Carbon leaned in over Alex’s shoulder, her cheek almost resting against his as they stared at the screen on the auxiliary control console, currently displaying the starboard view in visible spectrum. She was the first to break the silence. “What is that?”

At any other time Alex would have enjoyed the warmth radiating from her, maybe leaned over for a little bit of contact. Now, he was preoccupied by the object that had appeared about five hundred kilometers off their starboard side, minutes after the Kshlav’o entered the globule. His lips pulled into a thin line and he grumbled quietly. “I was hoping you’d recognize it.”

She shook her head as annoyance crept into her voice. "I know it is shaped like a ring and that you are the one operating the sensors."

“Well I’m not getting anything useful back from them.” He pointed at the display, getting short from the lack of data he could suss from the object. More than a billion dCred worth of sensor equipment and it was just short of useless. The primary arrays couldn’t pull any chemical composition. Radar was blank, the ring didn’t even exist as far as it was concerned. LIDAR barely had it, but was mostly just showing dust and echoes.

They didn’t find any shielding or fluctuations to indicate a power source. Polyphase bombardment returned static. The secondary arrays came back with all the same problems, so it wasn’t a hardware issue. At least it showed up on the external cameras.

This wasn’t how the sensor suite was supposed to react with real, solid objects, even in the globule. There may have been some interference, but nothing that would have caused malfunctions this bad. It’s not like it was even unusual to be unable to scan inside of an object; radiation in space was not your friend and most hulls were resistant to it. The inability to pull something as basic as surface chemical composition was unsettling, though.

So far, all Alex knew was that it is a huge ring of unidentified material, putty gray in color and a little over a kilometer across - but only a meter thick and barely three deep. Despite appearing insubstantial, it was incredibly dense. Around ninety million tons, according to its gravitational pull. The crisp edges and smooth surface further pointed towards manufacture rather than natural formation.

The thing that really bothered Alex, and likely Carbon as well, was that it wasn’t there when they entered the Thackery’s Globule. It appears to have materialized out of nowhere. Perhaps using some sort of FTL they were yet unfamiliar with, or a cloaking device that had also hidden its entire gravitational signature. Neither were particularly settling. At the very least, it didn’t seem to be aggressive towards them.

For that matter, it didn’t seem to be doing anything other than hanging out and rotating slowly.

Carbon stood up and stretched behind him, resting her hands on the back of his chair. She just sounded tense now, which was a step up as far as Alex was concerned. “We should move off from it. I do not like it being so close.”

“Yeah, I don’t either.” There was ample room in the globule, a few extra hundred thousand kilometers in any direction wouldn’t matter as long as they were roughly where the distress call had said they’d be. He took hold of the joysticks and goosed the throttle before snapping out an Immelmann, a holdover from his aircraft background, accelerating away from the object with the sublight engines.

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In the back of his mind, he was allowing himself to be a little excited. As unsettling as it was, they had likely found an alien object. That was pretty cool, particularly if it didn’t vaporize them or something. It didn’t hurt that finding objects came with a big bonus, even more so if it was usable somehow. Alternately, being shot and gravely injured by the Eohm also merited double pay for his entire tour. He was going to get paid well when they got back to Earth.

As he pushed the throttle up, he started thinking. Things would be really different once they were off the ship. He did love Carbon, he was pretty sure, but where would their lives take them? If they just got another scoutship and went back to work, that would be great. That was pretty far out of the realm of possibility though. They’d be in decompress and debrief for at least a month, and ships cycled in and out at a fairly slow pace.

How would he explain his relationship to his parents? What would his brother say?

“It does not seem to be moving.”

“Huh?” Alex’s eyes snapped up to the viewer, focusing on the scope. The little marker that represented the ring was closer now than it had just been. His looked over to the speed indicator, sitting at a rather startling 0 km/s despite the sublight engines being at quarter throttle. That ought to be good enough for at least a kilometer per second by now. He tipped the throttle all the way up, theoretically accelerating much more rapidly. By the time he looked back to the scope, the marker had drawn two kilometers closer. That probably wasn’t good.

“That is not working.” A hint of fear had crept into her voice.

“I know.” His lips pressed into a thin line again and he flipped the onscreen view back to the ring. It wasn’t rotating anymore. It had stopped, facing them like some giant eye and drawing them in despite the engines pushed to their limiters. There wasn’t a single visible, recognizable structure to be found on it, but apparently had some sort of tractor beam. Delightful.

The chair rocked back gently as she gripped it, leaning in over Alex’s head. “We should go faster.”

He gritted his teeth and swallowed a snide comment about their current lack of waverider drives. “I know. The engines are already spun as far as they’ll go.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that and just leaned in further, pressing her chest to the back of his head. That was distracting. He wanted to be able to enjoy it, and in some way he did - a few months ago she wouldn’t have come in contact with him at all. It was nice to know she trusted him, despite the current situation.

The engines went dead. They didn’t spool down like they should have, the output just shut off. Alex hit the engine restart and fiddled with the controls, to no avail. Maneuvering didn’t work, either. Navigation shut off next. “Aw, shit.”

“What? What has happened?” Carbon’s voice pitched up as her hands moved to his shoulders and gripped them, claws grazing his skin through his jumpsuit.

“Everything’s just turning off.” His access to the systems was gone, anyway, which may as well have been off. The ring disappeared off the screen as the ship rotated, the nose pitching down as the belly of the Kshlav’o was brought to face the ring. It could have been whatever was intruding in the systems used the docking thrusters to do it, or the thing had a tractor beam capable of manipulating whatever was caught in it.

The distance on the range finder dropped rapidly, scant seconds before the ring reached them. Carbon’s arms curling around his neck and her cheek pressed against his was the last thing Alex felt before the counter hit zero.