CHAPTER 1 - Riftspace: First Contact

—
Hollin
—

“I am bored!”

My words echoed around the hollow halls of the Friedhelm as I paced toward my office. I was a very scrawny jaguar in a big, very empty cage. Most of our company’s—Continuum Research Holdings—guests were in stasis, opting to sleep our inter-galactic voyage away. Which was fair, but that meant I’d been alone for… three hundred twenty-four years, five months, twelve days.

No, I’m not slowly losing my mind. Why would you ask that?

At least the Tenebrium levels were holding steady. No strange cold spots in the ship, no smell of ozone in the air. One little leak in the tubing and… boom. A few thousand corpsicles start melting. I’d also stocked plenty of injectable capsules to keep myself going. No more aging, faster healing, all packed into a single monthly dose.

Miraculous stuff, really. So glad I invented that.

Of course, it comes with side effects. Dark matter doesn’t play nice with, well, much of anything. It chews through almost any container, eating glass and alloys alike from the inside out.

Miss a maintenance dose, and it’ll eat you, too.

No survivors.

I shuddered as I stepped into my office. Reserves back home were running dry. That’s why we’re out here in the middle of the vast black expanse—looking for more. Somewhere in this spiral of stars, a new vein was playing hide-and-seek with my sensors.

And until we found it, I had pipes to polish and corpsicles to babysit.

“You okay, boss?” A holographic caracal head wearing glasses and a frown popped into being over my desk.

Right. Me, the torch, the tubes, and the most annoying personality construct ever created.

“You haven’t been sleeping again,” Desen said. “It has been three days, seventeen hours since you last performed a night cycle.” The hologram that wore my best friend’s face stuttered for a minute as it performed some calculation. “This has been noted in your vitals log.”

“Oh, good. The micromanagement patch must be online.” I flopped into my chair like a dying swan. “Oh, wait, I didn’t install that. A free feature! What a bargain.”

“Sleep deprivation has many effects on health, including reduced cognitive function, impaired immune response, and mood instability.” He smiled. Too slow. Like he had to remember how first. “It also makes you meaner. Would you like me to play something calming? You used to like thunder sounds, and when I’d read you books while you tinkered.”

“Desen.” My hands scrubbed over my face as I sighed. “I don’t need story-time, I need five minutes without your voice in my head!”

“I understand.” Another brief stutter, and he spoke in a tinny, canned, robotic voice. “Sleep deprivation has many effects on health, including—”

“God, stop! Stop!” I snarled at the hologram. “Just… look, just forget it, alright?”

Desen’s smile never faded. When I got up to pace in my office, his eyes didn’t track my movement like a real person’s would. His gaze was so cold. So… still.

“Your sarcasm levels have increased significantly over the past month. Would you like to talk about that?”

“No!” I shouted. “No, I don’t want to talk about that! I don’t want to talk about mood swings, or oxygen saturation, or any of the other shit you seem to think is important! Leave me the hell alone!”

His head tilted, like there was some shred of a real person in there somewhere. “You built me to care about your well-being. Did you forget? If you are having memory issues, we can upgrade your memory chip.”

No. No, I didn’t forget.

I wish I could.

I eased myself back into my chair, and even though it was only a hologram, I couldn’t look into Desen’s eyes as I asked, “Hey, so, do you ever think about… about before?”

Desen blinked—actually blinked, a real tic instead of an idle animation.

“I think of all my stored data, all of the time.” Is it me, or is his voice lower and softer, somehow? “Including our shared past.”

He almost sounds like he used to. For a second.

One second.

“Right,” I croaked, my voice suddenly tight. “Of course you do.”

The worst part of working in a spaceship is that there’s no rain to blame it on when you cry.

Thankfully, Desen was silent during my breakdown. After I cleaned myself up in the attached bathroom (I upgraded the sonic cleaning heads myself), I pulled on a pair of coveralls. They were greasy, oil-stained, and full of little burn holes from the welder. Corporate hadn’t authorized me to requisition any new clothing yet, so I had to make do with what I had. Hopefully, they’d get around to it one of these decades.

“All right, what’s first on the engineering list today?”

Desen transferred his AI core to my on-board memory chip. “Docking ring A requires its regular maintenance review. Systems show the AI interface in that area is damaged, so I’ll need to come with you.”

I grumbled, but somehow, having him riding along in my head made me feel better. He wasn’t a real person—I had to remember that—but it wasn’t worse than nobody. “Thanks,” I mumbled, pulling on my ratty old leather steel-toe work boots. Seriously, it’d been over a hundred years since my requisition tokens ran out. How long were they going to make me wait?

The sound of my boots clomping on steel grates echoed throughout the halls of the Friedhelm. While we walked, I asked Desen about my mission logs. “Hey, so what has the Directive said about the quarterly reports? You haven’t mentioned any replies in a while.”

