Angel strode out of the chamber she had just looted. Her origami drone, BFF21, hovered near her shoulder.

Angel tried to keep her eyes on the ground, but somehow the trees in the biodome drew her gaze. They loomed over her, dark as night, their canopy so far above that she could barely see it.

She shivered.

“Your body temperature is ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit,” BFF21 announced in na gruff yet feminine voice. “Your trembling indicates that you may be coming down with the common cold.”

“It’s not that,” Angel said. “It’s just those trees, they give me the creeps.”

“The purpose of the biodome is to provide oxygen and comfort to the occupants of the ship,” BFF21 said. “It’s meant to be peaceful.”

“Well, it looks like the set of a horror movie,” Angel said, picking up her pace to reach the next doorway so she could escape the view of the woods.

Angel had grown up in a colonial-era townhouse on a cobblestone street in Old City Philadelphia. Trees were for field trips and fairy tales. You weren’t supposed to live under them like a troll under a bridge. Literally anything could be hiding in there, waiting for a person to let her guard down.

She scurried into the next room and slid the tagger out of her holster.

Though this was her first mission as an intergalactic treasure hunter, she was getting the hang of it quickly. The pirating trade suited her restlessness.

“But what would my brother have to say about it?” she wondered out loud as she scanned the room for anything worth scavenging.

It was a sleeping chamber, a bit fancier than most. The gold-toned fixtures were only painted composite. But she saw real metal in the frame of the bed. Someone important must have slept here.

She bent to tag it.

“Good find,” BFF21 chirped.

“Thanks,” Angel said.

There was something anticlimactic about tagging a item of value and then walking away.

Carrier drones would come back when the captain retrieved her. They would take everything she had tagged back to the Stargazer, or maybe onto a freighter if her haul was big enough and worth the steep rental cost for a freight ship.

The only other thing in the room maybe worth saving was the hanging on the wall. It appeared to be some sort of projected image on a liquid looking screen. The image was of a woman either floating just over the surface of a stream or drowning just under it - it was hard to tell which.

“Is that art?” she wondered out loud.

“It appears to be everyday art,” BFF21 said cheerfully.

“Is it worth anything?” Angel asked.

“The value of any artistic work is in the eye of the beholder,” BFF21 said.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Angel said, spinning around to get out of the room.

BFF21 swooped down to hover near her shoulder.

Angel took two steps and then BFF21 beeped.

“Proximity alert,” BFF21 said.

“What do you mean?” Angel asked.

“It means there’s another life form nearby,” BFF21 said.

She knew what the proximity alert meant. She’d just been taken by surprise to hear it. The ship was supposed to be deserted.

“What kind of life form?” Angel asked.

BFF21 hummed for a moment.

“An unidentified life form,” she replied at last.

“I thought this ship was abandoned,” Angel said, spinning to face her robotic companion, even though the little drone didn’t have eyes.

“With the electromagnetic interference it was impossible to get a reliable scan from the Stargazer,” BFF21 said. “It is still rendering many of my scans ineffective.”

“And Mama sent us anyway?” Angel asked.

The captain of the Stargazer was called Mama by the entire crew, though no one had ever said why. She was a tiny woman with a silver eyepatch - tough, mysterious, beautiful in her way, and far too young to be any of their mothers.

“The probability of any creature remaining alive on this ship is highly unlikely, “ BFF21 said.

“And yet, here we are,” Angel said.

“Here we are,”BFF21 agreed.

Angel willed herself to remain calm.

“Are you getting any reading on what it is?” Angel asked.

“Oh, there’s no need for alarm,” BFF21 said. “It is almost certainly not Gryvens.”

It had not occurred to Angel that it would be Gryvens.

Her stomach began to twist in knots.

“Why not?” Angel asked.

“There would be more corpses,” BFF21 said brightly.

Great.

Angel slid her hand into the side pocket of her suit and wrapped her fingers around the smooth, reassuring handle of her baton.

She pulled it out, flicking her wrist to extend the telescoping metal cylinder to its full length.

“You’re not supposed to have a weapon,” BFF21 pointed out.

“Sneaking around an abandoned luxury cruiser with a giant forest in the middle of it is no place for an unarmed privateer,” Angel said.

“Mama wouldn’t like it,” BFF21 said.

Angel decided now might not be the best time to mention that the end of the baton was electrified.

“Mama’s not here,” Angel said.

“Where did you get it?” BFF21 asked.

“It was a gift,” Angel said.

“How thoughtful,” BFF21 sniffed.

“You ready?” Angel asked.

“Are you suggesting that we deliberately try to find this thing?” BFF21 asked.

“Better than letting it sneak up on us,” Angel said. “We don’t have to make contact, but I want to know what we’re dealing with.”

She didn’t wait for the little drone to answer, instead she headed back into the corridor, trying once again to keep her eyes away from the trees that filled the center of the ship.