"Halloway?" Elias called out. "Jace?"
Suddenly, the lights on the bridge dimmed. The Aethelgard groaned, the sound of metal settling under immense pressure.
The bridge was empty.
The silence on the bridge of the Aethelgard was not the peaceful kind. It was the silence of a held breath, the kind that hurts your ears after three weeks of listening to the rhythmic thrum of a fusion drive.
Elias reached for his sidearm, his breath hitching in his chest. In the pitch black, he heard the soft, familiar hum of the fusion drive restart. The lights flickered back on. cpsky-055
"Scanners just picked up a metallic signature. Bearing 030. It’s small, drifting. No transponder signal."
Within the hour, the object was in their cargo bay. It was a relic—a data core encased in a shell of battered titanium, older than anything currently in service. It bore the markings of the Caelus , a survey ship that had vanished nearly two centuries ago during the first wave of deep-space expansion. It was a piece of history, a ghost made solid. "Halloway
"Reading on the long-range scanners, Commander?" Elias asked, his voice raspy from disuse.
"...don't trust the silence. It isn't empty. It’s listening. We charted the nebula, but the nebula charted us. I can see it now, in the reflection of the glass. It wears our faces. If you find this, do not—" The bridge was empty
Elias froze. The Caelus had been gone for two hundred years. The file continued to loop, but the static was changing. It was resolving into a rhythmic pattern, a digital heartbeat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.