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Everyone was wide awake as they approached Europa. Jackson was serving fresh hot meals but they were staying away from Europa now. Their ship was unable to approach. His hot meal was slowly getting cold and no one was willing to touch it for now. Both the IRPF black list transport and the Adrift Sphere were not moving any closer right now. They were scanning a debris field.

“Are you sure it’s dead?”

Lauren was covering her mouth in shock, stunned at the display before them. Hoary was checking systems, and they could see the nervous twitches about her as she did so. “Confirm, no sign of life, activity, or whisper signs. It is dead. Why did it not fade back to where it came from?”

Orashen gulped as she took it in. The IRPF Agamemnon, a heavy cruiser flagship of the IRPF combat fleet, combined with a dozen of her escorts, were ripped apart in the vacuum of space, a huge whisper creature impaled through the ship’s bow; the only way they had been able to definitively identify the vessel in question.

It had the shape of an Orca. No sign of how it propelled itself through space, but it did have the Orca flippers, except this whisper creature was nearly as large as the Agamemnon, almost one-hundred and seventeen meters in length and twenty-eight meters wide and eleven meters at the vertical beam. This living creature was in space and had somehow ripped apart an entire IRPF battlegroup by itself, according to the battle signs.

Fighter size craft, heavy fighters that could operate independent of a mothership, patrol class vessels of similar size to the Adrift Sphere, destroyers that were made to chase down ships like Orashen’s own, frigates for fighter hangers and support ships and the heavy cruiser itself, all rendered pointless before this creature.

Unexploded ordinance of missiles and torpedoes floated through the field. However, Hoary could find no air pockets using her sensors, no signs of life or controlled motion, no energy signals, nothing. A fleet of two thousand vectors had been shredded to pieces, and no one had even heard them cry out for help.

Lauren was calling her boss. Orashen could only stare, and the crew dared not approach for fear the whisper creature was still alive. The liquid looking body of what appeared to be living blood with no muscle or organs made no effort to move, and by all readings, Hoary was certain it was dead, but it hadn’t faded back to its point of origin like other whispers and Owls when slain.

There was certainly no top secret corporate capturing tech present for something this large, and none they knew of. It was what made whispers so dangerous. An incursion would come out of one vector without warning, shredding and puree their internal organs and bones to make the liquid mass of their body then rip out of their victim before assaulting other victims and trying to spur further Whisper Dives to gain more numbers.

Whisper Dives were so incredibly rare, but even one whisper could become dozens in an hour. The largest scale event involved a mass suicide on Europa for reasons of unknown origin that resulted in so many Whispers that Europa’s third city, MacAffee, had been nuked from orbit out of existence and then hit with Rods from Gods to be certain it was permanently dead.

Owls though, Owls were scarier. They didn’t require a host to enter the universe. They would suddenly appear, and as Lexington had experienced, were nearly unstoppable. Fully automatic high caliber weapons might slow them, but it would take anti-tank or anti-ship munitions to put one down permanently.

Again, both normally faded back into their reality after being slain. This one had not.

Orashen listened to the call with Lauren and her fleet command. “Commander Strain, I understand that the last you heard the Agmemnon was going to investigate a strange reading on Europa. I am telling you, we found them. They’re gone sir. No sir, her entire battlegroup. We are uploading the telemetry now.” Lauren made a motion for Orashen to upload it, and Orashen turned to Lexington.

“Lexington, send it. Let them see it for themselves.” With that, the broadcast went out to the IRPF fleet commander on the frequency Lauren was indicating. It would take twenty seconds to reach them, and the call video appeared on the viewscreen as a side window.

Commander Strain was a tall, bipedal, and muscular viperess in charge of the IRPF combat fleets. She wore a navy blue uniform with the bars and stripes to indicate her rank, dozens of ribbons on her set of fruit salad that one could spend quite some time counting.

Contrasting her blue uniform were the orange and white scales that covered her in splotches, creating a kind of pattern similar to what one would expect from spilling paint. One yellow reptile eye stared at them, while the other was covered by a patch and heavy scarring across the entire side of her face from her service.

“Hello, Captain Orashen and crew I presume?”

Orashen nodded, shaking off her stunned feeling. “Yes, we’re here.”

“You’ve made quite the unusual requests, and now left a mess at Mercury Station for us. Yet, I can see now why. Can you make a guess as to what happened with this… thing?” Strain commented and straightened herself up, looking very disturbed as she flared her hood outward, showing she was in fact based off a cobra, not a viper.

“From what our sensors show, it is no longer alive. We aren’t getting a residual transcendence signal or whisper signs from its body. The Agmemonon looked determined to ram it for some reason and died in the process. I mean, Hoary is good at forensics like this, and we have a full scientific suite on board. We could further investigate if you wished.” Orashen tried to keep her composure and portray a sense of calm back at Strain.

I really hope she says no. I really do not want to go anywhere near it.

Strain considered her options and shook her head. “No. You’ve got something on the ground to investigate, and those damn eldritch horrors will only allow you and your crew down there to look at it. Your orders…” Strain trailed off and adjusted her collar.

“Pardon, I am so used to dealing with other IRPF ships and not independent ones. Does your ship possess a railgun unit or any heavy weapons?”

Orashen looked over at Jackson and nodded, then motioned for Alison to go man the weapon suite that was located under the bridge. She jumped over and slid down the ladder, overcoming her own stunned silence long enough to give some sass, “Well, if someone has to blow it up, may as well be me.”

“Good, the IRPF would like to request you to dump a full salvo into it at maximum range and ensure that the creature is actually dead. If not, you are to run away. Once clear of this area, you are to land on the planet where our minisub team will be meeting you for your dive. I will be dispatching five of our remaining nine capital battlegroups to Europa to clean up this mess and recover any data or materials we can. Any questions, Captain Orashen?”

Orashen considered and weighed her options, then gave something that was unexpected: “Just one, Admiral Strain, we are not IRPF. So, those weapons we have to pay for, and technically we are on the hook for the unfortunate incident with Tabbington and Mercury Station. So, ya know, we’d like to know in writing if these things are handled for us, and not if we're going to leave the planet's surface and get arrested or shot in the back on the way out,” She brought up these concerns while giving Admiral Strain a look that indicated this wasn’t really negotiable.

