The Shining Dark

by Triple-Helix

AU: Ichigo Kurosaki, talented pilot with a troubled past, and Rukia Kuchiki, covert operative of the G-13, must find a way to work together to face an uncertain, perilous future. Familiar storyline reimagined as an epic sci-fi narrative. 1st of a trilogy.

26. Initial Phase Transition

Disclaimer: I do not own Bleach.

Chapter 26 – Initial Phase Transition

Somewhere far off at the end of the gloomy, underground hangar an overworked atmo system droned on. The scrubber filters had been neglected, leaving the air inside the enormous cavern musty and uncomfortably hot. Sputtering slightly, it seemed to keep running through sheer stubbornness alone, working to fill the massive space with breathable air as its low, continuous brushing echoed off the stone walls and floor, bouncing dully off the mounds and piles of disused scrap metal.

This sound, this far-off barely discernable humming seemed to fill the empty space as two groups stood stock still, staring at each other from across one of the few pools of light spilling down from the ceiling. Both unmoving and silent, the fugitives had a worn and weary look about them while the patrol force officers' clean and armored uniforms glinted like so much of the debris spread across the floor. Around them, out in the darkness, the dismantled spacecraft bore uncanny resemblances to huge metal skeletons, their bodies picked clean of the usable parts that had been meticulously reassembled into the single, enormous ship behind them. Blacker than the depths of space and crouched on its landing gear, patiently overseeing the altercation between the patrol force members and its new pilot, its engines rumbled, low and even, adding another note to the constant drone of the atmo system.

"Listen to me." Ichigo took a step forward, his hands raised but his mask down. It made his voice oddly distorted, layered and eerie, and Ichigo did his best to focus despite the wary looks it garnered from the patrol enforcers.

"You have the right to remain silent," Detective Hitsugaya cut in evenly, his tone verging on boredom. His only direct response to Ichigo was to raise his weapon, letting him know in no uncertain terms, not to come any closer.

"This is an emergency," Ichigo continued with careful enunciation. He could see the younger patrol members, well trained but edgy from adrenalin, fanned out around them, each aiming their weapon at him and his friends. Without even realizing it, he had already begun rolling vector computations on their weapon trajectories through his new link, extrapolating the places to go for cover in case anyone started shooting. Loading the results into his optic implants, his vision darkened somewhat as the glowing lines and contextual data was rendered in his field of view. Thinking it curious, probably just a polarization glitch, he nonetheless put the strange effect out of his mind as he had more pressing concerns to deal with.

Figuring he'd send the weapon and cover data to Rukia, the command to open a short-range connection to her was second nature by now, but when it failed to resolve he realized two of the enforcers were painting them with neural disruptors, effectively muting link communications. Testing his connection to the ship, he found it had been terminated as well, and having been datastarved for so long while his link had been burned out, the sudden return to a communications white-out grated on his already thin patience. All of this happening over fractions of a second, he turned a hard look at the younger, paler detective as he grit his teeth, only tangentially noticed his vision darkening further.

"Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a court of law," Hitsugaya went on dispassionately.

Ichigo cleared his throat, daring to interrupt the detective's sterile Miranda delivery. "There is a hostile alien spacecraft on its way in to this solar system. It's been lured here by whoever framed us. It's probably the most powerful ship anybody has ever seen and we have to stop it before they try to take it over, or it starts destroying anything and everything that gets in its way."

There was a long moment in which no one spoke, and even Ichigo thought the whole thing sounded like some ludicrous science fiction story. Casting his eyes around the various patrol force members and the two detectives he could see that half of them thought he was crazy and the other half were too distracted by the imposing sight of the black ship behind him to have listened. The curvy, blonde detective looked as if she wanted in on the joke and younger, white-haired one in charge simply let the silence draw out, a tiny quirk of his eyebrow the only indication he had heard the outlandish explanation.

"You have the right to an attorney, though I suggest a therapist. If you cannot afford an attorney one will be appointed for you," he finally said, matching Ichigo's flat tonality. "Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?"

Growing more frustrated and feeling foolish with his hands in the air, Ichigo could feel his lips trying to curl away from his teeth as he clenched his fingers into fists. "I'm sorry Detective, but we don't have time to waste. My friends and I," Uryu and Renji mutely motioned at this, as if to object at that classification, "Have to get in our ships and we have to leave."

Toshiro's face hardened as his resignation with routine dissipated, letting the uncompromising dedication to duty that had propelled him to such a high rank at such a young age show clearly on his face. "I don't think you fully appreciate the situation you're in here. How you have managed to evade patrol force capture for this long, I have no idea, but ever since you slipped past us at the bar on Junrinan Two, and then Captain Kyoraku, we've been on your tail. Tracking you down from out on that rock out past the sixteenth orbit all the way to here, between the twin suns wasn't easy, but it's over now. You've had a good run, but any minute now the crew on the ships you left in orbit will be arrested, so there's nowhere else for you to go except," he held up a pair of handcuffs, "Into custody."

Ichigo huffed out a breath through his nose, the sound of it crackling in his ears. The searing hot pins and needles feeling had returned to his eyes and were slowly sharpening in intensity, making Ichigo's teeth ache as he clenched them together. "You're making a mistake, Detective…" he began, fighting off the sensation as they dug their way deeper into his eyes. He felt his shoulders stiffen and heard the material of his gloves flex as his hands balled tighter. There, amid his darkened vision and throbbing skull, the white hot pins and needles brought with them the spark of an idea.

"It's no mistake, Mister Kurosaki. Too proud to run, too smart to fight, too stubborn to give up," Toshiro said. "Your only option is come along quietly, I know your type."

"Trust me," Ichigo uttered, "You've never met anyone like me." The pin pricks and heat burning in his eyes began to sharpen and resolve into the bases of calculations. Focusing, they became clearer and clearer, matrices of equations spinning out the positions of every patrol enforcer facing him, highlighting the firing vectors of each of their weapons.

The idea was crazy, he was sure of it, but the more it revolved around his mind the more plausible it seemed. Neural disruptors worked on a set of standards that all links employed, but he didn't have a standard neural link. Yes, he said to himself, his eyes narrowing behind his mask, the concept was sound and it would let him reconnect to the ship's systems. He tamped down the uncharacteristic sense of gleefulness and forced his lips back out of the grin they had formed as he opened his link's wireless system, dialed the bandwidth up to full and poured everything he could into it.

Down. Down. Down, into the system he plunged. Past the abstraction layers and interface commands, deep into the heart of the processor engine, letting the core of the system unfold in his mind. Thousands of permutations of calculations were at his command, each on dozens of variables intricately describing everything around him all in the language of mathematics. Darker and darker, the world fell away form him as swirling, twisting strings of formulas he understood but written in symbology he could only half comprehend burst behind his eyelids. Rukia had asked him once how it could be that he was able to pilot the way he could, and this was the answer, this ability to extrapolate the underlying principles of force, angle, velocity, and time. It had never been so clear to him, so easy to reach for as the darkness blotted everything else out. He could see the system spread before him, and he knew what variables to explore.

And what to exploit.

From the darkness, he drew the connection command to link back with the systems on the ship, stripped it of padding and ran it through his short-range comm buffer. He could regain link status to the ship, he was sure of it. Then it would be a simple matter of opening the communication systems array and… and the darkness around him whispered that once re-linked to the ship, he could put a stop to these aggravating delays, permanently.

Ichigo faltered for a second before redoubling his efforts on his comm buffer. Just need to open the communications system on the ship, contact Shuhei.

The pins in his eyes pierced harder, burned hotter, and he felt for a second like his head was being seared from the inside out. Just… Open… The… Communica-

The weapons system.

No. Ichigo refused to listen to the insidious whispers at the back of his mind. He had triumphed over that presence, it couldn't affect him any longer. It, in turn, laughed at his naivete, his hubris that he thought he could descend down to the core of his abilities without encountering their source. Ichigo tried to focus, but the whispers only grew louder.

A power unlike any other is within reach, to delay is to fail, and to fail is to die.

Ichigo felt weak as images of everyone he had ever known, dead and broken and bleeding, flickered through his mind. Horrid and nauseating, he felt himself recoil unconsciously from them even as that dark, shadowy whisper found the crack in Ichigo's own defenses, exploiting it.

Protect them. Together the power will be ours, together we cannot fail. Now, open…

"The weapon systems…"

From her place beside him, Rukia looked at Ichigo with a growing degree of alarm. There was a shocking intensity in his voice, a harsh metallic rasp, and he hardly sounded like himself. Her eyes widened as a prickling feeling sparked through her neural link, something that shouldn't have even been possible, and her thin eyebrows rose as she realized it was vaguely similar to their feelink, only quickly growing wild and out of control. Confused, she only had a moment to consider it before that prickling burst like a blown fuse inside her mind.

Pressure. For a brief moment, that was all she could think of, all she could feel as it tried to push her into the ground. Her neural link came roaring back online and Rukia felt her knees grow weak as it struggled to process the sudden deluge of data from her wireless system, squeezing her mind from the inside out. Like the air had grown thick and heavy, her vision and hearing filled with static as her implants went haywire from feedback. Blinking rapidly through the distortion, she could see everyone around her affected as well, momentarily confused by the sudden and overwhelming weight within their minds. All except Ichigo.

Trying to parse the crush of data pounding through her head, she saw it was a single command and authenticated with Ichigo's security token. He was overcharging the amplitude on his wireless system, channeling the command with such intensity that it was defeating the neural disruptors and distorting the links and implants of everyone around him.

The momentary pressure abated with a piercing burst, the static vanishing from her vision, and she could see the shaky, confused looks on everyone's face freeze as the solid sound of unlocking plates and working rotors echoed across the hangar. Daring to turn her head up and behind, the gunports across the belly of the Zangetsu had slid open and the autocannon turrets had rolled out into firing position, spinning around to take beads on the patrol enforcers. She jerked back around, eyes wide at Ichigo.

He was going to shoot them.

Turning back to the officers, a cold grip of fear closing around her heart, she could see the realization dawn on them, as a group drawing back in surprise. Only the young, white-haired detective managed to hold his ground. While the others were momentarily paralyzed, he had kept his aim true, eyes narrowed, and was drawing a steadying breath as he tightened his finger on the trigger.

Shit. He was going to shoot Ichigo back.

Deciding that the situation was getting out of control, Rukia did the only thing she could think of before bullets started flying. "Get down!" she yelled, and collided with Ichigo like a tiny battering ram.

"Take cover!" Rangiku yelled, tackling Toshiro with surprising agility.

The clarion crack of a gunshot rang out through the cavernous hangar, Toshiro's gun flashing in the low light as he was thrown off his feet. Rukia felt her head tugged to the side as the round whipped through her hair, whistling past her ear with chilling proximity. Landing on Ichigo as they careened behind a piece of junked spacecraft, she frantically hauled him further behind cover, pushing him bodily to the ground and covering her own head with her arms.

Chaos ensued. Restraint, tenuous at best, was broken the second the shot rang out. Conflicting orders were shouted in a panic as younger patrol members aimed their weapons wildly. The older ones hauled the ones they could reach behind the nearest cover, crouching behind thick pieces of old fuselage and framework. Cracks of gunfire began splitting the air, leading to more confusion, leading to more gunfire.

Uryu and Renji had prudently dashed behind the nearest pieces of fuselage as soon as they saw Rukia in motion. Checking around them, they could see Tessai quickly hustling Jinta and Ururu away, Yoruichi melding back into the darkness and Urahara managing to discreetly slip out of sight. Glancing at each other, the two of them drew their weapons, both wondering just how this was going to play out.

"You're a criminal, any bright ideas?" Uryu asked dryly, wincing as another bullet hit the metal plating he had put to his back.

