The absence of stars in darkspace was the first thing most new scouts complained about, but Roman had spent so much time on this side of the breach, the empty, velvet-dark eternal night seemed natural.

It did mean the Borealis was invisible until Roman pulled close enough for his own spotlights to touch her. Sensors were untrustworthy in darkspace, so you never knew for certain if the ship ghosting across your console was real or an echo until you saw it. Sometimes, not even then.

Borealis was an old ship, scarred and patched, but Roman could see how in her youth she’d been beautiful. Even if the sweeping lines of her nose to her wings to her engines had been blurred with the addition of storage pods and guns. Built by the Dragon; he could tell by the arched front and strutted panels that, together, suggested the shape of the creature that was their namesake. For a clan that was so dreadfully uptight, they did craft lovely ships.

Borealis sat quiet and still. No engines burning, no lights visible from the outside. No answer to his hails. “Run a thermal scan,” he said to his ship AI as he eased in for a closer look.

“Internal temperature steady at sixty-five degrees. No additional heat signatures.”

“Double check that.”

“Confirmed. No living bodies.”

Small AIs weren’t really all that smart, but a ship got to know the person it was working with. She knew what Roman had been looking for.

Roman disengaged his harness. The cabin of the tiny scout craft was just large enough he could stand—well, float—behind his pilot chair to get dressed for an EVA. “Log entry: Scout First Class Hayashi Roman on discovery of the Borealis. Ship has gone dark. No visible damage. No signs of living crew or passengers. Going in for a closer look.”

If anyone had still been alive, he would have called for backup. Survivors on a ship dead in darkspace almost always meant demons on board, and no Wolf—no matter how experienced—confronted a demon alone. But demons had no interest in the dead.

Roman pulled on his helmet and gloves, double checked the seals, his oxygen supply, that all the lights that should be blinking were blinking and the lights that shouldn’t were properly dark.

He finished his preparations by strapping his sword to his waist, working it back and forth until it was the least likely to get in his way while still being easy to draw, taking into account the restrictiveness of his space suit. Sharp metal and atmosphere suits didn’t really mix, but going without wasn’t an option. Not in darkspace.

Roman took a solid grip on the rail around the hatch as he opened his ship to the outside. There was no explosive decompression like there would be in real space. Darkspace was…different. But it was still an important habit to develop. You never knew what might be lurking on the other side, waiting to pull you out.

When no hand, pincer, or tentacle reached in to grab him, Roman let go and pushed himself up and out of his his ship. He floated across the narrow gap between his fang and the Borealis. His gravity anchor was locked tight; the two ships would drift together while Roman explored the inside.

Empty and not empty. Cold and not cold. Darkspace didn’t exist, but it created a different sort of void than real space, a sense of resistance as Roman floated through it. To Roman’s extra sense—the perception granted him by the nima—darkspace was waves and flows and eddies, an energy with its own currents and streams. Roman broke through those like a fish cresting the ocean as he made for the dead ship.

Borealis wasn’t huge, but she was big enough to have a real airlock. One that cycled automatically when Roman pushed the outer controls, meaning there was still power somewhere on the ship.

Power…and air. A noticeable atmosphere blew in around Roman as the inner door opened. A quick look at his wrist display confirmed proper levels of oxygen, nitrogen, and CO2. It hadn’t been an environmental failure that had left Borealis aimless and lifeless in darkspace.

Roman kept his helmet on and suit sealed, even though it dulled his hearing and reflexes. Not every poison was detectable to suit sensors. Not every threat could be measured in molecules.

The halls were lit only by the low, emergency lighting, but it was more than enough for Roman’s nima-adapted eyes to see. He didn’t draw his sword—not yet—but when he reached the first intersection, he was happy he hadn’t removed his helmet, that he couldn’t smell this air.

Blood. Everywhere. Floating spheres around the ceiling grates, in the hall, splashed against the walls. Roman edged around the worst of the mess and kept going.

The bodies were midship. The common room that would have served as galley, rec room, meeting room, and whatever other activity called for the whole crew gathered together. Well, here they were. Their final resting place—an undignified mass of torn limbs and heads and torsos floating lazily about in microgravity.

Roman could remember a time when sights like this had shocked him. There was a standard progression in the career path of Wolf-born scouts. You grew up hearing about the horrors of darkspace, thinking you’d be different—that you’d be brave. Your first few times out, when you came face to face with the reality, you discovered that no one was that brave. After, you either fell apart or you kept going.

