The impact knocked Hwang off her feet and to the ground, though she kind of bounced more than anything. She was still in her military fatigues and, while there was metal in there that my artificial gravity/magnetic field could grab, there was not really enough to cause her to impact the ground with any real force.

  Which means she quite comically bounced off the floor and floated over towards Carolina, who grabbed her and hauled her down to the ground... deck? The deck.

  “Brayden, what was that?” Carolina asked calmly, her eyes narrowing up at the camera she was glaring at.

  “The universe conspiring to make me eat my own words,” I shot back.

  I had a flash, and I could see what was happening. I could feel it too.

  Most of the shockwave'' had passed us by, so spread out I could only really see it for what it was because I knew where it should be.

  But one of the Lindwurms that had 'impacted' on the far side of the Cell we were sheltering behind had crawled around to our side and apparently leapt to us.

  It was currently digging it's way through the outer hull.

  “We have a boarder.” I said, grimly.

  “What?!?!?” Both Hwang and Megan shouted.

  Carolina closed her eyes and tensed.

  I knew she was reliving what had happened to her old ship, the invisible Lindwurms ripping through her crew.

  “Can you get Cat-bot or Dog-bot online?”

  They were still inside the ship, if I could activate them they could fight these things, but the other drones were in the drone bay that opened to the outside, they would have to crawl around to get in, like what I did on the surface of Hou Ji.

  Or I'd have to dismantle the drone bay to let them in.

  I also didn't really like the odds of a fresh drone going up against an invisible enemy. Cat-bot and Dog-bot had been... learning? To deal with odd situations and I trusted them more at something like this than a brand new drone.

  I also had a bad feeling that launching any of the drones outisde of the ship where they would use their fusion drives to maneuver would have the same effect as setting off that missile that had killed the bounty hunter.

  “I can try... they were hit by an EMP though, I don't know how much of their software it would have fried.”

  “If I have to I'll drive them myself.” I said. At the same time I ordered several of my drones to begin dismantling the inner wall of the drone bay to deploy them out. It wouldn't take long, we had to get them IN after all, but the whole machinery setup made it one way.

  Probably to prevent something with a fusion drive lighting off inside the ship.

  Captain Cofey... What's boarding us?” Megan said fearfully, snapping me back to the present after my little reverie.

  “Hopefully nothing you need to concern yourself with.” I said. Really really hoping that was true.

  “Brayd... Captain Cofey, I know you are unsure of our loyalties right now, but we are trained soldiers, and if this ship goes down here in transit we are all going to die. May we have our weapons back.” Hwang said, calmly and stoicly. As the camera focused in on her eyes I could see the hardness in her eyes.

  She was not wrong.

  But could I trust them if I armed them? We had literally just came out of a fight with their government. A fight where I had been shot. And lost an arm.

  I wasn't bitter.

  Okay maybe a little bitter.

  “Okay, here is what we are going to do. Carolina, you are going to try to get cat-bot and dog-bot online. Megan, Hwang, I'll give you your weapons back and show you to where it may breach, you get to hold on there until we can get dog-bot or cat-bot over there.” I ordered

  “Brayden... they won't be able to see it.” Carolina pointed out the biggest flaw in my plan.

  “I'll deal with that.” I replied, entirely unsure how I was going to deal with it.

  Doctor Smith spoke upward to me in the medical bay. “Captain, what's going on?”

  “Boarders, secure the medical bay and don't let anyone in.” I replied. I felt like I was compartmentalizing information pretty heavily right now, but my earlier conversation with Carolina about whether or not information about the void and what was in it was being actively suppressed was weighing on my mind.

  “Is it the bounty hunter? Trying a boarding action in the void? I heard they were crazy but...” Ricky said.

  I switched back to Carolina, who had ran back to where Dog-bot and Cat-bot had been disabled and promptly plugged in her datapad to Dog-bot, running through diagnostics on the disabled and spread-eagled drone, currently dogpiled on top of Cat-bot.

