Eryndor drifted beyond the gravity well of Calyx-9, its patched hull groaning like an old soul in the windless dark.
Kael sat alone in the observation deck, his thoughts flickering between alien fragments and fading human memories. Earthlight, once a pale jewel on the nav charts, had vanished. A blank spot now marked its position—Signal Loss: Primary Node.
For the first time in recorded history, Earth was silent.
"Try it again," Kael murmured.
Eryndor hesitated. The ship's synthetic mind had grown slower since merging partially with Kael's consciousness during the megastructure interface. It wasn't just damaged. It was changing.
"No signal. Quantum tether routes degraded. Long-range arrays unresponsive."
"Fallback frequencies? Legacy comm bands?"
"Negative. Earth's signal layer has collapsed. No trace of fallback beacons or orbital nodes."
Kael swallowed hard. That meant no news from the Concord. No confirmation that their rewrite of the Signal Cascade had worked. No idea whether humanity was even alive back home.
Behind him, Lorra entered, grease-stained and hollow-eyed. She tossed a data-slate onto the table.
"Navigation's corrupted. Drives are cooling faster than expected. If we don't pick a heading soon, we're just a ghost ship with good intentions."
Kael looked up. "No Earth. No uplink. No fallback path."
She raised a brow. "So we're officially marooned in a part of the galaxy no one remembers."
"We stopped the Cascade," Kael said, not fully believing it himself. "That has to count for something."
Lorra glanced at the empty star map.
"If no one remembers us did it even happen?"
The crew gathered in Eryndor's mess, which had become a kind of chapel for misfit salvation. Five of them, not counting Kael or Eryndor. Scarred, resourceful, twitchy—all changed in some way by the journey.
First Mate Enzo, once a Concord enforcer, now more metal than man.
Sera the linguist, who hadn't spoken aloud since Kael returned from the core.
Yim and Jace, twin engineers who finished each other's sentences, even in fear.
They stared at Kael like he might still have answers.
"Earth's dark," he told them. "No signal. No response."
"So the predator got there," Enzo said bluntly. "We were too late."
"Or the Cascade did its job," Sera whispered. Her voice was like paper tearing after so many silent days. "It erased everything to protect us."
Kael didn't respond. He didn't know. That was the unbearable part. The not-knowing. The growing realization that they might be the last archive of memory in the galaxy.
Yim cleared his throat. "So, uh… what do we do now?"
Kael glanced at Eryndor's slowly pulsing core.
"We survive. We carry what we know. We become the memory."
Later that cycle, Kael linked back into the neural interface—this time alone, unsupervised.
He wasn't searching for signals anymore.
He was searching for echoes.
Deep in the neural lattice, flickers of alien thought danced: fragments of the species that built the megastructure. Ghosts of entire cultures encoded into the original warning signal. Their memories clung to Kael like frost.
But something else stirred.
A response. Not a signal, exactly—more like a feeling. A presence. As if somewhere in the void, something had heard them reconfigure the Cascade. And now… it was watching.
"Kael," Eryndor said, "You shouldn't stay too long. Your neural pattern is destabilizing."
"I need to know if we're alone," Kael said.
"We are not."
That stopped him.
"What do you mean?"
"There is motion. On the periphery. A pattern—sub-signal resonance. Not Concord. Not human. Not predator."
Kael sat back, heart pounding. A third force?
He exited the interface gasping, eyes wide.
The crew would have to know. Earth was gone. The Concord was likely fractured or worse.
But something else was out there.
And whatever it was… it had survived the predator too.
Not by hiding.
But by becoming unreadable.