“Mal…”

“Malan! Malan, come in!”

Malan opened his eyes to the feel of cold steel against his cheeks and the grey of the Sparrow’s walls spinning around him. He pushed himself up on shaky arms and immediately regretted it as his stomach turned, then emptied across the metal grate floors.

“Malan, do you read?”

Wincing, he dragged himself upright and staggered back to the communication panel in the engine bay. Everything was wrong. His skin swam like ants swarmed beneath it, and his insides felt as though they were covered in a thin film of putrid oil. Concentrating on the feeling in any way pushed himself close to throwing up again, so he focused his attention on pushing the button to open communications with the bridge.

“I’m here,” he said, voice a strained rasp.

There was a pause before Elena responded. “Are you good? You’ve not answered for a good two minutes. We’re getting strange readings, and need an update on the rift before we launch. I want to know what we’re flying into.”

Malan pinched the bridge of his nose and delivered the news none of them wanted to hear. “It’s open. Sorry, I passed out or something trying to bring get back to the bridge.”

“Shit. Time to haul ass then. Get back to bridge Malan, Thad will check you over then you can carry on running checks for that glitch we spoke about.”

It took a moment for his spiralling mind to register what she meant by glitch. Sabotage. She wanted him to keep looking for signs of sabotage. Did the others not know? That was the only reason to refer to it as a glitch rather than what it was. He frowned. That would mean she must not have been on the bridge whilst she was talking with him, which was odd. She was the Captain, and they were trying to launch. Her place was on the bridge, and it was incredibly unlike Elena to be breaking protocol.

Malan bit back his suspicion and stumbled his way back up toward the bridge, the awful sensations running through him never ceasing even for a moment. The walls and ceilings swam with white celestial energy like swirling cloud, and he had to fight to keep his attention away from its drifting currents.

He had, after all, fallen into that trap before.

The Sparrow jolted as he entered the bridge, the tell-tale hiss of the docking mechanism separating indicating they had been let loose from the Miotov, and it was only Thaddeus’ steady hand that stopped the force of it knocking him back to his feet.

“Easy,” the older man said calmly into his ear. “Let’s have a seat together, shall we?”

Thaddeus guided him gently to the ground as Malan stared at the three at the front of the bridge. Beric had a navigational display up, helping Elena plot a course whilst she piloted the initial break from the Miotov. Through his hands Malan could feel the intensifying vibrations of the ship’s engines as they prepared for the system jump that would take them well away from this place.

A faint electronic ringing caught his attention, and with a start he realised Thaddeus had been waving his medical scanner up and down his body.

“How long have you been presenting these symptoms, Malan?”

“I’m fine,” he tried to start, and Thaddeus rolled his eyes.

“Like hell,” he snorted. “You know damn well what this device does. You’re running a fever, and your oesophageal contraction rate is telling me you’ve thrown up at least once in the last hour. More than that though, your nervous system is running wild. It’s like every single one of your nerves is overstimulated—I’ve not seen readings like this before. Why haven’t you said something?”

“It only started when the rift did, we’ve sort of had more pressing concerns,” Malan said, a wan smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

Thaddeus grimaced before nodding, whilst reaching to rummage in his medical bag and beginning to bring out vial of brightly coloured liquid. “Unfortunately, I would have to agree. I will administer nausea reductions and general painkillers, as well as something to calm the fever. Temporary measures, but it should keep you on your feet until we’re safe enough to examine you properly.”

“Appreciate it, Doc,” Malan said, as he heard the tell-tale whir of the engines as the Sparrow reached jump-ready status.

What he appreciated a little less was Thaddeus using his momentary distraction to press his hypodermic device against his neck and administer a sharp shot of whatever cocktail of drugs he’d concocted to deal with Malan’s symptoms.

He opened his mouth to complain, but all that left it was a relieved sigh as the near constant rolling in his stomach fell away, and the crawling under his skin subsided by a significant amount. Both sensations were still there, but distant. Mere echoes of the consciousness-consuming distraction they had been.

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Malan glanced back towards Elena as he felt the ship’s whirring reach a climax, ready to jump and licked his lips in anticipation of the sudden lurch that would signal their successful escape. Elena’s fingers tightened around the throttle controls and, now they were on the verge of getting away, Malan couldn’t help the slight pang of jealousy as he watched her ready to pilot the ship away from the system.

Had things turned out differently, that could have been him. Should have been him.

“Prepare for system jump,” Elena said, voice firm but clear, with out a single trace of nerves or worry.

She flipped up the clear casing that shielded the jump controls, and flicked the three release levers downwards before pressing the activation key. The engine’s noises reached a fever pitch as the jump drive corralled the ambient celestial energy around it to tear their own hole in the fabric of the universe—a pocket dimension they could navigate between systems.

Then, it stopped. The sound of the engines running at maximum capacity fell away like a deflated balloon, and the Sparrow juddered violently before stilling again. Malan saw luminescent blue energy crackle across the empty space ahead of them through the viewing windows—the ship’s jump drive trying and failing to open a portal.

