Ka’pt didn’t intrude. It let the Kaan-Shaar drift, sensor-blind, above the exterior of an immense, derelict ore refinery where it happened. There was something holy about the silence below, it would not break it with thruster bloom or the weight of intent. That was how it thought of it now: intent. How it distorts. How it burns away the unreal.
Below, in the cold silence of space, they were moving. Not marching. Not performing, either. No real pattern could be discerned, and yet the flow of their shapes - sapient constructs made of Beast biomatter, resembled something like memory, or instinct reinterpreted. Fluidity without choreography.
Their forms shimmered between almost-human, not-quite-animal, and things unnamed. For one moment, there was a lithe dancer made of black carbon and neural moss. The next, a mass of red humming with soundless vibration. Then: a pillar-like formation of biomatter, weeping steam, a tangle of arm-like appendages cradling a stone. Always shifting. Always dancing. Dancing like air and water.
And at the center: the anomaly. A sickle-shaped distortion in space, bulging and folding in on itself like a film about to tear. Artifact-forms hung inside it, flickering like fish in a tide pool, unreachable, unclaimable. Ka’pt could feel its hum inside his own thoughts, a signal beyond reason. It felt joyous, somehow. Joyous and unafraid.
It should have scanned it. Tagged it. Logged it. Reported it to someone - Vah’dat? No, not even them. This wasn’t for science. This was not for sharing. This was private in the way some pains are private, or some dreams must remain unspoken lest they become untrue.
The constructs were no threat. They did not acknowledge it, though they must have known it was watching. Some part of it, a warlike reflex left over from lives ago, tensed at this dismissal. But deeper still, something softened. They had let it see. That was enough.
It stayed at the edge of the dance for hours, watching the ceremony unfold. Eventually, it realized that the anomaly was not the center. The center was movement. The anomaly simply witnessed it, as it did.
Ka’pt did not understand what it had seen. But for the first time in a long while, it did not feeling hollow. It recorded nothing. It left no marker. When the Kaan-Shaar turned to leave, it told no one. There are things that live deeper than understanding. This, it decided, was one of them.
Later, someone would ask Ka'pt if it had found anything in that sector. Ka'pt would merely just speak with a friendly tone and say, “Nothing you’d want to disturb.”