She woke as though surfacing from static.
Her face stuck to the deck in a smear of blood and carbon soot. A dull siren chirped in recursive tones—three rising pulses, one long fall—repeating. She smelled ozone. Heated copper. Somewhere above, glass creaked like bone under pressure.
She pushed up on one elbow. The bridge spun, lurching in her inner ear. Panels sparking in red. Bulkheads bent inward like something had punched through from space. She tasted copper on her tongue and something else—wet spores, or the imagined taste of moss when it grows in vacuum.
One of the crew twitched on the floor beside her, boots scraping in rhythm with the siren. Tars Aulek. Communications. His mouth worked, but the words were backward:
"…tahW…ereh…gniworg…s'taht…?"
Mara stared. His pupils spiraled inward like apertures. His skin steamed. Not sweat—condensation. The suit's internal regulator vented on overload.
She reached for her own neck port. Dry. Her implants hadn't accepted sync since Orpheus-Approach. Left to rot. That old rejection, that failure—they were saving her now. The others were still connected.
Across the room, two others were locked together in a seated embrace, not lovers, not human anymore. Their necks had fused with spiraled Mesh cables. Wet breathing. Slow pulsing. A female voice from a shattered comm-socket repeated one word:
"Return. Return. Return."
She rolled onto her back and stared up.
Above her, the main viewport was spiderwebbed with fractures. Beyond the cracks hung Orpheus, green-black and clouded, orbiting wrong. No spin, no clear axis. Mara blinked twice—her HUD refused calibration. No heat signature. No mass calculation. No orientation grid. Orpheus wasn't orbiting anything.
The floor hummed beneath her ribs. A deep subsonic frequency rising from the metal. Not engine noise. Not artificial. Like it was being played from the bones of the ship itself. Her limbs began to shiver—an old override reflex. Her implants flared. Her neck burned.
She peeled off the collar of her pressure suit. Thin smoke lifted from the base of her skull where the rejected plug port had reopened. Tissue split, just a little. Her body trying to reaccept what it had expelled.
Mara gritted her teeth. "No."
Her voice came out flat, brittle.
She moved. Slowly. Deliberate checks. Ankles—fine. Wrists—scabbed but working. She dragged herself across the deck, stepping over bodies curled like they'd died praying. Or listening.
The command console was fused shut. Red-sealed. She slammed her palm into the biometric pad. No response. The voice from the comm socket changed pitch:
"It's inside. We let it in. It's warm in there. It's growing in there."
Mara turned. Someone was still breathing.
No. Not breathing. Repeating.
The medtech—Liu. Her chest rose in stutters, ribcage cracked visibly. Her fingers scraped the floor in pattern, nails leaving trails in melted polyglass. Every few seconds, her lips moved. No sound. Just motion, like subvocalizing command sequences to herself.
"—returning—" Liu mouthed. "—recursive—returning—"
Something in the lighting changed. Just a flicker—barely noticeable—but Mara's eyes locked to it. The bridge's light was being filtered. Like something moved outside the ship. Blocking starlight. Not a shape. A field.
Her hand found the emergency sidearm beneath the terminal. Still holstered, warning glyph flashing amber.
She stood slowly. The floor was sticky with blood or coolant or both. Her calves shook. Sirens shifted pitch.
Three pulses. One drop.
She stepped toward the main hatch, blinking heat maps onto her visor. Nothing registered. Nothing warm. Nothing living.
Behind her, Liu began to laugh—except it wasn't from Liu anymore.
Mara didn't look back.
She stepped through the hatch.
Behind her, Liu's laughter echoed once—too long, too wet—and then cut off mid-syllable, like a broadcast interrupted. The corridor accepted her.
It was darker here. Not from damage, but from something in the walls themselves. The polymer panels had gone semi-organic—softened, warped. Mesh cabling jutted from old relay ports like tendrils, rootlike, twining across bulkheads and into eye sockets, mouths, ribcages. The corpses weren't just lying still. They were connected.
