Blaring alarms; the metallic taste of blood and stomach acid.

What—

A dull moaning, her own gurgling breath. A voice thunders in her skull.

Navigator Lanis! Collect yourself!

Lanis. Navigator. The words seem to refract off her shimmering mind, but they have their effect. She gasps, opening her eyes into red-rimmed darkness. Other sensations flood into her: Pain— a splitting headache. Coolness, all around her. She’s in an acceleration pod, ensconced in oxygenated gel, a deep part of her realizes.

Navigator Lanis!

She closes her eyes tightly and another world lights up, the bionics in her mind running a full systems check and selective reboots. A stream of data flashes through her mind’s eye, absorbed by her subconscious and… something else. Another thing, inside her mind.

A name. Demeter.

Where are we? What just happened? She asks, thickly stumbling over the words. Except they aren’t words, but thoughts, conveyed as quickly as they arise to the ship’s AI.

Lanis. Navigator Lanis. That’s me, she realizes.

SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE

Her eyes snap wide open for the second time against the cool acceleration gel: She’s Lanis Osgell, Navigator Third Class, on her first warp jump. and something has gone truly, horribly, breathtakingly wrong.

We’ve been pulled off course, Navigator. Unclear etiology. Jump, stat. Jump, stat. Course: Terra. Powering jump, awaiting Navigator guidance.

The voice that echoes massively in her skull is that of Demeter, the five kiloton Jupiter-class ship’s AI. It’s just a supply ship, but the ship and its mind are still more advanced than anything she had set foot upon until just a day ago. She’s fresh out of Fleet training, not even a full Navigator; why is Demeter making her run the jump?

Where is Navigator Sanoslav? She asks, knowing the answer as fast as the inquiry is made.

Massive intracranial hemorrhage detected. Resuscitation efforts ongoing.

Lanis tries to push down the tingling flood of fear as she absorbs this information. What about her own headache? She has to trust that her Fleet implants will do their job and keep her ICP within just allowable limits. Except they didn’t, not for Sanoslav.

What the hell happened?

There’s a heartbeat pause.

Not alone, Demeter says, the bulk of its massive attention suddenly elsewhere, servitors scrambling.

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Lanis’ entire body twitches within her pod. She feels… it, not just with the Demeter’s sensors but viscerally, like a long finger brushing along her neck.

What in the fuck! she screams. This time she truly screams the words, her lungs' air gurgling out into the dim ochre of acceleration gel.

Focus, Demeter commands, haltingly. Get us back to Terra. Forming warp bubble. Awaiting!

Lanis eyes roll and widen, but she also gets to work, a decade of Fleet training and implants overriding her bulging terror. She doesn’t understand what’s happening, but she feels the Demeter fighting for its life against whatever it is out there, in a space where nothing should be. Lanis instinctively makes herself smaller, allowing only a trickle of data into her mind feed. It’s like doing a quantum physics assignment in the dark while hiding from a monster— flicking a penlight on and off to see the assignment, then to scribble a note, all while moving to a different hiding place. Still, a part of her mind registers an ongoing conversation with the Demeter, the chatter of battle-speak and ship data flowing around her like a pebble caught in a flooding river.

Captain Harris woken on emergency protocol. Specialist teams 5, 6, and 7 woken on emergency protocol. Weapons online. Countermeasures online. Weapons team AI integration complete. Countermeasure AI integration complete. Captain Harris at 70% function and rising.

Somewhere too is the dawning realization that she’s actually figuring it out, on her first jump. Still technically just a cadet; am I ever allowed? Finds that all the protocols have been overridden already. She was only brought along as a redundant observer on a routine resupply to Barrack, and now she’s computing an emergency leap out of Warp space. God, oh god.

Androvan ship detected. Weapon flares. Bracing.

Lanis’ pupils dilate again, her trance teetering. Where the fuck did that come from?

She doesn’t even get a reply from Demeter, merely a pressure in her mind that forces her back to her task, but not before she brushes against the impossibly rapid battle-chatter of Captain Harris and the weapons’ teams. She sees the energy spikes, and even within her gel pod she feels a shudder as something hits the ship. A damage report pops up for a microsecond, but it’s shoved aside as the weight of the Demeter’s attention shifts back to her.

Focus! Computation check complete. Warp bubble holding. Focus. Ship to crew— emergency jump in 3, 2, 1.

Lanis’ psyche suddenly becomes one with the ship. She can feel oxygen and biological matter spilling out from the gaping tear in the Demeter’s hull, bulkheads grinding down to staunch the bleeding. Across from the Demeter is the needle-like Androvan ship, shockingly close, less than a nano sec. Their enemy, but also, she suddenly realizes, a victim itself. It’s being… consumed. That’s the only way she can describe it. She watches with Demeter's sensors, nightmarishly better than any eyes, as the silver arches of the Androvan's command bridges buckle, one after another, its mass-drivers and point defense lancers no longer directed at the Demeter, but at something else, something that has already killed the ship past hope.

It’s coming. Jump. Now.

Lanis wonders briefly if she's ready. Realizes it doesn't matter if the ship is torn apart in the jump- any longer here and they're all dead anyway. She gathers the ship in the palm of her mind, an act that the Demeter, no matter how huge and advanced, cannot comprehend, and plunges it into a ripped hole of Warp space, back to Terra. She's heedless of the redlining energy consumption, or the bulging warp bubble, or the hemorrhagic warnings and blood in her mouth as she focuses her psyche beyond any capacity she thought possible. It's like a child's nightmare come to life on an impossible, unfathomable scale, her mind pushing the Demeter through the clinging mud of Warpspace while a terror reaches out its claws toward her, so close that she can feel its obscene breath hot against her back.

Back. Oh god, oh god, oh god.

The last thing she remembers: her body convulsing as they re-enter real space, screaming and bleeding into her acceleration gel, and the Demeter's quiet words:

You did well.

Then the ship sedates her.