Samir watched the battle rage above their heads from his seat on the bridge. It was a dance of light in the sky as the entities violently fired upon each other. Occasionally, Samir saw another ship jump in to join the fray. Even during his time on the Perses, he could hardly recollect seeing such a clash.

So this is the power of the Free Exchange. His blood turned cold as the entities violently fought one another. Even though this had been the plan all along, it was still terrifying how easily Erika had manipulated them. He didn’t doubt for a moment that this was her original purpose—to find the flaw in the Andromedans and destroy them. And she had done it. With only the barest of research, she had brought an entire fleet to its knees.

Samir didn’t want to think for a moment what she was capable of with actual time and planning. She would have more than both when they finally confronted one another again.

He turned away from the spectacle to his men, who were organizing the defense of the ship. On one wide table, they had activated a holographic screen displaying a three-dimensional view of Providence. While it wasn’t nearly as advanced as the Hyperion’s use of holograms, the image was still useful in tracking down the entities that had boarded.

Captain Singh studied the diagram silently. It detailed much of the structure of the ship, laying out the interior and key systems. Even though he had known that the ship had been gravely damaged, it was still surprising to see the extent of it depicted clearly on the diagram.

“We can’t let them reach any major power conduits.” Dr. Lukov stood examining the hologram. “If they plug into a system we can’t just shut off…”

Samir nodded. It would be just like when the original crew were forced to power down, except there would be no hiding this time around. They needed to eliminate the entities here and now if they were to stand a chance.

A minor sensor sweep detected they had punctured the hull on their descent. Likely, they were worried about the shields being recalibrated to force them off the outer hull. Most of the entities had landed near the bow, in what appeared to be storage and other unnecessary sections. Three of them had landed more towards the bridge and posed the greatest threat to ship security.

Samir watched as a squad of marines stopped three decks above the entity. They had been dispatched the moment the creatures had boarded, and this time there would be no holding back for curiosity’s sake. Samir himself couldn’t see it on the sensors, but the men were using a tracer to locate the entity’s heat signature through the decks.

The diagram suddenly detected multiple ruptures. Samir watched as yellow abrasive lines shot out from the squad towards the entity. He grinned as they scored multiple hits, tearing the entity apart. Another squad of men approached from the side, ready to use the hull cutter. The whole matter took about five minutes before the entity was destroyed.

One down. Six to go.

“How much time before the FTL drive is ready again?” Samir asked as Dr. Lukov rounded the table, watching the other entities’ movements.

Dr. Lukov’s face reflected blue from the transparent diagram. “About forty minutes.”

Samir felt his shoulders relax a little. Forty minutes already? He barely even noticed the time passing. Everything had been a rush since they made the jump. To think… a little more than half an hour is left between us and freedom. It was so close he wanted to reach out and grasp it.

“You need to stop that one next.” Dr. Lukov pointed to the diagram. One entity was dangerously near where the FTL drive was housed. “It gets any closer and it might do some damage.”

“Sergeant Barnes, take two squads and eliminate in the entity on deck eight.” Samir relayed the precise coordinates over the comm.

Surveying the rest of the map, Samir planned out the his strategy. Three of the seven had landed in the portions of the ship that Samir controlled. The remaining four landed in Erika’s section. He watched as a one her squads advanced on a nearby entity.

“You think that Commander Terese’s men can handle it?” Dr. Lukov asked, concerned.

Samir shook his head. “Hard to say.”

The problem was that these men only had auxiliary training. They were far from a professional fighting force, and that meant mistakes were going to be made. Samir supposed he should be glad that Erika’s numbers would be whittled down further, but that notion still felt revolting to him. They had once been his crew, and he wouldn’t watch them die needlessly.

Samir made to call Erika. If he couldn’t convince her to let some of his men take care of the entities—that was her problem. However, before he could contact her, there was a crackling on the ship’s communication system. Captain Singh turned in confusion, as they had been using personal comms since they had evacuated.

“Who’s activated the system?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Captain.” Dr. Lukov looked up to the ceiling where the noise came from. “There’s no reason to be using it.”

The crackling persisted. Some crewmen became distracted as they glanced up towards the odd noise.

Dr. Lukov examined a control panel and punched in a few buttons. “It appears to be ship-wide. I can try to trace it back to the source.”

Is this one of Erika’s tricks? Captain Singh thought. He was confident that she wouldn’t try anything for a while. That she took the sphere room all but told him she wanted to play the slow game. However, perhaps that was to lull him into a false sense of security. Still, trying something while the entities were busy battling overhead was an unnecessary risk. If Samir knew anything about Erika, it was that she hated uncertainty.