  Megan and Hwang meanwhile were currently standing outside of Carolina's room... which was now next to four other doors.

  “Do you have an issue.... Corporal? I don't know your rank unfortunately Megan.”

  “Um... Specialist. I'm a part timer, specialist is the highest we can go. No command ranks for us.” Megan said.

  Huh... that sounded different, but okay.

  “Any issues.” I asked.

  Megan and Hwang looked at each other.

  “I think technically you are in command corporal” Megan said, deferring to Hwang.

  Hwang just snorted. “We both know you've been in longer than me. I say we make our own calls but... I don't relish getting murdered by anything crazy enough to board us in the void.” She said.

  “Alright. Let's get you back to your guns, which are...” I said as I checked.

  They had been left outside the medical bay, but some of my repair bots had surreptitiously dragged them into a storage compartment nearby.

  “Still outside the medical bay but in a compartment, follow the lights.” I said, lighting a path for them and setting some of the LED's in the storage compartment to glow so they could find it.

  Then I turned my mind to figuring out how to allow them to SEE the damn Lindworm, along with a cavalcade of errors I was getting from the repair bots trying to let my drones inside the ship.

  Apparently one of the main things preventing it was the fuel lines to the drones, which snaked around and were designed to actively prevent a fully fueled drone from entering the ship. In attempting to just carve out a section for the drones to enter the ship, I had broken the fuel line... which was designed to take damage, so self sealed and shut itself down as soon as it happened, so we didn't have a catastrophic explosion, but now I couldn't get the drones out AND they couldn't power up their reactors. If they tried to do anything but link to the computer and talk to me the drones would have all of... thirty seconds of power, if they were using all their limbs.

  I wish I could move my body so I could groan in frustration, it just wasnt the same in full synch.

  I did it anyway.

  The Lindworm was currently tearing through one of the sections of the ship that had been damaged by the dive bombing aircars on the planet, and while much of the hull had been regenerated, many of the connections for both power and thruster gas had been severed in that area.

  I wondered if I could try my last trick of mixing contaminants in with the thruster gas to 'paint' the lindworm, but with all the damage I would have to introduce it far back enough that it would contaminate a full quarter of my maneuvering thrusters, which would result in us spinning off into space if I tried to fire them any time soon, unacceptable.

  Fuck... what else could I do.

  “Hey Captain? Could you tell us what exactly we are facing now?” Megan called up.

  While I had been working the problem they had made it to the compartment and Hwang was currently retrieving their weapons and ammunition, handing over Megan's rifle and ammunition with two hands while the other girl was meothodically adding it to her... webbing? Armor? I think that was armor in there but honestly I wasn't sure about their gear. It wasn't a vest or plate carrier like in my time but it definitely looked more substantial than a uniform...

  Stop getting lost in the details Brayden focus.

  I turned my attention to them. I was feeling fried really, and maybe talking the issue through with new people could give me a new solution.

  “Okay... I think this is a pretty big secret but I am not sure there are a lot of options, just know that repeating this out 'there' could get you kidnapped and silenced okay?” I prefaced my infodump to them.

  The both looked up at the ceiling, which actually turned their heads directly away from the camera I was viewing them with. I had an internal chuckle at this, maybe I should add paint to the cameras I was using so they could know where to look when I talked to them.

  I guess most other C.O.G. Captains wouldn't have this issue.

  “So... the short answer is the void isn't empty. There are things in the void.” I dropped the bomb.

  I paused.

  “Things? What things?” Hwang fired back after a moment of stunned silence.

  “Uh, living things.” I continued

  I let that sink in.

  “So... there are lifeforms in the void?”Megan said.

  “Yah-huh.” I replied.

  “Are they, like, plankton sized?”Megan continued.

  “No they can in fact be quite quite massive.” I replied, thinking of where we currently are.

