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Description
"I already told you, you big dumb bastard, that energy core regulator isn't worth 3,000 Credits! It's not even close!" The young woman grumbled as she slammed her hands down on the clerk's table. Her eyes were set in a narrow, green glare and she scowled between loose strands of bright red hair that fell in front of her face.

Before her stood a towering being of a strange, reptilian countenance with craggy clusters of ruddy brown, overlapping scales. It's long, muscular limbs lead to big clawed hands that scraped against the surface of his counter while he waved a mechanical device in the air, stray cables swaying to and fro.

Taurus, the inhabitants of the planet Kakataka in the Aldebaran star system and the largest, most cantankerous of all the sentient species in the galaxy. They were also notorious hoarders.

It erupted in a flurry of angry, guttural growls, its scales rapidly scraping and clattering against one another to create a series of accompanying clicks. As he made his odd noises at the girl, a mechanical device on his chest lit up and started to translate in a low, robotic voice.

"You don't know what you're talking about, Nexus. This a rare treasure! There is nothing else like it on Pantainos!"

"Zakka, you are so full of shit!" she said, as she reached into her lab-coat and withdrew a small pair of oval-shaped glasses. Slipping them over her nose, she peered past the huge, alien shopkeeper and to the staggering pile of discarded mechanical trinkets and components behind his kiosk. “I can see two more in the back from here!” she cried as she frantically removed her glasses and stuffed them back into her coat.

"3,000 credits or no regulator!" the salesman replied.

The young woman stood up as tall as she could and crossed her arms over her chest in her best attempt to look authoritative. She was short and scrawny by human standards, not to mention leaning on a cane, but absolutely minuscule compared to the seven foot monster before her. "Listen here, you idiot, you have no idea what that's worth to me and you're just going to eat it anyway! So hand it over for a fair price and stop impeding scientific progress!"

Without warning, the shopkeeper opened his jaws for the first time, the lower portion of his face splitting into two and spreading out in a slavering, triangular maw. Then, he chomped into the device in his hand! His shredding teeth crunched and tore the metal apart with ease as he ripped off a chunk and swallowed it before hurling the remnants straight at the Nexus's head.

With only a moment of shock, she narrowly ducked under the incoming projectile. The move sent her stumbling and she barely managed to catch herself with her cane and avoided an untimely fall, face first into the cold steel ground.

If the yelling earlier hadn't drawn the attention of the other merchants and customers that populated the market, this certainly would.

Before she knew it, the merchant was scooping up more hand-fulls of junk parts and tossing them at her with abandon.

"Whoa, whoa whoa! Is this how you treat all your regulars!?" Head held low, she scurried away from the bellowing Taurus, dodging flying gears and batteries as she did so. "Lunatic!" she yelled as she departed the market square.

She looked back over her shoulder more than once on her way back to her apartment, just to make sure there wasn't an angry alien reptile behind her. It wasn't until she was nearly three blocks away that she stopped to catch her breath, leaning against the wall of a building and wiping her brow with the sleeve of her coat. Just from that short run, her muscles ached and her chest burned with exertion. "I left my apartment for that damn regulator and the dumbass took a bite right out of it!" she said between gasps.

She spent nearly a minute bent over and panting before rising back up and fanning out her coat to relieve some of the intense heat.

Pantainos City, built in the most habitable, lush part of the colony planet for which it was named, was in Nexus's own words, "Too damn hot in the Summer to be conducive to intellectual pursuits." So then why, she often wondered to herself, did the United Earth Federation decide to build its premiere academies here?

Pantainos was one of the UEF's earliest and most prosperous colonies and had become a grand centre for training and education in the past several decades. Academies and accompanying campuses for humanity's most prestigious schools in the fields of science and military had developed here and dominated much of the city. The best and brightest across all of UEF space were sent here to learn.

But far from the glamorous universities and labs at the city's centre, Nexus walked along the ill-tended streets at the fringes as she made her way home in a decidedly poor mood.

The moment she stepped into the lobby and felt the cool, temperature controlled air hit her face, she let out a long, satisfied sigh.

Up the elevator and to the second floor, she entered the hall to find yet another annoyance. "Great. If the heat and the taurus weren't enough, some ass-clown piled a bunch of boxes in front of my door!" she thought.

For some reason or another, cardboard shipping boxes of varying sizes, piled six high, stood right up against the entrance to her apartment.