Admiral Strain looked at a separate computer screen. Programs flew past her working eye and she ran numbers. She was making several considerations here and ran those considerations through algorithms. She was weighing public outcry, expenses, and corporate backlash over the decision. Technically, this group had just assassinated one of the richest vectors in all of Sol. However, they now had proof he was involved in a crime on a scale that hadn’t been seen in over a hundred years; the last time an IRPF battlegroup had been left in shambles.

She was going to end up taking the fall for this. A lot of blame would go to the commodore and captain of the Agamemnon, but she was in charge of sending them there in the first place. The press were going to eat her alive. The only chance she had to save her career, possibly her life, was to have some heroes to hold up.

Admiral Strain turned back to the crew of the Adrift Sphere. “I will have a full pardon granted within the hour and remove the bounty issued by Tabbington’s corporate entity, and ALL bounties they issued will be removed. Nevo will technically be safe once we relocate her.”

Orashen made a motion towards the monitor and the supposed corpse of the creature in the void in front of them. “And our ammunition for this?”

“Don’t push it. You get to the planet and find out what is under the ice, we can consider ammunition costs and ship repairs. Consider it, understand?”

Orashen nodded, and before she could speak the call terminated. Orashen pressed a button on her captain’s console. “Everyone, full armor, battle station, and decompression will go into effect in three minutes.” The ship lighting changed to emergency lighting only. The crew scrambled up from their stations to put on their armor. Orashen didn’t have to put on a suit, but she still had to strap in to her station.

The ship was going to potentially do maneuvers that might rupture a spine or slam you into a bulkhead at a speed that might liquify your bones. Space combat was both fast and breakneck, and a slow methodical crawl. The agency a crew had was piloting, when they fired their weapons, the evasive patterns, the manual control of point defense weapons, but much of it was beyond their control. The crew's job was to compensate for damages and the wearing down of their ship.


Right now, Orashen was weighing her options for how to approach Europa. She could divert around to the other populated side of the planet and do a normal descent. That would take a significant amount of time, but she could kill time and still complete her mission, in theory.

The problem was that if the creature was alive and followed them, not only would it get the drop on their ship and the slower IRPF transport, but also the creature would be led to a major population center, and if the battlegroup for Europa had been unable to stop it, she doubted the Corporate forces would do much more than make it upset. She doubted her ship could do more than upset the creature.

Our best bet is to get it to chase us if it is alive, and lead it far away then double back. So yes, we need to confirm if it is dead first. She looked at Jackson. “Jackson, prepare to get us out of here at full speed. Hoary, if that thing so much as twitches, we want to be gone. Lexington, relay to the transport to begin an orbital descent, but to avoid the entire area and move away from the planet beyond sensor range first. Their passengers will have to wait and are too valuable to risk. Alison, calculate your firing solutions. Zero miss chances and fire torpedoes, they have the extra firepower we need that they might actually do something.”

The difference in space with torpedoes versus missiles was firepower and maneuverability. Torpedoes were made for when point defense was damaged or the missiles were too close for interception. They packed extra heavy warheads, replacing some of their maneuver thrusters to still maintain speed to the target. Missiles were when you expected a target to be evasive, and micro-missiles, while unable to do much damage, were when a target had amassed extra point defense or was too small to hit easily. These were generally the three options for ordinance and the primary weapon system in ship to ship combat.

Orashen hoped that if the creature wasn’t dead, it couldn’t dodge well with the front quarter of the Agamemnon wedged into its side. Orashen smiled, “A whisper ship. The first one of its kind to ever be discovered. A real revolutionary find for a scientist like who I used to be, or yourself Hoary, and here we are, about to blow it up.”

Hoary checked her sensors. “I agree, the loss of potential research and scientific data on the whisper phenomenon is not lost on me. But I think that our lives are worth more than that,” She spoke as the IRPF transport vessel moved further and further to the edge of sensor range. They were hard burning too, no slow boating here. Orashen just hoped the strain on the Orca bodies wasn’t something she would pay for later.

Minutes passed, then half an hour, before Hoary signals they could no longer detect the transport. “Alison, fire full volley and fire railgun to time it so impacts are simo,” Orashen directed. The ship gave a little shudder as torpedoes were jettisoned from their ship. A second later, they activated and set to their adjusted course, burning full speed towards the target.

Little burning dots appeared on the viewscreen, heading towards their target. On everyone’s individual panels were representations of the ship and everything they could see on sensors. The Whisper vessel labelled as a hostile threat. Small dots indicated their torpedoes speeding forward. Four hundred kilometers and closing.

At one hundred kilometers, Alison finished making course corrections and lined up the railgun for its shot. They were positioning it to perform raking fire to rip through the whisper from head to tail.

At fifty kilometers, she came over the intercom: “Brace for railgun shot.”

At ten kilometers, the ship shuddered as a 100 kilogram slug propelled out and flew towards the target at a fraction of the speed of light. At one kilometer, the railgun’s shot impacted, and a split second later, explosions from the missiles rippled across the body of the creature. The Adrift Sphere could only afford high-ex and plasma missile weapons, and only had clearance for those as well.

Water-like ripples traveled down the whisper ship’s body. Explosions ruptured parts of it off. They could trace the rupture wave of the railgun down the length of the creature, before seeing the shockwave at the exit wound. As the flashes cleared and the viewscreen allowed them to see again, two things struck the crew of the Adrift Sphere.

One, the whisper ship wasn’t moving or reacting. Two, its flesh and blood were moving, closing the wounds, wrapping back to heal its form. Its body was acting just like the whisper back on the stark white derelict when Jackson shot it. The wound closed before their eyes, the whisper creature returning to its sharp point, but it did not move. It did not flinch or twitch, it did not even react to being shot.

“Hoary?” Orashen paused and looked at her friend. “Can you figure out what is going on here?”

Hoary kept analyzing the situation and zoomed the viewscreen in to the point of impact where the Agamemnon was buried in the side of the creature. There, the flesh was trying to knit itself, but couldn’t do it. “My best guess is that it is in a healing coma. I had not expected our shots to do too much damage to something that big, and we were right. Even with an optimal hit, it basically did not feel it. However, the mass of the cruiser is just too much for the regenerative abilities to dislodge. So long as that is in it, the creature can’t heal, so it did what most creatures do when they are having trouble healing.

“So it is in a coma, I can only guess. It can’t sense us, or if it can, it cannot do anything about it,” Hoary explained as the viewscreen went back to their normal view.

