Chapter 2
Tobias tightened the final bolt on the thermo regulator until his knuckles turned white. He listened to the familiar creak of his knees as he stood up.
“Station,” Tobias addressed the air, “Status report on sector 5.”
“Sector 5 power grid is operating at 73% efficiency. Hull integrity is stable. Warning – life support filters in block B require replacement within 72 hours.”
“Put that on the list,” Tobias muttered, adding cynically, “Right under ‘contemplate existence’ and ‘clean the sewage tanks.’” He grumbled grimly to himself as the silence of the station settled heavily over the workshop.
A sudden shrill ping from the main console shattered the quiet. Startled, Bolt jolted in his tracks, knocking over a stack of depleted power cells.
Tobias frowned. “Station. What is that?” He wasn’t expecting a supply run for another two weeks.
“Unidentified signal detected,” the AI droned. “Low frequency distress beacon, class 3. Origin… the debris field in quadrant 2.”
Tobias walked over to the console, leaning heavily against the desk. The screen displayed a swirling mass of orange dots. This was the graveyard of ships and asteroids that orbited the planet below. Buried deep within the chaos was a faint pulsing green square. Tobias squinted at the readout.
“Class 3,” he murmured. “That’s barely enough to run a small appliance. Could be a capacitor discharging on a derelict.”
“Signal analysis indicates a rhythmic pattern,” the monotone AI countered. “Standard galactic coding but outdated. It is an SOS.”
Tobias froze. Outdated signals were usually ghosts, echoes of tragedies that had happened long ago. But a signal meant power. Power meant a core. And a core meant money.
“Could be a cryo unit,” Tobias reasoned aloud, the scavenger in him waking up. “Or a sealed data vault.”
He grabbed his battered space suit and headed for the cargo bay.
“Bolt, I’m heading out on a retrieval. Do not touch anything. Last time I was only gone for three hours and you somehow managed to set fire to the water purifier.”
Bolt peeped an affirmative that sounded suspiciously sarcastic but Tobias ignored it.
The small pods Tobias occasionally used for salvage operations weren’t state-of-the-art. They weren’t even particularly safe. But they got the job done. Tobias strapped himself into the pod’s worn seat, and the canopy hissed shut overhead. It smelled faintly of burnt wiring and old socks.
“Launching,” Tobias announced to no one in particular. With a jolt, the pod detached from the docking bay and shot out towards quadrant 2.
Navigating through the debris field never got easier. Twisted metal carcasses of ships loomed like specters, their edges sharp enough to cleave his pod in two. Tobias weaved through the wreckage with the deftness of someone who had done this a thousand times before.
“Closing in on signal origin,” the pod’s basic nav computer informed him.
“Understood,” Tobias muttered, keeping his eyes peeled for the source of the SOS.
After what seemed like an eternity of dodging broken freighters and shattered fighters, he finally located the signal. A small, cylindrical vessel floated smoothly amid the ruin, its hull adorned with clear signs of the meteor shower that had clearly stranded it here in the planet’s orbit.
“Target in visual range,” Tobias said to himself, flipping on the floodlights. The side of the vessel was blackened like it survived a fire. There was a symbol on the side but it was burned beyond recognition. Something about the ship was familiar though. It gave him a sense of deja vu that felt like an itch in the back of his brain. He shook it off quickly and turned back to his console.
Tobias carefully docked his pod alongside the vessel and activated the mag-locks. The seals hissed as a tunnel connected the pod to the derelict vessel. He cautiously pried open the access hatch and stepped into the airlock.
“Hello?” Tobias called out through his suit’s speakers, his voice echoing through the silent corridor.
The lighting was dim, flickering sporadically. He raised his arm to glance at his handheld computer. The ship looked like it had been abandoned for years, yet the air was somewhat breathable—a testament to the engineering. He didn’t remove his helmet though. One close call with an explosive decompression incident several months ago still haunted him.
He moved systematically through the craft, checking the command center first, then storage rooms, and the crew quarters. Most of the doors were jammed, which required a fair amount of elbow grease and cursing to open.
Thankfully, he didn’t find any bodies, but he didn’t find any escape pods either. So, the crew had made it off the ship at least. Whether or not they survived the asteroid field right outside was another story though.
He made his way into the secondary cargo bay where the signal was the strongest and halted. There was a container. A standard shipping crate reinforced with dura steel corners gleaming dully under the artificial lights, but it was the markings on the side that made Tobias’s blood turn to ice in his veins.
The logo was immediately recognizable—a modern design featuring a sleek blue asymmetrical oval encapsulating a stylized, gold letter "A." Alion Corporation. The very company he worked for. Beneath the logo, stenciled in stern warning red, were the words, “Hazardous bio asset. Level seven containment. Do not open. Incinerate upon discovery.”
Tobias's breath hitched in his throat. He knew that logo. He knew that font. Worst of all, he knew what kind of horrors warranted level seven containment.
“Leave it,” a voice hissed in his head. It sounded disturbingly like his old supervisor, Dr. Ronald Lor. “It’s just trash, Tobias. Dangerous trash. Push the ship into the atmosphere. Let it burn.” An all-too-familiar headache began to pulse at the back of his skull. He squeezed his eyes shut briefly and breathed deeply through his nose.
Backing away was the smart move—the survivor’s move. Alion didn’t lose things; they discarded them. Just like they had discarded him at the space station. If they labeled it hazardous, it meant it could kill him, infect him, or bring a black ops kill squad straight to his door. His feet moved before he told them to and he backed up to the bay door.
He hesitated. It didn’t feel right but he couldn’t articulate what was wrong.
