Visch looked out over the dead world below. That grand building, so out of place, so impenetrable, yet so easily penetrated. Why was it? For that matter, why were they here in such numbers? This fortress had put up no defence, there seemed to be no beings of any kind to assault. Most of the fleet lay idle.  

An underling disturbed his thoughts.  

"Commander Visch, we've received new orders," said the officer, passing Visch access codes to the encrypted message. He received it through his ocular viewer.  

"Finally," rasped Visch, turning sharply to leave the room. Time to get on the bridge.  

Making his way onto the command deck, his presence was immediately known. Everyone tensed up and came to attention. The fear of snakes seemed fairly widespread across intelligent species. "Set course for the Xeh-Kel system and inform all tertiary support ships to join us," snapped Visch, a fire glinting in his eyes.  

"Yes, Fleet commander," nodded the lead navigator. Slowly the ship began to turn, heading back towards their home galaxy. Eighty other assault vessels followed like a mass of fish. As one elastic blob, they twisted out of normal space and into that compressed void between dimensions.  

In this place where height, width, and depth became confused, Visch considered the mission given to him and why it had come to them. The Xeh-Xel, a low technology race of horrifying but otherwise uninteresting creatures, inhabited a world overgrown with leafless forests and burning mists. This fleet had taken great care to evacuate numerous worlds at this point, with news coming in of many other planets still being fully evacuated of all advanced life, along with samples of flora and fauna, as if an apocalypse were about to befall. But on so many worlds all at once?  

There were no evacuation transports among the eighty one vessels travelling to their home world. Their mission was clear and unavoidable. They were to be an apocalypse to the Xeh-Xel.

The Gentleman and his mount had passed the raving party without incident, which was quite a relief. The violent lights and excitable noises had been quite enough for him. They drifted through the cloudy mists for a very long time indeed. That black misty sky started to become familiar to the suited man. He could almost see stars, though he fancied they were a construction of his mind, for no lights ever populated that great expanse above. Was it a sky? It seemed more of a soup, with them under a great ocean.  

They did at last run out of treacherous terrain to travel, at which point he realised it was time to give up his offering. Sliding down the great webbed beast, he turned and presented his cane, bowing slightly. As obedient as this creature was, he still feared its physical might. But as daintily as could be, the cane was lifted from his open palms and tucked away in some hidden pocket.  

Before leaving, the skirted beast rustled against the ground, vibrating the very air. A shimmer spread out from it, and the Gentleman felt at unease. Then with a whoop, the monstrous thing leapt into the air and was gone, leaving him alone and stranded.  

This did not look like the port of Nastrus. So he decided to wait, for that is what his folk did when presented with no obvious options. After an hour, he did rather feel like he was in a queue, albeit the first up, which was a rather pleasant thought. This kept him entertained for another hour, staring at the scuffed pillars of stone.  

Then a dark shape emerged, skipping like a stone over water, but on the underside of the sky. It grew nearer and nearer, until the Gentleman began to have thoughts of jumping his queue of one. But he was certain this thing must be proper and intentioned, or else why would it have come after so much waiting?  

It was indeed for him, as it sailed down and launched out three vicious speared claws from under it. Serpentine in form, it roared overhead, flicking a fat feathered tail downwards. But the feathers were thick flesh and armour. The thing's head was a more like a long helmet, with three main spikes and two in the front. No eyes adorned it, as was true with everything else here. It dug into the ground directly before the Gentleman's queue. And there it waited.  

Satisfied, the Gentleman strode up to the creature and inquired of it, "I seek transit to the port of Nastrus. Can you take me there? I own the kingdom of the webbed shroud beasts."  

There was little reaction from the thing, which the Gentleman took to mean assent. So he grasped hold of its head bone and mounted its thick winding body. His legs were barely astride the thing when it launched off again at a frightening speed. Into the misty tar of the sky ocean they went. This was a glorious way to travel.  