Orashen considered her options and nodded. “Jackson, pull us out of sensor range and make our way planetside. Now that we know it won’t react to us or our actions, we are free to move. Hard burn the whole way. Lauren, relay to Admiral Strain what just happened, we want the IRPF ships to have both the combat data and our working theory on why the creature isn’t moving. Still suggest to them that they annihilate it with nuclear bombardment rather than risk capture or moving it.” Orashen made the motions to their crew, and now they were on a mission. If another one of those huge whisper ship creatures or even a small fleet of them made it to orbit, Vector kind was doomed like humans were.

Whatever was at that base under the ice had to be responsible. That was the only explanation Orashen had. She dialed in to the satellites around Europa and waited for the next pass over their target area. She had to confirm her findings. The live video feed took another ten minutes, but there it was, on live video.

To Orashen’s horror, the ice had been recently ripped open and freshly frozen over. The tear in the ice wasn’t the little circular holes they had seen before. This was gargantuan, easily large enough for the whisper creature to have torn its way out of it. What made it worse was the bodies under the ice that they could see from space. Three or four Orcas, much larger and with fully functional arms for how large their side flippers were, were shredded to pieces near the surface. Parts of them floated around the water, still too fresh to start sinking.

“Umm… Hoary, that isn’t good, is it? Tell me that’s bad.”

Hoary nodded. “The salt water content and density of Europa’s oceans mean that those creatures have only been dead for at most two days.” She pointed at the ice and how it still had pieces free floating in it. “The ice hasn’t rehardened. So I would guess it has only been a couple of hours since that space creature was released.”

Orashen held her hand up to her chin, looking at their situation. “It managed in just a few hours to kill several Orcas that normally required heavy space based ordinance to kill or entire submarine fleets to take down. Then it took out an entire battlegroup, and they couldn’t even cry out for help. No matter what the Orcas think of us, our situation is inherently linked now, and whatever is at the source of the signal that killed Tabbington, is a risk to all life in our solar system. In for a sub-crit, in for a whole credit. Alright, Jackson, full burn, get us to the planet. Let’s hope that the submarine crew survived.”

Jackson nodded. “Aye aye, ma’am!” He replied as the ship pushed them all back into their restraints and started down.

“Lauren, call your submarine crew, tell them we are going to meet on sight.” Orashen looked around at her found family. She said a prayer, not that she was a believer in any higher power, but a captain in circumstances this dire would just hope something in the universe heard them and shifted the odds in their favor.

******

Europa’s biting cold wind blew across the planet. The city was kept warm by heated ground and geothermal access. Out here in the wilderness though, even after more than 700 years since the last human, no one had managed to finish much more terraforming. The temperature was a nice -170 °C; no one could survive out here without protective implants and armor. The entire crew were wearing armor, even Orashen.

There was a difference between being able to survive for a time without atmospheric pressure and the coldness of space, and the coldness of a pressured planet. Her implants wouldn’t compensate, not to mention they were going under the ice into freezing cold water. There was no chance of survival for anyone in vector society under those conditions without protective gear.
The IRPF team was finishing releasing the Orcas into the water. They didn’t seem to mind being released into the same water that some of their kin had just been shredded to bits in. Apparently to them, the danger in the water was them, not anything else. The minisub was prepared, extra armor had been added to it in transit. It was hoped that if the Orcas turned hostile, there would be a chance the sub would survive long enough to get its crew to the surface.

A dozen support teams were waiting nervously on the ice as the sub swayed on the crane in the wind. “Alright, so we’ll have one person in the sub with you all. The objective is to get to the bottom, figure out what is there, and if you are able, put a stop to it. Those things say they’re on our side, but I ain’t about to stay down there fer any longer than necessary,” The sea otter that was going to be their sub driver explained to them. He was a very portly creature, and was clearly used to sitting down behind controls, letting himself go for a while. His Ganymedian accent reminded Jackson of his home before he became a marine. His name was Norman. He didn’t give them a last name, says he didn’t want to get too attached to them on a suicide mission.

There wasn’t much else to do. They waited as the Orcas were lowered off the crane and the bioprobes swam into the depths out of site. A full minute of tension rolled about everyone. Then two. Then three. Did they betray us? Are they going to surface through the ice and eat us all? Was thi—

Orashen’s thoughts were interrupted by the presence of the void one returning. Its mind felt oppressive and like an unknown horror pressed from all directions. Void silenced any thoughts to the contrary with the oppressive feeling and narrowing of vision as fight and flight instincts were trying to kick in.

“I am here. The others agree, with contempt. Proceed with your dive. We are watching.”

The crew piled into the submarine in silence. They were uncomfortable with all of this, and even Riptide felt like those extra armor plates were to make them feel better, not actually there to protect them. The crane lowered the submarine into the water, and with a soft swaying against the water, it began to take ballast and sink.

The descent was tense. Sonar was a mess due to the Orca swimming alongside them. His presence couldn’t be denied or pushed out of their minds at this range. They all knew he could hear their thoughts, and he was staying this close to make sure they didn’t do anything off the plan. Deeper and deeper they went, ten minutes down. The silence and oppression of the Orca’s mind made it feel as if the walls of the sub were closing in faster than they actually were.

Then Void’s presence drifted away. There was a sense of discomfort as they dove deeper. “This is as close as I go. I will be here to escort you out, if you live.” With those words, the Orca drifted further and further away until they could no longer sense its presence. The submarine was coming towards a ravine in the water, when it started to ping something angular. The right angles and perfectly rounded dome was a dead give away. Deep on the depths of a moon halfway across the solar system from Earth, they were closing on a home to someone that shouldn’t have been there.

The sonar was also picking up several smaller forms moving in the water. The sonar was tuned for both structures and animal life, specifically Orcas and vectors. They had it, right there, the sonar was definitely picking up some vectors. Orashen leaned forward, towards the view window.

“How many IRPF logos are on this sub? Because if one of those vectors swims up to us, I’m pretty sure they are going to realize we aren’t on their team,” Orashen whispered to the sub driver, as if the creatures moving around outside might hear them.

“All over, but no turning back now. We’ve got some mini-torpedoes, but all I can hope for is to get you there and that they don’t notice us on the way in, because I definitely don’t have enough torpedoes for that.” As Norman spoke, he shut off the engines and let them glide on the power they accumulated, hoping to steer against the currents enough to drift in and remain unheard.

However, Hoary approached a computer and plugged her PADD into the system. She set it up, and after a moment Norman and Riptide both looked at her with surprise. “What is on the underwater speakers now?” Norman demanded.

