The Tartarusios glided through the star-strewn void, her black hull sleek and silent. Behind her the remaining Empire cruisers flared in pursuit for as long as they dared. Bjorn threaded the ship through an asteroid belt, then through the edge of a radiation field that no sane navigator would have touched. One by one the pursuing signatures dropped away from the scanners until there was nothing behind them but cold, empty space.
"Captain, we've successfully evaded the Empire's forces," Halley said, and the relief in her voice was tight with something else. "Connect me to Titan Zero."
A moment later the communications panel buzzed. "Titan Zero is in leaping process. ETA five minutes."
Those five minutes felt longer than the battle had. Down in the docking bay, the hangar doors hissed open onto dim light, and every crew member who could be spared stood braced at their station, watching the dark beyond the doors as if staring hard enough could bring him back sooner. When Titan Zero finally surfaced, it came in heavily, and the docking clamps closed around it with a metallic thud that echoed through the whole bay. The crew held their breath as the medics rushed forward.
"Youri," Oscar said over the open channel, his voice caught somewhere between relief and worry, "thank you for saving us."
No answer came. Instead, the alarms began to blare. "Titan Zero shows no vital signs!"
Chaos broke out across the bay. The medics sprinted up to the cockpit with jacks and bio-scanners already springing to life in their hands. Crew members who had been cheering a moment earlier were shouting over one another now, panic visible in every movement as they tried to get the hatch open faster than it was built to open.
Somewhere far from all of that noise, Youri drifted. He was in a gray place with no floor and no ceiling. The only sound was a faint mechanical hum that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
"I did it again," he said. His voice was weak, broken into pieces, as though the words themselves were struggling to survive. "Pushed Alto to its limits." He tried to look around and found that he could not tell which way he was facing. "Where am I? Alto… is that you?"
"You damn fool." The response came low and sharp. It carried a weight that pressed against the shadows of the place until they seemed to lean in closer. "Why are you throwing your life away for them?"
Youri swallowed, and every breath he took trembled. "I don't know. I guess I got used to them. I couldn't let them die."
The silence that followed was thick and heavy, broken only by that faint, endless hum. It felt as though the gray walls of the place were holding their breath along with him, waiting for whatever came next.
"Last time, you lost your taste," the voice murmured at last, quiet now, almost intimate and almost cold. "Tell me. What have you lost this time?"
He shivered. "I don't know. What did you take?"
A soft, dark chuckle answered him, more a feeling than a sound. "Your smell. Consider yourself lucky. Next time, it will be your sight."
Youri closed his eyes and let the gray emptiness wash over him, the hum of the machinery around him turning into something like a lullaby in the void. "Thank you, Alto," he whispered, and the shadows swallowed the words almost before he had finished saying them.
In the Tartarusios' medbay, the medics worked frantically over him. His body lay unresponsive on the table, every limb slack, and only his brain activity remained, flickering stubbornly across the monitors in thin green lines while the machines around him beeped in a steady rhythm that nobody in the room trusted.
"Will he wake up?" one of the younger medics asked, unable to keep the worry out of her voice.
"It's hard to say," another replied without looking up from his hands. "For now, we're pumping his heart manually. If he doesn't wake soon, we'll lose him."
Oscar stood near the edge of the room where he would not be in the way, and guilt sat on his face as plainly as the soot from the battle. He had made the call to dock at Zellion. He had trusted Blain, against every instinct he had, because the run paid well and the ship needed the credits. Now the man who had saved all of them was lying on a table with his heart being pushed by someone else's hands. "It's all my fault," he said quietly. "We walked into that trap because of me."
Halley came to stand beside him and did not touch him, because she knew he would not want her to, but she stayed close enough that he could feel she was there. "Don't be so hard on yourself," she said. "Everything happens for a reason. He chose to go out there, Oscar. Nobody made him."
Before he could answer, Nolan's voice came over the intercom. "Captain, we need you at the helm."
Oscar hesitated for one more look at the table, and then he rushed back up to the bridge with tension radiating from every step. Nolan was waiting for him there with grease up to his elbows and an expression that told him the news before he said a word.
"Boss, we have a problem," Nolan said grimly. "The leap engines overheated. Part of the heat sink melted during that last jump, and we can't leap for a few days. Maybe longer."
Oscar pressed his palms against the console and breathed out slowly. "Stay stationed, then. Nobody touches the engines until you say so. Any vibration could risk a core explosion."
"Understood. But we can't sit out here in the open forever," Nolan said. "We need somewhere to put her down while I fix it. Where's the nearest habitable planet?"
Bjorn was already pulling up the charts, the glow of them reflected in his round glasses. "We're in the Pascal region. There aren't many habitable worlds out here," he said. "The closest is Planet Altea — a rocky world sitting right in the Goldilocks zone. I'm reading multiple biosignatures on the surface. Big ones."
Oscar looked at the planet turning slowly on the display, a small blue-and-green marble surrounded by an awful lot of nothing, and weighed it against the empty dark around them and the man lying downstairs who might not wake up. There was no good choice here. There was only the least bad one.
"Alright," he said at last, and the determination hardened in his voice as he said it. "We have to risk it. Set destination: Planet Altea."