Without another thought, she stomped forward and delivered a swift, hard kick with a flip-flop clad foot to the side of the box mountain. Much to her chagrin, the pile barely moved. So, she took a step back and shoulder checked it with the entire, fairly insubstantial, weight of her body and this time she sent it tumbling to the floor with an appeasing clatter. She grinned down at her handiwork, hoping there was something both fragile and valuable within.

The commotion brought someone running almost immediately as a man stepped out of the open door across the hall, looking concerned. His expression promptly shifted to surprise and confusion as he spied Nexus standing over the upended pile of his belongings.

He was tall, broad-shouldered and muscular young man with blond, neatly trimmed hair and a square jaw. Nexus thought immediately that if he put on a uniform, he'd look like he walked right out of a military recruitment ad for the Federation.

"Did you knock over my boxes?"

"Oops," she replied with a shrug as she reached for the keycard in her pocket.

"The hell, lady? I keep important stuff in those!"

"Well then maybe you shouldn't keep 'em in front of my door."

He furrowed his brow and attempted to speak up but upon noticing the cane in her hand, he suddenly felt a strong desire to remain reticent. "Uhm... Sorry," he said with downcast eyes as he kneeled down and started to gather up his things, shuffling them out of the way for her. "So that's your apartment then?"

"Yep, 37B," she said with the absolute most disinterest she could muster while jabbing a thumb toward the numbers posted behind her.

With an armful of boxes, he stood back and extended his free hand toward her. "I'm just moving in next door. I'm Parker Walsh."

Her eyes drifted back and forth between his hand and his face for several seconds. "Are you suggesting I make physical contact with you?"

"Generally speaking, an offer to shake hands with someone would imply that, yes." Yet more confusion was starting to creep into his voice.

"Ew," she replied curtly, rolling her eyes. She turned and swiped her card over the electronic lock and stepped into her apartment.

"Ouch!" he shot back. "Can I at least have your name?"

"Nexus," she said as she slammed the door behind her.

"There is no way that is your real name!" he yelled with his lips scant inches from the door but to no response.

"Parker?" said another man as he stuck his head out of the open apartment. He was thinner and less chiseled than his friend but with a sly, fox-like countenance. "What are you doing out here?"

Parker shrugged. "Neighbour girl kicked over our boxes."

"And so you quit unpacking to come out here and flirt with her?"

"Not at first."

"But you did flirt with her?"

"She didn't even give me a chance. It’s just not fair."

"My heart aches for you, brother. Now get back to work. We need everything set up by tomorrow."

"On it." With boxes in hand, he started back toward his own apartment, taking one glance at the door behind him as he went. "Well then. See you around, Nex."

The moment she stepped inside her apartment and flicked on the lights, she felt her legs start to shake. She grumbled softly, finally allowing herself to wince at the constant pain she felt in her muscles and eased her body into the wheelchair lying in wait by the door.

Inside her apartment, where one might normally find furniture, decorations or just about anything, Nexus had cables, power generators and several large processors stacked against the wall. In the corner sat a desk with a pair of computers, razor-thin glass panes mounted on swiveling stands. Nexus produced a third, smaller device from inside her coat, a handheld computer. With a few swipes on the surface, her chair wheeled itself over to the desk. Once situated, she began sliding her fingers across the dual screens and they came alive with images and information. Her eyes darting back and forth between them. Within arm's reach of her chair sat a large espresso machine with a mountain of discarded flavour pods, generally counting among the excessively sweet variety.

All this technology (save the espresso machine) was connected to a strange, ceiling-high object in the middle of the room, taking up the vast majority of floor-space. It was a huge mechanical ring of some kind, built into a large platform. It stood eight feet high and across, appearing to be deactivated at the moment.

She looked upon the device briefly, shook her head, and returned to her work. "Damn Zakka, always being a pain in my ass."

It wasn't long before she noticed she had an update on her post on the local University forums. She wasn't exactly a student, but where else was she going to share her hypotheses?

"Oh fantastic, this idiot," she said with mock excitement when she saw who posted. "Hello, Student 681966, a man so boring he uses his student ID as his screen name." Nex skimmed over his latest dull refutation of her work and rolled her eyes.

"Your ridiculous idea of a potential intersystem artificial intelligence program has no bearing in modern computer science. Even the most simple-minded of your species is aware that software is limited by hardware.

