In her environmental suit’s cumbersome magnetic boots, Mira plodded as fast as she could on the derelict ISS Resolute’s outside hull. She didn’t want to be late for the salvage chief, and so while hurrying she almost missed the strange substance near the sensor array.

Granth, the smoky yellow planet they orbited, loomed large above, illuminating the abandoned starship cruiser’s hull. From about midway up the sensor nodule to the hull stretched white flaky material.

The hell? That’s definitely not from a meteorite. Her suit sensors showed no sign of abnormal radiation. She reached out with her suit glove to break off a piece. She twisted it back and forth before it severed, like a frozen cloth.

Up close the fist-size material’s surface looked like an ornate bird’s nest. At least, what she had seen on the vids about birds in the orphanage on Granth as a child. There weren’t anything like birds on the salvage ship where she worked or the asteroid station, where she called a four-by-four meter room in the shitty section of the station home.

Interlocking thin threads made up the material, resulting in a design of bending and interweaving threads that captivated Mira. The design seemed to shift with a change in perspective.

As though her spacesuit had let in a draft she felt a chill in her midsection. It felt like someone was watching her. She thrust the substance into her waist bag and looked around.

Nothing had changed. She was alone on the steel hull.

Nearby, the gauss gun barrels still pointed away like broken fingers out of the ruptured gun house. She knew a dozen other derelict ships were also floating nearby in far orbit of Granth, but all she could see was a starry black void.

#

Two days later, Mira sat in her coveralls on top of her sleeping bag on the deck of the Resolute’s ruined bridge. She hadn’t showered for a week, the air smelled like burned plastic, and the designers of the sleeping bag had cared more about its clinging to a metal deck than her comfort—despite all of this it felt luxurious finally to be free of the environmental suit.

Struggling to stay awake, she played solitaire with her well-worn deck of playing cards—her only heirloom, as she liked to think of it. She kept looking back at the round pressure-tight door that the salvage team chief, Zoelane Rivers, would be entering. Six other crew members slept in their suits or relaxed, leaning up on an elbow or sitting as they looked at their glowing laptop screens.

Mira was going to ask Zoelane to keep her on the team permanently. She had resolved to ask at the start of the third day, and if she failed to do so now, she wasn’t sure she’d get up the nerve later.

The bridge on the derelict cruiser served as their base of operations. Blue padded swivel chairs lined the walls next to the charred consoles, dials, buttons, and shattered displays that had been the province of the communication officers, steersmen, and tactical officers who had operated the ship. Covering more space than bare walls and ceiling, pipes and cords snaked along and over each other, overrunning the bridge, their gray color accented occasionally by a red or green conduit.

The crew had made their crowded camp of sleeping bags, backpacks, and suit helmets in a recessed circular portion of the floor that had been the deck under the holo star chart. Despite herself, Mira kept nodding off as she tried to keep her eyes open.

“Why are you out of your suit?” A woman’s voice. Zoelane’s.

Mira shook her head to wake up—she had fallen asleep after all. She sat up.

Zoelane still wore her suit, helmet affixed to her midsection, and her boots clanking on the steel deck.

“What’s the point in getting the backup power going for air and gravity and lights if we can’t take our suit off? What’s the point of even bringing sleeping bags?” said Mira. Then she wanted to curse her stupidity. I’m supposed to be getting in Zoelane’s good graces, for fuck’s sake. She noticed for the first time that the six other crew members in the room were all still wearing their suits, and she felt her neck grow hot.

Zoelane’s angular jaw hardened, and her blue eyes looked even icier than usual. She wore her black hair close-cropped like the mercenary she had surely been once. Or pirate. She drew in a large breath, and Mira closed her eyes, ready for a lecture. When it didn’t arrive, Mira opened her eyes in surprise.

“Where did you get that?” Zoelane pointed to the bird nest-like material on top of the unruly heap of clothes, sheathed utility knife, half-used oxygen tank, low pressure hose, and laptop that was visible in Mira’s salvage gear.

“On the hull. Two days ago, when I was doing a supply run to the shuttle.”

Zoelane passed a hand over her hair and bit her lip. Then she grabbed the white substance and stuffed it into her side pouch. She turned to the half dozen crew lounging around them. “Jae, how long has the hull been secure?”

Sitting on her sleeping bag, Jae perked up, clearly pleased that someone asked her opinion about anything. She was a skinny, nosy gossip. “We got the Resolute’s backup power going twenty-four hours ago, and the nanobots closed off space in around twelve hours, give or take.”

“OK. Listen up everyone. You, too, Andrei. You all know this cruiser is our big chance to make some real money. We’ve had a long time with only the occasional shitty mining freighter, and finally our luck has changed. But it isn’t without risks.”

“Risks, sure. That’s why we have the rifles,” said Andrei, sitting on the main bridge deck with his legs hanging in the recessed holo deck circle. “So what’s the big deal?” His uncle was the salvage ship’s bosun, who had pulled some strings to get Andrei promoted to second in command on the salvage team.

“In their wisdom, the company has provided us lovely Hodgson SIG 32 rifles. The big deal is that all those nicely stacked rifles between the crate of food rations and the backup battery won’t do us a damn bit of good if we run into a rival salvage team or one of the Imperials. I know lugging a rifle is a pain, but all of you need to carry one.”

Groans from several of the team members. Andrei snorted. “Why would we start doing things by the book now?”

Zoelane crossed her arms and stared at him, and he held up his hands in surrender, made his eyes go around in circles, and walked to where they stored the rifles amid some chuckles from the rest of the team. He wasn’t the smartest person in the group, but his clowning was usually good for a laugh.

“Andrei, get all the internal bulkhead doors closed to seal off non-priority salvage targets. And you,” Zoelane pointed at Mira, “suit up, grab a rifle, and come with me.”

Now she’s mad at me because of this bird nest crap. I’ve got to get my shit together or there’s no chance she’ll approve my permanent transfer.