"I do my best to avoid law enforcement," Renji shot back.

"And when you can't?"

"I have a great-" Renji ducked back as the old viewport next to him shattered. "Lawyer."

Uryu stared at the crimson haired pirate for a long, long moment.

Rukia pushed herself up from atop Ichigo, the pops of gunfire and the zings of ricochets sounding loud in her ears as she ran her hands over her head and down her neck looking for any signs of damage. Finding nothing but her own singed hair, she turned down to the man laying prone beneath her, his masked face turning back at her.

"What are you doing?" they both asked each other in unison, Ichigo acidly and Rukia incredulously.

His masked face snaked right up close to Rukia's. "Get off me!" Ichigo snarled, the sharp slats of the mask's ventilator bearing a stark likeness to clenched teeth.

Rukia reared back as if he'd struck her across the face, eyes wide in disbelief. "What the hell is the matter with you?" she demanded. "You were going to kill a whole squad of patrol enforcers and two detectives!" Cracks of gunfire rang out, pinging off the metal they hid behind, punctuating her accusation.

Seething, unthinking rage was coursing through his veins as twin points of fiery blue-violet light pierced the veil that had muddled his thoughts. Focusing on using her eyes to guide him, like they were shining in the dark, he hauled himself away from the grip of that furious, ravenous hunger for power. He heard, as if from far off, that black raspy laughter flutter away as the shroud was stripped from his mind.

A change seemed to come over him, she could feel the angry tension flee his shoulders and he set his head back on the ground in silence. He hooked his fingers into the juncture of his mask and pried it up off his face with a concerted effort, and for a moment she saw the whites of his eyes far more shadowed than they should have been.

Ichigo gasped for air, free from the suddenly stifling mask, and blinked at the sudden shift as his vision cleared. Beginning to ebb and slip away, he could still feel the murderous wrath burn like acid through his veins. Mortified and furious at himself for being so easily manipulated, he didn't have an answer ready for her and when he finally met her eyes, the whole situation was made doubly worse. The way she was looking at him… it was like she didn't recognize him at all.

Steeling her gaze as she gripped him by the front of his flightsuit, her enhanced muscles tightening her fingers into the material, she brought her face down close to his. "Are you still my pilot, or not?" she spat at him. Ichigo only nodded his head, too caught up somewhere between shame and indignation to speak aloud. "Good, then that still makes me tac officer, and I don't recall giving you weapons free, pilot, so: Stand. Down."

Ichigo abruptly released the firing control system from his neural link, but not without an involuntary glower. Blowing a calming breath, he did his best to release those last sparks of anger. However annoyed he may have felt at being ordered around, he reminded himself that if he could trust anyone, it would be her.

Above her, between the reports of gunfire and panicked shouting, she heard the turrets go offline and the engines spin down. Daring to raise her head she could see them idling, untargeted and immobile. "Good," she said, patting his cheek approvingly. Rippling up from the tips of her fingers and shivering down her spine, she felt that cool tingle of electricity the moment she touched his bare skin.

Still angered at his willingness resort to violence, she was mollified somewhat by his immediate response to her demand and rationalized his behavior at a reaction to his new link. She was about to remove her hand when the tingle up her arm surged to a jolt, changing to a sharp, searing flash. Jerking her hand away more forcefully than she needed to, she almost expected her fingertips to be red and burned, but they were perfectly normal when she looked.

Looking back at his bewildered expression, she cleared her throat to explain when another crack of gunfire, then another, then another, echoed around them, forcing her to duck back down onto him. She felt his arms wrap protectively around her and grew briefly concerned that the painful heat would return, but his touch was as cool and familiar as it always was.

Beneath the panicked shouts and warnings from the patrol members, the sound of metal footfalls on the gray durocrete grew conspicuously close. A shadow loomed over the entwined pair and they turned their heads, their expressions blanched as if they'd been caught in a compromising position. What caught their attention was a slender foot coming down to the ground with considerable force, crushing the grit and pebbles to dust.

Looking higher, Rukia and Ichigo found it was a woman, compact of frame and serious of disposition, standing calmly and paying no attention to the gunfire zipping past her. At first it appeared she wore something like a black, skin tight softsuit, but when the seams along her legs and joints began glowing with a soft red light, and her eye burst into crimson incandescence, they realized why she was blithely ignoring all the gunfire: She'd been considerably augmented, partial reconstruction at least.

Holding out her arm, the plates and panels that made up its form unlatched and popped apart at strange angles. Watching in macabre fascination, they couldn't turn away as her arm essentially dismantled itself, sliding back and tucking away to allow the barrels of the minigun concealed within to slide out and lock into place. It was when she held the weapon up and the barrels started to spin that they clapped their hands over their ears.

The screaming sound of metal tearing through the air drowned out the patrol enforcers' yells and gunfire. Firing a short burst into the air, the rounds sparked against the stone ceiling adding the crunch of crumbling rock to the din of the gunfire. The ear-splitting racket cut out a second later, the barrels of her minigun clanking to a stop as she narrowed her eyes at something beyond the two of them.

"Kisuke Urahara!" she shouted, her eye blazing a cherry red through the smoke from her weapon and the dust from the ceiling.

There was utter silence before the faraway answer. "Yes?" Urahara's capacity to sound both hesitant and amused was becoming commonplace.

"We have things to discuss!" she said harshly, stalking past Ichigo and Rukia without a second thought, moving with a sinuous, machined perfection.

Stunned for the moment, the patrol officers had stopped yelling and shooting, perhaps finally realizing that no one had fired at them in the first place. In the ringing silence Ichigo and Rukia could hear a concerned Matsumoto trying to determine if Hitsugaya was alright, followed by muffled shouts that she was suffocating him. Ichigo and Rukia used the brief respite to get their feet back under them and scramble towards Renji and Uryu.

"Cease fire, cease fire!" Toshiro ordered harshly, Rangiku less-than-helpfully pulling him back to his feet. Shuddering mildly, he ran his hands through his shock of unruly white hair and tried to get the image of being smothered to death by Rangiku out of his mind. Straightening his uniform, he turned a cold glower at the listing hulk of metal fuselage he knew the four of them were hiding behind. "Weapons hold until I give the order," he called out to his men, checking the clip on his own weapon before sliding the magazine back into place and taking a position behind a suitable piece of cover as well.

Opposite the detectives and the patrol enforcers, Ichigo risked a glance out at them before slipping back behind the metal plating. "We have a problem," he said to the other three. Putting his back to their impromptu cover and looking over at them, he could almost feel the trio of pointed looks aimed his way.

"Was that you're idea of handling it?" Rukia asked, "Just shoot all the cops? Were you completely out of your mind?"

"Listen, I-" Ichigo tried to answer.

"As much as I may loathe the Central Four-and-Six, these men are just trying to do their jobs," Uryu muttered.

"No, see-" Ichigo began.

"Glasses is right," Renji added, "We start shooting back and things will… escalate. It's one thing to have warrants out for your arrest, believe me, I know. But it's a whole 'nother thing to have 'armed assault on a patrol officer' be one of them. We'd 'disappear' out an airlock before we even made it to lockup, they're just like us man, they take care of their own."

"Would you just shut up already?" Ichigo snapped. "I didn't arm the weapons to shoot the patrol enforcers!"

"You were bluffing?" Rukia demanded.

"No! The weapons system wasn't the only thing I had loaded when I was connected to the ship!"

"What are you saying-" she started before she felt a thrum of vibration through her hand. Splayed out against the ground, she fell silent and stared at her fingers. Just when she thought it might have been her imagination, another deep pulse shivered against her skin. A small pool of oil had collected in a shallow basin just beyond and its surface rippled with shimmering rainbows as another thrum of vibration, closer this time, hummed through the hangar.

"I'm saying the threat assessment system that's polling the hangar's external sensors says: we have bigger problems."

It took her only a moment to discern what he had been trying to say. "No shielding," Rukia whispered, staring at Ichigo's head with a new level of concern.

"What?" Renji asked, perturbed at being left out of the loop. "What is it?"

"We need to get out of here," Rukia asserted, looking slightly pale as another low vibration rippled underfoot.

Detectives Hitsugaya and Matsumoto, peering out from behind their own piece of junked spacecraft, watched the area they knew the four of them were hiding behind with growing concern. "What are they waiting for?" Toshiro muttered to himself.

"Well," Rangiku began, putting a manicured fingertip to her chin. "Their ship seems to be offline again, so they're outmanned, outgunned and outmaneuvered. Maybe they're working out a way to get aboard their ship?" she suggested with a shrug. The motion, combined with her half-unzipped tactical vest, served to totally distract the patrol enforcer next to her, staring down at her chest until Toshiro pointedly ordered him back to attention.

Realizing Rangiku may have had a point, he motioned for two officers to start moving around to cover the twenty meter distance to the black ship's boarding ladder. It would give the jumpy and excitable ones something to do rather than keep pulling the triggers on their weapons, he thought with a sigh. "Alright you four, you're surrounded," he called out, "Drop your weapons and come out, and we can get this whole thing straightened out."

"Hey, Detective Hitsugaya, isn't it?" Rukia called out, pleased that she remembered his name from the bar.

"Detective Toshiro Hitsugaya, of the Tenth Precinct's Colonial Patrol Force, Homicide, and Captain of the patrol cruiser Hyorin Maru."

"I have a proposition to make." She swallowed dryly as the oil in the basin rippled again, more forcefully this time.

"You're not in any position to make deals," Toshiro replied. "You're armed and wanted suspects in a dozen different crimes, why would I listen to you?"

"Just hear us out," Rukia answered as she lifted up her empty hands above the edge of the metal plating.

Toshiro patted the air, sending messages to his officers to remain calm and to hold their fire. He looked back to the pair of hands help up and paused a beat before saying, against his better judgment, "I'm listening, feel free to incriminate yourself all you want."

"We all leave this hangar, right now. You give us ten hours," Rukia answered, standing slowly and easing her way out into the open. "Then you can arrest all of us." She silenced Renji and Uryu's complaints with a look, whispering at them, "In ten hours, we'll either have succeeded and it won't matter if we end up in jail, or we'll have failed, in which case… nothing would matter at all."

"I wouldn't make jokes at a time like this," Toshiro remonstrated. "You're asking for ten hours in exchange for what? You're word that you'll turn yourselves in?"

"No, we'll give you all the evidence we've collected in the frame job that set Ichigo and I up for the crimes you're trying to arrest us for."

"I'm not trying to arrest you, I am arresting you."

"And our protection as we leave this hangar," Rukia finished.

Toshiro's brows rose a fraction. "Your protection? You're going to protect us, the patrol enforcers?"

"We have information and tactics that you-"

"Don't tell me this about your alien ship story, is it? What next, are you going to claim time travelers are their accomplices?"

She could see him shaking his head, thinking her ridiculous, and her blood began to simmer. "Detective, I would not make jokes at a time like this." She allowed herself a tiny degree of smug satisfaction as she used his own words back at him.

"I've heard enough of this nonsense," Toshiro shot back, "I've chased you all across this system, there's no way I'm going to let you go now that I have you, not without a good reason."

Kisuke Urahara, standing calmly off Hitsugaya's shoulder, gave the young homicide detective quite a start as he removed his hat from head and examined the brim with long, slender fingers. Unperturbed by the weapon Toshiro pointed at him, his only movement was to flick his eyes to the pool of coolant gathered at the top of an old storage cylinder. To the tiny ripples that shivered across its surface. "Be careful what you wish for, Detective." Kisuke said evenly.

