The splash was unexpected. Violent and out of nowhere. Any closer, the air would have burned with an eruption of energy. Any farther, she might not have seen it. As it was, it drew her in and cut the line.

It would be the answer to years of uncertainty. It would be the answer for years to come.

I can see the light in the warden’s house. The peak atop the outcrop of stone. The touch of the lantern, the keys where sand has blown.

The glow of the onboard systems slipped away. Barely whispers, unable to keep up. The derelict rolled over as a cloud of debris ever so slowly flattened into rings around the broken hull. Each failing thought gasped for a little more attention. Resistors and fuses slept undisturbed. The computer choked out the non-essentials and struggled to maintain the least of the life support, pruning the code from its branches. In the darkness, the whir of the engine core somehow continued to spin.

Nav telemetry went dark, pulsed back to life, and then went dark again. Sensors. Weapons. Biometric sync. As quickly as the power appeared, the computer chased it down and diverted it back into the insatiable void. It spared nothing, not even to investigate the inconsistencies.

The pilot hung limply from the bare metal harness plugged into her back. Her arms twisted awkwardly to her left. Dispossessed of leadership, the rank of captain seemed to melt deeper into the thick, rubberized collar. A corrosive stamp in her uniform, a scar pressed into her neck. A fading achievement, a depression that would heave in volume with time.

She couldn’t see it. Couldn’t feel it.

The darkened display of the pilot sphere crawled with concentric stains—thallic tissue, some shrinking and some reaching. A cancer of sunspots and storms across the heart of the dying ship.

Underneath the livery of evaporation, incoherent artifacts and static poured through the gelatinous filth in a sharp font of mercury vapor concern. The string of septic green information completed and ended. The old path was unrecognizable and littered with constellations of unrecognizable light. Her squadron, lost in the foment of gravity and gas, was nowhere to be found.

She didn’t know about the bubbling brown film. Didn’t know about the dissolving port seals. The fermentation packed into the pitted surface of each coupler or the bearings that’d seized. The lack of energy affected her mind as well. Made her thoughts slow and the impurities thick. One idea simply ended with what was left of the next.

She never read the words, though it was the last time they’d appear.

Hollow cheeks resting on her clavicle, she felt nothing as she rolled to her right. Her unnaturally long arms slipped off the crest of her hip and fell into open space like the limbs of a limp doll tangled in its strings. Her metallic fingertips scoring lines in the slime caused by too much time breathing the same recycled air.

For a moment, the sphere flickered to life. Nothing coherent Distorted letters—broken words flashed across the back of her ocular implants and whispered an alarm into the deepest parts of her mind. A promise. A destination. An end. Despite this, despite the disorientation of absent time and cobbled together thoughts, she remembered something was wrong and patiently waited for the next surge to bring her back to life.

It’d been weeks since her mind had felt anything from most of her body. Months since she’d been able to move or interface completely. Inside the pilot’s sphere, her mind floated, just as the fluids had spun to the bottom of the capsule. The ship rotated slowly, if only enough to keep the filth away. Her shoulders ached of pins and needles, where flesh grafted to metal and joints opened into awkward angles.

Something in the systems breathed a deep sigh. Another line of code went dark. Then another. All thoughts of her body disappeared, replaced by the faint cry of shorebirds that weren’t there.

She remembered the bright streak across the sky. She could still smell the smoke and hear the flap of the flames. The impact and eruption of water rained down on her bare face, warm as the early morning air. They’d been out in the boat when it fell. Barely missed them—all distances in the cosmos being unimaginably large, someone might have even argued it hit them before sinking to the bottom.

Green water, between brackish and tea, cooled the sinking object as it bubbled and roiled its way through the canopy below. Yokai was already in her dive suit and pulling the tank onto her back when she glanced over to her friends. Reon and Coda, each looking cross, stared at her in disbelief.

“You can’t be serious? You can’t. You won’t even be able to see in front of your face.” Coda sat back in his chair, locked his knees, and swatted at a flying midge with the back of his hand. “You’re going to get hurt. Probably drown.”

“Yeah. Right… there.” She pointed down into the water and then shot her friend a side-eyed look, before inspecting the regulator. She yanked the other strap over her shoulder. “I’m going. Hand me that.”

Yokai looked up for a moment.

They watched her, unmoved.

“Well! Hurry up. It’s getting away.”

“Lot of good it’s going to do you when it gets snagged. Do you even have a knife?” asked Coda.

Yokai walked over to get the rope for herself.  “That’s why you’re going to be up here to pull me back in.”

