The files opened, and she saw a long chronological list. The station had still been manned for months, and so there were dozens of entries, roughly one every day.

She glanced over the first one. It was fairly standard; settling in, getting to know the peculiarities of this particular station.

"Scan the logs for anomalous activity on the station," Pirra ordered her system.

It hummed for a second, then showed her a selection of dates.

There was a pattern to them. They started intermittently, but slowly grew closer together. Just like what she and Tred had experienced, but stretched over months instead of hours . . .

Near the end, they were all recording as anomalous. A solid month of logs, with multiple entries a day, all of them had pinged her search for anomalies.

She opened the first.

"The strangest thing happened today. I had left my coffee in the break room before I went onto bridge shift. Stenni didn't mind letting me go to get it. Ten minutes after I got back, though, I couldn't find it . . . and when I went back to the break room later, it was in there. I know it was mine because it was in my mug that dad gave me. Had I forgotten it? I felt certain I had it with me both times. Guess it's the new station jitters, huh?"

The next entry opened.

"Today I heard someone shout in the hall. I don't know why I woke up, but I couldn't get back to sleep so I took a short walk. But then I heard a voice; it was a yell or scream, and it scared the crap out of me. The system said no one else was even in that section with me, though. I checked in anyway, asked if anyone had heard anything. They heard nothing."

The next night was also flagged, and she read on.

"I can't get that scream out of my mind. I checked my system, but it recorded no audio activity at that moment, nor did the system log. Was it just in my head?"

A week later, a short entry;

"I heard the scream again. But it was saying something this time. I can't be sure what, but I think it said that we don't belong here. I've heard of weird sounds on ships and stations before, but never heard of voices. I told Saltzmann, but he said it was probably just someone watching a film in their room. It could be, but it just doesn't sit right with me. It sounded so real."

She didn't have time to read all of this. She skipped ahead half a dozen entries.

"Today I saw the unknown man again. I went past the service hallway leading to the airlock and I saw four people huddled in the hall. I'm sure it was four - Saltzmann, Porthu, Stenni, and . . . someone. It couldn't have been Crube or Joon, they were on the bridge. Who is this man? And why were those three talking to him?

"I was too afraid to approach. After the veiled threats Porthu had made the week before, I didn't want to anger him again. I watched, but several minutes later I blacked out. I woke up with Stenni over me. Dessei are hard to read, but he didn't even seem concerned. Just watching me. Didn't offer me a hand up or say anything. Eventually he just walked away."

She read the next journal entry.

"I saw him. Clearly, this time. Not just a flash out of the corner of my eyes. Not just mixed among the others. He was down the hall from me, staring at me as I walked by. I nearly had a heart attack, and when I looked back, he was still there. We just stood like that for what seemed like minutes, when he said to me that we don't belong here and ran. I tried to follow him, but I lost him. The system couldn't find him and said there were still only six of us on the station. I even looked through the past logs at prior crews, but saw no one who looked like him. I tried reporting it to Saltzmann again, but he refused to write up a report on my 'mad ravings'."

She skipped ahead more. There had to be something useful here.

One of the later entries was marked as important. She opened it.

"I cannot track time anymore, I don't know how long we've been here. My log says that it's only been months, but I can't be sure. I feel like I've written and re-written this entry - a thousand entries - that don't show up. Some of them are even corrupting, as if I'm writing over the exact same data over and over again.

"I can't trust anyone anymore, except maybe Crube. But she's locked herself in her room and won't come out, says she doesn't even care if she's brought up on charges of dereliction. I got in to see her, though, but it was no good. She says she knows what's going on, that she's figured it out, but she won't tell me. I think she wanted to, I think she felt bad not telling me, but she said it was for the best.

"Saltzmann doesn't even seem to notice our absence. Just chatting with his new friend all the time, or with Porthu and Stenni. Or all of them together. They're together most of the time, talking about something they won't let me in on. Acting like that stranger is part of the crew. But he only ever says to me that we don't belong here.

"I feel like I'm replaying the same days over and over again. Some days I forget the man isn't supposed to be here and just go about my business. It's impossible, though, I remember disembarking. I have memories of getting on a ship and leaving, flying away from this place, of going home, of being home . . .

"They're not just imaginings! They're not made up in my head! These are memories, memories of leaving but I still wake up every day on this station!

"Am I insane? I remember it a dozen different ways.

"Or . . .

"Or is a part of me stuck here? Can I never truly leave? A never-ending cycle of this hell, running over and over?