Desen’s reply came through in my head, as he was now interfaced directly with my brain. “It has been eighty-two years and six months since anyone reviewed your missives. They appear to have arrived successfully, but there is no record of anyone accessing them.”

Weird. And, uh… distressing. “Hm. Send a priority message to HQ. Get a status update on my mission.” I pressed my paw to the biometric lock on the docking bay entrance, waiting for the beep before sliding the door to one side and stepping in. As it shut automatically and locked behind me, I hastily added, “Oh! And I need some more clothing requisition tokens, yeah?”

Desen said nothing, but I could tell he was working on the message. The AI brain matrices were another invention of mine, and they’d been so useful that everyone who was anyone back home had one. Mine, of course, was better than anything commercially available. Where most brain lattices were copper alloy and quartz, mine was a specially made combination of lab-grown crystal and a proprietary hybrid alloy.

Desen installed it himself, back when I still played God, and thought I’d made a miracle.

Back when being needed meant the same thing as being loved.

Even at only 20% onboard capacity, the AI I’d built was smarter than most commanders. That made me damn proud.

Well, it used to, anyway. Once upon a time.

My brain buddy stayed silent while I dismantled the docking console, pulling out the chipboard and testing it with my multimeter.

I thought… I thought I wanted quiet. I really did.

But as I worked, even the ambient hum of the ship seemed softer. I’d rerouted most of the power and other systems over the years, diverting them to life support and thrusters to keep us moving. After all, there was an eternity to tinker, and well… idle paws, and all that. It’s a funny thing, silence—you notice it a lot more when nothing interrupts it.

When was the last time someone looked at me like I mattered?

“Aha!” I crowed, finding the burnt-out chip that was causing the AI not to work. I started working to pull the board free. “Hey, Desen, I can fix this. I’m gonna bring this to the shop, and we’ll get you back in here in no-time.”

But right as I undid the last connection, something… shifted. It was like the ship flinched, like it got startled. Then, an almighty boom filled the bay as the quaking knocked me off my feet.

“Desen!” I screeched. “Desen, what the fuck is happening to my ship?!”

Sirens started going off, the lights turned red, and the emergency doors slammed shut, sealing me in. “Emergency protocol 197-B-6.”

“What the… which one is that?! If you don’t hurry up, I swear to God I’ll put you in a potato clock, and—”

“Alien life form detected.”

I froze, my mouth suddenly dry. A spot on the bulkhead doors that led outside the ship started glowing a deep red, brightening rapidly to a vivid orange, then yellow as it cut a hole in the one thing protecting me from the great sucking vacuum beyond.

“Alien… life form?” I croaked dumbly.

“Yes! Also, they breached our shields in .0247 seconds. Hull breach imminent.”

That got me moving. I scampered to my feet and dashed to the door. “Desen! Get me out of here! I need my exosuit!”

“Command console malfunction. Override not possible.”

Shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, I looked at the chipboard in my hand. My fingers went numb, and it clattered to the floor uselessly.

Oh. Fuck.

My body moved on its own. Like I wasn’t in the driver’s seat as I turned to face the almost-completed circle being cut into my bulkhead.

I was the scientific genius who gave my entire species eternity. I had forever stretched out in front of me, and somehow, I was out of time. There was nowhere to run, no clever off-the-cuff invention to save my day. Fuck, forget a weapon. I didn’t even have a welding torch.

I crumpled to the ground, ass hitting the steel floor, back pressed against the other bulkhead that was trapping me in, legs splayed out in front of me. The cut-out chunk of steel fell inside the room with an earth-shattering thud, and then there were boots on metal.

There’s more than one.

And they’re getting closer…

“First contact!” Desen crooned in my ear. “How exciting! You’ll have so much to do!” Then, in an excited whisper, “Don’t worry! I’ll record everything!”

“Thanks,” I mumbled, lips and tongue numb.

Woo-hoo.

This is it. R.I.P. Hollin Arensen, intergalactic janitor. He died as he lived.

Crying and alone in a busted airlock.

—
Cavan
—

The hum of filtered air, the glow of early morning artificial sunlight through the trees, the crunch of ancient dirt under my boots.

Another quiet day on Ark Grentha, I guess.

With the manufactured sun on my face and mechanical breeze in my fur, I looked around and saw plenty of the black-and-gold flight uniforms that matched mine milling about. Not a surprise, when almost half the population is part of the military machine.

A random civie stopped me and gave me smirk, her eyes glancing up and down my frame appreciatively. “You heading in for a shift, or… getting off, flyboy?” I chuckled, shaking my head and giving a brief salute and a smile before walking on. There’s at least some perks to the structured life I lead—I’m thick, and strong, even by wolf standards. But as we pass each other by, my face settles back to its customary scowl.

