Space.

The ambient glow of distant stars cut through the darkness past the thick, purple cloud of an emissions nebulae surrounded by a field of light blue wispy tendrils. Beyond that, thousands of stars blanketed the sky above, below and beside them stretching on into infinite dark, and also infinite light.

Outside his own breathing and heartbeat, space was absolutely silent. The movements of his companions were quiet on the outer hull of the ship. Even as Cannon churned slowly through space in his massive suit, his feet making no noise against the hull of the ship. Their shadows were cast long behind them haloed by the deep blue light emitting from the nebulae. Captain Vir slowly crouched down against the zero gravity to open the side ship panel pulling lightly against where he was clipped to the safety line.

Cannon slowly knelt next to him, floating strangely in the zero gravity. Two sets of arms splayed out to either side floating there without gravity to pull them down. The suit he wore glinted with the sheen of something shiny and new. Drev made up almost 1/10 of his ship's population now, most of them belonged to Cannon, some of them belonged to Sunny, all of them were part of the same clan, the clan that Vir happened to be a part of and was, now, technically clan chief. After defeating Cosma, It should technically have been Sunny, but she deferred to him making him the defacto leader of a Drev clan, and he had adopted them to the best of his abilities. He had taken Cannon to get his leg examined, and the Drev had received an exo-brace.

Now he moved without a limp.

Off to their left, another Drev knelt slowly opening one of the hatches in the near silence only to reach inwards to plug a diagnostic hose, unwound from the suit, into the main diagnostic port. Vir's suit didn't have such a device, being older, and he looked upwards to where Cannon stood unhooking the deice from his suit and handing it down to Vir. They made the exchange in near silence with nothing but the sound of his own quiet breathing and thudding heartbeat.

"Diagnostics ready, Captain." The static and distorted voice broke through the silence over his coms system

That was odd, "Run it again." He ordered taking the deice from Cannon with his ungainly gloved hands, and plugging the attached hose into the port. The thick, light up screen on the device blinked blue for a few moments with the attached loading screen. While he waited, Captain Vir lifted his helmeted head to the vastness of space open to the endless expanse. His heart began to speed up, as it always did, when viewing eternity. That same familiar thrill of complete infinity shot through his brain releasing a cascade of warmth through his body. It would have been better were he simply tethered to the ship, able to pretend that he was alone in the vastness of space.... If space could give him this much of a high, he dared not guess how he would react to real drugs.... He was sure he would be a fantastic addict.

A short beep from his coms, and he looked down at the loading screen to find diagnostics popping into life... huh, that was weird. There was nothing there.

Only a few hours ago, the ship ad stalled, all stations had gone dark, and the coms systems indicated there was some sort of interference with the electrical components of the ship. There was no way to tell where the disturbance was coming from, and with their navigations, and radar systems down, it would be dangerous to keep going, especially in this particular area. They were working their way through one of the most densely packed solar clusters in the known universe, binary star systems on top of the rare triple star system, and all amid thick nebular dust and gasses. Crewmembers had nicknamed it the Cobalt Cluster after the intense blue light created by the diffuse gasses and dust spreading from the nebula. It was an eerie feeling, and now they had no explanation for their malfunctioning ship, and with no radar, no coms, and a malfunctioning electrical system they may as well be stuck here until things can figure themselves out. Captain VIr looked up towards the vastness of space again. That would be alright from about five sides, the sky was clear for thousands of miles giving them a clear view of anything heading in their direction, but the fifth side was thick with clouded, clotted dust glowing a pale blue from the hidden star behind. Anything could approach from there, anything at all if they weren't careful.

Captain Vir sighed and went to run the diagnostics again. Off to the side, the Drev was tinkering around in the ship's interior. While they were here, Captain Vir had decided to do some much needed maintenance on the ship, Cannon would have sent the news about their current predicament back to the bridge, and they would be looking for other solutions, but there were a few parts that he was going to have to replace here. They had a minor gassline running under the panel of the ship supplying some of the inner workings with the air required to function, and the pipe that ran it had corroded over the past few years without proper replacement. He'd just have to shut off the valve. He unclipped himself from the mainline preparing to transfer over to a more permanent station to avoid drift while working.

A sudden thud made him turn his head. The sound hadn't come from outside the suit, but had traveled upwards into the souls of his feet from the vibrations of the ship into the compressed atmosphere in his suit. The Drev working on that side of the ship shot away down the line flailing and tumbling as, superheated gas shot into the vacuum propelling a segment of piping into the ship's outer panel. The panel was ripped off and flung towards them, a silent missile through space. Heading straight for Cannon.