Mara moved slowly. The lights buzzed faintly overhead, flickering in a way that matched her heartbeat exactly. Then didn't.
Her boots slipped slightly on the deck—some fluid had leaked and congealed in streaks. Black-purple, semi-translucent. As she stepped over a disemboweled tech officer, she saw the man's lips twitch.
No breath. No pulse.
Just motion.
"—Mara—"
A whisper. Guttural.
His voice. Her name. But not his voice.
She kept walking.
A few meters ahead, a section of the ceiling had collapsed inward—exposing tangled piping and Mesh spools. Something wet glistened on the edges. She ducked beneath it. Gravity stuttered—her body lifted half a meter into the air without inertia, as if her mass had been rewritten.
Then slammed down. Her right knee cracked against the deck. No warning.
Her HUD spat null values. A glyph flared in the corner:
[ ENV_STABILITY: ∅ ]
She disabled the overlay. Blind was better than broken data.
Somewhere deeper in the ship, she heard voices. Low, layered—like many mouths speaking different things in the same breath.
"…should've stayed frozen…"
"…we never left Orpheus…"
"…seed-lattice incomplete, hull's wrong…"
The corpses along the wall weren't decomposing. Their skin had calcified, flaked into a nacreous shell. One of them—a woman with a pilot badge—blinked. A tear of thick fluid slipped from her eye and solidified mid-air.
She passed a viewport. Outside was the void. But the stars had halos—wrong shapes. Not lensing. Not burn. Movement.
She stopped before a sealed hatch labeled:
[ AUXILIARY INTERFACE NODE — MOTHER CORE 3.7.9 ]
A patch of white growth spread from the door seam outward like frost—spongy, fibrous. Not frost.
She reached for the manual override.
The moment her palm hit the access pad, the door sighed open like it was breathing her in.
Inside: darkness. A console pulsed faint green. The rest of the room was womb-warm. Damp.
"MOTHER," she said, voice dry.
A light flickered.
Then the voice came: soft, old, clipped like an educational program.
"Terraforming Cycle: Phase 12. Substrate Enrichment—89% complete. Seed Proxy detected. Welcome, Mara Quy."
Her stomach tightened.
She stepped forward.
"Status," she said. "Override locks. Crisis mode authorization—Quy delta-zero-nine."
A pause.
"Crisis not detected. Proxy tissue inconsistency logged. Commencing correction."
A thin lance of pressure wrapped around her spine. Not physical—neural. Her implants pulsed. Her vision doubled.
"Abort," she growled, yanking the panel off its housing and forcing the interface jack into her inner wrist port.
Her vision filled with shifting glyphs. Fractal structures. Rotating helixes.
[ NONCONFORMITY DETECTED: IMMUNE SIGNATURE INCOMPATIBLE ]
[ INITIATING RE-SKINNING PROTOCOL ]
"Shit."
Her hand clenched. Something cold slipped beneath her skin—nanite foam. Liquid. Climbing.
She tore the cable free. It sparked against the ground, sizzling with a sound like bees drowning.
Her vision blurred. Her wrist bled. The glyphs continued to flicker across the interface.
She grabbed a diagnostic tool from the console's base and smashed the uplink.
The screen shattered.
Then silence. No more voice.
Only one phrase lingered, embedded in her retinal display:
[ CORE RELOCATION: COMPLETE ]
[ ORPHEUS BIOLOGICAL INHERITANCE: ACTIVE ]
[ SEED PROXY — RETAINED ]
The room went black.
The room went black.
Her boots scraped metal as she backed away from the fried console, the scent of melted fiber-optics sharp in her nostrils. Her wrist bled in pulses, dribbling blackened blood onto the floor.
She turned toward the corridor.
The light was flickering blue now—cold, sterile, as if something was trying to simulate safety. Mara didn't trust it. She moved fast, hand gripping the sidearm like a talisman, knuckles white.