Before long they descended, for there seemed to be something of interest below. A long flat pillar with some squirming writhing mass, unlike anything he had yet seen in this bizarre world. Its form seemed to shift before the eyes, not morphing so much as falling out of space and back in again. Its parts didn't connect to themselves as they should, and some didn't even appear to be connected at all, yet moved as one. The light striking himself and his mount disagreed with the light hitting the other thing, as if there were many mischievous lamps about. And darting about it on the ground was a strangely familiar form, a think black figure.  

"I believe I have heard of you, my dear fellow. Do you require assistance?" called the Gentleman from atop his steed.  

The little man raced out of the way of the mass of flesh, which seemed to be trying to strike at it, forming limbs from nowhere that as quickly vanished jerkily.  

"Who are you?! Yes, I'm trying to catch this thing," yelled the little one.  

"Very well, we shall endeavour to assist you. My steed? Please apprehend this miscreant," said the Gentleman, patting the sightless creature on the side of its skull.  

Twisting about like a suddenly alert panther, it oriented its twine spines towards the mass and with a popping sound, fired a black, shiny tongue at the thing, piercing it and rending it through. Vicious inverted ridges ripped at its flesh. The thing shuddered, twisting about the obsidian tongue, its movements convulsing and pulsing in the air, pieces separating and floating. The little figure leapt on top of it suddenly, helping to hold it down.  

"That's awesome! Thanks! I'm going to need a bit more help though," said the being.  

"Is there anyone we can call upon?" inquired the Gentleman.  

"Not here, but I see someone coming."  

"Might I get your name? I'm sure I know it, but it's not coming to me at the moment," said the Gentleman courteously.  

"Yeah, I'm Stickman!"

The ironically named "Observation Deck" was as small, cramped, and useless as ever. Pushing aside some boxes, Cat uncovered a viewscreen. Sitting down, he accessed the security systems and began flipping through the prisoner sections of the vessel. Bored and agitated as he always was on this ship, he started scanning faster, assuming he would recognise the black dot of Stickman's head.  

He slowed briefly as he passed a screen showing significant movement. Going back, he saw a very familiar and (in his opinion) stupid Octopousse, accompanied by a horde of somewhat concerning tall squid things, seemingly wearing armour. They were heading down the hall, though from where and to where was difficult to gauge, given the completely mazelike quality of this ship. However, the vibrations in the floor suggested they were coming towards him.  

Rising from his chair, Cat awaited the arrival of this undesirable meeting. The oval door irised open to reveal a short and stubby Octopousse with a frown and an eye patch, followed by a hallway full of towering squid with long thick tentacles and armoured crowns. Their mouths clenched with a ring of teeth, their limbs flailing about, seeming to be hunting for prey. Running against the Observation Deck's numerous storage boxes was thwarting their attempts to a degree.  

"One Good Eye, I see," noted Cat dryly.  

"Good evening, my dear feline," sneered One Good Eye. "I'm glad to see you've been expecting us."  

"I can't find Stickman. Where's he got to?" asked Cat, already irritated by this little being.  

"ELIMINATED!" screamed One Good Eye with a certain insane zeal, his tentacles flailing upwards excitedly.  

Cat raised an eyebrow at that. "Oh really? Because you've been trying to do that ever since he embarrassed the lot of you knowing how things work around here. Not been too successful, have you?"  

"Well, he's very much deceased now. He was dealt with most ruthlessly. By me," crooned One Good Eye, very pleased with himself.  

"We are both Andonian citizens and you know very well we are protected," said Cat, taking a step towards the Octopousee. "Now take me to see him."  

"Stop!" squealed the squishy thing, tentacles bracing forward. "You aren't going anywhere unless I say so. You are still dimensional intruders and you might have... dimensions all over you. It's not safe! But we will take you somewhere. Yes, yes indeed. We will take you somewhere quite far, along with your friend."  

Moving aside, One Good Eye waved his guards forward. Surging aggressively in, crushing whatever junk crossed their path, they quickly lanced out their lead tentacles to seize Cat. He flinched, resisting their attack, but their gooey grasp encircled him all too effectively. A snarl crossed his face as he eyed One Good Eye.  

"Now take him to the Severance Pod! There he will get to see his dear Stickman," laughed One Good Eye, pulling a small kitten from a pouch he carried. "Yes, you will be together again soon! Ah! Haha! AHAHAHA!"  

