Rieven looked up as his XO sounded ‘red corners’, as it was colloquially known. The last of the prisoners had just been paddocked when her voice came over the ship and all the corners turned red. Immediately, he sprinted for a bunker room. While he was the captain of the ship, he was not in command of the bridge at the moment, that was Gahst; nor was there time for him to come to her relief, and honestly it wasn’t a good idea for him to be piloting the ship at all given the state he was in currently, he needed sleep and rest before he even thought of touching those controls.

  What he could do, however, was to lead the broad picture. He found an empty seat and slid in next to one of the marine guards – corporal Skylark. He pulled his datapad out and connected it to the mount behind his head, and the wall changed; it began showing him the reports that were coming in from across the Fourth. While axiom practitioners were unable to have chip implants, this was the next best thing. It tracked his body language and did precisely what he wanted without him having to make motions others could see. The good news was that every soldier on the detention level was cleared for anything they might incidentally read on his datapad projection.

  Rieven began skimming the messages. He frowned. Why would Greeves do that? That makes no sense. He’s a reasonable man whose actions were going to result in merits, commendations, and potential promotions, both in the military as well as in society. Why would he do this? I don’t understand.

  Rieven continued skimming, then stilled. Looks like the Grace and Wonder was becoming a dead zone, they’d lost full contact with sergeant Marchioness and her squad. That was not good. The Death’s Silence concurred with that diagnosis. A dead zone. Why was commander Ashley running his FTL engines in sublight? The Academy ensures that every officer is aware of the dangers of engaging the axiom engines while running the mundane ones. It led to a breakdown of local reality. Never in the same way twice, and always with deadly consequences that were not reversable, though with enough pain, money, and effort they could be ameliorated.

  It was called a dead zone because natural law was dead there. Nothing functioned as it should, or rather, it functioned the way it always had until it suddenly didn’t function in any understandable way humanity could determine. Huh, thought Rieven, that’s not at all unlike what I observed after we left Medusean Gambit and arrived here. I wonder what caused that. All ships were running properly. No misfires, the Lord Admiral had checked for that, and Werner didn’t have any weirdness he could see, nor the CIC. This is worth looking into. I know dead zones occur naturally in the empire on occasion, but I don’t know what causes them. Could that be it? He logged that thought away for later and continued to skim through the reports.

  Why didn’t commander Ashley’s SI put a stop to any of this, or alert us that it was happening when Ashley refused to cease his actions? Same with commander Greeves’ SI. It was supposed to be impossible to sabotage one of the Ship’s Intelligences. But it had happened. That was problematic. A new report shuffled into his vision. Nine ships were in the process of becoming active dead zones. Nine. Nine of the vessels in the Fourth were willing to commit suicide rather than have him lead. That was staggering. He’d let them do it, if only to get rid of the pain they would cause him later on down the road, except it was people who had done no wrong and were now behaving strangely out of character. Some were commanders who refused to come to the Hidden Dagger as ordered, some were commanded by men and women who were present above, just getting situated in their sleeping quarters. Why would their crew mutiny? The SI would have caught that straightway. Once again, nothing in Rieven’s life was making any sense.

  The ship began to move, he could feel the vibrations of the engines powering on. He put a call through to Big Red. A moment later, the dragon was looking at him through the wall. “Have you decided to fight us despite the honour we have done you?” His voice rasped across their minds.

  “No. It would appear that just as you have serpents in your garden, I have one in mine. I request that your fleets pull back and remain a safe distance from us as we sort this out. There is an actively forming dead zones among my ships, believed to be artificially created. Do not destroy my navy. We are not firing on you or yours.”

  “Reasonable.” He paused, “I can give you thirty of your imperial minutes. If, after that time, you are no longer in control of the situation, I shall intervene.”

  “Agreed,” Rieven said, though he hated to do it. Thirty minutes was not much time, but to be fair, about forty was the longest a dead zone went before it became dangerous on a solar level. Big Red was being reasonable. The screen cut out and Rieven pinged a message to Gahst: The dragons will stay out of this for thirty minutes. I’m bunkered down in detention level 3. I’ll stay here until it’s safe to be unsecured. I will be coordinating the Fourth’s efforts from here. Please be aware that my datapad is currently on wall display. Every soldier with me is authorised to know anything you might need to send me. I trust you to steer us through.