"There you are, slippery little snake," Commander Soi-Fon said triumphantly, spying Urahara from the top of a nearby junk heap she'd climbed. With a smirk, she moved her minigun arm to match the thin red laser line, glowing in the dusty air, that had traveled from her eye and stopped over Kisuke's chest. "What? No witty comments?"

"In about thirty seconds, there won't be air to make any," Yoruichi answered instead, stepping out of the shadows to stand at Urahara's side. Handing him a softsuit helmet, she kissed him lightly on the cheek and whispered something in his ear, her lips curved in a cat-like smile.

"Thank you my dear, impeccable timing as always," he replied with a disarming ease that seemed out of place amid all the drawn weapons and tense emotions.

"Princess Yoruichi!" Soi-Fon sputtered, careful not to aim her weapon at Yoruichi and looking on the verge of stamping her bionic foot. "I must protest! I was sent to find you and bring y-"

Her words were lost as the sudden, deafening sound of heavy collision rolled over them, pounding in their ears and leaping their hearts into their throats. The thunderous impact that shook entire hangar, quaking the ground and rattling every scrap heap around them. Heavy and massive, the sound didn't echo so much as fill the chamber, and as it faded to silence it left a ringing in their ears and a reverberation in their bones.

While Soi-Fon's balance was cybernetically perfect and she remained poised atop her scrap heap, the stiff skin of her face was unused to expressions of abject shock. "Wha-what was that?"

Addressing Toshiro, Kisuke answered as he wiggled a finger in his ear, "I believe it was your good reason, Detective." To those who knew him, the absence of his usual jovial timbre hinted at the severity of the situation.

Scattered, anxious muttering and the sound of Urahara fitting the helmet on over his head filled the silence that followed. Toshiro, his mouth open to speak, turned to Urahara and as the helmet seal closed with a final snap, another deafening collision shook the very ground beneath his feet.

"The ship-lock gate!" someone called out, and all eyes swept to the far end of the hangar.

And then the decompression warning klaxons began to wail.

Bleeding into the darkness at the far end of the hangar, around the edges of the massive main ship-lock door, bright light was shining in and sending long spears of white through the dusty air. The red strobes began flashing their decompression warnings around the perimeter of the hangar as the few overhead lights began going out, sparks and cracks raining down from above. Another heavy, thudding impact wrenched the door from its tracks at one end, spilling in even more blinding sunslight, and through the gap, appearing only for a moment, flashed a dark shadow. A second was all they had before it moved into the dark reaches of the far ends of the hangar, but that was enough to see it's massive, jagged bulk and serpentine, unnatural grace.

His gun at the ready and his eyes scanning the far side of the hangar, Detective Hitsugaya spoke over his shoulder towards Ichigo and the others. "That… That thing was what you were talking about?"

"No." Ichigo stepped up in line with the detective. The air, whipped into to gusts as it rushed out the broken ship-lock gate, was getting progressively thinner, pitching the klaxon alarm to a higher tone.

"That's one of the little ones," Rukia finished, moving in line as well. Uryu and Renji followed suit, both raising their weapons, barrels pointed over the mounds of strewn metal at the darkness beyond.

"We're facing the suns out there for another few minutes, which means it came down in the light," Urahara mentioned, fiddling with his gloves. "Such extreme exposure would normally put one of them on its last legs, so to speak, but with all this food," he held his hands out to all the junked spacecraft, "We might be facing a more serious threat."

"They eat metal?" Hitsugaya asked, somewhat uncertain.

"The actual process is closer to a refinery, but yes, essentially they eat metal," Urahara answered. "But here, see for yourself."

Cresting one of the larger, more jagged piles of stripped down spacecraft hulls, it came. Moving with a serpentine grace on unnaturally jointed legs, it's clawed feet clenched into the debris as it turned its featureless, shield of a head towards them. As large as any of the ships in the hangar, it was gigantic in comparison to any of the humans and the silvery plates that covered its body were dripping with melted metal, adding a unreal sheen to it as the shafts of light played across its body.

"Uh, Captain?" Rangiku asked, discreetly pointing towards where the ship-lock gate had been partially torn off, out of which all the air in the hangar was currently escaping. Beyond, all was fiery red and orange, the light of the suns igniting the oxygen as if funneled out onto the scorched, blasted surface of Pendulum.

"Hold positions," Hitsugaya ordered, trying to bolster his unnerved men and women.

The Hollow, backlit by the inferno beyond the gate, cut an impressively terrifying visage as it crept down towards them, the whole of it a concert of alien motion as it propelled itself forward. Tipping its massive plated head back, it split into jaws upon jaws that spread open wide, pivoting dozens of rows of chainsaw-like teeth into place. It roared, the sound blood-curdling in the thinning air and its foul breath stinking of machinery oil and decay even at this distance. Its mouth opening wider, the gears and chains within screeched to life.

Easily scaling down the slope of piled high metal, its jaws flexing and snapping, the Hollow turned its massive head to let a trio of claw tipped tentacles snake out at one of skeletons of disassembled spacecraft. The massive Hollow dwarfed the remains of the large ship as it was dragged back up into its mouth, clamping down on it to let its chainsaw teeth go to work grinding and tearing at it with terrible efficiency. Shredded pieces falling from its maw, the Hollow turned back towards them, growling with the sound of squealing, tearing metal.

"Magnificent," Urahara whispered appreciatively.

Screams of alarm from several of the officers rang out as they drew back away from the horrid monstrosity. A single crack of gunfire split the air, the weapon of Detective Toshiro Hitsugaya barking back in response to the Hollow's thundering bellow. Smoke drifting from the barrel, Toshiro stepped forward and re-centered his gun, mouth set firm and his finger tight on the trigger. "Open fire."

The remaining air was immediately filled with the staccato bursts of gunfire as the patrol officers began squeezing off rounds down the length of the hangar at the huge Hollow. Uryu and Renji took positions on the firing line next to Toshiro, adding their own bursts of gunfire to the assault. The sparks of bullets glancing off metal peppered the area around the Hollow and across its body, the clangs and zings of ricochets tinny in the thin air. The gunfire dwindled as their magazines ran empty, and as the gun smoke cleared they could see that if any of the rounds had a damaging effect, it wasn't apparent. More perplexed than injured, the Hollow drew up, stringy red muscle tissue sliding around beneath its heavy silver plates, and cocked its massive head at them.

"I think you're going to need a bigger gun, Toshiro," Ichigo commented.

"That's 'Detective Hitsugaya' to you," Toshiro answered, calmly slipping a softsuit helmet over his head and sealing it to his collar. Behind him, the other patrol officers were donning masks and helmets as well, the air in the hangar now preciously thin.

Soi-Fon, barely inconvenienced by the growing vacuum, walked calmly to the line and leveled her forearm minigun at the approaching Hollow. "Allow me," she said, her voice cold through their aural implants, as she spun up the barrels. The whirring reached a quick crescendo before the remaining air was split by the rolling thunder of hundreds of rounds, ripping across the hangar and tearing at the Hollow's plated armor. Gouts of black ichor splattered across the armor and fell to the floor as the stream of bullets cracked and cratered its metal skin, digging deep into sinewy flesh.

Bullet casings showered to the ground as the spinning tips of the barrels began to glow the same cherry red as Soi-Fon's eye, but the sound of her continuous gunfire and high velocity machinery slipped oddly away, falling down to a whisper before being snuffed out completely. The smile of grim satisfaction faltered as Soi-Fon looked from the Hollow to her silent weapon, the barrels spinning but no longer firing a stream of bullets. "It isn't designed to work in a vacuum," Soi-Fon grumbled, her lips and mouth moving in the airless hangar but her voice carrying through to their aural implants.

The ground vibrated again beneath their feet, drawing their attention back to the Hollow. It had drawn back, rearing up like some enormous beast and hunching its shoulders to protect its head. Ragged holes had been punched through the silvery metal plating across its forelegs and shoulders while slimy black blood oozed from the bullet wounds.

Dropping down from its perch to the hangar floor, the crash they expected never came, the hangar now as airless and silent as the depths of space, but the ground shook as landed. Its head low to the ground and jaws snapping in pain and fury, its huge, barbed claws carved deep furrows through the durocrete as if to charge, but it held its ground. Instead, the damaged plates on either shoulder split and hinged open, greasy muscle and stained metal moving disquietingly within. The Hollow tamped down its feet, clenching into the surface as sparks of yellow flashed within the recesses it had revealed.

"Run!" Rukia yelled, turning to flee with Renji, Uryu and Ichigo hot on her heels. She knew what was coming, what those shifting plates of armored metal meant.

Deciding discretion to be the better part of valor, both Toshiro and Rangiku began backing away from the firing line, the other patrol officers having already broken ranks and gone scrambling for cover. The order to fall back was halfway out of the young detective's mouth when the sparks of light within its shoulders flared brightly in the dim hangar. Without warning, two brilliant yellow beams split through the darkness, blinding, harsh and utterly silent. The light raked across the ground to touch a junked section of hull plating that some of his officers, young ones fresh from the academy, had taken shelter behind.

In a moment they were gone. They didn't even have time to scream. Somewhat anticlimactically, the light flickered and died and all that was left was a long scorch mark on the durocrete and a piece of blackened wreckage, melted to slag.

The lone exception to the frantic search for cover, Toshiro stood unmoving and stared at where his officers had been. Another vibration beneath his feet diverted his attention and he calmly turned his gaze down the hangar. The whispered rumors of a dark, deadly menace out there in black, wild speculations that he had so casually disregarded, were all true. And three of his men had paid it with their lives.

Rukia, holding an emergency air supply system to her face, dashed up next to where Ichigo was hidden behind one of the Zangetsu's landing gear. "We need to get that thing out of here," she said to him over their local comm, her voice clear but urgent. "It's eating to power its energy weapons and there's too much food here," she pointed out, waving to all the heaps of old spacecraft, "It's going to become unstoppable."

Nodding, Ichigo opened a public comm to the detectives as he turned back to Toshiro. The young man remained standing in the open, an unreadable expression on his face as he stared at the Hollow, the tightness with which he gripped his weapon being his only visible indicator of emotion.

The Hollow, visibly weakened for the moment, folded its shoulder plating back up and took an unsteady step as it uncoiled its tentacles to latch onto several pieces of scrap metal. All but ignoring the tiny humans peering out at it from a few hundred meters away, it greedily began to devour the hulks of junked spacecraft. Gulping down the shredded metal, it backed up towards the torn hangar door, shifting its head around and pacing a few steps back and forth. Preoccupied with the heaps of available metal around it, it only flicked its attention towards the patrol enforcers when they tried moving from their cover, sending them scuttling back to further hiding places.

"Why isn't it coming after us?" Rangiku asked, looking next to her at Toshiro. The quiver in her voice as she looked uncertainly at the Hollow down the length of the Hangar, belied her calm composure. Taking a breath inside her softsuit helmet, she looked again at her calculating captain as she steadied her hands around her weapon.

Through clenched teeth Toshiro replied, "Why should it, it can take all the time it wants. We're obviously not a threat."

Rukia, leaning out to catch a glance at the Hollow, furrowed her thin brows and shifted back behind cover. Her breath fogged the clear faceplate of the air mask as she huffed in thought. "He's right but that's not all, it's guarding the exit," she reasoned, looking troubled.

Catching her expression, Uryu peeked as well, mentioning, "I've never known a Hollow to use such a tactic either."

Ignoring the conversation regarding atypical Hollow behavior and its myriad implications, Ichigo narrowed his eyes behind the visor of his mask as he looked from his ship to the broken ship-lock gate. "Only one way out, and the Hollow is standing between us and it," Ichigo muttered. "Hey, detectives," Ichigo interjected, drawing their attention as he moved away from Rukia and towards them.

