Nothing.

There was nothing. No matter how many hallways they walked or rooms they checked, they couldn't find a soul aboard the Manticore, living or otherwise. Some sections of the ship were too badly damaged to traverse, with whole bulkheads balked and twisted into impassable barriers.

As she continued on, Wraia saw more evidence of gunfire, more blast marks at random intervals along the walls, along with more of the strange indents in the deck plates. Twice more they saw evidence of the strange, hull warping gravity effect they'd seen when they boarded.

She could feel herself getting agitated and that wasn't good. Agitation led to nerves, which led to fear. Fear made you make bad decisions. That had been her father's mantra, one that she carried through the academy and all the way to the bridge of the Cobra.

She repeated it to herself silently as they walked, hoping that neither Mayeda or Ensign Hooper could see just how much her gun hand was trembling. They continued upward, into the ship's command decks, where evidence of fighting became more and more frequent. Clearly the ship had been boarded, but by who?

Or what?

Wraia directed her two subordinates through the cloying dark, micromanaging their movement, moving the trio and a slow, leapfrogging pattern towards their destination. Sound tactics in unsecured territory, and it also kept her mind occupied. She kept searching for an explanation that wouldn't come. None of the evidence matched any enemy she knew of – not pirates, not the Traussicans, not Narvorian or Behlandrian. The human race had had its fare share of bumps and scrapes when it emerged into the galactic community, but nothing like this had ever been recorded.

They finally reached the bridge deck, clumping soundlessly along with their magnetised boots. The passages bent in on them along the right hand wall, the plates buckled wildly by whatever weapon had mangled the Manticore from the inside out. She saw a discarded particle blaster float past her visor, its internal battery winking dismally in the gloom.

"Take point, Mr. Mayeda," she whispered over the comm. "Hooper, rearguard."

Neither of them verbally acknowledged the order, as though they thought they might conjure something out of the shadows if they spoke too loudly. Mayeda moved past her with his shotgun raised, and she followed, keeping close to the opposite wall in a staggered formation.

They reached the door of the bridge and found it closed.

"Seal looks good," Mayeda commented as he inspected the structure. "No sign of any breaching charge."

"So it's airtight?"

"Looks like it."

"Could someone have survived in there? If it was sealed?"

"Maybe." The deck officer shrugged. "Even if life support failed it could hold a few hours of air."

Hooper shook her head, looking grimly at her scanner. "I'm not reading any atmosphere on the other side, ma'am."

The brief blip of hope she'd allowed herself quickly vanished and Wraia steeled herself for the worst. Holstering her torch, she took a grip of the manual emergency release and nodded to her companions.

"On my count. One. Two. Three."

She pulled hard, bringing the large toggle down. It didn't run on electrics, designed to operate precisely in the absence of main power, and when she triggered it, tiny bolts along the door seam exploded, creating just enough force to propel the door open.

The aperture was about two feet across, and no burst of air came rushing out of it, confirming Hooper's readings. Wraia breathed deep, and followed Mayeda through onto the bridge of the Manticore.

"Ma'am..."

Mayeda's shaken voice immediately grabbed her attention. She turned and found him looking up with a nervous expression on his face. She followed his gaze and couldn't stop herself from gasping when she saw the drifting forms of asteroids, and the infinite darkness of space beyond.

There was a thirty-foot hole in the ship.

Something had punched through half a dozen armoured decks above them and torn the top off the bridge like a tin can. Wraia blinked a few times and pressed her lips together hard.

"Holy hell," Hooper breathed.

Wraia just nodded. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, lowered her head and refocused her attention on the bridge consoles. The footage from their helmet cams could be picked over at length when they returned, and then someone could try and figure just what in black space could do something like that.

Empty screens stared accusingly back at her. She moved over to the tactical console and thumbed one of the switches, but as she'd expected nothing happened. Wraia allowed herself a faint curse.

"Ma'am, I can try and pull the physical back ups from the consoles," Hooper suggested quietly. "They might be fried to all hell by whatever did this, but if there's anything on them, we should be able to extract it back on the Cobra."

"Do it," Wraia replied without hesitation. "How long do you need?"

"Give me fifteen minutes."

She nodded, and as Hooper set to work, she double tapped the comm stud on the outside of her helmet. "Clay to boarding team," she declared. "Report in?"

"Specialist Kosmas here, ma'am," the thickly accented young man replied from the gunnery decks, his voice tinny but readable within the structure of the Manticore. Even through the dodgy reception, though, Wraia could hear the apprehension in his voice.

"What have you got?" she said, not entirely sure she actually wanted him to.

