Getting to the bridge of the derelict turned out to be much harder than expected. The midse of the ship was more heavily damaged thater-protected stern. After traveling for the better part of an hour, the team was fronted with an impassable mess of sharp, tangled metal beams interspersed with rge pieces of furniture jammed between them. It was hard to fathom what kind of act could have created such a perfectly blocked passageway. However, First Mate Bouchard khat time and vibrations could craft structures so plex they seemed almost man-made.

  With their dwindling oxygen supply, she was relut to backtrack, but after twenty minutes to remove enough material from the corridor to allow them to pass through, she gave up. The work was simply too slow in the microgravity of the a ship, the darkness and the dangers lurking in it too distrag, and the risk of one of her crew members ripping their suit too great. Bouchard realized going back was their only option.

  An hour ter, the team was floating i jun they had passed through befoing down the wrong path. This presehem with a problem: if the corridor was also blocked, they might lose too much time to even have a ce of reag the bridge before they ran out of oxygen. She was relut to do so, but uhe circumstahe safest way to move forward was to split up.

  The jun forked into four narrow passageways, one of which they had already explored. With the captain still in a near-catatonic state, he would be of no help surveying the corridors, and she didn’t want to leave him alone in the darkness of the interse. That meant someone oeam would have to stay with him, leaving four team members—including herself—free to look for a passage they could use.

  Four crew members going down three corridors meant two of them would have to go aloo the tunnels.

  “Est-mar-kort, I want you to stay with the captain,” she said.

  The young woman nodded with relief. “Yes, ma’am, bless your hair,” she aowledged.

  “I will go aloo the sed passageway,” Bouchard tinued. “Suwannarat will take the third.”

  The mission specialist returned a somber nod, not feeling the o say anything. He did not look forward to going aloo the shadows ahead.

  “Pv-tor-fel-mak and Murray, you’ll go together into the fourth entrance.”

  With the team members assigo their respective tasks, the problem was how to maintain unication.

  “The walls of the corridors will block radio transmissioweeeams,” she expined. “We won’t be able to talk onside, so I want everyone back here in thirty mio report their findings. We’ll then decide what to do : either go down the most promising tuogether or do another round of separate exploration. And most important of all—stay safe. If you enter any trouble, head back to the junmediately. Once you return, there will be at least three of you waitiogether.”

  No, Mission Specialist Yevgen Suwannarat did not enjoy being alone in the dark tunnel. Fifty meters in, the passageway began to fill with debris again, making it increasingly difficult to navigate the farther he went. Briefly, he sidered giving up aurning to the jun, but a quice at his watch told him he had only spent ten miraversing the passage. It wouldn’t do to waste what little time they had left by giving up so easily.

  Luckily, the metal beams here weren’t the razor-sharp kind that had littered the blockage in the first corridor. Crawliween them wasn’t a recipe for a quick death. Well, perhaps crawling wasn’t the right word in microgravity—with the fshlight held in a steady grip in his left hand, he used his right to grab the beam in front of him, propelling himself forward through the maze. Then he grabbed the beam, and the , repeating the process. But there were a lot of them, and time after time he could feel the beams scrape against his spacesuit as he squeezed his body between them, hoping the corridor oher side would be less obstructed.

  The shadows from his fshlight, cast from oo the , made the tangled web of metal bars seem like he was drifting through a dense forest at night. In the darkness beyond the fshlight’s reach, he half expected to see a pair of eyes suddenly open, their retinas glowing from reflected light as they stared back at him with malice.

  It was almost twenty minutes into his journey when he suddenly realized something was very wrong.

  In his haste to move forward as far as possible withiime limit the first mate had set, he had stopped looking at the beams he was holding. There was always one or more within reach, and the process of extending his hand to grab one and then push forward had bee almost routine.

  Only, what he now held onto with his right hand was not a metal beam.

  Through his spacesuit glove, the object felt as hard as metal, but the surface wasn’t like the smoothly polished beams he had been gripping. Instead, his fingers sensed knotty protrusions—joints, maybe...

  Quickly, he withdrew his hand, the image of unseen alien cws reag out to grab his wrist f itself into his mind. If someone—or something—was out there, lying in wait in the shadows, ready to strike at him, and he had just alerted it to his presence by grabbing its limb, he would soon find out for himself what had mutited Sawhney.

  Alone in the darkness of the narrow tunnel, he screamed at the top of his lungs. But no one would hear him. The dread of the moment was his and his alone, as his entire world began and ended with the fshlight he carried. Beyond it was only the night, and the unspoken terrors it held.

  Breathe, Yevgehought. Just breathe.

  The moment, filled with horrors he could only imagiretched into seds. And as the seds accumuted, he realized he was still alive.

  Slowly, still fearing something might poun him from the darkness, he turhe fshlight toward the thing he had grabbed, half expeg to see the snarling face of an unseen moaring back at him.

  What he found was almost as frightening.

  H among the beams was an arm, its pale skin dry as part, with six elongated fihat looked like spider legs from the underworld. Each digit was divided by four joints, and every one ended in a sharp cw. The arm, severed at the elbow, didn’t appear to tain any muscle tissue. All he could see were fragments of desiccated skin stretched over dry sinew and bone.

  When Suwannarat returo the jun, the two other teams were already there, waiting for him. Both teams had entered impassable blockages in their corridors, just like the ohey had found in the first passageway, and had decided to abandon their exploration early.

  The mummified hand the mission specialist had brought with him uandably caused some excitement among the crew. Pv-tor-fel-mak, in particur, took an i in the find, but with their dwindling oxygen supply looming over them like a space-age udying it would have to wait. For now, finding a ast the barriers was their top priority.

  The disappointing news from the scouting expeditions forced First Mate Bouchard to think hard about their options. They could double back even farther, hoping one of the other juns they had previously passed would lead them around the blocked portions of the ship.

  She made a few quick calcutions in her head. With no way of knowing the exact locations of the juns or the difficulty of navigating the corridors, her estimates were little more than educated guesses. But she quickly realized that even the best-case sario meant they’d have, at most, an even ce of reag the bridge while still breathing.

  That left Suwannarat’s maze of metal beams as their only practical choice, but it tion she was relut to take. The mission specialist hadn’t mao reach the end of the rubble before time had forced him to turn back, and there was no way to know what y beyond it. ces were, if the other three passageways were blocked, his would be too. Bouchard was starting to feel that the debris wedged into the other corridors hadn’t collected there by ce. All three blockages were too he rge pieces of furniture interwoven too intricately with the metal framework, and the serrated beams wedged among them too closely resembling a chevaux-de-frise for her fort. The piles of rubble looked more like beaver dams thaus left by a passing storm.

  If the obstrus weren’t natural, and all three corridors they had iigated so far were blocked, it wasn’t unreasoo guess that the fourth passageway would be cut off as well—making it a huge gamble to proceed that way.

  Then there was the matter of the desiccated hand Suwannarat had found iunnel. Not only would crawling through the maze mean they might discover more body parts along the way—something she didn’t relish in their fragile state of mind—but she also uood the severed arm clearly hadn’t ended up there by act. The cut at the elbow made that much clear. The thought of entering whatever had severed the alien limb ihe byrinthiangle of metal girders filled her with dread.

  Still, despite the myriad dowaking a Suwannarat’s tunnel was a better option than backtrag and riskih by suffocation before they even reached the bridge. Overwhelmed by fatigue and fear, she gathered the crew and, using the mission specialist’s description fuidance, led them into the darkness of the maze ahead.

  MvonStz