"What's he doing?" Renji muttered to Rukia, watching him walking calmly out in the open, towards the two detectives.

"Being Ichigo," Rukia replied. The tone of her voice was somewhere between exasperation and appreciation. To anyone else, the scenario would have been simple: either get in your ship and escape, or help out those in need. However, by now she knew to Ichigo it would have been even simpler: help.

Stopping before Toshiro, his dark mask in place and the fiery light glowing dully across the armored panels of his flight suit, Ichigo spoke again into is comm. "Get back to your shuttle when the way is clear. We'll cover you," he promised.

Immediately wary, Toshiro's brows drew down at Ichigo but he couldn't hold it, distracted as he was by the monstrous form of the Hollow across the hangar eating another chunk of spacecraft frame. "You're still under arrest, but that thing just killed three of my men, Kurosaki. My priorities have changed."

"Does that mean we get that ten hours?"

"It means we can't do anything planetside. Spaced, back in my ship… we'll have to see how it turns out for you." Toshiro's gaze flicked back to the Hollow, "Can you fly as good as people say you can?"

Ichigo scoffed. "Better."

"I've heard bold words like that before, you sure you can back them up?" Toshiro asked pointedly.

"I'll have to," Ichigo shrugged, "Or we'll all dead." He studied Toshiro's face through the visor of his helmet, the detective's gaze alternating between the Hollow, his men, and quartet of Uryu, Renji, Rukia and himself standing their ground but ready to move up the boarding steps of the long black ship.

Coming to a decision Toshiro finished with, "At least you know what's at stake." Offering Ichigo a single, terse nod of his head in thanks before he turned on his heel and opened a comm to the other patrol officers. "Be ready to fall back to the shuttle," he ordered, heading for the rear airlock they had come through. "We don't have the firepower to engage that thing down here." He had a responsibility to uphold; whatever the prior situation was, that creature was a clear and present danger to the system far beyond four wanted criminals.

"Get aboard," Ichigo said, turning to the other three and waving to the boarding steps leading into the great, black ship, "We've got work to do." With a flicker of thought Ichigo sent the neural command to restart the main engines, set proper power levels, and begin reinitializing standard systems. Not really expecting an immediate return status, he was somewhat surprised when the monitors across the ship quickly informed him that he had green lights across the board.

Uryu and Renji disappeared into the ship just as Rukia halted on the first step and turned to face Ichigo. "What do you think Urahara meant when he said the tactical and navigation systems were a little unorthodox?" When it came to combat flying, she didn't like surprises.

"I guess we'll have to see-" Ichigo trailed off at the look on Rukia's face, her eyes staring wide over his shoulder. Spinning around, he turned his masked face back at Hollow. "Oh shit."

As it powered up, the ship had caught the Hollow's attention. Ichigo had a clear view of the terrible efficiency of it as it moved to come closer, barring its huge, chainsaw filled mouth and sinking its metallic talons into the ground. Far different and more advanced than the one they had seen on Junrinan Two, whose planetside form had been a mishmash of whatever appendages it could muster, this one moved with a sinuous, reptilian grace, muscles working below its plated skin in an alien, unnatural interplay. A long, barbed tail lashed behind it as it crested a tall spire of exposed structure-work, its massive head aimed down at them.

For a moment it appeared ready to leap down upon the back of the Zangetsu, until a rocket sliced across the stillness of the hangar and slammed into the side of the Hollow's head with a bright yellow flash. Zipping overhead, a fully repaired Sparrow Bee banked low beneath the ceiling of the hangar, the light from her engine wash and brightly glowing I-Grav emitters throwing craggy shadows out from the heaps of junk metal.

Together, Ichigo and Rukia watched the Hollow teeter precariously on its perch, whipping its head around to its new foe just as Yoruichi, sitting in the pilot's seat of the tiny ship's open canopy, brought it around again. Hovering in place, another rocket soared out from the ship, this time blowing apart the junk heap the Hollow had scaled. Silently, the Hollow lost its footing and tumbled down among the discarded hull plating and dismantled bulkhead structure, giving them a clear view of Soi-Fon, standing beside Yoruichi in the open cockpit and holding a large shoulder-style rocket launcher.

A comm notice appeared in his vision with Urahara's security token attached to it as the Hollow went crashing down to the ground, the scaffolding and girderwork collapsing on top of it. The Sparrow Bee set down smoothly as Kisuke appeared, stepping out from where he had been nonchalantly leaning in the shadows of an eave of old hull plating.

"From what I've seen, I'm confident that you know what to do with that new ship of yours," Urahara said, moving up next to the open canopy. "But how you do it is going to have to change."

Puzzled, Ichigo remained silent as Kisuke vaulted up into the cockpit of the Sparrow Bee with the ease of years of practice, as if hopping into fighter ships was something he was well versed at, or used to be.

Urahara settled in next to Yoruichi, earning a look from Soi-Fon that would have been venomous if not for her stiff, cyborg skin, and kept his eyes turned towards the rubble heap from which the Hollow was still working to extricate itself from. "You and Rukia make a great team, better than I had anticipated, but up until now you're relied only on each other. From here on out, in a ship like that, something tells me that you won't get much further without a full crew." The Hollow wrested its head free of the tangle of metal struts and beams, tearing apart the metal it could and simply eating what it couldn't. Its upper torso coming free, it redoubled its efforts and thrashed about, flexing its jaws and wrenching apart the metal with its talons.

"That won't hold it for long, get moving Ichigo!" Yoruichi commanded, the authoritarian edge in her voice cutting through their momentary stupor. Before he knew it, Ichigo found himself vaulting up the steps behind Rukia in a mad dash to the bridge.

The two of them crested the landing of the small loading bay, turned and hauled themselves through the short corridor that apparently led to the bridge. No time to take in the design aesthetics, the only impression they had of the interior was of cool, gray metal bulkheads, exposed rivets and a bare, focused purpose. Every part of the ship was designed to do one thing, and do it extremely well. That feeling carried over as they caught up to Renji and Uryu, staring out as they stood in the doorframe of the bridge.

Laid out long and lean, the bridge deck comprised nearly the entire front portion of the craft. Front-rear navigation and tactical stations dominated the front, while two more side-by-side stations took up the rear. The canopy overhead had been blacked out by the nanoweave sleeve that covered the skin of the ship, leaving the interior to be lit by a soft, unfamiliar type of glow. Like the rest of the ship, space was at a premium across the bridge, more cramped with consoles than other, roomier bridges they'd been on before. Looking closer at those consoles, Rukia and Ichigo realized what had stopped Renji and Uryu short at the door.

"This is not what I expected when Urahara said 'unconventional'," Ichigo noted.

The glow came from display screens, easily a dozen of them, embedded in the control panels and consoles arrayed around and above each station. Apparently requiring no link connection at all, each of them shined simple, monochrome output display of various systems and resource levels. The running lights flickered on and they stood there, speechless.

Every control on every panel at every console was a physical, mechanical toggle switch, knob, dial, slider, selector or button. There were no holo-panels anywhere.

"How old did he say this ship was?" Renji muttered to Uryu.

Renji may have had a point, Ichigo thought, but all the same, the layout of the switch plates and screens, the dedicated keyboards and real needle-and-meter pressure and temperature gauges harkened back to a time when the concepts of design and efficiency meant different things. It was the polar opposite of a ship like Byakuya's limousine, whose stark white featurelessness and sculpted curvature carried the eye across like a work of art. Rather, the bare plating of the gunmetal bulkheads and flat planes of the control-covered consoles combined to appeal to him in an oddly familiar way. There was form that existed within the function.

It was when he caught sight of the navigation station that he began to understand another, more important line of reasoning behind the total absence of holo-panels on the bridge. Though more control consoles were arrayed around it, it none-the-less bore a striking resemblance to the saddle and handlebars of his classic hovercycle back on Karakura station, complete with twist-throttle, foot peg controls and center mounted screen display. It even had the number '15' stitched into the fabric of the seat.

"I know this may sound like a dumb question, but why is everything on the bridge a… a thing?" Renji asked, tapping against a gauge and watching the needle quiver.

"Because," Ichigo realized, "No matter what, they won't stop functioning from link interference."

"Are you certain about this, Kurosaki?" Uryu asked skeptically.

"Don't have that luxury," Ichigo replied, pushing past them. Ducking his way between the two rear stations and down the edgewalk to the side of the tactical station, he swung his leg over pilot's saddle and sat down, taking in the controls as the restraint system clipped into the catches on his thighs. Rubbing his fingers together and glancing over the panels around him, he felt his confidence returning. He couldn't blame them for feeling out of their element; Renji was used to flying his 'appropriated' ex-patrol ship and Ishida could run the entire QNC Longbow from the custom console he had wired together. Both of them had probably used holo-panel controls their entire lives, though they'd be loathe to admit they had anything in common. Ichigo, however, felt immediately at home behind the banks of gleaming chrome toggles and knurled selector knobs. After flying the Masaki for so long, a ship his father would never change and that sometimes seemed a hundred years old, the systems and controls on this ship felt distinctly familiar.

"Uh, hey Ichigo," Renji said, rubbing at the back of his head as his eyes flicked up to the black canopy. "But how are you going to fly this thing if you can't see?"

It was a good question but Ichigo didn't want to admit it out loud. He was spared from answering as he heard Rukia slip into the tactical station behind him, her breath hitching as her eyes settled on one section of her consoles. "I can't believe he got this to work…"

"According to the documentation," Uryu said, scrolling through a readout glowing on the lenses of his glasses, "The nanoweave defense system controls are on the engineering station."

"Oh," Renji said, realizing where he was sitting. "This must be it," he said, adjusting a few control. The canopy and viewports above and around them, which had previously been a flat, lightless black, shifted to clear, giving them an excellent view out the front of the ship where the Hollow's huge, open mouth was spread. Looming closer to the ship, the mouth seemed ready to snap closed around them, chainsaw jaws working at angles everywhere they looked.

A chorus of distinctly non-masculine screams erupted across the bridge as the Hollow's metallic, clawed tentacles came writhing forth, the cruel tips primed and ready to pierce through the clear canopy. Muffled bursts sounded through the ship and the tentacles were all blasted away, the Hollow knocked back as huge showers of yellow sparks hit it across the mouth. Tipping backwards, the Hollow scrambled across the junkyard piles to get some distance between it and the ship as Uryu, Renji and Ichigo glanced at over Rukia.

Wearing the tactical station's thick visor over her eyes, Rukia's lips were set in a firm line as she studied the Hollow skittering away. Keeping her gaze locked on target, the autocannon turrets smoothly tracking her line of sight, she reached out to switch the active loadout to bigger ordinance. With a flick of her fingers, the main railguns came online as the autocannons rolled back into their housings, and the lateral missile bay doors retracted as Rukia sat back and raised her hands to ready positions.

Rather than softsuit gloves, her hands were sheathed in ship's firing control system; thick, sensor-fitted gauntlets tethered to her console by hardwire cables. With a flex of her gloved fingers, she charged the forward railgun capacitors and armed her missile warheads, letting the glove's weapon status indicators blaze into brilliant red light.

"We are weapons hot," she announced, bathed by the crimson light from her gloves. Realizing something, she looked back at them quickly, asking, "Did you guys just scream like a bunch of little girls?"

"Nope."

"Nu-uh."

"Nonsense."

With a disbelieving curve to her lips she slid the opaque visor slid back down over her eyes and the targeting and trajectory displays flickered into place. Overlaying the visor display with the shortrange sensors and zeroing back in on her target, she gave Ichigo the order she knew he was eager to hear. "Get this thing off the ground."

