The icy breath that licked the floors with sleet parted to reveal the sturdy steel platforms that stretched through the bulkhead. Ribbed steel girders, equally spaced with a uniform coating of dust, lined the roof and walls. No lights were on, not even emergency strobes. The power drain must have been used for something though but the state of the ship left the team questioning what was being powered if not the ship.

The footprints continued on deeper into the darkened corridor. The ribbing left jet black shadows that moved as they did, startling the imaginative Reaper, his mind already receptive to the idea of bogeymen hiding in at the periphery of his senses. Chilled air still followed them inward with the deep freeze haunting their footprints.

Every hatch they passed was tested with spin of the hatch lock and a hard kick to see if they could gain access to the otherside. No luck, the ice had thoroughly permeated through the gears and joints ,freezing them in place. Using the flamethrowers would have been a terrible idea inside the cramped quarters of the corridor. Every hatch was the same, frozen shut. The footprints continued going through. It seemed as if the scientists knew where they were going , never seeming to stop to check hatches or door panels. Odd, very odd. Scientists usually stick around to study such an amazing discovery. They would take the time to investigate. Not here though. It was enough to cause Ryuki to consider more nefarious plans were in mind when the scientists entered. Perhaps they even knew exactly what to look for. Ryuki knew that the couldn't be right. No one was ever in here until now,so there couldn't be any way that they knew what was here. Indeed, it made no sense to Ryuki. Which left only disturbing possibilities of what happened to the science team.

Ryuki surmised that they walked at least a kilometer before the reached an open hatch. That wasn't right, the ship couldn't have been that wide. Karin claimed that the ship couldn't be more than 500 meters wide and only the largest battlecarriers were ever that big. The corridors didn't even hint at the true size of the ship as each section was the same as the previous ,the ship seemingly repeating the same hatches over and over again.

The hatch was nondescript and the only difference to it was that it was slightly ajar. Opening it revealed a junction with four corridors leading into different directions. "Frak, you know what this means" Barry commented. It would be unwise to split up in such a vast vessel. With the lack of long distance communications , they could all disappear into the depths to never reappear. "Alright, ten minutes in then ten minutes out, we meet back here in twenty. Make sure you use your neon tracers and glow sticks. Use the tracers to leave a trail for yourselves."

Ryuki took the farthest tunnel on his own. The others splint into three teams. When they asked why he went alone,he flipped the ignition latch on his flamethrower,lighting the blue flame at the toothy maw of the launcher. He nodded his head and disappeared into the dark corridor. No one thought to stop one wished to join him. "If Im not here when you get back, Barry takes command".

They left the junction without a word with their minds firmly concentrating on survival. But what was Ryuki thinking of while wading through the darkness ,why go alone?

He was preoccupied. Survival had been pushed from the forefront. Instead his thoughts were swirling around the hull of the ship. Why? Why was it here? He couldn't understand it. It shouldn't even exist. But its here and perhaps in its travels through unknown space,it brought with it something that latched onto it, at the fringes of the universe. Perhaps they waited just outside of existence, capturing this ship to host their corporeal bodies and traveling to where they dont belong. What else could explain the horrid bio-corrupted composites that haunted the hangar? No no no, that wasn't right, Ryuki couldn't believe what he was thinking. There isn't something outside trying to peek in and this vessel wasn't its fiery chariot. The Tradewind could have fell into a wormhole , while on routine resupply duty, and then deposited into the thick ice crust of this planetoid.

Of course, it made sense. Wormholes were theoretically possible. Dark intelligences at the edges of the universe, not possible at all. Why would they even exist? No reason. A wormhole has a reason to exist, according to the standard model of astrophysics. It was completely possible. Xenos and malicious lifeforms have no reason to exist. At all.

It was a comforting thought. Only for a while. Science only could explain what can be seen. And these things? No ones seen them except for Ryuki and his team. To the universe, none of this exist. The universe doesn't care to bother even investigating ifit was even possible for this ship, these creatures and these people ,to exist. To the scientists ,there was nothing to explain since there was nothing to be seen.

So this unknown void, a place that fell through human consciousness, this place that existed only for Ryuki to see, it wasn't real at all. It was home sickness and disorganized commanding officers that put them in this position. Those mechs that just walked on their own, those were glitches, that blood was just battery fluid.

The Zephyr combat frame does not use batteries. Its power source is a 300 megawatt microfusion reactor, supplemented by a ten cell emergency fuel cell with thirty thousand kilowatt-hours of power. The power system was directly connected to the life support systems. To prevent it falling into enemy hands, the reactor fused its coolant lines when the life support failed. The Zephyrs cannot run when the life-support systems have failed. It cannot power itself.

It should not pulsate with oozing fluid. Its body does not quiver upon being shot. It is a machine. It cannot do what they saw.

Ryuki's suit light dimmed, the manually charged battery slowly draining. The darkness seemed to encroach on his peripheral vision. Tiny fragments of the shadows nipped at his heels , the thin tendrils of the night wriggling in anticipation for the flashlight to die. His eyes darted but his vision was unfocused. His mind was clouded with visions of malicious nothingness. His eyes were searching for what it couldn't see.

