Tanya circled her battered shuttle like a doctor examining a patient, her engineering tablet glowing as she catalogued each dent, scrape, and twisted piece of hull plating on her engineering diagram of the shuttle. The crash had been spectacular, but looking at the damage now, she couldn't help but feel a little impressed at how well the ship had held up.
"Well, aren't you a tough little thing?" she murmured, patting the shuttle's scarred flank. "Most ships would've turned into confetti after a landing like that."
The port drive was salvageable, at least enough for a short hop back to Eden-Five if she could get the shuttle airborne again. The structural damage looked dramatic with twisted metal and scored plating that would make any mechanic wince, but most of it was cosmetic. The real skeleton of the ship seemed sound, though she wouldn't know for certain until she could get it off the surface and inspect the undercarriage.
The vortex drive, however, was another story entirely.
She crouched beside the drive housing, running her fingers along the sealed casing. These things were mysteries wrapped in corporate patents and tied up with military-grade encryption. Black boxes that even master shipwrights treated with reverence and caution. The manufacturing specs were classified, the repair manuals were restricted, and the closest thing to maintenance protocol was "if it breaks, replace it entirely."
"And naturally, you don't break very often," Tanya said to the silent drive. "Hundred-year lifespans, they said. 'More reliable than gravity itself,' they said." She tapped the casing with her knuckle. "So why would you pick now to have a crisis?"
The drive didn't answer, which was probably for the best.
She worked her way through the rest of her survival checklist with the methodical optimism of someone who'd learned to find silver linings in the darkest clouds. Atmosphere systems: functional. Water recyclers: gurgling along nicely. Life support: green across the board. Even her evac suit was charging properly, its status lights blinking a reassuring blue.
Food, however, was a different problem. She had maybe four days of rations if she was careful, two if she wasn't. The shuttle's emergency supplies were designed for short-term survival, not extended camping trips on dead planets. They were designed for short trips.
"Right then," she said, shouldering her pack and checking her suit's seals. "Time to see what the neighbours left behind."
The drone's communication array was still functional, but Tanya had dismissed that option almost immediately. Even if the signal somehow reached civilised space, the chances of anyone being able to locate her were essentially zero. Timing a vortex drop to hit something the size of a small planet was like trying to thread a needle while blindfolded, underwater, during an earthquake. She needed to provide coordinates accurate to the meter, and she had no idea where she was.
Better to explore than to sit around composing increasingly desperate distress calls.
The ruins spread out from her crash site like the bones of some massive creature, all curves and organic angles that hurt to look at directly. The architecture was completely alien, not just foreign, but built according to principles that made her engineer's brain itch. Nothing had right angles. Everything flowed into everything else in ways that suggested the builders had either been very artistic or completely insane.
"Definitely not human," she said, recording her observations on her tablet. The material was something she had never seen before it was not metal and not stone, but something that seemed to shift between the two depending on how the light hit it. "Question is, how long have you been here?"
She waited for the answer, but none came.
Ancient was her best guess. The ruins had that weight to them, that sense of deep time that made her feel like a tourist in her own galaxy. But they were also eerily well-preserved on the inside, as if the builders had just stepped out for lunch and might return at any moment.
She spent the better part of two days mapping the settlement, if that's what it was. The layout defied easy categorisation as there were structures that might have been homes, others that could have been workshops or temples or something else entirely. The alien architecture made it impossible to tell purpose from form.
By the third day, even her relentless optimism was showing cracks.
"Come on, universe," she muttered, kicking at a piece of rubble. "Throw me a bone here. A food synthesiser. A spare ship. Hell, I'd settle for a 'Welcome to Paradise, Please Don't Die' sign at this point."
Her stomach growled in response, a sound that echoed strangely in the alien spaces. She had been rationing her supplies carefully, but hunger was starting to make itself known. The complete absence of any sun in the sky meant this place was a biological wasteland with no plants, no animals, no convenient emergency rations growing on convenient emergency trees. She had already written her 2-star review. "Interesting view, lousy service"
She'd fixed the port engine using her repair kit, but without a way to restart the vortex drive or get the shuttle to hover, she was essentially building a very expensive paperweight. The technical manual was frustratingly vague on vortex drive failures, mostly because they weren't supposed to fail. Ever.
"Time to expand the search radius," she announced to the empty air. "Because sitting here feeling sorry for myself isn't going to fill my stomach or fix my ship."
