Although I knew that we were doomed, I refused to submit to the inevitability of it and began savagely shooting out lancing bolts of energy from the Explorer’s front laser cannons hitting tentacles, tumbling ships, and whatever else might dare to come near us.

There always seemed to be more, but a fierce and unwavering drive had taken hold of us. The thing below was growing frenzied too. Perhaps it had never felt the searing heat of a laser bolt. I fired with abandon, all sense of minutes or hours lost.

But for all our fury, it was to no avail. We were being herded.

Another cluster of tentacles lifted up to grab the corvette, forcing us to climb up out of the graveyard, only to loop over and descend right back into it again when we saw what awaited us outside.

A gruesome army had gathered above the graveyard. Upon spotting us, they began hurling roiling balls of flame that exploded all around us, demolishing wrecks, even setting aflame some of the Void-Horror’s feelers. This resulted in a deafening screech and immediate retaliation.

The Void-Horror turned to these new targets. One of its appendages wrapped around one of the exogorths and pulled it and its rider down. Another few snatched one of the wicked-looking ships, tearing it apart. I hadn’t seen a mouth on the thing earlier, nor did I care to now, but its victims vanished into some tremendous opening that might have passed as a maw. In response, a rain of fireballs was launched at it, followed by a legion of massive wasps. I recalled the Keeper saying that not all who dwelt in this expanse were friends.

But the voices from the floating cubes continued to drone, “There is no escape…”

“There is no escape,” I repeated.

“Hex, what are you saying?”

“There is no escape… There isn’t, but that d?sn’t mean we can’t take a few of them with us! Target the largest of them.”

“Blaze of glory it is,” Cuenyne affirmed.

An enormous blast of energy erupted from somewhere beyond the m?lstrom, impacting on one of the f?tid creatures or ships (it was no longer possible to tell). Another beam scattered the cube-like beings, followed by another, splitting open one of the exogorths, which spilled out a sickening purulence of entrails and shattered cartilage.

“What was that!?” I shouted.

“There’s only one thing I can think of,” replied Cuenyne.

“But the gate was destroyed!”

“Maybe it’s your new friends,” Cuenyne reasoned. “Or maybe she just puts on a good show.”

“Why wouldn’t she just tell us?” A barrage of apparent asteroids came hurtling across our port bow, destroying and scattering our enemies.

“She may be protecting something… or someones,” Cuenyne offered, taking advantage of the brief respite, “and d?sn’t want anyone to know. Historians have a tendency to make things known.”

On the forward viewscreens, from the starboard side, rolled the strangest shape I’d ever seen. It bore an implausible number of eyes and wings upon a revolving wheel within a wheel, which it raised in flight just as the giant spiral of the wormhole came into view.

“Did I just imagine that?”

“Are you still asking that?”

Streams of destructive energy continued lancing our enemies from beyond, thinning out the phantasmic armies. “The Watcher said the Firstborn had initially shared their discoveries with one another.” Cuenyne dodged a determined wasp that had briefly landed atop us. “The force of the blast is not unlike what we know of the Guardian of Alashan. She could have other allies out here.”

What a powerful force these Progenitors would be together! “Well, wh?ver it was bought us some time; best we not waste it. The Rebels fleeing the Charon used simple coordinates to escape Otherspace.”

“Either an accident or they knew something we don’t,” Cuenyne replied. “The coordinates in this dimension aren’t so easy to ascertain in relation to Realspace. With time, I could figure it out.”

“The one thing we don’t have!”

“Well, we can’t fly back out that!”

Our window of escape closed. Whatever had kept our enemies at bay was no more.

At that moment, the head of Areana spoke… or rather croaked, its speech capacitors all but fried. “The worms eat through space and time…”

“Oh dear, she’s at it again!” Cuenyne groused, wizzing the Explorer through a sea of corpses great and small.

To silence the hateful thing, I removed the rod still stuck in the one eye and plunged it hard into the other. If I’m being frank, I probably stabbed it a few times. Smoke and fire emerged from the nostrils and mouth along with some kind of foul, viscuous fluid. This was followed by a popping sound and a whirring noise. The head uttered a final, sibilant hiss before falling silent at last.

“The worms eat through space and time …” Cuenyne repeated.

“Wait… It couldn’t be, could it? The worms eat, as in make holes…” I crowed. “Wormholes! It’s a clue!”

“She was supposed to help us,” Cuenyne said regretfully.

“And I just destroyed it!”

“I have a thought… The odds are slim beyond reckoning, but it is a possibility.”

“Whatever it is, do it!” I said, jumping back in my seat just in time to dodge a new rain of conflagrant ships, talons, webs, and energy bolts, emboldened by the cessation of their mysterious adversaries. “We won’t survive in here much longer!”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” the droid stated.

“They rarely are. So what’s your grand plan!?”

“Oh, I never said it was grand,” he replied. “Steer for a bit.”