Still, he reached for the personal comm to call her. If this is when you decided, then so be it. I won’t go down without fighting.

“I wish to speak to the Captain.”

Samir’s fingers trembled as he heard the voice. His eyes widened as something that was neither quite male nor female spoke over the comm. It spoke oddly, as if it couldn’t quite get the pronunciations correct. Samir might have expected some giveaway that it was synthesized, but the voice seemed, if anything, too fluid instead of stiff. It skipped to the next word too quickly, as if impatient to finish speaking. And yet, the voice retained a resounding command that Samir had seen in a few men.

He knew to whom it belonged instantly.

“Do they have access to the transmitters?” Samir quietly asked. “Can they broadcast anything off the ship?”

Dr. Lukov silently shook his head. “They’re accessing interior comms. That’s another system entirely.”

“I wish to talk,” the voice rasped.

“That’s interesting,” Samir snapped back as he began to pace, “considering your kind didn’t care to talk earlier. You fired on my ship unprovoked.”

“An unreasonable judgement by our allies. We ourselves have done nothing.”

Samir noted that the voice was far more articulate than the entity they had captured. It spoke eloquently without the awkward mannerisms and misunderstandings of the other one.

“If you wish to open a dialogue, then prove it. I want a few questions answered.” Samir intended to buy time. If the entities distracted themselves with this conversation, then he wasn’t going to stop them. “You speak better than the last time I spoke with your kind. How is that?”

“We sent a ship to board your Hyperion soon after we received your transmission.”

Samir tried to calculate how feasible that was. They had detected none of the entities’ ships entering the solar system. That meant their ship must’ve jumped in after they had already departed and were in transit. An enhanced transmission could outrace ships in FTL, but even then the entities would’ve had precious little time to examine Hyperion before Providence came into the solar system.

If they were that efficient, that just proved how dangerous the entities were. He could hardly believe anything left in them was still human.

“Your computers gave us more than an adequate database to draw from,” the voice continued.

Captain Singh shook his head. “That’s impossible. Our computers were encrypted. You couldn’t have done it so quickly.”

“We exist as machines, Captain Singh. Did you really think it would be so difficult?” There was a touch of mockery in the voice.

It’s still hard to believe that they could communicate like this. Samir thought, still remembering the last encounter. However, previously Erika was selectively feeding it information. She gave it just enough for basic speech and not much else. If the entirety of Hyperion’s database had been compromised… He had no choice but to accept that they had done it.

“You know my name. How about yours? What do I call you and your people? I never got a straight answer.”

“You may refer to me as Hermes. As for my people, that is a difficult question as we need no broader name for ourselves. However, I will designate us as the Inheritors.”

That same answer. Samir blinked. The Inheritors of the Stars. That was a name that sounded unnecessarily grandiose, but there was intent behind those words. Now that they were actually speaking instead of communicating through text, Samir could hear the resolve in the voice. It was a matter they considered seriously, and that was the name they chose for themselves.

“What do you want with Providence?” he asked. “What are you going to do with this ship?”

“We already answered two of your questions, Captain. We would like you to answer one of ours.”

Captain Singh crossed his arms. “I won’t promise an answer.”

“You many remain silent if you wish. However, we have an offer to extend to you. We want one of our drones to remain aboard. If you should accept, the rest of us shall immediately depart from the vessel without conflict.”

Samir blinked. “Why would you ever offer that?”

“Because our pantheons are legion among the stars. You have evaded our capture for the time being, and we would not see this ship fall to another.”

“You are extending help?” Samir snorted. He could hardly believe what he was hearing. “Do you really hate your kind so much that you would rather see this ship fly free?”

“Hatred has nothing to do with it. We would rather see the potential of this ship realized then squandered by another of what you call our kind. You can take the proper precautions as you please. From some of your logs, it appears you already know how to render us powerless. We only ask for a voice aboard your ship.”

There was no chance that he was ever going to accept this offer. That the Inheritors extended it at all only meant that it pushed their agenda. While he supposed he could lie and agree to get the rest of the entities off the ship, they had to have foreseen that option and accounted for it. They were too smart otherwise.

There was a trap somewhere in the offer, and Samir wouldn’t fall into it. But what about Erika? He asked himself. She wouldn’t hesitate to accept, especially after how she so easily manipulated them. For her, the Inheritor would be a wealth of information which would only strengthen her position. It was another card added to the deck that was already stacked against him.

