Ancient Legacies part 6

Commander Vance drifted in the centre of the infirmary, a solitary ghost in a room full of them. Her magnetic boots were disengaged, allowing her to hover above the deck as she sifted through a sheaf of frost-dusted papers recovered from the desk of the ship’s Chief Medical Officer, Charles Adams. In the harsh, clinical light of her helmet’s lamps, the handwriting on the pages felt like a voice from the grave.

The early entries were mundane—routine physicals, a few cases of radiation sickness from the shakedown, a minor fracture during a training exercise. But as Vance flipped toward the end, the script transformed. The neat, disciplined cursive of a career officer had devolved into a jagged, frantic scrawl. 

“The thrum is getting louder,” one entry read, the ink smeared as if the hand had been shaking. “Adams says it’s just the Displacement Drive settling, but the men are seeing things in the shadows of the vents. I performed three sedations today. None of them are sleeping. They say the stars in the Dark Sector are looking back.”

The final page was a nightmare of half-finished sentences and desperate prayers. “The breach wasn't from the outside. We brought the silence back with us. May Earth forgive us for what we’ve done.”

Vance stowed the papers in her suit’s thigh pouch just as Ensign Childs’ voice crackled over the radio, a burst of high-pitched electronic screaming preceding his words.

“Commander... over here. You need to see this. Now.”

Vance kicked off a bulkhead, drifting toward the back of the bay where the rest of the team was huddled around a specific diagnostic bed. On it lay a figure in the high-collared blue and gold of the Earth Alliance. The body was a ruin; a horrific, partially melted hole was burned directly through the centre of the chest, the edges of the wound cauterized into a blackened, obsidian-like rim that shimmered under the frost.

Kovic winced, his gloved hand tightening on his particle pistol. “Grizzly. But Ma’am, with all due respect, what’s the tactical significance? Half the bodies in here look like they were hit by a heavy thermal discharge. This ship was a slaughterhouse.”

Childs didn’t look up from the body. His breath was coming in short, ragged hitches that Vance could hear clearly through the comms. “Look at the nameplate, Sergeant. Look at the rank.”

Vance leaned in, her torch beam centering on the small, metallic strip pinned to the frost-coated tunic. 

LT CMDR J. EVANS

The silence that followed was heavy and suffocating. Vance felt a cold sweat prickle at the back of her neck. “Evans,” she whispered. “The Armaments Officer.”

“The suit in the quarters,” Aris added, her voice trembling. “The one with the identical hole in the chest. We saw the empty suit, fully sealed, five decks away. If Evans is here, lying dead in the infirmary with his chest melted out... how did his armour get back to his bunk? And why was it empty?”

“Maybe he crawled out?” Miller suggested, though even he sounded like he didn't believe it.

“Nobody crawls out of a suit after taking a point-blank plasma hit to the heart, Miller,” Vance snapped, her mind racing. “And they certainly don't seal the suit back up and place it neatly on a footlocker afterward.”

Before the paradox could sink in, the radio erupted with a violent surge of white noise. It wasn't the rhythmic interference from before; it was a chaotic, multi-tonal screech that sounded like metal being ground into powder. 

“Swiftsure to Vance! Do you... copy?” Jax’s voice was a jagged shard of sound. “Commander, we’ve got... activity. More lights are popping up along the Starlight’s hull. Not just the infirmary. They’re... they’re spreading toward the bridge. Like a nervous system waking up.”

“Stay calm, Jax,” Vance replied, her voice a forced anchor of steel. “We’re seeing anomalies here too. What’s the word from Command?”

“That’s the... problem,” Jax’s voice digitized into a robotic growl before clearing. “Navy High Command on Earth just sent a Priority-One burst via Sector Command's relay. They’ve flagged the Starlight’s Wings as a Class-X Biohazard and Temporal Anomaly. Orders are: Do not board. Maintain minimum distance of ten kilometers. Monitor and report only.”

Vance let out a harsh, humourless bark of a laugh. “A bit late for the ‘no boarding’ part, Jax. We’re already elbow-deep in the dead. Did the database search turn up anything on the ship's history?”

“Affirmative,” Jax said, the signal stabilizing for a precious few seconds. “The EAS Starlight’s Wings was an experimental Titan-class testbed. It was officially recorded as 'Lost with all hands' three hundred years ago during a shakedown of its prototype systems. Location of the loss: The Arcturus System Test Range.”

The team went perfectly still. 

Miller was the first to speak, his voice a subdued whisper that seemed to carry further than a shout in the thin atmosphere of the bay. “Arcturus? Commander, that’s on the other side of the core. If this ship was 'lost' in the Arcturus system, how the hell is it floating out here, thousands of light-years away, at the edge of the Dark Stars?”

The silence that followed Miller’s question was deeper and quieter than the void beyond the hull. In the distance, somewhere near the engineering decks, a long, low groan vibrated through the floorboards—a sound that wasn't metal expanding, but something deep and rhythmic. 

Like a breath.

“It didn't drift here,” Vance said, her eyes fixed on the frozen, hollowed-out chest of Lt. Cmdr. Evans. “It jumped. And it didn't come back alone.”

Vance turned toward the exit, her jaw set. “Childs, forget the medical logs. We’re going to Engineering. I want to see this 'Displacement Drive' for myself. If High Command is this scared of a three-hundred-year-old ghost, I want to know exactly what kind of door they accidentally opened.”

As they moved toward the hatch, the radio didn't just static. A single, clear voice—layered and shimmering as if spoken by a hundred people at once—whispered through the team's shared channel.

“The door... is still... open, Vance”

Vance didn't stop. She didn't look back. But she gripped her rifle until her knuckles ached.