Echoes of Time - Chapter 1: The Abandoned Station

The shuttle slammed against the ancient space station.

Metal screeched. The magnetic docking equipment clamped down with brutal force, and Traq's merchant ship—the Adelina—shuddered beneath him. His hands gripped the console as the Mark IV 'Galaxy Hopper' settled into place against Arcadia's hull. Small by galactic standards, the shuttle was barely a speck of dust against the space giant's side.

Then silence.

The kind of silence that shouldn't exist on a functioning station. No thrumming engines. No whir of mechanized equipment. No people. The air circulation system still worked—his scans confirmed that—but everything else was dead.

Machines didn't die. A preposterous thought. Of course machines couldn't die...yet a chill ran down his spine. Wrongness pressed against his thoughts, a heavy dread he couldn't name. Nothing moved in there. Nothing called out or signaled or made itself known. The station loomed dark and silent, and his stomach dropped at the scale of that wrongness. Something so huge shouldn't be so empty.

And it was huge. Sixty thousand meters of metal and void, built for hundreds of thousands of souls. Now nothing more than a ghost town.

He wouldn't have believed it existed if he wasn't here right now.

But it was here. And so was he. Traq had come for a reason: to find answers. His teacher Vivian spent decades tracking the Arcadia, convinced it held secrets about the Vanguard program, about the implants they wore in their skulls, about where the power came from. Before she died, she made him promise to finish what she started.

But that was only part of it. The Ministry tried to kill him. The Empire branded him a traitor. And somewhere in his fragmented memories, something was wrong with who he was. Something fundamental.

*Find the Arcadia*, she had said. *Find the truth about what we are.*

That question had become an obsession. Every path he'd taken since her death—the killing, the running, the desperate survival—all of it circled back to this single burning need: to understand what he was becoming. The implant in his skull did things it shouldn't. Sensations tore through him that defied human experience—pain without source, emotions without cause, memories that belonged to strangers. Sometimes, in the dark quiet of space, he caught himself thinking thoughts that didn't seem his own.

If he didn't find answers here, he might lose himself entirely. And that terrified him more than any enemy ever had.

So he returned to the task at hand. His fingers flicked over the computer screens and terminals, drawing up all of the data about the Arcadia that he had managed to find over the last several months.

Years of war got him here. The battle on Bateria, where the sky burned perpetual amber through clouds of ash and the thin mountain air left soldiers gasping between volleys. The siege of Parwen, its jungle islands steaming under twin moons while the humidity rotted equipment and men alike. The day Vivian fell and took the last piece of his innocence with her. Then the darker years: assassinations, the fugitive's life, the slow realization that every institution he'd ever trusted was built on lies.

All of it led here. To this dead station. This impossible silence. This moment he'd been dreading and chasing in equal measure.

Hard evidence remained scarce—he would have killed for an internal layout. Only four had ever existed, if the old records were believed. People assumed all four were destroyed or lost centuries ago. He'd been one of the skeptics.

Until today.

***

Traq rubbed his eyes and blinked, glancing out the viewport at the swirling red gas giant below. How many ships passed right by here and never noticed the space station in orbit? Hundreds? Thousands? He wouldn't have found it if he didn't already know it was here.

The Indeil Kingdom built them as the backbone of their ancient fleet, back when the King ruled dozens of systems. History wrote them off as myth. Even Traq had been a skeptic.

But Vivian never was. And now here it was—the Arcadia Vii, third of its line, torn back out of legend and into cold, impossible reality.

Until now.

But if it's real, and none of the original crew ever reported the location...

The meaning of what he was seeing finally set in. Seven hundred thousand passengers. Not one ever returned. No crash. Not lost. But no one lived to tell about it. What the hell happened here? No word came after the Arcadia vanished; people speculated, some hoped, but now the awful truth. What killed them?

Part of him wanted to turn away from the answer.

"I shouldn't have come alone," he mumbled, rubbing his forehead.

Once, he wouldn't have been alone. Vivian would have been beside him, her hand steady on her weapon, her mind sharp and fearless. Morty would have had a joke ready. Cecil would have been checking his gear for the third time. Dina would have already scouted the first corridor and reported back.

The war took them all from him, one by one, in ways he couldn't have imagined when they'd first shipped out together. Now it was Traq and a broken robot against the silence of the dead.

