“Aunith to Niocia jump complete. Niocia III on visuals. Fitz, full scan please—we’re right on the edges of civilised space, here. I don’t want any nasty surprises.”

  “Right you are Cap’” grunted Fitz from his station as his fingers darted to adjust their scanner’s settings.

  The UGC Vantage was a well-worn frigate that had safely seen Niall Reed through nearly a decade and a half of service across more systems and worlds than even he himself could remember. He eased off on the throttle as the flash of their jump into the system faded from his eyes. He had closed them just before the jump, but more and more the blinding light of Nexus travel left a lingering blur across his vision no matter how he shielded them.

  It didn’t much matter. It rarely did these days. The jet black of space stretched before them, dotted with their usual canvas of distant stars, marred only slightly by the tan surface of Niocia III. There was no threat that required his peak visual prowess immediately out of a Jump. The days of sweeping out of a Jump guns already blazing as pulse weaponry blazed around them, or finding themselves materialising in the centre of a pirate ambush, were long past both him, and the Vantage.

  Niall was long past his prime, and both he and his section commander were well aware of it. He had built enough of a reputation and record that he would never simply be shunted aside, of course. But the missions his crew was assigned had gradually become more and more softball as the years had slipped by. Now, he had been reduced to recovery missions and safe-space patrols. Oh, and the scanning of minor Celestial anomalies to confirm whether somebody more qualified to actually do something was required, or simply new scanning equipment.

  His current mission was of the latter variety. The briefing had spoken of a geology research vessel picking up odd readings from the planet’s orbit, and the Vantage, as the closest available crew, were here to confirm the readings and liaise with the UGC brass. Busy work.

  He stood, shoulders squared and back straight, a reflexive reaction to his desire to slump and sigh. Behind him, his small but experienced crew moved about their duties with practiced precision and honed diligence, barely reacting to his sudden decision to stand. They had served together a good while now, and Niall trusted them all implicitly. Still, he was the Captain.

  It wouldn’t do to let them see him mope.

  “Henson, open a channel with the Head Researcher aboard the Clarke—a Thomas Wellson. Let’s find out what had them excited enough to send an request for aid rather than simply file a report of their findings.”

  Had this been a military craft, that particular decision might have sent ripples of concern through both him and his superiors. They would have know better than diverting border patrols from their course—even if the risk in this part of the Galaxy was low. Perhaps not concerned enough to send more than the Vantage, but there would be a considerable amount more than there currently was.

  Civilian scientists, however, tended to be a little overly sure of the importance of their particular work, and of its importance over whatever job it was you were currently leaving undone to answer their summons.

  “Ah—Cap?”

  Henson’s hesitant voice snapped his attention straight to the man whose clean-shaven face was currently scrunched up into a frown beneath a close-cropped blond hair.

  “Speak.”

  “It’s the Clarke, sir. They’re not responding to our hails.”

  “Actively rejecting, or just not answering?”

  Henson scratched awkwardly at his face. “Neither, sir. We’re not even connecting with their systems.”

  Niall held back the curse on the tip of his tongue, and glanced at Fitz. “Are we detecting them with our scanners—perhaps they left the system for some—”

  He stopped as he saw Fitz already shaking his head, before turning to face him with hard eyes. This time, a sharp, muttered “Fuck,” did manage to slip past his lips.

  “I have them on the far side of the planet, Captain,” Fitz said, voice carefully even. “Totally dark. I’m also getting some considerable interference around their location. The readings are highly unusual.”

  “Celestial?”

  Fitz shrugged. “Hard to say with just our own scanners. It’s possible.”

  Now the whole crew had paused, stopping to watch the conversation between the three. Niall could see that each of his five subordinates had reached the same conclusion he had. Something had happened to the Clarke. They were already too late.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Fuck.

  Protocol said that a retreat was best, here. Advise UGC command, and regroup with reinforcements before investigating. Pirate groups would happily pick off a lone ship by numbers alone, and most merc crews would risk the fight if the prize was worthwhile. Stacking the numbers in their favour was the sensible way to play this.

  Of course, that did essentially leave any survivors that might still alive for the proverbial wolves, which Niall didn’t think he could really countenance.

  “Henson, can you get me UGC command?”

  There was a pause, then— “Negative. In fact, I’m not able to open comms to any out of system person. Something’s affecting our ability to broadcast.”

  Niall scowled. They wouldn’t be able to jump again for another half an hour, and in that time, they’d be sitting ducks for whatever had brought silence to the Clarke. Half an hour with no back up. If it were pirates or mercs, it was even odds whether they were already long gone or preparing an ambush. If it was Abyss, then the rift was already long closed, or else Fitz would have seen it by now.