Captain Vir yelled incomprehensibly as the panel cut silently towards them. In a split second, Captain Vir Kicked himself towards cannon, flipped onto his back, and then used both of his feet to kick the Drev in the chest sending the two of them flying apart, and cannon tumbling to safety, his clip catching on the mainline as he dangled. He turned his head just in time to see the panel flying towards him.

He struggled to fling himself out of the way before they collided, but it was no use, not without gravity. The panel caught him with an edge as he was trying to spin away filing his suit with a horrible ripping noise and a hot pain at his side. The panel flew one way and Vir was knocked another.

As the panel cut away, he heard the horrible sound as gas violently ejected from the hole in his suit flinging him off into space cartwheeling and back flipping at a terrible velocity as the ejecting air pushed him. His ears popped violently and the world of silence outside the suit matched the world of silence inside.

He desperately fought against the G force of his constant acceleration using his piloting skills to keep conscious as he forced his hand over the rip in his suit. Lights flashed in his vision, and he was sure a siren blared warning him about the decompression and oxygen loss, but he couldn't hear it against the pain in his ears. With a desperate hand, he cupped the tear and pressed hard forcing a seal and holding it there. Inside the suit, the lights flipped off, but the warnings still continued to flash across his screen.

The ejecting atmosphere had kept him separated from the vacuum of space, but his oxygen was running dangerously low. If he removed his hand for even an instant he would, perhaps, have thirty seconds before he froze or his blood boiled, and that was if he wasn't holding his breath, in which case his lungs would just go ahead and explode. Now, with nothing to stop his momentum, he continued to cartwheel through the vacuum squinting his eyes against the Gs.

He just had to keep enough oxygen going to his brain to keep him conscious, if he passed out, he would die either from lack of oxygen to his brain, or because he would let go of the tear. He estimated the force at about 5 Gs. As a trained fighter pilot, he could fight it off, but an average person with a weak tolerance to G force would not.

All around him, space passed in a terrible wheeling of stars and dust so fast, to watch it made him dizzy, nauseous, and disoriented like being in a plane and not knowing which direction was up. The most dangerous situation to be in as a pilot.

He closed his eyes and then opened them fighting back the urge just in time to watch the thick wall of dust rising into the air before him, and the soft rush as he was engulfed into the nebulae. The Gravity of the situation was not lost on him, the situation had more gravity than the space around him, and he realized he was going to die.

He wouldn't be able to keep this up forever, his hand was the only think holding his skin between him and the vastness of space, but he was spinning, and that spin was making him confused, and his body ache. An extended time at these forces WOULD make him pass out eventually, and when that happened, his hand would slip and he would die. Even if he managed to keep conscious until his oxygen ran out, which was sure to be soon, he would suffocate. His breathing sped up and his heart pounded as he fought to keep from gasping using up the rest of the air that had been allotted to him. He couldn't see a thing, the thick cloud of space dust was clogging his vision, and he closed his eyes using all his concentration to fight against the horrible, horrible spinning.

It went on for minutes, it felt like hours, and the exhaustion overtook him quickly, he was going to die. He could feel himself slowly fading into unconsciousness even as he fought to keep it down. He groaned in agony as a tear slipped from the corner of his left eye. Without the gravity, it would have simply pooled at his tear duct in a strange floating orb, but the Gs dragged it away and spread it outwards.

His hand slipped. A small bit of the tears was exposed, and his rotation sped up.

He groaned.

This was it.

Blackness, and silence.

***

He awoke to the feeling of floating, there was no gravity, there was no G force, there was just him, the blackness and floating. Is this what it was like to be dead? Was this the afterlife, to float here in interminable blackness until the end of eternity? But no, there was something there, a strange light cutting through his close eyelids.

It was then he realized that, while he was floating, he could still feel his limbs. His fingers flexed as did his toes, his side hurt terrible and he could feel the interior of the suit pressing against him, but...... but.... He wasn't holding the tear shut. His right hand drifted limply outwards as did his left, yet he wasn't dead.

With all his force of will, captain Vir slowly opened his eyes, immediately blinded by the strange blue light of the Cobalt cluster. He squinted against it slowly allowing his eyes to adjust as they opened to the space around, and finally everything came swimming into focus.

Focusing on a pale white face, and a set of strange black eyes.

He almost screamed, but choked off in terror as the strange black eyes fixed on him, staring through the mirrored face mask, as if it knew he was there, as if it could see him through the helmet. In his horror, he tried to jerk away, arms flailing and legs kicking, but something..... Something gripped him tighter. He could feel the pressure through the suit around his waist.

The head leaned a little closer, and then a soft thud echoed through his suit, as the creature rested it's forehead against the facemask of the suit. They looked at each other face to face now. Through his pounding heart, Captain Vir fought down the panic focusing instead on the creature's face.

