The countdown burned like fire across the reactor core, each rune pulsing in rhythm with the ship's heartbeat. 00:59.
"One minute?" Lyra snarled, darting to the nearest console. "AI, what am I looking at?"
"Unknown code structure," the AI replied, unnervingly calm. "Organic and quantum fused. Attempting decryption… failure. Thirty-eight percent of the reactor's systems are no longer under my control."
Kaelen ripped open a panel, exposing a mess of glowing conduits. "If we can't decode it, we sever the connection." He reached for his tools—then froze.
The conduits were… growing. Black tendrils of energy snaked along the wires, pulsing like veins, spreading faster with every second.
"Lyra," he said, voice low. "It's alive."
She looked up sharply. "Then we kill it."
00:43.
The tendrils suddenly lashed out, forming spindly limbs that struck like whips. One caught Kaelen across the chest, slamming him into the bulkhead. Another wrapped around Lyra's leg, dragging her toward the core.
She fired wildly, bolts tearing through the writhing appendages, but more emerged to take their place.
"AI!" she screamed. "Options!"
"One," the AI replied. "Overload the core manually. It will destroy the infection… and the ship. Two: Contain the entity in a quantum stasis field. I can prepare one, but it requires external activation—from the hull plating outside this chamber."
Kaelen coughed, struggling to his feet. "I'll do it. Buy me sixty seconds."
"Kaelen—"
"No time to argue!" He sprinted for the exit, grabbing a magnetic clamp and leaping onto a service ladder that led to the outer hull.
00:27.
Lyra turned back to the core, eyes blazing. "Alright, you ugly thing," she growled, reloading her pistol. "Come and get me."
Outside, Kaelen emerged into the freezing void, tethered only by a thin line. Stars stretched infinitely around him as he crawled along the hull toward the reactor's apex. Below his feet, he could feel the infection writhing, alive, as if the ship itself had been possessed.
Inside, Lyra's screams echoed as the tendrils closed in.
00:11.
Kaelen reached the panel, ripped it open, and slammed the activation key inside.
00:03.
"Do it, AI!" he roared.
Inside the chamber, a sphere of shimmering light erupted, swallowing the tendrils. They shrieked—a sound not meant for human ears—before collapsing into nothingness. The countdown halted at 00:01.
Lyra collapsed to her knees, panting. "Kaelen… you still alive out there?"
"Barely," his voice came through the comm, ragged but steady. "But whatever that was—it wasn't just sabotage. That thing was… summoning something."
Far away, on the derelict station where the shadowed mastermind waited, the map flickered. The glowing dot of Lyra and Kaelen's ship stabilized.
The hooded figure leaned forward, a smile curling under the darkness.
"Good," they whispered. "They passed the first test."