He patted the crate beside him, and she sat. They looked at the screen together as the others suited up and their helmet feeds came online. Hans was handing out some surprisingly low-tech guns: a pistol for Robin, a shotgun for himself, and an automatic rifle for Ibn, who’d been a sniper in the water wars.

Elena said, “You’d think we’d have fancy lasers or plasma blasters or something. The future is a disappointment.”

“Simple ballistic guns are easy to repair and service, and it’s not even hard to cast extra ammunition, with the fabricators we have. Plasma is notoriously hard to make from scratch.”

“All right, can you hear us?” Robin said.

“We can indeed,” Sebastien said.

“We were ready to explore unknown and dangerous terrain, but we didn’t expect to start with the inside of a giant anthill, so we’ll see how this goes.”

Hans was uncharacteristically silent as they opened the airlock, and Ibn characteristically so. The screen was divided into quadrants: three squares for the helmet feeds, and one rotating through the ship’s external cameras. Three figures in environment suits appeared on that fourth screen, moving in close formation, and Sebastien stabbed the quadrant with his forefinger to keep it from rotating away from that view. The suits had lights on their helmets and on the arms, and the crew shone them around in various directions, moving with military precision and grace. The views through their helmet cams were just indistinct washes of brightness, and darkness, and shapes.

“Looks like some kind of hangar,” Robin said. “Lots of big equipment. Cranes, hooks, nozzles… no sign of anything moving, though–”

The ship abruptly shuddered, clattering against the hangar floor, and Sebastien and Elena exchanged a glance. The ship rose into the air rapidly, the external camera feed showing the figures receding below, the helmet feeds showing the ship receding above. Hans cursed, and Ibn muttered a prayer, and Robin shouted, “Sebastien, are you all right?”

“Apart from being dragged into the sky? Yes.” His voice betrayed either fear or excitement or both.

“It looks like some kind of claw grabbed the Anjou and… Wait, there’s light, are those sparks?”

Elena leaned toward the screen, frowning at the view from the helmet cams far below. It was hard to see through such distant cameras, but it looked like the Anjou had been pulled up into some kind of docking cradle, and now robotic arms were sliding and ratcheting around… and tearing chunks off the ship, and cutting at the hull with white-hot torches, showering sparks. The distant squeal and shriek of metal made Elena and Sebastien huddle closer together.

“Who the hell’s doing that?” Robin said. “Where’s the control center?”

“Might not be one,” Hans said. “It could be some kind of automatic repair system.”

“I– ” Robin said, and then the hangar flooded with light, and they all saw the alien.

Chapter Seven