He glanced over at the sound of intense clicking. His translation augment replayed the rapid binary clicks into understandable language. Vivian gave him the implant years ago—a necessity, she'd said, for the work they did together across dozens of worlds and species. He'd almost completely forgotten about the robot, and his shoulders relaxed slightly at the reminder he wasn't completely alone.

The robot's voice modulator broke many years ago, before Traq was born, and neither he nor his teacher ever bothered to replace it. They let it continue clicking along as the years went by.

"Well of course you don't count," Traq replied when the robot finished complaining.

The robot clicked angrily.

"How would you know it feels unnatural?" Traq asked. "And I'm not scared."

The robot clicked in binary again. "Shut it. Your sensors do not tell you that I'm scared."

He waited for the robot to finish clicking the response. "Well yeah, I do have a headache and my heart rate might have increased, but the rest is wild conjecture."

The TM model robot clicked again, slower this time.

"No," Traq said after it finished. "I don't think there's any risk inside. We did scans and picked up heat signatures—faint ones, clustered together. Could be residual reactor warmth or biological contamination from something that got aboard since. Doesn't look like a permanent settlement. I want to take a quick peek inside before we head on to Mali."

Again, he nearly added. The planet didn't appeal to him the first time through, but they would need to refuel before the trip back home. Mali, the habitable dirt planet where most of the Indeil Kingdom manufactured warships, was barely one system away. Less than a day's travel.

Traq rubbed his forehead. Sweat beaded toward his eyes. It wasn't hot in his ship, but nausea churned in his stomach. His skin prickled with cold sweat. This was nothing new. It would ease. Relax and stay focused.

Except that might not be true.

***

A sensation like this gripped him before, on Immis as a teenager, but never this intense. Deeper. Thicker. All around more disturbing than what he endured at the Church on Immis.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on edge. A prickle of awareness crept over him, over his shoulder, but when he turned there was nothing there. Nothing here except the empty, lonely ship and his TM model Robot.

Pain lanced along the left side of his skull, where the thin Vanguard implant sat. He'd received the implant at fifteen—almost thirteen years ago now, a lifetime—but what was happening now was something entirely new.

Sending his thoughts and mental powers out through the small device was second nature. But things coming in through the implant unbidden—that was different. He'd grown up using his mentalist powers—gifted by the Emperor some believed, but he was more inclined to say gifted by science—drawing thoughts and memories from other people. But this was different.

The source was wrong. In-human. The energy here pushed at him, seeking to use him as a conduit for release.

He could release telekinetic powers here with nothing more than a thought. Lift shuttles, tear down buildings, kill...

Kill what? The thought entered his mind unbidden with a gravity that made him hesitate. Traq blinked and found his muscles clenched. He forced himself to relax and took a deep breath.

The sentient mind pushing through his implant was gaining in strength.

What sentient mind? There was nothing here. They'd scanned. And even if there was another Vanguard here, this didn't feel like a human mind.

An alien presence burrowed into his brain through the implant.

*Through His Grace we grow strong.* Traq forced all thoughts from his mind except for the Vanguard's Chant, willing his body into a trancelike state: *Through His Grace we grow strong.*

The tainted energy ebbed at his consciousness, unnatural in its volatility. The small portion of his brain where he stored and collected his internal energy pulsed with its own rhythm. Pain lurked at the edges, waiting.

But it would be.

*Through His Grace we grow strong: through his grace we grow strong.* The energy called to him, taunted him, tempted him into claiming it for himself. This place was imbued with the life energy of something else. Something...evil.

What did evil even mean? The voice whispered in his head. It was his voice, but detached—distant. 'Evil' was a brand that the Ministry used to scare children, but the truth was much more complex. What could be more evil than destroying children who were different simply because they feared what they might become? If anything was evil, it was the Ministry.

Traq pushed the thoughts away, hoping to convince himself that they came from the sentient creature enveloping him. But his efforts were futile. Those thoughts were his own.

***

*Through His Grace we grow strong...*

He didn't serve the Emperor.

*Through His Grace we grow strong...*

The Ministry was a lie!

Traq slammed his fist down on the control panel in frustration, unintentionally blasting the coalescing energy out through his skull. His fist sank a foot deep into the equipment and destroyed the control panel, setting off a hot flash of sparks and the loud whoop of an internal alarm.