The guards slithered out, bumping into each other and almost swimming down the halls. Cat squirmed around, looking behind him at One Good Eye, petting his kitten.  

"You'll never get away... oh bother, never mind," started Cat, cutting himself short.  

As they moved through the ship, Cat saw numerous strange sights through the external view ports, as always. An empty Andonian mall, a distant space port with many ships transiting in and out, some bizarre destroyed planet under attack by a vast fleet, and lastly a dark moon. The guards threw him down in this last pod, alongside another. Cat's fur stood on end when he saw who it was.  

The oval portal irised closed and pod 8 of 3 was jettisoned off to join its sibling.

Wet feet pattered along the frigid plate floor, panicked. Seven team members downed without even seeing their attacker. Agent Tau slipped along the corridor, looking for cover. The interior of structure was chaotic and easy to get lost in. They'd mislaid their first member upon entry, getting split up at a division in a vertical shaft. His scream was what let them proceed without him. But the sound of the clattering bones along the hallway had taken them down, one by one.  

They'd lost contact with the fleet shortly after entry. Using standard practice, they tried to secure their entry position, which lead to losing a man. After losing a few more, standard practice gave way to blind assault. Agent Tau wasn't sure if he was faster than the others, more cowardly, or less of a target. But he was the last one alive in the bowels of this technological maze.  

The structure was obviously artificial and highly advanced. Nothing was recognisable, but a lot of systems seemed to be vulnerable to weapons fire, unlike the exterior. They had done a fair bit of damage both intentionally and unintentionally. Tau needed to get back to the external port to report to the ships. That's what he told himself, anyway.  

*fsssst*  

Swinging his weapon sharply around to bear, he fired five times at the sound, blowing a glowing hole in what seemed to have been a ventilation port. He was jumpy and unfocussed. He wasn't going to make it.  

Then the sound of slow dull strikes of soft bone against metal floor. He'd heard that before. Then something else, something that caused what little courage Tau held to drain away from him. A ghostly call from the thing.  

"Harooo!"  

He looked at the hole he'd just made, wondering if he could squeeze into it and hide. The molten sides would cook him. The tapping sound grew closer; he ran. Behind him the cadence accelerated. It had heard him.  

"Agen-- Zeta! Agent Zeta, report on your progr--" came an unexpected voice over Agent Tau's communicator. It was the mission commander of his ship!  

"Command, this is Agent Tau! I am being pursued by a hostile alien force, request immediate extraction! All team members lost!" yelled Tau, trying to hide the desperation in his voice.  

"--peat, Agent. Please rep--at," came the reply.  

"Immediate extraction! Immediate extraction!" screamed Agent Tau, glancing behind him.  

"Harooo!"  

There it was. All bone, no jointed limbs of any kind. Bone spikes carved through its back, head, and tail. It walked on what looked like elongated shoulder blades. Its skull was empty, wrapped in sharp angled corners. Tau raised his beam weapon and flipped it to single shot overload. One shot was all he was going to get.  

He fired, the light of the explosion from his weapon blinding him. He felt cold, somehow. It was strange, screaming silently. The radio, would it pick up what was happening to him now? So far from home. The last sound he heard was the harsh clatter of hard sponge against shaped mineral.

A perpetual starless night surrounded the Severance Colony. It was founded on a tide locked moon, around a tide locked planet. The orbit of the moon never took it into the light of the system's sun. Despite this, the colony here thrived, as this moon was the largest habitable body in the planetary system.  

It was winter now, which brought the temperature down to a paltry three degrees Centigrade. The thermal conditioners spread about the moon's crust helped with that. However, it could have been three degrees Kelvin and Stickman wouldn't have been bothered.  

Leaving the crashed pod, Stickman ventured out across the rocky plains. Looking about for signs of civilisation, he spotted the distant glow of technology. The sky was alight with the light pollution of what should be the main colony. It would likely be about twenty kilometres from where he had been laid. He'd better get started.  

The rocks and soil around him shone with a certain sharpness. This made for better progress across the foreign terrain. Yet every once in a while, he caught a glimpse of a chunk of earth that was a bit fainter than the rest, a bit blurrier, a bit harder to see. As he continued towards the colony glow, these marks grew in frequency and size. His unease grew with each one he saw.  

