The Merlin pulled up alongside them two hours later.

The vessel was a cataphract warship like the Cobra, but an older model with ageing plates of armour darkened with smoke and heat. It had a few dozen meters shaved off its length, a smaller engine and not quite as many guns crammed into its lower decks, but it could still pack a hefty punch if the occasion called for it.

Wraia was fairly sure it would call for it. She sat at the head of the oval table in the Cobra's primary tactical suite, Gallagher and Ratcliffe to her right, Hooper and Whitlock to her left. A square screen sat in the centre of the table, ready to run the camera images of the Manticore's ravaged interior for their visitors.

So far Gueller hadn't responded to briefing packet they'd sent across in advance of this meeting. Evidently the other commander wanted to wait until he could look her in the eye to air his opinions. She didn't know the man personally, but his service record was an unremarkable beige of patrol assignments and policing actions.

Nonetheless, the record also stated in inarguable black and white that he had seniority, having received his commission a year before her. Technically he was in command, if he had the stomach for it. Part of her wanted that, and another part of her loathed to give over control of the operation to someone who didn't seem any better qualified than her to tackle it.

The door of the tactical suite hissed open and she looked up to see Deck Officer Mayeda poke his head into the room.

"Reporting as ordered, ma'am," Mayeda said with a salute. "I've got Commander Gueller and his command crew with me."

"Show them in, Mr. Mayeda," she confirmed with a nod.

"Ma'am."

He disappeared back through the hatchway for a moment, then reappeared leading the command crew of the SNV Merlin into the room.

Lt. Commander Gueller was scarily tall but spindly with it, his Sol-Navy uniform struggling to fit his gangly frame. His narrow face formed a scowl as he crossed the threshold, hands clasped behind his back, and followed by his senior officers. His skin was ghost-pale, cheeks hollow – clean shaven and putting Wraia uncomfortably in the mind of a skeleton.

He folded himself down into the chair opposed her, bringing both hands together in front of him in a manner than somehow reminded her of a preying mantis. As the rest of his command crew filed in he fixed her with an expectant stare. Reports were one thing, but by now Gueller had had a chance to see the wreck of the Manticore for himself. The man undoubtedly had a lot of questions, and she was the only one who could even attempt to answer them.

"Take a seat, Mr. Mayeda," Wraia said once Gueller's crew had made themselves comfortable. Then she nodded to two deck guards. "That will be all."

The pair saluted, and eagerly retreaded back into the passages of the Cobra, leaving those of higher rank and pay to grapple with the impossibilities that they'd discovered out here. Mayeda wasn't so lucky, and he was a picture of discomfort as he sat down. Right now Wraia didn't much care for his discomfort – he was the senior deck officer and he'd been aboard the Manticore. She needed his voice.

"Commander," she began with a cordial nod to Gueller. "I'm sorry we haven't met under better circumstances."

"Quite," he replied, in a raspy, growling voice. His long fingers twitched as he continued. "I've read your report on the Manticore. This is ... a strange situation. I understand you were able to pull the physical drives from the Manticore's bridge?"

"That's correct."

"I would very much like to see their contents."

"It's being worked on," she told him. "I have a team of technicians assigned, but the drives were badly damaged by whatever wrecked the ship. It will be several hours before we will know if there's any intact information on them."

The corners of Gueller's mouth twitched. "Very well. You have helmet camera footage from your first boarding?"

"We do."

"Please show us."

"Ms. Hooper." Wraia gave her a small nod.

"Ma'am." Hooper straightened sharply in her seat, and keyed a command into her control panel.

After a second, the quartet of screens shimmered into life, and each display showed the various helmet cam recordings from Wraia's earlier excursion. The images flung her back to those tomb-like hallways and she crossed her legs, folding her hands onto her lap and trying to appear unconcerned.

Over the next hour they walked Gueller and his team through the grim tour of the Manticore, from the bridge, to the gunnery decks, to the engines and mess hall. She saw the other ship-master's demeanour grow slowly more on edge as he began to grapple with the reality of what they were dealing with. None of them could explain the strange denting in the passages of the ship, or the warping of the internal structure.

Or the fused power lines.

Not having those answers made put Wraia increasingly on edge, and she was gratified to find that Gueller felt the same. At the end, when the screens died, an uneasy silence filled the room. Wraia exchanged a dubious look with Lieutenant Gallagher, then cleared her throat.