As I took over, an assortment of impossibly long and jointed legs wrapped itself around the port side of the Explorer, halting its movement mid-flight. Mercifully, at that very moment, a burning missile flashed across the creature’s femur and tibia,and, with a nauseating chirrup, it let go. I slipped the ship around, unfortunately right into the path of a giant exogorth which slammed headlong into our aft section.

“Our shields are gone!” I howled. The diminutive robot didn’t respond, having begun communications with the ship while performing a series of technical manipulations that included attaching Areana’s ruined head into a coiled cable that he’d ripped from the bulkhead. “How is that possible?” I asked while weaving the corvette in and out of a ferocity of hurtling fireballs, giant vespid?, and long-dead ships.

“You’re thinking modern tech. Areana’s older and far more advanced. Her components were designed to automatically adapt to whatever they’re connected to.”

I momentarily wondered at the value of introducing such technology to the galaxy before realizing that the first thing they would do with it was make weapons. “Don’t look now,” I warned. The swirling mass of the wormhole appeared before us like the monstrous exhalation of a raging god annihilating all in its path.

“Head into the mouth of the tunnel,” the droid urged.

“Are you certain that’s what we want to do?!”

“Not at all,” he said worriedly, keeping his photoreceptor on the task, “but I’m pretty sure there’s a trick to it that should give us a window. It should work like the Endor Gate. You just need a key. I think she has it. No guarantees, so don’t go blaming me if we blow up, get sucked into the void, or wind up in the middle of a sun.”

“I’ll try not to. What now?”

“We just fly in. She’ll course correct.”

“Assuming she d?sn’t still hate us.”

“I don’t think she’s still alive, but that d?sn’t mean she can’t still function like an advanced computer. The Watcher sent her with us for a reason. Besides, I’d say deathby-calamitous-flight-through-wormhole is preferable to any of the other options currently facing us.”

Those other options began to manifest.

As if they’d surmised our escape plan, into the chaos swam the three cyclopean horrors led by the thing called Ooradryl. Everything in their path was invisibly hurled aside as they regally floated into the whirling debris before them. They were followed by the tenebrous army of flying worms, wraiths, insectoids, and bizarre ships.

“In case we don’t make it,” I started, faltering, “I’m sorry for dragging you into this. I just wish we’d gotten some hard evidence.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. And we do have evidence!”

“Her?” I asked, pointing to what was left of Areana’s head.

“No. That has barely enough juice to do what it’s hopefully doing.” We were in the whirling m?lstrom now, but the horrors were just behind us.

“Well, don’t keep me in suspense!”

“What do you think all that beeping was when the Watcher said goodbye? She wasn’t serenading us. She was transmitting the Osserians’ records into my databanks!”

“That great—wait, why didn’t she just give you the coordinates that way?”

“Maybe she wanted to get rid of the android. Maybe she surmised her instability and hoped that with us she’d get better.”

“No, she made a choice…”

Before I could say anything further, our senses were assaulted by a terrible screeching sound of metal being rent, which could only mean one thing: something had us in its grasp! And, at that very moment, we soared, hurtling the wrong way up a wormhole!

The trip back was, if possible, more harrowing than the trip there. At least for me since Cuenyne didn’t see the colossal faces that emerged out of the kaleidoscope swirl that was the wormhole. Their grim visages wore expressions that had never known love or mercy; they did not stir but gazed upon us ghoulishly with the blackest of eyes. I could feel the cells in my bloodstream curdling, shutting down, and dying.

And just like that, they were gone… But in my nightmares, before I awake in an icy sweat, I see them still.

We were back in Realspace, but the XS-Explorer was catastrophically damaged, and in moments we’d be sucked right back into the dimension from which we’d only barely escaped. Despite the protective crash webbing, I’d been thrown from the cockpit and was trapped underneath a fallen bulkhead. Thankfully, the hull hadn’t yet ruptured, but that was a mere detail at this point.

“You have to go,” I urged Cuenyne. “Take a lifeboat. Get to Attahox; from there you can find your way to Daalang or Fusai. The information you carry is all that matters. I’ll follow if I can.”

“Arhul,” he said glumly. In all the years I’d known him he’d never called me that. “You know as well as I do that no one’s going to accept the word of a droid. Not even one as advanced as I am. Without you, the information is as good as worthless. I’m going to try and lift this debris…”

“They’re going to have to! Listen, the pull of the wormhole is too strong, and in a few minutes we’ll both be trapped back in Otherspace. Don’t worry about me. I never expected to come back. I never needed to, except to bring this information. You asked me why I was doing this. The answer is… well, you know… Now, you have to go. You have to make them understand… so that it wasn’t in vain….”

The droid was silent.

“Are you hearing me?”

“Yes, but… Wait. I understand now. I’ll see you later, Hex.”

“I’ll see you later, Q9-X7.”