Just over a month later, Tanya Loter gazed down at the radar readout of the Dustbin as it approached the strange object that had mysteriously appeared at the edge of the Tiere system. She took the distance reading and compared it to their rate of deceleration and breathed a sigh of relief, they’d be slowed to a standstill just before hitting the edge of the debris cloud surrounding the object. The new drive system was doing its job, hopefully this thing would be valuable enough to recoup the cost. As she watched the timers count down the feeling of false gravity around her lightened and finally ceased altogether.

Carefully she unclasped her harness and swung around in the open air over her seat, microgravity making it seem effortless. Tanya was not particularly athletic, though she also wasn’t as chubby as some of her species got. She easily massed more than 90 kilograms on a 170 cm frame, but enough of that was muscle that she could arrest her momentum when needed. She had barely cleared the cockpit bulkhead when she had to test that agility. Just after she pushed off into the corridor, she spotted a now familiar black form flapping her wings towards her. Acting on well-practiced instinct, Tanya flicked out her long ringed tail at the frame of the bulkhead she was passing through, causing a shift in her trajectory that flung her up towards the “ceiling” of the corridor. She reached out for one of the straps along all the walls of the corridor while also holding a hand out to guard her head. A second after her hand looped into the strap her other hand collided with the ceiling, causing her lower half to spin up towards the ceiling instead. She winced a little as her tail absorbed the impact with the wall, a little embarrassing to do in front of a planet-sider but the best she could manage in the situation.

Melene Corus spread her wings wide and slowed her own approach, the neo-raven’s talons casually grabbed hold of a strap on the opposite wall from Tanya’s own handhold and she came to a stop within a meter of the raccoon. She turned her large black eyes on Tanya’s and asked a single biting question. “Shouldn’t you be at your station?”

Tanya considered her words carefully. “We’ve stopped dead in space, there shouldn’t be any problems. Given Mr. Lupus’s prior preferences for face-to-face communication…”

“We are nearing a debris cloud produced by an artifact of unknown origin.” Corus cut her off. “I would say that under such circumstances having a pilot ready to respond to unexpected circumstances trumps my employer’s communication preferences.”

“Oh, lay off you big turkey.” Corus retracted her wing and turned to spy an opossum in an engineer’s many-pocketed jumpsuit. “Tanya may have sold us out but she knows what she’s doing.”

Corus brushed aside the “turkey” comment and rounded on the opossum. “Engineer Didelph, your confidence in our pilot’s abilities notwithstanding, our priority is to make sure that Mr. Lupus recoups his substantial investment in this expedition. That he lives to see that repayment should be assumed to be the most important part.”

Luke Didelph snorted in derision. “We’re perfectly fine, this isn’t the dark ages when ships had nothing but telescopes to guide them. Our active radar has every scrap of metal in 10,000 kilometers tagged and registered. We’re perfectly safe.”

Tanya cringed at the reminder of how they had secured the funding for this trip, and the terms that had been attached. But this was no time for second thoughts, they’d taken the oligarch’s money and equipment, spent the better part of a month coasting through the void with him on board, and now it was all going to pay off. They were in the home stretch, just hours away from securing the biggest haul in decades. They were…

Shaking.

---

The micrometeorite impact had quite thoroughly derailed the mission. Warp envelope compromised it had taken all the computer’s immense processing power to keep the tidal forces from tearing the Resolution apart. Even then the rock’s passage had torn a long rent in the side of the ship, causing nearly the entire atmosphere to vent and killing the crew in stasis. With no officers to issue orders and far from any potential champions to recruit the ship AI had nothing to do but follow its basic directives to maintain ship functions. With tractors and drones it had halted the local Kessler cascade generated by its own debris and repaired itself to the best of its abilities. The hull breaches had been sealed, atmosphere regenerated from stored elements, even the champion recruitment systems had been restored to full capacity. But the warp drive was a total wreck, it was dead in the water.

And so, it had waited, observing the movement of the system’s planets and spaceships, tracking a few craft that appeared to be approaching its own location. When one craft came within a light-minute of the ship defense systems came online, locking on with high fidelity sensors that evaluated its threat potential. As it began decelerating the ship gradually lowered its evaluation of the threat potential, but kept laser projectors locked on to the other ship’s meager weaponry just in case. Shortly after the local ship finished deceleration burn one of the tactical system’s observations crossed with the Ronkalli ship’s mission directives. There was an 80% chance the local ship carried sapient biological life forms, sapient life could be recruited as champions, the mission mandated the recruitment of champions. Therefore, they must be brought on board and recruited.

