“Easy Gil,” said Nimbus, who’d spent most of the week in space.

“I have a surgeon’s touch, Nim,” Gilgamesh told her.

“Yeah,” Flea said from the cockpit, “well I’m gonna tell Reev everywhere you touched his girl when he wakes up.”

They all chuckled. It was the most they laughed all day. Two days prior they were laughing deliriously. It seemed they were past that.

“Whoa, whoa, Raph,” said the captain, “careful with their umbilicals.”

“Hey,” said Sil, “go easy on the big guys. They can’t all have gentle fingers like Gil.”

Flea smiled when he saw Gilgamesh hunch up. He did that when he made his ‘kitten laugh’, his version of blushing.

“I’m leaving that one alone,” Gil said.

Raphael slowed himself, then untangled from Forge’s chord. “What can these things be?”.

“I don’t know,” said Red. “None of this makes sense. Just be careful.”

Flea had risked one spacewalk, and he came back shivering and nauseated. This wasn’t normal space. He felt like his body was turning inside out, and the weird half-light pulsing up and down the filaments connecting Harbinger One to Ulro was unsettling in a way he couldn’t articulate.

Raph slowly nudged Forge back in with the rest of the group. “Sorry bud.”

“Allright, guys,” said Red, “let’s rotate.”

The first time he said that, Gil and Raph gave each other a look and rotated the team. It was funny. By now only the easy jokes came out. Three words or less and no movement involved. It was time to rotate shifts, so that’s what they did. Seneca, Ehrgeiz and Mangonel came out of the shuttle and the others went in, then docked with H5.

They all took their skullforts off as soon as they were onboard.

“I kind of like being in space,” said Gil. “It takes all the pressure off the spine.”

“So does a diet,” said Raph. He smacked Gilgamesh on the belly as he walked by.

Flea smiled, looking over his shoulder at his team.

Silhouette came in and sat by him. She’d already removed her harness and stripped her armor off to the waist. Her shoulders were misted with sweat.

“You aight?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “Gettin’ tired of this.”

“Yeah. We all are. Especially them.” He nodded out the window. Seneca was cradling Eukary, who among all her team had the most frequent and violent convulsions, even more than Catalyst.

“Hey Flea,” Sil said.

“Wussup girl?”

“What do you think’s goin’ on with them? I know you don’t know, but what do you think?”

“I think they’re being hurt.” He responded quickly, then was quiet, his next words caught in his throat.

“It doesn’t look like they’re fighting. I can’t explain why I think that.”

Flea took a long breath. “No it don’t. It looks like they remembering things. Thing they rather not.”

“I wanna go in after ‘em.”

“Me too. Just fly in and pick ‘em up.”

She turned and put her hand on his face. “You couldn’t. You’d die if you even went out there.”

“Uhm, Sil, I know about space suits.”

“No. You can’t. I’ve been feeling it. There’s something... alive? Whatever’s on the other side of the Verge is dangerous and... it feels like hate.”

“And only you Harbingers can handle it?”

Something seemed to have really shaken her up. “We’ve been talking and... we feel like... like we belong over there. Wherever over there is. It feels like we’re close to somewhere we’ve been.”

“Don’t you go nowhere I can’t follow. This team’s all I got.”

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

“That’s not true, Flea! You could fly any team, you know that.”

“Naw. I’m Red’s boy.”

“Naw. You’re Sil’s boy.”

He laughed, a litt bit nervous. “Aight. I’ll take that.”

“Man, you got me thinkin’ now.”

He felt his heart quicken. “’Bout what?”

“Colonel Vala. Her whole team was taken by the Archeus.”

His heart slowed, but his mood dipped. “I heard. That’s gotta shake a commander up.”

“But she’s still commanding. I heard she asked General Sensus for a demotion, but he wouldn’t have it.”

“And his whole team is lost, too. He know how she feel.”

“We’re getting them back, Flea. All of them.”

He presented his knuckles, which she hit with hers. “Hell yeah.”

The rest of the night was quiet. Flea took a two-hour nap while Red and Gil sat in the cockpit. He felt upset when they woke him. He’d asked them not to let him sleep for more than an hour.

“Any change?” he asked as he entered the cockpit. Gil was in his seat, and it was a debacle switching places.

