In the infinite blackness of space, the blinking cabin lights of the Chronos-class freighter Long Haul were clearly visible. The vessel's flanks were coated with dusty residue, and streaks of grime trailed back from its angular nose. The engine cowlings were blackened by years of use ferrying cargo back and forth.

Inside, four Terrans sat around a small metal table in a cramped cabin just aft of the cockpit. It was square with rounded edges, and like the rest of the vessel, it was dark and dirty. A woman was cutting a tattered deck of playing cards quickly and assuredly on the table.

"Aces high?" the woman asked, brushing her thick auburn hair back from her face. "You to start, Mack."

Mack took the cards up in his hand and looked at them glumly.

"We aren't meant to see you have a bad hand, Mack. Learn the poker face."

"It's not that..."

"Well, what the hell is it?" The other three stared at him piercingly.

Mack squirmed slightly, then sighed with an exasperated tone, "What do we do every night, guys?" There was silence in response to his question. "I'll tell ya... we play cards. Every damn night."

"You don't have to if you don't want to, Mack."

"Yeah, but there isn't anything else to do, is there?"

The man opposite Mack smiled slightly, adding to the small lines on his face. "Sounds like you could do with a good story."

"Oh, God, not one of those," the woman broke in. "The great Tales of Matthew Mackenzie, straight from the glory days of the Alliance. Jeez, get over it, it's been five years. We don't need one of your stories, we need a television."

The other two, Mack and Peter, chimed in with low-pitched chuckles. However, they both fell silent as Matt began to tell his story. For all their joking, his stories did alleviate some of the boredom of the long cargo flights.

"During the last war with the Shivans, we found out a lot more about them. One of those things was that they communicate with each other via electromagnetic pulses. Sometimes we could hear them over the comm channels. It was the damnedest thing to hear; really puts a shiver down your spine and makes those little hairs on the back of your neck stand on end."

"Last time I heard that noise was five years ago. It was in Capella, and I was stationed on board the GTC Draco. We were defending a convoy of evacuees, when we heard this freaky magnetic scratching sound. Next thing we knew, the Shivans launched a co-ordinated strike on the convoy and us. We lost all of the civilians within a few minutes, and the Draco went down not long afterwards. Only thirteen of us got out. They also gave me this." He flexed his left hand a little. There was a faint whine of servomotors as they moved. "That was the end of my days in a GTVA ship."

"Real nice story, Matt. Mind telling us what it has to do with anything?"

"All right Jenni, I'll tell you. You see some people say that there aren't any Shivans left in GTVA space, and that there haven't been for five years. Out here on the Rim, it might not be true. The Shivans were here eight thousand years ago. Who's to say they're all gone?"

The question hung in the cabin for a few moments while the crew thought about it in silence.

"That's an awful long time to be waiting around, Matt. Don't you think they'd have packed up and gone home by n---"

A harsh sound interrupted the sentence. It was a drawn out hum and a whine. Everyone stopped dead.

"Did I just imagine that?" asked Mack after a moment's silence. The others shook their heads.

"Probably just the environmentals on the fritz again. We oughta take a look at them," said Peter. He began to stand.

"Yeah," said Jenni. She too rose.

A loud, buzzing noise cut into the cabin again. The underlying hum was punctuated by a series of clicks, rising steadily in volume and intensity as the interval between clicks decreased.

The infinite blackness of space was lit briefly by the glare of afterburner flares as the Long Haul burst away...