Chapter 1

The cold shimmer of light that lanced out from the edges of the rift washed across the cockpit's surfaces and the face of Dar Kree, overwhelming the dim emergency lighting.

"Nest, this is Claw Three Echo Seven Light," Dar called into his comm. Again there was no response, only the soft hiss of an open channel.

"Claw Leader, Claw three," again the forlorn hiss was the only reply.

Dar worked his way back from the cockpit into the crew quarters. The damage to the ship did not make it easy, even as agile as he was. Nor was he as agile as was normal for him. He may have lived through the disaster, but he had suffered some injuries doing so. At first he had hoped he would find others of Kadamon's crew alive, but the hope had been dashed, first by his failure to get a response over the ship's internal comm, and then more utterly by the bodies he found when he was able at last to tour the ship. The Chief Engineer and the engineer's mate had died at their stations, as had the two ratings who normally manned the ship's pulse cannons.

The Kadamon, had dropped its four squads of marines on Numaza, taking only moderate damage getting back into orbit. Dar had known it was a bad sign when the orders had come almost immediately for a relief pickup. The Fighting Fifth's four squads who made the Kadamon home must've really stepped in it, he'd thought at the time. The ship had taken even more damage going back into atmosphere, but nothing she wasn't built to take, and Dar had been looking for the pickup beacon when the orders had come to bug out. A bug out call had to mean that the beast had been well and truly gutted and stuck on the spit, planetside, he'd thought when that call came. By the time the Kadamon had slipped out of atmosphere, she had damage that was going to require some time to fix. Nothing the shipboard repair drones couldn't handle, but serious enough.

"Ship, how goes the scan?" Dar asked, knowing that there would be no news. The ship's keruden would have contacted him immediately if there had been any change.

"85 percent complete commander," came the ship's reply. Again Dar regretted his decision to use his mate's voice for the keruden. The war mind was the current state of the art in Sondag Electronic Intellects, and if he was going to live, it would probably be due to the keruden's ability to interface with the ship systems, but it haunted him to hear that voice now, knowing he may never hear the real one again.

There were serious signs of the entirety of Claw Three having stepped in it by the time he'd gotten back to high orbit. The cover ship that was supposed to be keeping any of the enemies big boys off his back was nowhere to be seen. The Kuros, the Heavy destroyer assigned to cover his cover ship was spitting fire from places it shouldn't and had dropped into a much lower orbit than it should have. The ship told him that there were a half dozen other planetary landing craft and supply ships spinning their gears trying to get into high orbit. 'The Kuros must be trying to provide cover for us.'

The destroyers efforts seemed to have been effective, as several dozen craft lit fires under their engines and fled the Sionnex system entirely.

Dar's circuit through the ship served no purpose except to give him a sense of purpose, and he knew it, but busy work was fine with him, even if it was busy work he gave himself. He'd cleared out the remaining bodies days ago, and the repair drones were almost completely finished restoring the blown bulkhead that had been the outer wall of the warrior's training and equipment repair bay. Dar looked with curiosity once again at the row of biomorphic polyarmor suits that hung on the inner wall. If the ship's crew had been wearing those suits when the disaster had happened, they would more than likely all still be alive. The armor was designed to survive far harsher attacks than that which the Kadamon's crew had been exposed to. The space marines were bio-engineered though, to make them capable of wearing the suits, and the crew of the Kadamon was not. The pilot's pod, where Dar had been offered a similar level of protection, though certainly not accompanied by the mobility or lethality the armor offered the marine who wore it.

Past the marine billet, he worked his way back past to the engineering space. It too looked to be restored completely. The engines themselves were another story, Dar knew, and since he was there, he checked with the ship. "Ship, what's the status of the engine repairs?"

"The port engine will be operational in three days, five hours and seventeen minutes, commander. The starboard engine will be operational in six days, eleven hours and nine minutes. Both engines will be restored to fleet nominal status in twelve days."

Satisfied that things were proceeding as best they could, Dar stopped for a meal at the ship's galley and then headed back to the cockpit. There wasn't really a need for him to be there, the keruden was doing everything that could be done. Once back in the pilots chair, he sighed heavily and queried the ship again.

The sad remains of the fleet had thought themselves safe by the time they'd reached the Volmon Rift. They'd left the Sionnex system and Numaza behind, and were fast approaching the proper jump vector for getting back into Sondag space proper. It was here, within sensor range of their transition point that the remainder of the enemy forces attacked. Operating underneath the sensor blinding haze of the rifts transit interface, they attacked with six Hellmouth missiles. Given the damage most of the ships had already suffered, three missiles could have been called overkill. Only Kadamon's position on the far port side of the Kuros saved her from the obliteration that took the destroyer itself out. Still, it damaged her engines, shutting them down completely, and killing the rest of the crew with a wash of energies designed to disrupt Sondag neuronic interfaces. The minds of his shipmates; the Sondags behind those minds, died immediately. The bodies took some time longer.

"Ship, time to the transition interface?"

"Fifteen hours until transition, commander," came the ship's reply.

There was his real problem. Dar sighed again with a grimace. His ship, and he with it, was slowly drifting towards the Vormon Rift. When the ship reached the transition interface, it would transition through O-space and reappear somewhere else. The ship, with no engines to direct her, would be almost completely helpless when they arrived at the other end of that transition. The odds told him that the other end of that journey would be unknown space. He didn't need the odds to tell him that an un-powered transition was fatal for anyone not in stasis. Few had ever survived it even in stasis and been found to tell the tale. The rifts of space may have taught the Sondag about the existence of O space, and how to jump through it from one place to another, but it also taught them that the rifts themselves were too dangerous. Rifts made good beacons and served as excellent anchors for ships jumping across O space, but they were fickle and dangerous, subject to whims that no being could control and few could even pretend to predict.

"Ship, status of stasis chambers?"

"All stasis chambers are fully operational commander, and the full diagnostic you requested shows they meet all fleet and imperial specifications."

Twelve hours later, a hungry Dar climbed onto the couch of stasis chamber Twelve. Those about to enter stasis were encouraged to do so on an empty stomach. It had no effect on stasis itself, but it did make post-stasis recovery much easier.