You persist in the idea that your entirely theoretical sub-space processor would alleviate this issue and allow a program to move freely between systems, but this has in itself a litany of issues. There is no evidence to support the idea that information can travel freely between sub-space and normal space. How do you propose such a device would maintain a fixed location within sub-space? In addition, the power requirements would be astronomical.

Fixed sub-space pockets have never been found to be a remote possibility and tests have resulted in failure, every single time. The only possible use for sub-space is point A to B travel through fixed gates."

She shook her at the computer as she reclined in her chair. She let out a guttural groan of frustration and swept a hand back through her sweat-matted hair. "This guy has no imagination."

Nex pondered the list of possible rebuttals. Everything from explaining the potential power of a flywheel energy storage system in the absolute vacuum of sub-space or reference to the sub-space tests performed by Earth scientists decades earlier that implied the possibility of direct access to sub-space beyond simple two-way passages. However, when she received a sudden response from a rather important contact,' she decided to let her opposition stew for a little while.

Anxiously she opened the message with a tap of her finger and pulled contents up on screen. Just reading that first sentence left her stunned.

"I have acquired the information you requested."

That alone was all she needed to send her mind alight with fireworks. There was some more afterward about releasing the hold on the promised payments and how to contact him again. She absent-mindedly tapped out an affirmative response and delved into the attached files with all haste possible.

A few weeks ago she'd contacted someone who claimed to have worked on some classified Federation experiments performed here on Pantainos. She'd been making a few inquiries about them and they had become a subject of great interest to her, even though they never got off the ground. What they were attempting to develop and why it failed is still unknown to this day, but Nexus's own digging had told her that it had something to do with personal sized sub-space gates, as opposed to the massive rings that transported ships across the galaxy.

"I was right," she muttered to herself after nearly twenty minutes of poring over the contents. "Schematics, test results, dates and locations."

She gleaned from the notes that they had managed to design a miniaturized sub-space gate, though from what she could find, it wasn't able to sustain itself before collapsing after only a few seconds. Several pages appeared to be missing, including details of who was involved and the purpose of the experiments, but all the technical data she needed was right here in these files.

Again she gazed upon the massive mechanism in the centre of her apartment, this time with new excitement and rattling nerves. She bit her lip as she considered her options before giving a small nod of affirmation to herself. "To hell with the regulator, I've got work to do."

She wheeled over to the huge ring and pushed herself out of her chair. For hours she consulted the new specifications and readjusted her machine. Multiple trips were made back and forth between the device and her computer and she went through around a dozen cups of coffee and sixty teaspoons of sugar. She scoured every crate of spare parts she had lying around (which was no small number) to get everything she needed. The clanking and clamour of her tools filled the apartment all through the night and up until the early morning.

She awoke with a start around noon the next day, passed out in her wheelchair with a collection of her tools sprawled across her lap and around her wheels. She yawned, grumbled and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, shadowed by black bags.

Blinking rapidly, Nexus looked at her device, consulted the schematics and then back to the device. It was a match. Better than a match even. She felt she'd improved on the old schematics. "I did it?" she asked herself, brushing back a tangle of red hair. She laughed quietly, pleased with her work. "Of course I did it."

Still coming to, she mumbled out a few commands. "Computer, begin recording a new log now. "

Next to her desk, a camera mounted on a small robot, not unlike an ambulatory tripod, came alive. Its lens promptly veered in her direction.

Pushing herself to her feet, she stood before the device and stumbled toward the terminal mounted at its edge. "Sub-space portal NG Model-1, test 27, sans energy core regulator. Upgraded system to further compensate for the Verdricci effect. Added new subsystems to target a specific location within sub-space, based on new research documents. No more firing off randomly. Begin activation now."

Triumphantly, she punched in the key sequence to start up the machine and listened with glee as it whirred. Lights flickered on around the ring and sparks coursed across the empty space in the middle.

Staring into her would-be sub-space gate, Nexus's hands shook excitedly. "Alright UEF, let's see what you were up to."

The machine's laboured noises intensified and she could feel a charged tingle on her skin. Then, all at once, a disc of torn space appeared inside the ring, contained and stable! Her smile vanished, only to be replaced by a slack jaw and wide eyes. The sight beyond the portal sent shivers through her body and chilled her blood. There, floating in the vast emptiness of sub-space, was a cylindrical device and it was surrounded by lifeless human corpses.

