Story so far

Eight days ago, the light freighter Scopuli was boarded and seized, and its crew hauled off. Julie Mao, a young woman with years of low-gravity jiu jitsu training, fought her captors when they tried to strip her, doing real damage before an armored fist knocked her down. She woke locked in a storage locker aboard the attacking ship, warned she would be shot if she made a sound. For days she survived in silence, rationing the stale water from an old environment suit, listening to boots on the decking and the muffled cries of her shipmates being beaten somewhere below. Through the locker door she heard Dave, the ship's mechanic, begging for his life before he was thrown out an airlock. She understood that her crew, Captain Darren and the others, had been dragged off without a fight, and that the ship had been scrubbed of sensitive OPA data before the attackers came aboard, though it had made no difference. Then, little by little, every ordinary sound of the ship faded: the drive shut off, gravity vanished, and no one answered her increasingly hoarse shouts. By the eighth day, dehydrated and out of options, she kicked her way out of the buckled locker and armed herself with a magnetized pipe wrench. Deck by deck she found the ship completely empty, cabins in crisp military order, signs of a struggle in the commissary, and engineering sealed from the inside. It took hours to cut through the hatch by hand. Inside, the huge cathedral-like engineering deck held the fusion reactor smothered under a slowly pulsing layer of flesh threaded with veins and tubes. An outcropping of it shifted toward her, and she recognized Captain Darren's severed head. It spoke to her: 'Help me.'