Nigel Rhodes had been staring at the same readout for forty-seven minutes. The numbers hadn't changed. He wished they would. A fluctuation, a spike, even a complete system failure—anything to explain what he was seeing without accepting what it meant.
The coffee in his cup had gone cold, leaving a bitter film across his tongue that matched the staleness of recycled air—that familiar metallic tang of atmosphere filtered through too many lungs, scrubbed and rescrubbed until it tasted of nothing but machinery. He couldn't remember when he'd last eaten. The laboratory around him hummed with the quiet efficiency of systems designed to run without human intervention, the overhead lights flickering with that intermittent pulse that maintenance kept promising to fix, casting harsh shadows across banks of monitoring equipment that had operated flawlessly for longer than Nigel had been alive. Everything worked exactly as it should.
That was the problem.
The warp route sensor array filled the wall of his laboratory, seventeen monitoring stations connected to probes scattered across human space. Each station displayed the same baseline metrics they'd displayed for two centuries: quantum field stability, dimensional membrane tension, resonance frequency deviation. Numbers that hadn't moved more than three decimal points since his great-grandfather's generation. Numbers that every scientist in the division had come to treat as constants, as immutable as the speed of light or the charge of an electron.
Until today.
"Run the diagnostic again," he said to the empty room. His voice sounded strange—too loud in the stillness, too small against the weight of what he'd discovered. The computer complied without comment, cycling through calibration protocols that Nigel already knew would return nominal results. He'd run this diagnostic eight times now. The equipment wasn't malfunctioning. The equipment had never functioned better.
The problem was what it was measuring.
Station Seven—the monitoring probe at the Arcturus junction—showed a 0.003% deviation in membrane tension. A fraction of a fraction, invisible to any instrument except his own. The kind of variance that automated systems were designed to filter out as noise, the kind of subtle shift that would escape notice in any normal context.
But membrane tension didn't deviate. Not ever.
The dimensional barriers between human space and what lay beyond had been sealed two hundred years ago by methods no one fully understood, using sacrifices no one talked about, and they'd held firm ever since. Three generations of scientists had monitored these readings, documented their stability, published papers about the remarkable constancy of the seal. Nigel's own doctoral thesis had been a statistical analysis of two centuries of unchanging data.
And now that data was changing.
Nigel pulled up the historical records, overlaying two centuries of readings in a cascading display that filled his secondary screen. A flat line, essentially. Two hundred years of absolute stability, of barriers holding, of humanity sleeping peacefully while something vast and hungry waited on the other side. The graph looked like an EKG of a dead patient—no movement, no variation, just the steady assurance that nothing was happening.
Except at the far right edge of the display, where the line began to rise.
Seven weeks ago. So small that the automated systems had dismissed it as sensor noise. So insignificant that no one else would have noticed, no one else would have looked twice, no one else would have felt the cold terror that Nigel had felt when he'd first seen the numbers tick upward by a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
But Nigel had noticed. Nigel had built these sensors himself, calibrated them with his own hands, spent three years developing algorithms specifically designed to detect exactly this kind of subtle shift. He knew the difference between noise and signal. He knew it in his bones.
This was signal.
He pulled up Station Twelve. Betelgeuse corridor. The same deviation, emerging six weeks ago—one week after Arcturus. Station Three—the Procyon gate—five weeks ago. Station Fifteen, then Eight, then Twenty-two. One by one, across the entire network, the readings began to shift. Different rates, different magnitudes, but all trending in the same direction.
The pattern was unmistakable once you saw it. Ripples spreading outward from somewhere beyond the barriers, growing stronger with each passing week. Not random interference, not equipment drift, not solar radiation or gravitational anomalies or any of the dozen explanations that Nigel desperately wished he could accept.
Something was pushing against the fabric of reality itself.
Something was trying to break through.
"Computer, calculate rate of deviation increase across all active monitoring stations. Include confidence intervals and projected trajectory."
The response took longer than it should have. Nigel watched the processing indicator spin, his throat tight with the knowledge that the computer was about to confirm what he already knew.
"Rate of increase: 0.00017% per standard day. Confidence interval: 94.7%. At current trajectory, membrane tension will exceed safety parameters in approximately eighteen months."
Eighteen months.
Five hundred and forty-seven days until the barriers that had protected humanity for two hundred years failed completely. A year and a half of borrowed time before the portals reopened and the Dominion returned.
Nigel's hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his workstation, willing steadiness into fingers that refused to cooperate. The cold metal did nothing to calm him. Nothing could have calmed him right then. He'd just been given the expiration date for human civilization, and the computer had delivered it in the same bland tone it used to report equipment status.
He needed to tell someone.
