One day, Paradrei came to Elvenheim with an invitation to a party.
"Of course, I'd be delighted," Elvenheim replied, but when the day came, she was too busy with her experiments to wish to come.
"Mindeham," she said, he being nearby, "would you do me the favour of conveying my apologies to Paradrei, for I cannot come to his party."
"What party?" Mindeham almost replied, but he was a sly creature, and was silent.
Paradrei's party was a feat of wonder, with all the food and entertainment a God could want (Mindeham would later base the menu of his fated Light of Immortality dinner off the one from this party). Everyone was there, except of course Elvenheim.
"Hello, Paradrei," Mindeham said, instantly depriving the host of his enjoyment.
"Er, hello, Mindeham," Paradrei said awkwardly. "Look, the thing is--"
"We thought you wouldn't enjoy it. You've said before you don't like talking with us," Xysphael said.
"I thought you were invited? Your invitation must have been lost in the mail," Aphelka said.
"We thought you'd spoil the fun if you were here," said Byque, the Searingly Honest.
All the gods winced at this. Mindeham looked at them all, one by one, then smiled.
"I am just here to convey Elvenheim's apologies," he said. He bowed and left the party in shambles.
***
Elvenheim floated at her desk, bored out of her brain. Nothing of interest had happened for over a year, even out at the frontiers of human space, and she was seriously considering ignoring the pleadings of her disciples and going on an adventure somewhere. Her computer blipped, needing attention. She strapped herself into her chair, and brought her monitor to life. Apparently there was a report that could not be adequately tagged. Elvenheim read it, her eyebrows raising. This was probably absolutely nothing, but it was the perfect excuse to get out into the field.
"Send me any more reports similar to this," she said, and pushed off her chair towards the door. Her heart sang. An adventure--a probably boring adventure, but still an adventure--awaited.
Elvenheim looked at the current lot of Adventuring Squad members, lined up next to her spaceship like accessories. Her monocle reader outputted their names, test records and fieldwork history. Navem had good research outputs, but had never been in the field, and Elvenheim guessed that this would be a good time for him to learn about it. Poll was a solid fieldworker, so would balance Navem out in case. Elvenheim called their names, and the rest of them saluted and left. The crew of the ship were robotic, so all that was left to do was get on board--
Wait for the recruits to message their families and friends and such, and then get on board. Elvenheim repressed a sigh. She almost couldn't remember a time when she had been like that. But then, her family hadn't been the most stable. Her brother hadn't even shown up to their parents' funeral, and that was before the business with the asylum--
The recruits hurried to catch up to Elvenheim as she abruptly walked onto the ship.
"We're investigating disappearances in the Frontier system 9373," Elvenheim told them, as they headed towards the control room. "There have been twelve disappearances in all: most individual ships with one to twenty people on board, but one was a moon outpost. That appears to be the first, chronologically, and the one where the most people disappeared, so we are going there first. Five were found dead at the scene; their autopsies found they were pierced with some sort of pseudo-organic material. We will hopefully have access to traces of the material for analysis."
"What do you suspect?" Poll asked.
"What do you suspect?" Elvenheim asked back to them both.
"A murderer or gang of murderers from the outpost," Poll said, which was what Elvenheim suspected herself.
"Aliens," Navem said, which was Elvenheim's secret hope.
"We shall see," she said, and ordered the ship to move.
***
It took ten hours from warp to get to the moon 9373-230, called Thirty by the nearby inhabitants. Elvenheim and her crew used the time to scan the surrounding space for anomalies, and to have a good nap. Navem woke Elvenheim up at one point to point out a scattering anomaly.
"It could be the instruments, you know," Elvenheim said, yawning and staring blurrily at the one-pixel blip.
"I know. I want to send a collection drone out there."
"You have my permission," Elvenheim said, flapping her hands to shoo him away, and went back to bed.
The moon base itself was now maintained by a skeleton crew consisting of two police constables and a forensic scientist. The forensic scientist seemed on edge and obviously didn't want to be there; she was, however, the most excited to see Elvenheim, who was the patron god of researchers as well as adventurers.