"Gunnery stations are a mess, commander. Port-side batteries are totally wrecked. Looks like a hurricane came through this place."

"Any sign of the crew?"

"Negative."

"And what about the batteries themselves? Have they been fired?"

"That they have, ma'am, and not for target practice. Ammo caches are almost three-quarters depleted. Whatever happened to them, they went down shooting."

That didn't exactly fill her with confidence. If a powerful ship like the Manticore could almost empty its ammo reserves and still be destroyed, she shuddered to think about an enemy that could have done such a thing.

"Move to the bow and assess the bombardment decks," she instructed. "Check the torpedo tubes. And be careful – there may be live, unsecured ordnance in those sections."

"Aye, ma'am. Moving to bombardment decks now."

"Ms. Whitlock?" Wraia changed her attention.

"I read you. It's the same down at engineering, ma'am," Whitlock confirmed. "Haven't seen a soul – dead or otherwise. Place is a bloody ghost ship."

"And the engines?"

"Totally shot, ma'am. The main power lines have been ... well ... fused." There was disbelief in the chief engineer's voice.

"Fused?!"

"Aye, ma'am. Like they all overloaded at once and just locked solid. And the dropspace drive's been completely shunted offline."

"Is it damaged?"

"Negative, but I can't get a whisper out of it without main power," Whitlock said grimly. "I've never seen anything like this."

"What about emergency power?" Wraia tried not to let the desperation seep into her voice. God how she wanted to get some lights on in this tomb.

"Sorry, ma'am. I'd need a full week in dry dock just to fix up the basic power grid before we could get the emergency batteries online – let alone main power."

"Understood." Wraia could feel an ache in her jaw as it tightened with unease. "Keep working and see if you can't figure out what caused it. Log everything." She glanced at her wrist counter. They had two hours of air left on this excursion. "Everyone watch your oxygen levels and make sure you're ready to return to the Cobra within safety parameters."

Acknowledgements flitted back over the comm link from the other teams, and they continued their work. Wraia paced uneasily, checking various consoles even through she knew they were dead, just waiting for Hooper to finish her work. It took a little longer than the ensign anticipated, but twenty minutes later she was standing triumphant with a back full of solid state drives removed from the beating heart of the Manticore.

Hooper held the bag up, opening her mouth to speak, before an incoming message cut across the comm.

"Cobra to boarding team, I repeat, Cobra to boarding team. Come in please."

It was Gallagher, his voice surprisingly audible through the strange sea of interference that blanketed the Myrr Idol system. Wraia exchanged a surprised glance with Mayeda and opened the link.

"Go ahead, Lieutenant. We're reading you loud and clear."

"Same to you, ma'am," Gallagher replied. "Mr. Briar's tuned our comms to the main navigation array. It's takes a lot of manual adjusting to keep the transmission on target, but the extra power seems to be enough to punch through the interference – at least locally."

Wraia smiled. "Good work."

"How are things over there?"

"Not good." The smile faded as quickly as it had come. "No survivors. No bodies either."

"The crew were taken?"

"We don't know. We don't know much for sure yet, but they were definitely boarded. There are signs of small arms fire all over the ship. It's a mess out here, Lieutenant – you'll see from the helmet cams when we come back."

She wished she could have said something reassuring, but that was not the reality. You did not sugar-coat reality for your shipmates. Every person aboard the Cobra needed to know exactly what they were dealing with, or they could not be relied on to do their jobs.

"Well, I do have some good news, ma'am," Gallagher said after a moment. "We've received a subspace comm burst from the Merlin. They've dropped in system and are on their way to us at maximum sublight. E.T.A. two hours."

Relief surged in Wraia's chest, the grim, lonely weight of the Manticore's halls lifting from her shoulders just a little. Finally she'd have another commander to share this nightmare with.

"Have you been able to respond and appraise them of the situation?"

"Yes, ma'am. They sent an acknowledgement but otherwise they've not commented. Probably not sure what to say."

"It's probably something that needs to be seen to be believed," Wraia muttered. "Alright, Lieutenant, we're on our way back. I want fresh boarding crews assembled and rotate them in every three hours. I want every inch of this ship gone over. I want everything logged. Clay out."

*

Wraia wished she could have had time to take a shower after peeling herself out of the boarding suit, but somehow it didn't feel right to take even the briefest moment away from the mystery unfolding before her eyes. She wrestled her hair back into a ragged ponytail and slipped on a fresh uniform, and then was back on the bridge barely ten minutes after returning to the Cobra.

