The lights aboard Astra-9 flickered again—but this time, every alarm in the ship shrieked at once.
Red strobes flashed across the engineering bay.
The air vibrated with layered warning tones.
Holographic panels filled the room like a swarm of frantic insects.
QUANTUM CORE UNSTABLE
GRAVIMETRIC SHEAR DETECTED
UNKNOWN FIELD INTERFERENCE
DISTANCE: 180,000 KM AND CLOSING
Orion's fingers flew across the interface, dismissing half the alerts just to see the ones that actually mattered.
"Lyra!" he shouted into the comm. "Report your sector!"
"Gravity wells forming inside the ship!" she yelled back. "Micro singularities—tiny but unstable!"
Micro singularities inside the ship?
That shouldn't be possible. That couldn't be possible.
Unless—
He looked up at the observation windows again.
The fractal dragon glided through space with the effortless grace of something that had lived in vacuum far longer than humans could imagine. Its body radiated patterns—recursive loops of light and shadow that pulsed like a living algorithm.
Every pulse made Astra-9 shudder.
Commander Rhea's voice boomed through internal comms.
"All hands, brace for impact. Tactical, raise shields. Engineering, stabilize the quantum core. Now!"
Orion slammed a command into the console.
"That's what I'm trying to do—core oscillations are off the charts!"
"Can we shut it down?" Rhea demanded.
"If we shut it down," Orion said, "we'll lose our shield matrix and drift into the anomaly."
"And if we don't?"
Orion glanced at the numbers.
"Then the core rips itself apart."
Rhea swore.
Outside, the dragon drew closer, its fractal wings stretching wider than Astra-9's hull. Its presence bent gravitational fields, twisted plasma currents, and made spacetime hum like plucked strings.
Yet it did not attack.
It simply… observed.
Almost curious.
Lyra's voice cut in again.
"Orion, listen. The singularities are stabilizing when the creature pulses. It's controlling the distortions, not causing them to worsen."
Orion frowned.
"Wait—are you saying it's preventing the ship from collapsing?"
"I'm saying," Lyra replied, "that without it, we'd already be dead."
The dragon tilted its massive head, as though responding to her words.
Then it opened its mouth—not to roar, but to emit a deep harmonic tone. The sound wasn't audible; it resonated purely through vibration, through gravity, through mathematics itself.
Orion watched in stunned amazement as the ship's alarms began to shut down one by one.
The quantum core stabilizer readings flattened.
The gravimetric shear readings reversed.
The micro singularities vanished.
"What… what is it doing?" Orion whispered.
Lyra's breath trembled through comms.
"I think… it's communicating."
Suddenly, every console aboard Astra-9 shut off.
Darkness overwhelmed the ship like a curtain falling.
Then a single line of glowing text appeared on Orion's darkened screen:
WE ARE NOT ENEMIES.
WE ARE WARNING YOU.
Orion felt his heartbeat freeze.
Lyra whispered, "Orion… something else is coming through the tear."
He turned slowly toward the observation window.
Behind the fractal dragon, inside the swirling corridor of geometry, hundreds of massive silhouettes were emerging.
Not creatures.
Not machines.
Ships.
Thousands of them.
Refugee ships.
Escaping something.
And the dragon?
A guardian.
The alarms flashed one last time.
SPATIAL COLLAPSE INBOUND.
PREPARE FOR IMPACT.
Orion grabbed the console.
The universe was changing—and he was in the center of it.