Description
"I already told you, you big dumb bastard, that energy core regulator isn't worth 3,000 Credits! It's not even close!" The young woman grumbled as she slammed her hands down on the clerk's table. Her eyes were set in a narrow, green glare and she scowled between loose strands of bright red hair that fell in front of her face.

Before her stood a towering being of a strange, reptilian countenance with craggy clusters of ruddy brown, overlapping scales. It's long, muscular limbs lead to big clawed hands that scraped against the surface of his counter while he waved a mechanical device in the air, stray cables swaying to and fro.

Taurus, the inhabitants of the planet Kakataka in the Aldebaran star system and the largest, most cantankerous of all the sentient species in the galaxy. They were also notorious hoarders.

It erupted in a flurry of angry, guttural growls, its scales rapidly scraping and clattering against one another to create a series of accompanying clicks. As he made his odd noises at the girl, a mechanical device on his chest lit up and started to translate in a low, robotic voice.

"You don't know what you're talking about, Nexus. This a rare treasure! There is nothing else like it on Pantainos!"

"Zakka, you are so full of shit!" she said, as she reached into her lab-coat and withdrew a small pair of oval-shaped glasses. Slipping them over her nose, she peered past the huge, alien shopkeeper and to the staggering pile of discarded mechanical trinkets and components behind his kiosk. “I can see two more in the back from here!” she cried as she frantically removed her glasses and stuffed them back into her coat.

"3,000 credits or no regulator!" the salesman replied.

The young woman stood up as tall as she could and crossed her arms over her chest in her best attempt to look authoritative. She was short and scrawny by human standards, not to mention leaning on a cane, but absolutely minuscule compared to the seven foot monster before her. "Listen here, you idiot, you have no idea what that's worth to me and you're just going to eat it anyway! So hand it over for a fair price and stop impeding scientific progress!"

Without warning, the shopkeeper opened his jaws for the first time, the lower portion of his face splitting into two and spreading out in a slavering, triangular maw. Then, he chomped into the device in his hand! His shredding teeth crunched and tore the metal apart with ease as he ripped off a chunk and swallowed it before hurling the remnants straight at the Nexus's head.

With only a moment of shock, she narrowly ducked under the incoming projectile. The move sent her stumbling and she barely managed to catch herself with her cane and avoided an untimely fall, face first into the cold steel ground.

If the yelling earlier hadn't drawn the attention of the other merchants and customers that populated the market, this certainly would.

Before she knew it, the merchant was scooping up more hand-fulls of junk parts and tossing them at her with abandon.

"Whoa, whoa whoa! Is this how you treat all your regulars!?" Head held low, she scurried away from the bellowing Taurus, dodging flying gears and batteries as she did so. "Lunatic!" she yelled as she departed the market square.

She looked back over her shoulder more than once on her way back to her apartment, just to make sure there wasn't an angry alien reptile behind her. It wasn't until she was nearly three blocks away that she stopped to catch her breath, leaning against the wall of a building and wiping her brow with the sleeve of her coat. Just from that short run, her muscles ached and her chest burned with exertion. "I left my apartment for that damn regulator and the dumbass took a bite right out of it!" she said between gasps.

She spent nearly a minute bent over and panting before rising back up and fanning out her coat to relieve some of the intense heat.

Pantainos City, built in the most habitable, lush part of the colony planet for which it was named, was in Nexus's own words, "Too damn hot in the Summer to be conducive to intellectual pursuits." So then why, she often wondered to herself, did the United Earth Federation decide to build its premiere academies here?

Pantainos was one of the UEF's earliest and most prosperous colonies and had become a grand centre for training and education in the past several decades. Academies and accompanying campuses for humanity's most prestigious schools in the fields of science and military had developed here and dominated much of the city. The best and brightest across all of UEF space were sent here to learn.

But far from the glamorous universities and labs at the city's centre, Nexus walked along the ill-tended streets at the fringes as she made her way home in a decidedly poor mood.

The moment she stepped into the lobby and felt the cool, temperature controlled air hit her face, she let out a long, satisfied sigh.

Up the elevator and to the second floor, she entered the hall to find yet another annoyance. "Great. If the heat and the taurus weren't enough, some ass-clown piled a bunch of boxes in front of my door!" she thought.

For some reason or another, cardboard shipping boxes of varying sizes, piled six high, stood right up against the entrance to her apartment.