“The signal they are using to repel the Orcas, perhaps it is also a signal to indicate a friendly craft,” Hoary suggested with a half-hearted smile and a very sarcastic tone in her voice. The speaker signal continued to go out, and Norman let out a sigh.

“Doesn’t matter if we turn it off now, hope it worked because anyone with echolocation definitely heard that already,” Norman’s groan was the last word spoken for a bit as he turned the engines back on and started a powered approach.

They continued on in, but strangely, the signals from the other swimming creatures did not approach them. It was surreal, but no one dared to come towards the submarine. It was almost as if they avoided them. Norman leaned over to analyze the structure on sonar as they were moving towards it and started towards a docking ring.

“There is a docking and decompression ring. But how are we going to get inside without them just shooting us all?”

Orashen considered her options, then took note of how they hadn’t been challenged or investigated on the way in. “They aren’t actually expecting anyone down here. Those three groups of swimmers, they aren’t guards. They’re researchers or investigators, perhaps engineers. They don’t need to investigate anyone who makes it down here, the Orcas should have killed everyone who tried who wasn’t them. The moment we started emitting the signal, they moved away from us.”

Riptide growled, “That damn signal hurts my ears. I imagine it hurts like…” He trailed off as it dawned on him too. “They are with those people from that lab on Mercury. Once we started putting out the signal, they recognized us as friendly.”

“Exactly, move like we belong, go in like we are supposed to be there. Acquire whatever uniform we need and move about the facility until we figure out what is going on and what we can do about it,” Orashen explained and nodded to them all. “As we did in the tower, we will do here. If you got here, you belong here. No one will argue with us on that, at least until we find Tabbington’s boss.”

With that, the submarine made dock to the airlock a few minutes later. The shape was universal, much like a USB plug, for fear that if the shape was even slightly wrong, it may result in the end of everyone’s life involved.

The crew all tensed as the submarine rotated on its side in order to press into the umbilical dock. Slowly, the pressure equalized, and they got ready to come storming out under gunfire, with Jackson going first, his armor fully pressurized just in case. The hiss of air passed over the course of six minutes. Jackson could look through the airlock from where he stood and the viewing window over the submarine door. There was no one there. The docking process appeared to be entirely automated.

His tactics told him that they wouldn’t be there waiting for them, because a bullet in the wrong place could result in the water rushing in and the airlock chamber and transitional chamber being useless. If someone was waiting for them, they would be beyond that, in the primary hallway or diving room, or whatever was on the other side of those corridors jutting out from the sealab. It was painted stark white. No markings or indicators anywhere for anything. It creeped him out how much he was reminded of the lab on Mercury. Those long days of eerie silence surrounded by death and eldritch horror crept into his mind.

The door opened and he sprang through it, sweeping the corridor and running right up to the far door. He held his suit helmet close over it and let the motion sensor orient itself. He waited. Seconds passed, and the motion tracker detected nothing. Either there was no one there, or they were remaining perfectly still. Jackson reached up and made a motion for the rest of the crew to approach. They eased out of the sub and came forward, checking their various weapons and tools. Lexington closed the submarine behind them.

Hoary clicked her radio with Norman. “One Hour. You better be here when we get back.”

Lexington checked the door for security and found none. That was the part that unnerved them the most. Every building within Vector Society had security measures. Locks and safeties that required implant adjustments, pass cards, or phone programs combined with bluetooth frequencies to open. Yet here, these doors were simply open-and-close, no security devices, no fingerprint reader, no retinal scanners, no card swipes, the door simply opened when they pressed the button.

Inside was a diving locker room. No one was home. The room dripped with water that had no way to evaporate. Lockers did not have names, and like everything else in this place, it was painted white. Markings of individuality, manufacturer, direction around the facility, all were gone, replaced with a white stillness that, if not for the shadows, would look almost like a basic computer sim. It was beyond creepy. They slowly walked inside this place that the light of Sol could never reach.

Orashen smiled, remembering an ancient quote by human explorers and spoke it softly aloud, “Here, There Be Dragons.” She was feeling both the apprehension of their surroundings and the thrill of seeing something completely unknown. It was as if she were at the archeology site back in the asteroid belt the day Hoary and her met. That is when the unnerving sensation hit her.

“This… this place was built for humans, by humans,” She spoke softly as she approached one of the white washed lockers and pressed her hand to it. She could feel the rust under the white paint. The ancientness of the metal was not lost upon her. The grooves beneath the paint were not hidden from her.

“Orashen, are you okay?” Riptide asked, placing a hand on her shoulder.

Hoary nodded. “She is intrigued. This place is older than vectors isn’t it?”

Orashen reached down and pulled the mechanism on the locker up with quite a bit of force to get the rusted old lock to move and break the tension the paint was applying to keep it in place. The click made the locker open with a squeaking whine of hinges that hadn’t moved in centuries. Inside, a rotten divers suit had fallen apart, the rubber long since giving up. This hung across from a set of deep sea armor, an ancient model that lacked many of the upgrades and refinements done to future iterations like the plating Jackson and Hoary wore.

The thing that struck them all though, were the human faces in photographs that somehow had survived the test of time. The photographs were damaged by moisture and erosion, but one could make out a middle-aged male human with a buzz cut, dancing on a grass field. The picture was close to the face, and beside him, a vector child, no older than five years old. A fox, a girl by the pink dress and human customs as they were remembered at this point. She was riding on his back and laughing with him.

Orashen reached slowly and took the photo down. It slowly peeled from the locker, and she pulled out one of her small little plastic bags, putting the photo inside. It was an old habit, to keep little artifact and relic bags on her person, just in case. This sort of artifact was precious, to say the least. She placed the bag into one of her armor’s air tight compartments and pressed it closed.

“Let’s keep going, keep in mind this place is old. It may have things that have failed or no longer work. Whoever our enemy is, they are using it now. How it got here, I don’t know, and that may be something we want to find out.”

They moved through the facility. Every corner appeared updated to some degree with modern vector technology. They had not found a locker room with regular clothes in it, only the diving locker room, which did not contain clothing that would be used for normal operations. They also found themselves surprised to not be encountering people. Alison was walking ahead, sneaking around and skulking from corner to corner, checking each of the rooms.

What she found were research stations abandoned mid experiment, in one case a bunsen burner was still on, the glass starting to melt as the chemical inside had long since burned off. In another room, a mess hall. Half eaten meals left behind, an apple dropped on the ground. It was as if everyone had just gotten up and left.

