Bekko was sweating, which wasn’t a good sign. There’s no good reason to be sweating in space.

All those spotlessly clean ships in the movies were totally unlike anything Bekko had ever experienced. The most generous thing he could say about space travel was that it was utilitarian. But even those old movies and shows had gotten this part right: if people were breaking a sweat, things had gone badly wrong.

He wasn’t sure if he had time to check on why the temperature control wasn’t working.

The thing was, this wasn’t his ship.

He was three-and-a-half days out of Catena Davy, screaming off the lunar surface as fast as this crusty heap could go--there’s no such thing as sneaking into space--and of course that meant the people whose ship it was were in hot pursuit. Or they had been, at first. Bekko was pretty sure he had shaken them by this point, hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them in almost a full day now, but the suspicion kept gnawing at the back of his mind that they were still out there. Lurking. Lying in wait. Ready to round the corner of some planet or moon or asteroid when he least expected it, and take back their property by any means necessary.

Bekko had a pretty good idea of how that would go for him.

Catena Davy had been one of the original options for the location of the first moon landing, but now it was effectively a junkyard. A great place to find a ship that wouldn’t be missed, if you needed to get out of town in a hurry. Somehow, Bekko had managed to pick the one ship that someone did miss. He cursed his rotten luck, for the fifth or hundredth time in the past few days, and wiped his sweating face with his sleeve.

He reflected, with a half-laugh, that Catena Davy was like the whole Moon in that way. It used to be something, or maybe it had almost been something, but now? A junkyard.

He had lived there all his life and it had never been anything. A century ago, maybe. When it had first been colonized. But the moment the first newer, farther colony was established, the Moon’s fate was sealed: it was a grimy backwater, and it always would be.

They were supposed to be calling it Luna, now, as part of some rebrand that sought to make it out to be a funky, cool type of a place, trying to attract artists and hipsters, but that never stuck with Bekko. It was the Moon. 

In interplanetary space, it was easy to zone out if you weren’t careful. The landmarks didn’t change fast enough to be noticeable, and it was rare to see another ship, even in a well-traveled shipping lane, which this wasn’t. Bekko realized an alarm had been beeping for several seconds.

“Shit. Shit!” His head whipped back and forth, scanning the displays frantically to find the source of the sound. This was the problem with stealing a ship--well, aside from the risk of angry owners trying to make back the value of their stolen property by way of your teeth. But you never knew where everything was on the instrument panel, and you didn’t know the vehicle’s quirks, and you couldn’t be sure it wasn’t going to burn fuel at a prodigious rate and leave you stranded somewhere between the Moon and Mars.

This had not happened yet, but it was in danger of happening; Bekko had found the source of the alarm, and it was a low fuel indicator.

“Goddammit,” he said. He throttled back, figuring that he was probably safe to slow down, and anyway he’d be just as dead if he ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere as he would be if the Eprian brothers caught up to him. He unbuckled himself from the seat and pulled himself into the back of the ship, where he could get at access panels and maintenance hatches.

He didn’t know what he was looking for.

He didn’t find it.

After he slammed shut the last panel, having found no extra fuel or useful controls or another, better ship hiding within, he half-swam back to the cockpit, and started looking around for systems he could afford to turn off. Maybe if he could get this thing to burn less fuel, he could at least get to a more well-travelled route, and get picked up by a passing ship. It was a long shot, but it was his only shot. Well, that or letting the Eprian brothers or their goons catch him. At least he’d die faster that way.

Fifteen minutes later, Bekko slumped back in his chair, having switched off nearly everything he could find outside of the bare minimum necessary to sustain life. He had found an EVA suit in one of the hatches at the back, and it now hung draped over the back of his chair, for when things got really dire and he had to switch off the environmental controls altogether to squeeze out a few more drops of fuel. He was still sweating.

He peered out the viewport, not that there was anything to see out there. He hadn’t noticed earlier that it was kind of blurry; he tried rubbing it with his sleeve, but it didn’t help. Must be dirty on the outside, he reasoned. Or the thick plexi material had been abraded by something. Or… it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to fix it, or clean it, or replace it. He’d be lucky if he didn’t die behind it.

Bekko wiped the sweat from his eyes again. Okay. Right. Shipping lanes. He punched in a new course, to intersect with the nearest one, and started moving at a crawl.

A couple of hours later, his fear had turned to boredom and his anxiety to hunger. Nothing had happened; the Eprians hadn’t shown up, and he barely felt like he had moved at all. He rummaged in his battered old shoulder bag for another nutrition tube. He was glad he had dumped a big double handful of them in before leaving his apartment, but he was never especially glad to eat one. They contained all the necessary nutrients and calories of a regular meal, but they were the texture of chunky yogurt and about as appetizing.

Sucking grimly away at the tube, Bekko looked out the viewport again. Or, rather, looked at the viewport. It had to be his imagination, but it seemed like it had gotten more blurry than before. Surely that wasn’t possible, though. How could it have gotten dirtier in space? By definition, there’s nothing out there.

Maybe it was him. Maybe his eyes were going. Maybe--oh, god, maybe the sweating wasn’t because it was hot in here, and maybe the viewport wasn’t blurry, maybe it was all him, all something wrong with him. His armpits and the places where his legs joined his groin began to throb with a sickly, painful itch. 

He fidgeted, trying to find a comfortable position, but nothing helped. He noticed he was breathing faster, whether from the panic or from the fever, he couldn’t tell. But he knew he had to calm it down, if only to conserve oxygen to keep himself alive long enough to be rescued. Who knew what this ship was going to run out of next.

Bekko shut his eyes.

