As I did so, I tensed, waiting for the moment.

  It came a second later, the flash, and I quickly recorded all the things I had seen. I couldn't take a screenshot, even though I knew I was seeing it, all that was recorded was black after all, but I noted where the bounty hunter ship was, how far away the transit point was, and where the... tentacle... was...

  I couldn't see it anymore.

  There were... strange streams, almost conduits all around me, but no tentacle, no lindworms.

  There were pretty massive... islands? That seemed to be drifting along with us. Like circular tubes, with a flat middle...

  The tentacle had been there the entire time, and now I couldn't see it.

  This freaked me out more than anything else, and I wound up shifting where I was looking to a completely different direction to see if I could see it on the next flash.

  The flash came. No tentacle. But I noted the direction the bounty hunter ship had drifted. I could make it out, barely, on passive sensors, but the flashes I saw gave me far more information.

  Another flash, still no signs of the tentacle, but I was able to note a third position of the bounty hunter ship relative to me.

  With that, and the minimal data my passive sensors were returning, I was able to figure out it's course and speed relative to myself pretty accurately.

  I gave the order, and loaded the modified torpedo into the tube.

  I double checked all of my calculations.

  And then fired.

  It was not a particularly notable launch, just a puff of pressurized air that forced it onto the trajectory I needed it to be on. The drive in it had been physically disabled.

  I goosed the thrusters, firing the compressed air for all I was worth to get as far away from the bounty hunter vessel as I could and take us to the transit point.

  This was complicated by the fact that I had to dodge these islands floating in my way.

  It would have been easier if they had chosen a direction to be going but they were just all floating willy nilly, this way and that, one tumbling clockwise, the other counterclockwise, THIS one was tumbling in multiple different axis and was also a headache to navigate around without getting caught on the edge.

  Well the floating willy nilly thing wasn't entirely true, they were all flowing in one direction. Thankfully it was the same direction I was going. It still made flying around them feel stress inducing.

  I just wanted to go faster than they were going.

  An alert pinged my display. The bounty hunter ship was maneuvering forward as well, also on maneuvering thrusters. They could also probably see me on their sensors and were trying to match my movements.

  “Fuck.” I said, as the bounty hunter vessel adjusted it's path towards me.

  “What is it captain?” Hook said.

  “The bounty hunters are matching our maneuvers.” I said.

  “I was going to ask, SHOULD we be maneuvering in the void captain?” Hook replied.

  “It's in the stuff previous you sealed Hook. It's safe for me, but...” I said, as I changed my vector in relation to a flash that revealed more of those floating round tubes... tires! They looked like tires, floating in a river kind of...

  it also revealed that the bounty hunter ship was headed right for one of the tires, it's thruster boosting setting itself right in the path of one as it tried in vain to catch up to me.

  I winced as I saw the front of the ship crunch like a beercan, the whole front crumpling inward like a cheap car whose crumple zones just gave up all at once.

  In the next flash I could see it embedded in the side of the tire it had been headed towards...

  And I could see a dozen lindworms crawling over the tire towards it's crash site.

  “Well that's not too to many... maybe they won't get in.”

  These Lindworms looked small, even from so far off, smaller than the smallest I had seen even.

  Which brought up more concerns as to how I was able to make them out at all from this distance but I buried that thought before I got distracted from the situation at hand.

  And then the missile exploded.

  It went off exactly where I had expected it to, which means it went off quite a ways behind where the bounty hunter vessel had been before they started maneuvering and crashed into the tire,. Tyre? In my head spelling it with a y made it cooler.

  Did I care?

  Yes.

  I mentally smiled to myself as I waited for the next flash. The explosion had been too far off to cause any damage to the bounty hunter vessel at all. I also stopped my maneuvering thrusters until I could make sense of what is happening.

  The next flash that came left me cold inside.

  I figured out where all of the lindwurms were.

  They were flowing out of the enormous floating islands, streaming towards the site of the explosion, which had torn a gigantic hole in the... membrane? That covered space here.

  I made sure that I wasn't going to run into any of the tyres any time soon, before I went back to watching for the next flash.

  The next flash came, and I could see a swarm of Lindwurm's swirling around the site of the explosion.

  And the bounty hunter vessel was blanketed by them.

  I wished I could close my eyes. My imagination flashed with scenes from Carolina's ship. Carnage everywhere, people being torn limb from limb.

  Blood.

  I knew what the Tyre's reminded me of.

  Blood cells.

  Giant blood cells.

  The Lindwurms lived on the tentacles, I had seen them swimming to and from it before...

  It wasn't much of a jump from that to the idea that they lived IN the tentacle.

  In it's blood specifically.

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  Which meant...

  We were also IN the tentacle.

  In one of it's blood vessels, specifically.