A weapon or a trap was going to be needed soon, before he arrived. What lay ahead may not be what he was expecting, though what he was expecting was quickly changing for the worse. Scouting about, he found some nearly buried antigrav relays. They operated by twisting a small hole in space, acting like a sinkhole for gravity, such that other objects would be in a gravity vacuum when linked to it. It created bizarre patterns to Stickman's vision, and even getting near it gave him vertigo.  

Nevertheless, the thin framed being carefully worked to disconnect one of the devices while retaining its power source. He accidentally set off quite a few tamper alarms in the process, but that would likely prove to be a help, should anyone be around to receive them. Holding the bulky device, he moved on, back towards the colony.  

A deep furrow crossed his path, one which he put his foot clean into, causing him to partially trip. His partial trip caused him to partially lose the antigrav device, dropping it on the ground. Something noticed that.  

Crouching, Stickman looked up and saw the thing rolling ponderously past him. A great set of shark fins, or dinosaur teeth, sawing by, almost unaware of him, small as he was. Fear overcame him and he crouched behind a mound of dirt and rock, clutching the antigrav device, what was working of it, to himself.  

Twisted shapes roiled over the surface of the thing, pulsing and oozing. Blood gushed about in open air over unsealed veins, the creature's own. Stickman saw it in its entirety and did not know what danger it posed to him. Few things could threaten the little being, and he now felt what his more vulnerable companions often did. Mortality. He truly did not know whether or not this thing could destroy him.  

Stickman flipped the antigrav device on, aiming it away from himself into the nearby hill he cowered against.  

The creature roared horribly, the sound echoing first, then the source sound never arriving. It reeled about, torn rib cage-like structures unfurling above him. It struck the ground, tearing it apart all about him. The sharp landscape became blurred with the flying chunks of stone and dust. The little figure was paralyzed, unable to move while the world swirled around him in a chaotic explosion.  

After a storm of angry strikes all around him, the beast settled and turned about, moving off and into the sky, shrinking from view, then disappearing altogether. The antigrav unit sputtered and lost power, exhausted from continuous disconnected use.  

"I can't believe that Octopousse computer actually got something right," Stickman thought, then tossed the defunct unit aside and started into a run for the colony.

"Event 17," Xecia murmured, flipping through the screens of information. "And what do we do about you, eh?" Her eyes flicked rapidly across the lines of text and the charts and diagrams. A dull panic slowly set in as she realised what this was. "Oh."  

Closing her eyes, she sat down. This was too soon. It wasn't supposed to happen this early. Something must have disturbed the normal timetable. Would it still play out the same? She shifted in her seat.  

The room spun about her dizzyingly. Reaching a hand out to grasp the desk corner, she steadied herself. They needed to find out whether events were proceeding as expected or not. Shaking off the spell of disorientation, she got back to the console and accessed the local network. A small program running on it pleased her significantly.  

Tapping into the hidden program, she traced back through it and gained entry to a very specific mission log. Fleets from across the inhabited systems were converging on a distant intergalactic planet devoid of life, but having been recorded as bearing an anomaly. Nothing new there. They had attacked it, with no effect. She then exited that interface and quickly switched over to the conventional monitoring networks. Knowing exactly the planets to check, she saw that they had experienced varying levels of destructive spatial ripples. The arrangement of them was slightly different.  

"Hmm... that's new," smiled the doctor. "I think we'd better get ourselves involved again." One last hack. Within moments, she had a flight order and numerous rapid transport routes collected to get her to that cored dead world.  

-==-  

On arrival in the system, she observed the fleets still focussed on the penetration of the planetary structure. They had launched numerous landing parties, some successful, some not. Entry had been gained, though contact with those inside tended to disappear quickly afterwards. This had slowed their attempts as they worked on a way to keep track of people going in, and keeping them alive.  

Doctor Xecia's ship emerged into normal space adjacent to a pentagonal port on the side of the endless sheer surface above the planet. Stepping out with companion in tow, they reached the sealed doors. Taking out various tools, she carefully dislodged and then removed the covering of the port. Her partner carried the thick plate away as Xecia prepared to go inside.  

