Carl sprang from his bed, still half in shock. The walls around him pulsed with warning lights—crimson bands sweeping across the interior like a heartbeat. Every screen in his quarters displayed a single line of text:
INCOMING VESSEL — IDENT SIGNAL: UNKNOWN — RANGE: 1,200 KM AND CLOSING
He rushed to the cockpit, fingers dancing across the backup manual console. The autopilot was still functional. No weapons. No shields. Civilian ships in TerraCore didn't need them—or weren't supposed to.
He activated the external visual array, and the ship's forward screen magnified the approaching object.
What came into view was no Terran design.
The incoming ship was sleek, tapered like a dagger, with a crystalline hull that refracted light in ways his optics couldn't calculate. No heat plumes. No visible thrusters. It was moving—drifting—but against all known laws of propulsion.
Silent drive tech, Carl thought. But not human. Not even Martian.
He accessed the comms system again. No outgoing signal. No emergency beacon. Even his quantum ping relays were dead—he was outside the FoldNet range, stranded in true deep space.
His breath fogged the cockpit glass. The silence was overwhelming.
Then a transmission came through—not through the ship's systems, but directly into his helmet's neuro-link.
[—Attention: Conscious Designate Detected—]
[—Non-native Neural Signature. State Allegiance or Intent—]
Carl froze. The voice—or the presence—was synthetic, yet too… layered. It wasn't audio. It was an invasive whisper inside his skull, like someone pressing their thoughts through a sieve into his brain.
"This is Engineer Carl Serrano of TerraCore, Sol System. I—I'm not hostile."
[—TerraCore… Unknown Entity Classification—]
[—Designate: Carl. Register: Non-Aggressive. Standby for Analysis—]
The vessel came to a stop a few hundred meters from his ship. Lights along its edge pulsed in a spiral, scanning the Valkyrie. Every sweep caused minor distortions in his instrumentation—gravitic displacement, possibly localized time dilation. Carl recorded as much as he could on the manual log, in case he ever made it back to tell someone.
Suddenly, a sphere detached from the alien ship, drifting toward him.
He leapt back, instinct screaming. The object was roughly the size of a human head, covered in glowing filaments. It moved like it was alive—no propulsion jets, no inertia drift. Just deliberate motion, as if it knew precisely where it was going.
It phased through the hull like vapor, solidifying inside the cockpit. The air shimmered around it, and then the ship's lights flickered back to normal—amber stand-by mode. The AI's voice chirped back online.
"System diagnostic restored. Welcome, Engineer Carl Serrano. External interference: neutralized."
"What the hell…" Carl whispered, staring at the orb. "What are you?"
The orb pulsed, and this time the voice came through both the AI and his neuro-link.
[—Designation: Archive Beacon Zeta-9. Emergency contact protocol initiated—]
[—You have activated a pre-collapse artifact tied to the lost hyperlane nexus. This region is classified as a Dead Sector—]
[—TerraCore registry does not exist in current stellar archive. You are alone—]
Carl's throat tightened. He wasn't just off course.
He was out of time.
"Dead Sector? Collapse of what?" he asked, voice trembling.
The orb hovered closer. A holographic map projected from its shell—a star chart filled with unfamiliar constellations and glowing trails of once-active space lanes. At the center: a glowing knot labeled KETHRIS NEXUS. A name etched in a language his implants could barely translate.
[—Thousands of cycles ago, the CoreLanes collapsed. The civilizations that used them fell. This sector has not seen contact in 4,611 local cycles. You arrived through a malfunctioning temporal beacon. This event is… highly irregular—]
Carl swallowed.
He'd triggered an ancient stargate by accident. And now he was here. Trapped. Possibly in the ruins of an extinct interstellar empire.
"Can it be reversed? Can I go home?"
The orb went silent for a moment. Then:
[—Negative. The beacon's sequence was one-way. Signature decay prevents re-alignment—]
[—You are now registered as the Primary Conscious Entity in this sector. A new operational cycle may commence—]
[—Do you wish to activate the MiningCorp Protocol?—]
Carl stared. That last phrase hit like a punch to the chest. MiningCorp. His mission. His company. His life.
He hadn't found an anomaly.
He'd found the origin of it all.
* out in the void, screens lit, systems were activated, engines were powered. Waiting. *