>>96407105
>The ship screamed. Steel shrieked like a living thing as the warp-sickened Navigator tore her mind open and with it, the hull.
>Gravity failed in a heartbeat.
>The longshanks, near as tall as the tank corridors she served in, spun like a rag in stormwater. Her long arms flailed uselessly, fingers splayed like claws. The air was gone in an instant; the deckplates below her weren’t there anymore. Only black. Only the shrieking pull of nothing. She screamed and her long neck craned toward the breach and the starlight beyond, jagged shards of void twinkling around her as the hull bled atmosphere into the abyss.
>Other bodies went past her, shrieking crew, shreds of paper, tools spinning end over end, sucked into eternity. The red hazard lumen strobes cut across her pallid face in pulses, showing the sheer animal panic in her wide gray eyes. She clawed for something ... anything. Her long fingers closed on a rail, missed, closed again, missed. Too slow. Too long. She was too much of herself, stretched thin, ungainly, useless in zero-g.
>The Navigator’s voice bled through the vox, not words but laughter. A wet, choked sound, as if gargling with a throatful of stars. And then the longshanks was gone, flung screaming into the hole the Navigator’s madness had made.