The dust of dead worlds had a particular smell. It wasn't just sterile regolith; it was the scent of ozone from millennia-old energy discharges, the metallic tang of vaporized armor, and the faint, cloying sweetness of organic matter that had been flash-fossilized in the vacuum. To Kaelen Vance, it was the smell of history. The smell of a question he had spent his life trying to answer.
The derelict hung in the silence between moons, a colossal skeleton picked clean by time and scavengers. This was the Oblivion's Span, the corpse of a Precursor battle-leviathan. It was the reason Kaelen had maxed out his credit line, hired a crew of misfits who asked no questions, and risked a one-way trip into contested space. Exile from the Galactic Federation Academy had its privileges, chiefly a burning desperation to prove them all wrong.
His mag-boots clung to the ancient hull as he navigated the scarred landscape of the ship's spine. Below him, the battlefield stretched into infinity—a frozen ballet of destruction. Dozens of other warships, human and Chimeran, lay where they had died centuries ago, caught in the gravitational pull of this larger, more ancient tragedy.
"Vance, anything that isn't radioactive slag?" a gruff voice crackled in his helmet. Roric, his pilot. The man's patience was as thin as his ship's hull.
"Patience is a virtue, Roric," Kaelen murmured, his eyes scanning the petrified metal through his visor. "We're not looking for salvage. We're looking for a signature."
"A signature. Right. You mean a ghost."
"Something like that."
His theory of Resonant Memory was a joke to the Academy. The notion that the Precursors' advanced alloys could psychically imprint with the memories of their final moments—the "echo" of a dying pilot's thoughts, the "scream" of a failing reactor—was dismissed as mysticism, not science. But Kaelen felt it here. A pressure in his temples. A whisper on the edge of hearing. This place was screaming, and he was the only one listening.
He found it near a massive rupture in the hull, as if a giant fist had punched through. Not a weapon, he realized. A mech's hand. The arm of a Precursor war machine, sheared off at the elbow, its once-gleaming surface now matte and stone-like, fused to the deck by the heat of that long-ago catastrophe.
This was it. The source of the psychic pressure.
He reached out, ignoring Roric's warning grumble in his ear. His gloved fingers brushed against the petrified metal.
The universe vanished.
Fire. Not the clean burn of oxygen, but the silent, ravenous fusion-fire that eats through reality itself. The leviathan is coming apart around him. No—around her. He is her. Sorrow, cold and absolute. Not for herself, but for the civilization she has failed. A flash of a silver world, shattered. A chorus of voices, severed mid-song.
A command, not spoken but felt, imprinted into the very atoms of the machine: CONTAIN.
Then, a final, coherent thought, a desperate arrow shot into the future: Find us. Stop it.
Kaelen gasped, wrenching his hand back as if burned. His heart hammered against his ribs. His mouth was dry. It was more than a vision; it was an entire life, a purpose, downloaded into his soul in a nanosecond.
"Vance! Talk to me!"
"Roric..." Kaelen breathed, his voice shaky. "The theory... it's real. It's all real."
"Yeah, well, your ghost is about to have company! Long-range scanners just lit up like a supernova. A Chimeran scavenger fleet just dropped out of FTL on the system's edge. They're not here for the view."
Adrenaline burned away the disorientation. The Chimerans. They were drawn to Precursor tech like vultures. If they found him...
The vision. The command. Find us.
His eyes darted around the rupture point. Where there was a hand, there was a body. Where there was a pilot, there was a cockpit.
"Roric, I need a deep scan on my position. Look for a power signature. Anything buried under this wreckage."
"Are you insane? We need to go!"
"SCAN!"
A string of curses filled the comms, followed by the whine of the ship's scanners focusing.
"Fine! I'm getting... something. Not energy. It's weird. Like a... a harmonic resonance. Twenty meters down, directly below you. But it's dead, Vance. It's a coffin."
It wasn't dead. It was dormant. And he had the key.
Kaelen didn't hesitate. He triggered his suit's thrusters, burning a controlled hole through the layers of scorched deck plating, following Roric's coordinates down into the dark heart of the corpse-ship.
He found it in a cavern of twisted metal. It was smaller than he expected, sleek where human mechs were blocky, organic where they were angular. It looked less built and more grown. Its carapace was the same petrified stone, but at its chest, a faint, intricate pattern of veins glowed with a soft, internal light. The cockpit canopy was opaque, sealed for eternity.
He landed before it, his helmet lights reflecting off the dark surface. This was an Axiom-class. He knew it in his bones. A legend. A myth.
He placed both hands on the cold canopy.
The moment he made contact, the petrified stone under his palms turned transparent, then vanished. The cockpit was open. Inside was not a chair and controls, but a crystalline matrix that pulsed in time with the light in its chest.
The voices of the dead whispered in his mind, a siren's song of forgotten wars and lost causes.
Behind him, the entire derelict shuddered. The Chimerans were here. They were cutting their way in.
There was no choice. It was die here as a disgraced academic or die trying to become something more.
He climbed inside.
The crystalline matrix enveloped him. There was no HUD, no control yoke. There was only a sudden, terrifying sense of expansion. He could feel the ship around him. He could feel the cold of space. He could feel the approaching Chimeran vessels, their presence like a psychic screech of alien hunger.
And he could feel the Axiom mech's heart, a slumbering star waiting for a mind to give it purpose.
A single word formed in his mind, not his own, but the mech's first and only question to its new pilot:
What is your Command?
On the viewscreen that was now his own mind, the hull of the Oblivion's Span tore open. The jagged, biomechanical form of a Chimeran boarding pod pushed through, its sensory arrays already scanning, locking onto the strange, awakening power before it.
Kaelen Vance, the disgraced archaeologist, took a breath that was also the mech's first intake of power.
His voice was not his own when he answered. It was the echo of a dead pilot, the hope of a lost civilization, and the fury of a man with nothing left to lose.
"Survive."
And the god of a dead age opened its eyes.