Time is suspended.

All that remains is the appointed task.

The spinners craft towropes, powerlines, and all-purpose cable, hour after hour without rest.

The White Captain moves among them, her many limbs. She feels what they feel, knows what they know, as soon as they know it. She uses this information to align, and together, they build something new in this home they've found.

Every Drekh yearns for more arms than their Captain allows. Every four-eyed Eliksni looks with envy upon the eight-eyed. Every Kell and Archon raises their horns as high as they dare.

Now, together they are as no Eliksni before them. A miracle. A being of hundreds of limbs, lungs, eyes.

The White Captain gently touches the limb previously named Yaraskis. Her appointed portion of the great diagram flowers to life in her head.

Legs stumbling under her, she moves towards the station's prow. One limb may be unsteady, but their great shared body is strong.

Faint noises make no sense. Words she doesn't understand. The un-Eliksni babbling of a foreign mind.

The only mind that matters is the White Captain's.

Hands connect circuits and power lines. The diagram is beautiful but difficult to grasp. She searches for the right shape, the right configuration that will let power flow through its appointed channels.

The work goes on.

Until the hands tie off the last cable.

The eyes look up. The knees buckle in joy. The heart surges along the bright paths of the diagram.

Somewhere in the joined crowd, a single hand throws a single lever.

The mind rejoices.

Orange light flares to life in the cold dark.

It flares in hundreds of souls. Yaraskis is there.

Somewhere.