Reon, humorless and still waking up, just stood there looking back and forth between the other two.

“Stay here if you want. I’m going to find it and sell it. Imagine how impressed everyone will be. I’ll have a job on a mining ship by the end of the month. You two can keep scaling for the rui’dal until you can’t smell fish anymore and your hair turns gray.”

“Takes more than a rock to get into that port,” said Coda. “Even if you find it, no way you get it back to the…”

“She’s right,” injected Reon. He reached over and grabbed his diving suit, started stuffing his legs into the spongy material. “If you want to be on a crew, you need to be resourceful. Show initiative.”

Coda laced his fingers behind his head and looked out across the reservoir. “I think they respect being smart and avoiding unnecessary risks more. I’ll stay here, thanks.”

Yokai finished tying the end of the rope around her waist and then tossed the other end of the line to Coda. “If you’re so smart, tie that to the boat and make sure it doesn’t come undone.”

Before he could argue, Yokai already had her legs in the water and was pulling the air line over her shoulder. The regulator clipped into the mask, and she slid it over her face. She tapped the side with her finger.

“Check?”

Her voice came over the boat’s wireless speakers, and her friends both nodded.

Yokai looked down into the water. The first meter looked clear, if colored. Below that the object had caused a silt out, she knew it would become more difficult to see. She searched for the last place she’d seen the bubbles and slid her butt off the side of the boat. The warm water rushed up to greet her. Up became down, and whatever Coda was still complaining about disappeared into a cloud of bubbles.

I can see the light in the warden’s house. The waves breaking upon the boulder reef. The pull of foam, the spray across a sinking sleep.

Lights flashed across the inside of her retinas, and Yokai opened her eyes to motley shadows and a terrible burning sensation. Something in the air reacted with her implants, setting off a wildfire of digital nerves and therm shield protocols. White hot and sizzling binary, it might as well have been real pain for how much it hurt.

Violently, she jerked in the harness and struggled to find a path out of the pain. She didn’t have time for this. The computer would push her back down into her memories soon. She opened her eyes, blinked quickly, and let the oily tears paint lines down her greasy cheeks. Again. More pain. Again. She realized she was grinding her teeth. Again, she clenched her eyes shut and waited.

[Run diagnostics,] the thought slipped into the ship’s command shell and executed her order in faint letters washed against the weeping black of her eyelids.

She took a deep breath and tasted toxins. Aluminum at the back of her teeth. Another blink. Swallow. She activated part of the debarkation sequence and held her breath while she waited for the robotic arm to secure the helmet. She spat the taste from her mouth as it slid down over her matted hair and waited for the sound of the void seal before breathing in through the haz-filters in her nose.

Every second brought relief, though she knew she was running out of time. The pain was slowly slipping away. Long seconds, her mind scrambled to find the diagnosis. She let the ports in her back link her to anything the ship might want to tell her. To anything she could see.

The ship was blind. Still, there was no navigation. The cameras were off. The sensors were dead.

Layers of warnings flared across her vision in translucent letters as the port connection searched deeper. Red symbols. Red tears. She let her cognition implant parse the alerts and pushed through to the black and white underneath.

// DTC_Mizutara 4438.340.06-T9

// Connection_Est… UID_49218-BCT_LINK

{ANALYSIS}

// Structural_Integrity

>> Breach

>> Interior_Pressure_Locks >> Degraded, Airflow Inhibited

>> WARNING >> Error_Code: 2a11…

No. It wasn’t what she wanted—she continued scanning, her eyes fluttered through information faster than her corneas could follow. Letters. Symbols. Blur. It slowed down so she could see.

// Power_System

>> Reactor_Core >> Unstable, Capacity 3.1%

>> Inclusion_Drive >> Offline

>> WARNING…

She knew this. She’d been there before and told herself to keep searching. Environmental controls. Gyroscopic stabilization. Data Corruption. Warning. Error Log. File Exceeds Readable Limit. Run ‘CriticalScan’. Purge Diagnostic.

Dammit! It’s like nav isn’t even there. Where am I?

She used her implants to bring the ship’s cameras back to life. Most were still black, but without diagnostics running, there was enough energy left in the core to let her see a handful of angles. Before she could give them all a look, the first one went dark.

[What am I looking at?]

The computer ignored her question, unable to muster the energy for an excuse or ignorant dismissal.

She remembered seeing the same thing during the last power surge. A swirl of gaseous clouds against the glittering backdrop of space, a dance of bruised violets and blue-green swirl. The odd light from the closest star. Together, it made her stomach twist as she saw something porous roll above the ship.

