The search was quick and pointless. The chamber was large, but there wasn't much in it beside the corpses of the Greys. Four tables outfitted with restraints. Five stations with control spheres, all inoperable. Several trays filled with torture equipment. There were odd devices mixed in with the knives and screws, but Yvian decided not to mess with them.

The dead greys didn't have anything useful on them. Didn't have anything on them at all, actually. Yvian kicked one of them in annoyance and immediately regretted it. The impact made her bare toes sting. She kicked it again, this time using the bottom of her foot. Motherless sons.

The others were gathering around her. Yvian wasn't feeling very Captain-like, nude and banged up as she was, but she took charge anyway. "What do we know?"

"Not much," said Lissa. "Their technology's nothing like anything I've seen before. I can't tell which parts are devices and which are just decoration." She frowned at one of the control stations. "The aliens were touching those glowing spheres, though. It looked a lot like what we do with Lucendian control crystals."

"That makes sense," said Scarrend. "They're psionic. Like us."

"We're not psionic," said Yvian.

"We are now," Scarrend disagreed. "That Lucendian crystal in your brain can connect directly to the soul of a Lucendian ship. We can feel them at range. We can feel each other's emotions to a small degree as well."

"We can?" Yvian blinked.

"You didn't notice?" asked Mims.

"It might be a little too subtle for Captain Sis," Lissa teased. She gave Yvian a smile. "You probably thought you were just getting better at reading people."

"I am better at reading people!" Yvian protested. "I'm insightful!"

"Yeah," Lissa agreed. "Because you're psychic."

"The point," Scarrend chuffed, "Is that our implants give us a small amount of psionic ability. The Grey Ones use psionics to control their ship functions. It is possible we could do the same."

"That's a dangerous thing to try," said Mims. "We don't know if our minds or the implants are compatible. Touching one might fry your brain."

"Even if it doesn't you might end up touching the souls of three billion hostile aliens," Lissa pointed out, She frowned. "You know, Sis, I'm not sure Kill Them All is a viable plan. This ship might as well be a planet, and we don't even have guns."

"I'm just happy we're not dead yet," said Mims. "If I was the Greys, I'd have activated some defenses by now. Sent in some drones or flooded the place with plasma. At the very least, I'd have decompressed the section we're in."

"There is no mechanism to decompress this area," Kilroy reported. "This ship's life support systems appear to be biological instead of mechanical." The machine pointed at one of the destroyed control stations. Liquid was oozing out of the charred remnants of a control sphere terminal. "As are many of the ship's functions."

"Well they have to have some way of dealing with intruders." Yvian winced as she shifted. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, the bites she'd suffered were really starting to hurt. "I got the impression they bring a lot of beings up here. We can't have been the first ones to get loose."

"Affirmative," said Kilroy. The machine pointed up. "In addition to the phased abduction beams, this unit detects energy weapon turrets hidden in the ceiling. The ion grenades disabled them."

"So we're looking at restraining beams and turrets? That seems..." Lissa frowned. "Kind of basic."

"It's plenty," said Yvain. "If Mims hadn't had ion grenades we'd be dead."

"It's still basic," said Mims. "No redundancy. No backup plans." He nudged a Grey One corpse with his foot. "The bastards seemed pretty arrogant. They were offended that we hurt them. I think that's why they kept tracking us down."

"Playthings," said Lissa. "They called us playthings. They're mad we fought back."

"Not as mad as they're gonna be," Yvian decided. "We're just getting started. Kilroy, do you know where their bridge is?"

"Negative," said the Peacekeeper. "There is a significant amount of electromagnetic interference. This unit's sensor readings are only reliable within a four hundred meter radius."

"Hard way it is." Captain Yvian tightened her grip on her knife. "Kilroy, take point. Scarrend, you're rear guard. Let's go find a control node."

The chamber had five doors. Kilroy lead them to one of them. They couldn't find a control panel, so the Peacekeeper unit pried it open. "Alert," said the unit. "Hostile forces incoming." Then he disappeared.

Yvian backed away from the door. Lines of green light sizzled past. There were screeches and screams. Then silence. Kilroy reappeared. He had a fresh coating of green blood. He held a pile of strange looking guns in his arms. Yvian took one. It wasn't as sleek as the blasters she was used to. The pistol grip was small, but the body of the gun was bulbous, quickly narrowing to a point. Clear material formed three circles around the barrel of the weapon.

