Arix had seconds to decide.

  Her eyes locked onto a loose panel - a maintenance hatch barely hanging by its hinge. Inside, nestled in dust and carbon scoring, was an old service drone. Obsolete by half a century, but familiar. The kind her cohort trained on in zero-G sabotage drills.

  Its logic core still pulsed faintly - enough for a trick.

  She slid silently across the deck, popped the casing, and ripped out the board. Behind her, the figure twitched - head jerking left, then right, as though scanning corrupted subroutines. The overhead sparks had died, leaving only the glow of emergency lights cycling amber-red.

  Thud. Pause. Thud. Pause.

  She interfaced the core with her suit’s neural node. A moment passed.

  VIRNA, her onboard AI, responded immediately. “Clever. Faking a drone malfunction. Broadcasting signal… now.”

  Arix lobbed the core hard, the servo-assisted throw guiding it into a banked ricochet. It clattered down the corridor, bounced once, twice - then skidded out of sight.

  The figure froze.

  Its head snapped toward the sound. From around the corner came the rhythmic beep-beep of a damaged drone signaling a critical fault.

  Then it screamed - not a voice, but corrupted binary blared through bone-cracked vocalizers:

  “DRONE INTERFERENCE. INTERROGATE. INTEGRATE.”

  It sprinted away.

  Arix slid back into the shadows just as more thuds approached. Six more emerged from the gloom. Staggering, twitching, wearing exosuits with cracked visors and limbs swollen with crystalline growths. Blue circuitry laced exposed skin. Not entirely human. Not entirely machine.

  They passed her - chasing the decoy.

  Then the light flared from the side corridor, blinding white. A metallic screech. Then silence.

  Only the drip of condensation remained.

  VIRNA: “You’ve got maybe two minutes before they recalibrate. Nearest data terminal’s ahead - sealed bulkhead, left corridor. But... I'm registering something else. An electromagnetic pulse. Sector D-3. Not movement. But... awareness. It's growing.”

  Arix didn’t hesitate long.

  Left was the mission. The terminal. Data core access. Answers.

  Right was something else. Something no report had ever mentioned.

  She moved right.

  Accessing Sector D-3 meant navigating through some of the station's narrowest corridors. Arix’s boots hissed on the damp metal. The walls looked at first as if they were veined with hairline cracks. Sensors indicated faint ion traces, the twisting metal increasingly covered with a fungal frost as she ventured farther into the station. Then, as she turned a corner, a flash of momentary unsettling recognition - that the cracks weren't cracks, but glyphs - etched into the surface, with the faint ion traces triggering a slow, pulsing blue luminescence - not part of any Coalition design. Not made by human tools.

  VIRNA: "Commander… these symbols aren’t part of any known Coalition language set. They're... rewriting my syntax filters. I recommend caution."

  The shimmer of the glyphs, now covering every surface of the bulkhead, walls, floors - all of them reacing to the helmet light on her exosuit, pulsing slowly -

  And then it dawned on her -

  Arix's Coalition training included heightened situational awareness, honed by centuries of research into the biomechanical responses that people have when they are in danger. A sort of sixth-sense to increase reaction time and survival odds, when your body knew something before your conscious mind became aware of it. Noticing the glint of metal just before a bullet made its mark. Barely perceptible shifts in weight before an attacker made a swing. The groaning of rock before a landslide. Human senses were incredible, and when unleashed, they provided awareness that no technology could match.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  But in this moment, the opposite was happening. Alarm bells were not going off. She felt calm, lulled into safety.

  Inspecting the walls - what first seemed to be hairline cracks, that had a pattern - a language - and the faint ion emissions from the glyphs that hadn't seemed to match a rhythm -

  the light from the glyphs were matching her own heartbeat.

  As her pulse increased in a mix of surprise and alarm at this realization, the glow from the corridor around her seemed to breathe with her, matching the rapid heartbeat within her chest.

  What is this? A deep breath -

  Her heart slowed as she inhaled deeply, and the pulsing of light slowed in tandem.