"Welcome, welcome," she said, ushering them into a meeting room, One of the constables gave them some coffee, which Elvenheim appreciated.
"Have you made any progress since your last reports?" Elvenheim asked them all.
"The B2Raven, one of the missing ships, which we are not necessarily officially linking to this investigation yet, has been found having crashed into an asteroid," one of the constables said.
"The residue is acting a little strangely," the forensic scientist said. Elvenheim drained her coffee cup, then pushed herself to her feet.
"Do tell," she said.
The forensic scientist led her visitors to her laboratory.
"Elementally it's mainly a sulphur-hydrogen-carbon mix, with some oxygen and silicon mixed in," she said. "Macroscopically it seems to be at least semi-structured, and while the more complicated molecules in the sample denature or break up under normal conditions, samples appear to not decompose if you feed them simple chemicals containing those elements. The strangest thing occurs when you put a lot of sample together--" she brought up her microscope view on a monitor.
"That looks like cells dividing," Poll said reluctantly.
"Still might not be aliens," Navem said generously.
"We'll see," Elvenheim said. "Very interesting. We'll see the bodies now."
***
The five bodies had been kept in the food storage facility, as there was not enough people anymore for the space to be needed. The cause of death of four of them appeared similar--pierced by some kind of thin, uneven weapon that left behind the residue the scientist had been studying. The other died from a blow to the back of the head.
"Consistent with a fall, though could have been a weapon," Navem said.
Some of the bodies had scratches on their hands and forearms, though there were no defensive wounds on others. The one who perhaps had fallen had had residue underneath their fingernails. Navem and Poll sketched out possible scenarios while Elvenheim studied the bodies.
"If the residue is part of some kind of weapon, I think it's likely to be a spike rather than a blade," Poll was saying. "Otherwise our fallen guy would have at least scratches on his hands."
"So the first guy grabs one of the weapons, and is pushed over," Navem said. "The others are stabbed with the weapons. The wounds are at varying heights--do you think they were stabbed at different heights at the same time, or by the same weapon consecutively?"
"Hard to say," Poll said, and they bent their heads together to draw out the different scenarios. After a while, Elvenheim wandered over to look at their drawings. One of them raised a flag in her own memory as well as her databases.
"You've drawn the sun devils there," Elvenheim said, pointing at the drawing. It showed part of a circle, covered in jagged radial spines, advancing on a horrified stick figure.
"Sun devils?"
"They're a myth derived a couple of sectors over. When people were first exploring this space, one ship was lost, and three or so people came back in lifeboats claiming that it was attacked by spherical aliens that can protrude tendrils from their skin, which they used to great effect to kill everyone else aboard their ship. I actually went out here to try and find them at the time, but I could not find any trace."
"So you think that it might have been these sun devils?" Navem asked. Elvenheim shrugged.
"Who knows?" she said, but she seemed to the others to be a little more enthused about the work.
***
Elvenheim and the others trooped back into the recreation room to discuss their plans.
"I think we should stay on this moon for tonight," Elvenheim said, "and investigate the other disappearance points in the morning."
This gave Navem a chance to compose a note to his parents, and Poll a chance to obsessively wash part of her arm that had accidentally touched a corpse, before they met the constables and the scientist for dinner.
"What do you suppose happened?" one of the constables asked.
"We cannot speculate yet," Elvenheim said. "What are your thoughts?"
"Pirates," one of the constables said.
"Aliens," the scientist said.
"Sun devils," the other constable said dramatically. The other two laughed.
"We have noted that possibility," Elvenheim said. The others stopped laughing.
"Sun devils are just a myth," the scientist said.
"What is the difference between a sun devil and an unidentified alien species?" Navem asked.
"Meeting a new alien species is seen to be exciting. The sun devils only evoke fear. Every time an exploratory ship goes missing--and they go missing about the same rate as ships within the Human Sphere--people blame the sun devils and stop sending ships for a while."
"Statistically, we should have expanded a lot further out by now. This shouldn't be the human frontier," the other constable agreed.
"Why such fear?" Navem asked. The constables and the scientist looked at each other.
"Let us entertain you tonight with our traditional frontier culture," the scientist said.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
"Fine with me," Elvenheim said, looking amused.