She pointed the gun at a bulkhead and squeezed the trigger. It made a high pitched hissing noise. A line of green death sparked against alien metal. "Huh. You'd think they'd be DNA locked or something."

"Foolish," Scarrend agreed. He took two of the guns from Kilroy. Lissa and Mims each took another. Kilroy tucked the last one into his suit.

"More will be coming," said Mims. "We should move." He grimaced. "Kilroy, can you take care of any automated defenses? I've got more grenades, but only six of them are ion."

"Affirmative." The Peacekeeper's eyes glowed red.

Yvian stepped out into a corridor. It was round. Most of the bulkheads were the silvery alien material she'd seen earlier, but there were lines of pulsing organic tissue running through it like veins. It was bright, but Yvian couldn't see a light source. The corridor stank less than the chamber she'd left, but not by much. Bright Lady, she hated this place.

Kilroy picked a direction. They walked. Periodically the Peacekeeper would disappear. When he came back they'd continue, stepping over the corpses of Grey Ones and glancing at torn bulkheads that used to contain restraining beams or turrets. Fifteen minutes of walking brought them to another set of doors. Kilroy ripped them open. He entered. Yvian waited, listening to the sounds of torn metal. A minute later he invited them inside.

This chamber was just like the one Yvian had left, but with few corpses. It was not unoccupied. Three tables contained creatures Yvian had never seen before. Pixenoid, but furry. They had big floppy ears, and might have been cute under different circumstances. They were very dead. The creatures were strapped down, covered in cuts and burns. Their faces were contorted in pain and horror. Their chests had been opened. Organs were missing.

"Motherless sons..." Lissa muttered.

"This was recent," said Mims. He touched one of the dead things. "Still warm."

"The Grey meatbags evacuated as we approached," said Kilroy. "This unit can hunt them down, Captain Mother Yvian."

"No, stay with us," the Captain decided. "There's no point hunting stragglers if we're going to kill all these things at once."

"Do you have a plan for that?" asked Lissa.

"No clue," Yvian admitted, "but that's what we gotta do. You felt those things. They're not going to stop." Scarrend snorted. Yvian frowned at him. "What?"

"Sorry Captain." The Vrrl chuckled. "It's just, you have no plan."

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"That's not-" Yvian protested.

"No plan," Scarrend continued. "No resources. No idea what we're up against. And still you set an impossible goal. You trust yourself and your allies to do the unthinkable with no regard for the odds." He chuckled again. "It's insanity on the same level as the humans."

Yvian scowled. "You're an asshole."

Scarrend laughed. "Don't be offended, Captain. Your refusal to accept reality is your finest trait."

"To be fair," Mims cut in, "we've done a lot of impossible things these last few years." His lips quirked. "It's amazing what you can accomplish when you're too stupid to know better."

"No one does stupid like Yvian." Lissa agreed. She grinned. "Right, Captain Sis?"

"You're all assholes," Yvian muttered. She mustered her dignity and limped to the nearest control terminal. The glowing sphere at the top of it was undamaged. The pedestal holding the sphere was a mix of metal and that odd dark organic material she'd seen in the corridor. She held out a hand, stopping just short of touching it.

"You should let me do that, Captain," said Mims.

"I got it," said Yvian. She hovered her palm over the thing. She didn't feel anything coming out of the sphere. Was she really psychic? She didn't feel psychic.

"You're the leader," Mims argued. "I'm more expendable."

"Captain's prerogative," she told him. "You're in charge if this goes wrong." She let out a breath and closed her eyes. Her palm descended, resting against the sphere. It was warm. Hard. Kind of slick. Hmm. Yvian had expected an immediate connection, like when she touched a Lucendian ship.

"Is it working?" asked Lissa. Yvian raised her other hand, motioning for the others to shush. She focused, trying to feel the sphere the way she'd felt the Crystal ships. Her soul reached out. There.

"It's working," Yvian whispered. "I feel it." Her soul sank into the sphere. She felt herself stretching through corridors of alien flesh, a network so vast her mind reeled. The soul of the ship was vast. Vast and... quiet. Simple. She'd touched souls before. The smaller Lucendian ships had felt like children, excitable and eager for attention. The Crystal Mother had felt old, tired. Wise, even if she didn't think the way Yvian did. This ship, the Grey ship, it didn't think at all. It had feelings, sort of, but...