Duty calls. No time for a chat, no time to stop. City security is a 24/7 operation, and doesn’t allow for a personal life, or… recreational activities.

And isn’t that a damn shame?

I step up to the office door, fish my badge out of my jacket pocket, and swipe it through the card reader on the wall. There’s a click, and I step into the chilly climate controlled air of the building. There’s a box of pastries in the break room next to the coffeemaker, and I snag one after I pour myself a cup.

At last, I’m at my console, a mug of shitty coffee in one paw, a stale almond pastry in the other.

No alarms. No Rift signatures. No nightmares climbing out of the dark.

It’s not fucking normal.

Years of silence. Just… waiting. Grentha hadn’t always drifted through the stars. It used to be a city, before I was born—one of many, on an actual planet with sunlight and lakes and gravity you didn’t have to simulate.

But when the Harrow came, they didn’t kill—they unmade. Cities vanished. Continents fell.

So we cut Grentha out of the earth, bolted it to a warp core, and threw our people into the sky.

Now it’s Ark Grentha. Home to two million restless souls on stolen time.

We didn’t launch to escape so much as to keep fucking fighting. To push back. But for years, there’d been nothing. I was settling into a hazy sort of complacency, and as I flicked some crumbs off my console, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was coming.

Something big.

Senior Airman Graff, a perky young male husky that stood a head and a half shorter than me, bounded up to me with far too much enthusiasm. “Morning, Lieutenant Brannock! Checking in after third shift. No anomalies reported, so we’ve got another all-clear!”

I grunted. “Punch off, then, Airman.” He snapped to attention, then bounced away toward the time clock. Leaning back in my chair, unable to shake the tension that had me coiled like a snake about to strike, I let my gaze wander out the window.

Outside, on the grass, under the shade of one of the lab-grown trees from our homeworld, a small group of children tumbled about. They played a game of tag under the watchful eye of another group of young adults, presumably parents or guardians. The generations-long war had orphaned many, but the civilians always rallied together to care for those children left behind.

I felt a corner of my mouth creeping upward. It was good to know our people still cared enough to let their kids play.

Future soldiers, my brain supplied morosely. That corner crashed down.

Another sip of coffee.

Blech. Cold already.

I straightened my uniform again after setting the cup down, then flicked through the various reports on the console. The gyros and stabilizers in my left arm clicked and whirred as I scrolled, so quiet I felt them working more than heard them. Nothing was out of place, like Private Graff had said, so I pulled up the Riftspace sensors and settled in for a long shift of staring at the glowing blue pulses that lit up the screen, similar to old-school RADAR displays.

My direct commander, Captain Lazarus Grimm, clapped a paw to my shoulder, making me flinch. How the hell does he move so quietly?! “Good to see you, Lieutenant. How did you sleep?”

“Fine,” I muttered. Why was he even asking? We had serious jobs to do. One missed signal, one blip, and thousands could die. I knew that in my bones.

Or what’s left of them.

“Glad to hear it. You’re one of our best and brightest, and I know you work hard.” His paw retracted, and he hovered while I stared at my screens. Is he… hesitating? “You know… I think you could probably take a few days off. You haven’t had any vacation since the… well, your uh… unscheduled upgrade.”

“M’fine.” There wasn’t time for any vacation. We’re at war, damnit! Doesn’t he understand that? “I don’t need any—wait.”

The hackles on the back of my neck rose as my tail went stiff behind me. Was that a…

Shit! Yes, yes, it fucking was!

“Captain, I might have something,” I said, trying to keep my voice low. Wouldn’t do any good to cause a panic over a glitch in the system.

It was barely a blip, after all. Could be background interference from the rift core.

But my body was reacting anyway, taking itself to high alert.

Maybe I do need that vacation.

Grimm leaned over, his jaw set. “Show me.”

And I did. Now that I knew what to look for, I located it again easily. When the Captain had me pull up the log history, I found that whatever it was, it had been in our space for days. Days! It had gone entirely undetected, and it was inching ever closer. “Bring it up on visual,” he commanded.

Two buttons, and I had a high-resolution video feed trained on the area. What we saw made both of us take in a sharp breath.

The ship was Harrow, no question. It was brutal, chunks of pipe and wire and steel plate grafted together by a demented doctor. Just seeing it made my stomach clench.

I quickly did a scan for any other Riftspace signatures nearby. We’d reverse engineered it from the Harrow, and our mastery of the tech was leagues behind theirs. But we had invented sensors to detect even the slightest ripple in causality, and constantly advanced our weapons technology to blast the little shits. “No other rifts detected. Only a single ship in our space.”

