Questions about "Sonnie" and "Beyond the Aquila Rift" (Spoiler Alert!)

1. The girl's body died after the attack and her brain was inserted into the biomech (or whatever that's called). She needed a remotely operated human body so she could continue to participate in the fights.

2. I think this's kind of a space spider who sucks souls out of spacemen. Under certain conditions a ship in hyperspace gets tangled into its net and gets pulled to the "station".

In "Aquila Rift, I think the 'spider' Alien is like a Normal spider sitting on its web and waiting until some fly (or in this case a spaceship) lands on it but it uses mind control to sedate and slowly eat its pray.

Sonnie's mind was put into the monster... she became the monster after the attack.

The "human" body was actually a cyborg remotely connected to the monster through a neural link, which is why it kept talking even after its body (and brain) became a gory, lipstick-stained puddle of mush.

As for Aquila Rift... the slipspace portal would send ships out into deep space -- or through some parts of space that humans should never travel to -- and as others mentioned, there were extradimensional or other-worldly creatures that would capture ships in an organic web and feed on the inhabitants until they died. Not all the ships that passed through the portal went there but some did, usually when a temporal anomaly would occur.

Part of the dangers of deep space travel is that there are things beyond the comprehension of man, and Aquila Rift dabbled in the concept of a sector of space where Lovecraftian horrors roamed free between destinations deemed "safe".