The crater still smoked when I climbed down its ashen slope. Each step sank into loose gravel, crunching against fragments of stone still warm from the impact. The air was acrid—burnt metal, scorched soil, and something else I could not name but would never forget. Behind me, Ka!ri and !Gareseb moved with careful precision, rifles trained but tension in their shoulders. No one spoke. Even their boots seemed to tread softer, as though the ground itself might bite. It lay where it had fallen, tangled among broken rocks. A long mass of sinew and bone, alien yet unmistakably alive. Limbs bent wrong, twitching sporadically like nerves striking metal. Its chest rose shallowly, unevenly, as though breathing itself was foreign. Rachel stood at the crater’s edge, hands clenched until her knuckles shone white. Pale, sweat-dampened hair sticking to her temples, eyes fixed on it with something I couldn’t name—fear, maybe, or recognition. “Is it conscious?” I asked quietly. “Not like us,” she

The air in the council chamber was cycled and sterile, but the mood was thick enough to taste—a metallic blend of fear, suspicion, and ozone from the overworked life support. I stood in the center of the obsidian ring, every eye boring into me. The faces of the Consolidated Human Survivors were pale, etched with the fresh trauma of extinction. The Khomani elders, including ǂGao and a stony-faced Da’kar, were carved from harder stuff, their expressions unreadable, their postures radiating a skepticism that felt like a physical force. “We do not propose a mission of conquest,” I said, my voice echoing in the tense silence. “We propose a surgery. A precision strike at the source of the infection.” I gestured to a holoscreen that flickered to life, displaying the captive Rake in its containment cell. A collective, sharp inhale hissed through the room. “This is not a prisoner. It is a living guide. Its hive-mind connection is the only map we have to their homeworld—the only way to ensure t

The silence on the bridge was a physical weight. The viewports showed the star-dusted blackness of the void, Mars a fading ochre marble in our wake. We were moving. The mission was underway. But the triumph I should have felt was a leaden cold in my gut. We had our mandate, bought with a currency of terror and a calculated lie. Around me, the bridge crew worked with a subdued efficiency, their voices hushed, their movements precise. They had seen the adolescent Rake. They had felt its alien fury. The victory in the council chamber felt distant, cheapened by the visceral horror of the attack. We were flying into the abyss, and the abyss had just proven it could already be living in our walls. I stood from the command chair, the motion feeling too loud in the quiet. “Ka!ri. With me.” She followed without a word, her footsteps a silent echo of mine down the sterile, brightly lit corridor. The door to my quarters hissed shut behind us, sealing us in a tomb of our own making. The room wa

The emerald beam from the lead ship didn’t strike us. It unmade the space around us. One second, the bridge was a hive of controlled chaos, the thrum of the engines a constant reassurance. The next, a silent, expanding wave of distortion hit us. It was a physical blow. The main lights died with a sound like a dying man’s last gasp. The holographic displays shattered into static snow. The deep, comforting hum of the engines was replaced by a deafening, absolute silence, broken only by the frantic beeping of backup power cells failing one by one. The emergency lighting flickered on, casting the bridge in a dull, oppressive red haze, like the inside of a freshly opened wound. We were dead in the water. Not just disabled. Erased. Before the disorientation could even fully set itself into panic, the main airlock door—a foot of reinforced titanium alloy—exploded inward with a shriek of tortured metal. The bridge doors followed a heartbeat later, blasted off their tracks. They moved in th

The silence was the third member of our crew now. It had weight, texture, a cold, metallic taste. It was the absence of the Star-Chaser’s heart, the deep, comforting hum of her engines that had been my world for years. Gone. Replaced by the creak of a cooling hull and the too-loud sound of my own heart thudding against my ribs. The last emergency light on the bridge gave a final, pathetic hiss and died, plunging us into a blackness so complete it felt like a physical shroud. The only light was the steady, ominous blink of the life support counter on my command slate, its glow a death sentence: 17:42:11. We weren’t a ship anymore. We were a coffin, drifting in a sea of nothing. The debate had been a ghost of its former self, voices hushed in the dark as if the enemy might still be listening, their ears pressed to the cold hull. “It is our duty,” Dr. Aris insisted, his voice trembling almost as much as the hand he held over a secondary comms panel. He’d found a spark left in it, a tiny