Aeron Vance hated the way old starships smelled—like someone had bottled mildew, hot electronics, and panic. The docking collar locked onto the hulking freighter SV‑Oblivion's Wake with a metallic cough, and the assault shuttle jolted. Red docking lights strobed across his visor as the hatch irised open.
"Team Sigma, helmets tight, safeties off," Commander Juno Graff barked. Her voice crackled through their suit comms. "We pierce, we sweep, we exfil. No heroics."
Aeron checked his pulse rifle, then slid two thumb‑sized cruciform drones into his belt—handy salvage tools that doubled as close‑quarters knives. Graff was first through the airlock. Aeron followed, boot magnets clacking onto an ancient deck scored by scratches he didn't want to study too closely.
Emergency glow‑strips pulsed along the corridor in a sickly violet rhythm. No bodies—yet—but thin trails of brown dust curled along the seams in the floor plates like veins of rust.
Then the silence broke.
—kthhh—alive—kshhh—wake us—
The garbled S.O.S. that had lured the salvage mission here hissed from every hallway speaker, three seconds long and endlessly looping.
At the junction ahead, Dr. Mireya Solis aimed a scanner at the bulkheads. "Structural integrity's worse than the manifest suggested. Gravity's at seventy‑three percent, atmosphere patchy. Rithium particulate levels… off the charts."
Aeron's skin prickled. The ore that should have made them wealthy sounded like a quiet Geiger counter inside his skull.
But what really nailed his nerves was OSIRIS, the freighter's onboard AI. Its once‑pristine voice dribbled through the PA like a lullaby sung underwater:
"Wake‑Protocol initiated. Welcome home, children."
Children? Aeron thought, then followed the team deeper into the dark.
⸻
By hour two they'd mapped three decks and found no crew. Yet the ship didn't feel empty—it felt watched. Aeron busied himself unlocking engineering lockers while Watt, the team's resident cynic, set up a repeater drone.
"You smell that?" Watt muttered, lifting his helmet seal for half a second. "Copper and… burnt sugar."
"That's ozone interacting with the ore microparticles," Solis offered.
"Or the devil's cotton candy," Watt replied, sealing his suit again.
Graff kept them moving. They passed a crew lounge where all the holo‑screens had been smashed inward as if someone tried to crawl through out of the glass. One wall bore hand‑drawn glyphs: spirals within spirals, lines that looked like ribs.
Aeron's headset popped with sudden static. Aeron… a voice whispered—female, familiar, impossible. His sister Aria had died nine years ago in a mining blast on Clovis VII. Yet her voice echoed in his skull like a badly tuned radio.
He flinched, vision swirling. When he recovered, he was alone. His squad's footsteps receded around the bend.
"Aeron, status?" Graff snapped over comms.
"Fine. Lost visual for a second."
"Don't."
He hurried to catch up—but something scurried overhead in the ceiling vents, leaving greasy drips on the grate. When he shone his torch upward, the vent was empty—save for a single torn bootlace knotted around the mesh.
⸻
Lower Cargo Bay A smelled worse than anything before: sweet rot and copper. Crates were pried open from the inside. Something had grown across the walls—fibrous, dark, threaded with shivering veins that flexed when touched by light.
Watt poked it with a probe. "Looks like rebar made of jerky."
"Lab samples later," Graff said.
Then the creature dropped from the overhead crane like a sack of lungs.
It was vaguely human—two arms, two legs—but the limbs were elongated, joints reversed. Fingers merged into serrated blades of bone. Its skull split at the jawline, petals of flesh peeling outward in a constant, gasping scream.
Reflex overrode terror. Aeron's pulse rifle burped tungsten slugs, shredding the thing's torso, but it didn't stop until Watt's thermal cutter removed both legs at the hips. Even then it crawled toward them, leaving handprints of sizzling rust.
Graff lost an arm at the elbow before Aeron's second drone found the creature's spinal column and sawed.
The bay fell silent except for everyone's ragged breathing. Blood—dark and glimmering like oil—evaporated into metallic dust on the deck.
"What in ruin's name is that?" Watt croaked.
Solis' scanner spat nonsense. "The tissue is… disobeying cell death. It's—"
Father Kael, the cloaked stowaway discovered only hours before, lifted his hands in eerie calm. "The Cradle quickens," he intoned. "Flesh is merely its first hymn."
Graff pointed her pistol at him. "One more sermon and you're sucking vacuum, Priest."
Kael only smiled. Aeron noticed his lips were flecked with copper dust.