Year: 2478

  Location: Orbital Research Station Helix-9, deep above the methane clouds of Neptune

  The silence of space was absolute - until the docking clamps engaged with a dull mechanical thud. Commander Arix Solen felt the moment artificial gravity reasserted itself, her boots thudding gently against the steel floor of the inner airlock. The decompression cycle completed with a soft hiss. Then the airlock doors parted.

  Helix-9 had once been a flagship research station - experimental, ambitious, expensive. Eighty-six crew members had staffed it before the blackout. After that, nothing. No distress calls. No logs. Only one brief transmission - a data anomaly the Coalition’s blacksite analysts called the Neptunian Signal - intercepted seconds before the station went silent.

  Within minutes, the Coalition's automated system had unceremoniously scrubbed the station existence, the mission, and the lives of the scientists and personnel from most public records. Arix wasn't surprised at this. It was typical for the bureaucracy to cover up any and all failures, anything out of the ordinary, to maintain the air of supremacy that lingered over the inner worlds. Her job wasn't to ask questions, at least not of the briefing. The Coalition's process for mission assignment was simple enough. Standard comms displayed mission briefings, sent over secure comms. Commanders would consider the risk, with a deadline of reply within half a cycle. Decline the mission, and submit to neural modification to prevent long-term memory retention and standard systems scrub if you decline, the equivalent of a massive blackout, concussion, and tooth extraction. The hangover afterwards took weeks to recover from - not something that Arix nor any other commanders ever looked forward to.

  Accept, and the terms included the usual non-commitment from the Coalition, no one is coming to save you, secrecy, threats of erasure, non disclosures after the fact. At least you avoided that knockout headache. Which was the tradeoff for sometimes arduous, sometimes dangerous, usually insane, and always profitable work across the galaxy. This mission was all typical, all standard, but for the mention of that Signal.

  Arix stepped inside the station's airlock module, her exosuit hissing with micro-adjustments. Every motion was silent, practiced. She was Coalition-trained, a xenoarchaeologist with deep systems specialization - one of only a handful cleared to handle pre-human artifacts and the AI-contaminated ruins that sometimes came with them. In an age when trilions of lives crossed the galaxy, Arix knew that he Coalition's algorithms had selected her - her - for this mission. More telemetry started to pour in. External scans from her ship were useless at penetrating the shielded walls of the station. This was her first look inside, after weeks of travel to the outer planets.

  The corridor that greeted her was barely lit, long stretches shrouded in darkness where overhead panels flickered or had gone entirely dead. Red emergency lights pulsed like a distant heartbeat. Condensation was visible, dripping in lazy rivulets along the walls. Arix's telemetry indicated a mix of breathable enough atmosphere and a collection trace elements that she recognizes as space industrial stale air. With three and half hours of EVA time, she left her helmet on for the time being, not keen on filling her nostrils with ozone and decades of decay.

  Arix's boots barely whispered against the wet decking. She walked nearly silently beyond the airlock modlue and into the corridor towards Sector D. Electrical panels sparked in places, casting erratic shadows across the walls like twitching fingers. Malfunctioning life support systems, especially humidity control, likely lead to further breakdowns. While the station could operate for centuries with regular maintenance, this station had been without human hands or intervention for decades. Ruin was expected.

  Systems on her suit finally began to download updates from the station, having crossed out of the neural network of her ship. Damage was reported across the station, sensors sending junk and contradictory readings. No logs access, with minimal power generation that seemed primarily dedicated to maintaing the station's orbit around Neptune, and basic life support. Erratic power spikes, mostly slience (or sirens?), hard vacuum, temperature readings all over the place - the sensors clearly were going haywire. She'd need to reach a dedicated maintenance terminal to begin making requests of the station AI, if it was still functional, or, at the very least, make to start making manual repairs to the systems. She started to cross reference the station's sensor data at a high level, looking for patterns through all the junk and errors.

  Arix started walking, to slowly make her way towards the nearest maintenance terminal with the permissions she needed - to review logs, to assess the state of the station's systems, prioritize repairs. She stepped carefully, continuing to review the new scans from the station and anaylzing the station's status. While this was not the only functional airlock on Helix-9, it was the closest to the station's comms modules. One of the Coalition's mission parameters was to reconnect the station to the interstellar network and restore basic systems after threats, if any, had been remedied. This goal came with the largest payout for Arix - not just financially, but for her reputation as an archeologist and Coalition operative. The prestige gain of bringing hard assets back into the fold was second only to rescue and recovery operations. Her hope was to explore, reclaim, and then turn the radio back on on the way out. It meant better missions in the future, and more answers about the deep unknowns in the galaxy and into humanity's history.

