“The last log entry ends mid-sentence. There’s no sound except the dull hum of emergency power, still running after eighty-six years. No bodies. No blood. Just drifting dust and the shimmer of a radiation leak that never finishes spreading.”
Sana and her team had been hired to salvage what remained of the ISS Kordalis—a long-lost research station orbiting a dead moon in the Veilesson Belt. A job like any other: dock, breach, sweep, extract. Standard rates. Standard risk.
Sana was a Radiant Theorist, someone that believed in hope above facts, and she hoped there would be something that explained the loss of this habitat. She scanned for signs of life with her bioscope, but found nothing but silence.
Her team of three moved through the dim halls with military precision. Vix, her Stealth Operative, mapped out heat signatures and security choke points. While he didn’t have any proof of an ambush, he felt something was “off”. Joro, their Mystic, was also on edge.
When they reached the command core. A glass viewport looked out into the dark beyond. Inside, consoles blinked, awaiting input from long-dead hands. As they examined the console, the lights that had held solid or blinked for decades suddenly began to fail.They did not flicker, but responded to all of their energy being peeled away, devoured by a growing void that pulsed like a slow heartbeat.
Joro raised his rifle. Vix whispered, “That’s not a power anomaly.”
Sana checked the bioscope again—no signals. But not all things in the universe fit the description of being alive. The darkness poured forward, soundless and hungry, dragging the false comfort of matter with it. It wasn’t a monster. It wasn’t a machine. It was a failure in reality. Something born in the deep. Sana’s mind went to a quote she had found in her early career, something scratched into metal at a last stand over a decade ago.
WE TRIED TO LISTEN TO THE STARS. THEY SCREAMED BACK.