Mira had been a technician on the salvage ship. Then the director of engineering made her teach everything she knew to an attractive intern who turned out to be the director’s lover. She had been temporarily assigned to a salvage team, but once the ship’s salvage tour ended, she would be out of a job.

No job or money on the station, Mira knew all too well, was an almost impossible ditch to crawl out of. Come on, Mira—get this bitch to like you or you’re in trouble.

#

They found more of the white fibrous material near where Mira found the first piece. A long cocoon made up of the same intricate, white material clung to the hull. The outside of the cocoon resembled the torso and head of a humanoid taking a nap. It was empty, though, the cocoon ruptured outward from its lower section.

The idea of something being encased in the cocoon horrified Mira. “From the mold it looks like a person. Was someone—” her breath caught, “was someone trapped in there?”

“No, from the stories, it’s a creature picked up while traveling in hyperspace. It takes the rough form of the sentient beings it’s nearby.” Zoelane looked around with her eyes wide, holding her rifle ready.

A faint memory prodded Mira’s mind. “I’ve heard of something like this. Grier’s Terror, right? But I thought that was fake, like hyperspace ghosts and battleships crewed by zombies waiting for the Second Coming.”

“Why do you think starships always sanitize their hulls after a hyperspace jump?”

Mira had never been on a hyperspace jump, so she had to take Zoelane’s word on that. “Why didn’t this ship do that?”

“Because another fleet ambushed them right out of hyperjump.”

Mira could feel her pulse quicken. I need more time to earn a permanent spot on the team. “We won’t need to scrap the mission because of this, will we?”

Zoelane looked up at the yellow planet huge above them and contemplated it. “No. The hull nanobots got the hull closed fast enough once we got the backup power going, so we should be safe. But just in case is why I gave them the scare about other threats. Come on, let’s get rid of this shit.”

Zoelane and Mira visited the shuttle locked onto the cruiser’s hull and got two handheld plasma throwers, strapping on the backpack units that connected to the rifle-like sprayers. Manipulating the magnetic field shutters to control the stream of partially ionized gas, they began vaporizing the cocoon material. With the backup power on the derelict cruiser now going, the magnetic network in the cruiser’s hull kept it intact under the rush of the plasma.

When they finished searching the hull exterior, Zoelane climbed up onto the column of a cooling tower. She held down a hand to help Mira up.

“If we sealed the hull in time,” said Mira, “the thing should have been out here. Where is it?”

“It doesn’t have magnetic boots. It probably just floated off into space.”

“Can it survive exposed to open vacuum?”

“Don’t know and don’t care.”

“Well, I’m glad we won’t bail,” said Mira. A stray white piece of cocoon spiraled lazily away as it floated into space.

“We’d better damn well not. If the team hears about this creature, they might want to bail. The Freedom would let them, too, with evidence of this thing. Luckily we have to maintain radio silence. That just leaves Andrei as a problem.”

“Why can’t we radio the ship?”

“We’re stealing tech off an Imperial warship. That’s why we’re busting our asses with double shifts to get done as soon as possible. Whichever side won is probably listening in to the region to catch people doing that because they’ll want to return and take the tech themselves. If they find us here they’ll space us without a second thought.”

“But Andrei can scuttle the mission even without radioing the ship?”

“Yes, as second in command. He’s a fool, so he’d probably do it, too.”

She turned to face Mira. “Look, I may need someone who has my back here, and you are completely under my thumb. Your previous supervisor put a bunch of crap about what a poor employee you are in your file.”

Mira felt her face heat. “I work hard and follow the rules. Does that make me a bad employee?”

“No. He was trying to justify stepping his girlfriend over you. But now you’re going to have a horrible time finding any work on the station. It’s hard enough as it is, even for technicians with experience.”

Mira felt a cold growing in her stomach. Things are worse than I thought.

Zoelane gestured at the black space around the ship. “Since the Ergon System fell, the fighting has moved on, and so this is the last Imperial salvage we’re going to get. If I can get some serious money, I can start my own mercenary outfit and leave this system for good. Cleaning up mining rigs won’t do it. This hulk is my last chance. You follow my orders and help me make this mission pay off, I will get you assigned permanently on the team. You disobey me, and you will probably find yourself whoring on the station for ration vouchers within a couple of months.”

#

Laying on top of her sleeping bag—suited up this time—Mira thought about the cocoon on the hull. The idea of something trapped in there jogged an old memory. She felt nauseated and her mouth felt dry. She was also getting a headache. She hadn’t had a headache in years.

She could not forget that day.

As a child working in the orphanage bakery in a domed city on the surface of Granth, she was always hungry, like the other girls that worked there.

Shadows lurked in every corner of the bakery, as over the years one then another of the industrial ceiling lights gave up trying to provide illumination. Tall, narrow windows set in one wall promised light but never quite lived up to it—the girls would start baking the bread at night, and when dawn finally arrived Granth’s poisonous yellow atmosphere stingily held back much of the illumination. A multitude of pipes crisscrossed the walls, like the engorged veins on the backs of Mr. Oatley’s shriveled hands. Against one wall was a monstrously large brick bread oven that the orphanage had made from this world’s clay. Other than the armoire, no closets were available for storage—sealed jars, boxes, and unused baking implements littered the floor. The wood armoire against another wall served as storage for perishables and items of any value. It had once surely been someone’s pride—understandably, since anything wood would be from off planet—but now it was sordid and falling apart.

“Ladies, ladies, your attention, please.” Mr. Oatley’s wheezy voice stopped all the chattering, and the girls looked at the sunken cheeks and receding hairline of the orphanage director standing next to a kitchen counter. He held a girl’s bag, a light blue canvas satchel with the front flap fraying at the edge. Mira felt a jolt of anxiety. That’s my bag.

“Ladies, gather around, please. Whose bag is this?”

Girls leaned forward to get a better look at the bag while Mira tried to shrink behind one particularly large girl.