"As you can see," she declared, "the Manticore appears to have run into something very powerful. Something unlike anything in Sol-Navy databases."

"We've had reports of new Narvorian weapon testing along their border regions," Gueller said, leaning back into his seat and removing his cap to reveal a faint fuzz of blonde hair against his scalp. The cap twisted between his fingers as he continued, his gaze fixed on the blank screens. "They've been experimenting with singularity-detonation mines. That could account for the hull warping."

"From inside the ship?" Wraia gave a dubious shake of the head. "The outer hull looks like it was just... ripped open."

"Whatever was used on the Manticore was well past being experimental," Gallagher put in. "The affected sections were critical crew pathways to move throughout the ship. They were carefully targeted."

Mayeda nodded. "If you cut off those arteries, it would make it impossible to deploy anti-boarding teams to properly defend the ship. No way to move deck guards around effectively. Assuming the enemy force had the means to board in numbers, they could divide and conquer."

"Sir – the warping – it looks to me like someone opened a dropspace window," Gueller's chief engineer suggested, fingers of one hand wrapped around his narrow, stubbled chin. "A miniature one within the ship. Look at how everything's pulled inwards."

Whitlock nodded sagely. "I agree, ma'am."

"If the Narvorians have a weapon like this that's operational, we need to warn Davian Naval Command," Ratcliffe said, casting a pointed glance at Wraia. "Ma'am, they need to know. This could all have been a pre-emptive strike, testing out that weapon before the real strike."

"Our SLC Comms are still scrambled," she reminded him. "By the time we've gone all the way back to clear the interference and contact Davian, whatever did this will be long gone."

Gueller's brows creased into a frown. He seemed to ignore Ratcliffe's suggestion, remaining icily calm as he considered the facts. Eventually his eyes lifted from the screen and locked with Wraia's.

"I understand you have a team still aboard the Manticore?"

"We do. I intend to keep a rotating presence until we've extracted all possible information from that ship."

Gueller held her gaze for a moment, then shook his head. "That will no longer be necessary."

Wraia felt a bristle of annoyance go up her spine. "Commander, that ship is evidence of what happened here."

"Indeed. And it is not going anywhere in its current condition." He thumbed the control panel in front of him and brought up the Cobra's sensor readings on the quartet of screens, showing the sweeps of the Myrr Idol system.

And the void where the moon, Myrr Lomas ought to have been.

"Our mission objective," Gueller continued. "Was to assist the colonists of Myrr Idol. They are the ones who sent out the distress call."

"Yes, but-,"

"Your report has made it clear that the crew of the Manticore – whether they are alive or dead – are no longer aboard the ship. You have made a full assessment damage assessment of the vessel, and you have also extracted the physical drives from the ship's bridge." His hands parted, in a gesture that was probably supposed to be casual. "There's nothing else to be done here, Commander."

"But, sir-,"

"Ms. Clay, I remind you that I have seniority," Gueller snapped. "With Captain Ackerman missing, lack of contact with Davian and in the absence of conflicting orders, I am in operational command. This is not up for debate." He stood up sharply. "We have a missing moon, a wrecked ship, a vanished crew and a distress call. That leaves us with one logical course of action that must be taken."

"And what is that?"

"We go to Myrr Idol. And we go now."

*

Wraia leaned her arms on the rests of her chair, quietly seething to herself as they followed the Merlin in-system, leaving the ravaged hulk of the Manticore behind. They remained unable to pierce the interference beyond short range local comms, so right now their superiors at Davian remained oblivious to what was unfolding in this dark corner of space.

She understood Gueller's urgency to get to Myrr Idol, but charging forward like this without all the information they could find – it made her feel sick. The Manticore would have been more than a match for both the Cobra and Merlin combined, and had been wrecked by whatever they were looking for.

It was hard to fight the sensation that they were barrelling headlong into a trap.

Conversation on the bridge was subdued, the crew communicating in clipped orders and status updates, as though sensing her black mood. They'd extracted the what was left of the Manticore's munitions and distributed them between both vessels, but it would still be some time before her the ship techs could dredge up anything useful from the drives they'd rescued.

So on they went, and Wraia kept the crew at battle stations. Whatever was going on out here, she had no intention of being caught by surprise.

They cleared the asteroid field, sensors punching holes in the boiling static of interference all around them. Reliability was still a concern, and she could feel Ensign Hooper's frustration as she tried to carve out a true picture of the system. So far they'd been able to fully ascertain that Myrr Idol was certainly still out there, but the sensors still couldn't find the missing moon.

