"And I'm not sure which of those possibilities is more terrifying," Eva had said, and the words just hung there in the cold, recycled air of the Wanderlust's bridge, heavy as a lead blanket.
Being ignored by a cosmic juggernaut that could probably crack our little freighter like a nutshell? Yeah, not exactly a confidence booster.
My tail, which had been trying to drill a hole through the deck plating, gave a weak, uncertain thump.
"Insignificant is… better than 'immediate target practice,' right?" I offered, trying for a lighter tone that didn't quite make it. My voice still sounded like it had been roughed up by a gravel road. "Maybe it just had bigger space-fish to fry? Or its 'scan' just registered us as… cosmic background radiation with an unusually high protein content?"
Eva ran a hand through her short, dark hair, a habit she had when she was deep in thought or seriously stressed. Right now, probably both. "Or it's playing with us, Bolt. A cat with a mouse. Letting us think we're safe, letting us get a little bolder…"
She didn't need to finish that sentence. The image of a giant, obsidian-shard Felid command ship batting us around before the final pounce was… vivid. And not in a good way.
"That cold intelligence I felt," I said, images from the close pass still flickering at the edges of my mind like a badly tuned old holo-vid. "It wasn't… playful. It was… assessing. Clinical. Like a scientist looking at a microbe under a microscope. It saw something. It registered something. But then…" I struggled to articulate the fleeting impression. "There was this… flicker. Right before it moved on. Not emotion, exactly. More like… a directive. A priority shift."
"A priority shift?" Eva latched onto that.
"Meaning it was interested, but something more important came up? Or it filed us away under 'minor anomaly, investigate later if bored'?"
"Maybe," I conceded. "But there was something else, too. Just a flash, as it pulled its 'awareness' back." I closed my eyes, trying to recapture it. It was like trying to catch smoke with your paws. "An image… or not an image, more like a… a symbol. Or a command code. Very fast. Very… precise."
"A symbol? Like what?" Eva leaned forward, her previous fear now overshadowed by a new intensity – the thrill of a puzzle. Some humans just can't resist, can they?
"I… I can't really describe it in words," I said, frustrated. "It wasn't visual in a way that translates to your kind of seeing. It was more… a data packet. A burst of pure information that my brain, or whatever part of me processes these ancestral echoes, just… tagged as significant. It felt… old. Older than the ship itself, maybe. Like a core command. And it had a… flavor to it."
"Flavor?" Eva raised an eyebrow. "You're tasting data packets now, Bolt?"
"Not literally," I huffed, a little embarrassed. "More like… an association. It felt… linked to Orion. Deeply. Almost like a… a key, or a sigil. And it felt… patient. Like it was part of a very, very long game."
Eva stared at the spot where the command ship's icon had been, now just empty space on the tactical display. "A patient, ancient symbol linked to Orion, from a ship that's playing a very long game, and decided not to swat us out of the sky today…" She tapped her chin. "This isn't just a random patrol asserting dominance, is it?"
"My bones are screaming 'no,'" I confirmed. "This felt like… like we just brushed past a Grand Master moving a piece on a chessboard that spans galaxies."
And that symbol… it wasn't aggressive. It felt more like… a marker. Or a key."
Eva looked at me, her expression unreadable for a moment. The dim lights of the bridge cast long shadows, making the familiar space feel alien and charged. The silence, now that the immediate threat had glided past, was almost worse. It was a silence filled with unspoken questions and the weight of that colossal, obsidian ship still fresh in our minds.
"So," she finally said, her voice low and steady, cutting through the quiet. "That 'key,' Bolt. That ancient marker you sensed. Is it a key to understanding what's happening here? Or is it a key to a door we really don't want to open?"
She didn't offer solutions, not this time. She didn't lay out the options of running or pressing on. Her question hung in the air, direct and heavy. She was looking at me, not just as her ship's quirky, talking husky, but as the one with the inexplicable connection to this ancient, unfolding drama. The one who'd felt that fleeting, cryptic… something.
I stared back at her, then my gaze drifted to the star chart, where the Orion sector still glowed with that faint, angry crimson. The 'Grand Master' had made its move, letting us, the insignificant gnats, slide. But why? Was it truly disinterest? Or was that 'symbol,' that 'key,' somehow relevant to us, to our unexpected presence here?
My mind raced. The drive to understand, to decipher the whispers in my DNA, warred with the primal instinct to survive, to get the Wanderlust and its human captain as far away from this cold, calculated silence as possible.
The decision we made next wouldn't just determine our course through space. It felt like it would set our course through whatever ancient game was resurfacing from the dust of Orion. And that fleeting 'key' I'd sensed? It felt like it was sitting right in the ignition.