The Nightborne sliced through the void, its engines humming like a living heartbeat. Outside,
the galaxy stretched in endless black, punctuated by pinpricks of dying stars. Kael Mercer'shands gripped the console so tightly his knuckles whitened.
The transmission replayed in his mind, looping: "Kael… if you can hear me… I'm still out
here." A voice that should have been lost forever now clawed at him from the void. He
couldn't ignore it, no matter the risk.
"AI," he said, forcing his voice calm, "run a full scan of all nearby systems. Plot the signal's
origin, and cross-reference with any historical star charts of collapsed colonies."
"Scanning," the AI replied, neutral but precise. "Signal is faint. Estimated origin lies within a
region designated restricted by the Astral Dominion, coordinates unregistered in known star
maps."
Kael leaned back in his chair, the leather creaking beneath his weight. Restricted regions were
more than dangerous — they were erased. Entire systems, lost to time or political erasure. And
yet, somehow, this signal survived.
His chest tightened. Every mission he had flown since the Helion Rift collapse had been
haunted by a void like this one: a hollow stretching across space, filled with memory and
silence. And now, that silence was answering him.
He tapped a sequence on the console. Holomap projections flickered, stars and planets
spinning across the viewport. "Nightborne," he said, "lock course to the nearest jump point
capable of high-energy traversal. We're going in."
"Captain," the AI said, hesitation threading its tone for the first time, "entering that sector is
considered a violation of Dominion protocols. Estimated survival probability: low. Emotional
risk factor: extreme."
Kael's eyes didn't leave the viewport. "Survival probability has never been high, has it?"
He thought of her — Liora. Five years dead, or so the galaxy believed. Her memory had been
the only thing keeping him alive through the cold emptiness of space. Now, the impossible had
happened. The echo of her voice had found him, like a beacon through time itself.
He remembered the Helion Rift. The final moments. The alarmed screams, the collapsing
energy fields, the crackling comms. And her face — pale in the strobing lights, reaching for
him, fading as the last gravity pulse claimed the ship.Kael shook himself, trying to banish the memory. Memories were dangerous things, especially
for a pilot trained to rely on logic and instinct. Emotions were anomalies that made mistakes
lethal. And yet, here he was, chasing a voice, following a phantom that could very well be a
trap.
The Nightborne lurched as it passed through a cluster of ionized gas. The cockpit lights
dimmed in soft pulses, casting shadows across his worn face. He noticed the AI had adjusted
its routine checks, monitoring his heart rate and stress markers. "I do not need monitoring,"
Kael said flatly.
"You are outside standard operational parameters, Captain," the AI responded. "Deviation
from protocol detected. Emotional instability may compromise decision-making."
Kael swallowed, jaw tight. "Protocol doesn't save people. People save themselves — if you're
lucky."
The starfield ahead grew thicker, colors bleeding into one another. Nebulae stretched like torn
silk across the void, their radiation fields painting the ship in hues of violet and blood red. The
signal pulsed faintly through this cosmic brush, intermittent, like a heartbeat struggling to
survive.
"Life signs?" Kael asked, though he knew the answer would be nothing.
"Zero active biological readings," the AI replied. "The signal is artificially maintained or
transmitted from stored records."
Kael clenched his fists. Artificial or not, it was real enough to make his chest ache. He didn't
care if it was a trap, a recording, or some trick of Dominion technology. If there was even a
chance it was her, he had to see it with his own eyes.
He adjusted the ship's shields, prepping for anomalies. The space ahead was uncharted, and
uncharted space was never forgiving. Meteoroids, debris from collapsed systems, radiation
spikes — everything could tear the Nightborne apart. But Kael had flown through worse. He
had survived when survival seemed impossible, and he would do so again.
Hours passed in tense silence, punctuated only by the faint hum of the engines and the irregular
pulse of the signal. Kael remained seated, eyes fixed on the viewport, on the distant flicker of a
star that seemed to hesitate, then vanish, then reappear.Finally, the signal sharpened, coalescing into a pattern he could trace. The coordinates were
impossible — a sector claimed erased decades ago, removed from every map, every database,
every log. Yet here it was, glowing faintly, stubborn against the void.
Kael's lips curved into the faintest smile, almost imperceptible. "Then we go," he whispered.
He initiated the jump sequence, and the Nightborne's engines roared, warping the stars into
stretched streaks of light. The familiar tug of high-speed traversal gripped him, and the cockpit
blurred as they breached the folds of space.
The stars reformed, but the darkness ahead was different — heavier, oppressive, almost
sentient. Kael felt it pressing in on him, whispering of things forgotten, of memories better left
buried.
Yet he did not hesitate. The signal pulsed stronger, and he was bound to it by every thread of
guilt, hope, and obsession he carried.
The Nightborne emerged into a system bathed in eerie twilight. Planets drifted in silent, frozen
arcs. Nothing moved, nothing breathed — yet the signal blazed, a single, lonely point of light,
waiting.
Kael's voice was a rough whisper. "Show me."
And somewhere in the stillness, the void answered