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  This place was as much the disaster as the briefings had indicated. She considered returning to her suit to grab more of her kit when her wrist terminal pulsed.

  Arix felt a familiar pulse of pressure just behind the eyes, as the voice of her suit AI, VIRNA, spoke to her over the internal exosuit speakers.

  VIRNA: "Commander, I’m detecting movement in Sector D-3. Records indicate that area was sealed for biohazard protocols. Proceed with caution."

  Arix paused.

  The station had been declared lifeless for nearly ninety years. Well, that was what the briefing had said. Sector D-3 was part of the bio sample research and containment wing . Movement meant one of two things: either a mistake had been made in reporting before the blackout, or something had survived whatever it was that had killed everyone else. Survivors, stranded on a station for weeks, months, even a few years, were rare. Eighty seven years would be a new record. She stared hard at the sensor reading. It was movement, not noise, or error.

  Then came a sound that didn’t belong in a dead station. Nearby, the unmistakable screech of metal being dragged against metal, echoing, piercing through the bulkheads, through that dead atmosphere, through her suit helmet, slow, for several seconds. Followed by immense silence, which made it clear to Arix that she had, in fact, heard something.

  Arix froze for a moment, before instinct drove her toward the nearest cover - a half-collapsed bulkhead that had buckled at some point over the past eighty years.

  She heard a dull thud of metal on metal from the same direction as the screech. Then, another. And another.

  Her training triggered a reflexive gesture as she moved - a quick flit of the fingers inside her glove. As she pressed her back against the bulkhead, her suit responded with full stealth protocols; her visor dimmed, energy output dropped to minimal levels, while the exterior of the suit shimmered to filter her thermal and EM signatures to near zero. She began to steady her breath, and hastily brought up the station' schematics, guessing as to the possible origin of the sounds.

  VIRNA: "Initiating ambient masking. Recalibrating sensor echo. Cloaking thermal signature. We’re as invisible as we're going to get, for now."

  The thuds grew louder.

  They were still slow. Heavy. Uneven. Stuttering in rhythm, like something mimicking the act of walking rather than performing it naturally.

  From behind the bulkhead, Arix made out a shadow. It stretched long and jagged across the corridor floor, flickering with each pulse of the red emergency lights. Then came the figure. It wore a Coalition exosuit - standard issue, but torn, dented, and missing in parts. Human shaped, in a human suit.

  The helmet visor had fractured wide open. Arix's suit optics zoomed in, and sh e saw pale skin stretched beneath the visor on a hollow face marbled with unnatural blue lines, like old-Earth circuitry. Traces circled, and interwoven with protrusions of small blue crystalline mineral deposits across the skin of the empty face. The figure's limbs moved not in the way that limbs should move, but as if they were a puppet jerked by someone who had never actually seen someone walking bfore. Each step was stiff, calculated one at a time, and wrong. Through a large tear in the exosuit's side, Arix could see only the stretched fabric of the Coalition's grey standard issue jumpsuit, soaked dark with what apepared to be a gel or liquid.

  Thud. Pause. Thud. Pause. Thud. Pause.

  Its head twitched side to side, as if scanning the darkness with those unblinking eyes - eyes without eyelids, criss-crossed with thin traces of blue, parellel, circuit like eyes that gleamed with a faint blue machine-glow.

  A few more thuding steps llater, and It stopped, frozen, a few meters from Arix's hiding spot, seeming to look past her repeatedly as its head twitched.

  VIRNA, silently projected a message inside the visor of Arix's helmet: "Readings indicate an active, direct connection between that suit and the station’s neural grid. Ambient temperature. Life Signs Negative. Coalition ID Negative. Motion in Sector D-3 increasing."

  At this, the figure tilted its head. It seemed to sniff the air.

  Then, with a lurch, it slammed its fist into the wall beside it. The impact of suit against bulkhead rattled what felt like the entirety of the corridor. A high-pitched, garbled screech followed - a synthetic binary tone, warping and twisting as if filtered through broken speakers. It spoke:

  "ACCESS GRANTED. PRIMARY CORE LOCATED. ALL MUST LISTEN. ALL MUST TRANSMIT."

  The red emergency lights were drowned by the sudden activation of all of the corridor's lights, exploding with light in stuttering chaos. Wall panels sparked, as arcs of electricity broke between the walls. The floor of the station seemed to tremble beneath Arix’s feet, and she moved her hands to keep from stumbling onto the floor.

  The figure, hand on the wall, slowly turned towards the direction of the airlock that Arix had entered through.

  Thud. Pause. Thud. Pause.

  Then, from farther down the corridor, the grinding sound of metal against metal started to make its way through the air. More doors began to open. And from the shadows beyond them started to come more slow, methodical, unnatural thuds.