Norman called in to Orashen, “Hey, I don’t know what happened down here, but those dives on sonar are swimming off into the water. They just swam right off outside the protective sonar broadcast. The Orcas are just, devouring them or shredding them apart. At least, that is what my long range sonar is telling me. What the hell? Why would they just give up on life like that? En masse? They aren’t even fighting back.”

Orashen suddenly felt a pit in her stomach sink down, and she wanted to throw up. “Because whatever they were seeking to accomplish here, they have already done. Just like the scientists on Mercury, they are no longer useful.” Orashen motioned for everyone to start moving. “Move faster, we need data and information about what they were working on. Lexington, check the computers. Hoary, check their notes.”

They scrambled through the lab, checking computers, frantically looking at PADDs, and even hand written notes, then staggered away. The notes had been drawn over by frantic scribbling. Warped versions of vectors and what appeared to be long impossibly thin creatures with warped tentacles walking across the pages.

Hoary stepped away, disturbed. One of the drawings depicted an owl, the kind that had ended the Star of Io when Lexington was on board. Lexington couldn’t make anything of the computers, the data across them was corrupted to hell. Their OS systems flashing all sorts of warnings that spiraled from somewhat sensible to making no sense. On screen he saw the following:

Warning: Data spike
Warning: Hostile Data Spike
Warning: They’re here
Warning: It’s too late
Goodbye Vector Scum

The computer flashed all sorts of other warnings, but nothing made sense in here. Hoary was reminded of her secret conversation with the void one, how the Orca had taunted her about her origins and tried to convince her that she was a danger to everyone. How she should just submit to the fear and so many other things that burned within and without. She stepped back, holding her head from a rush she had never experienced. She was feeling woozy, sick, and her insides were hot.

Then she felt fine. She let out a gasp for air as her lungs realized she hadn’t been breathing for nearly a full minute, and she panted for air and to cool off.

Jackson at the door rushed over to her. “Are you okay, Hoary, you with us?”

Hoary held up one of her armored wings and nodded her body back and forth, since her head couldn’t nod on its own. “Whatever this place is, it’s trying to drive us mad or kill us. I think… I think this…” She hesitated at that implication and took a long breath to calm herself and reassure herself she was still alive. “This has all the hallmarks of a Whisper Event in progress.”

Jackson flicked the safety on his gun and activated his radio, “Orashen, we may be in the middle of a Whisper Event. We need to go.”

Orashen came back strangely, as if she were too calm and serene about all the issues. “Yes, I agree, meet back at the sub, we should go. We know what is here now and certainly don’t want to—” The line went dead, as did their suit electronics and the lights in this place. Everything was gone, quiet. The electric hum went with it. The armored suits switched to manual mode, but that would slow them all down. Hoary stepped out of her suit, deciding that it wouldn’t save her at this point, and left it behind. Lexington removed certain parts of his as well.

“You guys, we might need our armor,” Jackson complained and tried to push Hoary back towards her suit.

“Jackson, armor is useless against a whisper. It cleaves reality apart. It ignores our laws of physics as easily as Lexington ignores the boundaries of putting bird girl pin up posters in his room, or Alison sneaks in and takes one of my books without asking.” She was voicing things that annoyed her, but it was more to keep herself stable and sane. “We are better moving faster, and the sub is our only way out.”

The group was running now. Hoary was carrying notebooks. Despite the darkness, the windows to the sea let in just enough light to help them see. Hoary could naturally see very well in the dark, and Jackson was used to boarding ships that had a loss of power. They moved with a purpose to escape this place before it claimed some part of them.

The air felt more and more oppressive as they closed on the diving airlock. Then came a voice, “That is fair enough, if you would please halt for me. Stand there and listen, don’t move.” The voice was calm, soothing, smooth. It was as if it had spoken these words hundreds of times. It was as though the voice knew they would obey without questioning them.

Hoary felt a chill from this new voice but did not stop, but after a couple more frantic steps and flaps of her wings to propel her forward, she noticed Jackson and Lexington both had stopped, and around the corner stood her friends.

Orashen, Alison, and Riptide were all standing as if in trance. Another figure was in the dark, a figure that looked like no vector Hoary had ever seen, but somehow seemed familiar. She couldn’t quite place it in the darkness.

“Hello you medalsome ones. I cannot have you all interfering, I think if you would please go for—” Hoary did not hesitate now. She recognized the effect, this was the Voice of The Master speaking. Not a speaker playing it, not an imitation that could only go so far of a genetically altered Vector. No this was the real thing, whoever that was, they were actually human. Which to her was an impossibility and meant potential certain doom.

She leaped and used her wings to close the distance, lashing a talon forward, seeking to slash the figure in the dark. She got close enough and saw why it was familiar, why they had this ability. She was looking at a human. Not just a regular human though.

The red tentacle lashed back at her. The whisper arm had replaced his original left arm, and whisper blood biology coursed over part of his face, flashing around like liquid held together in a solid shape by unknown forces.

She twisted on instinctual training more than conscious thought. Part of her was stunned by this. Hoary propelled sideways with her wings to avoid the whisper arm that missed her by a hair.

“What? How…? Damn blip.” Hoary did not wait for an explanation. She dashed into the darkness and the nearest lab.

How do I break the trance? What can I do? She looked around for a solution, searching for some way to break the effect. The first was talking to her friends, but then he could just reassert his control. She looked at her suit that she left behind and the broadcaster device on the outside of it.

This! I can configure it to emit waves of sound that distort voices, that should be enough to break the effect. Then we just have to kill a human-whisper hybrid… Just thinking that hurts.

“Come out, Hoary. There is no sense in hiding, I get them all eventually. Perhaps if I explain myself, you will come out,” This creature spoke, and it felt like in another life she would find it tempting and intoxicating. But now, after having listened to human music for years and her own DNA’s immunity to the effect, the voice simply gave her a moment of tension and nothing more.

She slid under a lap table and kept working on the device, methodically and deliberately working to adjust the frequency and output.

“Fine, if that won’t work for you, perhaps this will. Lexington, was it? If you would please, put that gun to your head, barrel first.” Hoary heard the order and felt her blood run cold. She hesitated. She considered for a brief moment coming out, nearly dropping the device she was working on from her pushframe’s loss of concentration.