The bright floodlights from the ship cast the interior of the place into pitch darkness. A small flashlight held in her gloved hand illuminated little within. Her heart was racing. This was very very dangerous. Going inside was not something she wanted to do. She didn't always come out.  

Turning to the squat being behind her, she summoned a set of exploratory tools. "Stay here, Se," she said, latching a molecular hook into the lip of the wall. "Move the ship to the sixth port down and open it in 8 hours. Do not open it before then," she said to the little fellow. His scarred eye scowled at her, but he consented.  

She turned back to face the darkness. Leaning forward, she shifted and fell inside.

Terrick and Elacin strode out of the confines of his home to get a breath of fresh air. Elacin was too frustrated to ignore her as he usually managed. The minor glitching happening around the city had started affecting his daily life as well, as much as he hated to admit it. There must be some bug going around corrupting the software. Central services should have it fixed soon though.  

"Look at that, Terrick. Do you see that?" pointed Elacin, indicating the backed up pedestrian traffic to and from the nearest transport station. "Two hours, Terrick. Two hours squashed in there with everybody else."  

"Yeah, it's like century's end. Always lots of crowds. Never seen them so much though. Gonna wait until that clears up before going home?" asked Terrick, hoping to divert the conversation to something else.  

"Duh. VT better be up by tomorrow or I'm not going to school," grumped Elacin.  

They strode away from the station, heading towards the park. The geometrically placed stones on the walkway shifted as they approached, meeting their steps gracefully. Glassy columns outlined their way, guiding them into the central play area. There were the usual random shapes set about, some floating, others sinking into the earth. A lot of little ones were frolicking about, their annoyed guardians standing near, likely stranded by the same problems that brought Elacin here. The sky was dimming as noon came on.  

"What are we going to do, Terrick? I'm so bored," moaned Elacin, searching about for somewhere to sit, or something to kick.  

"I dunno, let's just walk around a bit. Or we could check out the Notoris. They probably have some new stock this week since that war's over," suggested Terrick. He'd actually forgotten about Notoris, it had been over a year since he collected anything from there. But being pressed to find entertainment in the physical world, that was the most interesting place he knew that was nearby.  

"Which war? There's so many," Elacin said, only half interested. Notoris wasn't really her thing.  

"With the Vendans," Terrick answered, thinking she should know this.  

"That doesn't count. They're just a minor race," snapped Elacin.  

"Yeah, but they'll still get trumps at least, maybe some commons I need," noted Terrick hopefully.  

Elacin slowed, shielding herself with her arm. "What's going on? Why are the lights getting so bright?"  

They were getting past the centre of the park and as midday arrived and the sky dimmed, the tall spiral lights of the park were alighting one by one. Terrick was accustomed to this, as every other day they did this. But some were indeed getting too bright, with no sign of ceasing. He quickly turned his face away from them, as Elacin swung around, walking towards a darker part of the grounds.  

"It's too bright! The lights are messed up too?!" Elacin yelled, starting to run back the way they'd come.  

Terrick ran after her, as more of the park's lights over illuminated, started to actually heat his back with the intensity. Then they started to pop and go out. An unsettling rumble shot through the ground at that moment, and they both found themselves in uncomfortable darkness.  

-==-  

Gak-gi stepped carefully through the muck, watching the eggs carefully placed in the mud. They were slow to release their gas sacs, but that wasn't unexpected. The moon was nearly absent and the eggs needed more light to flourish properly. It would have to do.  

The twisted parent wobbled slightly, thorns scraping against the soft ground, digging furrows. Something seemed amiss. Hopping once to test the ground, its jagged feet felt the vibrations coming back unevenly. As if the earth below were hollow. Yet that couldn't be.  

Then a sickening twisting passed over Gak-gi's whole body, stretching the muscles and nearly tearing some joints. The effect visibly travelled outward over the egg field, smashing some of them, distorting others. Whirly shapes formed in the mud, bubbles and pits. A scream pierced the dark night.  

Something had gone very wrong.