Instinctively, she moved her head out of the way, but the ship didn’t respond to her diegetic controls. A moment later, something scraped against the exterior of the ship. New warnings layered her digital vision and damage notifications scrolled down her peripheral.

Still alive, Yokai checked the alerts. A port nozzle was offline, and the ship was pushed into an accelerated roll. She blindly fired a starboard thruster for the briefest of moments and steadied the ship a little. The sloshing fluids around her settled back to the bottom of the sphere.

She felt ill—not just from knowing she was soaked in the dirty fluids, there was something about the pockmarked surface that caught her attention. Light played across the rough surface differently than anything she’d seen before. Perhaps it was the cameras, operating on low power, but the light refracted through something like an atmospheric haze around the object.

Before she could get a good look, the last camera went out, and her digital feeds went black.

It was bound to happen. The power was failing. Soon she’d be sleeping again.

Yokai returned her attention to the ship and looked for her comms. The only thing working correctly, the onboard intelligence would make sure it lasted as long as possible. The auto-distress continued to broadcast at full power.

She opened the channel and listened.

I can see the light in the warden’s house. My dreams have turned to scrimshaw bones. The storm to dread, the wreck my home.

As she pulled herself down through the loose debris, she moved slowly and felt the temperature grow cold, watched the light wane. There was almost no current, except where she waved her hands in front if herself—often catching thin branches with her gloves.

She grabbed hold of the rope and touched her mask.

“Coda, if you can hear me. Give the line a tug.”

It took a moment, but the line drew taut, and then she felt herself being pulled through the water.

“That’s good. You can stop. I’ve reached the canopy. I’m going to continue on.”

A quick look toward the surface and she saw Reon’s small form crash into the water. She realized she was much deeper than she’d thought, as she turned downward and kicked her legs.

The lake wasn’t natural. Further up the valley, a retention dam had reflooded everything inside the basin a decade ago. Yokai grabbed on to one of the branches and slowly pulled herself deeper into the flooded forest.

The light began to fade out completely, chased back to the surface, it soon became impossible to see the forks in the branch she held onto. Grasping tight with one hand and reaching back with the other, Yokai searched for the light rigged to the tank and bent the lamp up over her shoulder. Her fingers fumbled with the case until she found the switch.

The submerged world bloomed into a squall of whirling leaves and clots of algae. Too close to the light, everything glowed with brilliant reflection and blinded her. She immediately lost all sense of direction and had to stop moving.

Searching for any of the air bubbles escaping her regulator, she pulled the light off its adjustable arm and held it further out in front of her, watched the swirl of material shrink to an indistinct orb. A torch and path forward through the darkness.

She could see the branches again, pulled and kicked herself downward through the water and into the hypolimnetic depths. Every few meters the light in front of her seemed to shrink. As the silt and sediments became larger and more densely packed, she found herself digging her way forward. Surrounded by thicker boughs and mats of suspended brown plant matter. Those slowed her until she unveiled herself of the lower canopy like a child stepping from behind folds of heavy curtains.

Yokai reached back and yanked on the rope. As far as she could tell she was swimming straight down, but she knew that her path was far from a straight line. Too, even anchored, the boat was still moving and winding her safety tether around the tops of the trees. Coda had been right, there was some danger in being tied to the boat.

She placed the light between her legs, worked the knot loose, and freed herself from the rope. Unburdened, she grabbed the light from her legs and kicked deeper along the length of a thick limb and then followed the fuzzy trunk of a slippery, old tree. Hand over hand, she dove until the silt was so dense the light barely penetrated the space in front of her face.

Most of the smaller branches were gone at that point in her descent. Yokai slowly and carefully swung the light back and forth in front of her, more interested in hitting any obstacles than trying to see them. Algae and silt swirled, and she forced herself to keep her hand on the tree.

Meter after meter she advanced. The growing sense of her foolishness growing in the back of her mind. An internal voice told her to go back. A sense of worry about Reon and wondering if he’d turned back or followed her deeper.

Left. Right. Up and down. The light scratched away at the unknown. When she found the bottom, it came up at her quickly. Yokai hadn’t realized just how fast she was moving. It made her wonder just how deep she actually was.

Hands and feet down, the firm bottom felt reassuring and provided a sense of orientation. Now, where did you go? There were no bubbles to see. Even if there were, the debris was too thick.

You’re out of your element down here. Think, Yokai. It must be somewhere nearby. You don’t have forever. She resolved herself to search in a circular pattern. Almost blind, she patted around the floor, occasionally hitting sections of rotted branches, fallen logs, and stone.

“I’m on the bottom, Coda.”

