Falmenec, alien detector in hand, strode uneasily through the maze of bodies and waded in the lake of blood that had flooded the chamber, as he scanned those few who still lived. Coming over to the girl last, scanning her, and, humming sadly upon receiving a negative result, Falmenec stated, "We have nothing to fear from these people — they are, in fact, people."
Shuddering, Falmenec went on, as a pair of tears streaked down his face, "That makes this even worse."
Standing and maintaining eye-contact with his old friend, Velan reassuringly patted him on his armored shoulder, "We'll make damn certain this doesn't happen again."
Falmenec stammered as he tried — and failed — to regain his composure, "And how will we do that?"
Velan answered by not answering; turning to Terxah instead, he commanded, "You have access to this station's systems, and from what I've seen you have a way with the Kalithiharian people. For the love of humanity, please use this combination of talents to prevent this"—Velan gestured around him, his eyes bloodshot and teary—"from happening again under my watch!"
Terxah nodded, and, a moment later, zoned out, as she began some unknowable task. Dentor, entering the room after having wept outside for some time, walked patiently and grimly towards Velan, taking care to tread on as few corpses as he could. When he reached Velan, he momentarily eyed the girl, before whispering, "I think I've found a way to get us out of the system."
Velan thought for a second. On one hand, getting away from the Cesspit was a boon; on the other, he had been summoned to Kalithihar for some unknowable task that he had yet to fulfill. Then again, Velan realized that by trying to talk to the Kalithiharian government, he had gotten his ship destroyed and most of his crew members killed: the further away he was from strange Kalithiharian tasks, politics, and plans, the better.
"Tell me," Velan replied.
Dentor sighed, looked around him, then continued, "There may be no ships aboard this shipyard, but there are remnant drives, and there is power—"
"Are you suggesting—"
"Yes," was Dentor's reply, "I'm suggesting we wire all the remnant drives we can find into the station's reactor, sever the space elevator with the station's weapons, breach the station into the Remnant, and then fly the station to the nearest major planet using its fairly powerful maneuvering thrusters."
Velan, cursing, ran his bloodied, gauntlet-encased hand through his now-bloodied head of hair, tearing out a few such hairs by accident while unintentionally painting many others with a mix of alien and human blood.
"Is there any other option?" Velan asked.
"Not that I know of."
"Fine; do whatever you need to do to get us out of this system — just be sure to do it quickly," Velan commanded, moving as if to exit the conversation, though Dentor turned to face him and pushed another matter.
"Even with our station-turned ship, captain," Dentor began, "I don't see what's stopping the Kalithiharian fleet above from atomizing us the moment we begin to breach like they did with the ships on this station. Even if we try to emergency breach and it, through some miracle, doesn't destroy the station, they could pursue us into the Remnant and finish us there!"
Velan met Dentor's stare, his intelligent eyes flaring with pride.
"Don't worry, my friend; we have something that all of the humans and aliens before us never possessed nor recognized the value of."
"And what might that be?"
"Terxah."
Dentor began to sputter, incredulous, "She's good, but no one can fly a space station evasively! You've overestimating how maneuverable this thing is!"
Velan sighed, disappointed.
"I don't mean that she's going to evade their fire, I mean that because she's on the station, the Kalithiharians won't fire at all. It's a hunch of mine."
This time it was Dentor's time to sigh.
"You place a lot of faith in hunches."
"And I'm still in one piece, am I not?" was the reply.
Dentor, argued into a corner, shrugged as if to concede, before stating, "As for timing, I must say, this task is remarkably easy, despite its outlandishness; I'll have it done in half, or maybe even a quarter, of an hour. We'll see then whether or not your hunch is right."
Velan turned to face Dentor, and half-forced a smile.
"Thank you, Dentor," he said, "for delivering the first good news I've heard in too long."
"No problem, sir," Dentor replied, saluting. Velan quickly returned the salute, and walked off to his own duties.
***
Within a quarter of an hour, Terxah had pacified the remaining human strongholds throughout the station. Uneasily, those rescued — a group that included a number of civilians — all rendezvoused with Velan's war-weary crew by the station's bridge, where Dentor was laboring with inhuman speed and tenacity in his attempts to transform the space station into a spacecraft. Moments after his chat with Velan, Dentor had, using the station's limited weaponry, severed the station's elevator link with the planet below, with the stated intent of preventing any aliens from coming up the way that Velan's enforcer had earlier — the station was now kept from falling into the planet below by its maneuvering thrusters, and the emphatic, desperate hopes of those within it.
