Kael's palm pressed heavily against the cold, damaged surface of the alien device. The texture wasn't smooth like metal, but a slightly gritty unknown material. Even in its ruined state, one could feel the precision and power it once held.
There was no expected energy surge, no dazzling light. The device remained as silent and inert as a common rock.
One second, two seconds...
At the lab's center, the "Pandora Stone" seemed to rapidly recover from Lia's brief disruption. The remains of Director Vance stopped convulsing, the empty eye sockets blazing with piercing white light once more, the distorted shrieking rising in pitch and fury:
**"Interference... ineffective... touching... the forbidden... ignorance... must be purified!"**
An even more violent energy field crashed over them like a physical tsunami! The mental pressure, which had just lessened, instantly multiplied, threatening to crush Kael's will! More crystalline aggregates swarmed from the churning matrix, no longer just sprouting from the floor and walls but now hanging and dropping from the ceiling like stalactites, crashing down towards the trio!
The roar of Rex's blaster took on a desperate tone. "Commander! Hurry! I'm running dry!" His energy cell indicator glowed a glaring red. His armor shields flickered violently under the concentrated assault, on the verge of overload. An energy ray grazed his shoulder plate, carving a deep gash that revealed internal circuitry, sparks flying.
Lia's situation was equally critical. The backlash from her forced disruption was worse than imagined. Her synthetic skin was ruptured in multiple places, exposing flickering, delicate components beneath. She was half-kneeling, straining to maintain the electromagnetic suppression on Vance's remains, but its effectiveness was waning rapidly. The shrieks from the remains grew more coherent; the energy link to the crystal core was re-stabilizing.
"Dammit!" Kael raged internally, his fist pounding the device's cold shell. Had he guessed wrong? Was this just useless scrap?
Just as he was about to give up—
*Hmm...*
A faint vibration, almost completely masked by the battle's din, came from where his hand made contact. Then, deep within the damaged device, something stirred—an incredibly subtle activation, like the final beat of a dying heart.
No light, no powerful energy wave. But a unique information stream, utterly different from the chaotic, frenzied energy signature of the Pandora Stone, trickled silently into Kael's consciousness via his neural interface, like a tiny brook!
It wasn't an attack, nor a whisper. It was a... fragmented, warning... **record**!
His vision shifted again, but this time it wasn't a horrific phantom created by the crystal's consciousness. It was a real memory fragment from this ship's final moments:
*...An unfamiliar starfield, the ship cruising smoothly... Suddenly, alarms blared! Sensors detected an incomprehensible, high-dimensional energy fluctuation... A small, gray-white glowing object (the crystal itself!) manifested inside the ship like a ghost!... The crew's reaction wasn't attack, but extreme... terror and despair! They seemed to *recognize* this thing!... The crystal swiftly began transforming the ship's internal structure and its non-human crew. Resistance was futile... The ship's AI core, before being completely consumed, initiated a final emergency protocol—not to fight, but to... **contain**! It channeled most of its power into a unique **regional spacetime stabilization field** based on quantum entanglement, attempting to seal the crystal, along with a portion of the ship, entirely within a temporary spacetime bubble!... The record ended with the faint feedback of the stabilization field activating, immediately followed by being utterly overwhelmed by endless gray-white light...*
The information stream cut off abruptly.
Kael's eyes snapped open, his pupils contracting!
He understood!
This non-human ship wasn't the crystal's "container" or "transporter"; it was a victim too! Its crew, in their final moments, had tried to seal the crystal away using some form of spacetime technology! But clearly, the containment had failed, or only delayed the crystal's spread, until who knows how many years later, the seal weakened, the wreckage crashed here, bringing the scourge to the "Lonely Endpoint" outpost!
The key was that **regional spacetime stabilization field**!
This technology didn't attack the crystal directly—that seemed ineffective—but instead altered the local spacetime properties *around* the crystal, creating an "isolation zone," severing its energy and informational links to the outside, preventing its spread and transformation, potentially even forcing it into a kind of "stasis"!
Human technology might not fully possess such advanced spacetime manipulation, but within this ship's wreckage, there might still be remnants of the device that powered this field, or at least... its underlying principle!