It was surprisingly human, but absolutely paper white, whiter than paper. It had a curving head like a human, eye sockets, a brow, the bridge of a nose, though there was no nostrils, cheekbones, and full lips.... It had no ears, he couldn't have told you the creature's sex based on the structure of the face. Captain Vir's hands shook inside his suit as he tilted his head downward at the creature's body. He couldn't see some of it, as it was pressed against him, but he saw a long neck and thin collarbones, and thin shoulders, smaller than his.

With a shaking hand he lowered his left glove downwards feeling for the tear in his suit, instead, he came in contact with something else.

The creature.... Was holding its hand over the tear in his suit.

He paused, and, body still shaking, he engaged the face mask of his suit, causing the mirrored outer-layer, to pull upwards exposing him to the deep blue light of the nebulae, and show his face to the creature. His body was stiff. The creature tilted its head at him pulling back a bit, and then it leaned in again. A long, thin, four-fingered hand rose into his vision resting against the side of his face mask, as if to rest its hand on his cheek.

Hesitantly, and with his right hand, he reached upwards. His glove looked thick against the creature's strange, thin limbs as he cupped his hand against the side of its pale white face. Inside the suit, his body still shook.

All around them, space filtered in from all sides, a glittering blue nebula to their right and left, stars hanging distantly below them in the deep vastness. They floated, suspended there in each other's arms, in this strange embrace keeping him alive... for a short while.

The creature shifted, and behind him/her a thick cloud of white billowed upwards. Thousands of ribbons and tendrils stretching out behind it and to its sided like trailing feathery wings. Each ribbon had thousands of tiny glittering filaments and crystals making it sparkle. Slowly, and seemingly without power, they spun in a horizontal circle filling his vision with a profusion of light.

He gasped as the blue light filled him up, underscored by a bright white pinpoint. The light flooded outwards from behind a thin wall of dust casting light on a massive clear circle inside the nebula.... And the thousands of humanoid shapes drifting through the blue light.

The pale white human forms drifted together in pairs or alone their arms held out to their sides. Their entire backs from the base of their neck, to their elbows to the back of their knees shed those strange crystal ribbons trailing off into space behind them some of them almost six feet long, angelic as they glided on an unknown power with their ribbons rising from behind them in strange, wing-like configuration despite their being no air in which to fly.

Trails of silver dust cut through the space in sweeping spirals and curls through the orb of blue light.

Captain Vir's eyes widened further, as he took in the center of the scene..... and the massive shape that filled it.

The creature must have been 100 feet tall seeming to sit, with its legs crossed and its hands resting on its knees as thousands of smaller figures swarmed about it. Blue white light burst around its towering figure. Hundreds of those massive ribbons trailed from its back rising behind it in all directions, some even flowing in front of its body. Gravity wouldn't have stopped its growth. Hundreds of stars dotted the edge of the massive blue orb of light in which they sat.

Vir clung just a little tighter to the alien that kept him alive.

It leaned its head against his suit again as a pair of the strange creatures spiraled past them seeming to dance with each other through the space. Vir looked back at the face of the creature lips parted in shock.

The creature smiled at him, showing hundreds of rows of small teeth configured in circular patterns.

He sort of wished it hadn't done that. He took a deep breath suddenly feeling very small, space was large..... The thought he had known, but he was an idiot.

He brushed his gloved hand over the creature's cheek gently wishing he could feel its skin, so strange.

It took his hand holding it to its lips for a moment before moving it down his side placing his hand over the tear and quickly moving so he was holding it . He glanced up at the creature as it took him by the front of the suit It rested its head against his visor one more time and then, it shoved him backwards.

Vir gasped, and watched in surprise and horror as the creature receded into the distance ribbons rising behind it in trailing arcs. Behind it the massive creature turned its head slowly, the last thing he saw before the dust engulfed him.

***

He traveled through the dust for an indeterminable amount of time. Inside his visor, the red light of his emergency blinker throbbed. Suddenly, there was a shutter, something grew dark around the edges of his vision.

His back slammed into something knocking the wind from him.

The airlock door shut tight.

Air spilled into the room as it decompressed, and the artificial gravity turning on throwing him to the floor where he lay gasping. His hand dropped from the side of his suit. His ears popped again, he lay gasping as the chamber finished decompressing, and the door was thrown open.

Members of the crew piled into the small room, Sunny, Krill, Cannon, and the bridge crew all looking horribly worried.

Sunny ran over holding him up in her lower arms as she used the upper to disengage his helmet.

He gasped some more.

The rest of the crew stripped the rest of the suit from him, and Krill prodded at his wound all with a thousand questions one question unspoken but hanging heavily on the air..... how did he survive?

They weren't going to believe it.