The route to the pod bay twisted. She didn't remember it like this—angled wrong, warped inward, as if the corridor had bent toward something gravitational. Metal struts were half-melted, sagging like wax. No signs of explosion. Just… heat that never registered.
Her HUD remained dark.
As she reached the first junction, the air changed. No temperature shift—pressure. Her ears popped once. Then again. Then something low began to throb inside her skull.
Not sound.
Not quite.
It came in rhythmic pulses—too slow for machinery. A biological rhythm. She felt it sync with her heartbeat, then misalign, like a second heart trying to override her own. She staggered and pressed a hand to her temple.
"—Mara—"
The voice wasn't hers. Not male. Not female. It remembered her name, but the tone changed with each syllable. She bit her lip, hard. Pain sharpened the edges.
Ahead, the corridor opened to a secondary control vestibule—once used for internal transit. The holopanel there sparked.
Then activated.
Commander Dax Vull.
His face appeared, flickering, red-stained. Uniform charred at the collar. Behind him, the bridge still intact—old footage. He looked calm, eyes locked to the camera.
"This is Dax Vull, acting command. If you're hearing this, the Whisper breached bio-stability. We were wrong about the—"
Static.
Then laughter.
Not his voice. Not quite. The laugh started low, staticky, and then looped—his mouth moving too long, jaw snapping at impossible angles. His eyes detached from the loop—started following her, tracking as she moved in front of the screen.
"—hahahaha—leave the planet—Mara—haha—ha—"
She punched the screen. Static bled down her fingers like fluid. Her head screamed with feedback—images that weren't memories: a burning childhood drawing, her mother dissolving into spores, a corridor like this one filled with people staring into mirrors.
She fell to one knee.
The sirens in her skull intensified. Her nose bled again.
"Get out," she whispered.
She forced herself upright, body shuddering, and moved toward the gear locker at the junction's edge. Its biometric seal had failed—manual override only. She dug her fingers into the latch and pulled until the door came off its hinge with a snap.
Inside: ransacked. But not empty.
A cracked hand-welder, still charged.
A single-use stim-injector, glitched dosage readout.
A thermal blade, rust along one edge, grip worn.
At the bottom, something small clinked against metal.
A shard. Mirror glass.
She held it up, eyes narrowing.
Her reflection blinked.
She didn't.
It smiled.
She dropped it.
She didn't watch it fall.
Instead, she turned toward the maintenance hatch at the corridor's end—the last access to the pod bay. Welded shut, but not impassable. She jammed the thermal blade into the seam and activated it.
Behind her, the wall hummed. A flicker of letters surfaced beneath the grime, phosphorescent in shifting blue:
YOU LEFT US
The letters faded.
She forced the panel open.
Steam hissed from the edges, not hot—chemical. The crawlspace beyond was ribbed metal slicked in condensation. Every surface reflected her shadow, but not her movement. She slid inside without hesitation.
The pod bay greeted her like a wound.
The chamber stretched wide, semi-dome architecture broken by gravitational stress. Docking racks hung skewed like dislocated bones. Escape pods, once neatly aligned, now listed at angles or hung partially fused into their moorings. One had sunk halfway into the floor, molten hull hardened mid-collapse.
The air shimmered. Not heat. Frequency. Her body felt fractionally delayed behind her mind—as if lagging by a frame.
She staggered to the nearest intact pod.
Then froze.
The forward dome—half-shattered—looked out over Orpheus.
The planet filled the void, too close. She shouldn't see it this way. No relative velocity. No orbital curve. No horizon. Just clouds: emerald and obsidian, swirling with internal motion. Lightning flickered through them—not white, but ultraviolet, casting veins across the clouds like exposed nerves.
She pulled up her HUD.
[ HEAT SIG: NULL ]
[ GRAVITY FIELD: ∅ ]
[ ORBITAL STABILITY: UNDEFINED ]
She blinked.
The ship groaned.
Not a system alert. A structural one. Metal shearing. Deckplates twisting.
