The quantum slipstream was not a tunnel. It was an unraveling.
Astra clung to consciousness within Verity's control nexus, her mind fused with the ship's navigational core. She didn't see stars or streaks of light. She perceived layers: the brittle, familiar membrane of normal space; the frothing quantum foam beneath it; and beneath that, a cold, profound substrate where the laws of physics were mere suggestions. Verity moved through this substrate like a needle through scar tissue, following a path inscribed in the fragment's resonance—a path that felt less like a course, and more like a memory the universe was reluctantly recalling.
"Transition complete in ten seconds," the ship's voice—her own amplified consciousness—stated. "Exiting into real-space adjacent to designated waypoint: Listening Post Theta-77. Status: Abandoned. No energy signatures. No recent traffic."
The unraveling sensation ceased with a lurch that bypassed the inner ear and struck directly at the soul. The swirling chaos outside the viewfield snapped into the hard, static clarity of normal space.
They floated before a corpse.
Listening Post Theta-77 was a skeletal flower of gray metal, a standard Fleet design from three generations ago. Its rotating habitat ring was stilled. Its sensor arrays were dark, shattered husks. Micrometeorite pocks and something else—long, jagged scoring that looked like claw marks from a beast the size of a starship—marred its hull. It orbited a lifeless, airless rock, the third planet of a dull orange star.
"No power. No lifesigns. Hull integrity at 42%," Ellison reported, her voice shaky from the slipstream transit. She was studying a secondary display. "But there's… residual energy in the superstructure. Faint, but it matches the low-frequency carrier wave of the Continuity's comms. They've been here. Recently."
"A forward observation post," Kael deduced. "Or a scavenging site. They were watching this place."
Astra disengaged from the full neural link, the sudden sensory reduction leaving a hollow ache in her skull. "Verity, extend passive sensor net. Full spectrum, emphasis on biological and anomalous quantum residue. Scan that post. I want to know what killed it, and what the Continuity was looking for."
"Acknowledged."
A lattice of invisible sensing energy, far subtler and more penetrating than any Fleet technology, washed over the derelict station. Data streamed into Astra's mind.
No active radiation. Hull composition: standard titanium-steel composite. Interior atmosphere: vacuum. Organic decay residues consistent with Standard Fleet microbial load, approximately 8.2 years old. Cause of structural failure: concentrated kinetic impact from multiple vectors, combined with energy weapon scoring of unknown type.
Then, a sharper ping.
Anomaly detected. Central computer core. Shielding shows signs of molecular-level forced decryption. A data-extraction attempt. Incomplete. A hardened data-fragment remains, isolated behind a physical cut-off switch. Designation: Station Commander's Black Box.
Astra's eyes opened. "There's a survivor log. Partially stripped, but not fully cracked. The Continuity couldn't get it all." She stood up, the yielding floor firming under her boots. "We need it. Ellison, Kael, suit up. Reyes, Chen, you're on the Ghost. Get her patched up and running independently. We can't keep her tethered forever."
"Captain, it's a tomb out there," Kael said, but he was already moving towards the equipment lockers Verity had seamlessly extruded from a wall.
"All the more reason to see what killed it," Astra replied, pulling on a lightweight vac-suit of advanced, self-sealing material provided by the ship. It conformed to her body like a second skin. "Maybe we can learn what not to do."
---
The airlock cycled open to perfect silence. Astra led the way, her suit's lamps cutting blades of light through the absolute dark of Theta-77's main access corridor. The station's gravity was offline, and they moved with mag-boots, the thump-click rhythm loud in the void. Frozen debris—cups, tools, a child's drawing of a starship trapped under a sheet of clear plastic—drifted in the still air.
The damage was worse inside. Walls were bowed inward. Conduits hung like severed veins. Here and there, a frozen, crystalline spray coated surfaces—the remains of atmosphere flash-frozen eight years ago.
Ellison's scanner chirped. "The energy scoring… it's not from plasma or lasers. It's a byproduct of spatial compression. Something hit this station so hard it momentarily warped the local space-time metric. That's what those 'claw marks' are. Stretch-marks in reality."
They reached the command center. The door was a twisted flower of metal. Inside, the bodies were gone, likely ejected or reclaimed, but the violence was preserved in the chaos of shattered consoles and the commander's chair, ripped from its mounts and embedded in the viewport.
"Black box is there," Astra said, pointing her light at a recessed panel beneath the main tactical station. It was sealed with a manual wheel, untouched by the data-thieves. "Ellison."
The science officer went to work with a cutting torch from her kit. The metal glowed, then gave way. Inside was a simple, heavily shielded data-canister, about the size of her forearm. She retrieved it, connecting it to her portable reader.
The screen flickered to life, displaying corrupted data streams and a single, intact file labeled FINAL EYES-ONLY.
Astra nodded. Ellison hit play.
The holo-projection was grainy, washed with static. A man's face appeared, gaunt, drenched in sweat, the red emergency lights of the station washing over him. Commander Ives. His eyes held the flat, horrified acceptance of a man who has already seen his death.
"—they don't scan like anything on record. No drive signature. No reactor bloom. They just… appear out of the gravitational shadow of the gas giant. Three of them." His voice was a forced calm over a tremor of primal fear. "We hailed. No response. They began moving. Not towards us. Towards the star."
