Distant crackling. Flickering light. The sharp scent of burning.

Pandora jerked upright—jolted, her jumpseat harness snapping her back into warp-transit position. Pain roared through her skull. Every centimetre of her body hurt, from her toenails to the roots of her dark hair. Her eyeballs felt like they'd been yanked from their sockets.

Warp jumps... They sucked even when they went to plan. When they didn't...

Smoke. The hot pop of overloaded wiring.

Her pulse raced. She didn't need her Ph.D. in astral navigation to know the last warp transition of the science vessel SS Adiona had not gone to plan.

Horror swelled. Those radiation anomalies she'd detected. She'd told Professor Hoder they needed investigation before the transition; the warp nodes were too sensitive to disruption. He'd dismissed her concerns—laughed them off as symptoms of her 'hypervigilance disorder'.

Humiliation burned through pain. The moment someone learned of her past, her reputation for triple checking and following protocols went from respected to a joke. Everyone had heard about the Expansion Incident—the 'biggest' lab accident in recent history. God, even strangers—disaster groupies—accosted her for selfies or offered to buy her a drink.

She'd been four years old; hadn't known an atomic-density augmenter from a water pistol. One innocent shot at an old cart wheel and a few kilos of wood had become an apocalyptic monstrosity, massacring thirty thousand chickens in a research farm, imperilling air traffic, and diverting an entire river.

Pan cringed, blocking memories of screams and her father's horrified face. No human lives had been lost, but the fearless curiosity that'd led her to play with an untested prototype had suffered a brutal death.

The smell of shorting electronics reminded her afresh of what happened when caution was thrown to the wind.

She forced open her eyes.

Darkness lit by sparks. Scattered equipment. A swinging ceiling panel, half dislodged. Beyond it, the sweeping viewing wall that was the astral-sensor hub of the SS Adiona no longer glowed with the electromagnetic waves and pulses of the universe.

Fear burned up her throat.

She jerked her gaze to the jumpseat next to hers.

Empty.

Her breath snagged. Kiran, her research partner. He'd been strapped in beside her, his too-blue eyes alive with uncharacteristic humour. He'd known she was nervous about the jump. To distract her, the usually aloof astrophysicist had outrageously flattered her last research paper and actually cracked jokes—none of which had ended with her as the punch line.

Her stomach rolled, not the usual flutter Kiran caused.

She shoved down panic; unclipped her harness—fell to her knees.

The weakness in her limbs reiterated the message her pounding skull had already delivered: while there had been a jump malfunction, some kind of warp transition had occurred.

A long one.

Far longer than the scheduled jump to Home Station in the next star system.

The emergency protocols she'd obsessively memorised tumbled through her mind. On unsteady legs, she reached the lab's emergency stores; hurriedly fitted a helmet and oxygen supply to her flight suit. Flicking on headlamps, she located first aid supplies and a fire extinguisher. After quickly dealing with the sparking ruins of her workstation, she cranked open the lab's hatch, every nerve ending burning with dread.

Blackness.

Her boots rung hollowly in the corridor's stillness.

No voices, no movement ... no one.

Respiration shallow, she headed for the bridge, helmet lights carving away night, starkly revealing a haze of smoke, darkened hatch windows, and...

Drops of blood.

Her heart jolted. She raced to follow the glistening trail.

A body.

"Kiran!"

She fell to her knees beside his sprawled frame. Her headlamps cut a horror from the darkness: blood leaking from nose and ears; blue eyes wide and still, the whites stark red.

Warp haemorrhage.

Transition length beyond physiological safety limits.

She almost threw up inside her helmet. Kiran... A few minutes ago, he'd been smiling at her for the first time ever. He was young and fit—a qualified long-range pilot. If anyone should've survived a protracted transition, it should've been him—not a gangly wimp like her.

She struggled to breathe, wanting to deny the truth. Her paranoia—cowardice—had saved her. She'd upped her dose of transition salts despite the short length of the scheduled jump. Everyone else would've—

"God." She hauled herself up; ran for the bridge.

More sparking consoles, more dislodged panels...

More bodies.

Pan turned in the darkness, her pulse a roar. Her headlamps revealed a nightmare: shipmates slumped in jumpseats; faces and flight suits stained red.

All dead.

She struggled not to hyperventilate.

She was alone, on a damaged ship, drifting in the infinite darkness.

