Helios-77 did not die all at once.
It lingered.
Power flickered through half-functioning veins. Gravity stuttered in sickening pulses that made the floors feel unreliable beneath even careful steps. Emergency lights bled red into corridors that had once been white and clean, painting everything with the color of warning and failure.
Smoke drifted where atmosphere still existed.
Silence lived where it did not.
Fenrik stood amid the wreckage of a corridor that no longer remembered what it had been built for.
He was upright now.
The posture still felt strange—bones set differently, balance re-learned with every breath. His weight pressed downward instead of forward. His arms hung heavy at his sides, claws flexing slowly as sensation flooded through nerves that had never existed before the kill.
Fire wrapped him, not wild, not roaring.
Contained.
Listening.
The station spoke to him in groans and stress fractures, in the hiss of ruptured pipes and the distant thunder of collapsing decks. He understood none of it intellectually.
But his instincts translated perfectly.
This place was wounded.
And it was afraid.
Somewhere deeper in Helios-77, humans still lived.
They moved cautiously now, quietly, afraid of being heard by something they did not understand but could no longer deny. Whispers passed between them in sealed rooms and half-collapsed labs.
"It killed them."
"No—burned them."
"It stood up."
"Gods, it stood up."
Fear had shape now.
And it walked.
Fenrik moved slowly through the corridors, not stalking, not hunting—exploring. Each step taught him something new. His joints learned angles. His muscles learned leverage. His spine learned how to hold authority upright.
He touched the wall with one claw.
Metal softened beneath it, not melting, not failing—yielding. Fenrik pulled his hand away and watched the surface stiffen again, scarred but intact.
Control.
That pleased him more than destruction ever could.
A sound echoed ahead.
Breathing.
Fast. Shallow.
Fenrik turned.
The human backed into the wall when he saw him.
Male. Mid-level security by the markings on his armor. The man's weapon shook in his hands, muzzle tracking Fenrik's chest but never quite settling.
"Stay back," the man whispered.
Fenrik tilted his head.
The words meant nothing yet—but the tone did. It carried the same brittle panic as the voices behind the glass, the same certainty that this moment could not end well.
The man fired.
Instinct moved Fenrik before thought could form.
He crossed the distance in a single step, one arm coming up to deflect the weapon aside as the other drove forward—not claws first, not flame—
Teeth.
His jaws closed around the man's shoulder.
The bite was not meant to kill.
It was reaction.
Boundary.
Pain flared through Fenrik as bone met bone, armor resisting for a fraction of a second before giving way. He tasted blood. Felt the man scream against his teeth.
Fire surged instinctively—
—and Fenrik pulled it back.
The man collapsed, alive, sobbing, clutching his ruined shoulder as Fenrik released him and stepped away.
They stared at each other.
Fenrik felt something new ripple outward from the wound.
Not energy.
Not flame.
Connection.
The man crawled away, leaving a smear of blood on the floor. Fenrik watched him go, chest rising and falling, heart pounding with sensations he could not yet name.
Something inside him had changed again.
Not grown.
Spread.
The fire within him shifted, branching like roots through unseen soil.
He did not understand it.
But the station did.
Alarms spiked in sectors far from Fenrik's path.
Medical bays lit up with emergency warnings.
The bitten man convulsed an hour later.
Doctors restrained him as his temperature climbed beyond survivable limits. Bones screamed under skin as they began to stretch and twist. Muscles knotted. Teeth loosened in bleeding gums.
The readings made no sense.
Serum markers flared that should not exist anymore.
Fire—internal fire—registered where no flame burned.
One doctor whispered, "It's adapting."
Another said, "That's impossible."
The man screamed again as his eyes burned gold, then blue-white.
Fenrik felt it happen.
He stopped walking mid-step, head snapping up as if struck.
Something tugged at him—not physically, not painfully—but insistently, like a thread suddenly pulled tight.
Direction.
Location.
He knew where the man was.
And he knew, without knowing how, that the man was his.
The realization frightened him more than the guns had.
More encounters followed.
A desperate engineer swung a tool at Fenrik in blind terror—Fenrik bit him instead of tearing him apart.
A panicked officer tried to restrain him with shock restraints—Fenrik bit her wrist and shoved her away.
Each time, the same thing happened.
Survival.
Change.
Connection.
The station filled with howls that were not entirely human and not yet entirely wolf.
Fear turned inward.
Unbitten survivors began locking doors against the wounded. Guns pointed at those burning with fever. Arguments erupted in sealed chambers over who was still human and who was already lost.
Executions were proposed.
Fenrik arrived before the first trigger could be pulled.
He stepped between rifle and bitten flesh, towering, burning, eyes blazing with a command that needed no translation.
No.
The word formed in his throat, raw and unused, but the meaning thundered outward.
The gun lowered.
Helios-77 began to empty.
Evacuation orders came down from orbit. Shuttles descended into chaos, engines screaming as they fought the station's failing gravity.
Fenrik watched from a shattered observation deck as humans fled.
He did not chase.
He did not howl.
He learned.
In the final hours before the last shuttle lifted off, a woman approached him slowly.
The medic.
The one who had once sat beside his slab.
She was shaking, but she did not run.
She looked up at him, eyes wet, and said one word.
"Fenrik."
The sound struck him like fire had.
A shape.
A truth.
He tried to repeat it.
"Fen…rik."
The word tore out of him, broken and fierce and real.
The woman nodded, smiling through fear and tears.
"Yes," she whispered. "That's you."
