"We should probably get back to work." Kamala sighed, glanced at her watch, and kept her arms around Roger. "But I don't want this to end."

"Neither do I." He smiled and rubbed her back slowly.

"Still think this is too weird?" She aimed a lopsided grin at him.

"I think I should've done this a long time ago." He smiled and kissed her.

"Well --"

A shrill beep came from the cockpit, followed by a muffled female voice.

"That sounds like Marissa." Roger frowned. "Can't make out what she's saying."

"Something about Luana's shuttle." Kamala gave him one more quick peck on the lips before pushing away from the bench and floating over to the door. She took a quick look around as she entered the cockpit and hovered over the console.

Roger plucked his clothing from the air and dressed before joining her. He buckled himself into the copilot's seat and took in the view. Not too different from a couple of hours ago -- chunks of metal surrounded them, colliding occasionally and spinning off in different directions, most of them silhouetted against the stellar matter being drawn away by the black hole.

Kamala opened a channel. "Marissa, wanna repeat that last message? We didn't catch all of it."

"We just lost contact with Luana's shuttle. We're not sure what happened. Henry seemed startled by something he saw, then they were cut off. We've kept trying, but they're not answering us. We're not picking up their transponder, either."

"Oh, no," Roger muttered. "I hope they didn't crash into anything."

"That's exactly what we're worried about," Asuka said. "We're asking everyone to search for them."

"We're on it." Kamala held all four hands over her controls. "Send us their last known position."

A window opened on the panel to Kamala's left and displayed a blip representing Luana's shuttle. Kamala steered toward it and accelerated.

Only a few minutes passed before they reached the blip's location. Roger brushed his shoulder-length hair away from his face and stared out the window.

Whoa. His jaw dropped.

The shuttle was nowhere in sight, but directly in front of him and Kamala, only a few hundred meters away, was an enormous ship. Or maybe a space station. Sort of an elongated ovoid with a dark, mottled hull, the patterns on which seemed to ooze around as he watched. The hull was sprinkled with sickly yellow, glowing dots and lines, possibly interior lighting shining through viewports. The front end had a round opening set into it which bore an unnerving resemblance to a mouth.

Kamala stared at it with her mouth hanging open. "That's big." She shook herself out of it and turned back to the console. "Uh, Marissa, we haven't found the shuttle yet, but we're staring down the business end of a huge-ass ship -- and it appears to be intact."

"Alien, or one of ours?" Asuka replied.

"It's either one of ours, but from hundreds or thousands of years in the future, or it's alien." Kamala shivered. "And honestly, just from looking at it, I'm betting on alien."

Roger reached out to his console, aimed the sensors at the ship, and watched the scan results pop up on his screens. "Jesus. It's almost three miles long. Can't get a reading on the hull composition or any power sources."

A pulse appeared in the corner of his eye, like a diffused lightning strike -- and the cockpit fell into darkness.

Roger twitched, shook his head, and stared at his control panel. The entire board had gone dark, as had Kamala's console.

"Uh, Marissa? Asuka? Can you still hear us?"

Silence.

"Oh, no," Kamala whispered.

The shuttle lurched forward, driving Roger back into his seat. He gripped the edge of his console and stared out the front window at the massive ship looming ahead.

"Is it …" Kamala sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Is it pulling us in?"

"It must be." He glanced at the blank control panels and shook his head. "Everything's shut down, there's no other way we could be moving this fast."

Seconds after the words left his mouth, the slowly tumbling shuttle entered the maw-like opening in the larger ship. As the shuttle continued turning, the maw passed across the front windows and closed, a giant metallic iris contracting until the shuttle had been locked inside.

Just before the iris closed, Roger caught a glimpse of a reddish vortex expanding toward the ship.

Kamala drew in another quick breath. "That … I think I've seen that before. When I watched a video of the Sagan leaving the solar system. The vortex it used to enter hyperspace looked a lot like this one." Her left arms reached out for him, her upper hand found his and latched on, gripping it like a vise. "We've just left our friends behind, and now we have no idea where we'll end up."