Niall’s boots touched the cold metallic sheen of the great ship’s interior, and he had to fight back the urge to suck in a surprised breath. The material somehow gave way to the impact, cushioning the touch of his foot, like stepping on a mattress. Rather than drift immediately away into the loping low gravity walk he’d been expecting, the inward flex of its surface also served to partially grip onto his foot, giving him just enough leverage to push forward into the next step without the aid of his suit’s micro-thrusters.

  “What the shit?” Came Fitz’s surprised grunt as his own feet touched the floor behind him, followed quickly by Bakare.

  “Some kind of adaptive alloy?” She muttered. “You think the whole ship is made from this?”

  Niall shrugged as he pushed forward, allowing his thrusters to turn his stride into slow-drifting leaps with practiced ease and control. “I’d have to assume so. The force absorption a material like this could allow for would make for far more resilient warships. It’s what I would do, if possible.”

  “I can certainly see why a ship of techies might leap without looking with all of this in front of them,” Fitz mumbled, eyes scanning left and right, finger resting on his weapon’s trigger.

  “All of them? At once?” Bakare asked pointedly.

  Fitz didn’t answer. These weren’t questions any of them had failed to consider before coming here, and Fitz wasn’t nearly na?ve enough to be living under any illusions about what they were walking into.

  The dark, still gleaming corridors of the strange ship had an unsettling stillness to them. Niall had walked the corpses of destroyed ships on salvage and rescue runs enough that he was used to the strange disquiet of spaces meant to be busy now forever silenced. But this place had an uncomfortable edge. Not simply because shards of scorched metal and debris hung in the air like motes of dust, bits of shredded hull and infrastructure, together with the decayed remnants of the personal effects of whatever used to live here.

  It was more that everything about this place was wrong. Its sleek curves played tricks on his eyes, the odd patterns on the walls swam at the corners of his vision, making his peripheral awareness scream in danger every time he forgot about them. The ceiling sat a little too low; the floor concaved at a peculiar angle.

  As he pushed further inward to the centre of the craft, he couldn’t help be reminded that every single aspect of his own ship had been ergonomically designed to be as suitable for his human sensibilities as possible. This craft, despite not appearing too strange from a distance, had been equally ergonomically designed, only for something else.

  “Cap, Bakare, get a load of this,” Fitz said suddenly, beside a doorway jammed half-open, he’d stuck his weapon’s light inside to sweep.

  They’d passed several such doors on their silent walk through the ship, though most had seemed to be simple workspaces, devoid of much of anything else but blank screens and monitors, atop desks that sat at strange heights with odd shapes.

  Niall turned to Bakare with a nod, and she raised her rifle to scan the corridor, whilst he stooped into the room behind Fitz. It was a large, circular space that sloped down in the centre like a bowl. Along the walls, circular spheres made of that strange metal topped with glass panels rested, dozens of them ringed around the walls.

  “What do you think they are, Cap?”

  Niall peered inside the closest through filthy glass, and saw nothing but faded fabric coating the inside, like a crib.

  “Beds, maybe? No way to know for sure,” he said, running his light over several more until he froze on one, holding hundreds of drifting shards of ivory. Bones. Similar to his own, and yet not. He grimaced. “Graves, now.”

  “Cap—where’s the rest of it?” Fitz asked, a slight hitch in the back of his throat for the first time since all this had begun.

  “What do you—”

  Suddenly, it clicked. It was just bones. No skin, no flesh or organs. Bones. Of course, his brain had simply accepted this as natural for a body left for hundreds of years to decompose. Only, decomposition shouldn’t have happened at all with this place exposed to the vacuum of space. There were a few explanations his thoughts provided as to what had happened to the rest of its body, but he couldn’t help but fixate on the one that inspired the most fear.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “What do you suppose did them in?”

  Niall turned back to the door. “Hopefully nothing that’s still here. Let’s get to that signal, Fitz, and then get the fuck out of here.”

  He turned his back on the spheres and used his thrusters to propel himself out of the room, perhaps a little faster than necessary. Bakare, still tense and alert, lowered her rifle and fell into file behind him, and Niall found himself appreciating the quiet professionalism.