  Hwang slapped her hand against her face. “And I am guessing that one of those massive ones is chewing its way into our hull right now.” She interjected.

  “No this one is fairly small. I would guess... mmm... maybe two, three times the length of a human being? Not sure of it's girth, it's hard to tell.” I said.

  “So, wait, no one else has seen these things, how come you can?” Hwang asked.

  “That I don't know, and I was hoping an in depth medical scan would actually reveal the reason for it. When I'm in the void I get flashes of whats going on in it. Like snapshots. It's terrifying and means I basically cannot sleep in the void. At least not without being knocked unconcious, but it has let me see some of what is out there, and most of it is... well terrifying.”

  Megan was standing there with wide eyes looking up at me. I think she was vibrating.

  Hwang nudged her.

  “You okay Megan?” She asked.

  “This is huge!” She practically shouted.

  “What? Why?” I asked through the ships speakers.

  “This completely changes our understanding of higher and lower dimensional physics! There shouldn't be ANY naturally occuring matter beyond the transit points, it's mathematically impossible!”

  I paused. This was... a different reaction than I expected.

  Hwang smirked at Megan, then looked up at my camera.

  “Megan is a bit of an academic, what degree were you working on?” She said to me initially, then offhandedly asked Megan.

  Megan looked giddy as she started talking, blowing right past Hwang's question. “Our entire theoretical model for jump points and the space between is that they are a degeneracy of the vacuum which results in them taking on the same characteristics as...” She began before Hwang shook her.

  “Hey, nerd out later, grab guns now, we need to defend the ship against a mathematical impossibility.” Hwang said before finishing securing her weapon to her rig.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Megan shook her head “ Sorry. Right. Um... so what is it trying to get in?”

  “I call it a Lindwurm, due to it resembling one from the old stories. Snakelike, big claws on two limbs extending out of the front. Only problem is... You can't see it. I can only see it in those snapshots I talked about.” I said.

  “I managed to mix contaminants into my maneuvering thrusters and spray one before, that gave us the ability to see it for awhile, but unfortunately due to its positioning I can't do that.” I continued.

  “Where is it coming through?” Hwang asked.

  I lit up a trail of lights on the ground.

  “Follow the lights.” I said.

  Megan and Hwang ran down my corridors and I focused in on Carolina, who was currently shoulder's deep in Dog-Bot.

  “How's the patient?”

  Carolina jerked in her position inside of dogbot and I heard a loud clang, followed by a stream of what I assume was invective, it was too muffled for my translator to catch it.

  She pulled herself out of the drone rubbing her head and glaring up at the ceiling.

  “Sorry?” I said, trying to be contrite over the PA.

  “It's fine. Not like I haven't smacked myself before. What do you want?” Carolina said.

  “Do you think you can get them online in, say...” A flash hit just then, and I could see the Lindwurm was neck deep in the hull, it's claws gouging out huge chunks of the armored surface.

  “The next few minutes?” It was looking bad. I swore I almost felt pain as it clawed into me. It wasn't really pain ,but the ship felt like my body, and this felt like an insect trying to burrow into my skin. Only without the pain, just the creepy sensation.

  That honestly made it worse in some ways.

  Carolina looked back into the innards of Dog-bot.

  “The EMP fried them pretty good... it sent both their reactors into shut down... I can probably rig some kind of auxillary power source but they won't be able to use any of their main weapons, since those are all plasma based and... it doesen't have any plasma.” Carolina said.

  “Shit, did they vent all their fuel into the ship?” I asked.

  “Once it cooled off yeah, Hook's life support took care of it” She said offhandedly as she went back to working.

  “Do what you can, I don't know if Megan and Hwang's guns will even do anything to this thing. If we can even see it.”I asked.

  “What about fire suppressant?” Carolina piped up, muffled now as she had ducked back inside Dog-bot's Chassis.

  I paused.

