"Do I have your attention?" rang out a voice, emanating from seemingly every corner of the featureless dark that Velan occupied. The voice was utterly inhuman and of an unnatural pitch, but every word it uttered was spoken with consideration and impeccable accuracy — somehow, Velan doubted that it was alien, even as it filled his heart with fear. When the voice spoke, Velan's thoughts rushed away, all of his focus being forcibly diverted to what was being said to him.
Velan, unable to speak, instead thought "Yes," in reply.
"Good," the voice uttered immediately, "Your mind is mine. Know that I can kill you with a mere thought, know that I can reduce your vessel to ash with as much effort as it takes to breathe, and know that the aliens lurking amongst your crew are of no concern to me: all I want is the adolescent girl. The one who changed her name to 'Kalmah'."
Confusion and apprehension seized Velan's mind simultaneously, and just as he began to think in reply, the voice answered his question.
"You do not need to know why I seek her, nor should you try to stop me once you deal with your alien threat, if you even manage to do that. Regardless of what happens, I will come for her before this ship docks, and when I do, I recommend you stay out of it. The one who commands me doesn't want you or your crew to die, though despite this, when compared with the girl, they consider you all to be a secondary priority."
Velan felt pulses of pain ripple throughout his mind, and the faintest sensations of his body began to return to him, though he remained ensnared as the voice said, "Go on; fight for your lives. I lack the time and the desire to continue this."
Velan felt his corporeal feeling flood back to him, though for a brief moment, his mind remained utterly enslaved by the source of the voice; Velan struggled to tear away, yet was powerless to do anything but listen.
"Do not make me regret my mercy now — I will have none later, should you fail to do something as simple as nothing," said the shrill voice, speaking without malice, but with the confidence of an omnipotent god.
Velan felt another pulse of pain ripple across his form, though after this, his will was unshackled, his body's control was restored to him, and his ravaged vision began to recover, allowing him to witness the anarchy that had emerged in the wake of whatever had stunned him so violently. His shaken implants revealed that only a few seconds had passed from when he blacked out to when he regained control of himself — doubtless, whatever he had talked with had somehow accelerated his thoughts as it held him captive.
Through the rapidly-subsiding cloud of debilitating gas, Velan caught sight of people, struggling to their feet, or opting to simply regain their wits from the comfort of the floor; though Velan's ears were on the verge of deafness, he still faintly heard the distinct clamor of gauss weaponry being fired. Glancing upwards at the source of the weapons fire, Velan saw Korthekar and the two other enforcers shooting machineguns at what appeared to be nought but dust-filled air, though somehow, this air sparked intensely when one of Korthekar's rounds struck something, and the faintest outline of a not-quite-human figure became briefly visible. Velan felt a pang of fear, a surge of confusion; a moment later, he was struck by a moment of clarity that only served to make him feel like a fool for not recognizing what had happened earlier, while also making him subtly quake with horror now that he knew what actually had transpired. Despite being trapped on a damaged space station, with no external help, and with aliens amongst his crew, the universe had found a way to torment him with yet another threat.
The gauss fire in the room died down, the screams and moans of those who had been incapacitated by the stunning set of detonations ceasing with them. As the room recovered, Korthekar grunted in frustration with such intensity that it could have been mistaken for an alien fiend's roar, and a tight collection of gauss shots could be heard coming from somewhere nearby, though aside from this, there was a strange silence.
Velan, contacting Korthekar via textcomm, asked, "I fear I know what just happened to me; am I wrong?"
Korthekar rotated his titanic form to face Velan, and called out to him, disregarding subtlety entirely, "You're right: besides aliens, we're hunted by a Wraith, and one that, for some reason, hacked your implants to have a chat. Care to tell us why?"
Velan glanced at a grim-faced Kalmah subconsciously, before, realizing his mistake, he glanced at anther random crew member to hide his renewed interest in the girl.
"No, I don't," he replied, catching his breath, the lingering remnants of the Wraith's presence still chilling him to his core.