Without another thought, she stomped forward and delivered a swift, hard kick with a flip-flop clad foot to the side of the box mountain. Much to her chagrin, the pile barely moved. So, she took a step back and shoulder checked it with the entire, fairly insubstantial, weight of her body and this time she sent it tumbling to the floor with an appeasing clatter. She grinned down at her handiwork, hoping there was something both fragile and valuable within.

The commotion brought someone running almost immediately as a man stepped out of the open door across the hall, looking concerned. His expression promptly shifted to surprise and confusion as he spied Nexus standing over the upended pile of his belongings.

He was tall, broad-shouldered and muscular young man with blond, neatly trimmed hair and a square jaw. Nexus thought immediately that if he put on a uniform, he'd look like he walked right out of a military recruitment ad for the Federation.

"Did you knock over my boxes?"

"Oops," she replied with a shrug as she reached for the keycard in her pocket.

"The hell, lady? I keep important stuff in those!"

"Well then maybe you shouldn't keep 'em in front of my door."

He furrowed his brow and attempted to speak up but upon noticing the cane in her hand, he suddenly felt a strong desire to remain reticent. "Uhm... Sorry," he said with downcast eyes as he kneeled down and started to gather up his things, shuffling them out of the way for her. "So that's your apartment then?"

"Yep, 37B," she said with the absolute most disinterest she could muster while jabbing a thumb toward the numbers posted behind her.

With an armful of boxes, he stood back and extended his free hand toward her. "I'm just moving in next door. I'm Parker Walsh."

Her eyes drifted back and forth between his hand and his face for several seconds. "Are you suggesting I make physical contact with you?"

"Generally speaking, an offer to shake hands with someone would imply that, yes." Yet more confusion was starting to creep into his voice.

"Ew," she replied curtly, rolling her eyes. She turned and swiped her card over the electronic lock and stepped into her apartment.

"Ouch!" he shot back. "Can I at least have your name?"

"Nexus," she said as she slammed the door behind her.

"There is no way that is your real name!" he yelled with his lips scant inches from the door but to no response.

"Parker?" said another man as he stuck his head out of the open apartment. He was thinner and less chiseled than his friend but with a sly, fox-like countenance. "What are you doing out here?"

Parker shrugged. "Neighbour girl kicked over our boxes."

"And so you quit unpacking to come out here and flirt with her?"

"Not at first."

"But you did flirt with her?"

"She didn't even give me a chance. It’s just not fair."

"My heart aches for you, brother. Now get back to work. We need everything set up by tomorrow."

"On it." With boxes in hand, he started back toward his own apartment, taking one glance at the door behind him as he went. "Well then. See you around, Nex."

The moment she stepped inside her apartment and flicked on the lights, she felt her legs start to shake. She grumbled softly, finally allowing herself to wince at the constant pain she felt in her muscles and eased her body into the wheelchair lying in wait by the door.

Inside her apartment, where one might normally find furniture, decorations or just about anything, Nexus had cables, power generators and several large processors stacked against the wall. In the corner sat a desk with a pair of computers, razor-thin glass panes mounted on swiveling stands. Nexus produced a third, smaller device from inside her coat, a handheld computer. With a few swipes on the surface, her chair wheeled itself over to the desk. Once situated, she began sliding her fingers across the dual screens and they came alive with images and information. Her eyes darting back and forth between them. Within arm's reach of her chair sat a large espresso machine with a mountain of discarded flavour pods, generally counting among the excessively sweet variety.

All this technology (save the espresso machine) was connected to a strange, ceiling-high object in the middle of the room, taking up the vast majority of floor-space. It was a huge mechanical ring of some kind, built into a large platform. It stood eight feet high and across, appearing to be deactivated at the moment.

She looked upon the device briefly, shook her head, and returned to her work. "Damn Zakka, always being a pain in my ass."

It wasn't long before she noticed she had an update on her post on the local University forums. She wasn't exactly a student, but where else was she going to share her hypotheses?

"Oh fantastic, this idiot," she said with mock excitement when she saw who posted. "Hello, Student 681966, a man so boring he uses his student ID as his screen name." Nex skimmed over his latest dull refutation of her work and rolled her eyes.

"Your ridiculous idea of a potential intersystem artificial intelligence program has no bearing in modern computer science. Even the most simple-minded of your species is aware that software is limited by hardware.