"Sit down, strap in, and shut up," Ichigo said with a smirk, wrapping his fingers around the handles of the flight control system. With satisfying little clacks, he thumbed the controls to get the attitude control surfaces powered up, nudging up the I-Grav output with a tap of his toe. Gently twisting the throttle, Ichigo eased the ship up off its landing gear to hover in place above the debris covered ground but below the roof of the hangar. Engines purring through the deck plating, Ichigo swung the nose of the ship around towards where the Hollow had gone, saying, "We have liftoff."

Tightening his hands on the handles, hardwire leads clicked into the sockets along the top of his hands as his mask slid back down into place. Reconnecting his neural link to the ship and loading up the nav computer, he was surprised to find another presence alongside his own, sharing the resource session. Immediately recognizable, Rukia's neural connection through the ship held the same frosty bite and fiery smolder as it did through their feelink, but being piped through the active weapon system channels brought the sensation to an all new level.

"The link manager is a neural net," she realized after their shared moment of surprise. Once again, the sheer pressure of his presence, so raw, unrefined, and brimming with the untapped power of the ship's massive engines, set her mind buzzing through the link manager. Their links shared a brief but reassuring caress as they set up a cross-panel protocol exchange, the action sending that warm electric tingle down both their spines. Not a moment too soon too, as two more presences unfolded in the running session, the first a whip-crack passion tempered by steely resolve, and the other a sterile but powerful computational engine.

"Neural net huh?" Renji said as he too established a connection and loaded up his systems. "Why'd they stop using those again?"

"Because not everyone has the high sync ratio required to use it," Rukia said, coming to the same realization as Ichigo.

"Ninety-five percent or better," Ichigo added, tossing a look towards Rukia. So that was why Urahara had been so interested in their shared sync ratios. Seeing her nod was all the confirmation he needed.

"Outdated link manager on an untested ship with an experimental defensive system flying a combat encounter in an enclosed space against a target of unknown capabilities," he muttered, keeping the reactors tamped down so Ichigo could manage the engines better so low to the ground. He flicked his eyes up to the glance the orange-headed pilot shot back at him, cracking his fingers and saying with a smirk, "Sounds like fun."

"All systems online, and I've got sensors running in tandem mode over the tightbeam to the Sparrow Bee," Uryu said, his hands busily adjusting controls across his boards. "We're as ready as we're going to be."

Ichigo could feel the cold drop of adrenalin pooling in his stomach as he caught flashes of the Hollow's back as it slipped between the darkened crags of piled wreckage across the hangar. Off to his side through one of the viewports he could see the silhouettes of the patrol force members hidden down among the piles of plating and ship structure, waiting for their opportunity to escape out the airlock across the hangar.

They were counting on him. He had made a promise to Toshiro to see them safely back to their ship and the weight of that responsibility threw into focus the enormity of their overall task. It wasn't just one Hollow and one ship full of humans, it was every ship, every planet and moon, every colony and station and outpost and platform. He could see them in his mind's eye, destroyed in an instant, burning and blasted to nothingness. The entire system wiped out, an enormous and dark shape drifting slowly in the background. His vision darkening as well, horrid details across the mothership came into focus, an enormous and ancient leviathan of unfathomable power. His gut clenched uncomfortably as flashes of the places he'd been flicked by, reimagining them as destroyed wrecks, smoking craters and whole planets turned to ash and melted glass. Everyone he knew, his friends, his family, even his enemies. Dead.

All at the hand of the dreadnought slipping through the dark, bearing down on them even now and consumed with a singular purpose. And the only thing standing in its way was this ship. A sinister, mocking laughter flitted about the back of his mind for an instant before Ichigo silenced it. His vision returned to normal as he thoughts returned to Rukia, her presence in the neural net the equivalent of standing back-to-back with him. The image of her seated at the station behind him, calm and in control, every bit the focused and unyielding soldier, all served to steady his nerves and return his confidence, his strength.

Turning his attention back to the task at hand, he stared out at the dark shape of the Hollow as it crept among the heaps of scrapped metal. Using the shadows and piles as cover, it remained near the torn ship-lock gate, preventing the patrol enforcers from moving closer and trying to keep them all trapped inside the hangar. "Let's get that door open, time to take out the trash," Ichigo said, sliding the long, black ship over to bring the huge, broken ship-lock gate in line with their weapons.

"Priming forward railguns," Rukia said, setting her sights on where the door was still connected to the housing. Designed to withstand the pressure differentials of full atmosphere and the vacuum of space, and big enough to permit ships as large as cruisers through it, the blastdoor on a ship-lock gate was a massive, reinforced piece of machinery. Hovever, Rukia was confident it would be no match for the high caliber, precision fired railgun slugs she was about to hit it with, and was just tightening her fingers on the firing control when the ship lurched beneath her feet, throwing off her aim and sending her hard into the restraints of her seat. "What the-"

A huge section of stripped down hull plating went sailing past the canopy, tumbling end over end, as Ichigo fishtailed the powerful ship out of the way. "It's throwing things at us," Ichigo said, teeth clenched as his hands and feet adjusted the controls. Evading the jagged metal projectiles, staying clear of the ceiling and sliding between the piles of scrapped spaceships required careful attention but he still managed to catch sight of the Sparrow Bee angling around in their direction. For a fraction of a second he could see through their canopy, Yoruichi at the pilot's station wearing a confident smirk as she zipped past the nose of his ship in a maneuver intentionally similar to the one he had performed in the Red Princess.

To his credit, Ichigo didn't flinch as the smaller ship went skipping over the top of the long black warship, but it was the tow cable out the rear of the Sparrow Bee that had him confused. Following it's curving path, his eyes grew wide as he swerved again, cursing as powerful engines roared behind them, sending them hurtling out of the way. The tow cable had been attached to a large, wicked looking chunk of scraped structure-work which went whistling through the space they had just vacated.

"What… was that?" Rukia asked.

"They call it a wrecking ball," Uryu said, his eyes following the little ship. "The colonial navy's ban on ship-board weaponry has led to some unorthodox developments."

"Unorthodox?" Rukia gaped, nearly disbelieving what she was seeing. The little ship skimmed around the edge of the metal ribs of a gutted spaceship, bearing down on the Hollow near the door. Surging out of the cover of darkness to meet its attacker, the Hollow tore across the hangar floor, mouth wide open, curved claws ready to pounce, only to realize it had fallen into a trap. The Sparrow Bee fired its booster jets in a brief, bright flash, popping it upwards as it braked hard and detached its tow cable. Beneath it went the huge, jagged hunk of metal, inertia carrying right into the Hollow's path.

Scrambling to get out of the way in time, the Hollow didn't see the tow cable whipping about behind the wrecking ball as it frayed into a dozen, thinner cables. Managing to slip barely to the side of the heavy metal projectile, the Hollow escaped a direct hit but was summarily wrapped up in several of the flying cables, lashing across its metal skin and cinching tight. The Hollow was carried off its feet as the wrecking ball bounced silently off the hangar ground, the impact setting it spinning, and went crashing into the far wall, dragging the Hollow behind it. As if to add insult to injury, the impact shook loose a heaped pile of debris, setting it sliding down atop the wrapped up, thrashing Hollow.

"But effective," Rukia had to admit after a moment.

"Detective Hitsugaya, this is…" Uryu said over a comm channel, his mouth curling in mild distaste, "The Zangetsu. Target has been temporarily neutralized. They way to the airlock is clear, get your people out as quickly as possible."

"Acknowledged, Zangetsu. We're withdrawing now."

Easing the ship into a stationary hover again, protectively near the small, undamaged airlock near the torn ship-lock gate, Ichigo watched the tiny figures of the patrol force members moving below him. Though he had no personal way to gauge their expertise, it certainly appeared they were moving as a disciplined unit and were just making it to the airlock when movement ahead of him demanded his attention. Wrenching itself free from the scrap metal and coiled cables, the Hollow was clawing its way back out of the rubble, its huge mouth snapping as it dug its powerful, clawed arms and legs fought for purchase. "Can't fire on the door until the patrol members are clear," Ichigo pointed out, hearing Rukia power up her weapons again.

"Who said anything about the door this time?" Rukia shifted her aim and dropped her reticles right over the Hollow as it came loose. Sucking up the metal cables, it turned its head towards them just as she activated the firing control. Muffled cracks of capacitors dumping their charges sounded across the bridge, propelling a slug of solid tungsten to supersonic speeds aimed directly at the Hollow. An explosion of flying metal debris and billowing clouds of powered stone obscured the impact area, and lifting her visor, Rukia leaned forward looking for any sign she'd hit her target. The smoke cleared and she could see her shots had punched through the piles of metal plating and left huge craters in the stone wall of the hangar. "Where-"

"Above us!" Uryu warned, his sensors feeding the threat assessment system, flashing red to alert of an inbound hostile.

Skittering across the uneven ceiling of the hangar and weaving in between the old, darkened hanging lights, the Hollow came rushing towards them. Pulling on the controls, Ichigo backpedaled the ship away just as it came leaping down, twisting in midair, claws and tentacles outstretched. Thinking he had veered back far enough to keep them safe, Ichigo and the others on the bridge realized they weren't the only ones who could set a trap. The plates across its shoulders were already retracted and sparks of yellow light burst from their depths.

No time to turn aside, Ichigo had a front row seat as the Hollow bent down and fired its laser canons. Expecting the worst, he watched everything around him go suddenly dark, pausing a moment as he realized the canopy had blacked out again.

"Hull integrity is holding, thermal tank temp climbing to one percent above base," Renji drawled, "I guess the energy weapon defense system works."

Ichigo knew he didn't have time to bother with the canopy, his only other option was something not strictly recommended without specialized hardware. Pulling up the shortrange sensor system in his neural link, he activated its holo-mode and dumped the output directly to his ocular implants. His vision suddenly swam with a dizzying overlay as rendered data fought with his eye's natural vision and he was thankful the canopy was still dark. He cut the display resolution down to the most basic level and when he looked again, the ship and surrounding hangar, scrap piles and hanging lights were all drawn with simple, glowing grid lines. The painful pins and needles sensation returned in full force as he saw the Hollow, drawn in bright red and stalking towards them with the slow, methodical gait of a hunting predator, confident it had wounded and cornered its prey.

Taxing his new link was not something he wanted to do for long, and his head was beginning to pound from the size of the datastream he had running through his ocular implants even at the lowest resolution, so he did the only thing that seemed obvious: he memorized his surroundings. Committing to memory the positions of the nearby scrap heaps and measuring the distance from the floor to the ceiling, Ichigo turned off the sensor display except for the red image of the Hollow as it paused, perplexed.

The ship had slid backwards and off center from the Hollow, and as Ichigo tried to right their course to bring the forward guns back in line, the Hollow bolted. Dashing to the side, long, strangely jointed legs loping along, it pounded its way over the durocrete and weaved among the towering piles of scrap. Twisting the throttle and working the controls, Ichigo sent the heavy, massive ship into quick pursuit. Realizing he was fighting against the ship, trying to balance the sheer size of it with how agile he needed it to move, Ichigo tried a different tactic. This wasn't a small interceptor and it wasn't a heavy cruiser, this gunship was something new and needed to flown in a different way. Beginning to interpret what the ship was telling him through the vibrations of the controls and shifts of the I-Grav surfaces, Ichigo bent lower to the controls and urged the ship on faster.

"We're flying blind here!" Renji yelled out, working on the canopy controls. There was still too much absorbed heat to release the sleeve and he could tell they had poured on the speed, dipping and weaving as they raced down the length of the hangar.

"Can't get a solid lock, Ichigo," Rukia said, ignoring Renji. Lip bit between her teeth, her reticles kept ghosting across the Hollow as it sprinted along, bounding from one outcropping of metal wreckage to another. She didn't have time to wonder at how exactly Ichigo was managing to avoid all the spires of old spacecraft, tipping the ship on its side and slicing past a heap of wreckage as he banked to stay on target. She was only thankful that he could.

