Four young astronauts wake aboard a drifting ship with dead comms, alien warnings, and a signal that suggests they are not alone.
The Kronos drifted through a blackness so complete it felt less like space and more like the absence of the universe. Beyond the hull, stars burned in hard, distant clusters, cold and unreachable. Inside, the ship was almost silent except for the low hum of failing systems and the occasional crackle of a light trying not to die.
Max woke first.
For a moment he did not know where he was. Then the edges of the hibernation pod came into focus, along with the red emergency glow washing over the chamber. He pushed himself upright, disoriented and stiff, and blinked at the control panels across the room. Warning glyphs crawled over every display. None of them were in any language he knew.
He swore under his breath and staggered toward the nearest console. The air smelled wrong too, stale and metallic, as if the ship had been sealed too long.
A hatch hissed open behind him. Lena stepped out of the adjoining pod, hair plastered to one side of her face, already reaching for the comms panel before she was fully awake. She tapped the screen once, then again, her expression hardening as the channel stayed dead.
"Nothing," she said. Her voice was calm, but only just. "No base. No internal response from half the deck. Wake the others. Now."
Mia came next, swearing about frozen joints and a dead calibration tool she had been clutching in her sleep. Kacper followed, pale and wide-eyed, staring around the chamber as if the ship might answer his questions if he looked hard enough. By the time all four were on their feet, the silence had turned heavy enough to press against their skin.
Then the star map lit up.
Kacper leaned over the console, fingers flying across the controls, and stopped cold. The familiar constellations were gone. In their place was a sky none of them had ever charted, marked with symbols that looked almost deliberate, almost readable. Outside the porthole, a blue-white glow pulsed through the darkness, distant and slow, like something breathing.
A tone sounded from deep inside the ship. Soft. Measured. Repeating.
The main screen snapped on.
An unknown planet filled it, wrapped in coloured rings that shimmered like thin glass. Beneath the image, an automated message began to scroll in the same alien script as the warning panels. No one spoke. No one had the chance.
Lena was still staring through the porthole when she saw it again: movement beyond the Kronos, too large to be debris, too deliberate to be chance. Something was crossing the dark at a crawl, as if it already knew they were awake.
Then, somewhere in the corridor behind them, a door slid open with a breath of escaping air, and the sound of something metallic moving closer echoed through the ship.