Her wing caught the weight and she resumed working. Come on, come on. If I surrender, he’s just going to send us out to the Orcas, and there is no promise that they will keep their end of the bargain or not mistake us for more staff he just sent to die. The voice carried over the intercom as if taunting her while she continued to reprogram the underwater broadcasting unit.

“Lexington, if you would please, remove the safety for me, but keep it pressed right there. Though I do not like doing things this messy, sometimes one must.”

Hoary found the frequency and started to reattach the battery to turn it on. She dropped it and caught the battery with her talon. Come on, come on. Her heart was pounding her ears. Her body was shuddering, something else was affecting her. She was a calm surgeon, her talons, wings, and beak trained weapons. She should have steady steel hands. Even under this kind of pressure, she had never faltered before.

She placed the battery in and–

“Lexington, if you would please, pull the trigger.” She turned it on.

Bang.

The thud of a body echoed across the intercom. Hoary wanted to scream, and suddenly everything for her went white hot. She disappeared from this plane of existence.

The broadcaster dropped out of Hoary’s hiding spot right in front of the group and started to play an ear piercing whine that caused them to snap out of it.

Orashen looked down to see the device in front of her, and just beyond it, Lexington’s body, his skull blown open and brains turned to liquid across the floor.

“Lexington!” She looked up at the creature in the darkness she could barely make out. She did not take the time to try to figure out why someone who would see in the darkness of space couldn’t see someone three meters in front of her. Instead, she threw one of her katarods right at where she thought his head was.

“I’ll kill you for that!” She howled as the others came to, but the rod never made contact with him. Instead, before the crew stood five copies of Hoary. Jackson and Riptide recovered next, and then Alison. They looked bewildered and perplexed. The katarod struck one of the Hoarys and it howled in anguish, then grew to a size to rival Riptide or Jackson, sprouting two extra legs and giant clawed talons.

This was an Owl Inclusion now.

“RUN!”

Orashen shouted and everyone turned to flee. The Owls blinked and glitched in and out of reality as if they were made of static on a television screen or a hard light projection that wasn’t quite working correctly. Their bodies flickered with bright colors, radio static, and other effects.

The Owl struck by Orashen howled and shrieked, then exploded in a ripple of bone, blood, and flesh that covered the hallway and forced the crew running to stop and stare. Five Hoarys were standing there again, and one suddenly jumped away as the others attempted to descend on it. In a flash of color warping, their feathers all flashed through with various shades of the rainbow, Hoary’s sign of transcendence flicker, and then they were not standing there. There was only one. It slowly turned its head completely around.

“Hey! Nice to see all of you,” It spoke to them in a friendly sweet tone.

Jackson took a moment, thought about it and lowered his machine gun to point right at this Hoary. He pulled the trigger and watched as the rounds ripped into Hoary, only for her to transform into the quadruped monstrosity. The bullets were not producing blood, but they were producing bruises and making feathers fall away. They were also staggering the creature. He held down the trigger and kept hitting it over and over again. He had a three hundred round belt that could fire normally underwater, and he wasn’t afraid to empty the entire thing.

The Owl howled and shrieked, as if it was being pelted with dozens of bee stings. Finally, it dropped to one knee as Jackson focused the ancient weapon directly on its head and held the stream of death there. With a final vain attempt to swipe at them, it fell over and the head started to tear from its shoulders. It took two hundred and thirty-three rounds according to his helmet vision. He was down to seventy-seven rounds, and they had only managed to bring down one.

Everyone’s ears echoed with painful ripples of high pitched whining from listening to a machine gun in close quarters barking until the barrel was nearly overheated. They were going to have to get treatment for tinnitus if they lived through this. Then their radios crackled to life.

“I’m alive, I don’t know where I am, they… they… look like me,” Hoary’s voice was stunned and in disbelief. Orashen recognized the ability she had used as translocation, a short range blink. She couldn’t have really known where she was going to end up, but that was her only choice in that moment, and with the cuil of reality peeled back to the point Owls could enter the world and stay, any intent she had would have been thrown to the winds.

Orashen tasted ozone, the sweet scent of perfumes, and the stench of humans filled her nose. The veil between reality and the exoverse wasn’t just thinned out here, it had been outright breached entirely.

“Hoary, if you can hear me, don’t use your transcendence implant anymore. The cuil is…”

“Non-existent,” Hoary whispered back, and Orashen realized she was trying to stay quiet.

Orashen spoke using her sub-vocal system, “Hoary, what’s there?”

She only got static in return. Breaches in reality could cause that, they could cause the power outage, they could cause–wait, Jackson’s armor was back on?

She turned, noticing how his armor was moving at normal speeds with the augmentation of his speed and agility now. “Jackson, your armor is working?”

Jackson paused and thought about it. “Yeah, it’s… Wait… is Lexington…” His voice cracked as he felt the wave of realization hit him. He had been watching. He had stood there watching, not moving. No, he couldn’t just bring himself to move, he couldn’t bring himself to care. He had just stood by, watched Lexington put a gun to his head and kill himself.

He held his chest and fell onto his forward knees, dropping his heavy gun on the floor with a clang. “I just… I stood there and let…”

Alison did not let him finish the sentence. Despite the differences in their armor plate and how much it would hurt her hand, she slapped him as hard as she could and got him to jerk his head to one side. “Yeah, and if you break over it, we’re gonna end up like him or worse. Now on your feet, I ain’t about to have one of these stupid whisper/Owl things take another chunk of me, and I ain’t about to let them take Hoary either. I owe her that much.”

Jackson stood up, and the discipline of his years as an IRPF marine started to refill him. He nodded down to her and picked up his weapon. Riptide readied his bow, and Orashen drew more katarods in each hand. Her body was lit up with bioluminescence, unwillingly at that. The breach in reality was causing her transcendence sign to fire uncontrolled, even if she couldn’t access the implant or her powers. They now had light to work by at least.

Riptide took a moment to look at Orashen and then had an idea. “Wait, if yours is firing, then the real Hoary should have her feather color flashing across the rainbow, right?”

Orashen nodded. “If anything about a reality breach made sense, then yes. There are four more of them right? Three?”

Jackson shrugged. “No idea. I think Hoary transposed with one of them, but where she came from, I can’t be sure.” Alison had walked down to check the hallway and pointed at something glowing just out of sight of everyone else.

“I umm, think I might have an answer.” Orashen approached slowly and looked around the corner. What she saw, she couldn’t explain. She knew no one else that had ever seen this sort of thing, at least and lived to tell about it.