The Resolution reached out for the local craft with a stream of invisible dark energy.

---

Tanya scrambled back up to the cockpit while the others were still trying to find their feet, and wings. She slapped on her heads-up-display, sending readouts on the ship’s hull integrity, momentum, and orientation relative to nearby bodies. Quickly assessing the situation, she leapt into her seat and wrenched the controls.

“I thought you knew what you were doing!” Corus shouted up the corridor, flapping wildly. “How badly were we hit?”

“We haven’t been hit!” The raccoon shot back. “I don’t even know what’s happening, it’s bizarre!” A light on the control panel began blinking furiously as Tanya reactivated the main drive. She tried to ignore it, slamming an array of other buttons and switches on her panel instead. Despite the nuclear fire streaming out of their rocket nozzle, they remained on a collision course with the strange ship, and she couldn’t tell why. “Mechrat!” She shouted, using Didelph’s nickname on board the ship. “Check on the coilguns!”

The opossum secured himself to the wall and his eyes glazed over. “Everything’s functional, no hull breaches or system irregularities. You expecting company?”

“I’m afraid so.” Tanya replied, she tried turning the ship to the side but something counteracted the force of her thrusters.

“Pilot!” A low lupine howl rebounded down the corridor. “Why aren’t you responding to my calls? What hit us?”

“Nothing hit us!” Mechrat shouted. “There’s no sensor records or hull integrity readings to indicate an impact. But, there’s this odd strain on the hull that looks oddly like tidal stresses… Oh crap.”

Reluctantly Tanya slapped the intercom button, to make sure he could hear her from the other end of the ship, and explained the readouts as best as she was able. “It looks like the artifact is projecting some kind of gravity well far in excess of its size. Given that none of the debris around us is falling towards the artifact I’d say it has to be artificial and directed.”

“The Feds didn’t have artificial gravity.” Mechrat whimpered. “It must be… them!”

“The Berserkers aren’t real.” Tanya replied dismissively. “It has to be some sort of experimental FedTech. But I can’t see any way to break ourselves free without blasting it.”

“As much as I hate to damage such a valuable find, if there’s no other way for us to survive then do it.” Lupus surprised her by how reasonable his orders sounded. “Just don’t vaporize it so we have something worth hauling back.”

“Way ahead of you.” Mechrat quipped. As he waved in the air Tanya saw their point defense coilguns come to life on her readouts and swivel to target different protrusions on the mysterious craft. But before they could fire the weapons lit up with overheating warnings and then lost their signals.

The pilot recognized the heat warnings from a dozen firefights throughout the Tiere system. “Laser fire!” She shouted in warning.

Didelph was already watching the same readouts with much greater detail through his brain-computer interface, of course, though if anything the excess of information was less helpful for him. “Oh, wow,” he muttered. “That’s some precision work their gunner has. Barely even scored the hull.”

Lupus’s voice came over the intercom again. “If they’re only disarming us that would suggest they want to capture us rather than kill. Perhaps we should broadcast a surrender?”

Tanya considered the possibility for a few moments, why would a highly advanced spacecraft want to capture the crew of a lower-tech vessel alive? It wasn’t likely they intended to give them presents, was it? No, it was more likely they’d be destined for study or interrogation, probably as a prelude to some sort of invasion. As much as the peoples of the Tiere system liked to scrap, she didn’t wish a war with people who could manipulate gravity on them.

No, there was only one way this could go. Every long-range spacecraft had a weapon of last resort on hand, one that made the question of “fight-or-flight” irrelevant. When decelerating previously she had angled the nozzle of the Dustbin’s matter conversion drive so that the stream of hot plasma sped past the unknown vessel by more than a kilometer, now she directed her small ship’s thrusters to bring the full force of nuclear fire to bear on the clearly hostile ship.

She watched the backstream wander towards the alien craft, a thousand meters, eight hundred, seven hundred, the screen lit up as a bit of space junk got caught in the stream and was vaporized in a flash, five hundred meters…

The readout for the engine block lit up with heat warnings a split second before the drive cut out completely. Without the drive fighting the tractor beam the Dustbin was flung towards the Resolution with the force of nine standard gravities. As Tanya’s blood pooled in her legs her vision swam, the readouts became blurry and indistinct. Just before her consciousness lapsed she gave a silent prayer to whichever egregores might be listening that some of them might survive whatever was coming next.