For each second that passed, on the Cesspit below, more and more swathes of cityscape succumbed to the alien corruption, despite the efforts of the human fleet; Velan could only be thankful that he had escaped the place, and be regretful for the countless others who had not. Though more than half of the survivors aboard the space station were civilian rather than military, they could still hold a gun, and they swelled Velan's ranks regardless; this was good indeed, for the threat of alien infiltration had not entirely passed, and as the ancient idiom went, there is safety in numbers.
Another ten minutes, and Dentor, working from the bridge, while a veritable horde of subordinate engineers and volunteers slaved away under his enlightened direction in various places across the space station, completed his daunting task in impressive time. Piping up with a hint of pride in his voice, Dentor announced to all those on the bridge — amongst whom were all of Velan's senior officers, the remaining Kalithiharian captains, and Korthekar — "Captain, this station is now a ship, and it is yours; I believe this mighty vessel needs a name befitting its fine construction."
Velan would have rather not indulged in such wasteful, frivolous activities such as naming something when his life hung in the balance, especially after he had been irreparably shaken by such a gruesome ordeal as the tragic misunderstanding earlier. However, already having a perfect name for the vessel, and knowing that declining would simply take more, valuable time, Velan immediately replied, "This vessel will be named the 'Placeholder' — a fitting name that reflects the temporary nature of the ship; the moment we arrive at Ihndrastar, we're ditching this wretched thing, and the horrors that have transpired within its walls."
"As you wish, captain," was the partly annoyed, partly insulted, and yet partly entertained reply. Velan was, for his part, rather stunned: he had seen Dentor function quickly and efficiently before, but, much to his pleasure, what he had seen that day was so inhumanly brilliant that he could only stand in awe of the accomplishment. Some collapsed under pressure; others, like Dentor, worked wonders.
Not wasting another moment, Velan ordered all to their stations, and began spooling up the ship's remnant drive. The moment power from the station's reactor began flooding towards the expertly-arranged array of drives, the very hull and structure of the station started to warp and buckle, and gasps of awe echoed throughout the bridge. While Velan's station struggled with something it was never built to do, the newly-christened Placeholder's sensors detected irregular movement on a massive scale within the system, though it did not herald the arrival of a new fleet or a change in the course of the Kalithiharian blockade — rather, it told of the Cesspit's sudden disengagement from its own orbit. As ancient, gargantuan, and somewhat concealed engines within the construct roared to life, answering the call of their creators on Kalithihar despite the alien corruption present throughout their systems, the Cesspit, under the force of these engines, entered into a rapidly decaying orbit that was clearly a destructive one, even if perceived solely with the unaided eye. Within minutes, the artificial planet would merge with and be consumed by the pale-blue star that had sustained it for centuries. As the planet hurtled through space towards its grisly end, the Kalithiharian blockade, each ship acting in perfect harmony with the rest of the formation despite human limitations usually limiting such skillful maneuvering, matched the Cesspit's movement perfectly, their formation not faltering even slightly in spite of the jarringly quick speeds involved as they continued to bombard the planet and intercept any alien attempts to flee the doomed world; such precise maneuvering seemed impossible for any human, let alone so many at once. As the Placeholder's haphazardly assembled remnant drive drew vast quantities of power from the rest of the slapdash vessel, creating an ever-expanding breach before the ship while resulting in a similarly ever-expanding, deafening cacophony of whining metal, the Cesspit's blockading fleet, seeing the overwhelming visage of their home star only a few hundred thousand kilometers away, dispersed and fled their charge, just as plasma from the celestial body began to lap at the corrupted planet they had been blockading. A moment later, though any sound the titanic collision caused was absorbed by the surrounding vacuum, the Cesspit slammed into the fiery depths of its own star, the violent collision sending great plumes of white-hot plasma hurtling into the void; the superstructure of the Cesspit, though it bravely resisted the overwhelming temperatures and destructive plasma of the star, quickly succumbed to the intense conditions of the celestial forge. The alien-corrupted sections of the planet visibly survived for over half a minute longer than their human counterparts, though after this brief grace period, they too came apart at the raging star's behest — nothing can resist the full extent of the universe's power. The impact had sent jets of stellar plasma soaring throughout the system, many of them reaching out to touch the void, before falling back to whence they came under the force of the star's immense gravity. As the star began to contort and warp, the sudden addition, subsequent loss, and general redistribution of mass disturbing its internal mechanisms in a minor yet noticeable fashion, the rest of the artificial bodies in the system began to adjust their own orbits so that they would not be flung out of the system by gravitational forces, or, worse still, share the fate of the Cesspit itself.