  Either way, Niall knew he couldn’t simply stay put when there were potentially survivors in need of assistance.

  “Knuckle up, everyone. We move to Alert Level Four. We currently don’t have enough information to plan for an enemy, if there even is one—but we need to be ready for anything regardless. Fitz, keep those eyes peeled. I want to know if so much as a damned ant moves in this system. Henson, alternate between hailing UGC command for back up and the Clarke for a status update, just in case. Mason, man the gunner’s station. Choudhary, weapons check. The Clarke may be being held by hostiles, and I want us ready to board it if needed.”

  His crew chorused their understanding in near-perfect unison as Niall dropped back into his chair and set his hands at the controls. To his left, a screen showed the long distance scans of the planet’s orbit, and he smoothly fed power to the engines, and the Vantage pulled away in near silence. There had been times in his career that he’d been frustrated at how his recon-centred ship had often found itself outgunned, but right now, he couldn’t be more grateful.

  They were equipped with scanning dampeners and engines that very few sensors on the market could detect whilst they were outside of visual range. In many ways, the Vantage had been designed for situations just like this, where the threat was unclear.

  Looking over the scans whilst his ship cut through space on a course that hugged Niocia III as closely as possible, he saw the Clarke clearly marked, albeit surrounded by dozens—possibly even hundreds of other entities of various shapes and sizes. At their initial distance, their scanners hadn’t been able to clearly image what these shapes were, so the reading he was looking at simply looked like a messy clump of dots on the screen.

  To a lot of younger men, those clumps likely would have been unrecognisable, but looking closely, Niall’s eyebrows rose up out of their own accord. He couldn’t possibly be right. It was impossible. But the readings didn’t lie, and he couldn’t think of a single other thing it could possibly be. It was very difficult, after all, to forget what something like that looked like on a long range scanner.

  He leant on the thrusters a little more; the ship lurching forward slightly as they accelerated and Fitz shot him a curious frown. Niall ignored it. Instead, his eyes stayed focused on the planet’s edge where in just a few moments, they would be able to see with their own eyes what was creating those—

  “Shit,” Fitz muttered as the Vantage rounded the planet enough to finally lay eyes on the Clarke.

  Niall swallowed, and was inclined to agree with the man. The Clarke drifted ever so slowly through the void of space, and mercifully appeared untouched by outside forces, although its systems were entirely dark. That did mean there was no life support systems active on board, but no signs of battle or boarding at least meant there was a possibility the crew had evacuated and were therefore still living.

  That, however, was not what had Niall’s breath sticking in the back of his throat.

  The Clarke was surrounded. Not, thankfully, by enemies. At least, they weren’t enemies any longer—it was very difficult to be somebody’s enemy when you were dead. All around the silent research vessels were scores of clumps of twisted, ruined metal—the carcasses of a veritable fleet of destroyed ships. As they flew closer, he could see that their hulls were rent and torn, and covered in a mass of scorched puncture wounds, and in some places, gaping maws where thick metal had seemingly been entirely melted away.

  There must have been a hundred destroyed ships that floated around the Clarke, and from the damage he could see, Niall knew he’d been exactly right—nothing looked quite like the aftermath of a massive naval battle on long range scanners. The image of it tended to stick in your mind, when a good many of those dots represented crews your friends had been serving on.

  In certain parts of the galaxy, where UGC and free space territory overlapped, sights like this were not uncommon. He’d fought in both Separatist conflicts in his lifetime and had seen his fair share of graveyards just like this.

  The trouble was, those conflicts had happened on the other end of the Galaxy. To his knowledge—and his history was pretty good—neither this system nor its close neighbours had ever seen any space combat on anything close to this scale since humans had first arrived here, and that wasn’t even the strangest of it.

  “Fitz,” he said slowly, as he once again brought the ship to a slow crawl. “Those ship match any spec you’ve ever seen?”

  The man, his own console almost completely disregarded as he too stared, shook his head slowly. “I was thinking they must be some kind of defunct, outdated models, but some of those poor fuckers were better equipped than we are. I’ve never seen anything like them—and nothing I can see is appearing in our manufacturer databases. How about you, Cap?”

  This time, Niall did curse out loud. That really left only a few options. First, some merc group or other had managed to design and build their own large fleet, and subsequently managed to get it destroyed before it had ever been seen. Second, they and the Clarke had inadvertently stumbled into some top-secret UGC military clusterfuck, which was unlikely given that they’d been ordered here by the UGC themselves. Or, the third, far more terrifying option:

  These ships were not human made.