Hermes was walking the mid-deck in search of Autolycus when an alarm went off, a blaring wail that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Hermes held his hands to his ears. What's going on?

An explosion rocked the ship, knocking him off his feet. The ship shuddered and started listing to the left. Iris' voice, piped in through some unseen intercom system, echoed along the corridor.

"The port side stabilizer has been hit." There was a tense edge to her voice, but she sounded calm. "More fighters incoming. All hands to battle stations."

The ship bucked again. Further down the corridor, Autolycus darted out from a doorway, but he was up the stairwell before Hermes could call out to him. He followed, more slowly, finding it hard to maintain his balance on the shuddering, tilted floor. He used the walls and door frames to pull himself along.

On the bridge, Iris sat strapped into her pilot seat, fighting the controls to try to bring the ship back level. One of the red conch shells was set on a post near her mouth. Hermes was about to ask what was going on, but he was cut off by a high whistle from somewhere overhead.

His eyes widened. That sounds like a mortar shell. Hermes had only heard the sound in movies, but he wasn't far off the mark. There was a bright flash. Something punched through the resonance bubble. It must have been a glancing blow, because there was no explosion, but a basketball-sized fireball skipped across the deck. Orange flames leapt up in its wake.

Autolycus grabbed his arm and pulled him towards the deck.

"C'mon, kid, make yourself useful," he said. Autolycus shoved a wet sack into Hermes' hand.

Plumes of black smoke billowed up from the deck, and he and Autolycus moved around dousing the flames with the sacks. The heat and the smoke stung Hermes' eyes and nose. It was getting harder to breathe. Narsil and Rashad were already on deck, firing small, shoulder-braced cannons at shadowy shapes moving out beyond the resonance bubble.

"How many are there?" Autolycus shouted over the roar of the flames.

"Three," Narsil said.

Rashad tracked a moving shape with his cannon, and pulled the trigger. A greenish bolt of light leapt from the barrel, collided with something out in the Void. There was a subdued boom and an animal-like shriek.

"Now there are two," Rashad said.

Iris' voice sounded across the intercom, tinny and distant:

"Rumble says we can't jump. I'll try to shake them, but watch--"

The end of her statement was clipped off by another explosion, somewhere underneath the ship. Hermes had to grab the rail of the ship to keep from falling.

One of the shapes skimmed past him, diving low towards the ship, and he finally caught a glimpse of it. It looked like a strange, armored squid, trailing long tentacles. A ball of flame appeared in the hollow where the tentacles met the main body, but a bolt of energy from Narsil's cannon slammed into the ball before it could drop it. The squid-thing, burning and thrashing its tentacles, plunged into the Void. Hermes stared after it. What the hell were they?

Rashad fired at the last of the squids, but it twisted out of the way, screeched and vanished into the darkness. Hermes waited to see if it would come back, but there was only silence and the dark of the Void. He put out the last dying flames on deck, and walked over to Autolycus.

"What were those?" he asked.

"Draylocks," Autolycus replied. He was looking up at the sky, watching. Hermes noticed a strange tattoo on the man's neck, just behind his ear. He thought it looked a pair of knives, set parallel to one another. "Arcadias created them to hunt the Void for us."

Hermes' eyes widened. "I thought he didn't know where we were."

"He didn't," Autolycus replied, frowning. "That was too small of a school of them to be anything but a random patrol."

"But one of them got away."

Autolycus didn't answer. He didn't need to.

Rashad and Narsil were busy packing away their cannons. Hermes took advantage of their distraction to slip away -- he still didn't want to speak to either of them. He nearly ran into Iris on his way inside.

"Are you alright?" she asked.

"I..yeah. It's cool. Not hurt or anything." His heart skipped a beat. She was worried about me?

"Good," she replied. "We can't afford to lose the Edict."

Oh.

Iris reached out and rubbed his cheek with her thumb. Her hand felt like silk, and the breath caught in Hermes' throat.

"You had soot on you," she said. Her hand dropped back to her side. Hermes had to stop himself from leaning towards her. He wanted that hand against his face again.

"Thanks." His face was flushed, but he hoped she thought that was just because of the heat. If she noticed, she didn't show it.

"Can I get by?" Iris smiled. "I need to talk to Rashad."

"Uh. Yeah. Sorry," he murmured, stepping out of her way. She squeezed past him, and he couldn't help but follow her with his eyes. Maybe not everything about being on this ship was bad.