All momentum, physical and mental, stopped as the dragon bird’s pursuit of the metal spider-thing that had hit him with the metal cylinder was forgotten to the scene playing out before him. Three humanoids rushed from a side corridor and pounced upon a lone crab turtle that was running down a well-lit hallway. Two of them worked together to use a large, wooden stick with a broad, flat end and metal crossbar that looked out of place to shove the flat end under the crab turtle, and flipping it onto its back. The third humanoid then rushed forward and jabbed it with a shorter, dark metal stick that crackled with electricity, eliciting a shriek from the creature as it thrashed for a moment before going still.

  A fourth humanoid, seemingly made of light or illusion, appeared from a wall and hastily whisper-shouted “Captain!” at one of the other three, and began to repeatedly, conspicuously gesture with exaggerated head nods and normally inconspicuous finger points from hands held up close to her chest. The three humanoids looked first to her, and then the direction she was pointing before freezing where they stood.

  A moment of awkward silence passed as the three organic humanoids realized the danger they were in and began backing away. The dragon bird was doubly perplexed, as that strange, oily reassuring feeling he had in his mind somehow felt happy; joyful like being care-free and doing aerial loops in a clear sky. The moment was broken by a deep rumble from the creature’s chest before its puzzled expression turned into one of embarrassment. Unlike the last several crab turtles he had bitten into that were scavenging those remains, this one didn’t carry that repulsive stench and even smelled tantalizing even from here. Realizing he had understood what the illusion woman had said, he cleared his throat and spoke in a voice gravelly from both being draconic and from lack of use (also where was a dragon supposed to get a drink of water around here?).

  “Are you going to eat that?” he croaked out sheepishly, glancing from the stunned? dead? crab turtle to the awed people who were slowly backing away. They once again froze as two of the organics looked to the illusion woman; the other, a male he presumed, tilted his head slightly. All at once the three of them spoke over one another.

  “Did that thing talk?” two of them chorused.

  “Draconic?” said the curious one.

  But the projected hologram blinked in two different ways and then blurted out “Wait, what?”

  Captain Jonathan Gray (just Gray, to most of his crew) had served in the military, worked as a mercenary for a short stint, and even dabbled in adventurer work before finally settling down as a joint owner of a small(ish) salvage company. Acquiring and refurbishing the large salvage vessel had been a stroke of luck in a long line of lucky breaks. Now, almost forty with a wife and kids and working a (to him) dream job of pulling apart machines (and sometimes putting them back together), Jonathan had seen a decent bit of the galaxy, and gotten out of all kinds of misadventures. The past several days had “turned sideways from so many directions”, as his grandfather used to say.

  The job started out as a routine salvage contract with a small shipping company the captain wasn’t familiar with (no surprise there, there were too many small companies and independent contractors to keep track of) to travel to one of their vessels that had engine trouble near the Pelones asteroid belt and suffered several strikes from smaller debris at the edge of the belt.

  The crew, he was told, had been evacuated safely and the high priority cargo had been removed, but they were to haul the ship out of the asteroid field, pick up whatever had been left behind in the rush, and prep the ship for salvage. If it was in good enough condition to repair, they could patch it up and get it moving or tow the vessel back to Rellis Station and hand it off to the owner or one of the many repair companies at the shipyards there if they chose.

  The start of the operation went smoothly. While overseeing the site after the preliminary scouting was done, the captain himself found the large, oblong crystal that appeared to contain some vibrant colors within, floating among the edge of the asteroid field. The crew teased him about his notorious luck (and on his insistence on hauling the thing into the cargo bay himself) and made jokes about “finding strange eggs in space.” Then, “sideways” started.

  The ship was in better shape than they feared. Despite colliding with one of the larger chunks of rock that drifted endlessly in this void, its shields and hull seemed to be holding out for the most part. A small breach near the aft of the ship raised suspicion though. The shields could be breached momentarily in sectors, but so long as the emitter itself wasn’t directly hit or fried from an overload, backups, overlays, and other assorted failsafes would kick in and replace or cover for the disruption while full operation was restored. These would rapidly deplete in a firefight, but the ship they were here to salvage reported engine failure; not an attack. Even more suspicious was that the hole that penetrated the ship didn’t look like a round had pierced its armor; it looked more like something had precisely cut its way inside. “All directions” came soon after..

  Before they could examine the ship’s engines, remains were found. Not much in the way of actual remains, but scraps of clothing left behind by the scavengers that eagerly devoured even bone. There shouldn’t have been any remains TO scavenge. This wasn’t some shipwreck where all hands perished aboard; this was roadside assistance in space. Or at least it was supposed to be.

