Thanks as always to RheasHelm for editing! Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in the US, happy Thursday to everyone else.

A blood test confirmed it: Nerai was pregnant. Meanwhile, her burns had healed and she returned to duty, what little there was for her to do.

Meanwhile, the Nixia was in orbit over the gas giant at the edge of the dust-cloud. They hung suspended over the planet, ringed in bands of blue and brown and orange. Hurricane-sized storms formed where the bands met. The planet was at the center of a gyre of material. As the gyre fell inward toward the planet, it became narrower and the particles began to move faster, causing them to be sorted by mass. Some day, Essa imagined, there would be an extensive ring system, but now there was only a diffuse halo around the planet's upper limb that shimmered in the light from the distant star.

The Nixia had been parked here for eight days while the science team figured out a way to dump the charge that was building up in the drive core of the FTL probe. Six days earlier, at the end of her watch, Neela had come to Essa with a plan that was both crude and simple. By stripping the wiring from a set of backup induction generators whose coils of whisper thin copper wire added up to nearly thirty kilometers, they could make a long cable. The plan was to attach a remotely operated maneuvering system to the end of the cable. Once the ship had descended deep enough into the magnetic field, it would deploy the wire to its full length, allowing the ship to dump the charge. Afterward, the Nixia would ascend to a safer orbit, using only its maneuvering thrusters, where it would recover the tether, and an EVA team could stow it on the exterior hull.

Work had begun immediately, and so far the commandos and science team had done a half dozen EVAs just to bring the coils of wire to the exterior of the ship. So far there hadn't been any incidents involving orbital debris, but Essa and Ensign T'Mera, the sensors operator were monitoring the situation closely.

While work continued, Essa went below to check on Nerai, who was barred from doing any EVA work because of her condition. Essa found her assisting one of the navigation officers with the telescope on the science deck. They were watching the parent star, which had grown progressively dimmer over the past several hours. The navigator suspected that a massive body was transiting across it, or that there was a particularly dense segment of dust passing between star and telescope. Nerai was biting at the black spot on her finger.

"You should have Neela look at that for you," Essa said.

"It's fine." Nerai unbuckled herself from her seat and pushed herself up toward the top of the compartment. From abovedecks, they heard the sound of the airlock's alarm ringing, as another team went out with another hundred meters of cable. "How long until they're done?" she asked.

"They should be finished in another sixteen hours. Provided there aren't any mishaps."

Nerai looked away, knowing what that meant. She bit at her finger again. "It feels like there's something in there," she said at length. "A bearing or a few grains of sand. It won't stop itching."

Essa thumbed the interphone. "Dr. T'Lanois to Astronomy lab." Nerai rolled her eyes, but said nothing. "We don't want any more surprises," Essa said. "Are we clear?"

They were quiet for a moment, and Essa watched the navigator taking measurements of the star. The light that passed through the shifting dust was beautiful. Neela appeared in the hatch.

Essa told her to have a look at Nerai's hand, and was about to say something more, but before she could the interphone pinged. It was T'Mera. "Captain, we have a contact."

Essa said she was on her way, and excused herself from the lab. On the crew deck, she found Orie grinding up another batch of berries. Lately she'd been making them into something that resembled dumplings that she stuffed with dried vegetables from other ration packs. According to her, they had another fifteen days of food before they would have to move to severely reduced-calorie rations. The thought of it gnawed at Essa day and night. They needed to get moving again and soon.

On the flight deck she arrived to find the three on duty crewmembers studying the same image on their individual screens. Essa sat down in the commander's chair and asked, "What can we see?"

T'Mera looked up and shook her head. "It's the same object again," she said. Drawing a circle around it with her finger, she enlarged the image, but it was grainy and almost impossible to decipher. "I've called down to the astronomy lab to have them orient the main telescope to it. We might get a better view, if it doesn't move too far off its projected course."