She'd been staying close to the settlement, but now she studied her rough map and tried to think like a city planner. If this place had been inhabited, where would they have put essential services? Where would ships have landed?
The largest cluster of buildings was to the west, connected by what looked like a major thoroughfare. If she were building a city, that's where she would put the spaceport.
"Worth a shot," she said, checking her suit's power levels. "And if I'm wrong, well, at least I'll have gotten some exercise. I have to burn off all these calories I'm consuming"
The walk took her through districts that might have been residential, commercial, or something else entirely. The alien architecture remained stubbornly incomprehensible, but she found herself appreciating it anyway. There was a beauty to it, a sense of organic growth that made the ruins feel alive despite their obvious age.
"You know," she said, pausing to admire a structure that twisted skyward like a frozen tornado, "I bet this place was gorgeous when it was occupied. All those flowing lines, the way everything connects to everything else. It's like the whole city was designed to be a work of art."
The thought made her a little sad. Whoever had built this place had put incredible effort into making it beautiful, and now it was just another dead world orbiting nothing. She wondered what had happened to them, where they had gone, whether they'd had any warning before the end.
The spaceport, when she found it, was unmistakable despite the alien design. A flat area surrounded by structures that could only be hangars, with what looked like control towers rising from the center. And there, partially buried in accumulated debris but clearly intact, was a building that seemed to glow with its own inner light.
"Now that's interesting," Tanya said, her spirits lifting for the first time in days. "You're definitely not like the others, are you?"
The building was perfect. Not just well-preserved but actually perfect, as if it had been built yesterday and protected by some kind of temporal bubble. The same flowing architecture as the rest of the city, but somehow more... intentional. More focused.
"Doomsday bunker?" she wondered aloud. "Emergency shelter? Really well-built storage facility?"
Only one way to find out.
She approached the building with the careful optimism of someone who'd learned to expect the universe to be interesting, even when it was trying to kill her. The entrance was clearly marked but not with symbols she could read, but with a design that somehow conveyed "this is a door" in the universal language of architecture.
"Well," she said, checking her suit's seals one more time, "exploring is the only thing left to do."
The door responded to her approach with a soft chime that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It dilated open like an iris, revealing a corridor that stretched into warm, welcoming light.
Tanya stepped inside, her heart racing with the kind of excitement that made all her troubles seem small and distant. Whatever this place was, it was her first real lead since the crash. And if there was one thing she'd learned in her short life, it was that the universe tended to provide exactly what you needed, exactly when you needed it.
Even if it didn't always provide it in the way you expected.
The entrance dilated shut like an iris behind her with the soft whisper of advanced engineering, leaving Tanya standing in what appeared to be an airlock. The walls curved around her in that same organic style, but here the material seemed almost alive, pulsing gently with patterns of light that reminded her of neural networks or blood vessels.
"Okay," she said, her voice echoing strangely in the enclosed space. "This is either going really well or really badly."
A brilliant white light flooded the chamber, bright enough that she had to squeeze her eyes shut despite her helmet's auto-tinting. It felt like being examined under a microscope, every inch of her body mapped and catalogued by invisible sensors. The light pulsed in complex patterns, and she had the distinct impression that something was reading her and not just her biological signs, but something deeper.
Then she felt it: a sharp prick in her thigh, like a needle sliding through the fabric of her suit.
"Hey!" She looked down, but there was no visible puncture, no sign of damage to the suit's integrity. The material had already resealed itself, leaving only the memory of that brief, precise violation. "Well that's not ominous at all."
Her suit's biosensors showed no contamination, no foreign substances detected. Whatever had just happened, it was beyond her equipment's ability to understand. She waited, every disaster scenario from her emergency training cycling through her mind, but nothing happened. No alarms, no sudden weakness, no dramatic collapse.
"Blood sample?" she guessed, running her hand over the spot where she'd felt the prick. "I mean, if you're going to take someone's blood, at least ask first. Politeness costs nothing." Shaking her head.
The scanning light faded, and the chamber's illumination shifted to something more comfortable. Then she heard it, the unmistakable hiss of atmosphere being introduced to the space. Her suit's external sensors detected the change immediately: oxygen, nitrogen, trace gases in ratios that wouldn't kill her instantly.
"You've got to be kidding me," she breathed, watching her suit's readings stabilise into something remarkably close to a standard breathable mix. "This place has been dead for who knows how long, and you're still running life support?"