  “That could work.” I replied, and left Carolina to her work.

  I switched my internal view over to where Megan and Hwang were currently hunkered down, aiming their guns at a bit of the internal hull I had lit up for them to indicate where I thought the thing would be coming from.

  'lit up' is a bit of a misnomer, I had ignited several LED's in the shape of a bullseye, to make sure I got the point across.

  My external view showed something troubling however, my ships hull had already regenerated over the location the Lindwurm had clawed it's way in, at least enough to make a pressure seal, so that was not an issue, but I could feel it digging around, and it wasn't taking a direct route. It was tearing it's way through the path of least resistance, which made it's course erratic to say the least.

  “Talk to me Cofey, what's going on?” Hwang called up to me.

  “It's crawling around between the outer hull and the bulkheads, I am having a hard time pinning it down.” I turned off the lights. “It's no longer likely to be coming through where I indicated. Stay alert.” I said.

  I ordered as many repair drones as I could into the vicinity of the hull breach, telling them to release fire suppressant in the area. This included all those working on the drone bay, as fixing that was going to take much longer than we had.

  I could almost track the location of the Lindwurm just by the repair drones that started going dead. It wasn't exactly a means to give me an exact location, but I could tell where it was as I first lost one, then another, then a third repair drone. They weren't close enough for the Lindwurm to take out multiple at once, but it gave me an approximate location, and I began circling it with repair drones.

  Once I thought I had it's location I englobed it as best as I could with repair drones in the maintenance ducts, and then 'jumped' into one of them to get eyes on what was happening.

  What filled my... camera's? I wanted to say eyes but camera's was more accurate, was a scene of devastation. The drone I was in was perched at the end of a maintenance tunnel, so it was quite snug around me, but it opened up into a much larger open space that had been clawed into the the machinery that formed the guts that were between the hull and the bulkheads we walked around in.

  As I watched I saw a rent appear in said guts, as it extended it ripped apart conduits and severed cables that either sparked or leaked fluid all over the compartment. A splash hit something and coated the claw for an instant before it was presumably flicked away.

  Or it evaporated, I thought, eyeing the fumes where the claw had been.

  I waited until I got another flash, revealing the Lindwurm in front of me, before I triggered the extinguisher build into the repair drone.

  As I tried this I realized two things, one, the... flashes I got took some time to fade in my vision, and kinda made me blind to what was happening for a moment after the flash. I had not really had to deal with much that required split second timing before, so this was... new. And irritating.

  It meant that most of the little spray I fired missed the Lindwurm by a country mile, impacting the inside of the compartment and expanding into a hard line of thick material as big around as my arm. Considering the reservoir in the repair drone was about the size of one you'd find in a child sized squirt gun, that was pretty impressive.

  A tiny nugget caught on something and expanded to about the size of a base ball.

  The compartment vibrated, and then all hell broke lose.

  All the debris in the compartment went flying, and I had just enough time to see the lump of foam get carved in half before the repair drone I was in got crushed, booting me to a black screen.

  “Well... that kindof worked.”

  I said over the intercomm to both Carolina and the girls... I guess they were all girls, the soldier girls. You know, minus Rekki-Ricky in medical. And Doctor Smith. But they weren't involved in this.

  “What did you try?” Megan asked.

  “Shot a fire extinguisher at it. It didn't like that. I am now down... a lot of drones.” I replied.

  Carolina only grunted from inside the drone she was trying to fix. I wasn't even sure if she heard me.

  “I've already lost a dozen repair drones to this thing I can't afford to lose many more, it is ripping up my internals. The maneuvering thrusters on the starboard side are all non-responsive, that's not counting the ones that are just gone, and... yep there goes the last sensor cluster.” I said, again to both groups.

  I was frustrated. It felt like every move I could make would lead to a worse outcome. Combat drones would cause more of these things to attack us, if not something worse. I had... honestly not a lot of internal defenses, what I did have was meant to clear the corridors of the ship, not the area between the interior and exterior hull.