"Oh Crunch," she swore. "Bright Lady..."

"What is it?" asked Mims.

"The ship," she breathed. "It's soul is... missing things. Like it was lobotomized somehow."

She sank deeper. The ship neither welcomed nor denied her. Yvian wasn't sure it understood she was there at all. Yvian touched pieces of it, functions. She focused on a few of them, but couldn't figure out what they were. "Scarrend," she ordered. "I need someone smart."

Dimly, she heard Mims ask, "Should the rest of us be offended?"

"Probably," Lissa answered.

A moment later, a second presence joined Yvian. Scarrend's soul was as she remembered, order and discipline superimposed on a cauldron of bloodlust and rage. The Vrrl's soul touched her, used her as a guide to find the ship's functions. "I smell it," he spoke through the connection as well as his voice. "Give me a little time."

"Hostiles are approaching," Kilroy reported. "Stand by."

Yvian shifted her focus. She could feel them. Nearly two hundred souls, seething with hate. They were splitting into groups, coordinating without the need for speech or signals. None of the Grey wanted to risk themselves. None of the Grey had a choice. If one showed weakness, the others would tear it apart. Or worse. The weak were playthings.

Some of the Grey looked up. They could feel Yvian. Outrage spiked. Hate crashed into her. The hate was replaced by terror. Kilroy was upon them. The unit tore through the first group in seconds, then moved to the next faster than they could see. Grey ones screamed. They fired their weapons. Green lines of light flew everywhere. Dozens of the Grey were killed by friendly fire. The Grey didn't care. Each Grey cared only for itself.

Yvian couldn't tell if any of the guns hit Kilroy, but the unit did not stop. In less than a minute, the Grey Ones were dead. Yvian's satisfaction fizzled when another soul touched hers. Alien. Indignant. Cruel. Others joined it. A lot of others. The Greys Kilroy had killed must have alerted someone. A deluge of souls crashed into Yvian.

Minds screamed their hate. Contempt and fury and promises of suffering. Yvian gasped. More souls. Too many. Yvian couldn't sort the emotions anymore. The Greys were not united. Each of them was hissing at Yvian individually. Yvian felt mind after mind pressing in. Images of torture. The agony of thousands. The savoring of screams. Tasting the despair in the aura of their victims.

Yvian's body was shaking. Her soul was being smothered. It hurt. The human's warning about getting her brain fried echoed in her mind. Crunch. The Greys were going to kill her. She tried to pull out. She couldn't. Thousands of minds had latched on, and they weren't letting her go. The Greys didn't want her to leave. They wanted her to suffer. Little surges of happiness spiked at Yvian's panic.

Scarrend's pained growl reached Yvian. The Greys were attacking him, too. The Vrrl's soul swiped and swatted, trying to figure out how to hurt the creatures the way they were hurting him. The Greys bore down harder. More and more were piling on, finding their way through the ship's network to tear at the interlopers. A concept was growing. A word hissed with gleeful hate. Playthings.

The word stabbed to the core of Yvian. She snarled. Fear and desperation gave way to something else. Anger. Yvian had been used as a plaything before. She'd devoted her life, her entire being, to making sure that would never happen again. Not to anyone, but especially not to her. Yvian did not have to dig down. The feelings came out of her like a punch. A lifetime of pain and determination and white hot fury slammed into the souls of the Grey. "I," the pixen growled, "am not. A PLAYTHING!"

For a moment, more souls than Yvian could count shied back. Yvian's mind pressed forward, matching the outrage of the Greys with a hate so dark and deep she'd never dared to look at it directly. The part of her that remembered, that hated herself and her father and the whole fucking world. The part that she'd shut away so hard she'd had forgotten it was even there.

A roar of defiance shook the soul link. Scarrend. The Vrrl unleashed his own rage and horror. Hope and despair, a lust for violence and the need to dominate. Scarrend sent the Grey memories. Memories of him slaughtering their fellows. He shared the joy of ripping flesh and cracking bone. He shared the secret knowledge that he was a monster, a thing made by mad gods to plague the universe.

The Greys were shaken. The new minds pouring in flinched at the onslaught in the memories of the others. It didn't last. They pressed forward again, hissing promises of pain. Yvian and Scarrend fought back, lashing out with everything they were. It would not be enough.