The idea was hard to believe. Whatever power source this facility used, it had been running for potentially thousands of years without maintenance. The engineering required for that kind of reliability was beyond anything in the Hallow Empire's capabilities.
A soft chime drew her attention to a section of wall that was now glowing with gentle blue light. She approached cautiously, her mind cataloguing every detail, making sure not to miss any details. The light pulsed in a pattern that somehow conveyed urgency without alarm; it was more like a polite "attention please" than a warning.
A small drawer slid open with mechanical precision, revealing a single object nestled in what looked like a custom-fitted depression. It was a cube, roughly the size of her thumb.
"Food?" she wondered, picking it up carefully. It was warm to the touch and had a slight give to it, like compressed cake. Without really thinking about it, she brought it to her nose and inhaled.
The smell hit her immediately, it was sweet and salty, with an underlying complexity that made her mouth water despite her caution. Her stomach chose that moment to remind her how long it had been since her last meal, growling loud enough to echo in the chamber.
"Well," she said, examining the cube from all angles, "if you wanted to poison me, you could have done it with the blood sample. And I'm going to starve anyway if I don't eat something soon."
She bit into it experimentally. The texture was strange, being dense and chewy, like concentrated everything and the taste was an assault of salt and sugar that made her face scrunch up involuntarily.
"Ugh," she gasped, forcing herself to swallow. "That's... wow. That's really terrible. But it's definitely food. It could do with a nice chaser"
Almost as if responding to her reaction, the drawer slid shut and then opened again a minute later, revealing another cube. This one was darker, with a completely different scent. She could tell it was rich and fatty, like concentrated protein.
"Okay, so we're doing courses now?" she said, accepting the offering. "First cube was carbs and salt, this one's..." She bit into it and immediately regretted the decision. "Oh. Oh no. That's just pure protein and fat, isn't it? Like eating concentrated meat paste."
The taste was overwhelming, but her body responded to it with desperate gratitude. She could actually feel the nutrients hitting her system, her energy levels stabilising for the first time in days.
The third cube arrived right on schedule, pale and almost translucent. This one had no smell at all, which somehow made it more unsettling than the others.
"Third time's the charm?" she asked the air, then bit into it without hesitation.
It dissolved on her tongue instantly, completely flavourless, like eating solidified air. For a moment, nothing happened. Then she felt a sharp, stinging pain behind her right ear, as if someone had jabbed her with a hot needle.
"Ow! What was—"
The pain exploded across her entire skull, a burning sensation that felt like her brain was being rewired with molten wires. She dropped to her knees, hands clutching her helmet as waves of agony crashed through her consciousness. Every synapse felt like it was on fire, every thought scattered by the overwhelming sensation of something foreign forcing its way into her mind.
She tried to scream, but no sound came out. The pain was too complete, too consuming to allow for anything as simple as vocalisation. It lasted forever. It lasted a heartbeat. Time became meaningless in the face of neural reorganisation.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the pain stopped.
And in the silence that followed, she heard a voice that wasn't her own.
//Bioscan complete. Neural pathway integration successful. Welcome, Tanya Furrow of Eden-Five.//
The voice was neither male nor female, neither young nor old. It simply was, speaking directly into her consciousness with the casual intimacy of her own thoughts.
"Well," she said, sitting back on her heels and trying to process what had just happened, "that was new."
//Integration successful. Language patterns acquired. Cultural context... limited but sufficient for basic communication. Please remain calm. You are safe.//
Tanya looked around the chamber, but she was still alone. The voice was coming from inside her head, speaking with the kind of certainty that suggested it belonged there.
"Right," she said slowly. "So either I'm having the most elaborate hallucination in human history, or I just got upgraded. Mind telling me which one it is?"
//This unit is designated as Educational Assistance Protocol Seven-Seven-Alpha. You may call me... Sage. I am designed to facilitate learning and survival in new colonies. You have been selected as a compatible host.//
"Selected," Tanya repeated, her natural optimism warring with the sheer impossibility of the situation. "Well, that's one way to put it. And here I thought I was just looking for spare parts."
She stood up slowly, testing her balance. Everything felt normal except for the alien intelligence now sharing space in her skull.
"So, Sage," she said, surprising herself with how easily she accepted the situation, "I don't suppose you know anything about fixing broken vortex drives?"