“Well? What is it, then?”

Theol blew out their cheeks the way they only did when there were too many words piled up inside them. God help us all.

“Do you want the accurate answer or the efficient answer?” they asked, always a little too eager to remind me there was a difference between the two.

“I want whatever the hell is going to get us out of here,” I said. “Lex says this gunk is stuck in the engines, so how do we get rid of it? You got something we can use to dissolve it, or burn it, or…?”

Theol scowled at the tiny sample, trapped in glass, it had taken them two perfectly good saw blades to cut loose from the snarled, silent engines. The stuff hadn’t looked like anything at all on radar, not in time for us to avoid sailing right into it, but trapped in a sample jar, it was a frayed, cloudy white, as thick and bastardly to clean off of hands and tools as half-dried hull sealant.

“Then I don’t have anything for you,” they said.

“What the hell does that mean?” I snapped, louder and harder, maybe, than even Theol deserved. But my ship had been stuck for upwards of six hours in a rumbling slick of something the helm controls just called WARNING – SEVERE TURBULENCE and the database just called SUBSTANCE UNKNOWN. If the person I paid to have better answers than that was stumped, what the hell did we have left?

“If you want to know how we’re going to get out of here, the accurate, efficient answer is that I don’t have anything for you,” they said. “Whatever it is, its chemical bonds are remarkably strong. None of the solvents we have on board will touch them.”

“Whatever it is? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. What am I even paying you for if you can’t give me anything better than whatever the fuck it is?”

“I do have a more efficient answer to that,” the thick bastard said.

“Then why the fuck didn’t you say so? If you know what we’re stuck in, I’d better hear it in the next ten seconds or I’m kicking your ass out on the hull to cut us free of it by hand.”

Theol paused, maybe just to prove they wouldn’t need ten seconds, maybe for dramatic effect, the bastard, or maybe because the latest rumble through the hull was hard and loud enough that they would have had to shout to be heard over it.

It faded out again at second eight, and a gallows-grim little smile turned Theol’s lips.

“A web,” they said.