Silence.
The blinding flash was gone as quickly as it had come, leaving behind only the stark, familiar darkness and the frantic strobe of her own helmet lights. The ghostly luminescence in the alien filaments was utterly extinguished, as if her act of theft had been the final, fatal blow to the ship's dying heart.
Kaelen floated frozen, the crystalline shard clutched in her glove. It was warm. Warmer than it should be, generating its own heat in the deep freeze of the vacuum.
…Awake…
The word echoed in her skull, a faint, distant impression more than a sound. It was the sensory memory of a sound, like a dream upon waking. She shook her head, the movement exaggerated and disorienting inside her helmet. It was just her own mind, spooked by the darkness and the scale of her discovery. Stress. It had to be stress.
But the word had felt… external.
"Chip, run a diagnostic on my suit's comm system. Check for any feedback or signal interference," she said, her voice sounding too loud and too small in the sealed confines of her helmet.
> Diagnostic running. All systems nominal. No anomalous signals detected.
The shard in her hand pulsed softly, a gentle, golden rhythm that had no source. It was beautiful. Terrifyingly beautiful. It cast a warm, living light on the grey alloy of her glove, a stark contrast to the cold, blue-white beams from her helmet.
She couldn't take her eyes off it. The urge to stow it in her sample pouch and retreat was overpowered by a mesmerized fascination. It felt… important. Not just valuable, but significant. It was the answer to a question she hadn't known to ask.
Her eyes drifted from the shard back to the colossal being. In the new, intimate light of her discovery, its details were sharper. The artistry of the armor, the subtle, flowing script etched into the metallic flesh around the wound—it was all a testament to a culture immeasurably advanced, immeasurably ancient.
A corpse of a god. She hadn't understood the truth of the term until now. This wasn't just an alien; it was a being so far beyond human comprehension that the distinction between technology and biology, between individual and ship, seemed to blur into irrelevance.
And she had just looted its heart.
A fresh wave of primal unease washed over her, colder than the vacuum around her. This wasn't a salvage op. This was a desecration.
The greed that had driven her here curdled into a sharp, urgent need to be gone. She fumbled for her sample pouch, her movements clumsy. The moment the shard was sealed inside, its light vanished, plunging her back into the sterile glare of her suit lamps. The darkness felt heavier without its glow.
She pushed off from the central chamber, jetting back the way she came. The corridors seemed longer now, the shadows deeper. Every flicker of ice caught in her light was a movement, every creak of the dying ship settling was a footstep. The voice in her head was silent, but the silence itself felt watchful.
Just your imagination, she told herself, repeating it like a prayer. There's nothing here. Just rock and vacuum and a dead thing.
She practically threw herself back into the Scrap-Jumper's airlock, slamming the cycle button the second the inner door sealed. As atmosphere hissed back into the chamber, she tore her helmet off, gasping for the ship's recycled air as if she'd been drowning.
On the cockpit display, the derelict still tumbled, silent and ominous.
"Chip, plot a course out of here. Maximum burn. Get us back to our claim," she ordered, her voice raw.
> Course plotted. Engaging thrusters.
The ship pivoted, and the main engines fired with a force that pressed her into her seat. She watched on the rear-view monitor as the derelict shrank, becoming just another dark speck against the starfield, then vanishing entirely.
The familiar hum of the Scrap-Jumper enveloped her. She was safe. She was alone again.
She unsealed the sample pouch and pulled out the shard. In the light of the cockpit, it was even more stunning. It wasn't just a crystal; it was a lattice of impossible complexity, holding a light that seemed to swim just beneath its surface. It was warm against her palm.
She set it carefully on the co-pilot's console, its gentle pulse a new, silent heartbeat in her ship.
Kaelen let out a long, shaky breath, trying to unknot the tension in her shoulders. She had done it. She had the sample. She was—
A sharp, synaptic jolt—like static electricity directly to her brain—made her gasp.
Behind her eyes, an image flashed, clear and vivid: the schematic for a plasma torch regulator, but with a modified magnetic constriction field she had never considered. It was more efficient, more stable. It was… brilliant.
The image vanished as quickly as it came.
Kaelen stared straight ahead, her heart hammering against her ribs. The afterimage of the schematic was burned into her mind's eye, perfect in every detail.
That was not her thought.
She slowly turned her head to look at the shard, pulsing innocently on the console.
The silence in the cockpit was no longer empty. It was filled with the soft, golden light of the fragment, and the terrifying, undeniable truth.
Something had come back with her.