The wreckage field was like nothing she'd ever seen before.

The Cobra edged forward, sensors and gun batteries hunting through the metal sea for any sign of hostile targets. From the look of the place, their quarry had long since been and gone, but that didn't make Wraia any less on edge. She didn't recognise any of the vessels in this dead system – none of them matched Sol-Fleet records on any known spacefaring civilisations.

A swift conference over the comms with Prallas Fifthhorn confirmed that the Narvorians had the same results. Nothing on records.

In any other situation this would have been an extraordinary find. Curiosity ripped at Wraia's guts as she watched wreck after wreck slide by, her eyes devouring the details of their hulls, their engines, their colours, their insignias. Languages she didn't recognise; symbols that matched no database. The history here was staggering.

"Steady as she goes, Lieutenant," Wraia said quietly. "I want all of this logged."

"Aye, ma'am. Steady as she goes."

"Cameras recording on full wide-spread," Hooper confirmed.

"How could that thing have done... all this?" Briar breathed.

Gallagher glanced at the comms officer grimly. "Some of that wreckage looks ancient. Who knows how long that thing has been rampaging around the galaxy."

"But why would this all accumulate here?" Hooper asked. "Whatever it is, it doesn't take trophies. It left the Manticore behind; left those Narvorian ships behind. Where did this all come from?"

"Speculation won't get us anywhere," Wraia said flatly. "Just keep moving, and I want a trace on the gravity anomalies. Our mystery guest came through here – I'd like to know why."

They continued on at an in-system canter along the edge of the field, avoiding the great twisting clumps of mangled metal, while getting as close as they could for the cameras. She could see the same warping effects on many of these long-lost vessels, their hulls bent and twisted out of shape by some impossibility of physics.

"Ma'am," Briar piped up almost an hour into their solemn journey. "I've got Chief Navigator Fifthhorn on ship-to-ship. Sounds urgent."

"Put him through, Ensign."

"You're live, ma'am."

"Chief Navigator," Wraia said. "This is Clay."

"Clay," came the Narvorian's gruff voice. "We have found something."

"What is it?"

"Bring your vessel close. You must see."

Wraia blinked at the Narvorian's brusqueness. She muted the comm for a moment, shooting Hooper a questioning glance.

"They're about ten thousand clicks ahead of us, just beyond the debris belt," the systems officer said, shrugging. "Sensors aren't showing anything different out there. Just more inert matter in the debris field."

Wraia frowned and reopened the comm. "We're on our way, Chief Navigator. Clay out." She nodded to Scarreth. "Alright, Ensign. Let's go see what the fuss is about."

"Aye, ma'am," Scarreth replied with a smirk as she keyed in a fresh course. "Course laid in."

The Cobra swung upwards, skirting the edge of the debris field and powering forward through the void until they had a visual of the Narvorian cruiser. The Rummus Lone lurked on the far side of the field, it's prow pointed at a clump of particularly ravaged vessels. As they drew closer, however, Wraia could see the wrecks were clustered around something much larger.

"Wait a second," Ratcliffe murmured as they closed in. "Is that what I think it is?"

"I think it might be." Gallagher cupped his chin in one hand. "Size is right."

"Bloody hell."

"Quite." Wraia nodded as she stared at the big shape. "I had really been hoping there was only one of those things out there."

The atmosphere on the bridge chilled as they got within visual range, swinging in on the flank of their Narvorian counterpart and facing the wrecked mass of something that looked an awful lot like the ship they'd been chasing.

"Do you think... do you think that's it?" Briar asked. "Do you think it came to this system and... died?"

Hooper shook her head. "No gravitational anomalies leading through this part of the system. I think this is another one."

"Clay," Prallas Fifthhorn rumbled over the comm link, sounding distinctly uneasy. "You see what we see?"
"I see it, Chief Navigator," Clay confirmed, fighting hard to keep her fingers from fidgeting as she worked over the implications in her mind. "It's a wreck."

"It is the same. Same as you showed us."

"I believe so."

"But old. Very old."