Ichigo came out of the bank near the far end of the hangar, having chased the Hollow out to the darkened recesses of enormous structure, and proceeded to slam on the braking thrusters. Tail dipping dangerously close to the ground, Ichigo brought the ship to a screeching halt as he scanned all around for a sign of the red-outined target. Bringing back up the sensor display in his ocular implants, the green grid appeared once again around him, accompanied by the swift jolt of pain through his head that he resolutely ignored, trying to find where their target could have gone.

A shift in the debris caught his attention. Peering close at the green-rendered scrap pile, Ichigo didn't see the Hollow creeping over the opposite pile until it was too late. Cursing, Ichigo hammer the controls to swerve aside but it was too late, the Hollow landing heavily atop the Zangetsu, jointed limbs and claws trying to dig into the frictionless skin of the black ship. A chorus of yells broke out across the bridge: the target's too close, the sensors are blinded, there's not enough power to keep them from being driven into the ground.

Ichigo ignored all that useless noise as the canopy finally shifted back to clear. Staring up at the Hollow's huge, shield of a face bent down and looking back at them, they went silent and Ichigo pushed the mask of his helmet up off his face. His vision swirling with murky darkness, he watched the Hollow pause for a moment and he knew, on one level or another, that he was staring at it in the eye. "Get off my ship."

The Hollow reared back to plunge through the canopy but nearly lost its grip as the ship beneath it shot upwards, engines flaring brightly in the darkness. Trying to stay in position to strike as it was pushed higher, the Hollow failed to register the full extent of the danger it was in until it was too late. With a jarring impact, the Hollow was crushed between the stone ceiling of the hangar and the reinforced hull of the gunship.

The squeal of stressed metal echoed across the bridge as Ichigo pressed the Hollow hard into the ceiling before cutting the I-Grav down to a low ripple. The ship dropped amid falling rocks and dust, only a few marks marring its black skin as the stunned Hollow slid off to fall heavily to the ground.

"You'll scratch the paint," Ichigo muttered, slamming his mask back down over his face and gunning his engines. Out the canopy, sprawled across the durocrete, the Hollow rose on shaky limbs. Its sleek silver skin was caked with rock dust and had splintered with cracks, red muscle and black blood visible between. Settling the ship down low, he pointed the bladed tip of the ship's nose at the Hollow and heard Rukia say the second best words he could imagine her saying.

"Target locked." There was steel in her voice as she narrowed her sights on her target. Fingers clenched in her interface glove, she smoothly exhaled, cleared her mind, and pulled the firing control. With no air outside the ship to carry sound, the only thing they heard were the muffled vibrations of the booster charges igniting, sending the four-inch tungsten alloy slugs out of their firing chambers to be caught by the Lorentz force created by millions of amperes of current running through the rails, hurling it down the barrels at thousands of meters per second.

At that velocity and at this range, there was no possible way for the Hollow to evade the attack, and Rukia pushed her display visor up to her brow just in time to see the Hollow tumbling backwards away from them, splinters of its metal skin flying off and black, ichorous blood spraying all over the ground.

Ichigo leaned back from the flight controls, looking over his shoulder at Renji and Uryu. "Damage report?"

"Minor stress to the sectional trusses, some damage to the external plating. Hull integrity still at one hundred percent though," Renji said, somewhat impressed the ship could take an impact like that and simply shake it off.

"Alright," Ichigo said, turning back around and bringing the hangar layout up on one of his screens. "Let's get that door op-" he was stopped by the blare of the threat assessment system, lighting the tactical station back up.

Rukia, already working on it, pulled the targeting display back up and projected the results to the front canopy overlay. The screen magnified the Hollow, wounded and staggering, as it pushed itself upright with obvious effort. Grotesquely convulsing, its metal skin strained at the seams across its back and torso until whatever bolts or rivets holding it together snapped apart. Metal skin and stringy flesh parted, putting the obscene union of biomechanization on full display, as it suffered through several most wracking spasms. With a wrenching twist of its body and lash of its barbed tail it essentially split itself in two, sloughing off and freeing itself of its wounded lower body. Clawing away from its now lifeless and mangled lower legs, it bent down as the muscles across its back shifted and slid aside the plates of its skin. Unfolding from what could only be its ribcage, a pair of engines locked into place.

"You gotta be kidding me," Ichigo sighed.

Eerily balancing on its two remaining legs, long tail coiling back and forth, it turned its massive head at them, spread its jaws, and hurled itself into the air. For a moment, Ichigo had the distinct impression the Hollow was staring at him through the front viewport. And laughing at him. Engines searing a bright line through the darkness, the Hollow wheeled and zipped past them with startling agility, flying a direct line to the ship-lock gate.

"Are the patrol enforcers clear of the gate?" Rukia asked, tracking the target as best she could.

"Sensors read no lifesigns in its vicinity," Uryu said, the glow of the screens around him shining off his glasses.

Already lifting the ship to move into pursuit, Ichigo centered the nose at the ship-lock gate across the hangar from them and began to push the throttle up. "Let's get that door open then." A searing flash and the billowing gray brown cloud of dust filtering through the hangar killed the words on his tongue, and he quickly slammed on the braking thrusters. Flipping the front viewport overlay from natural light to thermal only served to prove what he had immediately suspected.

The Hollow had fired its laser cannons at the stone ceiling as it slipped out the broken gate, collapsing the roof on that side of the hangar and trapping them inside. Rukia ran her weapon reticles all across the piled stone rubble looking for some way to punch through it, flipping through and just as quickly discounting various weapon systems on the ship as either ineffectual or too dangerous. Sitting back, Ichigo flipped his mask up and rubbed at his chin.

"We need to get out of here," Ichigo muttered to himself. "That Hollow is out there running loose."

"I'm working on that," Rukia replied testily, her fingers angrily snapping off different buttons and switches.

"Do you think…" Uryu began, garnering their attention with his calm, measured voice, "That Urahara will continue to need this hangar?"

"Uh," Ichigo said blankly, thrown off by the question, "I guess not. The point of it was to build this ship, and here it is."

"And the ship-lock is already destroyed, along with a quarter of the ceiling," Uryu continued, tapping away at the controls of his console.

"Where are you going with this?" Rukia asked, cautiously interested.

"It's not where I'm going," he replied, thinking himself clever, "It's where we're going. Mister Abarai, I have recalibrated the wide and tightbeam emitters to subsonic frequencies, data is waiting for you in the cross-console."

"And…?" Renji said, obliging Uryu and pulling it up at his station. He could see it was a wide-angle sweep of the hangar, along with a control hook for the tightbeam.

"And I'm saying let's forget the door," Uryu said, adjusting his glasses, "And punch out a window."

"Get aboard, double time now," Rangiku ordered through her softsuit helmet comm, standing at the airlock as the officers filed past. Sitting low to the deck, their shuttle was waiting for them, sheltered in the natural stone cavern on the other side of the torn ship-lock gate. Beyond the shuttle's landing lights, valiantly pushing back the darkness, Rangiku could see the searing light of the suns boiling away at the horizon. This tiny rock had such an erratic orbit and rotation that day and night were difficult to predict, but she figured they had at least a couple hours of safety on the dark side of the planetesimal.

Just as they were reaching the shuttle the ground lurched beneath their feet, leaving them all stumbling and their comms suddenly alive with shouts of alarm. A flash of yellow lit them from behind and Toshiro and Rangiku spun back towards the ship-lock door, the landing lights on the shuttle swiveling to shine on clouds of brown and gray rock dust billowing out from the bent open section of the huge metal door.

"The roof just caved in," Rangiku noted. "Do you think-?"

"Look!" one of the officers called out, pointing into cloud of dust. A darker shape drew itself up amidst the thick cloud, its silhouette bending and reforming as it moved steadily closer. The cloud of dust rushed over them before they could finish boarding, and between the darkness of the cavern and the glare from the diffused landing lights, they were suddenly, entirely blinded.

"Fall back!" Toshiro ordered, physically grabbing one officer and hauling him back towards the shuttle. He joined the others as they pounded up the boarding ramp. "Pilot, set inertial dampeners to lockdown, push engines to full burn and rear I-Grav at maximum."

"Sir?" the pilot said, turning back with a raised eyebrow just in time to go white with fear. Out the rear doors of the shuttle, beyond the press of the officers sprinting aboard, the Hollow's enormous head emerged from the dust cloud and dropped level with the ground. Opening wide, coils of metal snaked out at them, barbed tips snapped open and gleaming in the shuttle's landing lights. The pilot screamed inside his helmet.

Vaulting into the seat beside the pilot, Toshiro slammed his hand down onto the dampener control, elbowed the I-Grav up to maximum levels and kicked the throttle, literally with his booted foot, up to full burn. The shuttle strained under the conflicting outputs, the cycling up engines and I-Grav trying to push it forward while the dampener system keeping it locked in place, and Toshiro spun around as Rangiku palmed the control to close the rear hatch. Out the viewport in the closed the door they could see the Hollow looming closer, ready to pounce, just as the engines reached full burn.

While shuttle engines are not as powerful as even the most basic spacecraft engine, designed primarily for extremely short-range transport, using the engine wash directly wasn't what Toshiro had in mind. The particles of rock and dust filtering around the ship rippled and began to flow, pushed by the I-Grav control surfaces, towards the rear. The Hollow barely paused as the engines lit and the emitters came online, opening its mouth wide and chainsaw teeth locking into place, eager to tear it apart.

However, instead of swallowing the shuttle whole, what it got was a mouthful searing agony. The dust flowing around the ship was swept right into the engine wash, super-heated into a cloud of molten rock, and turned into a plume of softly glowing gaseous lava aimed right down the Hollow's gullet. Watching it jerk away from the extreme heat only to writhe about trying to get the molten rock dust out of its mouth, Toshiro kept his face fixed from showing his satisfaction as he reached for the dampener control. "Chew on that for a while," he said, his tone clipped as he deactivated the lockdown system, sending the shuttle jetting away out of the cavern and up into the darkness.

Rangiku struggled her way over the tangled arms and legs of the officers in the rear compartment. No one had had time to strap in or secure themselves before Toshiro had vaulted all of them off the surface of Pendulum. "Captain," she said, extricating herself with some effort and leaning over next to his seat at the front of the shuttle, "What do you think happened to Ichigo and the others?"

"Pilot," Toshiro said, turning to the still-pale and slightly shaking man. "Uh, at ease," he said finally, thinking it better the terrified man keep his hands off the controls. His fingers dancing over the holo-panels, Toshiro repressurized the interior while he brought the widebeam comms online. "I'll see if I can get-" Toshiro turned his head just as Rangiku was removing her helmet, her thick strawberry tresses spilling out around her head. Her hair wasn't the only thing spilling out as she unzipped the collar of her softsuit and took a deep, chest heaving breath of fresh air. "-them raised on the comms," Hitsugaya ground out, rolling his eyes at her antics as he turned to face the controls again.

The sensor display began flashing wildly as the young captain set a course back to the Hyorin Maru, and together both her and his eccentric partner leaned in to study it. "Is it that thing again?" Matsumoto asked.

"Thermal signature is all wrong and…" Toshiro adjusted the sensors to a tighter resolution, "It's coming from a different spot on the surface." Looking close at the sensor display, they glanced at each other before turning to look out the viewport next to him. Through the glassite they had a clear view of the blasted, ravine-scarred face of Pendulum, the heat flash of an explosion grabbing their attention as it was swiftly overtaken by the huge, billowing cloud of gritty, dusty smoke it generated. "Huh."

