“I cannot. The control room is compromised–”

“Find a way,” Robin snapped. “If that machine you saw is crawling around inside our control room, it could access all our systems, including our navigational data. They could find our system of origin – and they could follow our path back to Earth. I’m not as pessimistic as Hans is. I think there might still be a homeworld back there to protect.”

“No, thank you.” Uzoma’s expression was glassy and faraway. Elena realized what she’d taken for calm was something closer to shock.

“What do you mean?” Robin said.

“I cannot blow the engines without leaving this room, and I do not wish to do that. You did not see what I saw.”

“I’ll do it,” Sebastien said. “Uzoma? I’ll go out. Can you talk me through the process?” He snapped his fingers in front of their face.

Uzoma’s gaze drifted toward him. “What? Yes. No. I…” Uzoma rubbed the back of their head. “It touched me,” they said dreamily. “The machine.”

“Let me see.” Elena was the closest thing the ship had to a doctor; she was a xenobiologist who’d taken two years of classes in field medicine, anyway.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected. A bloody scratch, maybe.

Instead she saw a round silver shape, the size of a saucer, clamped onto the back of Uzoma’s head with half a dozen clawlike appendages: it looked like an immense metal spider.

Elena flinched back as the spider’s legs moved, somehow lengthening, burrowing under the flesh of Uzoma’s scalp. Then one of the legs rose up and darted toward Elena’s hand instead, and she lurched backward and let out a wordless cry of horror.

Uzoma rose unsteadily and stumbled around the cargo hold. Their eyes had changed, filmed over, and their pupils glowed, as if someone had lit a candle inside their skull. Uzoma opened their mouth, and released a series of liquid gurgles. As if in answer, the beam of some kind of plasma torch punched through the hull in front of them, and began cutting an opening from the outside.

Robin was shouting over the comms, but Sebastien tucked the tablet into his pocket and grabbed Elena’s arm. “I think we’d better go.”

“But… we have to help them.” Uzoma was gurgling at the wall now, watching as an archway appeared, drawn in lines of plasma. There was no sudden decompression, and no inrush of poisonous gas, which meant that the vast hangar was both pressurized and the air out there was breathable, which made no sense at all.