"Something happened. Something has trapped a part of my mind, my soul, on this station.

"I'm alone, and I'm afraid."

Pirra closed the log with trembling hands.

How long had she and Tred been here? She tried to remember, but it felt like days, if not longer. Were they supposed to have been here for days?

She wanted to ask her system, but she knew it was unreliable. She had only her own sense of time to tell.

And she didn't know.

"We have to get out of here," she said out loud.

Because they didn't belong here.

The logs had said that Dr. Crube had locked herself in her quarters, and there weren't that many crew compartments on this station. The one next to this room had been sealed, she wondered . . .

Creeping into the hall, she went to the door. She hated not acting more directly, but she needed the information. She needed to know so she could plan.

The door lock had been put into a looping cycle that would prevent it from responding to commands. It was a basic and quick way to keep a door from responding, but she could simply reset it. Surely the station commander, Saltzmann, could have done the same.

If, as the logs said, the man had stopped caring, though, then this would have stopped anyone with only a casual knowledge of these systems.

She ended the loop and the door opened on her command.

A stench came out to greet her, an organic smell that had been sitting for a long time.

Ignoring it, she went in, staying low. Perhaps this was where one of their mystery people had been-

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Something moved. A shape, like a person. Then, a voice spoke.

"You're not Stenni," a woman's voice croaked. "You're . . . new."

"Who are you?" Pirra demanded, watching the hunched figure and holding the knife ready. "Identify yourself."

The woman looked up, a smile splitting a face ravaged by stress. She did not even need to speak for Pirra to recognize her.

"Dr. Crube?" Pirra breathed.

*******

"Commander Caraval, we've got something on radar," Bascet said.

Iago turned in his seat, the stiffness of his muscles making it uncomfortable. "Is it debris?"

"No, sir . . . I think it's a ship. Its size and markings match those of the Sunspot."

Taking a deep breath, Caraval steadied himself mentally. They'd been travelling for days, searching for hours, trying to find some trace of the lost ship . . . and they'd finally succeeded. He didn't know if he was happy, but he had some sense of relief that was quickly swallowed by a worse dread at what they'd have to do next.

"Move us closer so we can get more information. Everyone, take a quick rotation and limber up. Use muscle stims if you need to."

As the ship began to alter course, someone else looked to him. "Are we going to have to board her, sir?"

"I don't know," he replied. "We might."

They moved closer. They'd been in the ship for forty hours already, and they were all weary. Sleeping was hard in full kit, unable to lay down. None of them had hoped they'd actually find the Sunspot, the ship lost years ago at the battle here.

It was where they had predicted, based on its last known trajectory.

The doomed ship had been lost with all hands, as far as Caraval knew. Why the Captain thought it was worth investigating, he couldn't know. He could just act.

An hour passed. Streams of data were recorded, committed to nigh-industructible nano-diamonds, and ejected in a beacon out the back. It was the safest way to make sure, if something happened to them, that their data could be still be recovered.

"Ship seems fully intact, sir. We detect minimal changes to it."

"Are there any?" Iago asked.

"I . . . I don't see any. Records are spotty on just what disabled the ship, sir."

They didn't have all the information, unfortunately. Half the data taken from that battle had been locked away, too dangerous to ever see the light of day. Rumor had it that people who saw too much grew tentacles where their eyes should be and started speaking in tongues.

He knew enough to know that those were just stories, but that the reality was worse still.

Memetic disease, they had coined it. Knowledge that, when taken in, altered a person more subtly.

"Sir, I'm picking up krahteon emissions from the ship," Bascet said. "She's contaminated all right . . . the rate is tremendous."

"Are we at a safe distance?"

"Yes, sir. I don't think we can even get the ship in close, though. Should I send in a drone?"

Iago considered a moment. "Yes, do that. Pipe the info feed to my systems only, bypass the main computer bank."

The man hesitated, but Iago gave him a soft nod of encouragement, and Bascet complied.

It was a dangerous move. And why he wished he had Pirra here with him; if he was . . . changed by what he saw, then Sgt. Bascet would be in command. He'd prefer it be Pirra, but . . .

Well, at least she was safe on the monitoring station. Someone on the team would go home alive.

"Live feed starting, sir."

The feed was filtered through a number of dumb systems that tried to take out anything too harmful. Certain shapes, that people had called before unnatural were known to cause long-term hallucinations. Those were blocked out. As well as certain forms of mutation of objects or even people that . . .

