The suit's automated warning screamed in his ear just before the time his head snapped back as if it was hit by a giant's fist. Nick's vision focused down to a narrow tunnel as unconsciousness threatened to overtake him. He was dimly aware of many things - tumbling through the air, the suit yelling in his ear that he had taken a shot to the head, his team returning fire, and then hitting the ground in an unglamorous heap.

"I've got it!" Five heads turned in unison towards the old man. But instead of continuing, he pursed his lips.

Nick closed the tome he'd been shuffling through and approached the white haired wizard. "Yes, Victor? Where did you write down the formula? What book?" The young man placed his hand on the other's shoulder.

"Formula..." Victor muttered under his breath, his eyes loosing their focus.

The bow sang over the violin. Nick was tired, his eye lids were leaden, he dripped with sweat, it soaked his shirt, and his fingers, wrapped around he bow and neck of his instrument, ached, but he continued to play. No, ached was not the right word, it did not adequately describe the burning, stabbing sensation in his fingers that radiated up his wrists to pass through his arm and shoot straight into his brain.

Nick had never played this well before in his short career. Nor had he had the attention of so many eyes, focused upon his every motion, or ears, waiting for his next stanza, but he only cared for one set of each - hers. Her beautiful pair of liquid gold eyes smiled as his fingers race while her delicately pointed ears drunk up his performance.

The wind hit the house and the walls groaned. "Shoulda done like I told ya," the old man said as he shook his lanky gray-haired head. "This ain't your land, you don't know. Things come out in the storm."

Lenn, the tall, brash leader of the five chuckled. "So monsters now, pops? Please! Let 'em come, we've got lead enough for all," he said and patted the gun at his side for emphasis.

Thick drool dripped from the beast's near finger-length fangs. Nick cursed his fate. He randomly meets a nice girl playing tennis, and they really hit it off, enough that she agreed to dinner later in the evening, but on the way back to the car a werewolf - he did not know what else to call the eight foot wolf-man beast - emerged from the park. _A monster from the movies! Seriously, why me?!_ The young man embraced his anger instead of the knee shaking terror that was scrabbling at the back of his mind.

Nick watched the tall pine fall, time oozed by as his life entered slow motion. The tree ripped through the power lines next to the road and left a haze of needles and pollen. Sixty degrees, forty five, twenty, it exploded in a maelstrom of snapped branches, bark, and more needles. He could not hear or feel the impact, he was still a half-mile away, but he had a vibrant imagination.

His brain caught up with his eyes - he was less than a half-mile away from a giant pine laying across the width of the backwoods highway, traveling seventy in a compact rental car.

The light on the holo-display blinked again as the message repeated. Marah simply stared. The ship was not supposed to be there - no one had ventured into that sector of space in over eighty years. Yet a ship was there, all the vaunted technology at her disposal confirmed its presence, and it was not a run-of-the-mill merchant, flux runner, or even a mil ship. It was *the ship*, the last flux runner to venture into the Cassi Expanse eight decades ago, the ship that went missing and became a legend of the spaceways. The _Black Dog_ signaled a third time.