Kael hated how quiet the wreckage had become. Even the creaks of cooling metal and the distant clatter of debris had faded into stillness. The fuselage wasn't a place—it was a tomb. One he'd crawled through too many times in search of life he wouldn't find.
His boots clanged softly against the metal as he drifted through the corridor. The EVA tether coiled loosely behind him, anchored to the airlock. There was no gravity in this part of the ship, just the thin resistance of air still trapped in sealed compartments. Light from his helmet cast sharp shadows across the torn walls and floating fragments of what once was.
"Suit telemetry nominal," the AI intoned in his ear. "Oxygen at 87 percent. Remaining safe time: two hours, eighteen minutes."
Kael acknowledged it with a grunt. His mind was already on the solar panel array, still only partially functional. The AI had used nanites to patch his helmet and upgrade its systems, but it warned that full restoration of the power grid would require more nanite mass than they had.
So now he hunted.
The first few compartments yielded little—burned-out consoles, tangled wiring, scorched insulation. All stripped clean in his previous runs. But he pushed further this time, into the less stable parts of the fuselage. The outer wall here bulged outward, scorched from an internal explosion. He had to slip through a narrow fracture in the corridor wall, brushing aside cables that hung like vines.
Then he saw it.
A clump of debris floated near the ceiling—no, wedged into it. A heavy vent panel had buckled inward during the blast, creating a jagged pocket of compressed wreckage. Something glinted within. Kael drifted closer, shining his light into the cavity.
It was a body.
Partially obscured by the rubble, the corpse wore the dark gray uniform of an engineering technician. His legs were pinned beneath a collapsed conduit. The upper torso floated free, stiff and still. A helmet obscured the face, its visor cracked, but not shattered. The technician's gloved hand clutched something close to the chest.
Kael braced against the wall and eased forward, careful not to dislodge the mass. When he reached in, he felt the worn edge of a tablet—scuffed, cracked, but intact. With delicate pressure, he pried it from the corpse's grip and pulled it free. A corner of the screen flickered faintly.
He exhaled slowly. "Salvageable."
"No current power signature. Battery is depleted. External damage: moderate. Recommend repair using the fabricator," the AI noted.
Kael looked at the technician one last time. There was no dignity left in death out here. Just a body, suspended in silence. He backed away, tablet in hand, and resumed his search.
Over the next hour, Kael filled his pack with anything the pod could use: shattered processor cores, structural alloys, stripped wire insulation, broken drone arms—each carefully assessed by his HUD for nanite potential. He avoided the most dangerous zones where the structure sagged, walls bowing under the stress of vacuum and heat exposure. His suit's warning chimes began to sound just as he reached the edge of the tether's range.
He turned back, one hand grazing the corridor wall as he moved. As he passed the technician's body again, he paused. Something twisted in his chest—not quite grief, not quite guilt. He'd seen death before. Caused it, even. But the ship's dead seemed to hover around him differently. Watching.
"Back to pod," he muttered. "I've got what we need."
"Affirmative. Fabricator preparing input tray."
The pod felt even smaller than usual as the airlock sealed behind him. Kael dumped the salvage into the intake chamber. The hatch closed with a hiss, and the sound of internal motors hummed to life as the material was sorted and broken down.
"Estimated nanite yield: 9.8% of total reserves required for solar array restoration," the AI reported. "Cumulative reserves now at 27.4%."
Kael sighed. Still barely halfway.
He turned his attention to the tablet. Its screen was dark, the casing cracked along one edge. But it hadn't powered down completely—something in its internal battery still sparked faintly. He placed it gently onto the fabricator's repair plate.
"Begin tablet repair. Priority two."
"Confirmed. Projected time: fifty-three minutes."
Kael collapsed onto the padded seat and waited, watching the repair arms glide into place. They moved with eerie grace—tiny nanite swarms swirled along hairline fractures, sealing them with liquid metal while filament arms reconnected corroded circuits. Slowly, the display lit with a pale blue glow.
When it finished, Kael lifted it from the tray. The screen flickered. He tapped the power icon.
Nothing.
He frowned. "It's still not booting."
"Damage to internal memory controller may be interfering with normal access," the AI responded. "Suggest direct link for data extraction."
Kael hesitated, then walked over to the AI's core cradle. "Then let's plug it in."
The moment he slotted the tablet into the connection cradle, the AI's core shifted. Tentacles emerged from recessed compartments—three of them—moving like living wires. They curled around the tablet's sides, probing its ports.
He had seen them before, when the AI disassembled the other pod's core. But they always made his skin crawl. Mechanical intelligence shouldn't move like something that thinks it's alive.
"Scanning," the AI said.
Kael crossed his arms, leaning on the wall. "Find anything?"
"System logs and fragmented personal notes. I am decrypting now."
The screen on the nearby wall lit up, casting pale light across the cabin.
Maintenance Log 131-B - Technician Orlin Vex
"Three days before the explosion. I've run diagnostics on the cooling grid six times. No irregularities in the software, but thermal spikes keep appearing. Sector 7G registers power flux despite being sealed off since launch. Something's drawing power from the secondary core. Captain says it's an error. I don't think it is."
Kael leaned closer, eyes narrowing.
Maintenance Log 132-A
"Got into 7G. Someone bypassed the circuit locks. There's equipment in there I've never seen before. No serial numbers. Not on any of the manifests. I reported it. Got locked out of the logs an hour later."
The AI paused. "Security clearance for these logs is above your rank. Would you like to override?"
Kael didn't answer immediately. His fingers curled into fists. "Override. Use everything you've got."
The screen shuddered, then resumed.
Personal Note – Unsent
"They're hiding something in the engineering deck. I don't know what it is, but it's not supposed to be there. Even the AI pretends it doesn't exist. If something happens to me… look there. Someone needs to know. This ship isn't what they told us it was."
The logs ended abruptly.
Kael stared at the screen in silence.
"What do you make of it?" he finally asked.
The AI's response came slower than usual. "There are gaps in the data. Someone scrubbed large sections of the ship's system memory. Deliberately. I have reconstructed fragments, but the trail ends just before the detonation."
Kael exhaled sharply. "Sabotage?"
"Possible. I am detecting irregularities in the system architecture. The energy spikes recorded match the signatures I observed shortly before the explosion. Whatever Orlin Vex found in sector 7G may have played a role in the ship's destruction."
Kael turned away from the screen, running a hand down his face.
He had come out here to survive—to patch a pod and breathe a little longer. But every new revelation pulled him deeper into something he didn't understand. A ghost story written in corrupted code and shattered steel.
"What else is in the technician's notes?"
"Non-essential logs. Musings. He was afraid. Isolated."
Kael looked at the tablet still clutched in the tentacles. The AI withdrew them without prompting and slid the device across the table toward him. The screen was now clean, intact. But it felt heavier than it should've.
He took it and slipped it into a compartment in the wall. "File the data. Don't purge anything. Not yet."
"Understood."
He sat back down in the seat, the hum of the pod's systems now quieter, as if even they were holding their breath. For a moment, he let his eyes close.
Outside the pod, the stars didn't blink. The fuselage remained still. But Kael felt it—something out there had watched the ship die. Maybe something had killed it.
And maybe, just maybe, it was still watching him now.