The force shocked him—far beyond anything his implant had ever produced. The alien energy flooding through his mind had amplified his power tenfold, using his frustration as a trigger. This wasn't his strength. It was the entity's, channeled through him like a lightning rod.

The speakers only managed one whoop before the entire ship plunged into utter darkness. The opaque view screen clouded over, cutting off his view of the outside stars and the ambient sound around him. Complete loss of sensation.

Things were still before unintentionally cutting off the ship's power, but the sudden loss of ambient activity was disorienting. The emptiness was oppressive.

"Oops," he mumbled, his voice ripping the emptiness to shreds. "TM?"

His call was answered by a stream of clicks and a high pitched binary whistle from his TM model robot inside the cockpit. The implant translated the robot's angry statement into Standard, and suddenly Traq wasn't as glad for having it.

"I'm not a bug," he replied to the robot. "And no, you are not an exterminator."

A few seconds passed and light flooded the room as a compartment on the robot's chest opened and stuck a flashlight out. The robot whistled in binary again.

"I know, I know," Traq said, shielding his eyes. "It wasn't exactly intentional."

Traq surveyed the cockpit, gauging the level of damage. His headache was gone, as well as the pressure that had been building in his implant. The intrusive sentience was gone as well.

The faint energy was still there, outside his reach, but it was as though he'd created a void in his immediate vicinity, leaving only the normal ebb and flow of space behind.

"Not as overwhelming as I thought," he mumbled.

TM gave another series of clicks, followed by a beep. "Why would I stumble to the engine room for a lantern when you have a flashlight?" Traq asked.

Another fast series of clicks from the robot. "Hell, when did you get so touchy? I'm sorry TM. Can you fix the panel or not?"

The robot unsnapped its body from a mounted dock on the floor and walked forward on reverse jointed legs, surveying the damage.

TM was old—flat-headed, featureless, built for endurance—and could see in virtually any condition.

A long few minutes slipped past before TM turned away from the control panel and headed toward the cockpit exit. "Wait! Can you fix it?"

This time the robot clicked and whistled for a good thirty seconds before resuming its course. "Alright, go ahead and reroute everything," Traq replied. "As long as you can get us out of here I won't miss having manual control. I shouldn't be gone for too long, so do what you can until I get back."

TM gave an affirmative click and disappeared into the rear section of the ship. The extent of the Adelina was a cockpit, two crew quarters, a restroom, lounge, and cargo hold; for Traq, who spent his time in smaller ships with more crew, the ship was spacious.

Back when he was still lapdog for the Emperor, he thought, then winced—even that wasn't right. Back when he wanted to be a lapdog. When he wanted to be one of his Chosen. Small mercy he never got the chance.

His jaw clenched. His fingers curled against the console. None of that mattered now. There was no going back. If they discovered his location they would still be hunting him. Right now his only saving grace was that they probably thought he was dead.

That life was past, and now he was nothing more to them than a lost and forgotten soul, with only his stolen vibro-sword to link him to his past.

Well, that and his teacher's old TM model robot.

If only she was here...

This moment, finally finding the Arcadia, was the culmination of what Traq's Instructor spent half of her life trying to accomplish. What began as an accidentally stolen thought from a man named Jim Crater had inspired her curiosity; and that curiosity had gradually shifted into obsession.

What would Vivian think if she could see him now? Would she be proud? The answer eluded him.

TM was out of the room now, and there was only a faint flicker of light and the sound of him working in the rear of the ship now to replace the void. Traq didn't want to spend more time here than he had to. He'd search the place over, confirm that it was empty, and then get the hell out of here.

The hairs along his arms refused to settle, and his pulse drummed a steady warning against his throat. He swallowed hard and pushed it down.

"I shouldn't have come alone," he repeated, removing a datapad from his pocket. With the Adelina's sensors down he would have to use the handheld device.

He scanned the space station for signs of life; heat signatures or power supplies. The device was slow and its interface cumbersome. A missed life form could mean death if he scanned too fast, but if he scanned too slow it would take weeks to cover the entire station.

Weeks he didn't have.