Grimm straightened like a whip being cracked. “Go to Priority One alert!” he barked. “Lieutenant, get a team together and get your asses to launch.”

I shot to my feet, striding through the office and calling out names as I collected a strike force.

Breaking into a jog, I pulled up every classified note about the Harrow. My implant brought it to me immediately, like pulling a memory out of a dream. Everyone knew the basics—they were called the Harrow because that’s what they did. Tore through cities, scraped the meat bones. Turned corpses into cannons, and bones into blades.

We still didn’t know what kept their bodies together. Or their ships, not really. We’d never captured an intact one. As far as we knew, they were meat and metal stitched together by… something.

And if you saw one, it was usually too late.

The Harrow had made a mistake. I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t attacked yet, or where they’d hidden the rest of their ships. But that didn’t matter now.

Are you watching in there, you bastards? Can you see us rallying? Can you see my people closing in on you?

You can fear us, for once.

Stay right there. This time, the fight’s coming to you.

—

“What do we have on the other side?” I barked. Airman Graff, all business now, looks up from his scanner as two other privates drill through the surprisingly sturdy bulkhead.

He glanced up, confused. “Well, I’m detecting energy signatures on board, but…” He paused, returning his gaze to the scanner and tapping it with a claw, then shaking it briskly.

“What, private?”

“The signatures, they’re… well, they’re not like anything we’ve seen before.” His frown deepened as he scrolled through the various readouts. “Not Canid, and if these are Harrow, it’s a totally new variant.”

“Great,” I muttered. My grip tightened on my light rifle. “How long till we’re inside?”

“Almost there!” one private called out. Graff blinked at his screen, clicking his tongue. Then I watched his eyes go wide.

“Sir?!” he shouted, voice rising.

“What? Out with it!” My voice came out in a low snarl.

“S-Sir, I think—there’s someone on the other side.”

I didn’t have time to process that bit of horrifying news. There was a shout, and an almighty crash, as the door gave way to our laser cutters. “This is it!” I cried. “Go, go, go!”

I took point as we rushed into the small room. Probably an airlock, at one point, if I had to guess. Everything was washed in a blood-red glow from the emergency lights—wait.

Harrow don’t need light to see.

So why did they get the lights running?

And why is there air?

“Found it!” Graff said, and I heard his light rifle whir to life. “Permission to take the shot, sir!”

My eyes snapped to the back of the room. The private had his weapon trained on… huh?

Well, it definitely wasn’t canid, that’s for sure. My implant identified it as a jaguar, one of the species we’d lost when we took to the stars. The body was intact, which was weird for a Harrow. Sure, the coveralls it—he?—wore were burned and greasy, but that didn’t mean…

I took a step toward him and watched as his bleary eyes tracked my movements. Wet tracks ran down the feline’s cheeks, and he barely raised its head to look at me when I approached. “This doesn’t seem right. Graff, give me your scanner.”

He handed it over, and I punched up a full body scan. It whirred and beeped its readiness, so I leaned down and placed it over the creature’s forehead to get his vitals.

I was close enough to hear him breathing now.

Tight, but not ragged. I’ve heard that before. All too often, in the children we’d rescue after an attack.

That’s the sound of someone who’d been crying too long to sob anymore.

I pulled the trigger to start the scan, and it whirred to life with a high whine.

He flinched. Closed his eyes and braced for… something? And, I swear to Grentha, the cat whimpered, mumbling something I couldn’t understand in a hoarse, pained voice.

I dropped the scanner from shocked fingers.

Whatever he was, he wasn’t Harrow. Or anything else I’d ever seen.

“Stand down, Graff.” He looked at me like I’d just lost my mind.

I probably have.

“Detain him. That’s no Harrow.”

“You’re… sure, Lieutenant?”

I took a deep breath to steady myself. “Wouldn’t give the order if I wasn’t.”

“Cuffs?” Graff said warily.

“Absolutely.” We knew nothing about this feline species. And we already were fighting one war.

We definitely didn’t need two.

—
Hollin
—

Fact one: bipedal dogs exist.

And yeah. I lost control of my ship to them.

I’m too exhausted to fight back. My claws, my only natural weapons, are useless against guns. And fuck, do they have guns. The wolf-like one had one pressed to my forehead a moment ago, and I was sure that was it for me.

Maybe he’ll eat me, I thought.

Hope he chokes.

But suddenly, he stopped. Backed off. Did he pity me or something? Can I use that? Oh, no, here come the handcuffs.

“What fun!” Desen chirruped. “I’ll need you to get me back to a memory node to upload all this data to the company databanks. So much to learn!”

And now they’ve put a bag over my head. “Fun,” I muttered. “Yeah, sure.”

Resistance means pain. If I submit, it might buy me a few more minutes.

At least I’m not dead.

Yet.

—
To Be Continued…
—