Roman had kept going. Like every veteran scout, he’d found ways to cope with the horror. Like every veteran scout, he feared the inevitable day came where he’d seen so much he simply forgot that it was horrible. At that point, there were two possible endings—the happy path was you recognized that you’d slipped too far and retired and spent the rest of your days training the new generations. The most likely end was that one day you flew out into darkspace and simply never came back.

The good news for Roman was that a hold full of dismembered bodies was still upsetting. Although also, in its own weird way, comforting.

“Log entry: Scout First Class Hayashi Roman on board the Borealis. Numerous dead. No direct count.” He pointed his suit scanner at one of the torsos floating past. It was dressed in a coarse, bloody shirt—not a uniform of any sort. The reading Roman got was exactly what he suspected. “Based on apparent rigidity and temperature of the bodies, deaths occurred hours ago. No signs of infestation. No signs of remaining demons.”

Because no question a demon had done this. What had these poor bastards expected? There was a reason darkspace travel was regulated during an Eclipse. By regulated, that meant no one was cleared to travel here except for the bare handful of scouts like Roman whose adaptations were strong enough they could still navigate when the Dark World sat between reality and the rest.

But there were always a few who thought they knew better. Usually smugglers or raiders taking advantage of the fact no one was around to see them. Sometimes clan officials or highborns who thought their own self-importance would keep away the demons. People like that were one of the reasons Roman had to work double and sometimes triple shifts for three months and change. Because no error in judgement, however dumb, was enough to make a person deserve the sort of death sentence the demons brought.

A clang of metal against metal made Roman spin, drawing his sword in a fluid motion practiced a thousand times.

A wrench floated away from the pipe it had knocked against.

Roman took a deep breath, chiding himself. The ship was empty. The demons were long gone, and none of these dead were going to get up again. No use infecting bodies this torn up.

Roman pushed his way past a couple floating legs and one bodiless shoulder to get to the ship’s terminal. He pulled a chip from the back of his glove and found the ship’s input, connecting his own AI with whatever was left of the Borealis’s brain. “What have we got?”

A brief pause as his ship sorted through the information. She answered, “Navigation logs read point of origin was Pax, just outside Dragon capital. Ship’s armaments depleted. Inventory records ammunition used before entry into darkspace.”

So the Borealis had been in a fight, and darkspace had been an escape? Not well thought through. “Who were they fighting over Tapti?”

The ship didn’t answer. Another habit she’d developed over time—ignoring rhetorical questions.

“Most of Borealis data is encrypted,” she reported after another long pause. “I’ve uploaded for delivery to the Hub.”

Encrypted data on a ship that had fled into darkspace after a battle near where the Emperor was holed up for this eclipse’s shadow court. How very curious. What exactly had been happening on Pax? Something exciting, it sounded like. Too bad they had a few more days, at least, before interplanetary communication was stable enough for the gossip media to make any reports.

Roman pulled his chip free. Now the connection was established, the physical input wasn’t necessary. “Heading to the cockpit to prep Borealis for towing. Run a diagnostic of her engines to make sure nothing’s damaged too bad.”

With the ease of long practice, Roman floated through the dead ship. His nima-heightened sense were tuned as high as they could go so he heard every creak, every scratch, every ping, even through the muffling layers of his suit. Even knowing there was nothing else here, it was creepy being alone with the bodies. He kept his sword in hand, for comfort.

The hatch that led to the cockpit was open, and Roman braced his free hand on the edge to pull himself through. But it turned out, not everyone had been midship. A head floated down. Roman flinched and hissed a sharp breath. Took a couple extra moments to steady himself. Then pulled himself up.

And saw the rest of the body, and the creature wrapped around it.

It looked human. They sometimes looked human, and when they did, they were always beautiful. Long black hair floated in a cloud of sleek braids. Flawless skin of soft, golden bronze. Long limbs and soft curves that would have been enticing had they not been holding tight a shredded body, had her teeth not been stained red with blood.

She looked up, as startled by Roman as he was by her. It, he reminded himself. The demon.

For a long moment, they stared at each other. Her shimmering silver eyes swept up and down him, until her gaze came to rest on his sword. “I didn’t hear you coming,” she said, her voice soft and melodious. “I must be more tired than I realized.”

Demons lied and demons threatened and demons taunted. This was something new—a strange enough gambit it prompted Roman to respond. “I suppose brutally murdering a couple dozen innocent people is exhausting work.”

“Excuse me?” She arched one perfect eyebrow.

“The people on this ship?”

“Oh. Them.” Dismissive. “What makes you think I had anything to do with that?”

Roman’s turn to raise his eyebrows as he looked pointedly at the body in her hands, then back up at her.

