On an abandoned research station in the Orion Nebula, Martyn and Oskar investigate a signal that should not exist and find a logbook, broken lights, and something moving in the dark.
Martyn and Oskar docked with the Erebos research station after six silent hours threaded through the Orion Nebula’s bruised, glittering dust. From the shuttle window, the station had looked sealed and intact. Up close, it looked abandoned by more than people. Its hull was scarred by micrometeorite strikes, its docking ring was rimmed with frost, and the corridor lights beyond the airlock pulsed weakly, as if the station were struggling to remember how to wake.
Their orders were simple: trace the signal disrupting communication between Earth and the outer colonies, identify the source, and restore the relay if they could. Martyn had expected dead hardware, maybe a burnt array or a software loop left to rot. He had not expected the silence. It sat in the station like pressure, heavy enough to feel in his teeth.
Inside, the narrow metal corridors carried the stale breath of recycled air and old dust. Their boots disturbed fine grey powder that had settled in the corners and along the seams of the floor plates. Every few steps, the emergency strips along the walls flickered on, cast a sickly white wash over the bulkheads, then died again.
That was when Martyn saw the writing.
It ran in uneven lines across the corridor walls, scratched into the paint with something sharp and frantic. Not a warning exactly. Not at first. Just fragments, repeated and overwritten until the words blurred into themselves. Oskar stopped beside him, his scanner angled toward the nearest bulkhead.
“Read that,” he muttered.
Martyn leaned closer. The last line was clearer than the rest, carved deep enough to bite through the metal.
DON'T LET IT HEAR YOU.
Oskar’s scanner gave a brief, confused chirp. The life-sign display jumped from zero to a cluster of impossible spikes, then steadied again at nothing.
They exchanged a glance and kept moving.
The command centre door stood half open, resisting only slightly when Martyn forced it wider. Inside, the room was a wreck of dark monitors, drifting paper, and frozen cups of old coffee. On the central console sat a logbook, its cover warped by age and heat. Martyn flipped it open and found the final entry cut off mid-sentence, the handwriting tightening as if the author had been interrupted in the middle of a thought.
If you find this, don't go...
The station lights surged all at once, flooding the command centre in blinding white. Every screen woke at once. Static crackled from the speakers. Then, from somewhere deep in the corridor behind them, came the slow, deliberate drag of footsteps.
Martyn closed the logbook. Oskar went still beside him.
The footsteps stopped just outside the door.