***

Two hundred separate decks to search. Some of the rooms were large enough to be called caverns. He continued scanning, pushing the handheld electronic device to its limits and beyond. He didn't expect to find anything, so when he stumbled upon a clumped group of heat signatures he couldn't hide his surprise. Humans? It didn't seem likely. They would have to be new to the ship. He couldn't get an estimate on numbers, but there couldn't be over fifty.

"People," he muttered absently. Where did they come from? Until the smuggler showed up on Terminus with the location of this station, there was no word about the Arcadia. And Traq had made sure he was the only one in Imperial space to get the information from that particular smuggler.

More-so, external energy shields were down on the Arcadia, so all of the normal hangers were out of commission for docking. Anyone trying to get in would have to cut through a bulkhead or use an external dock the same way he was.

But Traq hadn't spotted anything in his external sweep and his sensors picked nothing else up, which meant he wasn't sure how these people got on board. Something about this situation nagged at him—a puzzle with pieces that didn't fit.

Hell, nothing about this was right.

"Probably explains the dread," Traq whispered.

The hint of a smile traced its way onto Traq's lips. Wasn't he a little old for melodramatic fears?

Suddenly the lights and engine of the Adelina flickered back to life, igniting a few sparks on the console before power rerouted and the control panel went dim.

Traq jumped as a spark hit his hand and accidentally dislodged a picture hanging on the panel in front of him. The picture fluttered to the floor.

It was a picture of the ship's namesake, Adeline Tourrent. She was no more than sixteen years old in the image, smiling brightly at the camera in front of some old ruins. Traq remembered that day vividly, despite it being over twelve years earlier.

That was back when the galaxy still made sense, good people like Vivian battled against the evil Union soldiers and won, and nothing was more complicated than whether he should swear off love and join the Ministry or settle down and have a family.

Instead he chose neither. He was a failure in every sense of the word.

That picture of Adeline was taken when he fell in love with her on her home planet of Immis, when she was still a hopeful young girl. Before Traq failed her.

Before she was a slave.

***

Traq kept the photo—partly crumbled and fading—as a reminder of the second biggest failure in his life.

That was mostly why he kept it, at least. He was unwilling to give voice to the other reasons.

But Adeline wasn't a memory. She was a promise.

Six months ago, a contact in the Outer Colonies confirmed she was still alive. Sold to a labor syndicate on some hellhole planet whose name Traq had burned into his mind. Working in conditions he couldn't bear to imagine.

He was going to find her. Free her. And then maybe—maybe—he could look at himself in a mirror again without wanting to smash it.

The Arcadia was part of that plan. Vivian believed the station held secrets about their powers, about what the Vanguard were. If Traq could unlock those secrets, if he could master whatever waited here, he might finally have the strength to do what needed to be done. Not for the Empire. Not for the Ministry.

For her. For something that mattered.

"Since I'm going to die anyway, it's probably better you aren't here," he whispered to the picture, letting out a deep breath and turning on the Adelina's more powerful scanners, flicking the switches to bring the radar and radio scanners to life.

This time he searched for something entirely different than the life forms he'd already detected. He was hoping to find a source for the corrupted energy. There must be another life form here, a conscious being twisting its way into his mind. An entity either hidden within the station or the area surrounding it that was emanating such horrid and perverse power.

Perhaps the original crew of the space station found something during their travels and brought it back to the Arcadia Vii. That could explain the deaths. Or maybe one of the planets nearby emanated the energy.

Neither possibility seemed likely. No record existed of human devices able to corrupt his implant like this.

Readings showed the other planets in this system empty and uninhabitable. But that didn't preclude the chance that their chemical makeup or radiation was causing a distortion in his implant. Maybe Phargus held something that distorted his thoughts.

He was reaching for desperate answers, but the source had to exist somewhere.

A few minutes passed, and he widened his search, scanning out farther into the Arcadia again. And again, he found nothing.

"Must have some way of hiding itself," he murmured, relaxing. He spent a few minutes recovering. "The people inside could know something about it," he reasoned, standing up and walking to the exit hatch of the ship. "I'll pay them a visit."

He'd meant for his voice to sound strong and reassuring, hoping he could trick himself into believing he wasn't worried, but instead it sounded timid and out of place. He stopped at the exit hatch, struggling to suppress the trembling in his hands.

