Roach's voice never rose, yet against the backdrop of the firelake's thunder and erupting magma it sounded all the clearer.
The adjutant's brow tightened, a flicker of wariness in his eyes: "Sir, you suspect… this isn't some planetary megaproject, but something far more dangerous?"
Roach didn't answer at once.
He kept staring at the colossal hulk hanging alone in the void, gaze cold and hard.
The drone's lens drifted over its hull; every crack and ragged wound seemed to whisper a buried secret.
"Either way," he said quietly, "the fact that ship exists is enough to upend our assumptions about the humans in this world."
He turned to the adjutant and issued a brisk order: "Keep the drones on it. Try to sweep the bridge and other sections. Confirm any signs of life—or residual power."
"Yes, sir."
The adjutant acknowledged and pushed fresh recon tasking.
Out on the horizon, the dead giant still hung in silence, like some ancient beast forced to keep a dying world breathing with chains of blue-green light.
Its mute outline sat at the seam between raging firelight and black vacuum, radiating a pressure that put nerves on edge.
Every recon trooper who'd stepped through the gate understood: this was not just a planet dying. It was the herald of an unknown power revealing itself.
And in Roach's mind a notion was taking shape—by setting foot in this universe, the Empire might be walking into a cataclysm long in the making.
Not long after—Main Universe Earth, deep within the Imperial Palace's Meditation Hall.
The vast hall rose like a night-sky dome, its vault inlaid with tens of thousands of psy-crystals glowing faintly, a scattered firmament in solemn hush.
The Golden Throne loomed at center, mountain-massive, exuding a sanctity and authority impossible to ignore.
Samuel Young sat upon it already, his face composed, his eyes seeming to read past and present alike.
He wore no deliberate display of might; it flowed from him as a matter of course, freezing the air across the hall.
At the foot of the steps stood Ap and Melisa, poised and grave as ever.
"Your Majesty," Ap began, her voice carrying through the hall, "the far side of Gate 20 has been preliminarily confirmed.
"The planetary environment is extreme—heavy volcanic ash and radiative dust across the surface, a barren hellscape.
"Critically, our orbital drones report a vessel likely belonging to Universe-20 humanity—an engineering ship.
"Its energy beams are binding and bracing a torn planet, holding it back from total disintegration—barely."
As she spoke, multiple hard-light displays unfolded before Samuel, cold-hued particles tessellating into a hovering tableau of the broken world.
On the images, the planet's colossal fissures glowed faintly with magma, while blue-green beams cinched shattered crust into a perilous stasis.
A ship roughly 1,700 meters long sat at the lattice's heart—the source of the beams—yet utterly lifeless.
No light in the bridge—an iron corpse adrift in vacuum.
Melisa spoke as well, her tone lower than Ap's: "Your Majesty, per the proposal from front-line commander Lieutenant General Gary 'Roach' Sanderson, Recon requests the Engineering Corps dispatch a planet-class engineering ship through the gate to take over stabilization and repair. Otherwise, if the planet fails, the gate's transit node could suffer irreparable damage."
The holodata flipped to gravity fields, energy flux, spatial stability curves—violent, uneven, dangerous.
"…"
Samuel studied the numbers. No ripple touched his brow, but a pressure seemed to gather anyway.
He glanced to Ap and Melisa and lifted his left hand. The motion was slow, yet carried a sense of the irreversible.
"Approved."
His voice was deep—iron on stone, a sentence passed. "Engineering is to dispatch a planet-class ship at once through Gate 20, assume full control of stabilization and repair. If it cannot be secured in time, the gate's anchor will be lost."
"By your command."
Melisa dipped her head. Her voice stayed even, but execution was immediate.
Task flows and fleet scheduling populated the charts in light.
Light and shadow crisscrossed the Meditation Hall, an entire cosmos unfurling before the Emperor.
But Samuel did not yet look away.
For all his calm, as he watched that uncanny engineering ship, a shadow crossed the gold in his eyes.
"…"
A planet torn but forced to breathe—like a dying beast sustained by extraneous lungs. A ship that looked familiar in silhouette and energy architecture. In his mind, an "afterimage" rose.
He closed his eyes. From the depths of memory surfaced an old terror he'd played and watched in another life—"Dead Space."
That universe was not mere technocracy; it hid archaic relics and forbidden sigils.
A sundered planet, resource extraction, a silent giant in orbit—these details rang like an alarm, pointing straight at a dimension of madness and anomaly.
And that human ship stabilizing the world was, most likely—
The Ishimura.
"Dead Space" was a world he'd never lived, yet touched through many nights of playthroughs, wikis, and films.
Truth be told, back when smartphones first hit, after he got his first one, he downloaded many mobile-optimized titles—including "Dead Space: Mobile."
That was his first true contact with the series. Before that, he'd only watched the animated films.
"Dead Space: Mobile" etched a real shadow on a younger Samuel, seeding nightmares. He'd only dare play it in the dorm when classmates were gathered.
The Ishimura wore mining decks and energy veins across its hull—a steel beast devouring worlds. Its name had long been inscribed on the prologues of horror.