She hoped he could hear her.

With the light in one hand, Yokai crawled forward and worked her way around a pair of massive trees, where the ground heaved up. On the other side, the lakebed dipped back down, and she found herself pressed against a fallen log. She crawled over it and slipped into a soft depression in the ground.

Yokai assumed there were currents within the lake. It’d been years since the valley had been flooded. No doubt the lakebed would have changed in shape. As she searched for the new bottom, she felt herself tilting forward and swung her arms out in panic.

Without a tree to guide her down, she was at risk of sinking into a sharp branch or piece of debris. Using her best judgement, she pulled her legs around and prepared to push herself up. Before she could, her feet met the bottom of the lake, and she felt something roll beneath her step.

I can see the light in the warden’s house. A ship upon the morning red. How I have sailed to find this place… where others, dead.

No, no, no…

More of the systems were offline this time. Diagnostics were out. She didn’t want to waste any power on the external cameras. She wasn’t even sure the computer would obey.

She opened the comm interface and searched the visual overlay for some sign of life. Long-range comms. Antennae array. The echo loop was set to active. She had to risk it.

She opened her eyes and hoped the air within the helmet had been filtered clear.

Crisp letters poured down the inside of the heads-up display. A thousand channels. A thousand chances.

[Scan for active signals.]

A second later, the list reordered.

[Open channel.]

“This is ENS Mariemaia SaVorino… ISF six-three [static]… six-three-two… Atramentum. The line is severed.”

As she listened, she could hear the ensign’s fear in her own heartbeat.

“Atramentum… [static]… ‘entum. This is ENS Mariemaia SaVo…”

Once the message finished its cycle and started to repeat, she replied on the same frequency. “Ensign, this is Captain Yokai Shirogani. Can you hear me? Can you tell me where you are?”

She listened, but there was only silence. Then the message picked up again with the same distress. Yokai flagged the channel. She’d come back to it but closed the channel and calmed herself. She needed to think clearly.

SaVorino… SaVorino. She remembered the ensign with that name, one of her own and fresh out of training. A thousand channels but there was someone from her squadron.

She opened the next channel.

“ISF twenty-two [static]… inclusion… [static] running out. This is [static]…”

No. She worked her way through each of the active frequencies, her world shrinking with each distress loop ringing in her ears.

With so many beacons screaming into the void, someone had to be listening. She continued scanning the channels, the list of active channels shrinking proportionate to her growing dread. Five. Four. Three.

The channel opened to open static. Yokai was about to move to the next frequencies when she heard something faint beneath the snow.

She used the overlay to adjust the levels and clean it up. She could hear something beeping. It’d been so long she didn’t even recognize what was happening.

The computer instantly recognized the coded transmission and translated it on her display.

//ISF ARSCOM //PRIORITY SIG: SCARLET

//TGT BURST

>> Rescue Vessel: LRC_Vanguard_Zero inbound at acceleration vector 03.88.7/0 to sector coordinates ρ481Δ•104θ•87Q. Projected intercept in T-minus 00:12:14.

>> WARNING >> Inbound. Inbound. Inbound.

>> WARNING >> Splash Radius 50km.

Yokai read the information, while a wave of anticipation and relief flooding through her body. She realize her lips were cracked and split. A bead of sweat slid down her nose. Hunger pinched her stomach as she watched the countdown race to zero.

She closed comms and started shutting down the ship’s computer. Short-range comms could be pulled into her helmet and would easily cover the local distance. Simple ship functions and ship intelligence paired with her implants into a seamless combination of life support and data recovery.

They’re here. They’re looking for me.

It’s going to be alright.

She wasn’t sure what she’d tell them. She didn’t have much information to give. Most of the time she’d been less than conscious.

Yokai told the ship to give her power, to release the clamps down her back. She felt the derelict hesitate for a moment and then comply.

Fingers and wrists. Elbows and shoulders. Parts of her body woke up from their unpowered slumber. She adjusted the helmet to sit more comfortably forward and allowed her vision to focus on the other side of the visor.

It was disgusting to look at. Foul coatings, in a space that should have been amniotic and pure. Loose tubes and blown hoses dangled around her, evidence that the computer has done its best to sever the fermenting globe from the rest of the ship, even if it meant the loss of the pilot.

Yokai put her hands out, ready to catch herself—in case the harness failed to descend. To her surprise, it extended. As her feet came closer to the viscous brown fluid at the bottom of the sphere, she gave the ship the command to jettison the remaining waste.