*Fear is natural*, his teacher's voice echoed in his mind, *but it is also the surest way to slip from our grace. When we succumb to fear is when we must be Reborn. We are born servants, and it is through our sacrifice that the galaxy can remain a safe and prosperous place. We cannot allow fear into our lives. Our duty is too important.*

Traq tried not to wonder whether he actually believed that.

He stared at the hatch, wrestling with his thoughts. His stomach churned. If anything, the unease had intensified. But he didn't have any idea of what lay beyond this door. No premonition, only a powerful sensation that he couldn't describe.

He rubbed his forehead as the energy built inside the implant once again. Pain throbbed through his skull, like echoes of thought that were...wrong. Some sentient creature lurked here, the wrong kind. Not human. Traq couldn't think of a rational way to describe it. He didn't like it.

What was he even doing here?

Vivian never said what she was going to do if she ever found the Arcadia. But she was never worried. He wished he had her confidence, because all he wanted to do was leave...

Once the thought edged its way into his mind, the pull was strong. He could turn around, wait for TM to finish repairing the ship, and leave. What loyalty did he owe to Vivian so many years later? She was gone now, wasn't she?

True, she spent more than a dozen years tracking this space station down with the sure understanding that it wouldn't stay hidden forever and that it held indescribable danger for the galaxy. But that was her objective and self-given duty, never his.

He'd never cared about these space stations as a child, understood nothing about them except that a woman he cared about told him they were important. What was here to find remained a mystery, as did why it might be useful. What if it wasn't supposed to be found...or worse, that he wasn't supposed to find it? What if this was where he died...

What was wrong with him? He'd faced terrible things...done terrible things...without concern. What was so unnerving about this place that it had him worrying over his own death?

He'd watched friends die on Parwen. He'd held Vivian as the light left her eyes. He'd fought his way through the siege of an entire planet and came out the other side with nothing left to lose. After all of that, death should have been an old acquaintance, not a stranger to fear.

But this was different. The wars were human. The killing was human. Whatever waited inside this station was something else entirely.

There had to be some subconscious reason he was so concerned, but he decided it wasn't a rational one. An effect of the corrupted sentience. Work through it.

Forcing his mind to focus, he checked over his gear. He was wearing a suit of black combat armor with a hooded black cloak pulled overtop it. He ran a hand through his short cropped raven black hair—unconsciously touching the long scar above his left eye—and pulled the hood up over his head.

The pockets of the cloak were filled with various supplies—rope, glow sticks, canteens—and his armor had dozens of pockets filled with clips, grenades, and power packs for his blasters. He kept a heat blaster strapped to his right hip and a projectile pistol on his left, as well as a holdout disruptor in his left boot.

But his most dangerous—and sentimental—weapon swung on his belt next to the heat blaster. It was worth more than all the other weapons combined.

The weight of so many items balanced around his body was comforting; he used a cloak in lieu of a backpack and experience taught him it would be easy to slip out of if he got into trouble without hindering his mobility.

Speaking of mobility, how long was he going to stare at this door?

He couldn't think of anything else to hold him back. His gear was ready, the Adelina was taken care of, and he had an objective in mind once he entered the space station: find and question the only people onboard. Other than the nausea churning in his gut, everything was in perfect order.

He held up his hand to push the button on the hatch that would connect his ship's bridge to the station's access hatchway and then hesitated, his hand wavering over the panel.

"TM? You there?" he asked, glancing down the hall to the rear of the ship. An affirmative series of clicks came back. "You can send that message now. She won't get it for a few more days after it hits the relays anyway."

TM clicked once in response. Satisfied, Traq turned back to the door and pressed the button before he could stop himself. The hatch slid out and to the left, opening the connected walkway between his ship and the station.

***

The Adelina's inner hatch opened. Traq stepped inside the small room to the outer hatch. The first door closed behind him. The walls pressed in around him in the small airtight pressurized room—as they always did when exiting the ship in space—and then the outer hatch slid open before him.

The cold hit first. Not the gentle chill of a climate-controlled ship, but the bone-deep freeze of a place that hadn't known warmth in centuries. The station's atmosphere stung Traq's exposed skin, raising gooseflesh along his arms and making his breath plume in thick clouds before his face.

Then the smell reached him.