They watched 'The Curse of the Sun Devils', 'Wreck of Horrors', and of course the horror classic, 'Frontier Madness' before calling it a night and going to what, in theory at least, would be a restful sleep on their ship.
"Don't forget to lock the door," Elvenheim said as they wandered in.
"Unless they're already here with us," Poll added.
"Never going to sleep again," Navem muttered, and they all went to bed.
***
Elvenheim considered banning horror films before bed, however culturally informative they were. Navem obviously didn't sleep the whole night, and at one point Elvenheim woke up to hear him talking to Poll, so she obviously didn't get a full night's rest, either. Still, whether by natural youthful vitality or doses of caffeine, they seemed reasonably alert at breakfast time.
"The probe came back last night," Navem said between bites of his breakfast bar.
"Oh?" Elvenheim said.
"The blip turned out to be a small plume of short-chain molecules. The elemental composition of the plume seems to be similar to the residue found on the wounds of the bodies," Navem said.
"Possibly ejected waste from a sun devil ship before warp?" Poll suggested.
Possibly, Elvenheim thought, she should ban horror films especially if they were culturally informative. It certainly seemed to have biased her researchers.
"Well, we should certainly keep an eye out for any other such plumes when we visit the other abduction sites," she said--and now she was doing it. Keep an open mind, Evenheim. Maybe they had all just joined a cult? The last time that happened though the results were far messier than the previous alien abduction cases she had investigated, so perhaps she should be thinking positively about sun devils herself.
They said their goodbyes to the constables and the scientist, and lifted off from the moon.
"I know it will take longer moving chronologically through the sites," Elvenheim said, "but if as you suspect we are investigating alien abductions that are leaving behind physical evidence, it is the best option. Did you want to plot the course to our next destination, Navem?"
Navem, with help from Poll, charted out a course. Elvenheim overheard a hurried discussion involving cousin's birthdays and quickest courses, and they decided to warp to their next destination. A subtle check indicated that the computers thought it was a legitimate route, so Elvenheim agreed to it, and they winked out of space, on their way to their next destination.
***
There was no trace of anything out of the ordinary around the next stop on their list, nor the two sites after. They did find what may have been a smaller plume at the fourth, but apart from that whatever had made the ships disappear left no trace of either the ships or the people who had been within them. Elvenheim collated their evidence, and filed it in a new folder in her Official Investigation database; she also composed a few memos to some alien ambassadors she knew personally. At the end of it all, she sat down with her apprentices, and had a discussion about what to do next.
"We could set ourselves up as bait," Navem said, obviously reluctant to put his idea into practice.
"We could put the probes out in likely areas of space," Poll suggested. Since the abductions in space did not seem to have a pattern to them, however, 'likely area' was a large volume to work with.
"Instead of the probes, we could ask the ships to keep monitoring devices on board, and drop them if they get into trouble?" Navem asked.
"A lot of these frontier ships would not like a monitoring device on board, but we can see if any would be willing," Poll agreed.
"Well, then, we can do that before we go home," Elvenheim said, and set a course for the nearest station.
"Why are you innerworld types bothering? We know what it is that abducted those ships. It was the sun devils!" the station master said, standing in the doorway of his office. Elvenheim and her apprentices looked at one another.
"Do you have any evidence or information to suggest this?" Poll asked.
"Well, no... But this is what they do!"
"We haven't heard of the sun devils behaving like this before. Do you have evidence of that?" Navem asked.
"Wait... you believe in sun devils?" the station master looked taken aback.
"We are investigating all possible leads," Elvenheim said smoothly. "Are the sun devils known to abduct people like this?"
"Well, people go missing around here, in cycles, you know? It shouldn't have been for another twenty years, but there you go."
"Do you know the period of the normal cycle?" Elvenheim asked, bringing up information about disappearances on her monocle. She paused for a moment, then,
"Sorry, sir, something just came up. May we please use your office?"
"Wh-what?" Navem and Poll walked into the office, and Elvenheim shut the door on the stationmaster's face. She closed the blinds.