“Come on now, ladies. We can take all day to figure this out if we have to.”

“It’s Mira’s,” said one girl.

“Mira Sandler. To you her name is Ms. Sandler. Try again, Ms. Tedbury, if you please.”

“It’s Ms. Sandler’s,” said the girl again, and now she was pointing at Mira.

“Ms. Sandler, please come to the front of the group. Everyone else, stay where you are.”

“You little bitch,” whispered Mira to the girl. Then she went to the front, next to Mr. Oatley.

“How are you doing today, Ms. Sandler?” asked Mr. Oatley.

“Fine, thank you, Mr. Oatley.”

“And this is your bag? What was that? Please speak up.”

“Yes, it’s my bag,” said Mira.

Mr. Oatley opened the bag with his free hand and took out two bread rolls and held them up. “You have been stealing food from the kitchen.”

“I got them for Susie—Ms. Parnell. She’s sick.”

Mr. Oatley set the two bread rolls on the kitchen counter. “It is irrelevant that Ms. Parnell is sick. You broke the rules. Ladies, this way please.” He led them near the armoire. “Please sit down.” Mr. Oatley swept a hand in a semi-circle. Some girls whispered as the group sat.

Mira felt her face heat as she felt all the stares. “I promise not to take food anymore, Mr. Oatley,” said Mira. “Please. I’ve learned my lesson.”

Mr. Oatley ignored her and waited until the girls were all sitting and quiet. “Bread rolls are rather poor fare, Ms. Sandler. You should know that the really good food is in the armoire. Why don’t you open it now?”

Mira turned and looked at it. In the least abused portions of its exterior, the armoire showed that at one time someone had taken the trouble of sanding it down and coating it with a reddish, glossy coat to bring out the grain of the wood. Since then the armoire appeared to have been beaten repeatedly, forced through small doorways that stripped its corners and edges, lost the two shelf drawers at its base, and stored in a filthy warehouse which gave it a permanently grimy appearance, despite the girls being instructed to scrub it weekly. The two doorknobs for the closet doors had vanished, replaced by loops of thick zip ties, which Mr. Oatley would lock together with a padlock when the girls finished baking for the day.

Mira didn’t move. She could hear the breathing of the girls behind her.

Mr. Oatley grabbed her left hand. Despite looking frail and feeling cold and dry, the hand was painfully strong. Mr. Oatley dragged Mira to the armoire and released her, then opened the armoire doors.

“Get in,” he said. Mira didn’t want him to touch her again, and so she turned to face the girls and stepped back and up into the armoire.

She could feel the shelves on the back of her legs, her butt, her back. Jars clinked. The armoire smelled musty inside.

Mr. Oatley turned towards the girls. “What I do here every day is for your own good. We live in a city that doesn’t care about you. When you turn eighteen, the local government will ship you to a sprawling asteroid station that services scores of spacecraft. The authorities are keen that the space port has ample cheap labor, but they don’t care what happens to the destitute who live in the cramped, stuffy slums of the station.”

Mira had always found Mr. Oatley’s speeches boring, but she hoped this one would be long. Maybe if it was long enough, he would think she learned her lesson.

“We took you in when no one else would. We teach you how to survive in a world where one mistake can doom your life to misery. I have seen many of the former children of the orphanage die as young women, drug addicts in the worst part of the station, selling their sex to dock workers and off-duty starship hands. I want better for you.” He turned to Mira. “Mira, as you wanted some extra food, I will be happy to share some with you.”

Mr. Oatley closed the armoire doors, sealing Mira inside. She heard the padlock that he would attach to the front handles at night click closed.

His muffled voice continued. “Because Ms. Sandler stole from the kitchen, I am afraid that we will all be skipping breakfast. Lunch will be at the hospital, as scheduled, after you serve the sick. Until dinner Ms. Sandler will be the only one with access to the food, and we will allow her this special permission.”

She would be trapped in here all day. The shelves in the door pressed her firmly into the shelves behind. She couldn’t move. A tremor began on her left hand.

Two girls whispered until Mr. Oatley shushed them. Mira could see the semi-circle of girls in her mind. She realized that part of this lesson—and probably his own pleasure—was to listen to her sobbing or screaming. Despite her pounding heart, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

She steeled herself, focusing all her mind on an image of Mr. Oatley leaning forward, straining to hear anything from the armoire. Time passed—ten, twenty minutes? She had no idea.

Then she heard Mr. Oatley: “To your rooms, ladies.” She hoped he looked disappointed. She could hear the low sounds of the girls getting up and whispering. One girl laughing. Then silence. The thin edge of light disappeared where the armoire doors met, as no doubt Mr. Oatley turned off the lights as he exited.

She felt a surge of savage joy. She had beaten him. Then the glee vanished, replaced by an icy dread in her stomach. She was alone. Only now did she notice the close, warm air of the armoire. She would run out of air in here ... she couldn’t move ... they would find her dead by dinnertime ... she couldn’t move.

She tried to retain mastery of herself. But without Mr. Oatley listening, her resolve finally collapsed, and she lost control. She thrashed vainly against the press of the shelves. She screamed again and again. She screamed how she would kill Mr. Oatley. She screamed she would kill that fucking son of a bitch.

#

Mira sat at one of the surviving desks in the Resolute’s ruined bridge, playing solitaire and waiting for the packaged ramen noodles to finish cooking on the stove kit nearby on the floor. She could hear three members of the salvage team gossip about somebody back on the salvage ship, the Freedom. Another three crew members were sleeping in the central area.

She had owned this deck of playing cards for many years. It was the only thing she had from her life before the orphanage when she was a child. Her single mother she only vaguely remembered as a haggard, tall woman with blond hair. She died in an industrial accident at the chemical plant where she worked. Mira had dealt her mother’s playing cards so often over the years that it wasn’t rare for her to form an intuition about what would be the next card based on the worn edges or a tiny stain. She knew dozens of solitaire games, and she liked to play the least forgiving ones, the ones whose rules gave little choice. Failing cost her nothing, unlike real life, and following the rules felt comforting.

