The Scrap-Jumper hung in the void, a speck of dust facing a slumbering giant. Kaelen had killed all non-essential systems, plunging the cockpit into a silence so deep she could hear the blood rushing in her ears. The only light came from the console screens and the cold, distant stars.
The derelict filled the main viewport, blotting them out.
Up close, it was even more wrong. Human ships were built with angles, hard lines, and welded plates. This was… grown. Its hull had the sweeping, graceful curves of a seashell, fused with the intricate, geometric facets of a crystal. It was a nightmare of conflicting physics, made from a material that seemed to absorb light, a black so deep it was like a hole cut in the fabric of space itself.
And it was ancient. Pitted by micrometeorites, scarred by some unimaginable violence, it tumbled in a slow, graceful ballet of death.
> No energy readings. No reactor signature. No life signs. Chip reported, its text a silent green ghost on the screen. > Hull composition is unrecognized. Alloy matrix does not match any known database.
"It's dead," Kaelen whispered to herself, a mantra to steady her nerves. Dead things couldn't hurt you. They were just… things. Resources.
Her scavenger's mind began to calculate the value. A hull alloy that defied sensors? That alone was worth a fortune to military R&D. The internal components… if they were even vaguely compatible… she'd never have to mine another rock again.
Greed warred with a deep, primal unease. This wasn't a salvage op. It was a tomb robbery.
"Mark the location. Full encryption. This is our coordinates alone," she ordered Chip, her voice hushed as if the derelict could hear her. "Plot a approach vector to that rupture amidships. That's our entry point."
With gentle puffs of maneuvering thrusters, the Scrap-Jumper crept forward. The giant ship loomed larger, its silent bulk becoming her entire world. She guided her ship into the jagged tear in the derelict's hull, a wound that spoke of a catastrophic impact. The Scrap-Jumper's external lights pierced the absolute darkness within, revealing a landscape of frozen chaos.
She suited up, the ritual of checking her seals and oxygen supply a familiar comfort. The airlock cycle was agonizingly loud in the new silence. When the outer door opened, there was no hiss of equalizing pressure. There had never been any air in here.
Kaelen floated into the corpse of the leviathan.
Her mag-boots clamped onto a twisted bulkhead, giving her a stable perch. The interior was even more alien than the outside. Corridors curved in non-Euclidean ways, meeting at impossible angles. Panels held interfaces of glowing crystal that were dark and dead. There were no sharp corners, no visible conduits or wiring. Everything was seamless, organic.
And there were no bodies. No skeletons. It was as if the ship's crew had simply evaporated.
Using her suit jets, she pushed deeper into the wreck, her light a frail, dancing cone in the overwhelming dark. The silence was different here. It wasn't the peaceful silence of the belt. This was a thick, heavy silence, a silence that had been waiting for a very, very long time.
A signal flickered on her helmet's HUD. Not a transmission, but a faint energy residue her scanners were just barely detecting. It was coming from a central chamber, its doorway shaped like a teardrop.
She drifted inside.
And then she saw it.
In the center of the vast chamber, held in a web of shattered crystalline supports, was the source of the energy. A figure.
It was colossal, easily three times the size of a human. Its form was bipedal but utterly alien, elegant and terrifying. It seemed to be made of the same material as its ship—a obsidian-like substance woven with filaments of gold and silver that still held a faint, ghostly luminescence. It wore armor of sculpted light and shadow, now fractured and dim. One hand was outstretched, as if it had been reaching for something when it died.
Its face… it had no mouth, no nose. Just a smooth, graceful plane where a face should be, and it was turned toward the ceiling, toward the hole she'd entered through.
This was no corpse. It was a monument. A god, fallen and forgotten.
Kaelen's breath caught in her throat. Her professional detachment shattered. This was beyond salvage. This was a discovery that rewrote history. That rewrote everything.
Her eyes were drawn to the being's chest. The armor there was shattered, and from the rupture, something glowed with a soft, persistent light. A shard. A piece of the being's crystalline core, no larger than her hand, pulsing with a gentle, rhythmic light like a sleeping heart.
The scavenger instinct took over. The awe and fear were washed away by a tidal wave of avarice. That shard was power. It was knowledge. It was the answer to every problem she'd ever had.
She pushed off from the doorway, floating toward the giant figure. Her gloved hand reached out.
"I'm just… collecting a sample," she said to the silence, her voice a shaky transmission inside her own helmet. "Just a sample."
Her fingers closed around the warm, smooth crystal.
The moment she pulled it free, the faint light in the filaments all over the chamber flared once, a brilliant, blinding white, and then died completely.
And in the back of Kaelen's mind, a voice that was not her own whispered a single, clear word:
…Awake…