Samuel knew it was more than an engineering ship.
It embodied the central conflict of that universe—human greed and blind probing of the unknown.
Because out there, buried deep, were not just ores and isotopes, but something more ancient and uncanny—the Markers.
In his memory those Markers were monoliths of maddening glyphs, relics of an alien antiquity, with power to warp minds and remake life.
They seeded tumors in a civilization's bloodstream—stoking religious frenzy, twisting science, and catalyzing grotesque bioevolution.
Humans who drew too near saw their sanity unravel—hallucinations, whispers, mania—dragging them into a pit of death and recombination.
That was "Dead Space" at its coldest: death without end—return not as human.
He saw again those abominations of flesh—and steel—cobbled together.
Bodies no longer singular lives, but forced assemblies. Limbs bent at impossible angles, bones stabbing through skin to become blades. The howls in their throats were not pain, but a blasphemous ecstasy.
Necromorphs.
And their emergence was no accident, but the Marker's "will."
In "Dead Space," death wasn't final—merely a prelude to reassembly, a return in alien form.
Ships and colonies vanished in days.
Colder than any Zerg swarm, subtler than lesser daemons, this terror advanced without warcry or banners—only silence, whispers, and widening madness.
Samuel's gaze hardened in the half-light.
Compared to the Zerg's tidal annihilation, "Dead Space" was hidden and venomous.
It broke minds first, corroded souls next, then turned meat into blades.
Tap, tap.
His fingers rapped the Throne's arm. The hall held its breath; only the holos threw light on his face.
He exhaled, and the inference resolved—
If that Universe-20 engineering ship truly was the Ishimura, then the planet beyond had to be Aegis VII.
This came from the timeline he remembered.
The 2508 Ishimura incident—"Dead Space's" opening nightmare.
He mentally re-sorted the history, like leafing a familiar forbidden file.
Aegis VII—rich, Earthlike, a jewel of the Aegis system.
By then, the Concordance Extraction Corporation had pushed planet-cracking to its limit. Their planet cracker-class vessels—like the Ishimura—were monuments to industrial madness.
Behind CEC's board, though, lurked something worse—
Unitology.
That church believed the Markers were keys to eternity, to "ascension." When word came that Aegis VII might hide a Red Marker, they pushed CEC to send the Ishimura—to run an unlawful crack.
Not mere economic risk—a catastrophe by design.
Even before the Ishimura arrived, the colony on Aegis VII was showing omens.
Engineers suffering mass insomnia, psychosis, then dementia and violence.
In the end, over fifty suicides—proof it wasn't simple collapse, but the Red Marker's whispering breaking minds.
Worse still—the Marker's true power.
Two centuries earlier, the EarthGov had replicated Markers from one found on Earth, creating human-made Red Markers.
They placed three copies—on remote colonies like Epsilon Eridani, Gliese 581, and Aegis VII.
Two hundred years ago, when the Aegis VII team tried to activate their Red Marker, they followed its "DNA instructions" and created the first reconstitution microbes.
Then it all ran wild.
Necromorphs happened, the researchers died to a man.
Only then did humanity learn: the Markers not only birth necromorphs, they command them absolutely—and any necromorphs near a Marker's core will go dormant.
The research site was overrun—flesh and metal absorbed and repurposed—forming a collective giant organism: the Hive Mind.
After a sequence of failures, EarthGov's Colonial Commission wrote in Contingency Five—the highest emergency protocol:
If a Marker-linked event occurs, treat all researchers as insurgents; execute immediately;
Destroy all data utterly;
And once the operation concludes, the task force must self-terminate, to guarantee nothing leaks.
The Hive Mind on Aegis VII slept for two centuries—until the Ishimura came.
The Marker, the necromorph threat—unlike Zerg or Chaos or any known foe.
The Zerg devour in tide; Chaos corrupts faith and power; "Dead Space" strikes from within greed and obsession—detonating when touched.
Samuel followed the old timeline forward.
2446—CEC's Ishimura completes her maiden voyage as the first true planet cracker.
Her gravity tethers could hollow a world in months. Her "success" planted the seeds.
2505—CEC quietly builds a colony in the Aegis system to pave the way.
2508—the Ishimura receives orders for Aegis VII, and the disaster ensues.
The Red Marker on Aegis VII is moved to the ship's hold; the crew falls into spiraling psychosis; amid the chaos, the captain triggers the crack, severing communications.
The Hive Mind wakes after two centuries. Necromorphs boil forth.
The colony's survivors launch escape craft to orbit—and bring the plague aboard the Ishimura.
And the engineering ship becomes a silent hell.
Samuel watched the holos—the dead vessel hanging in alien space, the familiar scarring and tether beams unmistakable.
The Ishimura,
Aegis VII,
Dead Space—
But these were only the shadows of his youth. Having traced the arc, he gave Ap a crisp order:
"Summon Sui Meng to the hall."
"At once, Your Majesty."
Ap acknowledged and immediately called for the Primarch who had been waiting outside the Meditation Hall.
______
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