  VIRNA: “Readings are synchronizing with your neural activity. Whatever this is, it knows you're here.”

  Arix didn’t respond, as she saw the entrance to Sector D-3 ahead of her at the end of he corridor.

  The observation window into was shattered, fractured glass frozen in mid-collapse, defying gravity. Station schematics had indicated a containment lab, but was light on details of the layout.

  The entrance was damaged, badly - not just from a lack from maintenance, but from something else.

  Arix knelt at the doorframe, running gloved fingers across the gouged paneling. Scorch marks laced the frame in circular patterns — not from weapons fire, but from *energy bleed*. Controlled. Patterned. Ritualistic, almost. The remnants of door to the containment chamber appeared to have been forced open from the other side - not mechanically.

  Melted.

  The alloy shimmered like glass under a fusion torch, slagged and folded outward — not broken in, but torn apart from the inside.

  Arix stepped inside past the doorway, and into the central chamber of Sector D-3.

  The chamber beyond was drowned in amber light, thick with humidity, a far cry from the faint blue light of the connecting hallway. Around the chamber were data slates scattered on the floor, blackened from heat. Shattered glass tanks lined the walls - a few still bubbled faintly, with viscous golden fluid leaking from cracked seams. Consoles were warped as if melted from within. Off to the side was a seemingly untouched, open stasis pod, save for the restraints, which had been torn apart - as if just emptied.

  But Arix knew she had found something important - because in the center of the lab hovered a glowing, golden sphere of light. About two meters wide. Spinning in perfect silence, radiating its pulsing light.

  And above it -

  A woman.

  Or what had once been a woman.

  She hovered inches above the glowing sphere. Translucent skin threaded with living circuitry, every vein casting bioluminescent shadows. Her body was too perfect. Too still. Her eyes closed. Suspended in some fusion of stasis and consciousness.

  Arix froze. Her instincts screamed to retreat. Her hand hovered over her weapon.

  The figure opened her eyes. Her head turned towards Arix.

  She could see, clearly. Eyes, glowing. Blue. Bottomless.

  And then - a voice, not spoken, but invasive. It did not ask for permission. It simply was:

  “You are not of the Signal. You carry the spark, but not the Will. Why have you come to awaken the Echo?”

  The voice rang in Arix's skull, each word the fullness of its entire meaning.

  Arix reeled. Her mind buckled under pressure - thoughts spiraling inwards. The sensation was like orbiting a massive truth, unable to escape its gravity. She struggled to maintain balance, as her hands instinctively formed fists and raised upwards.

  “VIRNA,” she whispered, barely audible. “Quarantine. Cut external feeds. Low-pass filter filer on all signal inputs. Don't need you getting weird on me.”

  VIRNA responded, tone flat. “Acknowledged. Isolation protocol engaged. External signals suppressed.”

  Through the storm inside Arix's head, she could feel the slight release of pressure behind her eyes as VIRNA's cognitive link went dormant.

  The floating figure watched her. She tilted her head, and with a gentler, more curious voice, spoke again.

  “Clever. You carry fire, yet resist the flame. That is rare. Dangerous.”

  “The Signal touched your kind once. You silenced it. Buried it beneath ice and fear. Why return now?”

  She floated down slowly, past the glowing orb, towards Arix, as the gravity field around her rippled with a strange resonance.

  Then, suddenly, images came unbidden into Arix's mind - memories that were not her own. A glimpse of ancient Earth, skies burning with auroras, towers of stone humming with sound. A civilization long lost. Flashes of images that carried with them the memory of loss that she had never known. It was over in a flash, and as she regained composure, saw the glowing sphere had begn to rotate - rising into the air. Arix's suit sensors indicated a concerning rapid increase in energy levels fromt he sphere, as it increased in brightness, casting long shadows that further revealed the ruined equipment around the chamber.

  The glowing blue woman's form shimmered, phasing slightly, becoming slightly less corporeal, as she stopped in front of Arix. She felt the question in her mind before the words were fully spoken:

  “Answer, spark-bearer: Will you reignite what was lost — or bury it once more?”