The sound of a circular door hatch opening interrupted the quiet. Then she heard another crew member, Efia, ask, “What’s going on?” Mira turned to look.

Zoelane stood near them carrying a rifle on her upturned palms, which she laid on the floor next to the holo deck. She had another rifle slung on her back.

“What’s with the rifle?” asked Efia. She had high cheekbones and red hair that she was usually playing with.

“This is Andrei’s rifle,” said Zoelane. “I found it lying in a passageway covered with his blood.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Efia. “What happened?”

“Lysias, wake up Wasim and Hagen. OK. Everyone, listen up. Things are more dangerous than we suspected before. We’ve got Grier’s Terror on the ship.”

Confused faces, some looking back and forth at the others.

“I thought that was a myth,” said Jae.

“Where’s the body?” said Lysias, a tall, stringy man with a prominent Adam’s apple.

Zoelane lay the rifle down near their stacks of their extra gear. “I didn’t find it. Andrei was a fool. He was careless and now he’s dead. Going forward we’re all teaming up in pairs. You stay with your partner all the time. Mira, you’re my partner.”

Mira nodded. Good. That’ll give me more time to show Zoelane that she should take me on permanently.

“With something like this, shouldn’t we abort the mission?” asked Jae.

Zoelane shook her head. “Not with this haul. We’re going to strike it rich here, and nobody’s going to stop us because of some weird creature. At the end of your rest shift I’ll issue you the new salvage-rest schedule for everyone. In the meantime, Hagen, clean up this rifle. That’s all.” Zoelane lay down in her suit on her sleeping bag and closed her eyes.

Mira checked on the noodles and turned back to her game of solitaire. The crew broke into two groups, settling down and whispering about this development. Mira could hear the group of three near her.

“I heard that it’s when a ship blows up in hyperspace,” said Lysias. “All the crew become these monsters, floating around hyperspace and trying to find a way out.”

“That’s stupid,” said Efia. “If the ship blew up, the explosion would blow them to bits.”

“The salvage isn’t worth it,” said Jae. “We should get off this piece of junk and back to the ship.”

“Well, now that Andrei’s dead it’s completely up to Zoelane,” said Efia. “I for one want to stay. When was the last time we had an almost fully intact warship for salvage? Andrei was a fool. If we stick together we’ll be fine.”

“It’s very convenient that Andrei is the only other one who could have called off this mission and now he’s dead,” whispered Jae.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” said Efia. “The man was the biggest fool on the team. Of course he gets himself killed first.”

The word “first” chilled the conversation.

Mira stared at the King of Hearts that she had turned over. Zoelane might have been a ruthless mercenary in the past, but she wouldn’t kill a man just to get more prize money. Would she?

She shook her head and moved the King card to cover up the available Queen. I’m not smart enough to worry about things like that. I just have to follow her orders, and everything will be fine. Then she groaned as she looked at the next card in the draw pile. Only the back of the card was showing, but that coffee stain meant that it was the two of spades. The game had locked her in a draw cycle that would forever deny her the cards she needed.

#

Later an enormous crew member named Brys and the red-headed Efia did not return from their salvage search.

Mira had woken to find Zoelane gone from the bridge. An open laptop on the backup battery showed the assignment schedule with the sections of the ship that Zoelane had assigned pairs of crew members to search. Neither Mira nor Zoelane were on the schedule.

When Zoelane returned an hour later, the missing crew members had been gone for eight hours.

“That’s three crew gone,” said Jae, addressing everyone on the bridge. “A quarter of the salvage team. Why are we still here?”

“Because I said so,” said Zoelane. “When we get back to the ship you can file a complaint.”

Some hours later Mira and Zoelane were exploring the ship. Much to Mira’s annoyance, she was always the one sent ahead while Zoelane covered her with a rifle. Mira’s rifle hung by its sling against her chest as she tapped on the faint display on the console next to a door. The same confused mass of pipes and wires crawled over the walls and ceiling as everywhere else on the ship.

“You think I’m a right bitch for making you go ahead all the time, don’t you?” said Zoelane.

Mira kept tapping on the console. “It would be fair to take turns.”

“You’re a fool.”

Mira had hit another dead end and had to start over. Why can’t she just shut up and let me focus on this?

“I learned long ago that nobody in this world gives a shit about you. People telling you about fairness and justice are trying to make you not give a shit about yourself either. Do you really think it’s fair that your only choices in life are to mop floors, work on a salvage ship, or whore yourself?”

“The rules of the game are still there. Some people are just dealt shitty cards.”

“I’ve done things as a mercenary I’m not proud of, things that haunt me when I should be sleeping. I did those things because they kept me alive when I was dealt shitty cards.”

The console made a negative-sounding beep. Mira hit it with her fist. “You want a tough start? Try growing up in an orphanage on a planet like Granth.”

“I grew up in an orphanage. Different system. But I bet it was just as bad.”

Suddenly Mira had an idea. This door wouldn’t open even when she used the digital key signature they had reconstructed on the general system console on the bridge. Instead of being pushy, maybe she should just try to get to know the door first. She requested its status in the security net.

“This is the ship’s magazine,” said Mira.

Zoelane whooped and dropped her rifle to her chest. “Hot damn, this is it! Just like I told you. These weapons will get us a fortune. Let’s get started.”

Mira felt a flutter in her stomach. I can buy a house on the planet under an open, enormous dome. “Now that I know its security status, we’ll need codes straight from the top. I need to set up sniffing routines on the systems there to capture the faint echoes of the codes the captain used. Then I can combine them to fool the door.”

As they made their way to the bridge, Zoelane said, “You don’t mix well with the group, do you?”

Mira’s neck began to feel hot. “I just feel better alone. Is that a problem?”

“No. You’re much like I was. You know, we make a pretty good team. There’s a lot I can teach you if you stick with me.” Then she muttered, “First we have to get out of this damn system.”