The smoke and dust whipped past the canopy of the black ship as Ichigo flew through the neat hole Rukia had blasted through the hangar wall, the Sparrow Bee zipping out right behind him. Opening up into the side of a jagged ravine, he pulled back on the controls to nose up the ship, then twisted the throttle to launch the ship spaceward. "Ishida, get a comm line open to the shuttle for the location of the Hollow."

"Already doing it, and sensor results are being crosstalked to the tactical station."

"Renji, the engines feel a little choked."

"Keep your pants on, I'm switching the levels to stellar instead of terrestrial flight. There, reactor limiters lifted and control surfaces set to combat flaps."

Ichigo didn't have to say anything to Rukia before she began speaking. "The Sparrow Bee is moving into an escort position for the shuttle and I've got a fix on the Hollow's thermal signature. It's gaining altitude and on an intercept course."

"I see it," Ichigo muttered, his ocular display readouts and the bracketed square glowing on the front of the canopy interlocking over the tiny streak of red-orange as it arced up towards them. "Now, let's see what this thing can really do."

The reflections of the stars slid across the surface of the black ship as its engines spun up, pushing it into a steep dive. The enraged Hollow, having returned to its spaceborne wedge like shape, was streaking up at them from the surface with its laser cannons glowing a hot yellow. Unconcerned, Ichigo remained true to course, hearing Rukia working on focusing her reticles as they sped towards one another.

Cannon fire sliced out into the dark as searing yellow beams tracked across the stars, neither finding their marks. Twenty thousand meters. Fifteen thousand. Ichigo gunned the throttle, his feet making minute adjustments as his fingers reached out to lightly touch the hand controls, preparing. Seven thousand meters. Two thousand meters.

Five hundred meters. The Hollow's huge shield-like head was rearing up in the dead center of his canopy, coils of claw tipped tentacles sliding into view.

One hundred meters. Ichigo's reflexes kicked into action.

Uryu, his eye on the rapidly dwindling time-to-intercept counter in the corner of the main sensor screen, only had time to make a noise of caution before Ichigo rolled the ship in a tight spiral. His stomach lurching in his gut, the inertial dampeners fought to keep him from flying too hard against his restraints, to the point they only left bruises instead of making him black out. Before he even had time to realize what Ichigo was doing, he had fired the braking thrusters and slammed open the control surfaces across the leeward side of the ship, pulling them into a crushing turn that had the structural beams of the ship groaning in protest. "Cutting it a little tight," Uryu managed to grind out, the sudden shift in g-forces pulling all of them hard into their seats.

"This ship is big, but it sure can move when it wants to," Ichigo replied.

The Hollow went skidding by over them, unable to cut inside their turning radius in time, giving Ichigo ample opportunity to ease out of their turn and into the Hollow's wake, which in turn gave Rukia ample opportunity to gain a solid target lock. The weapon reticles lined up in Rukia's vision as she flipped the weapon control to missiles, then fired. Two sparks raced out into the night, blazing across the darkness as they chased the Hollow. Cutting a sharp turn, the Hollow flung itself to the side, the missiles turning to follow. Another dodge, and another as the missiles closed in, the four of them unable to turn away from the inevitable.

"Wait, what's it do-" Renji asked, seeing the Hollow abandon its zigzag pattern, speeding as fast as it could in a single direction. The two missiles flew faster, gaining on it as it raced onwards. Leaning close to get a better look, all four of them drew back as the small flare that was the Hollow suddenly blazed with light, shining like a beacon in the dark. It had left the sanctuary of the shadow of Pendulum and was now exposed to direct sunslight. Worse, the two missiles flew out after it only to explode as soon as the light touched them, the heat and solar wind stripping them apart and igniting their warheads.

Rukia slammed her hand down onto her consoles as the Hollow wheeled and rushed back towards the shadow of the planetoid, streams of melted metal blown away by the sunslight stretching out into the dark. Its skin boiling and bubbled, the whole of it glowing a dull red, it came blazing at them with a new level of reckless abandon. Scrambling to reacquire target lock, Rukia cursed colorfully under breath before nearly shouting, "Ichigo, that's a collision course!"

"Coming in too fast," Ichigo shouted back, barreling out of the Hollow's way with a less than artful dodge. He knew he had undone Rukia's attempts at target lock, but it was either that or be skewered and eaten by a blazing hot alien ship.

"Target is coming around again for another pass," Uryu warned, tracing its projected path through the sensor display. Without warning two bright beams of yellow light sliced across their path and raked over the ship, crisscrossing over its dorsal fuselage and down one of the wings.

The canopy black again, Ichigo brought up the nav system in his link, seeing the Hollow's distance and trajectory as well as his own. "Damage report?" he called to Renji.

"Hull is holding steady, but the thermal tank is up to seventeen percent. Don't let it hit us with concentrated fire."

Ichigo was about to snark back at him when the Hollow, coming in fast behind its laser assault, was suddenly upon them. The blackened canopy cleared to the image of the Hollow ship's braking thruster fire as it flew past, snaking its whiplike tail across the midsection of the ship like snare. The noise of rubbing metal and bending hull plates squealed in their ears as the Hollow tightened its tail and ignited its main thrusters to full burn.

"Oh shit! Don't let it hit us with that thing either!" Renji added.

"It's pulling us laterally," Uryu shouted, barely able to hear the others.

"Hull sensors are going red!" Renji warned, his eyes trained on the needles and dials above him.

Another crunch from the plating beneath the tail wrapped around the ship was all Ichigo was going to stand. Fingers wrapping around the controls, he flicked closed the control surfaces and twisted the throttle, needing all the thrust from the engines to wrench themselves loose. He felt the ship straining and slip free for a moment, the tail loosing purchase as the ship drove forward, and for a second Ichigo thought they were going to pull free.

Until the Hollow spun them about, turning what would have been linear momentum into angular momentum. The Zangetsu went spinning out of control as the Hollow unlatched its tail, the engines at full burn and all the I-Grav surfaces closed, it had no way to right itself, the combination of thrust and rotation leaving it tumbling erratically.

Right out of the shadow of the planet and into the direct, brilliant sunsshine.

"Get us out of the light!" Rukia shouted. The air temperature inside the ship immediately shot up as the ship's exterior surface baked under direct exposure to the heat and radiation from the suns.

"Thermal tank is rising, forty percent… fifty-two… sixty-eight…" Renji called out.

"I've got it, I've got it," Ichigo swore, flicking the control surfaces open and righting their spinning trajectory. "Rukia, start firing when I get the ship turned around."

"We don't have target lock," she snapped at him. "Besides, anything we fire will be atomized by solar wind!"

"That's the idea!" Ichigo shot back.

Rukia opened her mouth to tell him off, then paused, getting what Ichigo was hinting at, then immediately went back to her controls, a disbelieving smile curving her lips. "This is crazy!"

"That's the idea," Ichigo muttered, getting the ship back pointed back at the Hollow and twisting the throttle.

"What's the idea?" Renji quietly asked Uryu, who only shrugged in mute confusion.

From beyond the haze of solar light the black ship approached. The Hollow, turning to pursue the other, easier targets, stopped as it picked up a trace of it on its sensors. If it were possible for it to experience as human an emotion as disbelief, the Hollow was frozen by it, hanging unmoving in space as the great knife-edge shape of the Zangetsu threw its shadow across the system. The sunslight washed over it, dark reflections of the suns' swirling, flaring surfaces spreading across it as the skin of the ship hungrily absorbed the heat and light. The fury of the stars in an obsidian mirror. A black sun.

It centered itself on the Hollow as the gunbays slid open.

Rukia clenched her fist, activating her firing control and feeling more than hearing the main railgun cannons pulse, millions of amperes of electricity accelerating their deadly projectiles. These weren't the gatling style, rapid fire railguns of her old ship, these cannons sacrificed fire rate for caliber and range, but she still kept the firing control activated, forcing the cannons to chamber and fire as quickly as the loading mechanisms allowed. Thankfully the Hollow sitting safely in the shadow of the planetoid, watching this all unfold, had no idea the true danger it was in.

A tungsten alloy slug fired from a railgun barrel on the Zangetsu leaves the muzzle at close to three thousand meters per second. The range to the target is just over nine thousand meters, a third of that distance is illuminated by the direct sunslight while the remaining distance is in the shadow of the planetoid Pendulum. In the space of the full second the unshielded tungsten slug is exposed to the light, its surface temperature quickly exceeds four thousand degrees Kelvin. At this temperature, the slug undergoes complete and rapid sublimation, moving from solid to a highly energetic free-liquid. Finally, while the slug is no longer a solid, its constituent particles have only lost a percentage of their original velocity.

Over fractions of a second, the sunslight has turned the armor-piercing railgun cannons into superheated molecular shotguns. Exactly what Ichigo had counted on. Hitting the Hollow across all of its facing edges, the spray of molten tungsten literally burned it alive. Its armored plates, which had moderately protected it from thermal radiation as it flew briefly out of the shadow to evade the missiles, were no match for the direct application of superheated metal. Cracking and pitting as they boiled away, they exposed flesh and muscle to the molten metal as it kept raining down on it.

Following in close behind their assault, the Zangetsu was just about to cross the eccliptical boundary into Pendulum's shadow when four thundering explosions rocked the ship in rapid succession. Curses were yelled as red lights began flashing across the bridge and sirens began to wail. Putting the commotion out of his mind, Ichigo left whatever new calamity had befallen his ship to the hands of the other three, intent on at least getting them out of the searing sunslight.

"No, no no no… no-no-no-no!" Rukia yelled, flipping up her visor and working the controls at her station at a frenzied pace.

"No hull breach!" Renji shouted, somewhat relieved, "But the thermal tank is up to ninety-one percent, don't let it hit us again. At all."

"That may be a bit more than Ichigo can handle, he isn't exactly known for his subtlety," Uryu pointed out.

"Would you two shut up, what the hell exploded?" Ichigo snapped back at them, limping the ship into the shadow.

"The coolant systems on the four forward cannons," Rukia answered with a distinctly unladylike snarl, slamming her palms down on the console. "No way to vent the heat with all that sunslight, it was hotter outside the ship than in. The exchangers got fried trying to cool the rails, so now the main guns are trashed."

"We've got more guns, don't we?" Ichigo asked. "Tell me we've got more guns."

"Surface temp is still too high to risk arming missiles but-"

The comm system chirped to life, calling for attention and Uryu reflexively established a channel, flicking the audio over to the main speakers.

"This is Captain Toshiro Hitsugaya-" The front canopy shifted to clear and the four of them glanced out the facing viewports, seeing a spark against the black as it approached. A long, silver-white streak of engine wash in its wake, one of the most advanced hardsuits they'd ever seen banked in their direction, giving them a dazzling view as the starlight shined off the pair of huge glimmering solar paneled wings extending behind it. The angular planes of its armored plating were patrol force blue and ice-white, it carried an immense long-barreled coilgun, and it moved with a speed and precision that hinted at its combat potential. "-Of the P-F Assault Hardsuit Daiguren. It appears you could use an assist."

"Captain Hitsugaya, our main weapons are currently offline," Rukia interjected before Ichigo could speak.

"Understood," Toshiro replied, his impressive hardsuit zipping in close enough to look through the canopy viewports on the Zangetsu. "You won't mind if I borrow this then."

The sound of creaking hinges and a rough, wrenching bang echoed through the ship as the four of them exchanged wondering glances. "Captain Hisugaya?" Rukia asked.

