They had drifted to the back of the line as the crew slowly made progress toward the bridge.

  “You should have told us earlier,” First Mate Bouchard said to the small Ker floating alongside her. “If we had known, we’d all be sitting on a beaewhere now, sipping drinks in the sun instead of being trapped in this dark hell.”

  Pv-tor-fel-mak bristled at the accusation. He had observed her behavior toward the two Ker crew members throughout the expedition. The sting of being overlooked when she assigasks at the barricade earlier still lingered in his mind.

  “How could I have known?” he replied, angry at once again being singled out. She probably just doesn’t like Ker, he thought, despite knowing deep down it wasn’t true. Yet Pv-tor-fel-mak felt the crew had always snickered behind his back, mog his keen eye for detail and his appreciation of beauty.

  “Maybe you did know and just didn’t tell us,” Bouchard said. She khe accusation wasn’t true. She just didn’t care.

  “Perhaps you just wanted all the gold for yourself,” she cluded, sav the power of putting the little lizard in his pce. The deeper they ventured into the wreck, the more her trol over the situation had slipped away. But now, she had discovered a way to recim some of that power, even if only for a fleeting moment.

  Bouchard had never had any problems with the Ker ground sample specialist or any of her Ker crew members, for that matter. She had always appreciated their eye for beauty in the fihings in life. But now, in the oppressive shadows of the ship, she was starting to see them in a different light, their dark eyes betraying thoughts she could not fully prehend. Thinking ba the events of the past day, she couldn’t really see how they had tributed to the expedition in any meaningful way. At the barricade earlier, Pv-tor-fel-mak hadn’t helped at all—he had just stayed out of the way, letting the Terran crew do all the hard work.

  “I don’t know what—” she started to say, but Pv-tor-fel-mak would never learn the end of the sentence, as the first mate’s voice through the radio was repced with a sickly gurgling sound that filled him with dread. In that moment, the terrors of the night had returo cim their prize.

  It all happened so fast. From the shadows of an adjat room, something had struck Bouchard. All Pv-tor-fel-mak had time to see was that it was tall, thin, and white, but beyond that, it was all a blur. With a siroke, it had severed First Mate Bouchard in two, her head and torso now drifting away from her legs in the weightlessness of the wreck, blood bubbling from her waist as it simultaneously boiled and froze in the cold vacuum of the ship.

  Drifting three meters in front of them, Murray a-mar-kort had not noticed the attack. Pv-tor-fel-mak and Bouchard had been on their interpersonal circuit, and the darkness of the corridor and the isoting vacuum of space had shielded their teammates from the sounds and sights of the horrific spectacle that had occurred only meters behind their backs.

  Frantically, Pv-tor-fel-mak switched his radio to group , screaming into the dark void for his two crewmates to help. In his paate, it seemed as if they rotated in slow motion, limited as they were by their maneuvering thrusters. When they finally pleted their turn, he could see the look of pure terror on their faces as they watched the two halves of their first mate drift apart in the pale beams of their fshlights, eventually disappearing into the shadows of the dead ship.

  Their screams made him wish the system had a mute mode. For safety reasons, it did not—it operated either on group or interpersonal mode, the tter automatically switg targets based on proximity.

  “Hurry! We o get out of here!” he shouted at his teammates.

  Once again, turning around became a slow, borious task, their urgent desire to distahemselves from the se sharply trasting with the straints of moving in microgravity. Grabbing the shoulder of Est-mar-kort, he pushed her forward, trying to speed up their escape, but he miscalcuted the physivolved, and she started to spin iuhe servation of momentum sending him into a somersault in the process.

  It took the three crew members several frantiutes to stabilize themselves again, minutes overshadowed by the om fear of another immi attack. They felt as if the eyes of their unseen enemy were peering out at them from the darkness beyond their vision, coldly calg its move. Yet nothing happeo them while they regaiheir posure.

  As they finally started to drift away from the pce where First Mate Bouchard had been killed, into the dark tunnel ahead of them, Pv-tor-fel-mak had only a single, dreadful thought in his head.