Back at the bridge an hour later Mira began setting up the sensitive operation on a laptop patched into the captain’s old console. It was delicate programming, and there was little to distract her from the severe headache she felt coming on. She heard what sounded like a distant banging noise somewhere on the ship. Or was that the pulse in her head?

“Does anyone else hear that banging?” she asked.

Zoelane looked like she would answer, but then stopped. She tapped her chin with the knuckle from a forefinger thoughtfully, her forehead creased, then she turned away.

#

The sniffer routines needed to run their algorithms for a couple of hours more. Zoelane hadn’t been around when Mira lay down on her sleeping bag and draped a folded shirt across her eyes. Her splitting headache showed no sign of diminishing. She slept and dreamed of a larva she saw in a vid once: a small black head with a long and fat blotchy yellow corrugated body. A young girl in the dream played with the larva like a pet. Then Mira realized that she was that girl.

She woke and thought again of the orphanage kitchen. In her mind she saw the girls working the bread dough on the counter, their hands white with powder. Another girl was mopping the floor—something must have spilled. The director would be upset at the waste.

Yes, I stole food for myself as much as for feverish Susie Parnell. I was hungry. Still, I was breaking the rules.

She remembered something odd then. She recalled how thick cobwebs stretching out to the floor, back wall, and ceiling covered the back of the armoire. How was that possible? Mr. Oatley tolerated no dust or dirt, except if tidiness cost actual money, of course.

No, they weren’t cobwebs—they were a white patchy material, made up of intricately designed fibers, like one of the puzzle book mazes in the orphanage library, where some idiot invariably had taken a pen and found the solution to the maze.

How odd. How could she have forgotten something as peculiar as that? She couldn’t recall Mr. Oatley ever complaining about the white patchy material.

#

By the time the sniffer routines had run their course, Jae and Lysias, another crew member, had vanished before anyone could get the message that the search was no longer needed. Jae was the one who had wanted to abort the mission.

Mira’s growing fear about the thing on board was greater now than her fear of being destitute on the asteroid station. Though she wanted to leave this derelict as soon as possible, one last safeguard on the magazine door resisted all her previous attempts to penetrate it. She asked Zoelane if they couldn’t just use explosives to blow up the door.

“We don’t have explosives,” said Zoelane. “We’re salvagers on board a starship, not miners in a mine shaft. Figure something out.”

She finally did. A line that went directly in the backup system powered the last safeguard. “According to the schematics from the bridge, if we turn off the backup system, I can get us into the magazine. Once the door is open, though, we won’t be able to turn the backup system on again without initiating the failsafe and blowing the magazine.”

“We’ll have plenty of days of breathable air left in the ship,” said Zoelane, “and anyway our suits and backup supplies can keep us going even longer beyond that. The gravity and lights will be off, but that doesn’t matter. Can we turn off the backup power from the bridge?”

“No. The ambush left the general computer system fried. We have to be at the manual console.”

The backup manual console was outside the section of the ship that Zoelane had ordered sealed off. The area that was supposed to be less safe with the presence of Grier’s Terror.

Rifles ready, they traveled the passages and stairs leading to the backup system manual console. About ten minutes after opening and passing through the bulkhead door into the sealed-off section they found Jae’s body face down on the deck next to the rung ladder that would take them to the next deck where the manual controls were.

The back of her suit had a bloody hole right behind her heart. It looked to Mira’s inexperienced eye like what one of their flechette-shooting rifles would do. Jae’s rifle lay next to her outstretched hand. Another rifle lay nearby.

Mira felt her heart pounding. Jesus. That is what a corpse looks like. She turned to Zoelane.

Zoelane wasn’t looking at the corpse but at the second rifle. She was tapping her chin with a forefinger knuckle as she studied the weapon. “Lysias was her partner. He’s probably gone, too. Leave her,” she said finally.

“Why were they in this section of the ship? And how was she shot? Does this creature use weapons?”

“It probably used one of our own rifles against us. Once we get the Imperial tech it won’t matter, though. We’ll be able to defend ourselves easily.”

“But how did it shoot her in the back?”

Zoelane turned her cold blue eyes on Mira. “I said I don’t know. Now get up that ladder.”

Mira climbed up and opened the hatch to the next level. When Zoelane joined her at the console, the two activated the magnetism in their boots. Mira’s feet felt rooted to the spot, and it took an extra effort to pull them off the steel deck so she could approach the console and turn off the backup power.

The lights went out and everything was black. Then Zoelane’s soft glowing chest light switched on and Mira illuminated hers as well, dimly lighting the pipes and wire conduits along the wall near them. Losing gravity was also apparent, as she had the sudden feeling that she was descending in an elevator and her arms floated away from the floor. The extra blood pooling in her brain from the lack of gravity made her feel giddy, though it also made her constant headache a little worse. Both Zoelane and Mira took out their flashlights from their belts and illuminated the sharp beams.

Traveling back through the sealed off section of the ship was even more frightening in the dark. It didn’t matter where she was pointing her flashlight, she always felt like something could hide in another place that she hadn’t illuminated yet. I was trained as a technician, not in combat ops.

Finally they traveled back into what was supposed to be the safe side of the ship, again securing the door behind them, and made their way to the magazine.

“A touch on this panel should open it now,” said Mira, as they stood outside the door.

“This better be filled with combat technology or there is going to be hell to pay for me,” said Zoelane. She touched the panel and the door opened.

Zoelane had been right. The room was stocked full of military gear. This was the first room on the ship that wasn’t covered with pipes and wires. Instead military technology covered the walls: assault rifles, pistols, grenades, and even larger mechanized combat suits for fighting in space or on a planet.

Zoelane clapped Mira on the back. “This is it! This is the score. We can transport as much of this as we can to the shuttle and then get the salvage ship to come back for the rest. With half the team gone, this is going to be a lot of prize money for us.”