The thought paralyzed him for a moment, because who would believe him? The data was subtle. The deviation was barely perceptible. Admiral Chen might listen—the Chen family had carried the burden of this knowledge for generations, had spent two hundred years preparing for the possibility that the seal might someday fail—but even he might dismiss a 0.003% deviation as within acceptable tolerances.
The military council would demand certainty before acting, and Nigel couldn't give them certainty. He could only give them probability. He could only give them data, and data this subtle wouldn't survive a committee review. They'd want independent verification. They'd want peer review. They'd want months of analysis while the numbers kept climbing and the window for action kept shrinking.
But there was someone else who might understand. Someone who wouldn't need convincing. Someone who might already know, on some level, what was happening to the barriers.
Kate.
The thought of her name sent a different kind of shiver through his spine. He'd examined her twice now, under the guise of routine medical monitoring. Chelsea had brought her in both times—the worried mother watching her impossible daughter submit to tests that measured things no medical protocol was designed to detect. Nigel had recorded readings that he'd shown no one, data that sat encrypted on his personal server because he didn't know what else to do with it.
Her DNA remained unchanged—fully human, not a single marker of Hollowing corruption. Every genetic sequence exactly as it should be, every chromosome pristine, every cellular structure indistinguishable from any other ten-year-old girl in the fleet.
But her energy signature... her energy signature terrified him.
The Hollowing hadn't possessed her. It had merged with her. Threaded itself through her nervous system like mycelium through dead wood, becoming so intertwined with her biology that separating them would kill her. Or maybe she'd kill whoever tried. Nigel had seen the readings spike when Kate became agitated, had watched energy patterns surge in ways that no human body should be capable of producing.
She didn't know what she was. He was fairly certain of that. She felt different, knew she could sense things others couldn't, but she didn't understand the magnitude of what was living inside her. The entity—no, the Hollowing, he had to use the right terminology—hadn't consumed her identity the way it did with other hosts. Instead, it had adapted to her. Shaped itself around her consciousness. Made itself at home in a ten-year-old girl's mind and started... growing.
Nigel pulled up the readings from Station Seven again, then overlaid Kate's most recent bioscan. The correlation was imprecise—comparing dimensional membrane data to human neural activity was hardly an exact science—but he saw what he'd suspected he'd see.
The deviations matched.
When the barriers had weakened at Arcturus, Kate's neural activity had spiked. When Betelgeuse had shown fluctuation, her energy signature had shifted. When the membrane tension had begun climbing at Procyon, Kate had complained to Chelsea about headaches that no medication could touch. Each ripple spreading through human space corresponded to a change in the child who shouldn't exist, the vessel who carried something ancient inside her.
The seal wasn't just weakening on its own. Something was testing it. Probing it. Looking for the path of least resistance, the weakest point in the barrier, the place where two hundred years of accumulated pressure might finally break through.
And that path led directly through Kate Morrison.
Nigel reached for the comm panel, then hesitated. His finger hovered over the activation switch, trembling slightly despite his efforts to hold it steady. Once he spoke these words, everything changed. The comfortable illusion of safety that humanity had maintained for two centuries would shatter like glass. Wars had started over less certain intelligence. Civilizations had collapsed from smaller revelations.
But civilizations had also fallen because the people who knew the truth had stayed silent until it was too late.
"Computer, establish secure channel to Fleet Admiral Chen. Priority encryption. Personal eyes only."
"Channel established."
Nigel took a breath that did nothing to steady his racing heart. The words formed in his mind, dry and clinical, the language of science struggling to contain something that defied rational explanation.
"Admiral, this is Dr. Nigel Rhodes, Dimensional Sciences Division. I need to report an anomaly in the warp route monitoring network. Multiple stations are showing synchronized deviation patterns that I believe indicate—" He paused, forcing himself to say the words, to make them real by speaking them aloud. "I believe indicate deterioration of the dimensional seal. After two hundred years of stability, something is pushing against the barriers from the other side. The seal is weakening. And if I'm reading the data correctly, the rate of deterioration is accelerating."
He terminated the message before he could lose his nerve. The admiral would respond within the hour, probably sooner. Chen didn't sleep much—another family trait, along with the weight of knowing what waited on the other side of the barriers. And then Nigel would have to explain everything—the pattern, the correlation with Kate's biosigns, the terrible math that gave them eighteen months before the walls fell entirely.
But there was something else he needed to do first. Something that might provide context for what he'd discovered. Something that might explain why the seal was failing now, after two centuries of stability.
He pulled up the deeper archives, the classified databases that most people didn't know existed. Records from two hundred years ago, from the original portal crisis, from the war that nearly ended humanity. Most of it was fragmentary—data corruption, deliberate erasure, the simple entropy of time wearing away at storage media and institutional memory alike. But some files remained intact, protected by redundant backups and the dedication of archivists who understood the importance of preserving the past.
