of here as soon as possible."

"No argument there. Beam me back as soon as possible, whether I've got this guy or not." Brant looked at her wrist unit and checked the readings. It looked like the engines would be ready in five minutes. The transporter would need eight to recharge. She'd consider them lucky if the ship even made it five minutes without taking damage from all this debris, and that could quickly turn ugly if their shields or engines got banged up.

As she stepped into the transporter room, she swiped a few commands into her wrist unit. "Transferring power from beam cannon to transporter," she called out to the crew. That would shave a few minutes off the recharge time. They'd also be at a disadvantage in a fight, but the scans had been pretty conclusive that no functional ships were in the area.

Beam in, find the engi, beam out. Be out of this sector in five minutes. That was the plan.

Plink, plink.

"…well, it's not getting any safer," she said to herself, and she stepped onto the teleporter.

Brant checked their sensors. The survivor aboard the freighter was slowly on the move, and had just entered what seemed to be one of the cargo holds. She targeted the transporter for the corridor he'd just left, hoping to avoid getting a belly full of plasma; even if this was an engi, it was a needless risk to appear out of nowhere and open herself to startled gunfire.

"Transporting in three…two…" she said to her crew.

"…one," and she activated the teleporter. And everything went straight to hell.

"Captain, we've got a…!" Toh shouted.

Brant's breath hitched and her mind reeled, but she had no time for any thought more coherent than "Of fracking course" before everything became light and haze.

She materialized a second later into near darkness, the steely corridor lit only by the orange emergency lighting. She lost the signal from Toh, but an alarm blared in her earpiece. She breathed in and out, and a primitive part of her brain screamed the same warning that she saw now on her wrist console: there was atmosphere in here, but almost no oxygen.

She took that primitive part of her brain and clapped her hand over its mouth. Panic would speed up her breathing, and in this atmosphere that would kill her. What was happening? The sensors hadn't indicated any hull breaches, and the life support systems were functioning. But the air was bad, this was bad, this was very fracking bad, she…

She calmly approached the closest door and opened it, and the gust of air that blew out felt better on her face at that moment than any lover's caress ever had done. She strode in to the adjoining room, a mess hall by the look of it, and sealed the hatch behind her.

Something weird with the life support system, she thought. Sabotaged, maybe. Or they powered them down temporarily and weren't able to turn them on again. There weren't a lot of reasons why a ship with undamaged life support would have a dead atmosphere. Was the engi just running from one room that still had oxygen to another, then?

A great PLONK echoed through the ship. This was a commercial craft; chances were, its shields were specialized for exactly this kind of situation, and would be nearly worthless in combat. Hopefully, that meant the freighter was safe for at least the next five minutes.

Next problem. "Toh, I lost you in transit. Report."

"We've got a…oh, Shaper…" Toh never let emotion into his voice. This was bad. "…oh, Shaper and Preserver, I didn't actually think…"

"Ship consistent with refugee reports has decloaked," 78 said, calmly but quickly.

Her breath caught in her lungs. It had nothing to do with the atmosphere. "Are you saying…?"

"Get the hell out of there, Charlotte!" the commander screeched.

Uncertainties clouded her mind, but she was truly menaced by what she already knew: these things had shown themselves right after the Kestrel depowered its weapons. That made perfect, terrible sense to her.

They could hope these things came in peace, or try to bluster them off. But if these things got to open fire first, Brant had a bad feeling there'd be no chance for retaliation.

"Divert something back to the beam cannon and get ready for a fight. Don't shoot unless they fire first, or…unless the debris field knocks out their shields and gives you an opening," she said.

"I've got to stop talking. Oxygen is busted over here, gotta' conserve. 78, you're in command until I'm back aboard. And Toh?"

A pause. "Captain?"

"I want you to repeat after me: at least it's not the spiders again."

She heard him breathe in and out slowly. "At least it's the not spiders again."

She wasn't sure she believed him, but she'd have to take it. They still had four minutes before they'd be able to jump, five minutes before she'd be able to beam out. All she really wanted to do was hunker down here and watch the data coming in and direct the fight if it went down, but she wasn't sure how much good air there was in here, and there was still the matter of rescuing the engi. If nothing else, the freighter had a transport beam of its own, but she'd need the access codes from a crewman to use it. The Kestrel's sensors were now directed at the unknown craft, so she'd have to find this guy on her own.

She opened the door and walked back into the corridor. The air actually seemed breathable in here now; maybe the oxygen system was failing, but not completely busted. It was confusing, but hopefully she'd be gone before she had to care. She inched up to the cargo bay door and put her ear against it. Something was scuffling around and making some noise. Good – the engi was still in there. She shouted into the closed hatch:

"Hello? I mean you no harm. I'm a Federation captain; we can see you're in distress, and you didn't respond to our hails. I'm here to help."

She held her ear to the door again, and heard…nothing. Whatever was in there went still.

"Enemy shields have taken several nasty hits from debris. We might get that opening soon," Ahab said just a little hungrily.

"Own shields at fifty per…make that twenty-five percent," 78 said.

Brant cupped her hands again. "I'm coming in! We've got to go right now!"

She opened the hatch to the cargo bay, and the emergency lighting wasn't nearly enough to light up the room. The yawning, open room was nothing but a haze of shadows and dim lights to show where the walls were, and...

