"Just try not to get my fur singed," I'd said. Famous last words, right? Or maybe, just maybe, famous next words, depending on how this whole 'let's poke the cosmic horror with a stick' plan went.
Eva didn't waste a second. "Alright, Wanderlust," she murmured, more to the ship than to me, her fingers dancing over the controls like she was coaxing a shy animal.
"Time to be the ghost we know you can be."
The familiar, comforting hum of the ion drives didn't exactly stop – you can't just hit the brakes in space and expect to float quietly – but it… changed. It deepened, thinned out, became less a vibration through the deck plates and more a whisper in the ship's metallic soul.
Lights on the bridge dimmed to a moody, operational twilight, leaving only the essential readouts glowing softly. Non-essential systems went dark with a series of soft clicks that sounded unnervingly loud in the sudden quiet. Silent running. It always made my ears twitch. Every tiny sound amplified, every shadow seem a little deeper.
"Course altered," Eva announced, her voice a low murmur that matched the ship's new mood. "We're skirting the edge of their last known patrol vector. Reducing emissions across the board. From here on out, we are a particularly uninteresting lump of space rock. Got it?"
"Got it," I replied, equally quiet. "Playing 'sentient space rock.' My specialty." Though, if I was being honest, my heart was thumping a bit faster than your average boulder.
This was different from our usual jaunts. Usually, space felt big, empty, maybe a little lonely. Now? Now it felt… charged. Like the air before a lightning strike, but instead of ozone, I could almost taste the ancient dread and that sharp, acrid tang of feline hostility I'd sensed earlier.
It was stronger now, a faint but persistent note in the cosmic symphony that only I seemed to be able to hear properly.
My "other senses," as Eva called them, were definitely on high alert. It was like someone had cranked up the gain on my internal weird-o-meter. The faint "whispers" I'd caught before were still there, but now they felt less like distant radio static and more like… well, like someone muttering angrily in the next room, just on the other side of a very thin wall. I couldn't make out words, not exactly, but the emotion behind them was unmistakable: suspicion, alertness, and a cold, patient readiness. For what, I really didn't want to find out firsthand.
"Anything, Bolt?" Eva whispered after a while. We'd been drifting like this for what felt like an eternity but was probably only an hour. The only sounds were the faint sigh of the life support and the occasional soft tap of Eva's fingers on a console.
I closed my eyes, focusing, trying to filter out the Wanderlust's own subtle creaks and groans from the fainter, more disturbing symphony outside. "They're still out there," I breathed. "The… the red triangles from your screen. Lots of them. Moving with purpose. Like well-trained hunting hounds, sticking to a pattern. And that… hiss I picked up earlier? It's like a background radiation now. Faint, but definitely there. Coming from deeper in that crimson-stained area of Orion."
I tilted my head. "And there's something else… under the anger. Something… big. And very, very old. Sleeping, maybe? Or just… waiting." Like a colossal predator, perfectly still in the dark, just its eyes glinting. That thought didn't exactly help my 'sentient space rock' composure.
Eva, to her credit, didn't dismiss it. She just made a tiny adjustment on her console, probably cross-referencing my vague canine premonitions with her sensor logs. "Keep focusing on that, Bolt. Anything more you can give me on 'big and old'?"
I tried. I really did. I pushed past the general hum of feline animosity, past the methodical sweep of the smaller contacts, searching for that deeper, heavier presence. It was like trying to hear a specific whale song in the middle of a noisy, crowded ocean. The 'library' in my DNA offered no clear catalog entry for this one, just a primal urge to either roll over and show my belly or tuck my tail and run very, very fast.
"It feels… cold," I said finally, the fur on my neck prickling. "Not like space-cold. More like… ancient-tomb cold. And powerful. Like it's not just one ship, but… a presence. Concentrated. Important."
Suddenly, a new kind of alarm flared through my senses – sharper, more immediate. It wasn't one of the distant, angry whispers. This was a focused probe. Like a searchlight beam, briefly, terrifyingly, sweeping right over us.
"Eva!" I yelped, my voice cracking despite myself. "Something just… scanned us! Not ship sensors, I don't think. Different. Like a mind, almost… a very cold, very sharp mind."
On the console, a proximity warning flashed yellow for a heart-stopping second before vanishing.
Eva's breath hitched. "I saw that! A ghost signal. Passive energy reading spiked for a microsecond then disappeared. Too quick to lock onto, too faint for standard analysis. Damn it!"