It was as if the very fabric of the universe were made of paper, and someone had made a tear in that paper, like life was a comic book strip and someone had torn it and now everyone could see outside the comic. The world beyond made no sense to their eyes. It warped with colors and shapes so quickly that it had no rhyme, reason or pattern. Orashen grabbed Alison and turned them both away from this tear.

Immediately she was leading her crew down the hallway, away from the tear, to look for Hoary. They were not about to leave her behind as far as she was concerned. Once they were away from the tear, she stopped and tried to breathe. The air tasted of that strange ozone-perfume-body odor to her. It was foul and refreshing all at once, like something could make you calm and relaxed and hurl up your lunch at the same time.

“Listen, we have to figure out which one is Hoary. Find her before they do, and get to the sub,” Orashen ordered. The group made their way through the halls, getting quiet now as they knew their best bet was to sneak up on the creatures.

Hoary, for her part, kept her eyes closed and controlled her breathing. Void was right, I was there… I was beyond our reality for a moment. He was right about how to get back, and he was right it would tear reality. He was right, they… ‘know’ me now. How do I get away? What do we do?

Jackson swept the corners with his old Ma-Deuce. He knew he couldn’t just mow one down again and would need Alison’s guns, Riptide’s arrows, and Orashen’s thrown rods to kill it, and they would have to hit it repeatedly. Their best bed was to avoid them.

That meant slow and steady steps, cautious and gentle. Don’t make a sound, don’t move too fast, make sure you know what is there before you move. Riptide was bringing up the rear, checking behind them, Orashen and Alison between them, checking door after door. The same color and lack of markings made it disorienting. They couldn’t tell where they were going. All they knew was that Hoary was somewhere in here.

Jackson rounded a corner and saw Hoary. She turned around to face him and let out a sigh of relief. “Oh good, we need to go. Those things could show up at any moment.” Hoary began to walk towards them with haste.

Jackson felt uneasy. This one was speaking more like Hoary, acting like her, but something was off. Then it hit him, the transcendence flash wasn’t on it. Orashen’s tails were glowing with transcendent bioluminescence, but Hoary’s feathers were not rotating in color. He looked through the doorway at the approaching Owl and reached over to press the button for the door to close. When it didn’t, he quickly dropped his gun and grabbed the door. The bird sped up, “Hey, don’t lock me in here!”

As it spoke, the voice changed. It grew deeper and gravelly. The creature shifted from Hoary’s diminutive form to one that was even bigger than Jackson and charged the door. Jackson got a grip and yanked the door shut manually. Riptide stepped forward and shoved him aside. His mouth glowed with energy, which he then opened fully and poured into the doorway edge. Working from top to bottom, he used the high intensity energy pulse that had killed a bounty hunter, now used to weld the door closed.

Several bangs on the doorway echoed through the hall. The hermetically sealing door did not dent however. It was designed as a pressure door for this depth of water. The door had no issue withstanding the hits from the creature on the other side, only leaving scratches and rips in the white paint as it vainly tried to escape the room.

Orashen motioned for them to move on while the creature kept banging against the door. “I thought they could violate the laws of physics,” Alison questioned as they moved down the hallway.

“If it believes it’s trapped, and so do we, it is trapped. At least that is my understanding. I don’t know, why don’t you stop and ask it for us?” Orashen offered as they moved away from the source of the banging, hoping that it would draw the other hostile ones and leave them alone. The circular central hallway brought them to another room that had signs of motion in it.

There was an Owl here, standing outside of a locker. It looked like Hoary, and its feathers were shifting in colors, roaming between the various colors of the rainbow, but it was approaching the locker, as if sneaking towards it. The creature stopped and turned its head around like Hoary would, without moving the rest of its body, in response to Orashen’s luminescence.

“Oh! Yes, we need to go. Where is the sub from here?” The locker suddenly opened and another Hoary bursted out of it.

However, this Hoary had the shifting colors of her feathers going wind. It was as if a rave were taking place and shining all the flashing lights on her with how quickly she was shifting between colors. Everyone pointed their weapons at the one who wasn't shifting and opened fire. Arrows struck home, bullets ripped into it, Orashen threw her rods, and Hoary ran away from it and for cover, flying across the room nearly silently.

They knew they couldn’t kill it as the creature metamorphosed into the huge quadruped combat form, bounding towards the group with intent, only to be slowed by the short controlled bursts of Jackson’s heavy machine gun. Riptide’s mouth laser needed at least an hour to recharge, an hour they did not have.

Instead, Alison stepped forward with the spare explosive from Tabbington’s tower, in case one wasn’t enough, and threw it into the room. She pulled Hoary across the doorway and yelled, “Close the door!”

Riptide dropped the arrow he had notched and slammed the door shut. He reached over and pulled the manual handle to seal it, cranking it down and hoping that the hydraulics did not need electricity.

Alison pushed the button, and a dull thud echoed around them. That thud was followed by the sound of water. At first it was a trickle, then a cascade. A steady cascade on the other side of the door from them. At this depth, the explosion had been enough to rupture something in the pressure chamber of that room, and with that rupture came a crack, then another, and then finally the pressure of the ocean above had done what it did naturally and crushed its way into it.

“There, maybe the ocean crushed it, or the Orca will get it.” Her words were cut short by shrieking howls of angry Owls echoing down the hall. The group got up and ran. Jackson picked up Hoary and put her on his back as they dashed for the submarine. They did not stop to look at the tear in reality, but saw something with red limbs pushing its way through and decided that was no good to deal with.

The group slammed the door to the diving locker room closed and dashed across to the pressure chamber. “Norman, you better not have tried to leave.” Orashen called out over her radio. No response came as they entered the pressure chamber and confirmed the sub was still there.

Riptide scrambled over to the pressure door and started to work on hotwiring the chamber to pressurize. It took him plugging the device into the port behind his gills and letting it process his own bio-electricity to jumpstart the room. He turned to the group as the pressure started to increase and equalize with the submarine’s. Norman still wasn’t responding as Orashen called him again. She was afraid whatever had taken the power out in the facility had killed the submarine, but they could at least float to the surface by manually blowing the ballast.

“How did you know it was me?”

“You weren’t acting like you were glad to see us,” Jackson replied and rubbed her head affectionately.

Hoary blinked a few times and nodded. “Fair. I should work on that.” She leaned over and hugged Jackson. She held him close and hugged him tightly. Jackson held her to his armored chest and let her sit there for a bit. The pressure door opened and Hoary immediately shifted away as a red tentacle clashed out between them.