  Now, he thought, it was time to start getting this situation under control.

  -x-

  Corporal Hunger kept looking at her. He’d shift his head forward for a beat, then shift it sideways to eye her, then she’d catch him, then he’d shift his head forward again. It was infuriating, not because he was looking at her – the man had to look somewhere, and why shouldn’t he look at her while he was doing it? No, it was infuriating because it was making her paranoid. Even with their faceplates up, Marchioness kept thinking she had something weird in her teeth, or maybe a dangling booger, but so far there was nothing. That left her with one conclusion: He thinks I’m cracked. I’m not cracking. This is what’s gotta happen. I’m not gonna ignore my duty and get called a wuss by all them. I’ma do my duty and some, that’s what.

  The problem was, that earlier in their shuttle, she had looked at everyone and said: “I’m going to find the anchor and that’ll fix it all up right quick.” Then she dropped in the hatch and started looking for the anchor room. After that, the squad started looking at her and trying to keep her from seeing they were looking at her. It’s enough to make anyone have a fit, she thought, a fit and a complex. That’s it! I’ve developed a complex!

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  She turned to corporal Hunger and said, “I’ve just decided that you’ve forced me to develop a complex. It’s not my fault and you’re responsible for it.” Then she looked forward and continued walking through the corridor that was beginning to look a lot like it was made of paisley shaped tiles carved into melted glass. The farther along they got, the more molten the glass became. It’s gonna be hard to walk here soon – melted glass gets soupy.

  Corporal Hunger couldn’t take it anymore and asked, “Sir, you are aware that we are on a ship in the void, yes?”

  She looked at him strangely, “Yeah, as opposed to what? A ship in grandma’s attic? Wouldn’t need an anchor in grandma’s attic – it weights too much there as it is, all old memories and sentimentality forcing pathos and tradition. There’s no changing it.”

  “Sir, what”

  “It’s just one of those things,” she interrupted him, “that you can’t change. It anchors the entire house, probably the whole neighbourhood and some. They never had a dead zone with an anchor like that convincing the world it ought to keep behaving. We need to find the anchor room, the place that will force the world to start behaving.”

  “Sir, do you mean the engine room?”

  “If that’s where they keep the weight of memories, then let’s go to the engine room corporal.”

  “No sir, I thought if we got them turned off, the engines, I mean, then we could stop the dead zone from growing.”

  “Ahh. That’s the thing, corporal Hunger. That’s the thing. The engines are off. Have been since before our shuttle docked.”

  The entire squad froze at those words. “Begging your pardon, sir, but that’s not true. We can hear them. We hear the engines running right now – feel them reverberating through the floor and the walls. It’s right there if you listen, that constant whirring hum that invades the back of your mind to live there if you let it…” he trailed off, listening intently, his head cocked slightly to the side.

  Well that’s not good, she thought, it’s already started. They’ve forgotten what an anchor does for a ship.

  -x-

  The pearl in Rieven’s left hand suddenly pulsed with terrified emotion. He sent a querying tendril of axiom through to it to ask what the fear was about. Instantly a feeling of dread settled into the pit of his stomach as the next thought-pattern took over his mind: They are come.

  -x-

  She turned to corporal Hunger and ordered, “Retract your faceplate. I need to touch you. Now!” He instantly obeyed because it was such a strange order, and it came without warning. By the time her hand was almost at the side of his face he realised what he had done and tensed. Her hand gently cupped the side of his face before he could step back. Just as he was about to protest, she shot a thread of her axiom into his laces, down through his heart and up into his brain. It was painful. More painful than anything he had every experienced before. Foreign axiom was not intended to enter a human body that way without that body’s permission.

  However, the fog surrounding his mind instantly cleared, and he realised what had happened. “I’m sorry sir,” he ground out, stepping back and giving a short bow, “it won’t happen again. I know what to look for now, I was just distracted by the floor.” He turned to his squad and ordered, “full axiomatic shielding on now. Turns out we have an active dead zone that was messing with us before we even docked.” He could see as each person of the squad complied, the tension in their bodies returned and their weapons snapped back up into ready position.