"It's turning," I whispered, my gaze fixed on nothing, yet seeing something in my mind's eye. "That 'big, old' thing I felt? It's not sleeping. It's aware. And it's… it's like a flagship. A command vessel. It's not one of the little hunters. This one is… different. It felt that… probe. And it's curious." My heart hammered against my ribs. "It's coming closer to where that probe hit."
Eva's face was pale in the dim glow of the monitors, but her hands were steady on the controls. "Can it see us?"
"I don't know," I admitted, a tremor in my voice. "The feeling was… like it noticed a dust mote dance in a sunbeam where no sunbeam should be. It might not know what we are, but I think it knows something is here that wasn't here before."
The Wanderlust, bless her silent, metallic heart, continued her ghost-like drift. But the vast emptiness of space suddenly felt incredibly small, like we were a mouse hiding under a single leaf while a hawk circled overhead. That hawk being, in this case, a potentially kilometers-long alien command ship with a very chilly disposition.
"Eva," I said, my voice barely audible. "This command ship… it feels like the source of that really concentrated feline animosity. Like the den mother of all space cats from hell. And it's definitely not on any 'let's just live and let live' program."
Eva didn't reply immediately. Her knuckles were white where she gripped the edge of her console. The Wanderlust was a speck of dust in the face of what was approaching, and we both knew it. On the tactical display, a new, much larger red icon, tinged with a menacing purple, was slowly, deliberately, moving towards the area of that ghost signal – towards us.
As it drew nearer, the "details" in my head sharpened, coalescing from vague dread into something more… defined. And infinitely more disturbing.
"It's… huge, Eva," I whispered, my eyes squeezed shut as if that would somehow make the mental image less terrifying. "Not just long, but… an unnatural kind of massive. Jagged. Like a shard of obsidian, impossibly vast, drinking the light around it. It doesn't have viewports, not like our ships. It sees in other ways. That cold probe I felt? It's like… tendrils of awareness, constantly sweeping, tasting the void."
The general background hiss of feline anger was still there, but emanating from this thing, it was deeper, more resonant, like the purr of a predator the size of a small moon. And interwoven with it, something else… a chilling, structured intelligence. Not chaotic rage, but calculated, patient menace.
"I can almost… feel its crew," I breathed, a shiver racking my body. "Thousands of them. Minds… sharp. Disciplined. All focused. Like a hive, but not mindless. A hive of very intelligent, very predatory… well, cats. But not the kind you leave a bowl of milk out for."
The purple icon on Eva's screen crept closer. And closer. Any second now, I expected alarms to blare, weapons to power up, that cold intelligence to lock onto us with undeniable certainty. I could practically feel its shadow falling over the Wanderlust. My own instincts were screaming, a chaotic jumble of 'fight!', 'flight!', 'play dead!', 'dig a hole and hide!' – none of which were particularly useful options.
Eva remained frozen, her gaze flicking between her sensor readouts – which probably showed frustratingly little – and the spot on the viewscreen where the invisible behemoth ought to be. The silence on the bridge was so thick, I swear I could hear the individual atoms of recycled air bumping into each other.
This was it. The moment of truth. Or, more likely, the moment of becoming an interesting smear on an alien windshield.
The purple icon… paused. It sat there, a hair's breadth from our projected position, for what felt like a thousand heartbeats. That cold, probing awareness washed over us again, more intense this time, lingering, as if sniffing a strange scent. I could feel it, like icy fingers brushing against my mind.
I instinctively tried to make my own mental presence as small, as insignificant, as a lost thought.
And then… just as suddenly as it had focused, the presence… retracted.
The purple icon on the screen, after that agonizing pause, began to move again. Not towards us. It continued its original trajectory, sweeping past our position, leaving us in its silent, terrifying wake.
It didn't fire. It didn't hail. It didn't even slow down again. It just… moved on.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding for what felt like a week. My legs were shaky.
"Eva…?" I managed, my voice hoarse. "What… what just happened?"
Eva slowly unclenched her hands from the console. Her face was still pale, but a flicker of utter bewilderment was dawning in her eyes.
"I have no idea, Bolt," she said, her voice hushed. "It was right on top of us. Its energy signature was… monumental. Our passive sensors lit up like a festival for a second there. It had to have registered us on some level."
"So why…?"
"Why did it let us go?" she finished for me, a deep frown etching itself between her brows. "Either we're so insignificant it literally didn't consider us worth a second thought… or it knew exactly what it was doing." She shook her head.
"And I'm not sure which of those possibilities is more terrifying."
I knew which one I found more terrifying. Being dismissed was one thing. Being deliberately ignored by something that powerful, that aware… that felt less like an escape and more like we'd just been subtly told we weren't even a gnat on its radar. Or worse, that we were a gnat it would deal with later, at its leisure.