Mira turned away from the magazine to look at Zoelane, who seemed as though she was going to say something else, but stopped with her mouth still open, staring at Mira.

“What? What is it?”

Zoelane looked away, her brow wrinkling. “Nothing. I told you if you stuck by me we would do nicely for ourselves.”

Even Mira’s raging headache didn’t diminish her relief at the idea of getting off the derelict cruiser. She could now afford to live on the planet in a house of her own. She understood the truth of it, but she was having a harder time imagining what that would look like now. As she and Zoelane made their way back to the bridge, she tried to imagine what she had seen on the vids of a house in a wide open, terraformed planet prairie, but her mind just kept going back to a small kitchen with an old, wooden armoire at the back of the room.

#

She remembered the empty kitchen at night. Strange. She must have forgotten that she had ever been there alone at night. But the memory felt so tangible.

She knew she should concentrate on the dark passage back to the bridge. But the darkness reminded her of that kitchen, where she was sitting on the floor playing solitaire by flashlight. Her game had gotten stuck with all her tableau piles locked out to any draws. She sighed and shined the flashlight on first the muted yellow of the brick oven and then the sink. The appliances looked strange in the bright glare against the darkness.

In her memory she shined the flashlight across the floor in front of the armoire, and dozens of little shadows lanced across the floor. Someone had arranged all the bottles of spices, jars of preserves, and boxes of food from inside the armoire on the floor in a semi-circle around it.

Why did they do that? Mr. Oatley will be furious.

She shone the light on the armoire. Something had changed. The white patchy material on its back covered all its surface now, forming a regular pattern with bulging segments radiating along its length. A giant cocoon, she realized, like the moths or butterflies on the vids. Only this cocoon was big enough that she could fit snugly inside.

She snapped off the flashlight. A faint glow from within the cocoon illuminated the room. In some patches the glow looked iridescent, like fish scales.

Despite her fear of closed-in spaces, she remembered the cocoon looked so inviting. She imagined the inside would be cool and quiet, a pleasant contrast to the noise and heat of the kitchen when they baked. Mr. Oatley would never find her in the cocoon—that would be the last place he would think to look.

#

“Mira!”

Mira was bathed in a bright glare, disoriented. Was she still in the kitchen?

“Why did you turn off your lights?” said Zoelane. Her flashlight beam moved away, and Mira was in darkness again.

“Can’t I just go by the light from the ship?” A faint glow, emanating from deep within the ship, shone through the decks and bulkheads as if they were merely some kind of mist.

“What light? Turn your flashlight back on.”

Mira fumbled with her flashlight and saw its beam cut across the nearby wall. How sad. She no longer saw the warm light from inside the ship.

When they reached the bridge, which was lit up with several of the team’s powered lanterns, they found Wasim dead. Hagen was wounded, and his magnetic boots kept him anchored in place in the zero gravity as he half leaned against the short, recessed wall of the circular holo space.

“What happened?” Zoelane pealed a corner of the med kit off Hagen’s wound. It was a gut shot, the same kind of wound their own rifles would have made. “Jesus, this kit is a mess. Did you put it on yourself?”

Hagen’s breathing was in quick gasps. “Azalea and Cort got us,” he said, panting. “They wanted to take the shuttle. Get off this damn ship. They said you were going to get us all killed by the creature. Wasim had the access codes. Refused to give them.”

Zoelane picked up the fat plastic bulge of another med kit and ripped off the activating strip. The exposed membrane rippled as it sought for the feel of damaged flesh. She removed the old med kit and placed the new one on Hagen’s bloody stomach with a practiced hand.

“They took the codes off Wasim. I think I hit Cort. Not dead, though.”

“They’ll probably run for the asteroid station. They might make it, too. Mira, grab me more med tape from the stocks.”

Mira fetched the tape and handed it to Zoelane. “But the Freedom will rendezvous with us if we don’t show back up, right?”

“Yeah, but the rendezvous time frame is eight days from now.” Zoelane finished applying the med kit then stepped back to scrutinize her work. She said, “That creature is real. It took Lysias.”

“It’s taken more than just Lysias. Four other people disappeared.”

Zoelane looked at her strangely. “And it’s doing other things, too. We can’t share this derelict with the creature. We’re going to kill it.”

As Zoelane finished with Hagen’s medkit, Mira stood in a darkened corner. She looked down at the softly glowing light radiating through the bulkheads from several decks below them, in the ship's section they had sealed off. Suddenly she realized that her pounding headache had disappeared.

#

Zoelane and Mira made their way through the stale-smelling passages to the magazine.

Zoelane stared longingly at the mechanized armor, but it was too big for inside the ship. Instead, as she told Mira how high-tech Imperial firearms had their own artificial intelligence that could make split second reactions, she picked up one of these rifles for herself, strapped a pistol on each leg, and threw a grenade bandoleer over her shoulder. Each grenade sprayed flesh-shredding shrapnel that wouldn’t harm the steel of the bulkheads.

“What should I take?” asked Mira.

“Nothing,” said Zoelane.

“You don’t think I can point and shoot a gun?”

“The creature has compromised you. I can see it in your eyes. Your job is to be bait.”

Mira gasped. “What?” She stood frozen.

“Whatever this thing is, it has its hooks into you. Your eyes are kind of shimmery. I’m betting that having you near will distract it.”

Mira snatched up a pair of goggles that hung on a small energy pistol. She looked at her reflection in the goggles and saw that the hazel of her eyes did shimmer with metallic colors.

What is happening to me? She looked in shock at Zoelane. “I thought you said we made a good team, you and I.”

“Look, I meant what I said. You do remind me of myself years ago. But you’ve become a liability.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her cold eyes. “Don’t worry—we’ll figure out some way to fix you up once the creature is dead. Now let’s go.” Then she turned away to activate the door opening.