Project Threshold.
The name appeared in several documents, always redacted in later sections, always surrounded by warnings about information security and need-to-know classification. Nigel had spent years trying to piece together what it meant, following threads through databases that seemed designed to lead nowhere, assembling fragments of a picture that someone very deliberately had tried to destroy.
The portals hadn't been closed by technology. They'd been closed by people.
Sensitives, the old documents called them. Individuals who, like Kate, had developed an unusual connection to the Hollowing—not possessed, not corrupted, but somehow merged. The records described them walking willingly into the light of the open portals, their bodies becoming part of the dimensional barrier itself. They hadn't fought the Hollowing. They'd embraced it. Used its connection to the dimension beyond to seal the doorways that threatened to swallow humanity whole.
They hadn't died. At least, not in any conventional sense.
The documents suggested they'd become something else, something that existed between dimensions, their consciousness spread across the membrane like mortar between bricks. A living seal, built from human souls. The ultimate sacrifice, offered by people who understood that some doors must never be opened.
And if the seal was weakening, if something was pushing against it from the other side, then those souls—those people who'd sacrificed everything to protect humanity—were being attacked. Worn down. Eroded by two centuries of pressure from something that had never stopped trying to break through.
Nigel thought of Kate. Ten years old. Small for her age, with eyes that saw too much and a mind that touched things it shouldn't be able to reach. The Hollowing spoke to her, he was certain of it. Whispered in her dreams. Showed her glimpses of the dimension beyond. She didn't tell anyone—he could see that in the way she withdrew sometimes, the way her attention drifted to things that weren't there—but she knew. On some level, she knew what was coming.
She could become part of the seal someday. If the correlation he was seeing held true, if her connection to the Hollowing grew stronger as the barriers grew weaker, then she might be humanity's last defense against what was coming. Another soul to shore up the crumbling wall. Another sacrifice to buy another generation of borrowed time.
Or she might be the door that let it through.
The comm panel chimed, startling him badly enough that he nearly knocked his cold coffee onto the keyboard. Admiral Chen's response, faster than Nigel had expected. He activated the secure playback with fingers that had finally stopped shaking.
"Dr. Rhodes." The admiral's voice carried the weight of someone who had spent his entire life preparing for news like this. Quiet authority, carefully controlled emotion, the discipline of a man who knew that panic served no purpose. "I'm calling an emergency session of the Science Council. You'll present your findings in person, tomorrow at 0800. Bring all supporting data. Bring your projections. Bring everything you have, and be prepared to defend your conclusions against skeptics who will not want to believe what you're telling them." A pause that stretched like a wound. "And Nigel—tell no one else. Not until we understand what we're dealing with. Not until we have a plan."
The channel closed.
Nigel sat alone in his laboratory, surrounded by screens showing the slow dissolution of everything humanity had built in two centuries of fragile peace. The numbers hadn't changed since the diagnostic had finished. They wouldn't change—not because the equipment was malfunctioning, but because it was working perfectly. The seal was weakening. The math was clear. The deadline was set.
Eighteen months.
He pulled up Station Seven again, watching the deviation counter tick upward by increments too small to see. 0.00017% per day. Barely perceptible. Easy to dismiss if you didn't know what you were looking at. Easy to ignore if you didn't understand what it meant.
But the math didn't lie. Eighteen months of barrier degradation. Eighteen months of something vast and ancient pushing against the walls of reality. Eighteen months until the portals reopened and the Dominion returned to finish what they'd started two centuries ago.
Humanity had won two hundred years of peace by sacrificing the people brave enough to become the seal. Now that sacrifice was being undone, one microscopic deviation at a time, and Nigel Rhodes was one of the only people in human space who knew.
He thought about Kate again. About the energy readings he'd never shown anyone. About the correlation between her neural patterns and the weakening seal. About what it might mean—what she might become—if the barriers failed completely.
She was ten years old. She should have been worried about school and friends and all the ordinary concerns of childhood. Instead, she carried the Hollowing in her mind like a passenger, like a parasite, like a symbiont that had made itself essential to her survival.
She shouldn't have existed. By every measure of science and probability, she should have been dead or corrupted or something other than human.
But she was alive. She was aware. She was learning to control abilities that no human had ever possessed.
And somewhere in the darkness beyond the seal, something was reaching for her.
Nigel didn't know which outcome was more likely—salvation or destruction, hope or doom. The data didn't tell him that. The data only told him that time was running out, and that the ten-year-old girl with Hollowing energy threaded through her neurons might be the key to everything.
He saved his findings to the encrypted server. Backed them up twice. Prepared for the presentation that would change everything.
Then he sat in the darkness of his laboratory and waited for dawn, watching the numbers climb toward a future he wasn't sure any of them would survive.
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