Antiseptic at first—the sterile, chemical tang of air recyclers working without organic contaminants to process. But beneath that clinical layer lurked something older. Dust. Metal oxide. The faint, cloying sweetness of decay so ancient it had nearly faded to nothing. It was the smell of a tomb sealed for six hundred years and only recently cracked open.

Traq's boots touched the station floor, and the difference registered immediately. The deck plating was thick, industrial, designed to carry the weight of heavy equipment and thousands of personnel. But it was also coated in a fine layer of grit that crunched softly beneath his soles—accumulated particulates from centuries of slow atmospheric decay. The texture scraped against his boot treads with each step, a sound that seemed impossibly loud in the vast silence.

He peered into the corridor beyond. The station's emergency lighting had failed centuries ago, leaving only the faint glow of bioluminescent emergency strips running along the floor edges—ancient tech that still functioned through some miracle of engineering. The pale blue-green light painted everything in corpse colors, turning the metal walls into something that looked almost organic.

Those walls. Traq had seen warship construction before, but nothing like this. The Arcadia's corridors weren't the narrow, efficient passages of modern vessels. They were cavernous—fifteen meters wide, with ceilings that arched overhead like cathedral vaults. The metal was layered, riveted, showing the manual craftsmanship of an age before automated fabrication. Each plate bore the subtle marks of human hands, of workers who had shaped this vessel piece by piece.

And the silence. God, the silence.

No station this size should be quiet. There should be the constant thrum of power conduits, the whisper of air circulation, the distant clang of maintenance, the murmur of thousands of voices. Instead there was only Traq's breathing and the soft crunch of his footsteps, swallowed almost immediately by the acoustic void of empty corridors that stretched away into darkness.

The weight of that silence pressed against his eardrums like physical force. He could hear his own heartbeat, the rush of blood through his veins, the creak of his armor as he moved. Every sound he made seemed to echo for a moment before being devoured by the emptiness.

Traq dug out a glow stick, snap-ignited it, and tossed it down the hallway. The chemical light arced through the darkness, casting spinning shadows on walls that hadn't seen illumination in centuries. It skipped along about fifteen meters and came to rest against the side, its green glow revealing more of what the emergency strips had only hinted at.

The corridor walls were streaked with something dark. Old stains, long dried, that ran in patterns suggesting they had once been liquid. Not rust—the color was wrong, more brown than orange. And the patterns were wrong too. They dripped downward from the walls, pooled on the floor, splattered in arcs that spoke of violence.

Six hundred years ago, something terrible happened here.

The air grew colder as Traq moved deeper into the station, stepping over the bodies of the centuries-dead without looking at their desiccated remains. The environmental systems maintained atmosphere but not temperature—the station's heating had failed long ago, leaving the interior only slightly warmer than the void of space outside. His breath continued to mist, and frost formed on exposed metal surfaces, giving the walls a crystalline sheen that caught his glow stick's light.

The deeper corridors were worse. Here the walls changed—metal giving way to something that looked almost organic. Dark veins traced through the plating like roots through soil, and in places the metal had been torn away entirely, revealing a substrate that glistened wetly despite the cold. It pulsed, almost imperceptibly, with a rhythm that matched the ache building behind Traq's implant.

The station wasn't dead. It was being consumed. Converted into something else.

The smell intensified here—less antiseptic, more primal. Wet stone and old blood. The musk of something alive that shouldn't be. And threading through it all, a high, metallic odor that made Traq's sinuses burn and his eyes water.

He'd walked into something ancient and wrong. Every instinct screamed at him to turn back, to flee to his ship and never look at this place again.

But the answers were here. Vivian was right about that, at least.

And Traq had made a promise.

There was nothing between him and the glow stick, and the hallway continued farther on well past the light.

Traq crossed the bridge between the ships and took another step inside. The corridor stretched before him, swallowed by darkness beyond the glow stick's feeble light. His boots echoed against the metal floor—a lonely sound in all that emptiness, each footfall returning to him a half-second later from walls so distant he couldn't see them.

He moved forward, one hand on his blaster, senses straining against the oppressive silence. The cold pressed against him like something alive, seeping through his armor, settling into his bones. Twenty meters. Thirty. The glow stick's light faded behind him, and he ignited another, the green chemical glow casting strange shadows on walls that seemed to move when he wasn't looking directly at them.