In a burn of understanding, Mira knew this moment was her only chance to grab the energy pistol and stuff it in her hip pouch. Zoelane might well have used the idea of a hyperspace creature on board to murder half the team to maximize her prize money. And she thought Mira so little a threat she turned her back on her in a room full of weapons. Mira should take the pistol. Now.

She knew she should, but she froze and the opportunity slipped past.

Zoelane was looking back at her again, and so Mira set the goggles back on the wall mount, where it leaped off her fingers to cling magnetically to its holder with a soft clink. She felt her cheeks burn in shame.

Mira looked at the deck. As though the floor were a thick, black fog, she could see the glow of something like a candle two decks down and some distance to port. Something like heat radiated through her chest, and she realized it was a surge of joy.

She kneeled and turned off the magnetics in her boots. She kicked off the deck and floated to the ceiling, where she grabbed handholds and propelled herself down the passageway. Occasionally reaching out to handholds to drive herself faster, she flew along.

Zoelane yelled behind her but she didn’t care. When she reached a turn she vaulted afresh into a new passageway. Arresting her flight when she reached the place where she needed to descend a level, she climbed down to the deck and opened the floor hatch. She could hear the clomping of Zoelane’s magnetic boots in the distance.

Each turn into a new passageway and each descent through a new hatchway bathed her in a stronger glow. What had looked like a candle before now looked like a standing person.

Her hands were tingling. Here I come.

#

Holding a handhold near the open door, Mira floated outside the engine room. Even though the ship’s power was offline, a warm light radiated from the doorway.

If she was wrong about Zoelane, the creature inside this room murdered half the crew. But she felt no fear.

Mira reactivated her magnetic boots, worked her feet down to the deck, and entered the doorway to the engine room.

In contrast to most of the tight spaces on the ship, this room was big, at least twenty by twenty meters. A blister nodule of the engine access rose out of the floor on the far side of the room, with a myriad of pipes spilling out of it before burrowing back below the deck.

Something that would have surprised the ship’s previous engineers was the glowing patches that loosely covered the walls, ceiling, and floor, like sea plants with fine tentacles on their free edge. They looked and even moved like sea anemones as they flowed back and forth as though moved by currents of water. They were the source of light.

All the bodies of the salvage crew members were here. Their magnetic boots anchored them in place, but the rest of their bodies floated sideways over the deck in a rough hemisphere in front of the engine access nodule. Someone had shot them. Even Jae’s body was here, reunited with her dead partner Lysias.

A human being stood on the other side of corpses, in front of the engine. Mira gasped and stepped fully into the room.

The person was a naked, hairless copy of herself.

When Mira stepped into view, her naked double seemed to break out of a trance. “You’re me?” Mira’s double said.

“How is this possible?” said Mira, coming closer. With each step, the flowing anemone-like creatures undulated away, like ripples on the surface of a pond.

“You can’t stay here,” said Mira’s double. “Mr. Oatley is coming. He’s angry.”

“You’re a copy of me.” Mira advanced up to the semi-circle of dead crew bodies. A small part of her mind knew this should bother her. She found a break in the line of bodies and passed within, only a couple of steps away from her naked double.

“Yes. We’re duplicates. Like sisters,” Mira’s double said, then made a carefree laugh, her naked chest and neck flushing red.

Mira couldn’t remember ever laughing with joy like that. She felt a smile begin to play on her own lips.

“Come closer,” said Mira’s naked double.

Mira was close enough now to touch her. There were few differences between them. A scar on her chin was absent on her double. Her double’s eyes were not hazel at all, but iridescent, like when bubbles floated in the air from the orphanage kitchen, with green, yellow, red, and blue streams floating over each other on the liquid surface of the bubble.

Her double reached out her right hand, palm up. Mira detached her glove and reached to touch her.

A metallic high-pitched scream erupted, and Mira found herself doubled in two, floating free, and twisted around so that she faced the door. She could see Zoelane crouching near the entrance, still aiming her rifle.

Mira tried to extend her feet to the floor again, but her arms and legs only flopped helplessly. Then she looked down at her chest. Bright red beads of blood grew in the zero gravity out from a vast wound that stretched from her left hip to the middle of her chest, the flaps of her environmental suit hanging free.

Her vision was browning out at the edges. She tried to put her hands on her wound, and her hands became slick with blood, but the flow didn’t stop.

Nothing. No fixing this. She relaxed and the world blacked out forever.

#

The naked Mira stared at the dead Mira in her environmental suit floating next to her. Beads of the dead Mira’s blood had touched her naked thigh and her extended hand, coating them with blood. She snatched her hand back and looked at Mr. Oatley. The old man crouched near the exit to the kitchen, aiming a rifle.

The orphanage girls sitting in a semi-circle around the armoire between them watched her quietly.

“Why did you shoot her, Mr. Oatley?” said Mira.

Mr. Oatley’s eyes were wide. “It’s true what they said in the mercs. You do take on human form.” His eyes narrowed, became more calculating under his old man’s bushy white eyebrows. “She must have been the first human you saw, and you bonded with her to take her form. That could be useful.”

“Why did you kill this Mira?”

“She was infected by your bond or whatever it was. You could see it in her eyes for days. Never mind her—can you take another human’s form? I don’t know what you want, but we might be able to help each other.”

Mira felt her power. She couldn’t see these things, but she could feel nexuses where in the kitchen time and space felt warped, where they pressed and curled back on themselves. Like playing cards in solitaire, where a Queen of Hearts can dance across the void between the stacks to appear on this King of Clubs or that Jack of Hearts.

There was a nexus by the enormous brick bread oven. Another was in front of the tall windows glowing with the sky of the planet’s yellow dawn.

The past. She could fall backwards through time and space into the past. She needed some slack to fall back on, though, so she walked forward and to the right, close to the windows.

“I didn’t scream for you in the armoire, so you brought a rifle to the kitchen to punish me,” said Mira.

“What armoire? What kitchen? This is an engine room.”