  The scavengers, too, came from all directions. Normally benign, the crab turtles that appeared were well known denizens of ship graveyards and asteroid fields, picking the bones of unrecovered ships’ crews and the carcasses of various space faring creatures. It was rare, but not unheard of for them to attack the living if they were in a frenzy, but the anecdotes and holos of crab turtle frenzies didn’t match the predatory ambush the crew was hit with. At least two crew members disappeared without warning around the time the swarm hit, and shots fired at the crab turtles were either deflected off or absorbed by their tough shells, or uselessly sniped off a limb or two, failing to stop the creatures’ advance. Another crew member was confirmed killed, swarmed by the bulk of the horde, before they began to pull back.

  For safety, the Shadow Spider tried to move farther away from the edge of the field to allow a buffer zone, deploying a shuttle to rescue the rest of the crew. Then something fried their engines and external comms systems, and they found themselves adrift. Acting quickly, they deployed two of their life boats and several of the small salvage drones (single seater, short-range vessels with cutting lasers, numerous grabber claws, and powerful engines that could grab salvage or debris much larger than themselves and haul them to the Spider) to aide those still in the asteroid field while they attempted to restore engines and comms. That proved too late as several of the voracious beasts had somehow slipped inside.

  Lockdown was immediately initiated, and the crew quickly secured themselves. Since then, they had been carefully trying to pick off the resilient scavengers-turned predator so they could fix the engines and external communications and then call back the rest of the crew or go and retrieve them.

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  Working with Zeb, the Chief engineer, and Corporal Ruthers, a younger marine the Captain had wrangled into his scheme, Gray devised a plan to get rid of the lethal pests. Using a long-handled pizza paddle they had raided from the cafeteria earlier and rigging a supportive cross bar so that two people could brace it, and jury-rigging a shock stick to have a much stronger zap to it, Gray and Zeb would use the upgraded paddle to flip the crab turtles onto their back, immobilizing them just long enough for Ruthers to rush in and jab it with the shock stick. From there, they should be able to safely lug the stunned or dead creature into a shipping crate or airlock and then space them.

  After stalking through the ship for a lone test subject, they heard a noise coming from the cafeteria and spotted a lone crab turtle wandering down the hall, and pounced on it as the perfect test of their plan. Gray’s luck held out and the plan worked perfectly. That is, until Avra, the ship’s spunky AI, drew his attention with a whisper shouted “Captain!”, and he turned to see the towering, feathered creature coming up the wide stairs to the ship’s hold. Terror hit instinctively like icewater in his veins before we quickly stamped it down and retook command. “Back away very slowly,” he said, barely above a whisper. “No sudden movements.” But as the trio started shuffling away from the creature, it made a gravelly sound that Gray vaguely recognized as Draconic from a brief period he worked with a blue dragon as a mercenary.

  He didn’t understand what the words themselves meant, but he understood what speaking them meant: this wasn’t some unintelligent beast that suddenly appeared; it was some kind of dragon. Then, Avra’s holo projection flickered as if it had glitched, then she said “Wait, what?”, and paused, tilting her head as she added “Did he just say ‘Your food to eat’?”

  Avra said something to the feathered dragon, who looked taken aback, but then confused as they seemed to almost argue in a quick back-and-forth where a few similar sounds were repeated with varying emphasis on enunciation and changes to syllables. After several seconds of the exchange, the feathered dragon looked like he was taken aback, but as his mouth opened to likely voice some sort of protest, another rumble echoed in the halls and its expression changed to one of embarrassment.

  “Maybe we should, uh, let the hungry … dragon? eat,” Gray said uncertainly, motioning for the others to back away from the stunned crab turtle and gesturing between the dragon and it. It grumbled something neither of them could make out, but stepped forward eagerly, reaching out to scoop up the shell before quickly and efficiently biting into its vulnerable parts, prying the turtle-like shell apart, and then swiftly devouring it.

  Avra looked distant for a moment, but then stiffened and turned towards the captain. “We have a problem!” Holding up her hand, a simulated holo projector displayed Arvak on holo comm. The stalwart Canid was starting to look concerned, an unusual reaction for him outside of concern for the AI holo avatar’s behavior.

  “CTs are swarming the dorms. We’re barricaded tight, but they’re starting to breach the door panels. We won’t last long, and need to evac. Where’s the captain?”

