Last Light in the Dark - Chapter 2: The Anomaly

Something was wrong with the Endeavor.

Marcus sensed it the moment his shuttle docked—a vibration in the hull that hadn't been there before. The Endeavor had always hummed, but this was different. A discordant frequency that didn't belong.

The docking clamps engaged with their usual pneumatic hiss, and Marcus unstrapped from his seat with numb fingers. Through the viewport, the shuttle bay was chaos—more activity than any ordinary dock cycle. Crews ran between ships with the frantic energy of disturbed insects, voices lost in machinery and alarms.

Soldiers, mechanics, and officers packed the halls with an urgency he'd never seen in six months aboard this vessel. The Endeavor was an M-Class warship, built for strength and utility at the complete expense of anything that could be described as "luxury." The hallways were narrow and jagged, with pipes running through them like exposed veins. The air tasted of recycled breath and hot metal. They were barely wide enough for two people to pass, which meant a lot of shoving as people rushed to their destinations.

"Move it, grunt!" A cargo specialist shouldered past Marcus hard enough to spin him into the wall. The impact sent a sharp pain through his shoulder, but the man was already gone, swallowed by the crowd.

Rylee disappeared to the bridge the moment their shuttle landed, her boots striking the deck in quick, even steps. She was late for a briefing with the other officers. He'd seen the flash in her eyes through her visor—that tightening around her mouth that presaged a storm.

"You'd think the universe was ending," Lucas muttered beside him, ducking as a technician rushed past with an armful of cable. "People need to calm down."

"Maybe it is," Nigel said from behind them, his voice pitched just loud enough to hear over the ambient noise. "Ending, I mean. Would explain a lot."

The rest of the team split off to their various tasks. Since Nigel couldn't remotely upload the logs he recovered, Marcus had to personally deliver the terminal he recovered from the wreck to the quartermaster's office. The journey took twice as long as usual, threading through crowds that seemed to grow denser the closer he got to the ship's core.

The quartermaster's office was buried deep in the bowels of the ship, past the reactor core and through a maze of service corridors that smelled of coolant and old decisions. The man behind the desk—Hendricks, according to his faded nameplate—barely looked up when Marcus entered.

"Log it and leave it on the pile," Hendricks said, gesturing vaguely at a corner where equipment formed a small mountain. "I'll get to it when I get to it."

"This might be important—"

"Everything's important today." Hendricks met his eyes, and something in that gaze made Marcus's neck tighten. Not fear. Resignation. "Just leave it."

After that, he dropped his kit off in his quarters, his mind circling that look in Hendricks's eyes. The quartermaster had been aboard the Endeavor for fifteen years. He'd seen pirate raids, diplomatic crises, everything in between. What could put that expression on his face?

No sooner had he stepped inside his five-by-eight quarters when the speakers clicked to life:

"Attention all crew members and civilians aboard the Endeavor: All enlisted officers of rank Lance Corporal or higher please assemble on the main deck. All other crew members assemble in your respective mess halls for a ship-wide brief. ETA ten minutes."

Marcus held his breath as the announcement clicked off and his room fell silent. He had never heard of a ship-wide briefing before. In six months, he'd attended maybe a dozen sectional briefings. Ship-wide meant everyone. Ship-wide meant serious.

He hesitated, staring at his bunk with its rumpled blanket and the photograph of his family taped to the bulkhead. His mother, his father, his younger sister with her gap-toothed smile. They were very far away right now.

Then he rushed back out into the hallway. He'd have to hurry.

The hallway jumble was worse as the entire crew streamed to their designated locations. The emergency lighting had switched on at some point—when had that happened?—bathing everything in harsh red that turned familiar faces into masks of shadow and crimson. Marcus ducked and weaved, sliding sideways past everyone else and squeezing through any gap he could find. It earned him angry looks, but right now he couldn't care less.

He'd known when signing up how dangerous this job could be, but the actual chance of being in a warzone had always seemed so small. Distant. Abstract. The kind of thing that happened to other people in other times.

Don't jump to conclusions, he told himself as he squeezed between two arguing technicians. The brief could be about anything. Doesn't mean there was an attack.

Yeah. Right.

His palms sweated anyway. His heart wouldn't slow. The voice in his head kept tallying the ways this could go wrong.

He stumbled into the mess hall along with a stream of latecomers. The space was packed with more soldiers than he'd ever seen gathered in one place. The usual smell of recycled air and bland food had been overwhelmed by the press of bodies—sweat and fear and the acrid tang of anxiety. He recognized most of them, but there were faces he'd never seen who worked opposite shifts. Names that had been database entries, suddenly real, suddenly present, suddenly sharing the same uncertainty.

His team was there waiting: Nigel, Lucas, and Chelsea Park. The only one missing was Rylee, still up with the officers on the main deck. Marcus slipped into the seat next to Chelsea. He glanced at the others—uncertainty met uncertainty.

"Any word?"

"Nothing yet," Lucas said. He was drumming his fingers against the table, a nervous habit Marcus had noticed a dozen times before. Normally it grated. Today it was almost comforting. A sign of normalcy.