The image shuddered as the station took a hit. Ives flinched. "They're… they're not attacking us. We're in the way. Like insects on a windshield. They're firing something at the star. Some kind of… resonant beam. Modifying its output. Oh, God. The solar flares… they're being directed. Shaped."
On the grainy feed, through the viewport behind him, the orange star seemed to develop a dark, spreading spot, like a bruise. Then, lances of plasma, far more coherent and violent than any natural flare, erupted from its surface, licking hungrily towards the outer planets.
"They're not just killing us. They're sterilizing the system. Making it… hostile to something. To something they think might be here. They're gardeners. Pulling weeds." His voice broke. "We're launching the distress buoy. The data… the data on their modulation frequency is key. It's a pattern. A targeting pattern. If they can do this to a star… Final log entry. Commander Alistair Ives, signing—"
The feed dissolved into screaming static as another impact hit. The image froze, then died.
Silence, thicker than the vacuum around them, filled the ruined command center.
"Gardeners," Kael whispered, the word obscene in the dark.
Astra stared at the frozen, horrified face of Commander Ives. The Leviathans weren't just hunters. They were curators. They'd found a piece of their ancient enemy's weapon (the Farsight fragment) and were systematically scorching any area where it, or its signal, might have spread. Theta-77 had recorded their stellar-scale weapons test. The Continuity had come for that data, but failed to get the core log.
"The pattern," Ellison said, her voice filled with dread and fascination. "The modulation frequency… if we can analyze it, we might be able to predict their next 'gardening' target. Or even… disrupt it."
Before Astra could respond, her suit comms crackled with a burst of static, then Reyes's tense voice from the Ghost. "Captain, we've got a problem. Verity's passive net just picked up a massive gravity wake. It just dropped out of whatever passes for FTL for these things. Twenty light-minutes out, on the edge of the system. It's… it's big. Bigger than the ones at the rift. And it's not alone. Two smaller signatures with it. They're scanning. Broad spectrum."
They felt the slipstream exit. Astra's blood went cold. Verity's power was a beacon, and they had followed.
"Time to intercept?"
"At their current speed? Fifteen minutes, maybe less. They're accelerating."
Fifteen minutes. In a derelict station with a prize the Leviathans would scorch a star to erase.
"Reyes, Chen, get the Ghost ready for emergency departure. Do not power up weapons or engines until I say. Kael, Ellison, grab everything. We're leaving."
They moved. As they hustled back through the corpse of the station, Astra's mind raced. They couldn't outrun a Leviathan in normal space, not even in Verity. Another slipstream jump required precise calculations and calm they didn't have. They needed a distraction. A bigger target.
They burst back into the airlock, Verity's welcoming light a stark contrast to the tomb behind them. As the lock cycled, Astra made a decision.
"Verity, as soon as we're clear, I want you to broadcast the unencrypted core log from Theta-77," she commanded, striding onto the nexus. "All frequencies. Maximum power. Directional broadcast aimed at the gas giant in this system."
Ellison stared at her. "You'll lead them right to it!"
"Exactly. They think that data is here, on this station. We're going to make them think we're transmitting it from the gas giant's magnetosphere, where it's hard to scan. They'll go to investigate, to sterilize the source." Astra slid into the command interface, the neural link re-establishing with a surge of focused clarity. "By the time they realize it's a echo, we'll be gone."
"It's a hell of a risk," Kael said, strapping in.
"It's the only play we have. Verity, execute. Then plot the shortest slipstream jump to the nearest neutron star's magnetic pole. We need noise. We need chaos."
"Acknowledged."
Outside, a powerful, wide-band signal burst from Verity, containing the terrifying final moments of Commander Ives, aimed directly at the swirling, massive gas giant. For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, on the tactical plot, the three Leviathan signatures altered course. The two smaller ones peeled away, streaking towards the gas giant at impossible speeds. The largest one, however, hesitated. Its scans intensified, washing over the derelict station, over the Ghost, over Verity.
It had seen them.
"It's not taking the bait!" Kael yelled.
The massive Leviathan turned. It didn't head for the gas giant. It pointed itself directly at Verity. A new energy reading, vast and terrible, began to build along its leading edge. Not a spore-cloud. Something worse. A localized gravitational anomaly, a focused singularity beam meant to crush them into a pinprick of degenerate matter.
"Slipstream jump now!" Astra commanded.
"Calculations incomplete! Jumping blind risks—"
"NOW!"
Verity sang its universe-rending tone again. Space began to tear open before them.
The Leviathan fired.
A spear of twisted spacetime, visible as a spiraling distortion that drank the light from stars, lanced across the void. It didn't move at the speed of light. It moved through space.
It struck just as the slipstream vortex fully formed.
There was no sound, only a violent, wrenching jerk that felt like the ship's soul being ripped in two. Alarms screamed in Astra's mind—structural integrity, power core instability, slipstream coherence failing. The Ghost of Gauntlet, still tethered, was sheared away by the gravitational shear, spinning off into the chaotic energies of the forming jump.
The last thing Astra saw on the external view was the Ghost, tumbling away into the dark, its comms a burst of static, and the colossal Leviathan, hanging in the void like a god of death, its weapon cycling for another shot.
Then, the vortex swallowed them whole.
But this jump was different. Agonized. Wrong. The soothing layers of reality were now a cacophony of screaming forces. Verity was wounded. They were not navigating. They were falling.
And where—or when—they would land, was anyone's guess.