She stormed onto the bridge, grim-faced but burning with energy. Her mind hadn't stopped racing since she'd stepped back onto their boarding galley, trying to come up with some kind of explanation for what they'd found, but nothing sensible would come to her.

No weapon in any of her training manuals could do the kind of damage they'd found. And if the enemy – because it had to be an enemy – possessed the kind of firepower to wreck a ship like the Manticore, why bother boarding it? Why the firefights in every passage of the ship?

The crew were taken?

Gallagher's question made her blood chill. It would certainly explain the lack of bodies.

"Launch-2 is away, ma'am," Gallagher informed her as she took her seat. "They'll be arriving at the Manticore in three minutes."

"Good. Once our suit helmet cams have been downloaded, I want a priority meeting of all department heads in tactical suite one."

"Ma'am."

"And pick a gunnery team to dispatch to the Manticore," she continued. "There's still ammunition and ordnance on that ship. I have a feeling we're going to need it."

Gallagher blinked, hesitated for a split-second, then clicked his heels with a salute. "Yes, ma'am."

"Err... Commander?" Lieutenant Ratcliffe called suddenly from the pilot station, and the tremor in his voice put Wraia instantly on alert. She sat up, fixing her stare on the back of his neck.

"Lieutenant?"

"I... well, I think the Tactical AI's managed to cut through some of the interference. We've got short range sensors working again – showing sixty-three percent integrity."

"Good."

"It's just, what I'm seeing doesn't make a lot of sense."

More bloody good news. Wraia shoved herself up out of the command chair and strode up to look over the pilot's shoulder.

"Out with it, Mister."

"Sorry, ma'am, I just..." He cast a furtive glance at Ensign Scarreth. The young navigator's brow was furrowed with concentration as she stared at her screen. "This doesn't make any sense."

"Ensign?" Wraia shifted her attention to Scarreth. "What is it?"

"Short range sensors have painted the local volume, but it ... it doesn't match my charts." Scarreth swallowed hard and looked up at the main viewscreen, where the asteroid belt hung like a barrier between them and any answers. She glanced at Ratcliffe. "It's got to be a glitch."

"We checked it three times over." He shook his head and pointed at her display. "The AI doesn't make mistakes."

"If one of you doesn't explain to me what the hell you're talking about in the next ten seconds, you'll be cooling your heels in the brig!" Wraia exploded. "I am ordering you to report. What is wrong?"

Ratcliffe swivelled to face her in his seat, stiff as a board, and white as a sheet. He pointed at the main screen.

"There's a moon missing," he said simply.

"A moon missing?!"

"We think so, ma'am." He cleared his throat and swivelled back, nodding to Scarreth. With a flick of her hand she brought the sensor display up on the main screen.

"Myrr Lomas," the navigator said. "The main satellite of Myrr Idol. It's not there anymore."

"A moon can't just disappear," Hooper exclaimed incredulously. "It must be the interference."

"That's what we thought," Scarreth snapped. "But everything else is where it's supposed to be. Except that moon and..." she gestured toward the screen, "and that asteroid field."

A few seconds passed. She waited for more, but it didn't come. Then the implication of what Ensign Scarreth had just told her struck like a lightning bolt. Wraia's jaw dropped, her veneer of calm falling away for a moment as she looked up at the screen, and the belt of smashed rubble.

"Are you saying...?" She shook her head for a moment, her body physically rejecting the idea that had just been presented to her. Taking a step back, she pointed to the screen. "Are you telling me that asteroid field used to be a moon?!"

Ratcliffe recoiled nervously. "We think so ma'am." He cast a desperate look at Hooper. "We can confirm it if we cross reference the composition of the field against the composition on file for Myrr Lomas."

"Are you kidding me?" Hooper blurted.

"Ms. Hooper!" Wraia snapped, shooting the woman an acid glance. Looking around, she could see that the rest of the bridge crew looked stunned, scared and baffled all at the same time, and she realised she needed to stamp some control on this situation, before it escaped her clutches.

"All of you," she told them, injecting as much steel into her voice as she could muster. "Pull yourselves together. You're naval officers! Last I looked, our orders were the same. Now, we have a job to do, and we are going to do it."

Head held high, she turned on her heel, marched back to her command chair and sat down. Then she sat up straight and took a deep breath, gathering her composure.

"Mr. Briar," she said icily. "Send a message to the Merlin. Tell them I'm requesting an emergecny meeting with their command crew in person aboard the Cobra upon arrival."

"In person, ma'am?"

"Yes, in person. We have an awful lot to talk about, and I'm not doing it over a damned view screen."