The first buoy had arrived, and been destroyed, sometime over the course of the past few days. So clearly an object traveling the system at an unusual speed would be spotted, no matter how innocuous they made it look. So this time… they didn’t bother to disguise all of them; and both launched most of them at a far slower, harder to spot speed that wouldn’t be good for pickup for weeks… and one with no disguise at all, at the same speed as the last. Let the enemy spot it…. and the Sapper could judge her next course based on the reaction.

  Would it be a group of pirates, concerned about someone spying on their lair, or protecting some storage space?

  The Empire, secretly protecting a clutch of dragon eggs or some other exotic space life-form they didn’t want anyone to spot?

  A dragon that noticed something tasty and had to grab it?

  Whoever it was, they weren’t operating legally. You were only allowed to establish the sort of boundary where you shot anyone that passed through if you clearly signaled and marked it.

  Which meant they were going in on full alert, weapons free, and ready to empty a considerable number of missiles downrange if they had to.

  As they watched the drones fly through the system, they checked the enormous debris field that the first had passed alongside… seeing numerous spots where rocks, here or there, were warmer than the first time, or had a changed trajectory.

  It looked like the aftermath of an enormous battle, far bigger than something that involved taking out a single drone. And then…. Hours after the new drone had started to pass through the system, with no disguises, no effort to hide at all, just constantly broadcasting what it saw…

  Kyle could feel his blood turn to ice.

  Movement. Something enormous; bigger than the first dragon they’d seen… and moving out into the void from one of the rocks. Not just that…. But it had at least a dozen smaller ones alongside it.

  It moved to intercept the probe… and a massive, toothed maw opened up… the familiar golden beam of a plasma beam spearing out… and the probe went silent.

  They could still see it, however. As the smaller, faster dragons moved in; a few of them getting bites of the molten slag… before they all started to turn…

  And then… something happened.

  An enormous cloud of black powder. One of the smaller dragons was gone. The bigger one had a gaping wound on its side… and… there was something else.

  Another creature, covered in the same black material, making it hard to spot against the background of space. But… different. It had been completely invisible until the moment it struck… and had dozens of tentacles surrounding a central beak, which had apparently just slammed into the dragon’s side.

  As the dragons continued to flee back towards the rock they’d emerged from, the tentacled behemoth started consuming the remains of one of the smaller dragons… and somehow drawing in all the black powder to itself… before vanishing once more, only a few minutes after it had first been seen.

  They all stared at the display. Horror. Excitement. Confusion…. And they all turned to stare at Kyle.

  “.....Fuck. Move us. Right the fuck now. Somewhere else we can still get the feed from the new drones.”

  A buzz from Poisseux. “On it.”

  ***

  Their new position was three light-hours from the point of contact; and once again they were stealthed, drifting… and Kyle was staring at the display. A massive, zoomed-in picture of what they’d seen so far.

  “...Okay people. I’m gonna go over what we just saw. I’m going to be naming this one a ‘Kraken’, though I’m sure the Empire has their own name for it.”

  He tapped a button, bringing up a zoomed-in image of it, focusing on parts, one by one.

  “Just in general? A bulbous central body. A massive spike-like beak. Hundreds of tentacles, though most were tiny; we could only see the really big ones, at first. And when I say big, this thing was bigger than us; maybe a hundred meters across, and those tentacles at least fifty or sixty.”

  He zoomed in on the spike. A wedge-shape, which was the only part of the body not covered in the same sort of dark material as the dragons.

  “The beak was for ramming, clearly. And good enough to smash through a baby and seriously hurt an adult in a single strike, so it must be able to move extremely rapidly. And I know how hot, and how tough those things are, so clearly not anything soft.”

  He rewound the video a few seconds… to go from the moment before it appeared… to the dead ‘baby’ dragon, a fraction of a second later.

  “There was no sign of it on sensors at all; and not even a rock nearby, so it wasn’t just pretending to be something else. It was just flat-out invisible, despite having random rocks and debris in the background, and just appeared right at the moment it struck.”

  The video fast-forwarded, and then paused at the point where it was eating.

  “And then there were the tentacles… which appeared to have an effect similar to an emitter, able to push or pull objects without contact, sucking in the dragon’s superheated blood and the shattered bits of scales. If it weren’t for the fact I know the field emitters were a Directorate thing, I’d think it was another case of the Empire making the technology from a natural source. But…. yeah. This thing…. Fuck.”

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  Elise stared at the display. “...That kind of stealth is impossible. If it weren’t too close to a source of gravity I’d have said it had to emerge from darkspace there. But…. we saw it. It happened. Literally invisible to infrared, UV, everything, one moment. The next…. Hit so hard it would’ve crushed any warship ever made.”

  Thor nodded. “I think we found why the Empire is still keeping them secret. I bet there’s a whole ecosystem of a hundred different species, and a few of them have tricks like this they’ve reverse-engineered. Somewhere out there there’s a fleet of Empire warships with capabilities we can’t even imagine. They weren’t ready for the second galactic war… but if there’s ever a third….”

  “...Why didn’t they use it to retrieve Kyle and company after the whole dragon thing? If they’d been invisible, no way in hell miss Huxley could’ve ambushed them. It would’ve been the other way around.”

  Kyle frowned. “Could be a levels of secrecy thing, where they don’t want to risk more info getting out? Or… and well, its way less likely. This cluster’s species might be different. Could be a whole other variety of weirdness in the Alpha side.”