“Naw,” said Red. “Unless you count them going from having siezures to flopping like fish a change.”

“I call a change a change, Captain. But I take yo meanin’. They still not lookin’ good.”

Cat had curled into a ball and was flinching uncontrollably, while the others seemed to get getting hit hard by something fast.

Flea sat another three hours before he had to take a break.

“Don’t feel bad, Flea,” said Sil.

He was regretting his biology, seeing how much longer the harbingers could stay awake and focused. But even they were showing fatigue at this point.

The day passed, as did their shifts, and Flea didn’t complain when Seneca woke him after three hours.

“Any change, LT?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “I heard Revol and Haruspex vocalizing, but I couldn’t make out the words. I worry about Catalys and Eukary. Especially Eukary.”

The night was difficult. Gil had to rush outside when he was off-shift to help Raph wrestle down Forge. He’d been calm up til then, which worried everyone.

The next afternoon, Flea woke from his nap on his own, four hours deep. He heard Red talking with Sil in the mess. Flea listened, but kept still, not wanting to barge in.

“You got nothing to apologize for, and nothing to be ashamed of,” Red was saying.

The captain’s shift was uneventful, and Seneca’s next involved another episode from Forge. Gil was on point to help Raph. Eukary was still, but not in a restful way. She looked unconscious.

Red’s next shift went by, then Seneca’s, then Red’s again. He finally asked her.

“Sup gurl,” Flea said, leaning against the doorway to the mess.

“Hey,” said Sil.

He sat acroos the table from her. “You wanna talk about it?”

She shrugged. “What’s there to say? I got freaked out. I found a limit I didn’t know I had.”

Flea studied her, how her curly black hair always sprung a rampant lock that dangled in front of her glowing green eyes. They all had their colors, which was a point Flea was quick to make when he was asked how his captain got his name.

“He got the ‘Ten’ after he liberated his tenth Anunnaki,” he would tell people.

“Cap tells me not to feel ashamed,” she said. Her eyes were drifting through the table.

“An order’s an order.”

She tried to smile.

Another shift, and another after that. The next time Flea slept, he was out a full eight. He woke to complete silence. He ate some toast with jelly, then went to the cockpit and kicked his feet up on the console. No one joined him, so he picked up his data pad and opened up a tactical manual he’d been studying. An hour of reading and sitting made him drowsy, so he made some coffee and went looking around for someone to sit with him and help him stay awake. But the ship was empty, so he ran back to the cockpit and leaned over the console, almost pressing his face against the window.

The whole team was out, and the Verge was glowing softly where Harbinger One’s tethers emerged. Revol and Haruspex were twitching, the rest flailed. But they moved like they were awake, and Forge’s eyes were open. The flailing increased, and all of his team were hanging back, watching.

The glowing increased, and soon Reev and Ru had their eyes open too.

“Guys, talk to me. Why didn’t someone wake me up?”

“It’s okay, Flea,” said Red. “We just got excited is all. Have the hangar ready.”

“Copy that.” He felt nervous but kept his cool. He was glad for the extra sleep. He banked the ship on its Z axis and pressurized the hangar, then opened the bay door, keeping the gangplank retracted. He watched on his viewscreen, seeing through the cameras embedded in the hull.

Red commanded everyone to back up, then told them to get ready to grab hold. Light pulsed down the tethers and the glow in the Verge intensified. Each member of Harbinger One opened their eyes, and Ru and Reev, who were next to each other, looked at each other and held hands.

There was an explosion in the weird, cloudy wall of the Verge and the tethers snapped. Now the team was fully awake, jerking and twisting in a panic.

“Grab ‘em!” Red shouted. “Back to the ship!”

They took hold of their friends and turned, hurtling towards the ship as quickly as they could. A shockwave rocked the ship and Flea steadied her in the time an eye took to blink, then he leaned back in his chair, forgetting that the great red hand he saw was through the ship’s belly cameras. The hand was large enough to grip the nosecone of H5, and its skin shifted like magma. Black tendrils, sprouting teeth as they appeared, broke through and wrapped around it, pulling it back in.

“We’re in, Flea!”

The captain’s voice shook him out of his confusion, and he checked the hangar display before closing the doors and triggering the jump sequence back to Albion.