"What've you got?" Asuka walked over to Morrison and raised an eyebrow. He had his arm around one of the techs while staring at a door.

"Some kind of … bug. Or something. I don't know, honestly." He shook his head and the tip of his tail twitched. "Like a cross between a spider and a centipede. Big suckers, too, at least three feet long." He nodded at the door. "We found a whole nest of 'em in the medical bay. Bastards attacked us."

"Anybody hurt?" She looked around at the rest of Morrison's team.

"We're okay," the girl he had his arm around mumbled. "One of them almost got its teeth into Henry. Or whatever the hell it has."

"It slipped through the door before we got it closed." Morrison waved a hand at his left leg. "It grabbed onto my leg, but I kicked it loose before it could bite me or inject me with anything."

"Henry shot it." The tech pointed. "It floated down the corridor. The rest are locked in the med-bay." She shuddered. "Unless there's an open air vent or something."

"Oh, great." Asuka opened her internal comlink and connected with Kamala's ultratool. [Looks like we might have a problem. We're gonna need the internal cameras and other sensing devices brought online ASAP.]

"Sure thing," Kamala replied. "What kind of problem is it?"

[Bug infestation. Morrison thinks they might be what killed the crew.]

"Oh, hell. Okay, I'm on it." After a momentary pause, Kamala added, "So … do you know if they're all over the ship?"

[So far, we've only found them in the med-bay, but since we've barely started exploring …]

"Right. I'm in the internal sensors now. I'll see if there's a way to track these things."

Asuka jogged to the end of the corridor and found the spider-centipede on the floor. "Jesus Christ. That thing is just wrong."

"I wonder how it got on the ship," Morrison muttered.

"Could be something they were studying in one of the labs. Whatever container they were in probably broke open when the ship arrived here. Or if they can survive in a vacuum, they could've found their way onto this ship from anywhere." She captured a still from her eyes' input and sent it to all the currently active ultratools. [Be on the lookout for these things, everybody. If you see one, don't touch it and don't let it get anywhere near you.]

Morrison took his 'tool out of his vest pocket, tapped the surface, and a small hard-light display appeared above it. He pointed it at the door and a mass of blips appeared in the holofield. "Well, we can track their motion when we're close enough, but we don't have a way to differentiate them from other life forms."

"Kamala's working on it."

Another voice -- one Asuka didn't recognize -- cut in. "Hey, everybody, we've just found the bridge. Or, well, control room. Or whatever. We were trying to find out where the ship has been and how it got here, and … well, you all need to see this."

[Is it a problem?]

"Could be."

[We're on our way.] Asuka located the tech's ultratool and headed back the way she'd come. She pointed at the med-bay door as she passed it. "That's locked, right?"

"Yeah, door and air vents." Morrison waved his ultratool. "I locked it down as soon as I was able to get into the system. Unless those horrifying fuckers can figure out how to crack my passcode, they won't be going anywhere."

"Good. Okay, let's go see what kind of trouble we're in now."

After finding the nearest ladder, climbing it to the core, and pulling themselves along it until they reached the forward centrifuge, they followed the signal until they entered a large, roughly circular room with control panels and chairs lining the walls and a half dozen other consoles in the center. Asuka followed the ultratool's signal through a door to the left, which led to a room that appeared to have planets and other bodies floating in it.

Well, that's … different.

"Hey, Bob," Morrison's techie friend said. "What's this? A holodeck?"

"Hey, Luana. I think it's for navigation. Or stellar cartography." Bob shrugged, took off his baseball cap and waved it at the planet and stars hovering around him, and put it back on. "We were just playing back a record of the ship's last few jumps. That's it in the center, by the way."

"Ooooh!" Kamala's voice, from behind Asuka. She turned and found Kamala slithering into the room with Roger beside her and Hitomi, Seth, and Marissa following. Kamala looked around and grinned. "This is gorgeous! What is it? A map room?"

"Looks like it." Bob pointed. "I don't recognize any of the planets, of course, but the onboard computer has that one listed as Gamma Geminorum c. Apparently, it's the site of an Earth colony spread out over a dozen space stations. It's about one hundred and nine light years from Earth."

"Nice!" Kamala circled around the planet, beaming, and glanced upward. "I wonder where the projectors are."

Morrison cleared his throat. "Um, you said you found something that could be a problem."

Bob nodded and said, "Resume playback."

The computer's representation of the ship -- labeled ISC Challenger -- moved away from a structure that looked like a series of rings linked together by a latticework frame, forming a sort of tunnel.

Huh. That looks a lot like the jumpgate we were building. Asuka arched an eyebrow. I wonder how many of them there are now.

Roger pointed his ultratool at the Challenger. "Looks like it's drifting. This must be after the engines got knocked offline."

The whole room blanked out. Asuka glanced around.

"That must've been when it ended up here." Kamala crossed her upper arms over her chest and fiddled with her ultratool in her lower hands. "Whatever the hell it was, it probably overloaded the sensors."

"The exterior cameras recorded a flash, and suddenly everything we just saw here was replaced by the debris field and nebula we found ourselves in." Bob glanced at the ceiling. "Next record."

The Challenger reappeared, surrounded by the same wreckage that had flattened the repair bay. Bob pointed at the stream of red light flowing past the ship.

"That's not a nebula. The crew was able to scan the area before everything went to shit." He raised his left hand and swept it to the side, and the holo-projection zipped past, moving to an area far ahead of the Challenger. When it stopped, a sun filled the room.

A tendril of light extended from the sun and vanished into the distance.

"Oh, boy." Kamala slid closer to the sun and shook her head slowly. "I can see where this is going, already. Something's pulling the sun apart, right? Ripping its outer layers away?"

"Yep." Bob did the sweeping gesture again, and the image zipped back to the Challenger and kept going, finally arriving at an enormous accretion disk. And at the center of the glowing disk was a point of utter blackness. "And that's where the stellar material is going."

Asuka groaned. "Lemme guess. Black hole -- and we're being pulled in, too?"

Bob sighed. "Yeah. It'll take a while since we're so far away, but if we don't find a way to get our asses to another star system before we're pulled in too far, we're dead."