Essa studied the image. There it was, that same stretched out triangle with what looked like a dozen different antennae projecting from its bow. It was almost invisible, a dark object riding along the edge of the brown-orange background of the protoplanetary disk. It seemed to hang suspended in the empty space between two large gyres of material that were being pulled away from the disk and in toward the planet they now orbited. Essa ordered the crew to capture images of the object and compare them to the others they'd seen.

"You think it's the same one we saw before?" the helm officer asked.

T'Mera said she wasn't sure. "I wonder if there's more than one."

"You mean, one per installation that we've found?" Essa asked.

"Well, exactly. Like a guardian."

Essa shook her head. She pinged Razia on the interphone and asked for an update. "Should be ready to go in less than twelve hours, Captain," Razia said.

"So soon?" Essa said.

"It seems your science team has their maneuvering unit up and running already, so we'll be able to deploy. They're testing it now."

Essa returned to the sensors contact. The object had moved slightly, toward the bottom of the frame of their image.

"It's moving," she said, "the ship." T'Mera adjusted her scope. They watched as the ship seemed to move again. "Are we drifting?" Essa asked. Helm examined her instruments and said they weren't. She looked down at the image again. The object had changed shape or—more likely—reoriented itself, its antenna arrays pointed directly at them. The ship, if that's what it was, appeared to alter its shape from moment to moment, the space around it bending and shifting as it moved.

Essa went to her bag to sleep for a few hours before they deployed the cable. When she woke, it was to the sound of the last EVA team returning. They hovered outside the airlock, as they removed their suits, and were nudging each other in an almost joyful manner. The hard and dangerous work was over! They were done and the ship could again begin moving! Essa went up to the flight deck, and ordered the ship to maneuver into position. It was a short burn, more of a nudge than an actual acceleration, and in another hour they were safely stopped at the correct altitude. She called below decks to make sure all sensitive gear was shut down, including the sensor array that was watching the strange object off to their starboard side.

"Deploy the cable," Essa ordered. She and the rest of the crew sat in silence on the dimmed flight deck, watching as it slowly unspooled, pulled onward by the maneuvering thrusters they had rigged to it. Meanwhile the helm called out relevant data. "Five kilometers out. Stable, no feedback in the line."

At fifteen kilometers they watched the cable jerk suddenly downward, before going slack and then pulling taut again. "It's the field," T'Mera said. "Playing havoc with everything today." Essa nodded and watched the cable continue to shudder downward, as the magnetic field took hold of it. A tremor passed through the hull as the movement traveled up toward the cable.

At twenty-five kilometers, a spark seemed to shoot from the end.

"One of the maneuvering thrusters just blew out," Helm said. We can compensate, but it won't be pretty."

Essa ordered Helm to keep going, and soon after an indicator light came on. She then signaled to T'Mera to open the grounding switch. The sensors operator hesitated.

Essa repeated, "Open the circuit, Ensign."

T'Mera looked up, her eyes wide. When Neela had first proposed her plan, about a week ago now, there had been a protracted discussion as to whether it would be possible to dump their static charge into the planet's magnetic field. There was concern that if the weather conditions in the planet's upper atmosphere were wrong, even a small cluster of thunderclouds, could be enough to flip the electrical tension in the opposite direction potentially frying the drive core, or even possibly reacting with their remaining fuel stores, causing them to detonate. Neela had assured them that they had sufficiently accounted for the local planetary weather, and there were safeties that would burn out if overloaded, keeping the charge from passing into the ship's drive system. Not everyone had agreed, and several of the deck officers had submitted a signed letter of complaint, after evening mess. Essa had noted their concerns, but made certain they understood the plan was to be carried out, no questions.

Now T'Mera was on the verge of disobeying a direct order.

"Ensign," Essa said again, the force of her voice surprising even her. "I've given you an order." T'Mera just shook her head. She seemed paralyzed. "You're relieved, Ensign." T'Mera nodded, and unbuckled herself from her seat. "Off my deck, now. You're confined to the crew quarters until further disciplinary action can be taken, understood?" T'Mera nodded again, and then quiet as could be, disappeared belowdeck.