  He could not help but wonder if the alien corpse they had seen floating in the room they had previously passed was still there.

  Thirty mier, still reeling from the sight of Bouchard’s body split in two, her iines slowly spilling out from her waist in a macabre, weightless dance of death, the three remaining crew members reached a colle of rooms anized in a circle, like spokes on a wheel around a tral pza.

  Describing it as a pza might have been using the wrong word, Pv-tor-fel-mak thought grimly. The word brought with it otations e, open spaces filled with glorious sunlight. This pce was nothing like that. It was dark and cramped, gray and decayed, its myriad anels on the verge of falling off—just like every other room on the ship. A rotunda of death, with satellite rooms h like round vultures around it, ready to pounce.

  Not many words had been spokeween them sihey had lost Bouchard. The silend monotony of the trek hung over them like a mountain, uing and suffog in its weight. Despite their journey bringing them closer and closer to their goal—the bridge of the alien ship—the approag end brought no joy as they slowly floated down the corridors of the wreck.

  “Est-mar-kort,” Murray said suddenly, her high-pitched voice breaking the silence. Pv-tor-fel-mak weled the intrusion, as it distracted him from his increasingly gloomy thoughts.

  “I need a new oxygen ister,” Murray tinued. “I have maybe ten minutes left in this one.”

  The silehat followed rehe past half-hour of quiet hiking a deafening cacophony by parison.

  Eventually, Est-mar-kort answered. “There is no more oxygen,” she said, her voice weak and uain. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to do,” she added as an apology. Given the grave news she had just delivered to her panion, her words seemed utterly insignifit.

  Murray didn’t reply, but the other two team members could hear, from the sound of her breathing, how fear and panic took hold of their teammate.

  It was an impossible situatio also ohey had known for hours they would eventually face. Long before even learning of the disaster, they had been doomed ever since Peretti's Legacy was first damaged. For the past day, the crew had, for all practical purposes, been dead women and men walking.

  “I don’t want to die,” Murray sniffled. “Promise to tell my family what happeo me, if you reach the bridge,” she asked.

  “Of course,” Pv-tor-fel-mak assured her, knowing full well there was nothing on the age-old bridge that could save them. The entire exercise of going there was futile and had been so from the start. Yet, despite the horrors they had endured during their journey, he still appreciated it. It was far better to have something to do to keep their minds occupied as they awaited the end than to spend their st hours sitting silently in ption, anticipating the slow death by suffocation that y ahead of them.

  As the miicked away toward zero, the two Ker tried to keep Murray occupied with versation. It was her sophisticated nor reted to their current predit, but it was enough to distract her from the iable end. Only once did the topic of oxygen e up again, when Murray simply remarked that her ister was empty. Now, all she had left was the life-giving air inside her suit, which would quickly bee inated with carbon dioxide as she took her st breaths.

  At first, there was little ge. The air simply seemed a tiny bit dehan she was aced to, giving her slightly less nourishment than she needed. But with every breath she took, the sensatioronger, and she started to gasp. Her breaths quied in a futile attempt to supply her starving brain with enough oxygenated blood. It was all in vain, of course.

  The suffog b of carbon dioxide y over her like a funeral shroud from hell, draining the life out of her. With the air inside her lungs turning to poison, her vision began to fade, and her head burned with the worst headache of her life.

  Est-mar-kort held Murray’s hand as her gasps became more violent. Then, suddenly, they grew irregur and finally ceased altogether. Her body rexed as death took hold of her, forever sending her away from the world of the living.

  They left her there, floating in the middle of the dark corridor. Eventually, the heat of her body, no longer replenished by the life-givihermic reas that had sustained her for thirty-two years, would radiate away into her surroundings, fading away in the cold darkness like snowfkes swept away by the wind.

  In silence, Pv-tor-fel-mak a-mar-kort tinued forward, pting what they had just witnessed, knowing that within a few hours, this would be their fate as well.

  MvonStz