She nodded, eyes narrowing. It had the same roughly circular profile as the image they'd captured, and up close she could see that its sludge-grey exterior looked more like rock than metal – almost organic.

"Ensign Hooper," she said quietly. "How do you read that?"

"Scanners are having a hard time penetrating the exterior structure," Hooper answered. "Measures one hundred and twenty-seven kilometres across. I'm not detecting any power readings or gravity distortions in the local volume."

Wraia nodded to herself. It was the right scale too – a little smaller than the thing they were following but still massive in its own right. There were no bands of light on this vessel, however. It was dead in space.

"Looks like it took a hell of a beating," Gallagher interjected, squinting at the camera screens. "Look at the port side. Those are blast craters. The main hull's got stress fractures across the whole central axis. It's a miracle it's holding together at all."

"That's a lot of firepower," Ratcliffe chuckled nervously.

"Chief Navigator?" Wraia said.

"Clay."

"I believe we should continue our sweep."

"You do not want to... look deeper?"
She glanced at Briar.

"Examine," he prompted. "Doesn't really translate well from Narvorian."

"We will," she said quickly to Prallas. "But I have a hunch – I mean, a feeling – about what we will find."

"What do you feel?"

"I feel if we keep looking, we will find more of these dead things in the debris."

"We can look. But we must move faster. Our prey is not here. We should not wait long."

"Agreed. We will move ahead as quickly as possible and report back to you with our findings. Clay out." Twisting in her chair she nodded to Ensign Scarreth. "Plot me a course along the top of the debris field, nice straight lines. Cover as much space as possible."

"Aye, ma'am."

"Hooper?"

"Ma'am?"

"Keep an eye out for any more clusters of ships like that. Odds are, those are where we'll find more wrecks."

"What exactly is your hunch, ma'am?" Gallagher asked.

She gave him a nervous smile. "If I'm right, I think I know why all these wrecks are here."

"And why's that?"

"This was a battleground." Wraia gestured to the ocean of dead ships. "Whoever they were, they came here in force to kill these things, and this is what was left behind."

*

They found six more dead leviathans in the debris field. Some were mostly intact, others had been broken apart by the cataclysmic forces that had once ravaged this system uncounted years ago. Wraia stared in amazement as they passed the sixth, its spherical bodily cracked clean in half and splitting open like a clam. Its innards showed a honeycomb of passages and think, snaking cables hanging inert in the empty space.

"Get everything, Ensign," Wraia breathed. "Make sure every scrap of this is being sent down to Whitlock, and I want a team examining this as we go. Tactical assessments, engineering, systems analysis – all of it."

"Yes, ma'am," Hooper answered, sounding almost in awe, as though they were treading on ground that was reserved for some higher power. "Chief Whitlock has department heads standing by and I'm compiling data packets for them now."

"Good. And make sure you send the whole lot to the Narvorians too. They need to see this."

Six dead monsters in the dark. Wraia tried to see what any of this actually meant in real terms. Knowing what had transpired in this cold place didn't solve anything. It didn't help her catch and kill the ship that had ravaged Myrr Idol.

Maybe they should stay here and gather all the information possible. There was enough here to keep Sol-Fleet's engineers, technicians, officers and xenobiologists busy for decades – maybe even centuries.

But the other vessel was still out there. Every minute they spent here increased the odds of it disappearing and never being found, until it showed up again and destroyed another colony, or another ship. Wraia was being torn in two by her conflicting desires.

At least her theory seemed to be correct, though. Some vast armada had descended on this system to destroy the strange spherical ships. Why here, though? What was so special about this place? There didn't seem to be any habitable planets, so what made this the site of a galactic conflict that she could barely wrap her brain around?

"Ma'am," Hooper called. "I'm picking up the gravitational anomalies consistent with the unidentified vessel."

"Where?" Wraia snapped out of her introspection in an instant.

"Ahead of us, running at a perpendicular course. It looks like it passed over the field and headed in-system."

"Pass those coordinates to navigation," she ordered. "Scarreth, lock us onto that trajectory. Mr. Ratcliffe, full ahead. All hands, standby battle stations."