…a door on the other side of the room hissed open. Brant only caught a glimpse of a shadow scuttling out of it before it slammed shut again.

"Oh God damn it," she muttered. She must have spooked him. She didn't exactly want to chase a frightened cyborg around a derelict ship with crap oxygen while her crew tried to sucker-punch hungry demon-aliens, but as ever, she had to play the hand she was dealt. Besides, this guy could get her out of here faster, and he might still have valuable intelligence. And blah blah blah the right thing to do, too.

She ran into the cargo bay. "Come on, guy! This is a rescue mission! For what it's worth, engi slaves aren't even valuable enough to justify the…"

She almost fainted. Her breaths became ragged and desperate. The air in the cargo bay was all inert gas, no oxygen. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she'd gone running off after the engi without checking, and she was nearly at the door on the far side of the room before her lungs or wrist unit had figured out something was wrong. She stumbled up to the door, amazed how quickly a few breaths of this dead air had winded her and pretty sure she didn't have enough oxygen in her blood to get herself back to the corridor she'd left. She opened the door ahead of her and jumped through, sealing it behind her and praying that the air she was breathing now had some O2 in it.

"Three minutes on jump!" 78 said. "Four on tran-" A loud blast interrupted him. Something had hit the ship.

The air was thin but breathable. She looked at the system readout on her wrist console. A shape moved at the far end of the corridor. What was going on with the life support? They'd just taken a direct hit to shields, a door closed at the far end of the corridor, their shields were out and 8 might be dead and the Lanius had come...

Brant slapped herself. "8, report," she said.

The channel opened again, and she could only here alarms and the hiss of the vacuum. "Alive. Hull breached, shields damaged. Repairing."

She wanted to strangle Toh. She knew, of course, that without his deft piloting and Karl's help they would never have lasted even this long in the field, but her anger needed someplace to go, especially when another piece of debris struck the ship a few seconds later. Brant breathed a sigh of relief as she saw it hadn't done any more damage to shields, or to their weapons or engines.

Then she saw.

78 came on. "Charlotte…"

The teleporter was down.

"Don't even think about it," she hissed. "Without shields you're all dead. I can catch a ride out of here, but I need a ship to go back to."

She focused on the door at the end of the corridor, the one that had just shut. Why weren't the Lanius firing yet? Or…was this their attack? Was the bombardment of debris not as random as it seemed? Who knew what a race of ancient legend was capable of? No, there was no point to those questions right now. She had to focus. This survivor might well be her only ticket out of here, and she jogged after him.

He was clearly agitated, perhaps paranoid, and she had no time for an extended chase. She didn't announce herself this time, just opening the hatch and stepping through slowly. It was very dark in here, too, only those same dim orange emergency lights ringing the chamber, but they provided enough light in this small space to reveal the beds, shelves, and footlockers of crew quarters.

There was no one in here. She looked ahead, and saw an open door at the end of the quarters, but the lights had failed in whatever room was beyond it. The open hatch was a rectangle of black space.

"Shields just…about…" 78 said. A squeal of static cut him off. Brant glanced at her unit, but it had lost connection to the craft. The sensors must have been hit, knocking out short-range communication. Well, at least it told it her that the air in here was good.

She walked slowly into the quarters, staring into the shadows of the next room. She heard shuffling in there, saw the dim lights around her reflect on some shape moving in there. She held her hands up to show she wasn't coming for a fight, but thought keenly of the baton and sidearm on her belt. "OK – can we talk now? I didn't mean to trap you, but it looks like we've got to rescue each other now."

The door shut behind her, and she didn't walk much further into the chamber. She didn't want to corner this guy, but she didn't want him escaping, either.

The movement stopped in the next room. Brant moved cautiously forward.

"That's it. I'm here to help you, and I need…"

Something moved, and two red eyes stared back at her out of the darkness.

That was no engi.

"…oh, God."

The thing in the next room crossed the doorway and came into the half-light. It was tall, and its body bristled with sharp metallic edges and points. The eyes glowed red, but they held her in a stare as cold and ancient as the void.

And without a pause, without a sound, it charged at her.

Brant drew her weapons and opened fire, getting a grazing shot on the thing's shoulder; the metal there did seem to fragment, but the thing did not stagger or cry out. It closed with her and dodged her baton, then grabbed it just above the handle before she could swing it again. She tried to pry it loose, but the thing's talons had melted against the metal of her weapon and fused the baton to itself. Brant let the baton go and tried to raise her sidearm, but the thing swatted it away.

And Charlotte Brant, unarmed and alone, hit the space monster in the face with her best left hook. It was like punching a steel bucket, but the thing reeled back. She hit it with a flurry of jabs as she closed, then kneed it in the abdomen. She couldn't tell exactly if she was hurting it, but certainly she was surprising it…

One of her strikes went wide, and her vision reeled. She stumbled and couldn't catch her feet. Her lungs burned. The alarm sounded in her ear: no oxygen. But…but she'd checked. That wasn't fair. She'd…

She tried to stand, tried to face the thing that was bearing down on her again, but she stumbled again. She tried to control her breathing, but she'd exerted herself too much and now her breaths were ragged, drowning gasps.

The thing's claws came down over her face, and everything went dark.