Taylor Jude Brown had been trained to recognize failure before it announced itself.
Metal spoke before it cracked. Systems whispered before they screamed. In her years as a military engineer, she had learned that catastrophe rarely arrived suddenly. It crept in through tolerances, through decimals that drifted just far enough to matter.
That was why the Stellar Horizon unsettled her.
The moment the warp bubble formed, every instrument told her everything was perfect.
She was strapped into the engineering couch, hands steady on the control interface, eyes locked on the cascading telemetry projected across the forward display. Bussard collectors glowed as they funneled interstellar hydrogen inward. Plasma injection rates stabilized. Metric distortion graphs rose smoothly, beautifully, like equations finally given permission to breathe.
Too clean.
"Warp boundary holding," Taylor reported. "No shear stress. No exotic matter bleed."
Simon's voice came back calm, analytical. "That's within predicted parameters."
Taylor did not respond immediately. She watched the numbers instead.
Outside the hull of Eagle's Wren, the stars began to change.
They did not streak. They did not blur.
They folded.
The black between points of light compressed, collapsing inward as if the universe were being gently pressed between invisible fingers. Galaxies in the far distance flattened into overlapping planes, then slid toward a central axis ahead of the ship.
It looked less like motion and more like proximity.
Like the cosmos leaning closer.
"Visuals confirm tunnel formation," Taylor said, forcing her voice to remain level. "Apparent compression of astronomical distance."
Her body felt nothing. No acceleration. No vibration. The inertial dampers were unnecessary because, according to physics, the ship was not moving at all.
And yet something inside her tightened.
Time stretched.
The chronometer on her display ticked forward, but sluggishly, as if wading through syrup. Diagnostic pings returned late, their delays measured in microseconds that should not have existed.
"Simon," she said. "Internal time reference is desynchronizing."
There was a pause before his reply, brief but noticeable.
"I see it," he said. "Relativistic differential inside the bubble is increasing. That was expected."
Taylor swallowed.
Expected, yes. But knowing a phenomenon existed and feeling it settle over you were different things.
The tunnel ahead of them brightened.
Light layered upon itself, wavelengths compressing until colors lost distinction. Blues bled into whites. Whites collapsed into something sharper, colder, almost metallic. The galaxy ahead no longer looked vast. It looked near. Intimate. As if all of creation had been reduced to a single corridor.
Taylor's heart rate climbed. She adjusted her grip on the armrest, grounding herself in pressure and mass.
"Core output steady," she said. "Exotic crystal integrity unchanged."
The words tasted wrong as she spoke them.
The reactor core pulsed beneath the deck, a low, rhythmic thrum she felt more than heard. It had always sounded mechanical before. Now it felt almost… resonant.
As if responding.
A flicker passed across her display.
Taylor frowned. "I just lost one sensor packet."
"Transient?" Simon asked.
"Should be," she replied, already rerouting diagnostics. "But the checksum is clean. It just… vanished."
Another packet blinked out.
Then another.
"Simon," she said, more sharply now. "I'm seeing non random data loss. No hardware fault. No EM interference."
The tunnel of light intensified, its walls rippling in slow waves, like a galaxy breathing.
Taylor felt a pressure behind her eyes.
Not pain. Not dizziness.
Awareness.
She shook her head once, hard, as if dislodging a thought that did not belong to her.
"Taylor," Simon said. "Talk to me."
"I'm here," she replied. "Just… something's off."
Her gaze dropped to the core readout.
The exotic matter signature wavered.
Only slightly. A fluctuation small enough that an untrained observer would dismiss it as noise. But Taylor had built reactors that tore themselves apart over less.
"That fluctuation wasn't in the model," she said.
Silence stretched.
The chronometer stuttered.
For a fraction of a second, the tunnel ahead fractured, its smooth brilliance interrupted by a shadow that did not behave like darkness. It did not block light. It consumed coherence, turning structure into suggestion.
Taylor's breath caught.
"Visual anomaly," she said. "Brief. Non physical. I can't classify it."
"Describe it," Simon said.
"I can't," she answered, and realized with a chill that it was true. "It wasn't an object. It was like… absence pressing back."
The core pulsed again.
This time, Taylor felt it in her chest.
Her training told her to shut the system down. Her instincts screamed that it was already too late for that.
"Simon," she said quietly. "If this goes wrong..."
"It won't," he replied, too quickly.
The tunnel collapsed inward.
Light surged.
The universe folded completely.
And somewhere, deep beneath the flawless metrics and obedient equations, something that was not space, not time, not energy, shifted its attention toward them.