The distress signal had been looping for 4,712 years.
Buried beneath layers of cosmic radiation and shifting nebula storms, the signal had gone unnoticed—until now.
Orion Vex didn't believe in ghosts, but as his ship, The Revenant, dropped out of hyperspace near Nyx-13, he felt a chill crawl up his spine. The planet loomed ahead, an obsidian sphere wrapped in an eerie, green aurora. No sunlight reached its surface. No colonies, no ships, no life signs. Just a signal, pulsing from somewhere deep below.
"That place gives me bad vibes," muttered Kai-74, the ship's rogue AI, its voice crackling through the cockpit speakers. "And I don't even have a nervous system."
Orion smirked, adjusting his flight controls. "You and me both, Kai. But we didn't come all this way to turn back now."
A warning flashed on his HUD—gravimetric instability detected. The ship trembled as Nyx-13's gravity well pulled them in, stronger than it should be for a planet this size. Orion gritted his teeth, forcing the ship into a controlled descent.
"Still think this is just another dead rock?" he muttered.
Behind him, the doors hissed open, and Dr. Ayla Meros stepped into the cockpit. Her fiery red hair was tied back, and her cybernetic eyes glowed faintly as she studied the readings. "That gravity field is unnatural," she said. "Something down there is generating it. And I intend to find out what."
Orion exhaled sharply. "You scientists and your curiosity."
"Curiosity is why we're still alive as a species," Ayla shot back.
Kai-74 snorted. "Debatable."
A sudden thud rocked the ship as they breached the lower atmosphere. Turbulence howled around them, shaking the hull. Orion tightened his grip on the controls. "Hang on!"
Below them, Nyx-13 stretched into an endless black desert, its surface cracked and scarred like an ancient battlefield. But in the center of it all, something stood out—a massive structure buried beneath layers of dust, shaped like a colossal obsidian monolith.
And at its heart, the signal pulsed.
"That's it," Ayla whispered. "That's where it's coming from."
Before Orion could respond, the ship's alarms screamed. Incoming energy spike detected.
Then, the world went white.
And Orion heard something whisper his name.
END OF CHAPTER 1.
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