The navigator moved over one station and flipped the switch. At first nothing happened. Essa and the rest stared at the cable receding into the distance, then suddenly there was a flicker as a small orb of ball lightning formed at the end of the cable. It grew and grew as they watched, until it seemed to explode below them into a whorl of red and yellow auroras that moved east to west across the planet, in a giant, rolling shockwave that looked like a gauzy curtain blowing in a gentle wind.

The ship shuddered as some movement from the cable jerked against the hull. Then all was still. Eventually the light subsided and Razia signaled from below that the static charge had zeroed out.

"Right," Essa said. "Back us out of the magnetic field and recover the cable."

Essa went belowdecks after the recovery operation was well underway to check in with Neela and Nerai. She found Neela stitching the commando's finger shut. A droplet of blood had rolled toward the tip of Nerai's finger, and Neela had something in a clear plastic pouch that hovered in the air in front of her.

"Good that you're here," she said, when Essa entered. "It seems our mother-to-be had a foreign body lodged in her finger." Neela snagged the pouch between her thumb and forefinger, and handed it to Essa. It was a tiny object, the size of a few grains of sand lumped together. It appeared to be made of bone, though there were threads of a metallic substance running through it.

"What is it?"

Neela shook her head. "I'll biopsy it," she said and shrugged. "It could be a fragment from the crash. It doesn't look like a tumor. Strange place for a cancer to form, anyhow."

Nerai was sitting staring down at her hand and shaking her head. She seemed horrified. At length, she removed the straps that were holding her to the bunk and pushed off across the compartment in the direction of the hatch. She mumbled something about checking in with Razia, and disappeared into the companionway.

When she was gone, Essa said, "Is she all right?"

"Her pregnancy is going well," Neela said. "No complications so far. Of course we don't have a lot of experience with low-gravity gestation. As far as I know there have been fewer than a hundred orbital and deep space births, so this will be a first for sure."

"I actually meant her—"

"Her mental state?" Neela asked, interrupting. "She could be better." Neela moved over to a screen that was showing Nerai's chart. "She's been having trouble sleeping. Not unusual for a pregnancy. Or after everything else she's been through, for that matter. The nightmares she's been having though—they're quite vivid. She keeps seeing some kind of creature coming after her. Disfigured asari, she says, with metal body parts."

"I saw them." Essa squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to. They'd been troubling her sleep, too, though not to the same degree. "The other asari on the ship thought they were Athame. But there were dozens of them."

Neela stared at Essa for a moment before she went on. "Nerai's been afraid that she's turning into one of them."

The interphone pinged. The EVA team had completed stowing the cable. It would need some repairs before it could be used again, but that could wait. "We need to get underway," Essa told Neela. "We can wait to do the biopsy until we're en route to the installation again." Essa gave the order to secure the ship for acceleration, and then hurried to her station on the flight deck.

T'Mera was tucked in her bag, her head facing away from the center of the compartment. She looked as though she were asleep, though her neck seemed to be bent at an odd angle. Essa didn't think much of it, and instead continued up the companionway to the flight deck. The helm operator was running the sensors package. While Essa buckled herself into her seat, she said that they'd lost visual contact with the other ship while they were dumping their charge and had yet to reacquire it. Essa told her not to worry, and soon they were underway, accelerating at three times the force of gravity. In a few hours they would be in position to interact with the installation again.

After the burn ended Essa went below to deal with the ensign, whom she found still in her bag. She didn't respond when Essa spoke to her, and when she put her hand on her shoulder to wake her, a blob of blood leaked from her mouth and wobbled in the air in front of her as it broke free, before being recaptured, and sticking again to the young asari's nose and her half open eye.

Essa wheeled around. Orie was in the galley, working on the evening meal, but she came over to help unzip the ensign's bag when Essa called for her. T'Mera—T'Mera was her name—had stabbed herself with a long sharp piece of metal, using both hands in an upward motion, she'd pierced underneath the breastbone, through the stomach, and into the heart.

