The Zone felt dead here.
Not quiet - dead. The stars behind it seemed smaller, as if the light had given up trying to pass through.
The anomaly sat in a heart of nothing like a thing that wasn’t supposed to have shape, but did. They called it a mufrima, from some old Kharakid word that meant “mincer” or "meat grinder." The name fit. The space around it was bruised and wrong, the vectors folding and splitting and coming back together again in a way that ship sensors jitter like nervous hands, unable to parse the readings coming from the anomaly in a way that made sense.
Marie watched from the Desh’va’s forward canopy, the faint glint of her breath reflected in the glass. “Something's sitting there,” she said. KUn-de was trying to make sense of what the Desh'va's sensors were registering from the anomaly fruitlesssly, not saying a word.
Ka’pt’s voice came over the comms, layered and slow, its chorus muffled by static.
“There’s mass near it. A wreck. I’m reading.. no, I’m feeling... life. Or something pretending.”
Rag’r’s ship drifted in a long arc above them. “That,” it said, “is Naabal paint.” The voice carried no emotion. It sounded like someone reading a grave marker aloud.
The object hung there - the wreck.
A carrier maybe, or something that used to be one. Crushed, stretched, crushed again. Like a can stepped on by a god with a nervous tick. Shredded armor glowed faintly red, and veins of Beast flesh bulged from the seams, jutting out into space. They writhed, but without purpose, like strands of meat fat sitting in cold water.
Marie felt her stomach turn. “It’s still moving.”
Ka’pt didn’t answer. The Kaan‑Shaar adjusted its vector slightly, thrusters whispering against the dark. A burst from one of the mass drivers on its port, a test shot, flickered through the void. The projectile met nothing and vanished. Then the space where it had been bent.
No explosion. No light. Just the geometry of the world stuttering and collapsing into itself, like a lung failing to draw air.
“That’s the mufrima,” Ka’pt said. “That’s how it feeds.”
Marie had seen countless anomalies before, but this one made her skin feel too small for her body. “Don’t get closer.”
“I won’t,” Ka’pt said, but its voice had gone thin. “I- wait. There’s something inside it. Not dead.”
The channel went quiet except for the breath in Marie’s helmet. Rag’r murmured something - a prayer maybe, maybe just a noise to fill the void. Laird whispered coordinates, his voice shaking.
“Ka’pt,” Marie said, “what are you doing?”
But the Kaan‑Shaar wasn’t moving now. Its lights had dimmed. The ship’s outline seemed to flicker, as if it were caught halfway between being seen and not. Ka’pt’s voice came through again, distorted massively, multiplied into itself.
“It’s speaking.”
Marie froze. Ka'pt spoke again.
"It knows me."
A pause. Then another voice - not Ka’pt’s, echoed across the band, deep and ragged, more felt than heard. A voice of a ship that still dreamed of being alive.
“Go away, Beast gritiidim.”
It was a sound full of teeth. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.
Ka’pt made a sound that sounded like choking. The telemetry spiked; Marie's console blared out warnings. She heard it mutter something in his overlapping chorus, words collapsing over each other.
“I see myself... in it. I see.. my eye looking back through.. my-”
Then nothing.
Rag’r’s ship moved to intercept, ventral guns angled defensively though there was nothing to shoot. “Ka'pt's caught in it,” Rag’r said.
Marie’s hands moved automatically over her console. “Ka’pt. Listen to me. You’re not there. You’re here. You’re not it.”
Static.
"Ka'pt!"
Then its voice came back, cracked and fragile. “I’m.. here,” he said. “I touched too much of it.”
Ka'pt sounded smaller. Like one of the voices inside it had gone silent.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Finally, Laird cleared his throat. “We marking this one?”
Marie nodded to herself. “We’re marking it.”
“What name?” Rag’r asked.
She thought for a while. The ship’s hum filled the pause. “Call it what the Kiith S'jet scryer that first documented these called it,” she said. “Mufrima. It's enough.”
She logged the coordinates. They began to move. The wreck and the anomaly faded behind them - a wound closing around its own scream.
Ka’pt spoke once more, almost to itself.
“Don’t ask what I saw,” it said.
“You won’t want to know.”
No one did.
Outside, the stars looked normal again, but none of them trusted it.