He tried to force himself to remember a time when he was happy, when he felt peaceful. But his inability to think of anything just panicked him further. No. No. There had to be something. He remembered something his boyfriend had said, shortly before Bekko left for the job that had wound up making him need to get off-Moon in such a hurry.

“I mean, everyone has a shitty life, but no one’s life is shitty one hundred percent of the time, right?” Gerry had said. They had been arguing more. Bekko was always edgier between jobs, when all he had to do was to stare at the screen that served as a window and watch the unchanging grey dullness outside, and think about the money he didn’t have. Gerry had called him out on this behavior; Bekko had doubted him then, and he doubted him now, but it was a little calming to know that someone cared enough to lie to him like that. 

He was going to miss Gerry. In fact, he missed him already. Bekko was pretty sure Gerry was out of his league anyway; they were both grizzled and prematurely middle-aged, the way it seemed like everyone on the Moon was, but on Gerry that worked out in a sort of craggily handsome way, whereas for Bekko it gave more of a “chronically unemployable” vibe.

Well. Maybe he didn’t need a memory of a calm and peaceful time, as long as he had the memory of a calm and peaceful person. Bekko’s breathing had slowed, and the itch had receded. He even felt a little cooler. Maybe he had been overreacting, after all. He opened his eyes.

Bekko felt his body go cold under the layer of sweat. 

His vision had not been going blurry. His viewport had not been dirty.

There was something out there.

His first thought was that this looked like gas, like a photo of a nebula at a distance, diffused over his ship. But that didn’t make any sense. Everyone knew that nebulae didn’t look that way if you were actually in one, and anyway there wasn’t a nebula sitting smack in the middle of the Solar system.

The thing was, there wasn’t anything sitting smack in the middle of the Solar system. Nothing that could look like this.

He was pretty sure it was growing, getting denser. As the fog, or whatever it was, intensified, it took on a pink tinge, brighter and brighter. Soon, he couldn’t make out the stars. Soon, he couldn’t make out anything else.

He had an unsettling feeling of being watched. Of being paid attention to. He hadn’t felt stupid speaking out loud earlier, alone in the ship, but now, he was already second-guessing himself as he opened his mouth to say “Who’s there?”

He got as far as “Who” when a burst of static erupted from the communications control.

Relief surged through his body. Another ship must have spotted him and be trying to contact him. Rescue at last.

The static crackled again. This time Bekko could almost make out words in it.

He slapped the button. “Request assistance. Repeat, request assistance. I’m nearly out of fuel and am experiencing malfunctions.” 

More crackles from the speaker. “...assistance. Remain c…”

“I’m barely receiving you,” replied Bekko. “It must be interference from this pink cloud thing. Can you transmit again?”

Suddenly the voice from the receiver was clear. Comprehensible. Smooth. “No,” it said.

“No?!” Bekko was suddenly furious. What kind of a monster would hear a distress call and refuse to help? 

“No. You are not experiencing interference from what you call ‘this pink cloud thing.’ What you are experiencing from it is communication.”

Bekko’s head spun. He felt like the fever was coming back, worse, and real this time. He punched the button.

“Who is this, really? Stop fooling around. Like I said, I’m in distress, I’m staring down the barrel of bingo fuel, the temperature control is busted, and I don’t know what else is about to go wrong. I’m not in the mood for whatever kind of a joke this is.”

“Ah. You are in discomfort. I can fix this,” said the voice, and suddenly Bekko felt cool air flowing from the vents again.

“Did you just… you know what, no. This can’t be happening. A cloud can’t fix a ship.” Maybe his fever had gotten worse. Maybe he was hallucinating.

“I am not a cloud. We are not a cloud.”

“We?” Bekko was at a total loss now. “Or, you know what, I don’t care. Can you help me or not?”

“Would you like our help?” The voice was grave, and louder, now. It seemed to come from all directions inside the ship. “You must ask. Again.”

“What is this? I asked! You won’t help me if I don’t ask again?”

The voice was so loud this time that it felt like it was coming from within Bekko’s bones, and deep enough to rumble through the soles of his boots. “You must ask again.”

Bekko paused. The voice was silent, waiting. A beep sounded in the cockpit, and he looked down to see a blip appearing on a display. Another ship. 

“Fine, I guess, I… okay. Please help me.” Bekko felt foolish, but he was desperate. He knew, he knew that this new ship had to be the Eprian brothers. Without whatever help this whatever-it-was could offer, he was a dead man.

“Fine, I guess, I… okay. Please help me.” Bekko felt foolish, but he was desperate.

“We shall help.”

The voice moved through him, vibrating his eyes in their sockets, shaking his teeth. He felt embarrassingly corporeal, a sensation he had never had before despite having had a body all his life. The reverberations of the utterance continued long past the end of the audible words, and the pink fog seemed to press in on him. It looked like it had permeated the ship’s walls and was now in front of his face, but that wasn’t possible, surely.

But just as soon as he thought that, he realized he knew, with an unwarranted certainty, that it was possible, and that it was, moreover, true. The opacity of the pink haze was increasing rapidly as well. Bekko had the sensation of being enfolded, of being consumed. His head felt fuller than usual. He became aware of thoughts in his mind that were not his, or rather, that his mind was being used by something other than him.

One of the last thoughts Bekko had, as Bekko, was that this was not an altogether unpleasant sensation. By the time his ship was absorbed into the briefly-solid mass, he had lost any sense of individual consciousness; by the time his own body was dissolved down to its component atoms, the mass was already reverting to its gaseous state. 

From then on, insofar as he was aware of his existence at all, it was as part of One-Which-Is-Millions, ever growing, ever expanding, floating through the void in search of new component beings.

The freighter that had heard the distress call found only an empty ship, spinning slowly in empty space.