"No." She stumbled to the captain's chair—blanched at the sight of the once formidable Salma Dungan now slack and pale.

Warnings flickered beneath the woman's limp hand. Multiple systems on emergency power, life support and gravity included. Ship shields down to thirty per cent. Collision warnings—debris field detected.

Cringing—gagging—Pan moved the captain's lifeless fingers; used them to authorise full system access.

The bridge's main view screen flickered out of stasis. Its long arc flared, wild with silver-blue bursts of light.

Shield flare.

A storm of objects slamming into the ship's defences.

Pan's jaw fell. What had the Adiona jumped into?

She zoomed in 'visuals', expecting rocks—debris from a collision between asteroids or other cosmic bodies.

What looked like the wing of a ground-to-orbit shuttle slammed into the shields in a blinding burst, then spun away, tumbling back into a mass of gleaming fragments.

The remains of a spacecraft—no, multiple vessels.

A chunk of hull rolled past, emblazoned with 'MSS Charon'.

Hands shaking, Pan accessed the Adiona's database.

The MSS Charon: Status: missing. Suspected warp-transition error. All crew presumed dead.

A surreal feeling of being in a nightmare crushed Pan's chest. These ships... Had they all ended up here after a failed transition?

Where was here?

Fighting to breathe, she checked nav sensors.

No identifiable star systems. Local stellar body unknown.

She clutched the captain's chair, knees threatening to give out.

How could she be outside known space? That was impossible.

Inescapable.

No one would receive the Adiona's distress call. No one would find her. She was going to die alone, screaming into the dark—

A bell-like ding. Radiation anomaly detected.

Pan scrambled to check sensors.

Not a random flare in background radiation. A pulse, strong and regular, typical of—

Another ship conducting an active sensor sweep.

A search.

Pan punched on comms, disbelief swirling into desperate relief. If she could boost the Adiona's distress signal—

Inactive.

She stared at the system log. The distress call had autoactivated, then five minutes later ... manual deactivation.

What? Why? Pan looked to the Adiona's captain, flinched. No way had Dungan survived the failed transition. So, who had—?

Something slammed into her, taking her to the deck.

She managed to roll to her side—froze.

A lolling head. Dishevelled black hair.

"Kiran?" Relief at seeing him alive died at the sight of unblinking, crimson eyes.

The astrophysicist's head jerked and rolled to the side as he crawled towards her, the unnatural motion evoking memories—from Earth zombie movies.

Pan scrambled back—shrieked as Kiran grabbed her legs and started dragging himself over her. Every fantasy about being caught in her research partner's arms vaporised as he stared down at her, jaw slack, drool oozing from bloody lips.

"Ve-hicle d-damaged." Barely comprehensible words.

"I know!" Fresh panic streaked through her. "Get off! We need to reactivate—"

"Emergency tran-transfer."

"What—?" She screamed as pain exploded in her skull. Images and sounds punched her brain like bullets: her laughing at Kiran's jokes before the jump; the ping of sensors—an active search; a bloody hand—Kiran's—deactivating the Adiona's distress signal... Shadows rippling across space, arrowing toward ship debris, seeking—hunting.

The 'Umbra'. Deep void predators. Nightmares.

Understanding struck an instant before consciousness ripped away.

Humanity was not alone in the universe.

And she was not alone in her skull anymore.

Void guardian Flux RaDjin winced as he suppressed the consciousness of the neural network he'd just hijacked. So much for downtime—a little sightseeing—between interdimensional battles. Like all djin, he'd just wanted to meet the human who'd expanded the subatomic void years ago, disrupting space–time for an instant, freeing trillions of his kind from an Umbra quantum trap. Okay, yes, he'd also flirted with their Saviour through the male vehicle she clearly admired, but who could blame him for—what did humans call it again?—fanboying? At least he'd resisted asking for a selfie, unlike her more ardent followers.

Flux stood, electrical and chemical signals flowing hotly through undamaged physical systems, a cascade his lovely host would have called 'anticipation'.

Now he had a functional vehicle in this dimension again...

He strode for the command chair. If the Umbra had brought the war to the Saviour's universe, he'd teach the ship-snatching, soul-eating bastards the human meaning of regret.

Acknowledgements, Copyright, and Challenge Details

This short story was written for the 2021 Ultimate Sci-Fi SmackDown challenge: round 1. Challenge details: Write a short story based on the following quote: 'Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.'