  “That sounded suspiciously like an excuse for ignoring standard military doctrine, corporal Hunger.”

  “No sir, not even a little bit. I was letting our boys and girls know why we failed, but in the end we still failed. How did you pick it out sir?”

  “Like I said, my granda’s attic is an anchor. In other news, this squad is going to hate me once this is over, ‘cause I’m talkin’ to the master sergeant about this slip-up, best way I can think of to clean the stupid off of you.” As one, they winced. The master sergeant meant pain, lots of pain and suffering. Pain and suffering through practiced repetition, the two great teachers of discipline, that mistress he forced them all to woo.

  She shifted slightly and said, “We need to find the anchor room. It can stabilise reality enough for us to nullify the dead zone. Should be just up ahead.”

  Private Digger ran the few metres ahead and stopped at the door on their left. He keyed the override code into the pad to the left of the door, even though it was changing from buttons to ribbons of dripping glass. Enough was the same that it worked, sliding the door open. Looking inside he shouted over the squad link, “Oi, you’re gonna want to see this sergeant, this changes things – I’m fairly certain they’re not supposed to be alive.”

  The squad rushed up and looked over his shoulder. In the centre of the small room they saw the reality anchor, a clear cylinder of glass filled with mementoes of every crewman who died in action aboard the Grace and Mercy since it’s naming. It was random and eclectic. An old shoe sat toe-down on a book made of vellum. A glass eye rested next to a green button. It was stuffed full of these leavings. It stood almost three metres tall and a metre across. It had on its base a panel that, once activated, would charge the axiom latent in the objects, which would remind reality of the way it was when those objects were cared for by their owners. It anchored reality axiomatically, stabilising it while the top of the cylinder interfered with the interruption to space-time directly, through more mundane methods, sewing the continuum back together on a quantum level, shifted by four dimensions.

  It was a relatively new development, but one which would hopefully prevent most of the Fourth from being destroyed in a ball of fire. Every ship of the line had one now, by imperial decree. If it were older even by a year, corporal Hunger judged, its mere presence would have been enough to prevent a natural dead zone from even starting to form. As this was an unnatural occurrence, stemming from the initial FTL engines revving in sublight against the mundane engines, it was most assuredly not enough to prevent, but its presence was enough to slow the spread of the effects.

  As impressive as it was, that wasn’t what private Digger was excited about. Sprouting out of the wall was a tentacle, long and dark and made of stone. Stone? That was strange. It was the same colour the walls and floors were turning. It looked alive, but the pattern was shifting on it and slowly the tentacle was becoming something more like metal. “Turn on the anchor!” yelled the sergeant. Hunger shoved Digger in the back and towards the room. He was blocking the way in and might as well make himself useful. Digger jumped when he was pushed but gathered himself and hurried over to the panel on the floor. He crouched to activate it and the tentacle made its move, darting for sergeant Marchioness unerringly. The squad unitedly fired axiom kinetics into it, shredding it and producing a roar of pain that wasn’t sound. It wasn’t anything, as far as Hunger could tell, because their armour was axiomatically sealed, no noise could get in above a certain decibel. This wasn’t noise, because it scoured their minds like rough sandpaper.

  Digger stumbled to the floor and caught himself with one hand, accidentally actuating the reality anchor. It pulsed once and the shredded tentacle fell to the floor, writhing mindlessly. The eerie sense of oppression that he hadn’t even noticed was present began to lift, and the melting glass behind them began to cool. The changes would never leave. Hopefully the ship would remain serviceable. Who knew? But for now, he breathed a sigh of relief that the dead zone was healed before it could stabilise permanently. He could hear heavy breathing on the comms as the marines took in the aftermath of the moment.

  It was sergeant Marchioness who broke it, “Get up, corporal Digger. Your stupid is keeping you from looking for survivors. We still have a commander to bring back to our commandant.” She turned and slowly continued to walk down the cooling corridor towards the bridge.