  Or whatever the equivalent was. I knew that I was grasping at straws but from what I could see it all felt right. I wasn't sure if the Lindwurms were part of this things immune system, or if they were some kind of parasite infecting the tentacle, but I could put enough pieces together to understand at least some of what I was seeing.

  “Captain, your blood pressure is getting extremely elevated.” Hook stated.

  “I just realized something intense Hook, I'll be fine.” I said.

  “I am going to request Carolina come up to the Bridge.” Hook said.

  “That is not necessary Hook. Nothing she can do.” I replied.

  “She can stand by with your medication.” Hook stated.

  I sighed.

  I should probably start taking that.

  It was the entire reason we had gone down to Hou ji in the first place.

  I switched to watching Carolina. She had taken Megan and Hwang to her quarters, and the two soldiers were sitting on her bunk while Carolina stood leaning on the door, they were talking about something...

  “...Wait what do you mean something in transit tore apart your crew?” Hwang asked from her reclined position, having leaned back all the way across the bunk till only her head was upright, supported by the bulkhead.

  “I mean we went into transit, then something on the ship blew, probably one of the shield clusters we had had to do a lot of damage control on them in the fight, and then all of a sudden invisible horrors were clawing their way into and through the ship.”

  “But if they were invisible how did you know they were there?”Megan asked

  “ Any time the cut someone in half they would get covered in blood, it was like in those movies with the invisible monsters that you only see via blood spatter.” Carolina explained her story. I expected her to look grim recalling it but instead she looked... thoughtful.

  They were quiet for a moment, and I was about to interject when Megan spoke up.

  “Why wouldn't anyone talk about these things? I've never heard of them outside of stupid begrade movies. Our entire civilization uses jump drives, SOMEONE should have discovered this.” Megan said.

  “Either because they don't know, or because talking about it would bring interstellar travel to a halt.” I said over the PA, making both Hwang and Megan jump.

  Carolina, to her credit, just grinned up at me.

  “Everything good Brayden?” She asked.

  “For certain levels of good. Hook is pestering to get you up here with my medicine.” I replied, not wanting to exposit more and freak out Hwang and Megan.

  “You planning on getting out of the chair for awhile?” She asked.

  “Yeah, things are handled here. All that's left is to drift to the transit point.” I said.

  “ETA?” She asked.

  “Unknown. Soonish.” I replied.

  “And our pursuer?” She continued.

  “Handled.” I intoned, solemnly.

  Both Hwang and Megan looked spooked.

  “Handled? How did you handle him? I thought ships that fired weapons in the void just spontaneously exploded? Wait? Did you trick HIM into firing weapons?” Megan asked. Sharp that one, that's essentially how it would have gone if the other ship HAD fired weapons.

  “Nope. Used a trick that made this place think he HAD fired weapons.” As I said that I got another flash. The Lindworms were radiating out from the blast site, and the blast site looked... sick. Not just empty, but like a wound that was infected.

  “That being said... we may be doing less drifting than I just suggested.” I said, as I sent a burst from the thrusters to put one of the floating blood cell things between me and the outwardly expanding radius of Lindwurms. Hopefully they'd hit the Cell and stop.

  Carolina spoke up. “What's happening Brayden?”

  “Eh.... what I did to get him is catching up to us, brace for acceleration.” I said.

  I figured I had... not much, time, but some time left as the expanding wavefront of Lindwurms continued seeping towards us. Just like any other shockwave it was spreading out, and while at the start the Lindwurms were very close together, to the point that at least a hundred had latched onto the bounty ship, now they were far more spread out.

  Carolina moved inside out of the way of the door and braced herself against the bulkhead with a leg and wrapped her arm around one of the protrusions in the wall.

  “Strap in girls, It could get rough.” She said.

  The girls strapped themselves into Carolina's Bunk using the webbing which was honestly way more versatile than I thought it was, each strap had multiple attachment points and they were able to strap themselves in sitting up against the back of the bunk.

  I repeated the warning to the medical bay to Doctor Smith and Ricky, though the later was passed out on the bed. The doctor strapped Ricky down and then folded a seat down from the wall and sat in it, strapping himself in with webbing similar to what the girls had strapped themselves in with.

  I goosed the thrusters and sent us jumping from cover to cover of the blood cells, moving further away from the wavefront.

  After three I figured we were almost far enough away that it was unlikely that the lindwurms would hit us.

  “Okay, I think we're fine.” I said to both the girls and the medical bay.

  “What was that Brayden?” Carolina asked. She had been trying to talk to me throughout but I had just sent a 'busy' text to her datapad.

  “Uh.... turns out I may have made something mad in here, and I was moving us to cover from it.”

  “Wait, what is there to be made mad?” Hwang asked, unbuckling themselves and standing.

  “What's there to take cover behind?” Megan added as she stood up shakily.

  Carolina looked at Hwang, then up at the ceiling.

  “Don't worry about it.” I said to Hwang.

  And that was when something hit us.