Chapter 14: Dead Space

The running lights carved a sphere no wider than the Morningstar's wingspan, and beyond that edge the light didn't fade. It stopped. A clean line, where illumination ended and the dark began. Sera gripped the edge of the helm console and stared through the forward viewport. No stars. No horizon. The darkness beyond the ship's lights pressed against the reinforced glass, dense enough to lean on. She'd flown through debris fields so thick the nav computer couldn't plot a path, through the black between galaxies where the nearest light source was a million years dead. None of it was like this. This was full. The hull groaned — a low, metallic protest that traveled through the deck plates and into the soles of her boots. Metal contracting. The temperature readouts on the bridge display were dropping in a steady, unbroken descent: minus forty, minus sixty, minus ninety. The numbers fell like a countdown to something she didn't want to reach. Frost was already forming on the viewport frame, crystalline feathers spreading inward from the edges. Her pendant lay against her sternum, cold through the fabric. No warmth. No hum. The blue crystal that had resonated with ambient magic since the day she'd bonded Crimson was silent, dead weight on its chain. She pressed her palm against it through the fabric of her bodysuit. Nothing but cold. "Sensors are returning garbage," Pip said from the secondary console. The Fae engineer was perched on the edge of the display panel, eight inches of frantic energy, their wings buzzing in erratic bursts that sent them listing sideways before they corrected. Tiny hands flew across controls scaled for someone six times their size. "I'm getting distance readings that contradict themselves between scans. One sweep says there's a solid mass two hundred meters out, next…