It was a while until the station's remnant drives had collected enough power to do what needed to be done, and its delay allowed those present to observe the spectacle with an intoxicating mixture of morbid horror and sickening relief; all the while, the nearby Kalithiharian fleet remained conspicuously inactive. Where it had relentlessly blown ships out of the void for even scraping the atmosphere before, the Kalithiharians now looked on dispassionately while an entire space station breached away, proving Velan's 'hunch' correct — much to the astonishment and bewilderment of the humans aboard his station. Once these drives had been charged, they set to work tearing a breach into the Remnant just in front of the station, and this process only took a few minutes; after this, with the space elevator having been severed long ago, the station-turned-ship drifted into the brilliant golden effulgence of the Remnant on the power of its own maneuvering thrusters, as the entirety of Kalithihar and its new navy watched on.
The station's remnant drives, audibly straining to maintain the breach, ran out of power just as the last portions of the station had slipped through the spherical hole in reality; as the portal snapped shut, the ugly craft became cut off from the rest of civilization, until it arrived somewhere able to service its battered crew. Of course, there were other craft, such as the occasional super-freighter, transport, or military patrol vessel, which shared the Remnant with Velan's station-ship, but all of these were understandably wary of unexplainable sights, and gave Velan' a wide berth. Kalithiharian military vessels in the Remnant, it seemed, were also gripped by the same strange inaction which had characterized their compatriots in normal space, though Velan was uncertain that the fighting ships of other worlds would be as welcoming. For his crew's continued safety, he resolved to keep as wide a distance from military vessels until he reached his desired destination — the nearest major world: Ihndrastar.
It would doubtless take more than a few hours of flight, or perhaps even a few days' worth under the power of the station's less-than-potent maneuvering thrusters, but, when Velan considered that he was stuck on the Cesspit until under two hours ago, he wasn't upset. As the Remnant particles around his "ship" lapped harmlessly against the thing's hull, Velan's thoughts instead drifted onto the most concerning facet of his reality. Doubtless, there were some aliens in humans' clothing amongst his crew, and now he had placed himself beyond the help of every other human in the galaxy until he could reach another planet after just half a day of flight: the issue was not what to do after he arrived at his destination, but how to preserve his humanity and that of his crew before he arrived.
So long as even one alien impostor remained aboard his expansive ship, the lives of everyone else on his vessel, and the lives of everyone on any planet he docked near, remained in jeopardy. Velan had long suspected that on the Cesspit, the aliens had let him and his crew escape purposefully. Why they would ever do such a thing, Velan had not been able to fathom, but now, his mind feeling refreshed by the brief respite, Velan believed he knew what had happened: the aliens may have attacked him at the garrison complex, not with the intent of slaughtering his crew to the last, but instead with the goal of turning as many of his crew members into infiltrators as possible. This way, when the aliens let Velan escape, he would take a number of infiltrators with him as he fled to another system; the aliens likely knew that the Kalithiharian fleet would not attack with a living Terxah aboard, and they had used this to escape Kalithihar's defences just like Velan had. The aliens could now take over his vessel in the Remnant, and use it to attack yet another human system once he disembarked: Velan had played into the aliens' hands from the moment he had plotted his last stand by the space elevator. The gravest danger he had faced since Light's End now beset Velan and his remaining human crew members — whoever these human crew members were.
Turning to a nearby Xandra, Velan said, "Get the word out across the ship — I want everyone to assemble in whatever the largest, most defensible room on this ship is, and I want them to come armed."
The vast, peaceful golden expanse before the Placeholder betrayed the apocalyptic situation at hand. As his station shot through the golden void, Velan got out of his chair and briskly marched towards the mess-hall, summoning all he met to a meeting as he did so; many of his current crew members had been separated on an alien-controlled planet for over an hour, and though he did not believe that most of them were alien, he had no doubt that some of them were. To survive Light's End, to survive the Cesspit, and then to die at the alien hands of those he thought were his own crew would be the most disgusting, unfair, and ill-deserved end Velan could fathom; forcefully replacing the magazine of his well-used, bloodied assault rifle, Velan swore to not allow himself or too many of his crew members to meet that abhorrent fate.
Whether or not this oath would be upheld, or if it were even possible to uphold, was unknowable to him.
***
"Every dictatorship has some topic or thing it is 'touchy' about — something that, if mentioned or attempted, its politicians, censors, and armies will hasten to decry, denounce, and crush. Our Empire is 'touchy' about the idea of other human sovereign states; just how many tens of thousands of years has it been since another world managed to call itself 'independent' for more than a year? Why do you think it is that any word which connotes 'autonomy' is never used in official documents or position titles?"
— Ekaliahn, political theorist. A week after this interview, he was arrested and questioned for half a year by the Ministry of Espionage.