Everyone’s head snapped towards the door and the near miss of a whisper arm. The creature from earlier was stepping out of the submarine. Norman’s head fell to the ground with a wet squelch of broken bone and liquified organs as the human-thing stepped out, his face and arm that of a swirling madness looking like blood made manifest into a body. The rest of him still looked like he was an untouched human.

The first human any Vector had seen awake and moving in over seven hundred years. His voice was now distorted though, and he moved with a certain twitch and raggedness. “No no, I have to finish the work. You can’t take it now if you want what you want, let me finish the work,” He rambled on, covered in the blood of Norman. His whisper arm dropped to the ground harmlessly through, extended across the pressure chamber from the submarine door he was stepping out of.

“I guess that is my answer. I’ve done the work you wanted, and now I am useless. Very well. Hello all of you, my name is Mr. Henderson. I am the avatar of them. Well, one of the avatars. The work I’ve done, you will never understand, comprehend or be able to know, not without destroying yourselves and inviting them in.” He let out a chuckle as his whisper arm fell apart and became a puddle of unmoving, thick red liquid on the ground. He fell over to one side and grinned at all of them with a half-nightmare face and his human teeth.

“What was it you said, when you came in?” For a moment, he seemed less monstrous, more human. “Here, There Be Dragons? You don’t know how right you are, and how far you are off the edge of the map, do you?”

He stepped to the side and fell against the wall, his breathing shallow. Parts of his body seemed to just fall off and slough into liquid. His skin was melting from him as if he had acute radiation poisoning. His whisper side was already turning into blood and then innate red liquid, falling away to reveal his skull and brain underneath.

“I took their deal,” he breathed. His exposed eye remained in its socket somehow and rolled to look at each of the crewmembers. The other one faded until there was no iris, only a white void, like the stark white paint in the room.

“Will you? Or will you run back to the map, to where you can hide from them? Will you be better than humanity? Or will you submit to them and bring about your own replacements to try again, like we did?” He spasmed and shook as his body went into shock, and within just a few moments, he turned into a puddle of biomass that congealed and turned into a viscous fluid that dried before anyone could even make steps towards the submarine.

Orashen and Jackson pushed Riptide and Alison into the sub and Hoary followed, slowly stepping forward. They threw Norman’s body out of the sub and desperately wiped down the controls. With a few flicks, Riptide had the engines on, and the submarine began to ascend.

After just a hundred meters, the submarine suddenly shook violently, and everyone looked concerned about the presence of something pressed against their minds. Something dark, foreboding and angry. Then the presence recoiled in fear. They could sense the fear.

“Never return.”

It was Void, and whatever he sensed from their minds, even he feared. He moved away from the submarine and kept his end of their bargain. For whatever reason, he had deemed it worth upholding.

They breached the surface so hard that they flew out of the water and had to bounce on the surface. The IRPF escort crew there rushed to them and started to hoist the sub from the freezing waters. They had made it.

*****

The Adrift Sphere was in full burn away from Europa. It had been four days of interrogations by the IRPF about what happened down there. They had tried to send another submarine, and when it didn’t return, they sent in a full combat squadron. They didn’t return either. All they had to go on was the Adrift Sphere’s crew and their word.

Everything was classified. Making the crew disappear would be a bad look, especially after they had kept their word and done their job. No, with the destruction of the Agamemnon, Admiral Strain needed heroes she could hold up and examples of exceptional bravery, even if it were from a bunch of independent contractors. The IRPF was indebted to them and they knew it. Plus they needed heroes and the Adrift Sphere made perfect PR heroes that could be forgotten later.

The events of that day were sealed away, never to be spoken of in public, at least within the Adrift Sphere and her crew’s lifetime.

Hoary stood in Lexington’s room, looking around at his things, considering what she was going to pack first. She was trying to help prepare the funeral for him by gathering something sentimental to him to add to the coffin they intended to send out into space.

She scrolled through his medical information, trying to find what was important to him, her notes on him and everything. Then, something struck her; it was Lexington’s brain scan. She had taken it just days before he died. She had a record of his every memory, synapse, and thought, right up until they were approaching Europa.

She went to Riptide to discuss an idea. Soon, the crew found themselves all assisting with building a cog, a robotic vector. All they had to do was say they found him on the classified IRPF mission, and no one would be able to dispute it.

“He won’t be the same. It won’t be Lexington,” Hoary explained to them, “But it will be like a twin brother. At least in theory. I mean, technically, people do this to create cogs sometimes. There is a lot of work to make sure it works correctly.”

Lauren was still on the ship, hitching a ride back to Mercury with them, and Nevo was going to be there to meet with them and decide what her life would be. “So, he won’t be my boyfriend?”

Orashen tried to hide a laugh. “I wasn’t aware that you two were that serious, I thought it was a first date?”

Lauren blushed and sighed. “Hell of a first date, a once in a lifetime event.” She admired the sleeker chrome body of this reptilia shape. “Wonder if we could, and he…” She trailed off, realizing she was talking out loud.

“Again, it will be a new being. Yes, they will have Lexington’s memories and brain patterns, but they will still be their own person. In a way, they are more his son,” Hoary explained as the crew worked on building the body for days.

The 3D printers to make the parts were going constantly. They were testing the body before they created a brain matrix for it, every step of the way on the slow burn to Mercury. They made sure there were no hitches, flaws, bugs, or problems in their design, and if there were they reworked them. Finally, as they were able to bring up Mercury Station on visual sensors, they were ready.

They left the station as terrorists, but they were returning as heroes. At least, that is what the IRPF promised. With Tabbington dead, they had been making mass arrests of his various cohorts, and with the security chief dead, the power struggle had resulted in multiple intelligence leaks that let them seize assets and people for various crimes. Tabbington’s entire empire was eating itself alive without him, and the IRPF was swooping in to play hero, and PR had the Adrift Sphere crew as the legends who helped bring him down.

Hoary came up to the bridge. “He’s ready to turn on,” She said and headed back down to the cargo bay where they had been working.

The crew approached and held their breath as Hoary made the last few taps on her PADD. The blue robotic eyes turned on for the first time, and their friend, stolen against his will before their eyes, was now being reborn before those same sets of eyes.

But that is a story for another time. A time when perhaps, we may venture beyond the edge of the map once again. To a place we call: Here, There Be...