The revelation that there was a Wraith on the ship, and that Velan had been hacked by one, only reignited and fuelled the flames of fearful conversation; such an operative was as much to be feared as the aliens, or perhaps even more so, depending on what it wanted with you. Being the Empire's perfect, utterly lethal assassins, Wraiths had been genetically engineered and trained to the point where they no longer even resembled a human underneath their bleeding-edge, invisible armor. Impossibly agile, able to scale walls by simply running on them, capable of reliably hitting targets from kilometers away using their custom-built sniper rifles and being the only things known to regularly slay enforcers in close-quarters combat, Wraiths were the deadliest soldier humanity had ever conceived of; holding multiple decades' worth of lethal training within their advanced, genetically engineered brains, the Empire's Wraiths were the lethal boogey-things of the Empire, rightly feared by anyone with even a modicum of sense. Wraiths were as much a technological achievement as the bleeding-edge armor they wore; a single operative cost more than the average frigate. Velan's episode, in reality advanced implant hacking of the kind he had never even seen mentioned before, as well as the series of detonations themselves, had been a Wraith's handiwork — this proved that the unwelcome guest was at least somewhat hostile towards Velan's crew, and that thought seemed to make his terrible situation even worse. No matter what its allegiance was, Velan took some comfort in the idea that the Wraith would be hostile to the aliens as well — at least, this is what he desperately hoped was the case, for the Wraith could opt to watch him get slaughtered, if it came to that.
Velan, with three enforcers at his side, barely stood a chance against the solitary killer, for his force's odds against the operative alone, with no aliens in the equation, were poorer than those he faced on the Cesspit. Still, before dealing with the Wraith, he had to contend with these aliens on board his ship, for they were seemingly always part of the equation. To that end, Velan immediately ordered Korthekar via textcomm to investigate the source of the gunfire he had heard upon rejoining the physical world, and as the brute eagerly lumbered off, a wave of recognition hit Velan. The next instant, he hastily looked around the room, at the faces of everyone present, and it was then Velan's chest fluttered with fright and sank with grim terror: Falmenec was nowhere to be seen.
Grabbing his rifle, which lay discarded on the floor nearby, Velan rushed to the door that Korthekar had just left through, a trio of combat medics following behind him as they also realized what had occurred. A number of Velan's senior officers, among them Ralthina, Xandra, and Illtera, moved to follow them, but Dentor interjected, arguing fearfully, "If we all march out into the exposed hallway, we give the aliens what they want: we ruin the security of this room! Korthekar can handle whatever's out there without your help, for that is his job after all!"
Illtera nodded approvingly, and backed down; Ralthina and Xandra were less willing to not accompany their captain, but stern glares from Dentor and several others made them stay behind as well. Terxah and Iselviah opted to remain in the room without an ounce of protest while they tended to the mildly wounded crew members within, though all of this was the least of Velan's concerns when Falmenec, his one chance of identifying the aliens on his ship, was in danger. The aliens had picked the perfect target, though Falmenec's announcing the plan to everyone in the station made this somewhat less surprising.
Reaching the now-shut door out of the dining chamber, whose marine guards had long since left the room, Velan noticed that the thing had received a fresh coating of blood — this blood was alien. Ordering the door to open with a desperate, impatient thought command, Velan's sweating hands gripped his rifle ever-tighter with each moment that the ravaged circuitry delayed performing its simple task. His chest pounding, his body perspiring, Velan grew more afraid of what he would see on the other side of the door with each passing nanosecond; when the door finally burst open, Velan was treated to a grisly sight.
Before him lay the eviscerated corpse of a brutish alien beast, the arms and weaponry of which still twitching on instinct as an endless stream of blackened blood poured forth from massive gashes in the creature's torso. Further down the hallway, there was a second alien corpse, presided over by two bloodied Nemesis marines, along with Parivahn — the Kalithiharian soldier whom Velan had met when first entering the station, who was now lightly wounded. On the ground, nearby these people, was Falmenec. One of the three medics who had followed Velan rushed to the man, while the other two, concerned looks marking their countenances, hurried over to the gruesomely mutilated Falmenec; their job was now to keep him alive, and to prevent alien residue on his wounds from making him into an infiltrator with time.
Lying prone on the ground, Falmenec, a gaping, gushing hole gouged in his stomach, writhed and struggled in a swelling ocean of his own blood; his hands and arms were lacerated by slash-wounds, and large flakes of metal had been chipped off of his durable helmet — all of this was unquestionably alien handiwork. A single glance at what remained of the man, and Velan was stunned that his old friend was still alive; this, however, did not dull his gratitude, and with two highly-trained medics tending to Falmenec, and as a surge of naive hope coursed through his mind, Velan became convinced that his friend would live. Allowing his rifle to magnetically affix itself to his suit's back, Velan rushed over to Falmenec, asking the single obvious question he could muster once he was standing over his friend.
"What happened?"