  The ambush from Megan and Hwang seemed to be my best bet, but if I couldn't give them a target to shoot at they'd just wind up torn apart like... Like the crew of Carolina's ship.

  I wracked my brains for a way through this.

  I jumped back into a repair drone and observed. I pulled back the rest of my drones about half a meter from the little nest this thing was carving into the ship.

  “Is it moving towards anything in particular?” Megan asked.

  That... was a very good question.

  I brought up the schematics of the ship and started looking for... something this creature could be looking for.

  “Hook, can you give me a hand? I need to figure out where this thing is going. Let's use the breach point as a starting point, and... I'll see if I can map out where it's been based on the dead repair drones and what I can see.” I said, both over the intercomm and to Hook. Keeping everyone in the loop right now was important, they had all proved to have decent input at one point or another.

  I opened an editing program and overlaid the ships schematics with it in 3d, and started plotting points where I KNEW the thing had been.

  It's course was erratic to say the least.

  I finished plotting the points and joined them chronologically with a line.

  It... looked like a an erratic line graph, no real pattern.

  “This... is not making any sense to me.”I said.

  “I have come up with a number of potential sites the... Lindwurm could be digging towards Captain Cofey, however I can determine no real pattern.”

  On the schematics a number of bright lights lit up, indicating points of interest.

  “This makes no sense... it doesn't seem to be going for any of them in particular. Maybe... these three? Do they have anything in common?” I asked.

  “One is the Manufactury. Another is the drive and the last is the raw materials bay.” Hook said.

  “That's... not much in common between those places. Wait, is there a stock of any particular elements that's in the material bay, the manufactory, and the fusion drive.” I grasped at straws.

  “There are a few in the materials bay that are used in fusion drives, however there are currently no rare elements being stored in the manufactory.” Hook replied, dashing my hopes.

  “None? Maybe some built into the components of the manufactory?” I asked.

  “No, the manufactory does not, and there are currently no materials in common stored in it's ready access hopper.”Hook said

  This was annoying.

  The only real chance Megan and Hwang had would be to ambush the creature as it clawed it's way out of the wall.

  “Maybe if we average out it's path... wait.” I had a thought.

  I rotated my view of the Lindwurm's path from a side on view to a top down one.

  It was a circle.

  Or more like a spiral.

  It was carving it's way in a spiral pattern towards something, the circle getting tighter and tighter...

  I cranked up my reference frame just in case something happened while I was pondering what to do with this information.It wasn't a perfect spiral however, it kept moving around or, maybe... Bouncing?

  “Hook, what do these locations have in common?” I highlighted the locations that the Lindwurm had been avoiding or bouncing off of.

  “All these areas contain coolant lines that run throughout the ship, taking heat from the core and internal components and running to the radiators on the exterior of the ship.” Hook replied.

  “Could there be something in the coolant lines that it is actively avoiding.” I asked.

  “Possible... However it has cut through other coolant lines, and they all share the same coolant.”

  That was... odd.

  “Do those coolant lines it's avoiding... are they thicker or anything? Extra shielding?” I asked.

  “Negative.” Hook replied.

  Goddamn this was annoying.

  “Are the coolant lines it's avoiding all coming from one particular device? Maybe the coolant flow is carrying some kind of charge still?” I asked.

  “All of the lines avoided would have run through the fusion reactor within the last second.” Hook replied.

  “I guess they really hate fusion? Maybe that's why they go nuts whenever someones fusion drives light up.”

  “Quite possible Captain Cofey.” Hook replied.

  I looked back at the spiral, and began plotting out the spiral if it hadn't run into the coolant lines.

  I plotted it to the center of the spiral and looked at the ship.

  “Hook, is there anything along this line that the Lindwurm could want?” I wondered.

  “The jumpdrive. Or transit drive, if you prefer.” Hook replied.