"This is a map of unexplained disappearances in the last few months, the intensity of the colour indicating how close the disappearance was to today," Elvenheim said, and projected the map onto the wall. Poll swore.
"Can we assume that the people here are safe, then?" Navem asked.
"Until the next wave comes through, sure," Poll said. They looked again at the map. It looked a little like a comet, a bright head with a curved fading tail. They were near the end of the tail; the head of the comet was much further into human space. Most of the disappearances had happened in the last few days, while they had been out at the frontier, investigating the earlier instances.
"Let's go to the head of the problem, shall we?" Elvenheim said grimly. "We'll pick up my hunting ship on the way."
They walked out of the stationmaster's office, ignoring his protests, and hurried towards their ship.
***
At Elvenheim's headquarters, they were already bustling about with the news. Her highest ranked adventurers had already gone to investigate, and if necessary, destroy the problem. Elvenheim added what they knew to the database marked 'URGENT: ONGOING', gave it the subtitle 'Sun Devils', and let Navem and Poll see their families before transferring to her war ship.
"I apologise that this has become a more urgent matter than first envisaged," Elvenheim said to them. Meaning: above their grade. But it was a tradition of her troop to see things through--otherwise how could they call themselves adventurers?--and she wouldn't insult and distress them by asking them to stay behind, making them choose between their honour and their families. Besides, her more experienced adventurers were all gone already.
Her warship was radar-absorbing, broadband optically dark, and actually bent light around it at various distortion levels between 467 and 712 nm. She hardly ever used it, mainly because unless the stars around her were particularly blue or particularly red people kept on bumping into it. It had torpedoes, an ion cannon, and what Worldians insisted looked like a 'real' cannon, which shot out spheres that could have payloads ranging from explosives, EMP bombs, tracking devices, sticky confetti, and in one nerve-wracking incident 200 years ago, a puppy in cryosleep.
Navem and Poll came back, and Elvenheim gave them their assignments. Poll was to be on the guns, and Navem on target tracking. Navem had only done target tracking in simulations before, so Elvenheim set up holographic projections in the corner of her and Poll's screens in case he got confused with the data handover protocols and had to point. They practiced a little for both their sakes for about ten minutes, then left the dock.
"Have you got the latest coordinates?" Elvenheim asked flight control.
"Haven't moved yet, as far as we can tell," flight control replied.
"Right," Elvenheim said, and they blipped into warp.
***
They came out of warp into a mess of ships, wreckage, and unexploded ordinance.
"I've found the enemy," Navem said.
"Put them on screen," Elvenheim said. Their terminals displayed a large, roughly spherical ship dimpled with hatches. The purpose of at least some of these hatches was evident, as they were open and the strange metal tendrils inside were grabbing ships that came too close.
"They must be very confident in their internal security," Poll said, as they saw a ship being dragged inside.
"Or they're selective in what they bring in," Elvenheim said, as they winced as two tendrils tore a ship apart. She looked at the larger map of the area, on which Navem had been steadily tagging ships. "Who is in charge of this battle?"
"I'll ask someone," Navem said, selecting a ship a little out from the immediate carnage. "Hello? Can you hear me? This is Navem, I was wondering who is in charge here... No, I'm a level A... I'm with Elvenheim--"
"Oh thank the gods." The response was loud enough that Poll could hear it at her own station. "Put me on to her please."
"They want to talk to you," Navem said. Elvenheim waved a hand in assent.
"Hello?"
"Hello, this is Elvenheim," Elvenheim said.
"This is Indigo."
"Nice to hear from you; it's been a while. Who is in charge here?"
"Me," Indigo said, sounding not very happy about it. Elvenheim paused.
"Can I ask where--"
"Everyone with battle experience has been eaten by that thing!"
"Ah. What ship are you on?"
"I'm on one of the B480s,"
"That may be more useful than what I have," Elvenheim muttered. She looked at Navem and Poll. "I might have to leave you. Are you okay with this?"
"We'll be okay," Poll said gamely.
"Don't join the battle," Elvenheim said. "You can relay messages to other ships for us if the field gets more messy than it is, but otherwise keep out of sight."
"We will," Navem said.