You persist in the idea that your entirely theoretical sub-space processor would alleviate this issue and allow a program to move freely between systems, but this has in itself a litany of issues. There is no evidence to support the idea that information can travel freely between sub-space and normal space. How do you propose such a device would maintain a fixed location within sub-space? In addition, the power requirements would be astronomical.

Fixed sub-space pockets have never been found to be a remote possibility and tests have resulted in failure, every single time. The only possible use for sub-space is point A to B travel through fixed gates."

She shook her at the computer as she reclined in her chair. She let out a guttural groan of frustration and swept a hand back through her sweat-matted hair. "This guy has no imagination."

Nex pondered the list of possible rebuttals. Everything from explaining the potential power of a flywheel energy storage system in the absolute vacuum of sub-space or reference to the sub-space tests performed by Earth scientists decades earlier that implied the possibility of direct access to sub-space beyond simple two-way passages. However, when she received a sudden response from a rather important contact,' she decided to let her opposition stew for a little while.

Anxiously she opened the message with a tap of her finger and pulled contents up on screen. Just reading that first sentence left her stunned.

"I have acquired the information you requested."

That alone was all she needed to send her mind alight with fireworks. There was some more afterward about releasing the hold on the promised payments and how to contact him again. She absent-mindedly tapped out an affirmative response and delved into the attached files with all haste possible.

A few weeks ago she'd contacted someone who claimed to have worked on some classified Federation experiments performed here on Pantainos. She'd been making a few inquiries about them and they had become a subject of great interest to her, even though they never got off the ground. What they were attempting to develop and why it failed is still unknown to this day, but Nexus's own digging had told her that it had something to do with personal sized sub-space gates, as opposed to the massive rings that transported ships across the galaxy.

"I was right," she muttered to herself after nearly twenty minutes of poring over the contents. "Schematics, test results, dates and locations."

She gleaned from the notes that they had managed to design a miniaturized sub-space gate, though from what she could find, it wasn't able to sustain itself before collapsing after only a few seconds. Several pages appeared to be missing, including details of who was involved and the purpose of the experiments, but all the technical data she needed was right here in these files.

Again she gazed upon the massive mechanism in the centre of her apartment, this time with new excitement and rattling nerves. She bit her lip as she considered her options before giving a small nod of affirmation to herself. "To hell with the regulator, I've got work to do."

She wheeled over to the huge ring and pushed herself out of her chair. For hours she consulted the new specifications and readjusted her machine. Multiple trips were made back and forth between the device and her computer and she went through around a dozen cups of coffee and sixty teaspoons of sugar. She scoured every crate of spare parts she had lying around (which was no small number) to get everything she needed. The clanking and clamour of her tools filled the apartment all through the night and up until the early morning.

She awoke with a start around noon the next day, passed out in her wheelchair with a collection of her tools sprawled across her lap and around her wheels. She yawned, grumbled and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, shadowed by black bags.

Blinking rapidly, Nexus looked at her device, consulted the schematics and then back to the device. It was a match. Better than a match even. She felt she'd improved on the old schematics. "I did it?" she asked herself, brushing back a tangle of red hair. She laughed quietly, pleased with her work. "Of course I did it."

Still coming to, she mumbled out a few commands. "Computer, begin recording a new log now. "

Next to her desk, a camera mounted on a small robot, not unlike an ambulatory tripod, came alive. Its lens promptly veered in her direction.

Pushing herself to her feet, she stood before the device and stumbled toward the terminal mounted at its edge. "Sub-space portal NG Model-1, test 27, sans energy core regulator. Upgraded system to further compensate for the Verdricci effect. Added new subsystems to target a specific location within sub-space, based on new research documents. No more firing off randomly. Begin activation now."

Triumphantly, she punched in the key sequence to start up the machine and listened with glee as it whirred. Lights flickered on around the ring and sparks coursed across the empty space in the middle.

Staring into her would-be sub-space gate, Nexus's hands shook excitedly. "Alright UEF, let's see what you were up to."

The machine's laboured noises intensified and she could feel a charged tingle on her skin. Then, all at once, a disc of torn space appeared inside the ring, contained and stable! Her smile vanished, only to be replaced by a slack jaw and wide eyes. The sight beyond the portal sent shivers through her body and chilled her blood. There, floating in the vast emptiness of sub-space, was a cylindrical device and it was surrounded by lifeless human corpses.