Wraia forced herself to consider the kind of force required to shatter an interstellar body of that size into rubble. Even the most powerful, galactically-outlawed weapons of mass destruction wouldn't even come close to accomplishing something like that.

"Within visual range," Ensign Scarreth announced.

"Tie in forward cameras and put it up," Wraia ordered, pressing her hands together tightly with anticipation.

The main screen came to life, filling the bridge wall. Just visible in the centre of the screen was the sphere of Myrr Idol, but even at this extreme range she could tell something was wrong. She leaned forward, gripping the armrests and narrowing her eyes.

They crawled inexorably closer. Myrr Idol grew and grew, and with every kilometre the feeling of dread in her gut grew with it. By the time both ships hauled themselves into high orbit, she couldn't believe what she was looking at.

The planet was barely recognisable.

In every vid she'd seen and every report she'd read, Wraia knew the place to be a rugged, but green world, filled with harsh, mountainous valleys and icy seas. That wasn't what she was looking at. The surface was a mucky, rust-brown, and even from high orbit she could see the strange pockmarking of the world's surface, like someone had been smacking it with a hammer.

"Mr. Briar," Wraia said quietly. "Get me ship to ship with the Merlin."
"Aye, ma'am," Brair answered in a shaking voice. "I have Commander Gueller."

"Cobra to Merlin," she said. "Sir, are you seeing what we're seeing?"

"I'm afraid so, Commander," Gueller answered, his voice tight with nerves. "What the hell are we looking at?"

His mask of brusque efficiency slipped, and in that instant she knew that Gueller was just as human as she was, seniority be damned. Unfortunately she didn't have an answer for him.

"I wish I knew." She glanced at Hooper. "Sensors?"

"I'm getting limited atmospheric readings," Hooper replied, looking at her screens with an expression of disbelief. "Oxygen content fifty percent below recorded norms. Extreme tectonic activity across the southern hemisphere. Water mass forty-three percent below recorded norms." She paused long enough to wipe her brow. "It's barely breathable down there, ma'am. A human without a suit would be dead inside of an hour."

"Life signs?"

Hooper looked up at her and shook her head. "Nothing, ma'am, though I won't swear by the instrumentation."

"Did you get all that, Commander?"

"We did. Our sensors show the same," Gueller answered. "Pull into covering formation. The colony should on the far side of the planet. Let's find out if it's still there."

"Copy that. Moving into formation now."

Gueller cut the transmission.

Wraia breathed in deep through her nose, out through her mouth, and inclined her head to Ratcliffe. "Covering formation with the Merlin, Lieutenant. Mr. Gallagher, I want all bow torpedo tubes loaded and prepped for a scatter-shot. Gunnery teams stand by for screening volleys."

"Aye, ma'am."

The Cobra lurched gently as it manoeuvred. The ugly, battered sphere of Myrr Idol swung to the edge of the viewscreen and the Merlin took centre stage, its sublight engines boiling in the dark of space. Wraia's vessel took up station behind him, higher up towards the planet's northern pole and hanging several thousand kilometres back, with a firing angle to cut across the bow of the other ship and shield them from any sudden enemy attention.

Space remained cold and empty though as they traversed Myrr Idol, swinging around to its night side. There she could see the evidence of the tectonic activity, with angry red smears scarring the southern hemisphere where vast lava flows had been shaken loose. Worse than that, however, was the small, mangled hunk of rock that emerged on the sensor array, orbiting out at around 400,000 kilometres from the planet itself.

"I think we found the moon," Scarreth laughed nervously.

"This is not the time for jokes, Ensign," Wraia snapped. "Ms. Hooper, can you confirm that?"

"It's where Myrr Lomas was supposed to be," Hooper answered. "But... gods, ma'am, it's lost almost eighty-percent of its mass. There's not much left except the core."

"Like someone stripped it for parts," Gallagher mused.

"Ma'am?" Briar piped up. "Ship to ship from the Merlin."

"Put him on speakers." Wraia made a circular gesture with one hand. "This is Clay. Go ahead."

"Gueller here. We're in orbit above the colony site."

Wraia braced herself as Gueller's voice sounded through the bridge. "What have we got?"

"More bad news, Commander. It looks like whatever wrecked the Manticore came here first."