Orie helped ease the body into a stable position in the center of the room, where they lashed T'Mera to one of the tables. Orie checked for a pulse while Essa called for a medical team.

There wasn't anything they could do. It hadn't been an immediate death, or a painless one, but T'Mera had done the deed before they had finished dumping their static charge. A body bag came up from down below, and before Essa knew it, cleanup was underway.

Evening mess was suspended for a brief investigation, but there really was nothing to determine, other than that T'Mera had, in fact, stabbed herself to death, and that she had been dead for nearly six hours before anyone had noticed. Essa blamed herself, but in talking to the crew, when it came time to eat, half a dozen different crew members, including the third watch helm operator, volunteered that T'Mera had been struggling for weeks.

"She said she knew we weren't going to make it," one of the lab techs said. "She said she should have died already, and that she didn't want to linger."

"Anyone else feeling this way?" Essa asked. Most of the people seated nearby shook their heads, but avoided making eye contact.

"Maybe," one of them said.

They stowed T'Mera's body in the main airlock, strapping her to a bulkhead while the ship prepared to interact with the installation. They would hold services for her afterward. Meanwhile Essa went around the ship, talking to everyone individually. Morale onboard was low. It was likely that their next jump wasn't going to improve things.

Within the hour, Neela had finished the biopsy of the object she'd removed from Nerai's hand. She showed Essa a dozen thin sections under the microscope.

"What is it?" Essa wanted to know.

"All I know is that it isn't a tumor," Neela said. "There's bone there, and threads of metal, thinner than I've ever seen. It could be that it was a fragment than got embedded in her hand, during the crash, or onboard that ship." She adjusted the focus. "That's not what worries me, though." She pointed to the screen and said, "See here where the metal curves." Essa nodded. "It didn't do that half an hour ago."

"It's changing shape?"

"If I didn't know better, I'd say it was growing."

Essa shook her head. "We don't need news of this getting out now. Tell Nerai it was a bone chip, nothing more, and no one else sees the sample or your notes, understood?" Neela gave a nod. "And keep your eye on the crew. Let me know if anyone else is feeling like they need an easy way out."

"Understood, Captain."

Neela looked like she wanted to say something, but Essa stopped her. "We'll talk later," she said. "For now, secure the deck for our next jump." The interphone pinged, and Essa pressed her mouth to Neela's before she answered.

It was the helm officer, "Captain, we've found the contact again."

"I'm on my way."

Flight deck again. The object—the ship—that had been following them now filled the screen at each station. Not that it mattered. The thing loomed large, nearly the size of Essa's fist, in the viewport. Its massive antenna arrays were pointed in the opposite direction, away from the Nixia. As big and as close as it was to them, Essa could still see that it was accelerating away from them. There were no obvious thruster ports, and yet the ship was moving at a high velocity that was steadily increasing. In ten more minutes it had receded to a point small enough that Essa could easily cover with her thumb.

While the ship was smaller than the installation, it was only fractionally so. As she sat watching, the installation seemed to light up, and a massive bolt of energy passed between it and the object. In another instant the ship vanished into the black of space.

Everyone on the flight deck was silent, and the only sound was the occasional tone from one of the instrument panels. Eventually Helm said, "Two minutes out."

"Prepare the ship," Essa ordered. She spoke into the interphone, and alerted everyone to secure for the jump.

The navigator made her final calculations, and spoke to Razia on a private channel. "They are in contact with the installation. They have control of the ship."

Essa shut her eyes and took a deep breath. "Systems check," she said. Everything came back nominal. "Right," Essa sighed. "Everyone ready?"

"Do you think it will be waiting for us on the other side?" the navigator asked.

"Only one way to find out," Helm answered.

"I just," the navigator began to say, "I wonder what it wants with us. If anything—"

She didn't quite finish her thought, because just then there was a terrible noise and a flash of light, and for a moment the world seemed to end.