“Self-destruct in T-minus six minutes. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

How many decks to the docking bay? Three? Four? She had only a general idea.

The ship groaned again, and the pressure door in front of her slammed shut, blocking the way. Overhead, the line of green arrows switched directions, pointing to the right. It started to blink with seizure-inducing speed.

Shit. Kira swung herself around a rack of equipment and hurried along Bishop’s detour. Time was running out. The shuttles had better be primed for departure or she’d have no chance of escaping.…

Voices sounded ahead of her. Dr. Carr saying, “—and move it! Hurry, you moron! There’s no—” A loud thud interrupted him, and the bulkheads vibrated. The doctor’s shouting shifted into a higher pitch, his words incoherent.

As Kira pulled herself through a narrow access hatch, a fist seemed to grip and squeeze her chest.

In front of her was an equipment room: racks of shelving, lockers stuffed with skinsuits, a red-labeled oxygen feed pipe at the back. Carr hung near the ceiling, his hair frazzled, one hand wound in a strap tied to several metal cases that kept bumping into him. A dead Marine lay wedged in one of the shelving units, a row of burns stitched across his back.

On the other side of the room, a large, circular hole had been cut through the hull. Midnight-blue light streamed out of the hole from what seemed to be a small boarding craft mated to the side of the Extenuating Circumstances. And within the recess moved a monster with many arms.

2.

Kira froze as the alien propelled itself into the storage room.

The creature was twice the size of a man, with semi-translucent flesh tinted shades of red and orange, like ink dissolving in water. It had a torso of sorts: a tapered ovoid a meter wide covered in a keratinous shell and studded with dozens of knobs, bumps, antennae, and what looked like small black eyes.

Six or more tentacles—she wasn’t sure how many, as they kept writhing about—extended from the ovoid, top and bottom. Textured stripes ran the length of the tentacles, and near the tips, they seemed to have cilia and an array of sharp, claw-like pincers. Two of the tentacles carried white pods with a bulbous lens. Kira didn’t know much about weapons, but she knew a laser when she saw one.

Interspersed among the tentacles were four smaller limbs, hard and bony, with surprisingly hand-like appendages. The arms remained folded close to the creature’s shell and didn’t stir.

Even in her shock, Kira found herself tallying the features of the alien, same as she would with any other organism she’d been sent to study. Carbon based? Seems like it. Radially symmetrical. No identifiable top or bottom.… Doesn’t appear to have a face. Odd. One fact in particular jumped out at her: the alien looked nothing like her suit. Whether the being was sentient or not, artificial or natural, it was definitely different from the xeno bonded with her.