  Avra’s projection pulled up a window with security footage from outside the dormitory. Around a dozen of the voracious creatures, smaller than most of the ones they’ve seen, were eagerly clamoring at the closed door. Pincers eagerly clacked and clawed at panels, door frame edges, and each other, blindly flailing and grabbing at anything they could reach as their pharyngeal jaws that were a disturbing amalgam of a moray eel and a horror movie monster posing as crab mouths punched at the metal panels.

  Thoughtful for a moment, but quick on his feet when it came to snap decisions, Captain Gray grinned mischievously as he looked the feathered dragon up and down appraisingly. “I think I have a better idea..”

  The dragon bird was confused at how things were unfolding before him. He could understand what the humanoids were saying with what he presumed was crystal clarity, but even though he spoke draconically, the language he perceived they were speaking in, there seemed to be something getting lost in translation. The organic humanoids stayed back a bit and observed after giving him room to eat their prey, but the one made of light illusion stayed where she was and spoke to him directly, but each time she spoke, she seemed to be trying to confirm or affirm what he had said, and each time her phrasing was odd; the words not matching up quite right and her version of what he had said differing slightly or being incomplete.

  The attempts to communicate were interrupted by what the dragon bird believed was some sort of long range communication spell that the illusion woman created visuals of. At that point, he humanoid the rest seemed to defer to decisively turned to him and made a proposal.

  “It seems you can understand what we’re saying, though we’re having trouble understanding you. We don’t have time to fully hash out the communication problem, but can you nod if you understand me?” The dragon bird did so, and the humanoid eagerly continued. “We seem to each have a problem, and I think we can help each other out. We’re under attack by a swarm of those,” he said, gesturing to the shell that remained of the crab turtle, “and you seem to both be hungry, and enjoy eating them, so would you be willing to help us out?”

  The dragon bird paused for a moment, silently considering before finally nodding. He didn’t know why, but that strange, slick barrier-like feeling in his mind was practically radiating joy or excitement for some reason. Not understanding why, he felt this was the right choice and said “Where?”, in a gruff Draconic that even Captain Gray understood.

  “Right this way, my fine, feathered friend.” Gray said amicably, leading them to another set of stairs down the hall.

  Just a short way down the hall was another set of stairs going up, this one narrow but short. At the top of the stairs was a door being assaulted by dozens of one to two foot wide crab turtles. Smaller than the ones previously encountered, these came in a swarm that frantically pinched and bit at everything - including each other - as they furiously tried to reach the food they sensed within. Their frantic scuttling made soft clicking noises as they clicked over the stairs and each other, piling on top of one another and occasionally falling off of the dog crabpile, bouncing down the stairs, and scrabbling back up once more.

  Wasting no time, the dragon bird eagerly set upon the snack-sized morsels, reaching up and plucking one from the pile (earning a bonus one that latched onto his arm with its pincers and started snapping eagerly at his wrist as it dangled, oblivious to the danger as its companion was quickly devoured. Finally scoring a hit on the dragon bird, the eager critter earned itself a string of draconic profanity, and expedited its place up the queue.

  As the feeding frenzy became the feed, some realized they had a closer food source not hiding behind metal and turned to eagerly engage the mass of scales and feathers that had ascended? descended? upon them. Crab turtles scrambled around him as he alternatively kicked some aside while plucking others to feast on as some of them managed to inflict some injuries as they tried to reassert themselves as the diner instead of the dinner.

  Avra’s hologram approached the stairs and squatted down, appearing to closely examine one of the literal ankle biters that had been kicked aside and landed on its back. Managing to right itself, it caught sight of her and lunged, throwing several pincer attacks and a few impotent bites that merely passed through her projected form. This earned a chuckle from her and she pantomimed patting it on the head for its efforts. Gray came over and flipped it with a light punt while it was distracted, then zapped it and used his foot to push it back towards the mutual feeding frenzy before stepping back away from the carnage.

  As the chaos settled down, the dragon bird craned his head up to pry the last, very eager crab turtle from the panel beside the door they had managed to pry loose somehow, revealing a gap too small for it to fit through, not for lack of trying.

  Prying the flailing and determined last-crab-stranding from its breach point, the bird dragon caught a glimpse of more humanoids in the room within. Notably, the dog-humanoid from the illusion woman’s communication spell, who appeared to be on one knee with a long, black metal object, presumably a weapon, aimed right at him.

  A deafening bang interrupted whatever train of thought he was forming, and he tumbled over the side of the stairs. As a persistent, piercing sound took the place of every other sound, he saw the humanoids soundlessly shouting something before he closed his eyes.