“I have one last question for you.” Samir walked with weight on his shoulders. “Is that acceptable?”

“Ask your question.”

“What are your plans with the Milky Way?” Samir asked. “What will you do with our galaxy?”

There was silence over the comm for a second. He supposed it might have been a pointless question, but he felt it needed to be asked. Samir technically represented every human back in the Free Exchange. Even after all that had happened, he would not desert that duty now.

The Inheritor could lie. It could tell him some fanciful promise of leaving the Free Exchange alone, and it wasn’t as if Samir could tell if it was lying. Still, he felt that this was the right path. He needed an answer to that question—for the sake of the trillions back home.

“None of our kind have interest in the Milky Way. Only in the ship named Providence.”

Samir stopped. “And how do I know you are not lying?”

“Your stars could not sustain us for long.”

Out of all the answers that Samir expected, that was not one of them. He turned his head at the response. “What do you mean?”

“We have stated it plainly. Your stars cannot sustain us. What you call the Free Exchange is of no interest to all our kind. Of that, we are sure.”

Samir couldn’t discount the possibility of a ploy, but the statement itself was so ridiculous that he was forced to consider it seriously. A lie would’ve been so much easier to craft. Really? Is five billion years not enough for you? While the strange voice was already unsettling, it took on a truly alien dimension. Samir had wondered how much humanity still resided in the creatures, and now he had a hint of that sinister question.

Whatever he was speaking with over the comm, while it might have used the voice of something close to human, even this was a mask to something else underneath. These were beings that diverged far from mankind, and Samir didn’t want to know what truly lurked behind that voice.

“What is your answer, Captain?”

“My answer…” Samir began, trying to find the words. “My answer…”

He had to bite down on his tongue, as he was shocked to find that he was tempted. Searching himself, Samir realized he had been lying to himself. He always liked to move on from his problems because he couldn’t bear to look at them. Leaving the pistol on the Hyperion was a symbolic act, but it didn’t fix what he was afraid of.

He was still terrified of losing. Erika Terese had nearly beaten him, and he would never forget that. All that talk earlier about relinquishing everything to God, but he never dared to think that he still felt betrayed. Deep down, he wanted to win, and he so nearly lost. Samir felt ashamed to admit it, but it was true.

If he let this opportunity go, Erika would accept it. She would have just another advantage against him, and he would almost certainly lose. The best choice was to agree to this, and then kill the Inheritor afterwards. However, that would fall right into the trap that he knew was there. Forty minutes was more than enough time for the creature to turn the tables.

I suppose we do whatever it takes to defeat our enemies. He realized. Even when he knew the offer was poisoned, he still wanted it. He wanted it more than anything. Samir clenched his hands until they were white. That was the real price to be paid. Erika would do whatever it took to win—even if it meant bargaining with an abomination. Meanwhile, he was the one with the sense to stop.

Samir turned toward the conflict above, the burning lights flickering in the sky. Despite its size, he now realized this was only a mere skirmish in a larger war. The Free Exchange had seen this road, and they were terrified of it. They built the greatest empire ever known just to contain humanity from its natural conclusion.

It was the same conflict again and again. Humanity would always use the next technological development because their enemies would do the same. On and on, until men went from throwing rocks to nuclear warheads and then to burning whole star systems to ash. To try to stop it only put you on the losing side of a war that you no longer had the capacity to fight.

Samir finally realized what it really meant to be on the losing side of history. While he still blamed the Free Exchange for their sins, he could truly understand them now. Glen Tannis, for everything he was, understood those stakes and made his bet accordingly.

Captain Singh closed his eyes. Erika Terese would always have the upper hand. That was just the nature of the game. She would always strive for what would come next, and Samir would be the man trying to make her stop. He was more right than he knew when he realized only God could save him now.

He opened his eyes to the stars, and he realized that all the universe was arrayed against him. This road could only ever have one outcome. He would be crushed and swept aside while Erika would triumphantly march on to whatever end she found for herself. Samir stood on the bridge, facing out towards his destiny—the fate that had been preordained since the beginning.

“What is your answer, Captain?” the Inheritor repeated.

“The only I answer I can give.” Samir glanced up to the ceiling. “I stand on one side of history and you on the other. There can be no compromise between us.”

“You refuse?” the voice seemed to mock him even then.

“I refuse,” Samir Singh spoke, his eyes distant, “and we shall see this to whatever end we meet.”