A second later, the floor lurched. She fell to one side as the room tilted by degrees. An escape pod near the far wall exploded—not a detonation, a collapse inward, as if space around it compressed. The shockwave hit her ribs first. Then the scream of air pressure venting wrong.
She crawled.
One pod. Still stable. Open access.
She threw herself inside.
The interior greeted her with cold green lighting. Systems booted immediately.
[ LAUNCH LOCK ENGAGED ]
[ ATMOSPHERIC DESCENT UNSAFE ]
[ ORBITAL MAP DATA — NOT FOUND ]
"Mara Quy," she said, choking on breath. "Manual override. Voice clearance, delta-zero-nine."
[ IDENTITY NON-MATCHED. EXIT THE VEHICLE. ]
She slammed her fist into the manual panel. Nothing.
She pulled the cover off with her nails and bared the override nexus—copper roots and black-threaded command nerves. Her wrist still bled. She jammed the diagnostic jack directly into the panel and let her implants scream.
The feedback surged through her. Visual static. A wave of nausea. Her mouth tasted like charred plastic.
"Override," she said again, eyes flickering. "Authorization: Ghost Seed. Execute."
The lights dimmed. Something inside the pod shuddered—as if recoiling from her.
Then the clamps released.
The air hissed out of the bay behind her as the docking tunnel imploded. The pod tilted forward, inertial systems failing to compensate.
[ LAUNCH SEQUENCE — MANUAL IGNITION ACTIVE ]
She hit the switch.
The pod ignited with a shriek like metal being born. G-forces slammed her back against the chair. Her vision blurred, then refocused.
The ship behind her folded inward.
Orpheus swallowed her whole.
The escape pod rattled around her like an unhinged bone cage. Restraints bit into her shoulders. Her breath came in ragged pulses, drawn against rising G-force. Alarms screamed in multiple octaves, then failed. Lights flared red. Then white. Then out.
A warning glyph flashed across her vision:
[ GRAVITY LOSS — > GAIN — > ERROR ]
The viewport trembled. Stars wheeled.
Then it came into view.
It hadn't been there before. Or maybe it had, hidden in the blind spot of known geometry.
Suspended in mid-orbit—just above Orpheus's corrupted exosphere—was something massive. Not a ship. Not alive. Or not entirely dead.
It resembled a mech: limbs, maybe, shattered and retracted. Rusted armor plates floated around it like broken teeth. Its shape defied ratios—wrong proportions, impossible anchor points. Jagged silhouette. A carcass of forgotten war machinery—or something older.
And at its core—
—a hollow.
A gaping cavity where the mech's chest should be. Oval-shaped. Lit from within by a flickering white-purple pulsar, faint like a heartbeat trapped in cloth. The glow pulsed in rhythm to nothing Mara could name.
Then movement.
Something inside the cavity shifted.
No light source changed. But the shadows within repositioned—as if limbs or roots or tendrils dragged along unseen walls. She couldn't measure it. It had no outline. Just the impression of presence.
The pod's hull moaned.
Her arms twitched involuntarily.
It wasn't looking at her. It had no eyes. But it noticed.
Noticed her the way an ocean might notice a grain of salt.
Her implants surged—one final flicker of unauthorized telemetry. A single word flashed across her lens:
[ OBSERVED ]
She screamed. Not aloud. Not verbal. A scream felt through nerves, as if every hair on her body transmitted it.
Then the clouds rose up.
Orpheus's cloud layer was not vapor. Not water. It moved like something thick and slow, cell-packed and fibrous. The pod dove into it. There was no break. No boundary.
Just contact.
Everything turned gray.
Then black.
Her breath vanished from her lungs—not from suffocation, but dislocation. The pod compressed inward. Metal warped toward her face. Gravity reversed once, then failed.
Her vision swam. The world narrowed.
And just before it closed—
A flash.
Not light.
An eye.
Open. Immense. Pupil vertical, not human. Embedded in the cloudmass. Lidless.
It blinked once.
Then—
Nothing.