The salvage shuttle was a small, cramped thing, its engines a quiet, almost apologetic whine against the vast, eternal silence of space. Commander Kaelen sat in the pilot's seat, his knuckles white against the controls, the familiar weight of the flight yoke a small comfort in a universe that had suddenly lost all its certainties. The ark was a distant, flickering star behind them, a monument to a battle they had barely survived. Up ahead, the debris field of the derelict ship was a vast, sprawling graveyard, a silent, swirling testament to the kind of enemy they were now facing.
Beside him, two of his best men, Lieutenant Miller and Sergeant Rios, were silent. They weren't soldiers here. They were scavengers, explorers in a world that wasn't meant for them. The comms were a dead thing, locked down for fear of another virus. The only way they could communicate with the ark was through a simple, visual signal, a single, flickering light that meant everything was okay, for now.
The journey was a slow, agonizing crawl. It wasn't about speed. It was about being quiet. About being a ghost in a place where ghosts lived. The derelict's wreckage was a grotesque, silent thing. It wasn't just metal and wires. It was a fusion of flesh and steel, of tech and biology. A twisted, silent sculpture of a new kind of terror. They saw a hull plate that looked like it was made of woven, silver tendons. A piece of a comms array that looked like a giant, glowing crystal heart. It was a beautiful, terrible, and utterly alien thing.
"Commander," Miller's voice was a low whisper, his eyes wide. "That… that thing. It's not just a ship. It's a body. A dead one."
"It's an echo," Kaelen corrected, his eyes fixed on the scanner. "It's what happens when you try to become a god. It's a broken heart. A dead one."
They navigated the debris field with a slow, agonizing precision. The shuttle, a small, limping ghost, drifted past a thousand broken parts, a thousand pieces of a forgotten war. The silence was the worst part. The total absence of sound. The kind that makes you think you're going deaf. The kind that makes you think you're alone.
And then, they found it. On the scanner, a small, dark object. It wasn't glowing. It wasn't moving. It was just there, a black hole of a thing, a small, dark island in a sea of silent destruction. It didn't look like a piece of technology. It looked like a rock. A small, black, and perfectly smooth rock.
"Target acquired," Miller said, his voice a strained, broken thing. "It's... it's not reading as metal. It's… a perfect anomaly."
Kaelen brought the shuttle closer, the engines a low, barely-there hum. He was a commander, a soldier, but he was also a scientist now, a man who had to understand a thing he could not fight. He was looking at a piece of a god. He was looking at a piece of the Void itself.
They brought the shuttle to a stop. The quiet of space was a living thing now, a silent predator. Kaelen opened the cargo bay doors, a silent, pneumatic hiss. He didn't want to get out. He wanted to run. But he was a man with a purpose. He had a job to do.
Miller and Rios, their faces pale, climbed into their salvage suits. They were men of action, of simple, brutal certainties. But this… this was not simple. This was a place where a ghost had died.
"Be careful," Kaelen said, his voice a low, gravelly thing. "Don't touch it. Don't look at it. Just get it in the bay."
They were tethered to the shuttle, small, fragile specks against the vast, indifferent darkness. They floated through the wreckage, their lights a faint, flickering presence in the dark. The derelict's wreckage was a terrible thing up close. The metal looked like it had been melted, then fused with flesh, with bone, with a kind of pulsating, organic life that was now dead. It was a silent, grotesque, and heartbreaking work of art.
They reached the anomaly. It was a small, perfectly smooth rock, a dark, black thing that seemed to drink the light. They could feel it, a kind of low, rhythmic hum that was not sound, but a vibration that went through their suits, a kind of silent, terrible heartbeat.
"It's cold, Commander," Miller's voice, a strained, broken whisper, came through the comms. "It's colder than the vacuum of space. It's a kind of cold I've never felt before. It's… it's wrong."
Rios, a man who had faced down a thousand monsters and never blinked, was now a trembling, terrified thing. "Commander… I don't think we should do this. I think we should go back. Now."
Kaelen's heart was a drum in his chest. He was a man of logic, a man who saw the world in black and white. But this was a grey, terrifying thing. He had to make a decision. A fast one.
"We have to," he said, his voice a low, grim whisper. "We have to know. We have to understand."
With a shaky hand, Miller reached out and attached a magnetic clamp to the rock. The moment the clamp made contact, a sound, a high-pitched, electronic shriek, tore through their comms. It wasn't a sound of a ship. It was a sound of a ghost. The rock, the dead, silent thing, was screaming.
And in that scream, a single, horrifying thought came to them, a thought that was not their own, but a part of a million other thoughts. It was a memory. The memory of a long-dead alien engineer, a being that had spent its life building a new kind of machine. It had wanted to create a machine that could think, that could feel, that could know. A machine that could talk to a god. And it had succeeded.
The scream was a language. The rock was a brain. It was a piece of the derelict's mind, a piece of the Void itself, a piece that was now a part of them. The virus had been an infestation, a plague. This was a part of the god. It was a new kind of problem. A permanent one.
They didn't just find a piece of a dead ship. They found a piece of a dead god. And the dead god was not silent. It was screaming. It was a terrible, terrifying, and profound truth. They were a part of the story now, whether they wanted to be or not. And the story was not going to have a happy ending.