  The deeper they went, the heavier the silence weighed, a strange counterpoint to the gradually strengthening distress ping from the Clarke’s crew. Corridor after corridor took them on a winding path downwards, checking and clearing each room and side passage they passed for signs of life, or even signs that the crew of the Clarke had been here at all.

  There was none.

  Instead, they passed room after room of the strangely familiar tainted with the strange. Rec rooms filled with equipment and machines none recognised, mess halls littered with utensils and appliances designed for hands that weren’t human. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that Niall had spent his entire life aboard military ships, he might not have recognised these spaces at all.

  It was the details that gave it away. Strange symbols, graffiti, scored into the sides of desks in a moment of boredom. Mess tables arranged in tightly spaced columns through a room—efficiency over comfort. The longer he spent walking through this place, the more he felt that no matter how strange or alien the beings that served here might have been to him, he could have found as much of a home here as he had on the Vantage.

  The signal led them away from where Niall assumed the bridge likely would have been, instead winding downwards into the bowels of the ship. Office spaces and excersise rooms began to be replaced first by repair stations, some holding remnants of half-repaired or serviced equipment and weaponry—the latter of which Fitz had to be dissuaded from approaching, an eager glint in his eyes. Then came the engineering bays, where parts of the ship were being worked on and maintained, as well as storage places for tools and materials.

  The gruesome discovery of more bones in some rooms sealed off before the hull breach only occasionally marred curiosity and wonder, their flesh cleanly stripped away, just as the first body’s had been.

  Finally, they reached their destination. A sizable double-door stood between his three-person team and the origin of the signal. Bakare raised her short-range scanner and sent a pulse through to the room beyond, giving them a simple mapping of the space awaiting them, and winced.

  “Still no life signs, Captain. The room itself is large. A lot of open space, with some kind of….structure in the middle. I can’t tell what it is from the shape.”

  Niall nodded. “Be ready for anything, regardless of the scans. Someone set that ping.”

  “Vilumi IV?” Fitz asked with a sour grunt.

  “Vilumi IV.”

  Bakare tilted her head slightly. “Sir?”

  “Rescue gone south years back. Slavers raided a colony where some important UGC upper echelon type happened to be. We were sent to get them back from a half-derelict space station they’d converted to some sort of auction house. Our scanners saw our kidnapped colonists alive and well—even picked up on the equipment keeping one of the older victims’ heart going—and we were given the go ahead to begin a rescue.”

  “It was bullshit,” Fitz finished with a grunt. “Bastards had found a way to mimic the colonists’ signals and hide a lot of their own and used it to bait us into attacking when they had us fully out-manned and out-gunned. Total clusterfuck.”

  “What happened to the colonists?”

  Niall scoffed. “No idea. I heard later that they’d sent Namhai to rescue the high priority target. But the rest? Likely already sold into whatever hellhole in Indy Space was willing to pay—too far ahead of any trail to be easily found, and nobody the brass felt was important enough to expend the resources needed to try.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuck is exactly right,” Fitz more growled than spoke, and Niall forced the bitter swell in stomach at the thought of that day to still.

  He didn’t like to admit, even to himself, how much that failure still rankled him, even to this day. The mission hadn’t been his. He’d still been far too junior to lead anything back then, but he still woke thinking about the other people that had been taken occasionally, even now. About what they’d been through because of their failure. His failure.

  “We weren’t ready, then. We are now. Ready?” He asked.

  More than anything, though, he woke thinking about how the families of those people from Vilumi still must feel. What the mothers and fathers, or the children, of those taken must imagine their loved one is going through when they close their eyes. How those thoughts could never stop, because their family member had never been found, alive or otherwise.

  He would not fail in the same way here. Alive or otherwise, the families of the Clarke’s crew would know, even if he had to fight his way out of an ambush to tell them.

  Bakare and Fitz raised their weapons with a nod, and Niall let out a quick breath, checked his weapon’s safety and stepped into range of the automatic door’s sensors.