Blaring alarms; the metallic taste of blood and stomach acid.

  What—

  A voice thunders in her skull.

  Navigator Lanis! Collect yourself!

  Lanis. Navigator. The words seem to refract off her shimmering mind, but they have their effect. She gasps, opening her eyes into red-rimmed darkness. Other sensations flood into her: Pain— a splitting headache. Coolness, all around her. She’s in an acceleration pod, ensconced in oxygenated gel, a deep part of her realizes.

  Navigator Lanis!

  She closes her eyes tightly and another world lights up, the bionics in her mind running a full systems check and selective reboots. A stream of data flashes through her mind’s eye, absorbed by her subconscious and… something else. Another thing, inside her mind.

  A name. Demeter.

  Where are we? What just happened? she asks, thickly stumbling over the words. Except they aren’t words, but thoughts, conveyed as quickly as they arise to the ship’s AI.

  Lanis. Navigator Lanis. That’s me, she realizes.

  SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE

  Her eyes snap wide open for the second time against the cool acceleration gel: She’s Lanis Osgell, Navigator Third Class, on her first warp jump. And something has gone truly, horribly, breathtakingly wrong.

  We’ve been pulled off course, Navigator. Unclear etiology. Jump, stat. Jump, stat. Course: Terra. Powering jump, awaiting Navigator guidance.

  The massive voice that echoes in her skull is that of the Demeter, the five kiloton Jupiter-class ship’s AI. The Demeter is technically a supply ship, but every ship in the Fleet armada is still armed for battle and more advanced than anything Lanis has set foot on until a week ago. I’m fresh out of Academy training, not even a full Navigator yet; why is the Demeter having me run the jump?

  Where is Navigator Sanislav? She asks, knowing the answer as fast as the inquiry is made.

  Massive intracranial hemorrhage detected. Resuscitation efforts ongoing.

  Lanis tries to push down the newest flood of fear as she absorbs this information. What about her own headache? She trusts that the Fleet implants will do their job and keep her ICP within just allowable limits. Except they didn’t, not for Sanislav.

  What happened? Where are we?

  There’s a heartbeat pause.

  Not alone, the Demeter says, the bulk of its massive attention suddenly elsewhere, servitors scrambling.

  Lanis’ entire body twitches within her pod. She feels… it, not just with the Demeter’s sensors but viscerally, like a long finger brushing along her neck.

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  What the fuck?! she screams. This time she truly screams the words, her lungs pushing gel out into the dim ochre of the acceleration pod.

  Focus, Demeter commands, haltingly. Get us back to Terra. Forming warp bubble. Awaiting!

  Lanis eyes roll and widen, but she also gets to work, nearly a decade of Fleet training and implants overriding her bulging terror. She doesn’t understand what’s happening, but she feels the Demeter fighting for its life against whatever it is out there, in a space where nothing should be. Lanis instinctively makes herself smaller, allowing only a trickle of data into her mind feed. It’s like doing a quantum physics assignment in the dark while hiding from a monster— flicking a penlight on and off to see the assignment, then to scribble a note, all while moving to a different hiding place. While she does so her mouth silently forms the words of a navigation invocation, unconsciously choosing the Gayatri Mantra.

  Still, a part of her mind registers an ongoing conversation with the Demeter, the chatter of battle-speak and ship data flowing around her, her mind like a pebble caught in a flooding river.

  Captain Harris woken on emergency protocol. Specialist teams 5, 6, and 7 woken on emergency protocol. Weapons online. Countermeasures online. Weapons team AI integration complete. Countermeasure AI integration complete. Captain Harris at 70% function and rising.

  Somewhere too is the dawning realization that she’s actually figuring it out, on her first jump. She’s still technically just a cadet, here just to observe Navigator Sanislov on a routine resupply run to Barrack Prime; am I even allowed to do this? She’s immediately informed that all the unalienable protocols have already been overridden. God, oh god.

  Androvan ship detected. Weapon flares. Bracing.

  Lanis’ pupils dilate again, her trance teetering. Where did they come from?

  She doesn’t even get a reply from Demeter, merely a pressure in her mind that forces her back to her task, but not before she brushes against the impossibly rapid battle-chatter of Captain Harris and the weapons’ teams. She sees the energy spikes, and even within her gel pod she feels a shudder as something hits the ship. A damage report pops up for a microsecond, but it’s shoved aside as the weight of the Demeter’s attention shifts back to her.

  Focus! Computation check complete. Warp bubble holding. Focus. Ship to crew— emergency jump in 3, 2, 1.

  Lanis’ psyche suddenly becomes one with the ship. She can feel oxygen and biological matter spilling out from the gaping tear in the Demeter’s hull, bulkheads grinding down to staunch the bleeding. Across from the Demeter is the needle-like Androvan ship, shockingly close, less than a nano sec. Their enemy, but also, she suddenly realizes, a victim itself. It’s being… consumed. That’s the only way she can describe it. She watches with the Demeter's sensors, nightmarishly better than any biological eyes, as the silver arches of the Androvan's command bridges buckle one after another, its mass-drivers and point defense lancers no longer directed at the Demeter, but at something else, something that has already killed the ship past hope.

  It’s coming. Jump. Now.

  Lanis wonders briefly if she's ready. Realizes it doesn't matter if the ship is torn apart in the jump- any longer here and they're all dead anyway. She gathers the ship in the palm of her mind, an act that the Demeter, no matter how huge and advanced, cannot comprehend, and plunges it into a ripped hole of Warp space, back to Terra. She's heedless of the redlining energy consumption, or the bulging warp bubble, or the hemorrhagic warnings and blood in her mouth as she focuses her psyche, magnified by the Demeter’s tech savants, beyond any capacity she thought possible. It's like a child's nightmare come-to-life on an unfathomable scale, her mind pushing the Demeter through the clinging mud of Warpspace while a terror reaches out its claws toward her, so close that she can feel its obscene breath hot against her back.

  Back. Oh god, oh god, oh god.

  She remembers screaming, her body convulsing as they re-enter real space: screaming and thrashing and bleeding from her nose, and her ears and her eyes, the blood blooming patterns into the acceleration fluid. Beyond the screams, deep in her mind, she still recognizes the Demeter's quiet words.

  Well done, Navigator.

  Then the ship tries to sedate her.