"It's clear that heat is only going to do so much here," Toshiro replied, flying past the canopy again in a rush of silver and blue, "I think it's time to cool things down a bit." The Hollow, smoking and melted, had turned to face them and was on approach, showing the full extent of the damage it suffered. Portions of its silvery metal plates had melted together under the light of the suns while others had cracked and split by the boiling tungsten spray. The whole of it was either charred to black, glowing red, or scorched and melted, yet it still came on, its horrid maw opening wide.

"You don't learn, do you?" and Toshiro flung what he had pried out of one of the Zangetsu's damaged gunbays. Spinning end over end, it sailed across the empty void directly at the accelerating Hollow, as Toshiro shouldered his rifle. Syncing his hardsuit frame to his targeting system, he fine-tuned the aim of his rifle, tracking the reticle as it skimmed across his eye. Zeroed in and locked on, Toshiro puffed his braking jets to bring him to a stop, facing the Hollow as it surged towards him.

From the bridge of the Zangetsu the four of them watched as Toshiro hung there in space after hurling something at the approaching Hollow, leveling his rifle and waiting to fire. The Hollow had size, and speed, and agony-fueled hunger on its side, but Toshiro held his ground, unconcerned.

A flash from the muzzle lit his hardsuit and the thrusters across his back fired with a small, anticlimactic puff. The thruster force countered the coilgun's as it let loose a single shot, the bullet proceeding to rupture the coolant tank he had thrown just as it entered the Hollow's massive mouth. Engulfed in a sudden cloud of white, the Hollow froze, literally, as its suns-baked and molten tungsten-covered body came in direct contact with the frigid coolant. Rapid temperature change leading to extreme differential splintered its plated skin, exposing more of the super-hot metal and flesh beneath, resulting in a chain reaction that violently tore it apart.

They watched him methodically shoulder his hardsuit rifle and turn in their direction, revealing the Hollow behind as it shattered apart. The glittering cloud of coolant sparkled in a dazzling array of colors as the biomechanical body within it seemed to simply come undone, splinters of its remains tumbling off on their initial trajectories or otherwise caught in the gravity wells of the nearby suns.

The comm blinked to life again as Toshiro's voice sounded across the bridge. "You said there are going to be more of these things?"

With the armor panels and defense sleeve retracted, the top airlock docking ring sealed with a hiss of equalizing pressure as the patrol force shuttle connected to the Zangetsu. Ichigo, leaning backwards on his station, watched Uryu and Renji prepare to leave. Their vacant stations at the rear of the bridge served as a sharp reminder that as much as he'd prefer to rely only on Rukia and himself, what Urahara had said was true. Without Renji and Uryu at engineering and astrometrics, the battle they'd just fought would have likely had a very different outcome.

Stepping around the raised boarding ramp set into the floor, Rukia made her way across the small loading deck toward the bridge after finally having time to change into a proper ship's flightsuit. Black, form fitting and paneled like Ichigo's, she finally felt a bit more professional now that she'd no longer have to operate the gunnery controls in ill-fitting, borrowed pants and an ink-stained pressure shirt. The status light above her flipped to green, signaling a secure dock and stable life support, and as the airlock door swung gently down a volume of blonde hair came tumbling down after it. Detective Matsumoto, hanging quite literally upside-down from the ceiling of the boarding deck, offered Rukia a brilliant smile before grabbing one of the railings and pulling herself onto the ship, twisting in midair to land somewhat cat-like on her feet.

"Hello again! This is some ship, it's so black on the outside we had a tough time getting the shuttle lined up right!"

"I… see," Rukia tentatively agreed. Somewhat off guard by the detective's boisterous attitude, and certain physical attributes, Rukia nodded politely as she made her way to the bridge. The soldier in her, the one who valued discipline and combat potential and assessed situations for tactical strengths and weaknesses on reflex, didn't quite know how to deal with Detective Rangiku Matsumoto. It was obvious the detective was skilled in investigation and forensic analysis, otherwise they'd never have caught up with them. Rukia had seen her confidently handle a weapon during the encounter in the hangar, and as executive officer aboard the Hyorin Maru, she undoubtedly had command of the ship while Hitsugaya had been piloting his assault hardsuit.

And yet, she was just so utterly… girly. Rukia found this line of thinking bothersome. It wasn't that it made her self-conscious or envious, but all the same, she didn't find herself not self-conscious or un-envious either.

"Alright people, let's get a move on," Rangiku said, cupping a hand to her mouth and calling up into the shuttle. Uryu and Renji appeared at the door to the bridge as Shuhei, Hanataro, and Kon in his goldtone hardsuit slipped from the shuttle to the docking deck with varying levels of grace.

"You talked them out of arresting us?" Shuhei asked as he helped Hanataro up from the floor, "I wish I could've seen that."

"Eh, it's just a temporary reprieve, and it's in exchange for more work," Renji explained.

"Does it have anything to do with those things we've been roped into fighting a couple times now?"

"Yeah." Renji clapped a pale and drawn Hanataro on the shoulder and offered him a winning smile. "It's ten hours until the end of the worlds. What d'ya say we keep that from happening?" Hanataro looked as if a light breeze might knock him over.

Shuhei pursed his lips in serious thought, evaluating the weight of Renji's statement. "We'd better get moving then," he said, coming to a decision. A rustle at his back made him flinch, then move off further to the side once he realized another figure had slipped down from the shuttle, moving as quietly as a feather.

Dressed in a modest flightsuit of dark material and wearing her dark hair in a single plait down her back, stood a woman Renji recognized immediately. Her face, calm and composed turned towards Uryu, to which she offered only the barest of nods.

Ichigo, coming up behind Renji and Uryu, looked over them both at her, his brows creasing as he wracked his memory for her name. "Hey, isn't that…?"

"Kurotsuchi's girl," Renji gaped, whipping his head at Uryu. "She's your crew?"

"Her qualifications are impeccable," Uryu sniffed, pushing up his glasses.

"Mister Ishida," Nemu said, speaking for the first time. "I was able to glean several pieces of sensor information regarding the present situation while in custody." There was a certain softness in her voice as she spoke to him, but it was buried beneath layers of dispassionate intonation. "Will we be returning to the QNC Longbow or shall I upload the data to this…" she had caught sight of the consoles on the bridge, giving her the slightest of pauses, "Vessel?"

"No Nemu, we're heading back to the Longbow to continue the mission. I'll debrief you on what's happened and then we'll begin analyzing that data," Uryu answered, steering her away from the group.

"Alright kids," Rangiku said cheerfully, "We'll be in touch!" With that, she reached up and hoisted herself back up through the airlock and onto her shuttle.

"C'mon," Ichigo said to Rukia, the others drifting off to separate conversations. "We've got a pair of docking maneuvers to do to get them back to their ships. She nodded and followed him back to the bridge, Kon following in her wake.

"You're gonna put Renji and Uryu back on their own ships?" Kon asked, sitting the hardsuit in front of the sensor display and idly flipping some switches.

"Yeah, they have their own ships and their own crews. I can't just keep them here." Ichigo spun up the engines and set them on course to the Longbow sitting in orbit once the shuttle had undocked, zipping its way back towards the patrol force ship. Docking maneuvers were completed in short order and soon the Longbow and the Zabi Maru were both powered up and moving into formation off Ichigo's flanks as he set a course away from the twin suns.

"Ichigo, the Hyorin Maru is coming along side and matching speed, are they supposed to be tagging along?" Kon asked, softly tapping his metal chin as he studied the sensor display.

A mix of confusion and annoyance crossed his face as Ichigo activated an audio comm to the patrol force ship. "Zangetsu to the Hyorin Maru, is there a particular reason you're coming into formation with us?"

Toshiro's face appeared on the screen, replacing audio comm with vid-comm and giving him a critical look. "I agreed to your ten hour grace period, but did you really think I was going to let you go off alone?" Leaning back, he crossed his arms over his chest and sighed, "For the next half day, consider me your wingman."

"So you'll have a pirate, a vigilante, and a cop as your wingmen for this thing?" Kon asked, suppressing a chuckle. "That's weird company you keep. Strength in numbers I guess, though."

"Weird company is rich coming from an A-I… wait, what'd you say?" Ichigo asked, turning towards Kon.

"About your wingmen?"

"No," Ichigo clarified, shifting his gaze to Rukia sitting in the tactical station. "Strength in numbers." He could see that she'd caught on immediately and was even now loading up the loading up the location of the nearest tightbeam relay as she spun the comm system up onto her console.

Turning back around and pulling one of the articulated displays closer, Ichigo began doing the same thing before pausing to say, "Kon, you never said which ship it was you determined to be the origin of all the thefts and abductions. That mothership is going to be headed right for it, so I need to know where that ship is."

"Well… It's a little tricky," Kon hedged.

Ichigo stopped what he was doing and turned to the hardsuit 'body' Kon currently inhabited, his features cross. "But you do know, right? You did manage to figure it out after all this work we've done?"

"Of course I have," Kon snapped indignantly. He went back to poking his metal index fingers together again, looking suddenly ill at ease. "But I don't think you're going to like what it means when I tell you."

"Stopping fuckin' around and tell me, we don't have time for games!"

"Alright, alright mister potty mouth!" Kon snapped. "It's the colonial navy prison ship, the CNCS Heuco Mundo."

A prison ship. The ramifications of it tumbled pell-mell through his head, going off in a dozen directions at once. Was it still under the control of the navy? Did that mean the navy was in on this sudden surge of bizarre Hollows? Had these Hollows been experimented on aboard the prison ship? Is that how they'd become so different from the run of the mill ones Rukia had fought for so long before they'd met? Had the ship mutinied? If so, why hadn't the navy done anything to get it back under control?

A cold truth began to dawn on him. The prisoners, that's the been the source of humans they'd experimented on. Captured Hollow DNA turned into genetic biomodifications and forcibly administered to the human prisoners. It's a perfect setting to perform such experimentation, with enough resources to support a large population.

"You extrapolated its trajectory," Ichigo said, eyes fixed far away as he continued along his various trains of thought. "What's its heading?"

Kon sighed, a strange noise since he required no air to speak and didn't have lungs in the first place. "Current projections show, with an eighty-two point six-six-seven percent probability…" Kon turned his metal, leonine head directly at Ichigo, "That it is enroute to-"

---

"Karakura Station," Orihime said cheerfully over her comm, "This is Traffic Control to the CNCS Heuco Mundo." As she watched the ship sliding slowly through the black, drawing ever closer to the station, she felt an unexplainable twinge of chilly fear. Depressing the comm again, she swallowed her nervousness and spoke again, "Please respond."

---

Drawing itself up from the shadows, it willed itself into existence, just as it had countless times before. At the fringes of its awareness, it could feel Ichigo settle back in the helm of this new ship. Though they both denied it, even to themselves, the thrill they shared of moving through this dark, endless void returned as Ichigo pressed the ship faster, something that had always been and would likely always remain.

It looked about at this false world, this fabricated reality it had constructed from deep within the genetic memory it had amasses with a mixture of resignation and anticipation. The huge, magnificent ships sliding slowly through the night, each one a pillar of glass and metal extending out into a future no one foresaw and stretching back into a past they'd all soon forget. Gleaming in the harsh, stark light, they were so familiar.

It stretched a hand out to the darkness beyond and gathered up a fistful. Blowing across it gently, it let the inky blackness sift through its fingers, fragments of memories dredged up by the sensation. This too was familiar, but something to have again. Something it needed again.

"I have done all I can," it said. Flicking its eyes to the star in the distance and stretching out the other hand, it let the pale light shine in bands through the fingers. The slash of yellow was vivid against the darkness, sending its memories reeling back over the centuries. "So many years… I never stopped searching…" it choked. "I will see you again, soon."

It looked up towards where the ships were headed, straightening its posture as he dropped his arms, tightening his fists at his sides. "And together, we will watch this system burn."