She shrugged. “Well, yes. Him, I killed. But to be fair, he attacked me first.”

Roman said nothing, and after a moment, she sighed. “Of course, you don’t believe me.”

Demons were liars. That truth had been drilled into Roman over and over again as he’d trained, then reinforced over and over again by years of experience in darkspace. This one was better than most. That note of resignation in her voice—something close to defeat—it was almost persuasive.

But Roman needed her distracted to have any chance of making it out of here alive. Which meant keep her talking. “If you didn’t kill those people, why are you here?”

“Why am I here?” She sounded incredulous. “Darkspace is my home. Why are you here?”

It was an unexpected question—one Roman wasn’t quite sure how to answer. “Because of this.” He gestured with the tip of his sword towards the body in her arms. “To keep things like that from happening.”

“How is that working out so far?” Her pleasant tone masked the spite embedded in that question.

Demons were clever. Demons could look into your soul. That was another lesson Roman had been taught. In practice, that idea was overblown and overly poetic. He’d never known demons to have any particular insight to offer, or even interesting conversation. They pretended to be human, but they weren’t, and they always betrayed themselves eventually.

This woman—this creature—it was like she was the specific demon all his training had been warning him about. Because this question was something Roman had been asking himself for far too many years.

She tilted her head sideways, a bird-like expression of curiosity. “Yes, you wonder that too. Over and over again. You kill us and we kill you and where does that lead?”

Never listen. That was the final lesson. Because, in the end, demons wanted nothing more than your blood and your flesh. Every word they spoke, every kind or clever sounding phrase was only to draw your closer to your own death.

Roman’s sword twitched. But the demon was ready.

She shoved the body at him. Roman kicked off the wall, dodging aside, spinning expertly around the point of his sword so he kept it pointed towards her.

She twisted around, dancing in the microgravity as though it gave her purchase. As she turned, her long braids grew, reached out for Roman like tentacles.

Roman sliced and slashed with patient finesse. He kept his movements tight, his sword close. He didn’t reach out for the tentacles. He let them come to him.

Demons were shapeshifters, liquid power given solid form. Cut a demon with plain metal and it would only reform around the injury. As did every Wolf that travelled darkspace, Roman had a sword that was nima-forged. Made to kill demons. It seared their flesh, destroyed their connection with themselves.

Most demons screamed or raged when they came in contact with nima blades. Most demons retreated, unwilling to face more pain. Not this one. She sighed again, shaking her head. “Here we were having such a nice conversation.”

Her braids split and split again until a cloud of dark hair surrounded Roman. They grabbed at his arms, his legs. One wrapped around his neck. She caught his wrist, the hair wrapping so tight his hand opened and his sword went flying.

This was it. This was the end. Roman was about to become another scout who disappeared into darkspace. He struggled, tried to pull free, but the hair only tightened until he couldn’t breathe.

His heart pounded; Roman had never imagined he could be this afraid. He gasped, trying to drag air through his constricted throat, trying to hold on just a moment more.

She was all around him, so close Roman could feel her heat through his suit. “Little lost Wolf,” she whispered in his ear. “We’ll talk again.”

Then, in a blink, she was gone.

Roman didn’t think. He paused only long enough to grab his sword, then took off running. “Are we still connected to Borealis?” he asked his always listening AI.

“Affirmative.”

“Forget the tow sequence. Power up her self-destruct.”

Where had it gone? Was it still on the ship? Was this a game of cat and mouse the demon had decided to play? Only training and years of practice kept Roman from jumping at every strange pop or clang or scrape that was probably just the background noise of the unfamiliar ship. He couldn’t afford to stop and look back, to listen, so he just went fast as he could back to the airlock and escape.

He launched himself out of the Borealis as soon as the airlock cycled. Aimed well enough that he needed only a slight correction from his jets to fly straight into his Fang’s open hatch. He slammed against the button to close up and strapped himself into his chair without pausing to undo his suit or remove his sword. He could live with the discomfort until he was away from here.

He untethered and fired the engines, only slowing once he’d reached a safe distance, and only then pausing until he saw the Borealis explode.

The explosion wouldn’t have hurt the demon—assuming she was still on board—but it would keep any other unlucky civilians from wandering into the haunted ship and getting themselves into trouble.

Roman ran a sensor sweep over his own ship. And then another. They showed both the outer hull and the inner cabin empty except for him. For what that was worth.

Which was nothing. “Log entry: Scout First Class Hayashi Roman, cutting my patrol short. Borealis is destroyed. No survivors. Demon contact. No confirmed kill. Heading home to make sure I’m clean.”