"Poll, you're in charge while I'm gone." Elvenheim turned to her microphone. "If it is okay with you, I will transfer onto your ship," she said to Indigo.
"Thank you," he said. It was the most heartfelt thanks Navem had ever heard.
***
They made contact with the larger ship, and Elvenheim officially handed her war ship over to Poll.
"Don't get into any trouble," she said as she departed through the airlock. Poll and Navem monitored the automated undocking sequence carefully, Poll from her new pilot's seat. The ships drifted apart, and then the larger one headed back towards the battle.
"Should we do anything? Are we meant to do anything?" Navem asked.
"No," Poll said. "If we were, she would have given us someone from the other ship to use as gunner."
"I don't like just watching this," Navem muttered, as the enemy caught another of their ships, a sea anemone reaching out to catch a minnow.
"We might be asked to relay messages," Poll reminded him, then, "I'm sorry that your first adventure turned out so unpleasant."
"I'm more annoyed that it turned into a distraction," Navem said honestly. "We did all that research, and we'd have found our answer more quickly by staying where we were."
"We have more of the story, though," Poll said.
"But why have they been raiding us for so long? And why have they changed their patterns?"
"Unfortunately," Poll said ruefully, "that's something we may never find out. They're aliens, after all."
"Debris," Navem said suddenly, tagging a piece of ship that was coming their way. Poll moved the ship a little to the side, so when it got to them in five minutes it would pass them, rather than pass through them.
"I think she's making them fall back," Poll said after a moment. It certainly looked like all the ships were organising, regrouping. "Maybe they'll start firing from a distance?"
It was generally considered extremely bad form, in human space at least, to fire projectiles from a distance where you couldn't be sure they would hit your target. Whole systems had been rendered uninhabitable, whole populations had been stuck planetbound, before this etiquette had been introduced. Low-velocity ordinance seemed to bounce off this particular ship, however, and this area was already debris filled enough from the battle that it would take a hundred years or a billion dollars of effort to make it safe again.
The ships finished regrouping out of reach of the tentacles. There was a pause, then in union they began to fire.
***
The alien ship's panelled exterior appeared resistant to ion damage, but the heavier ordinance broke the panels, exposing the interior to space. It appeared their goal was to keep up their fire on one spot to drill into the interior of the massive ship, though every so often the alien ship twisted a little relative to the fleet, exposing a new set of unbroken panels to fire. Navem couldn't figure out how the ship was turning for a while, until he caught a few of the panels opening, showing the glow of small engines. Evidently some of the panels hid engines instead of tentacles, though it was impossible to figure out which ones.
"Do we have enough ammunition to keep this up?" Navem asked, sounding worried.
"If a sufficient mass can break the panels, they can start throwing rocks if they do, I guess," Poll said.
"Have you ever been in a battle before?" Navem asked.
"Almost," Poll said. "My senior adventurer and I were sent on a diplomatic mission once, and almost arrived too late. Ships were literally in the air facing one another when we managed to talk them down."
"Do you know if it's generally this--target on the move." Poll looked at her screen, where Navem had highlighted the alien ship. It was heading towards the ships, accelerating fast.
"Are they going to break formation?" Navem asked.
"I'm sure," Poll said.
"When are they going to break formation?" he asked again nervously. "Because--"
The alien ship didn't stop, slamming into the fleet as it was beginning to break away. Panels and ships flew everywhere in a cloud, shredding one or two of the nearest ships. The others scattered, but as the alien ship flew past, they came in range of the undamaged panels on the ship's side faces. Tendrils flew out and grabbed most of the remaining ships, drawing them into the surface of the ship.
"Can you here me?" came a crackle on the radio.
"Elvenheim?" Poll dashed to the microphone. "Where is your ship?"
"Inside the enemy's," came Elvenheim's voice. She seemed calm, though Navem couldn't imagine anyone being so in her situation. "Go warn people. Go--"
They waited a few more minutes, but they didn't hear any more from her. The last few ships attempted to flee and regroup, but were destroyed by the tendrils and the expanding debris cloud.
"Where should we go?" Navem asked.
"Home," was Poll's first thought. They blipped out of the battlefield.