"Nothing from my sleuthing either," Nigel added, shaking his head. His usual enthusiasm had drained out, replaced by something darker. "Half the crew thinks it's an attack from the outer planets, the other half think it's a direct order from the First Citizen. And apparently communications with the anomaly zone have been unreliable—long-range signals are dropping. That's part of why nobody has real information."

"Which just means more panic," Chelsea said. Her voice was steady, but her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, knuckles white.

Marcus frowned. "The First Citizen?"

Everyone stared at him, and then Lucas burst out laughing. Too loud. "Oh, that's right. Sometimes we forget you grew up in such a sheltered life."

Heat rose to Marcus's face. He hated when they called him out about his upbringing. He came from a wealthy family on the planet Dresbon, which was famous for its utter disdain for Core world politics and history. He could list all thirty of the last Lords of Dartmuth and describe the local geography outside Dresbon's capital in exacting detail, but for anything from the wider galaxy, he was hopelessly out of the loop.

"The Core World leader," Chelsea explained with a shrug. "Core World Emperor would be more accurate, but they deemed millennia ago such a title had too much baggage and changed it to First Citizen. Marketing, basically. Makes autocracy sound democratic."

"He doesn't give orders to specific ships," Nigel added. "Like, ever. He rules through appointed governors and military commanders. Which means if he is giving orders to us directly, it would have to be something unprecedented."

"Not likely," Lucas objected. "It's an attack. Has to be. Why else would they scramble like this?"

A hush fell over the crowd as the viewscreen at the front of the mess flickered to life and the lights dimmed. The sudden silence was almost worse than the noise had been—the held breath of hundreds of people waiting for news that might change everything.

"Looks like we're about to find out," Chelsea said.

After a few seconds of blank white, the viewscreen shifted into focus on Captain Blythe Jessup. She had gray hair pulled back in a severe bun, eyes the color of storm clouds, and had never, in six months, smiled at anyone. She was not, according to shipboard gossip, a woman who tolerated weakness in any form.

"I know you are all wondering what is happening," she began without formality, her voice flat and precise, "but I will strongly caution everyone against the rampant speculation that has been pervading the ship over the last several hours. It is unbecoming for a crew of this nature, and such fear-mongering will not be tolerated."

She paused. Those gray eyes swept across the room.

Finally, she began speaking again.

"The update, as it pertains to all of you, is this: we have been tasked with joining the rest of the fleet in this region outside an anomaly to assist in a rescue and recovery mission. It will take us outside our pre-planned route and delay our port arrival by an indeterminate amount of time. There has been no attack, and these orders come from the fleet commander of this region. Your immediate commanders will fully brief you on a need-to-know basis.

"Anyone caught engaging in further untoward speculation regarding our orders over the next few hours will be punished to the fullest extent of the law."

And with that, the connection terminated with an abrupt click. The screen went dark.

Everyone in the room sat in shocked silence for thirty seconds, processing what they'd just heard—or rather, what they hadn't heard. Then Lucas burst out laughing, the sound sharp and manic in the quiet.

"I guess our captain doesn't like gossip."

"Guess not," Chelsea agreed, leaning back in her chair with bemused frustration. She was a diminutive woman who kept her blonde hair in a tight bun, almost a mirror of the captain's own severe style. She had green eyes and a quick wit and was one of Marcus's closest friends—one of the few who didn't treat him like an outsider.

"She's good at giving us information without telling us anything," Nigel said, rubbing his temples. "Rescue mission? Anomaly? I know less than I did before. And the communication drops near the anomaly zone—that's not normal interference. Long-range signals don't just fail like that. Whatever's out there is blocking them. Local transmissions probably still work inside the barrier, but nothing in or out. That's why command is using couriers instead of secure channels."

Marcus just shook his head. The entire situation felt off-balance, like reading a report with half the sentences blacked out.

"What now?" he asked.

"Now we wait for Rylee," Chelsea said. "She'll have a real update. Officers always know more than they're supposed to tell us."

"Unless we're not important enough to be included," Nigel added. "And in that case, we just accept that our leave was delayed for an unspecified reason."

"We better be getting paid for this," Lucas said.

Nigel laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Not a chance."

But Marcus wasn't thinking about pay. He wasn't thinking about leave or speculation or the captain's veiled threats. He was thinking about that word she had used. The word that had stood out like a beacon among all the careful military phrasing.

Anomaly.

In all his years on military vessels—admittedly not that many, but enough to know the patterns—he'd never once heard command use that word. They called things "situations" or "incidents" or "tactical scenarios." Clean. Clinical. Controllable. Words that fit into boxes on forms, that could be categorized and filed and forgotten.

Anomaly suggested something else entirely. Something outside their experience. Something they didn't have a word for because they'd never encountered it before.

Something wrong.

His mind drifted back to the wreck they'd just left. The stuffed bear with its button eyes. The terminal with its logs of a ship's final moments. The gnawing sense that something fundamental had shifted when he wasn't looking.

And for reasons he couldn't explain, a cold certainty settled into his chest: whatever they were heading toward, none of them were ready for it.

None of them could be.