Kaiel rocketed into space, his flight invisible in the night.

    Not quite invisible. A missile, silent in the thinning air, ricocheted off Kaiel’s ship and exploded in a blitz of hot metal. His spacecraft cartwheeled; time trickled to a stop, flattening his life-beat to a halt. 

    His spaceship juddered, smelling blood, and gave a desperate whine. Time jerked and resumed. Snapping back to consciousness, Kaiel grabbed for the navigator. 

    It was too late. His captors were on him. Deadly sharks circling a bleeding whale.

    Kaiel looked out the window to where space hung in ribbons, dangling across the palpable boundary between space and Earth that the humans called the “Kármán line.” His sentient ship tried to arc toward freedom. 

    To no avail. 

    Space’s threads would have to wrap around his ship for any chance of them making it back home. Only a propelling force could launch them to safety. They’d need an explosion.

    Worse, they were rapidly losing their collective life force and had no backup plasma–the “Holy Grail” that fused life to objects–aboard the ship.

    Kaiel knew what he had to do. He would rather die than be dragged back to his captors’ facility for their sanctimonious safety reasons. “We feel responsible for your life-force,” they claimed after leaching him so he couldn’t body-morph.

    Damn humans and their morality. He should’ve never ventured near Earth. But what choice did I have? 

    Humans no longer traveled to space—their brittle bones wouldn’t allow it. Instead, they’d snared his ship in one of their traps in a desperate quest for plasma to survive a world they’d all but burned down. 

    But he needed the plasma to get home in one piece. Kaiel would run any risk for his beloved ship, and his people who waited in cryonic limbo, trusting him to save them. He couldn’t let humans get their hands on him or the ship. 

This is going to tear me apart…but not if I can still switch, Kaiel thought and pressed the detonator. 

    A blinding supernova wrecked the atmosphere, boiling metal and blood and dripping vapor that tainted the Kármán line crimson. Captor and prey melted into a seething plasma of bios—like fish congealing in glacial water—and the ship sizzled through wafer-thin wisps of freezing air.

    The atmosphere sang graveyard silent. A requiem in muzzled agony. 

    Wrenching apart—mercury spilling over a film of ice—the plasma scattered. Seeking its like in heat, the plasma collided and poured into the boiling ship’s vessel.

     Hymned communion.

     Spaceship-tethered, the blistering vapor began to ripple. Warping across the Kármán, it morphed into its tethered form, and Kaiel resurrected. 

    Home.