“There has been a decompression in the forward section!” one of the bridge crew shouted as emergency alarms began to sound.

Varna looked up, his attention still divided between the command display and the screams breaking through his headset. He heard several men shouting over one another, then a wash of static swallowed their voices. Cursing, he turned to the command console and brought up a schematic of Artemis.

“White space is flooding the affected compartments,” the sensor operator reported. “Local communications are failing. Weapons targeting is offline.”

“Seal and polarize the forward section,” Varna ordered, forcing his anger beneath a calm, even tone. “We can restore the systems once we return to normal space.”

“Shouldn’t we stop and do that now?” Chen demanded. He had abandoned his work long enough to stare at the damage display. “The men who were ejected are still alive. I heard them calling. We have to recover them.”

“They are already dead.”

“I just heard—”

“But you don’t hear them now,” Varna snapped. He took a breath, stepped closer to Chen, and lowered his voice as though instructing a particularly slow student. "What do you know about transition space?"

Chen looked like he was preparing the academic answer, but Varna didn’t wait.

“It is not space. It is energy—a constant pressure of power and radiation that will destroy unprotected systems within minutes. That’s why we are losing equipment near the breach. Those suits might protect you briefly, but one system after another will fail.”

Outside the ship, Phillip hung from his tether as Artemis dragged him through the white. Warnings flickered across his visor. Several vanished before he could read them, replaced by a single red message fixed in the center of his vision.

RECYCLER FAILURE

The air inside his helmet had already begun to feel warmer and heavier. A low hiss came from somewhere behind his head. Phillip did not waste time trying to understand the machinery. He caught the tether with both hands and began pulling himself toward the ship. The motion reminded him of climbing a rope, though he could not place where or when he had done it. Each time his gloves closed around the metal cable, a tingling current passed through his fingers and up his arms.

Hand over hand, he drew himself closer to the hull.

On the bridge, Varna continued. “A ship cannot simply turn around in transition. Our course is determined by the velocity and direction we carried into the field. We can make some limited corrections, but we cannot reverse our momentum to retrieve something without risking the vessel itself.”

Chen looked back toward the damage display. “What would happen?”

“We could lose the transit channel entirely. The ship might emerge hundreds of systems from its intended position—or be drawn toward one of the black stars.”

Varna gestured toward the transition plot. “All energy in the white flows toward them. If we fall too deeply into that current, we could be forced back into real space through the corona of an actual star.”

Outside, a flash of blue light drew Phillip’s attention away from the tether.

He had nearly reached the airlock when the pulse struck Thomas’s line. Energy swelled around the braided metal. Individual strands glowed, frayed, and snapped in rapid succession. The tether recoiled from the hull and whipped out into the white.

Thomas began drifting away. Phillip reached for the loose cable, but it passed beyond his fingertips.

“No.” The word escaped him as a breath.

Thomas floated motionless at the end of the severed line, already several yards from the ship. The white pulled at him, drawing him toward one of the distant black points.

Phillip’s visor continued flashing. RECYCLER FAILURE. The air inside his helmet grew hotter.

On the bridge Varna told Chen, “When someone becomes separated from a ship in transition, they are lost. There is no practical rescue. Anyone attempting one merely joins them.” He turned away from the technician. “At least they took some of our problems with them.”

Phillip reached the hull and locked one arm around the edge of the airlock frame. His own tether remained secured inside, its line stretched tight behind him.

He looked toward Thomas. The lieutenant was drifting farther away.

Phillip judged the distance, the direction of Thomas’s movement, and the length remaining on his own tether. He doubted he would have time for a second attempt.

He planted both boots against the hull, then he pushed away.

The tether unspooled behind him as he entered the white. Its resistance slowed him almost immediately, as though he had thrown himself into deep water. Phillip extended both arms and concentrated on the loose cable trailing from Thomas’s suit.

He began to rotate. The black points wheeled around him. Thin bands of color bent toward them and disappeared. The air inside Phillip’s helmet grew thick, and moisture gathered beneath his collar.

He ignored it. Thomas’s tether passed beneath him.

Phillip reached. His fingers closed around empty white.

The cable drifted closer as he turned. He reached again and caught it.

Phillip wrapped the line once around his forearm to keep it from slipping away, then found an external restraint point on the front of his suit and forced the cable through it. His own tether reached its limit and snapped taut, jerking him back toward Artemis.

Pain shot across his shoulders. The captured line held and Phillip began pulling Thomas toward him.

On the bridge, Varna moved to the sensor station beside Morgan and tested several of the local systems himself. “Is anything functioning near that airlock?” he asked quietly.

“No,” Morgan said. “Not in that section. The white has saturated the local sensors and communications.” He studied the schematic. “Do you think they were trying to cripple the ship?”

“No. I think they were trying to communicate with Fleet Command.”

Varna cycled through several damaged channels.“They could not have received anything from that compartment, so they must have forced the hyper-pulse transmitter to send a general distress signal.”

“Do you think anyone received it?”

“It does not matter if they did.” Varna closed the failed channel. “Once we arrive at Nirenda, we will be doing a great deal of talking.”

He continued searching for some functioning sensor near the breach—anything that might quiet the unease building in his thoughts.

Outside, Phillip pulled Thomas closer one handful of tether at a time.

The lieutenant offered no help. His body turned slowly in the white, his limbs drifting loosely as Phillip drew him in. It felt agonizingly slow.

Phillip’s breathing became difficult. The recycler warning remained fixed across his visor, joined now by rising carbon dioxide and temperature indicators he did not understand but could interpret well enough.

Thomas finally came within reach.

Phillip caught the front of his suit and pulled him against his chest. He secured Thomas to a second restraint point, tested the connection, then began hauling both of them back toward Artemis along his remaining tether. Every time he closed a hand around the line, energy prickled through his gloves. He tried not to think about what would happen if this cable failed as well.

Back on the bridge, Varna moved quickly between panels and skimmed the incoming reports. His activity was less about finding useful information than preventing anyone nearby from seeing exactly what he was searching for. He suspected the ship had shed fewer complications than it had assets.

“What is it, Captain?” Morgan asked softly. “Are you looking for the Serpis?”

His tone made the name sound like an invocation. “That too,” Varna muttered. He returned to the damaged airlock display.

“What kind of lunatic opens a ship to the white?” Morgan asked, glancing at the sealed forward section.

“Someone who didn’t know what was outside.”

“No one survives long in transition space,” Morgan said. “Even if the decompression didn’t carry them away, the white will destroy their suits. Just as you told Chen.”

“But they still tried it.” Varna considered the fact. Desperate people were unpredictable. Determined people were worse.

He wanted neither moving freely aboard his ship.

“Gather another search team,” he said. “Sweep the forward compartments again as soon as the affected section can be entered.”

“We still haven’t found the Serpis.”

“Stay ready, Mr. Morgan. It is more likely the Serpis will find us first.”

Varna returned to the command console and reviewed the remaining systems. No additional failures had appeared beyond the compartments exposed to the white. Once Artemis returned to normal space, the breach could be sealed and the damaged systems restored.

The incident should have been contained, but the absence of proof bothered him. He could not confirm that whoever had opened the airlock was dead. Varna glanced toward Chen. The technician had returned to work on the authorization codes for the remaining weapons system, shoulders tight as he bent over the interface.

“Less than thirty minutes, Mr. Chen,” Varna called.

Chen gave no answer. That was what Varna expected. Keeping him nervous was not strictly necessary, but it relieved some of Varna’s own tension.

Above the bridge, a shadow moved through the ventilation duct.

G’Dahn twisted silently through the confined passage, his long body passing through the darkness like smoke.

Next Chapter: XI