Mira could see the fear growing in Mr. Oatley’s eyes, but he must have thought the rifle kept him safe. The dead Mira’s memories were still sorting themselves in her head, but she knew from them that the rifle was a dangerous Imperial weapon.

“But I did scream something eventually, Mr. Oatley. I waited until after you left. Do you know what I screamed?” Now she had turned enough to see the semi-circle of girls again, their faces studying her. Despite her nakedness, she felt no shame. She had moved forward enough now—there was room to maneuver to the past.

“I have no fucking idea.”

“I screamed you were a son of a bitch, and I was going to kill you.”

The rifle screamed.

Mira slipped back in time to when she was by the armoire, her body phasing through the curl in space and time away from the murderous fire. The rifle paused its shooting for a moment, then lurched in Mr. Oatley’s hands like a fish being jerked by a line towards Mira’s new location.

Mira ran towards the oven and leaped through its side as if it were a mirage, phasing through the loose curl in the physical dimension and coming out by the wall near the door, to Mr. Oatley’s far right.

“Goddamn!” he yelled, the rifle almost leaping from his hands in its eagerness to track her new location. The rifle screamed again.

She phased back in time so that she was in front of the armoire again. The rifle was learning—it was already screaming and firing at her new location. She ducked behind the armoire. Flechette rounds were hitting all around where she hid, the little plastic darts clumping together on the ground like the cut leg hair of the girls in the orphanage showers.

His rifle is too fast for me. There was no nexus close enough nearby to slip away, and the only time curl back would put her in front of the armoire in full view of the rifle.

Mira felt the sweep of the dead woman’s memories pulse through her, bubbling to a head with a realization. I’m tired of living in the past.

She felt then a new direction to go. Forward in time. It was a risk. Forward was always an unpredictable risk. She could phase into a grenade blast or find Mr. Oatley standing there ready with the rifle. But her past was a dead end.

The firing stopped. She leaned forward and saw Mr. Oatley pulling his arm back with a grenade in his hand. Mira felt through the curves of time forward. The farthest one she could phase through was only a couple of minutes. Fifteen at most. She heard the grenade hit the ground, and she slipped through time’s membrane.

She phased out of the nexus in the same physical spot, but now Mr. Oatley was there, his back to her. He must have thought the grenade killed her. He was peering further around the armoire, aiming the rifle, looking for her body.

The rifle sensed her and began to spasm in Mr. Oatley’s hands. The AI was fighting against his grip in its effort to track the target now behind them despite the ignorant human’s straining it forward. The AI was winning.

Mira saw one pistol strapped to Mr. Oatley’s prim dress pant leg. She leaned forward and snagged the grip and ripped it free.

His head was turning now, the rifle leading him on as it tracked towards her. Surprise and fury burned on his face.

She didn’t know how to operate this pistol. Time seemed to slow as she clutched randomly at it. I’m going to die here.

Perhaps responding to her panicked touch, the exterior of the pistol’s surface came alive in a flood of lights, and the AI corrected her aim. It felt like she was holding onto an immovable rock. The pistol wanted to fire, to kill. She felt the weapon itself push the trigger up against her finger as a report sounded.

The rifle’s sentience seemed to die when it fell from Mr. Oatley’s hands. He fell to the ground.

Standing above his body, Mira saw the wrinkled skin of Mr. Oatley’s face smoothen—it was no longer an old man, but a woman in her thirties with close cropped black hair, an angular jaw line, and glazed blue eyes staring at nothing. Zoelane.

Mira looked up. The pipes of the kitchen were now the wires and conduits of an engine room, and the armoire was a console nodule for the engines, and the watching girls from the kitchen were dead salvagers who had all been shot in the back by their boss before a hyperspace creature had collected them here one by one.

#

Mira stood on the hull of the ship, watching the Freedom’s crew swarming around the chute tube as they attached it to the derelict Resolute. After Hagen had been evacuated to the salvage ship for his gut wound, the Freedom’s XO had prioritized moving Mira and Hagen’s find as quickly as possible.

Half of the profit from the high-tech weaponry they would offload through the chute would go to the shareholders, of course. Of the other half, the captain and the XO would each get a fifth of the proceeds. Another fifth would go to the entire ship’s crew. That would leave two-fifths to split between Mira and Hagen.

The presence of Grier’s Terror had given Zoelane something of a potential alibi so she could kill almost all the team and attribute it to the creature. Her crimes had made Mira and Hagen rich.

When Mira had found Hagen on the bridge immediately after Zoelane’s death, he had feared her like the devil. He straightened his floating form and anchored his magnetic boots on the deck. Perspiration dotted his forehead as he grimaced, his left hand pressed against the medkit on his stomach, while his right held a rifle pointed at Mira. She told him the hyperspace creature had killed Zoelane. He looked down at Jae Hulet’s name tag on the spacesuit that Mira was wearing and then up again at her shimmering eyes. He said nothing, but she noticed his grip tightening on the rifle, his pupils dilating.

“We’ll each get one-fifth of this haul. That should be enough for any one person, right?” Mira said.

Hagen didn’t move.

“Let me tell you about my new philosophy,” Mira said. “We choose the rules we want to live by. If I think for a moment you will attack me, or so much as breathe a word to anyone about what I am, you’ll find out how I’m standing here instead of Zoelane and her Imperial rifle and grenades. Got it?”

Hagen relaxed his hold on the rifle, turn on its safety, and gave her wide berth after that. He didn’t ask questions when she got a plasma thrower from their equipment and headed back deep into the ship.

On the external hull of the ship, she turned from the bustling action of the crew and looked back at Granth. Her eyes, she knew, had changed to an innocent hazel now. With her take, a domed city on that poisonous planet was thinking too small. She would book passage to a terraformed world, with breathable air and a sky above a horizon so vast nothing would ever hold her again.

In her hand she held the playing cards from her mother, the mother of her memories, anyway. She opened her fingers and let the cards—the King of Diamonds, the Jack of Clubs, and all the rest—drift one by one into the dark void, taking all their old rules with them.