"Standby battle stations, aye," Briar echoed. "Passing the word."

"Get me Prallas."

After a moment of fiddling with the comms panel, he gave her a nod.

"Chief Navigator, we've picked up the trail again," she blurted, trying not to let her nerves get the better of her. "The ship we are following, it headed directly towards the centre of the system. There must be something there."

"We will require a course."

"It's on its way."

"We will accompany you. Slow your course-,"

"Negative, Chief Navigator. As you said, we must be quick. We will not engage any hostiles alone, I assure you."

"Clay..." Prallas growled with irritation.

"Follow our course and we'll lead you in. Clay out." She closed the comm and exhaled sharply. "Alright, everyone, stand to your stations. We're going in."

The viewscreen swung, and the Cobra's decks rumbled with power as the engines ramped up again. The glittering ring of ancient debris gradually faded from sight as they turned, locking on to the trail of gravitational pockmarks in the fabric of space. Their course came up on her display and she studied it with jaw clenched and fingers tightly interlaced.

They were going into the heart of the system, a straight line course only narrowly missing the system's sun if they followed it all the way through. An hour ticked by as they accelerated inward, passing a diminutive gas giant, two barren rocky worlds, and moving in towards the system's innermost planet.

A cold rock, it was maybe the size of Mars, too far from the system's red dwarf to be suitable for life without a Herculean terraforming effort. It began to grow from a spec on the forward cameras.

"I'm picking up another body on the navigational arrays," Scarreth warned as they drew close. "One that's not on the charts."

"Bloody hell, are those damned charts ever right?" Ratcliffe snorted. "What've you got?"

"Looks like a small satellite body in orbit," she answered. "Hooper, can you get the tactical AI on this thing?"

"Copy." Hooper's fingers fluttered on the controls for a few seconds, and then her console bleeped. "Confirmed, there's definitely something there."

"Something?" Wraia gave her a wary look.

"Too large for a ship – even the one we're tracking. Might just be a moon that didn't get picked up on the long range astrographics."

"Well, whatever it is," Ratcliffe said. "This course is taking us right at it."

"Steady as she goes," Wraia ordered. "Let's see where the trail leads."

"Aye, ma'am."

They piled on speed. Prallas Fifthhorn and the Rummus Lone lagged several thousand kilometres behind, the Narvorian cruiser built for brutality before speed. Wraia gripped her armrests tightly and watched the distance counter slowly click down on her display. Forty six minutes later, the Cobra cleared the planet and came into sight of the mystery body.

"Holy mother..." Scarreth gasped as the colossus came into view on the forward cameras. "What is that?"

It was the size of a small moon, but contrary to Hooper's assumption, it was not a moon.

The massive, spherical construct was beyond the scale of anything she'd ever witnessed before, looming large in the viewscreen like an angry god of the underworld. It's exterior was dark and pitted with dark scars and pockmarks, held together by vast ribs of rock.

She straightened up in her command chair, brows rising with both interest and apprehension. Maybe it had once been an innocent satellite of the planet, but not anymore. Wraia instantly saw the same evidence of blast impacts along those vast artificial bones, but that was the least of her concerns right now. In two great rings in the northern and southern hemispheres, she could see what could only be launch bays – enormous spherical launch bays big enough to berth an entire Sol-Fleet battlegroup.

"It's a bloody space dock," Gallagher breathed, shaking his head in amazement. "How in the black spaces could you even build something like this?"

"Those bays," Ratcliffe said, looking back over his shoulder at her. "They look like they're big enough for our friend."

"It's got power," Hooper confirmed nervously. "Low level but definite. Tactical AI is reading residual energy discharge along one of the bays on the southern ring. It's still... operational."

The Cobra slid forward, keeping well away from any kind of orbit, but they were still close enough to see the single glittering ring of light on the bay Hooper had referenced as the massive space dock turned on its axis.

"Well, now we know why it came here," Wraia said softly. "It looks like we've found 'home'."