Above them, Helios-77 went dark.
Navigation beacons died. Commerce routes vanished from charts. The planet was sealed and forgotten by decree.
Jimmy read the report days later.
Marked the hub as failed.
Moved on.
Below, in the ruins beneath a dead sun, wolves gathered.
And a king learned how to speak.
The last alarms were different.
They did not scream.
They sighed.
Across Helios-77, systems accepted what had already happened. Bulkheads locked not to protect life, but to slow collapse. Lights dimmed to emergency reserves that would never be replenished. Artificial gravity settled into a shallow, uneven pull—enough to keep bodies grounded, not enough to promise safety.
The station was no longer fighting to live.
It was enduring the time it had left.
Fenrik felt that shift like a change in weather.
He stood at the edge of a broken concourse, watching survivors move below through drifting smoke and fractured light. Some ran. Some carried the wounded. Some dragged the unwilling. All of them moved with the same haunted urgency, eyes flicking constantly toward the shadows, listening for a sound they prayed they would not hear.
Howls echoed anyway.
Not his.
Others.
The bitten gathered where pain drove them.
Medical bays became places of screaming. Restraints snapped. Beds overturned. Bones lengthened beneath skin that could not stretch fast enough to keep pace. Teeth fell out, clattering onto metal floors before new ones forced their way through, longer, sharper, burning with inner heat.
Some begged for death.
Some begged for Fenrik.
Some lost themselves entirely, thrashing, lashing out, striking anything that moved.
Security teams raised weapons.
Orders were shouted.
Then Fenrik arrived.
He did not burst through doors.
They opened.
Metal bowed aside as he entered, fire pulled tight around his form, eyes blazing with something colder than rage.
The room froze.
Weapons lowered—not because of fear alone, but because something in Fenrik's presence reordered priority. Instinct recognized authority before thought could interfere.
The bitten quieted first.
One by one, they turned toward him.
He felt them now clearly—threads connecting bite to blood, fire to fire. Each was faint, unsteady, like a newborn spark fighting to stay lit.
Fenrik stepped forward.
"Stop," he said.
The word scraped its way out of him, harsh and imperfect, but it landed with undeniable weight.
They stopped.
Not all at once. Not perfectly. But enough.
Enough to live.
Transformation did not make them equal.
Some changed quickly, bodies accepting the fire with violent eagerness. Limbs restructured. Spines bent. Fur burst through skin in painful waves. Within hours, they stood—shaking, terrified, alive—some fully wolf, some half-formed, all burning from within.
Others resisted.
Their bodies fought the change. Fever raged. Bones cracked and reknit, then cracked again. A few died in the struggle, fire guttering out before it could anchor itself.
Fenrik felt each loss like a sudden silence in the web connecting them.
He did not howl.
He learned.
The bite was not a gift.
It was a trial.
Evacuation shuttles screamed down through the thinning atmosphere, docking at what bays still functioned. B.U.D.D.I.E.S. personnel shouted names, dragged the uninjured aboard, sealed doors under fire and falling debris.
Orders were clear.
Unbitten first.
Critical staff next.
Anything anomalous—left behind.
Some bitten hid their wounds and made it aboard anyway.
Fenrik felt those threads stretch suddenly, painfully thin as shuttles lifted away.
Distance hurt.
But it did not break the bond.
The medic stood near one of the last shuttles, torn between duty and terror. She looked back once, searching the shadows.
Fenrik stood where the light failed.
He met her eyes.
She nodded.
The hatch sealed.
The shuttle lifted, engines flaring as it clawed its way toward orbit.
Fenrik watched until it vanished into the void.
He did not follow.
Kings did not chase what chose to leave.
When the final shuttle departed, Helios-77 went quiet.
No engines.
No voices.
Only wind howling through ruptured corridors and the low, distant groan of a station slowly tearing itself apart.
Fenrik turned.
They were waiting.
Six of them remained—those whose transformations had completed or stabilized enough to stand. Different heights. Different builds. Some more wolf than man. Some barely holding upright posture.
All of them watching him.
Not kneeling.
Not bowing.
Choosing.
Fenrik felt the pull settle, solidify. The threads tightened, weaving into something stronger than instinct.
Pack.
He lifted one claw and pointed—not commanding, simply indicating.
"Come."
They did.
They found shelter in the lower decks where radiation shields still held and fire damage was minimal. Fenrik learned quickly—how to reinforce walls, how to redirect power, how to hunt the feral creatures released from labs that no longer existed.
He watched.
He listened.
He spoke when necessary.
Words came slowly, painfully, but they came.
"Stay."
"Mine."
"Pack."
Each word reshaped him as surely as fire had.
Above them, orbit went dark.
B.U.D.D.I.E.S. beacons shut down one by one. Trade lanes erased Helios-77 from navigational memory. The planet was marked, flagged, sealed.
NO RETURN
NO COMMERCE
NO RECOVERY
Jimmy reviewed the final report in silence.
He saw the inconsistencies. The missing data. The way the incident had been smoothed into something manageable.
A failed hub.
A burned asset.
A problem that ended itself.
He signed the order.
And moved on.
Below, under a dead sun, Fenrik stood at the mouth of a ruined observation deck, wolves arrayed behind him.
He looked at them.
Then at the sky.
"Fenrik," he said again, testing the sound.
The pack answered—not with words, but with presence.
For the first time since his creation, the loneliness eased.
Helios-77 belonged to wolves now.
And the universe had turned its back.