Ka'pt dwelled over something, focused inward on itself until and musing over something until it was interrupted by a voice – another mind it shared its existence with.
“I’m reading multiple distortions.”
“Thermal?”, asked Ka'pt.
“Temporal. And thermal. Both. They’re layered.”
The voice was one of many, part of Ka'pt's essence, softly modulating through the Kaan-Shaar's bio-neural network. Underneath the speech was the hush of over a hundred overlapping internal dialogues, all the minds within Ka'pt murmuring, thinking, whispering to each other. Some worried. Some bored. Some remembering the Naggarok.
Ka'pt adjusted course by about 40 degrees to the right, then it began feeling outward with a sensor cluster. One of its mass driver turrets swiveled, then fired - bam. A round spat forward into the Zone’s haze. The anomaly took it. The projectile stopped mid-flight, suspended like an insect trapped in amber. Seconds later, another shot, different vector - bam. This one fizzled, caught in a heat bloom, and evaporated into nothing. The sensor feed whited out in the IR spectrum. Ka'pt frowned. Or rather, it thought about frowning.
There was a glowing shape in the middle of it all, about six meters in diameter. Spherical. Glowing faint amber, pulses through the plasma like a heart beating slowly. It could have been a power core. Could’ve been a mind. Could’ve been a shell casing from before the galaxy was born.
The comms channel hissed.
"That's ours," said the Taiidan scryer.
Voice smooth, too smooth. Cheerful, like an auctioneer in a morgue. He spoke slow, deliberate Galactic Common, practiced for diplomacy but worn thin with affect.
"Get it, and I’ll split it fifty-fifty with you. Easy."
Ka'pt didn’t answer right away. It could feel the ship around it groan faintly - unhappy about staying too long this close to the fold. Inside its mindspace, two others: the engineer and the scout, argued about risk margins. The archivist was already busy categorizing the artifact’s possible ancient signatures. Another round fired. Another freeze. The field around the anomaly remained unreadable.
Ka'pt spoke honestly - gently as it could with its many overlapping, oscillating voices: “Not worth the risk.”
The Taiidan scryer's voice sharpened.
"Where’s that Hiigaran grit? That Manaan fire? The Naggarok rotted in a tomb of metal for a million years, planning. You’re really telling me a little time dilation’s enough to scare you?"
Ka'pt sighed through its comm array. There was a pause. A flicker of empathy, real or synthetic, didn’t matter.
“No,” it said again. “I’m not going to risk it. Let’s look for something else. The Zone’s generous, if you let it be.”
The reply didn’t come through words. It came through weapons fire. A spray of kinetic rounds from the Taiidan frigate’s prow-mounted turrets, all aimed wide. Wildly wide. Deliberately – chug-chug-chug-chug. The rounds zipped past Ka’pt’s hull. Some scattered debris from a nearby anomaly cloud danced and vaporized in the aftershock. Ka'pt didn’t return fire, it flinched. Inside its neural-mass, the 150 other minds did the same. Some braced for impact or a fight. Others just turned away. One even laughed bitterly.
On the other end of the channel, the Taiidan scryer cackled, loud and giddy.
“Make your move,” he said, in thick-accented Common. “Come on. Show me what you are. Let’s see how much of a coward the Naggarok really bred-”
Another volley. Same trajectory, intended to miss. To frighten. To provoke. Ka'pt said nothing. The minds inside it were silent now, watching this man spiral. There was something wrong with him. Ka'pt had seen it before, men living too long in the Zone, waiting for their bones to hum with some fragment of divinity that never came. Scryers that had turned prophet. Turned addict. Turned lunatic. The Taiidan’s eyes on the bridge feed were too wide. Too wet.
He wasn’t bluffing. But he wasn’t going to pull the trigger either. He wanted Ka'pt to destroy him. Ka’pt didn’t. It sent a simple burst transmission:
“Good luck.”
Then turned. Thrusters low. Non-aggressive vector. A quiet retreat. Like a man stepping back from someone in the street who’s shouting too loudly about the end of the world. The Taiidan frigate didn’t follow. It just drifted there, its captain still laughing. The laughter turned to coughing, then silence. Ka’pt moved away. No fire. No heroics. No ceremony. Just quiet.
And the artifact?
Still floating, still glowing, still waiting.