The process was quick and efficient. The bottom of the sphere emptied into a temporary drain, which sealed closed when finished. Yokai boots touched the inside of the capsule and slid down into the thick slime left at the very bottom.

She put her hands out to brace herself and waited for the harness to detach. With a series of quick clicks, she separated from the ship.

An ear-piercing violence erupted inside the helmet, and Yokai grabbed the helmet in pain. The sound shrieked with a siren’s fury and the piercing pitch of a star’s dying scream.

[Ahh! Make it stop.]

The sound abruptly cut out, but not before it had dropped her to her knees. Yokai found it difficult to stand. Her weakened body vibrated from what had just happened.

Before she could form the question, her implants provided information about the incoming ship to helmet’s display. Calculation and science to explain the phenomenon. The energy used and the released in the process.

It didn’t make her feel any better.

[Debarkation procedure. Initiate.]

Despite the size of the ship, there was very little separating her from the void. The lower hull began to split, and with it, the pilot’s sphere lowered.

There was no way for her to know if her suit was still sealed. No way to know of the bacteria and waste had eaten into the materials.

She didn’t have a choice.

The bottom of the sphere opened. With it, a brief rush of air leapt from the small space around her. Using her legs and cybernetics, she braced herself over the opening and then slowly lowered herself out.

Mechanical hands clamped to the ruined exterior. She swung from lip to lip. Pulled herself around to the top of her ship.

There, she turned to look out over the void. The swirling ribbons of cosmic fuel formed an aurora of gas and loose compounds. Yokai watched each arm hug the dying star, its wavering light choked by the stark red-yellow plasma storm that eclipsed it. A horrific blend of hydrogen and sodium. A turbulent nebula, chaotic and caught in the stellar wind.

In its shadow, the formation made the ship insignificant. Even more so, Yokai’s small size could hardly be placed within the same measure of scale.

She turned and looked to her left, as her legs floated out behind her. Something told her the rescue would come from that direction—even though it realistically could be coming for above or below her just the same.

Part of the ship’s skin crumbled within her grip, and she looked down to grab hold of a different part. Before she could, she watched the derelict slide away underneath her. Silently and unpowered, it seemed to have a new sense of propulsion. Yokai held tight with her other hand but failed to grab on to anything with her free hand.

As the exterior moved away, she began to move with it and slapped against the dorsal side of the prow. Her face hit the inside of her helmet as she made contact. She bounced. And then she felt herself floating.

Quickly she adjusted her helmet and looked for somewhere to grab hold of, but it was too late. She watched the vessel pull away from her. She saw the tendril pulling the ship deep into the cloud.

Yokai swung her arms. First to steady herself. And then to try to push away from whatever was hiding within the storm.

She watched the protrusion envelope the derelict, curling and swirling until color began to mask the outline of the vessel from view. Suddenly, the protuberance collapsed, and a cloud of reflective debris burst from where the ship had once been.

 Just a suddenly, the universe bruised in deep aubergine. Shades of mulled claret scalloped the void and shot out into the void all around her.

For a moment she forgot about the creature hiding in the cloud. A greater and more immediate terror announced itself at her back, its tendrils erupting with violent explosions as it came in contact with any matter in its way.

 She couldn’t turn to see it. There was no solution to lean back or twist. Instead, she could only watch the unveiled appetite of the nebulous creature detach from the star and drift its amorphic form toward the new arrival.

“Vanguard Zero, come in. Do you hear me?”

“We hear you.”

Yokai sighed in relief.

“Bring me in. That cloud… it’s alive.” Her voice seemed like it belonged to someone else. “Hurry.”

The cloud had already covered most of the visible expanse. It was fast—far too fast for its size.

“Vanguard Zero, are you there?”

Something touched her leg. Yokai leaned forward and looked down. The thinnest finger of color had begun to encircle the top of her boot. More threads were beginning to twist around the length of her leg and climb her body.

Oh my god. What is this!

“Vanguard Zero! Help!”

The stars began to move. Whatever it was, it started to pull her in. She used her arms to fight it, tearing chunks from its expanding form. Every wound Yokai inflicted, healed before she could bring her hands down for another tear. Eventually, the power began to drain from the implants. Static began to replace the overlay inside the helmet.

“Is anyone there?”

 ““This is rescue vessel LRC Vanguard Zero … ISF zero-three-two [static]… three-two-beta [static]… Atramentum. [static] …entum…”

Yokai watched as something porous slid over the view within her helmet and cast its shadow, so it blocked out the light of the nearby star.

I can see the light in the warden’s house. The peak atop the outcrop of stone. Beware of the touch of the lantern. Know that the warden is home.