“Fuck!” This time, even Elena’s professional veneer couldn’t hide her frustration and fear. “Talia, Beric. Report!”

Talia worried the bottom of her lip with her teeth, vibrant eyes glittering with unshed tears. “I—I’m not certain, Captain. The diagnostics are clear.”

“Shit, mine too,” Beric hissed, face flushed red as he frantically input commands. “The shith—I mean, Malan found a mechanical fault that the scans didn’t pick up before, right? Maybe the thing is happening with the jump drive, though I can’t see how… Should I go and see what I can do, Cap?”

Elena’s eyes narrowed, and Beric looked taken aback for a moment, before her sharp eyes slid away from him and landed on Malan. She wanted to ask him to go, he knew. To make sure Beric wasn’t in on the sabotage, or even to go instead. The thought of standing again and having to race through the ship for another repair had his heart thumping again, but Thaddeus had seemed to pick up on at least some of what Elena was thinking. His hand landed gently on Malan’s shoulder, and he met Elena’s stare with a firm gaze of his own.

Their captain hesitated for only a moment before sighing. “Do it, Beric, and make it fast.”

Beric nodded and scrambled up from his chair, before setting off into the depths of the ship at a pace Malan quite frankly hadn’t thought him capable of. A few seconds passed once the sound of Beric’s footsteps had disappeared, before Talia’s hesitant voice broke the short-lived silence.

“Ah… Captain?”

The attention of everyone left in the room snapped back towards the demure girl, who was peering, with a slightly embarrassed tinge of red colouring her cheeks, at her monitor.

“What have you found, Talia?”

“Um, nothing, exactly. It’s just,” she paused, her hands fidgeting nervously away from her monitor as she tried to find the right words. “Well, have you set a course for us to follow whilst we await word from Beric?”

Elena blinked and turned back to her own station. “No, why?”

“Because, well, we’re following one. And it’s taking us directly toward R18-34C’s moon.”

Her words prompted a flurry of movement on the bridge. Elena snapped her attention towards her station, stabbing at her monitor with growing panic on her face. Thaddeus shot to his feet, followed—albeit slowly—by Malan.

He watched through the viewing window, with open-mouthed horror, as the Sparrow slowly rounded the research station currently hiding the rift from sight. His heart pounded against his chest, unable to tear his eyes away from the point where he knew the rift would appear from behind the Miotov.

So captivated he was, that he didn’t notice the intercom click on right away.

“Cap?”

Beric’s voice crackled through the bridge speakers, jolting them all from their stunned silence.

“What have you found, Beric?” Elena hissed, her fingers continuing to desperately input commands.

“I don’t even really know how to describe it. The jump drive has been…dismantled.”

That stopped Elena cold, and she and Malan shared a glance as cold sweat rolled down his face.

“Fixable?”

“That’s the odd thing, Cap. This is intentional for sure, but it’s been left in perfect condition, just taken apart. If whoever it was wanted to keep us here, they could have easily fucked us by getting rid of a few of these components. They just…haven’t. Give me an hour, and I can have us out of here.”

Elena lifted her finger from the intercom button, and looked back at her screen, pensive frown upon her face, before she pressed the button down.

“You need to be faster than that, Beric. Our traitor has set a course right at the rift—we’re on autopilot and I haven’t figured out how to take back control yet. If I can’t and we’re not ready to jump, we’re dead.”

Malan’s eyes widened. The possibility that somebody had planned all of this was utterly insane. There was no way someone could have predicted the formation of the rift and still had time to set all of this up, and even if they had—why? The creatures that spilled out of the rifts were horrors beyond reckoning. No human had ever successfully communicated with one, and any who tried died horribly.

But on the other hand, if the rift wasn’t part of the plan, surely you try and surreptitiously let them out of the trap to save yourself a horrible death? Trapping a crew on an isolated moon to rob them and hold the crew for ransom wasn’t unheard of by any means. Thaddeus and Talia had families that loved them, and Elena was a decorated captain—any one of them would earn a decent ransom.

Not enough of one, however, to risk getting caught up in the Abyss.

As if on cue, a vivid lashing of red and purple caught his eyes, and dragged his concentration back to the ship’s window. There, no longer obscured by the Miotov was the planet and its moon, vivid silver against the black. And just beside it, raging against the barren expanse of space, was the rift.

Torrents of crimson like blood and crackling violet light swirled into a gaping wound in reality that made him queasy just to look at. It squirmed and crawled in place as though it were alive, contracting and expanding the lung of some great God. In its centre, the tear swallowed everything. All light, all movement, leaving nothing at all. A gaping maw that seemed to pull in all surrounding it, including Malan and his gaze.

He barely noticed Talia collapsing to her knees to his left, nor Thaddeus’ whispered prayers to his right. The only thing he was truly aware of was that hungering chasm, and the malicious whispers of the thirsting demons that lay within.