The light finally died as he crossed the threshold into the cargo bay. Dim yellow warning lights strobed. The shadows convulsed under the waning flashes. Ryuki's eyes focused into infinity. The walls seemed to spread out , then expand before his eyes. Details sharpened, individual bolts and welds came into view as if they grew in size or under a microscope. The walls rushed away from him, the sudden visual shift causing vertigo to overtake his sense of balance.

As the world seemed to just disappear away from him , cold fingers slipped under his shirt. The sweat running down his sides had met sprites of cold air. The freezing touch jostled his mind back into reality. His lethargy was shaken out by the shivers that ran up and down his spine.

He looked again. The walls stood motionless. The ceiling was still above him and the floor still solidly underneath. Discomfort overtook the sense of dread as his inner-suit absorbed the rivers of sweat that snaked along his skin. No memories, none at all ,of the last few minutes. His mind was completely blank, the traumatic visions of oblivion seemingly never happening. No memories at all of the last few minutes.

The timer had rang three hours ago. It was a psychotic break. Strange though that it left him standing. Three hours of walking into the unknown,immersed in an ocean of shadows. Where is this, it didn't matter. There was no way he would get back. The strobes flickered in the distance, casting rays onto scaffolding and mobile stairs.

He took a few moments to recompose and recharge his flashlight. The crank on the flashlight body was stiff , each rotation taking more strength than expected. A few more turns and the red battery indicator turned green. His breath floated past the shaft of light , sparkling in the darkness.

With the flashlight attached to his folding machine pistol ,he swept the bay looking for clues to where he brought himself to in his waking dream.

A pyramid of crates , with the Sol Invictus stamped on them, the coat of arms of the Sol Republic. Empty hangars , where the aerospace fighters would be stored. Gurneys and cranes next to Battle Frame alcoves. Racks upon empty missile racks. Its as if the entire bay was stripped of all valuables. Spots where the dust was thinner, thats where the contraband had once been. Could it be, the scientists weren't here for archaeological insights? They were raiders, studying newly won spoils of war. It made sense, the freight elevator was much too big for any normal cargo.

So where did the contents of this cargo bay go? Nothing other than possesed robots were in the sub-hangar. The science complex was too small to store anything. So where? The ships. They left none behind. Everything they took were on them. And when they left ,they had no space for Ryuki's team.

While the idea of being left behind with no way to escape was terrifying, there was something more disturbing. Why? The base crew seemed lethargic but anyone would be in a permanent winter scientists seemed stereotypical shut-ins, their source of fun could have been spending hours looking at agar dishes, plotting out the projected population growth of a streptococcus colony.

This ship wasn't the end of this strange nightmare. Something more is going on , something far away from here, something more alien than a time traveling starship filled with sinewy mechanical was all the time in the world ,though,to find out the answer to the question.

His bearings slowly came back to him as he paced aimlessly through the deserted belly of the ship. A solid green light, off to the other side of the hold, caught his attention. He saw it , at the far end, a small room set off from the mech alcoves. A control room.

That was it, the way out. There had to be a hatch control for the cargo bay. The walls weren't ordinary, they retracted. Huge cargos would travel through wide berths , wide enough for assault spider walkers. The panel glowed when he reached it. There was no dust on it.

It made complete sense. Taking the contents of an entire cargo hold would be much easier if the bay doors were open. None of them had seen a hint of a cargo door since all evidence of it existing was buried under ice. Whatever work was done , all tracers were paved over by solid ice.

He tapped the panel waking it from its sleep mode. A series of green triangles swept through the lightened panel, followed by status indicators for hydraulics of the doors. A warning hologram popped up in front of him, that the structural integrity of the actuators was compromised. The ice must have infiltrated into the joints, possibly cracking them apart . There was nothing he could do about it though, he was no engineer, no matter how much his mother tried to persuade him. Those years studying math and physics, lonely years that kept him away from friends, had left a bad impression on him. It was doubly so when the only people he did interact with him were actively plotting to sabotage his projects and assignments. The high tension environment, not unlike the one he was in now, was distasteful. Not because of the anxiety or fear of failure but because of the cutthroats that surrounded him. They all had a singular goal and that goal did not include working as a team. It finally broke, his will to continue his studies, when his team members on a project to develop a low cost energy generation system decided that their grades would do better if the competition had been forced to quit. Idiotic as that thought was, the maliciousness that these people exuded had clouded reason. He was forced to finish the project on his own with the end result being his success and the failure of his backstabbing team members.

The memory flashed, instantly ,of that project. He had a team and it was his job to assure their safety. And he knew his lancemates felt the same about each other. That mutual camaraderie was what kept him going through boot camp and the deep void of space. He pressed a few floating symbols. The ferrofluid hydraulics began to whir. The bay door cracked open just a bit with icy water spraying into the cargo hold. Where it was opening to didn't matter. It was his path back to his team.