Well, he didn't know all the words that had been made up to describe their effects. He always just called them traumatic and counted his lucky stars he'd never had to see them.

He saw an image. The Sunspot was still an enormous distance away, but the drone was basically one big camera and suite of sensors.

At the time, the Sunspot had been top of the line. She would still be a good ship today, and her lines remained beautiful.

The drone was slowly orbiting the Sunspot, and he saw that debris travelled with the ship. After years he'd have thought that would have dispersed as minor heading differences led them astray. But no, they were there, and they were . . . orbiting the ship. Just like the drone.

At this distance, the ship was still fuzzy enough to be relatively safe to look at. Details were just lost, and he realized that the orbital debris was moving in a strange way, in lockstep. As if it was connected to the ship and not just free-floating.

"It seems she got no lifepods off," Bascet said. "We're registering all of them still on the hull."

"Okay," Iago muttered. "Can you feed a three-dimensional view of the krahteonic emissions into this? Use a subsystem we can jettison if it gets corrupted. I just . . . have a feeling here."

Bascet turned in his seat, grabbing the back of it to turn himself around enough to look into Caraval's eyes.

"Sir, are you sure that's a good idea?"

Iago wasn't sure. But he nodded.

"Do it, Sergeant."

"Yes, sir . . ."

The feed came in.

Projected over his view, with the spinning of the drone he saw that his suspicions were correct. The peaks of the krahteon emissions matched the debris field itself. It was not the Sunspot that was contaminated but the junk!

"Take us back 30,000 kilometers," he ordered. "The debris field around the ship is heavily contaminated. I don't want any of that to drift near us."

"Yes, sir."

"I'll keep monitoring the feed until we go out of range."

He put his eyes back on the scans. Something told him that he should cut the feed himself. They had, by the loosest bounds of their mission, completed their job. The Sunspot was still there and intact. Close contact was out of the question. Over the last two days they had deployed drones through their whole path that would monitor the system as best they could. But already their sensors had confirmed that nothing had substantially changed about the system itself.

The star shone dimly, dimmer than it should, but it had been that way since the aftermath of the battle. It wasn't deviating enough to even make Tred worry. The planets . . . well, they still existed. Their drones would approach and send out their data over the next few months, but that was all he could do.

They should turn around, burn their one-time use dashdrive to get back to the monitoring station, and leave this place.

But he kept watching the feed.

The drone was still orbiting the ship, and the three-dimensional representation of the krahteon emissions was slowly growing fuzzier. It aggravated him, as he could see that there was something to them; they weren't orbiting like a normal debris field, there was a pattern.

He wanted to see what it was; it was important. It was not a normal shape, there was meaning in that shape. It reminded him of something, but he couldn't quite place his finger on what. When he figured it out, he knew it would be important.

The formation was growing dimmer, in fact he could no longer even make out the debris itself, just the field of emissions as they moved from the drone's signal and data was lost.

His face moved closer to the screen. The worst part was, he realized, that the shape of the field didn't move as he expected as the drone rotated to give him a better view. It was shifting in odd ways, but combined they meant something. They formed a grander shape, and only if he could see the whole thing would it make sense.

"Computer, forget the feed. Compile the krahteon emission scan into a three-dimensional image and show me that." He spoke quietly; there was no need to worry anyone else with this. "Hide the data sifting behind my command clearances."

He didn't want Bascet to realize what he was doing and stop him. This was bigger than him, bigger than their mission, understanding this.

As the imagine began to slowly take shape, he smelled something. He couldn't quite place it, but it tickled his memory in an odd way. It was a stressful but happy event, and he wanted to understand why.

The shape coalesced, and he remembered the scent; it was from the hospital room the day his son had been born.

Why was he smelling that now? Oh, well. It didn't matter. It just meant new life.

And that's what he was seeing. The shape before him, it was an egg. Or that was as near as he could call it.

But that word was so offensively inadequate that he hated it. He squinted at the image, telling the computer to rotate through a dry mouth, blinking away tears that left his vision pink.

This was . . . greater than him. Greater than all of them.

He was witnessing the first steps of something momentous.

"Sir!" he heard the scream.

"Turn the ship around and go back!" he realized he was screaming. His throat felt raw, his eyes burned, and his body ached as he thrashed in his seat.

"I'm taking command!" Sergeant Bascet said. "Secure the Lt. Commander and get us the hell out of here!"

"Take us back! I have to see! I have to see!" Iago screamed.