That's when he saw them.

At first he thought they were bodies. Three figures slumped against the corridor wall, their forms barely visible in the edge of his light. He approached slowly, blaster drawn, waiting for movement.

None came.

They had been human once. That much was clear from the general shape—two arms, two legs, a head. But something had changed them. Their skin had taken on a grayish pallor, stretched too tight over bones that seemed to have shifted beneath it. Veins of something dark—not black, not purple—traced patterns across their exposed flesh like circuitry.

Their eyes were open. Staring at nothing. Milky white, without iris or pupil.

Traq's stomach lurched. He'd seen death before, in all its forms. But this wasn't death. These things were still warm—he could feel it from here, the faint heat that had registered on his scanner. Still breathing, if you could call the shallow, mechanical rise and fall of their chests breathing.

"What the hell happened to you?" he whispered. His voice fell flat against the walls, absorbed by the station's acoustic void as if the Arcadia itself were swallowing his words.

One of them twitched.

Traq's blaster came up, finger on the trigger. The figure's head lolled to the side, those blank white eyes somehow finding him despite their emptiness. Its mouth opened, and a sound emerged—not a word, not quite, but something that scraped against his mind like nails on metal.

The other two stirred. Rising. Not like people rise—jerky, wrong, their limbs bending at angles that made Traq's skin crawl. They moved as one, synchronized, puppets on invisible strings.

The truth slammed into him: they weren't the threat. They were the warning.

He backed away, blaster still raised. The converted humans—because that's what they were, humans converted into something else—didn't pursue. They stood there, swaying slightly, those milk-white eyes tracking his retreat with alien patience.

Whatever controlled them was content to let him go. For now.

Traq's heart hammered against his ribs. Every instinct he'd been ignoring since docking screamed at once—the trembling hands, the churning gut, the sweat that wouldn't stop. He should have turned back when he had the chance. For a split second, thoughts flooded through his mind.

The entity clawed at his skull, trying to rip its way inside his head through the implant. A mental connection slammed into him, but it was entirely different than anything he'd ever experienced before. Whatever it was, it wasn't human. It wormed its way into his mind and shredded his thoughts, screaming at the back of his brain.

The exit hatch of the station—the one TM insisted had no power—closed and locked behind him, but he neither noticed nor cared. Whatever creature was attacking him didn't want to hurt him. Its hatred was primal, and in that flash he understood that he was going to die. It tore at his consciousness with a fury that was indescribable.

*It can't be!* His mind screamed. *They aren't real. They can't be real!* But it didn't matter. Suddenly he understood that for thousands of years the Kanian Empire was wrong. The entire human race was wrong; wrong on such a fundamental level that the knowledge terrified Traq to his core:

Humans thought they were alone in the galaxy...

The sentient creature sought to destroy him, to punish him for what happened to it. In its fury, images flashed through his mind. Dead soldiers lying on the ground in pools of blood and gore, people with horrified looks on their faces as their conscious minds were destroyed. And worse—images of the converted, of human bodies twisted and repurposed, their minds hollowed out to serve as vessels for something ancient and hungry.

Minds merged together as the alien being fought through the implant into his thoughts. With clarity, he understood what this creature was, where it came from, and what it had done. They could never be prepared for this...

Six hundred and twenty-three years trapped here, alone. It killed everyone and no longer had a body of its own. All seven-hundred thousand crew, he thought numbly, plus the unfortunates who stumbled onto the station since. All dead because of this...this creature. The converted ones he'd seen—the lucky ones. The ones the intelligence kept as puppets, as extensions of itself, because even ancient alien minds grew lonely in the dark.

And that split second of awareness was all. The ground was rushing up to meet him, and everything went black.

***

But that was not the beginning.

The beginning was years earlier, on a scorched battlefield half a galaxy away, when Traq Lain was still young enough to believe the war would end and foolish enough to think the worst enemy he'd ever face would be human. The road to this moment—to the Arcadia, to the entity, to the terrible truth waiting in the dark—wound through blood and betrayal, through friends lost and loyalties shattered, through a war that consumed everything it touched.

To understand how he came to be here, lying unconscious on the floor of a dead station with an alien intelligence tearing at his mind, you had to go back to where it started.

Back to the bloodshed on Bateria.

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