  Sherry shook her head. “All that’s well and good. But. It brings us to the question…. What do we do now?”

  Kyle stared at the display. At the enormous betentacled space monster. “... We need to get a message home. And learn as much about these creatures as we can. Maybe, if possible, kill one and bring a sample back. If the dubs have one of the bodies, they can reverse-engineer what makes it tick.”

  A soft buzz. Poisseux interjected. “I think we can all agree that these giant space creatures probably can’t handle a planet, right?”

  Sherry turned to the emitter. “...Probably not, but who can say? Why?”

  “Because someone else was watching the fight. There was movement on one of the barren worlds in-system at the same time they were duking it out in the asteroid field. I timed it, and the planet had some movement… something I couldn’t quite make out aside from just two images having a different result on each… as soon as the light from the dragon popping out of its nest became visible to it. Maybe a defense network, or observation platform, keeping an eye on things.”

  Kyle laughed. “....Damn. So… we really want to check out whatever the hell is on the planet, too. Might be a covert Empire observation place that even now is relaying word back to the Empire that we saw the Kraken.”

  “...Which means that there might be a stealthed Empire warship trying to track us down right now. Or a stealthed comm buoy on the way to the limit to call home.”

  Sherry sighed, shifting her hair aside and leaning back in her chair. “Fuuuck. Okay. So. We could be dead. Any second now. We might have an invisible stalker waiting to shoot us down. Or not. And the only way to find out…”

  Another buzz. The central image suddenly changed. “Just got another bite. Another dragon just came out of a different nest. No babies this time. Going after one of the other probes.”

  The image shifted for a few seconds. And then centered on another of the long, serpentine monsters, as it moved through the asteroid field… it seemed to have spotted one of the hidden probes, and was keeping rocks between it and its target as much as possible…

  Until it drew close enough. A sudden burst of plasma. And… the dragon swept in to eat the molten remains, before turning back around.

  They kept watching as it made its way back… anticipating another Kraken strike…. Which never came.

  It tucked back into its asteroid, and was gone from scanners; the millions of tons of rock masking its presence once more.

  Kyle stared. “....Okay. So more dragons are out there. Kinda figured that.”

  Kyle watched the display for a few more minutes… and then turned to Poisseux’s emitter. “Alright. We should check out what the hell is on that planet. But first… we should test whether being these things can handle being planetside. I’m thinking… we slow-roll a few drones in with a roll of gold foil, since we know the dragons love that stuff. Then move something around on the surface, covered with it. If, and only if, nobody bites… one of us can get close enough to use a few drones to enter whatever it is that was moving.”

  A buzz from the emitter. “Myself, obviously. I can fit my brainbox in a drone, and we can use a course we know is safe because another drone already took it.”

  He stared at the emitter a moment… and grimaced. “...How close can we get to that planet in darkspace? I don’t want to risk losing you. Ideally, we could have you attached to a comm buoy… and the moment something shows up you can pop back out.”

  The response seemed thoughtful. “....I’d have to run the math. Usually we avoid using it within a light-hour of a star unless its a well-plotted system, but…. I think the sun only warps space enough to prevent it for maybe six or seven light-minutes, and a planet as small as that one, just a couple light-seconds. The lag would be terrible… but I could sit right at the edge, where I could drop in and out at a moment’s notice, and run things fairly safely.”

  “..If we’re going to do that, might as well bring a shuttle so you’re not alone.”

  Thor chuckled. “Well, I wouldn’t say a shuttle. We undead are actually a bit more portable. You could pop my mind out of here and send me along with her… and I could control some drones.”

  “...Undead.”

  He shrugged. “We were alive, we died, we’re back. This body is alive, but any one of us could run it, if we wanted. There’s actually public ones that people can rent for a bit.”

  Kyle shook his head. “Okay. Well, undead or not, why keep it to just a buoy? I can get the shuttle ready in half an hour. Slap some stealth plates on the outside so only someone on the planet can see it.”

  Thor nodded. “Sure you can. But. Whatever is down there is most likely either an unmanned observation platform, or a manned research base. By someone who doesn’t want anyone else to know about these critters. They’ve already spotted our probes, so keeping secret isn’t an option. If it were manned, they’d already be evacuating and have called for backup.. Unless its hoping it just went unnoticed. So… if its an unmanned base… its probably rigged to self-destruct if people investigate.”

  “...You make a strong case for not investigating at all and leaving for backup right the fuck now..”

  “But there’s the thing! We don’t know what it is. It could be some other living thing planet-side that was just watching the fight. And pulled its shell closed when it saw danger. Or even the wreckage of a ship that got damaged and crashed there. And while two or three would be good, I don’t think we should risk everybody.”

  "If it were a shipwreck, they'd be calling for help. We'd have picked up a signal by now."

  Thor nodded. "But... what if this new one, the Kraken, could pick up those signals if it got close enough?"

  Kyle stared at him for a moment.. And sighed. “That's... probably not happening. But.... Fuck. We have no clue what’s really going on. Alright. For right now, we’ll keep gathering data. We’ll launch a bunch more probes, including ones transmitting radio just in case, then hit Darkspace to call home. Make sure the Skulls know about this. Then after we get a response… we hop back in. You two can take a ride in to check things out.”