A new mind. Mims. The human assessed the psychic war. He was grim, cold, practical. Then he wasn't. Yvian had always been leery of seeing the human's soul. The few times their minds had touched, he'd worked hard to keep himself contained. Now, in the face of the Grey, he let loose. Pain and loathing and wrath beyond anything Yvian had imagined. It was an eruption that bordered on madness. No. Yvian shook with epiphany. It was madness.

The human's soul was a mass of fire and jagged shards, stitched together by discipline and the fear of failure. Yvian saw no sign of love or kindness or empathy. He was a broken soul. He would never heal. Didn't want to heal. What Mims wanted was... Yvian shuddered away from what Mims wanted. It was too much. Too much. Her body was whimpering.

Dimly, she noticed Lissa reaching for the sphere. Mims slapped her hand away. "Don't look," he told her.

The Grey recoiled. They ceased attacking Yvian. They focused solely on the human. They drank in his madness, and answered with respect. Contrition. The Grey Ones pulled back, touching just enough to maintain the connection. A new image was offered. Mims and the others, in a column of light. The human and his playthings returned to his ship. The Worldship leaving, never to return.

Mims acknowledged the offer. The minds of the Grey retreated. When the last one broke connection, the human's torrent of madness ceased. Cold discipline clamped back down on his soul. Mims communicated through the connection, careful not to speak out loud. "Don't tell Lissa."

Scarrend promised. Yvian gave the mental equivalent of a nod. Mims broke the connection. Yvian pulled her soul out of the ship a second later.

"What happened," Lissa demanded.

"The Greys didn't like us mucking around in their ship," said the human. "They changed their tune when they figured out we're psychic and as vicious as they are."

"They offered to put us back on our ship," said Yvian.

"There's no way they'll actually do that," Lissa frowned. "Right?"

"Crunch no," said Yvian. "If we let them put us in a beam they'll drop us in the void."

"They'll watch us die and laugh about it," Mims agreed.

"Hey Scarrend," Yvian placed a hand on the Vrrl's shoulder. "Can we control the ship from here or do we need to find the bridge?"

The Vrrl released the sphere and growled. "There is no central bridge, but there are control areas. I know how to get to the nearest." Three eyes glowered down at Yvian. "You smelled the offer?"

"We're not taking it," Yvian told him. "We're going to kill them all."

The Vrrl nodded. "Good." Four clawed hands clasped Yvian's shoulders and waist. The hands were armored, cold against her skin. "Captain..." His eyes softened. "Yvian..." Tears formed. "What I saw... I am so-"

"Stop." Mims didn't shout, but his voice cracked like a whip.

Scarrend blinked. "Scargiver? Surely you saw-"

"Nothing." The human's hand clamped on the Vrrl's arm. "You saw nothing, and neither did I."

"You can't deny it Scargiver," Scarrend protested. "Our minds were as one. We all-"

"We all." The voice of Mims was cold as the void, and twice as lethal. "Saw. Nothing." Mims released the Vrrl and stepped back. "There's some things you share, and some things you never speak of. The last ten minutes are the latter."

"Ok." Lissa stared suspiciously at the three of them. "What the Crunch happened in there?"

"The worst part of ourselves," said Mims.

"Oh." Lissa's eyes narrowed. "Is that why you slapped my hand away? Don't you trust me?"

"It's not a matter of trust." Mims told her. "There are some things you don't share with the people you love."

"That sounds like a matter trust of to me." Yvian's sister crossed her arms. "Aren't we supposed to share everything?"

"Not like this," Yvian stepped in. "Would you want everyone to see the worst parts of yourself? The things you hide in the back of your mind? Things you don't even want yourself to see?" She shuddered. "That part of Mark is burned into my brain, now. Trust me, Sis. You're not missing out. If I could forget the last few minutes I would."

"Oh." Lissa unfolded her arms. She gave Yvian a concerned look. "That bad?"

"Worse," said Captain Yvian. "Let's never talk about it again." She changed the subject. "Scarrend, did you say you can get us to a control center?"

"Yes."

"Then let's go. These motherless sons aren't going to kill themselves." She started for the door Kilroy had ripped open. She froze. "Uh, Lissa?"

"What's up Sis?"

Yvian took a quick glance around the chamber. Her suspicions were confirmed. The Peacekeeper unit wasn't there. "Where the Crunch is Kilroy?"