Checking his suit’s wrist computer, he noted the signal was weak, possibly dying. He let out a frustrated growl. Despite his better judgment, he raised his handheld computer to scan the container.
Organic, the screen flashed. Faint thermal signatures. Low metabolic rates consistent with cryo-sleep.
Six sources.
Six small sources.
Closing his eyes, painful memories struck him with the force of a sledgehammer. They came fast over and over until he was clutching his head in agony. The antiseptic smell. The sterile white walls of the lab. Rows upon rows of glass tanks housing small bodies floating in preservation liquid.
“They are not people, Tobias,” Dr. Lor had said indifferently while cleaning his glasses. “Do not attach emotions to the assets.”
But Tobias couldn’t shake the nightmares. The small, underdeveloped bodies stared accusingly in his dreams while he stood by and did nothing.
He’d planned to blow the whistle. Alion Corporation was conducting illegal experiments on children. He stole damning information about the project and sent it to someone he thought he could trust but Lor had found out. They had wiped his memory and reassigned him to this derelict space station at the ass end of nowhere to cover it up. It wasn’t an accident. The fire that destroyed the labs was deliberately set by Lor’s cronies to hide evidence. And he was their convenient scapegoat.
He gasped for breath as waves of fragmented memories crashed over him, leaving him momentarily disoriented. When he could see clearly again, he was slightly surprised to find he was still inside an empty ship in front of a container that now seemed dreadfully familiar. He must have fallen at some point because he was on the grimy floor.
Shaking and sweaty, he slowly regained his footing. Vague flashes of the past played like a broken reel in his mind. Dizzying snippets of things that barely made sense.
With a firm shake of his head, he tried to clear the fog. It felt like waking from a strange, unsettling dream. His eyes flicked to the door of the container and back to the ominous warning. He had to know. He couldn’t leave them in there.
He sighed heavily. “If this kills me, Bolt is going to be so smug.”
He approached the container nervously, hands shaking slightly as he fumbled with the release mechanism. His heavy pulse rifle hung over his shoulder. If whatever was inside wanted to kill him, a rifle probably would not stop it. If it was a virus, he was probably already dead.
With a hiss, the container's seals broke, and cold mist wafted out as the door creaked open. Tobias peered inside, bracing himself for what lay within. Nothing jumped out. No screeching monsters. No toxic clouds. He slowly stepped inside waving the mist away.
Six small stasis pods lined the interior, each housing a tiny, fragile-looking life form. They were children—frozen in time, eyes closed as if merely sleeping. Tobias’s breath caught in his throat. Memories of similar faces haunted his nights. He scanned the readouts on the pods, which showed stable, though weakened, life signs.
"Not again," he whispered, his voice barely audible.
He moved to the first pod and wipe the frost off the glass at the front of the pod. A young girl with dark purple skin and silver-blonde hair. She look no more than twelve. She was wearing a simple white shirt and pants with a barcode and a number on her chest. His chest tightened. He looked at the other pods. They were all labeled with a serial number, not a name.
Was Alion getting rid of them? Perhaps failed experiments? But why keep them alive in cryo sleep if that were they case? Maybe they were trying to hide them. Alion certainly couldn’t risk them being found. When Tobias sent the information to his contact, Lor said they intercepted it, but maybe Lor lied. If they were trying to contain a leak but not scrap the project it would stand to reason they would want to hide their assets. This ship just happened to get caught in a meteor shower.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said with a sigh. “I can’t leave them. No matter the reason they are here.”
He left the container and closed the door securely, then moved to the mag-locks to release them. He would need to enter the cargo bay from the exterior door and tow the container to the station. He moved with an urgency that he had forgotten he possessed.
Chapter 24
They navigated narrow corridors lined with reinforced doors, each one marked “Restricted.” Nina’s map on the tablet guided them past layers of security protocols and motion sensors. At the central wing, a heavy blast door loomed. They walked quietly down the last empty corridor to the main lab. Tobias was just starting to think that it felt too easy when they reached the door.
“This is it,” Tobias said.
The door hissed open, revealing a dimly lit chamber. As they stepped through, the lights remained stubbornly off, plunging the room into near darkness. A single spotlight flickered to life, illuminating a man seated in a high-backed chair like a king awaiting his subjects.
His sharp, angular nose held his wired glasses that did nothing to hide the cruel glint in his dead, grey eyes. His black hair was cut short but immaculately styled. Tobias recognized him immediately. Dr. Ronald Lor, director of Alion Corporation's science division, smiled smoothly, an unsettling look of triumph spreading across his face.
“Welcome home, Tobias.”
With a resounding thud, the door slammed shut behind them, magnetic locks engaging with a thunderous clap that echoed in the silence. Tobias froze, a cold dread creeping up his spine. Nina raised her energy pistols, fingers poised over the triggers. Vekra's spear extended and crackled to life with energy ominously. Yet Lor remained unmoved, rising from his chair as he smoothed the wrinkles of his expensive white silk suit, precisely as he appeared on the news feeds—cold, immaculate, and utterly devoid of fear.
Around the perimeter of the room, shadows detached themselves from the wall to flank them. Alion’s elite guards, 20 of them. Armor polished to a mirror shine and heavy plasma guns in their hands. And they were all pointed at Tobias, Nina, and Vekra. He ground his teeth in frustration. They were so close to their goal.
“You are late,” Lor said, glancing at a designer watch that gleamed under the spotlight. “I expected you ten minutes ago. Your stealth protocols are surprisingly outdated.”
Tobias’s heart raced, a tightness settling in his chest. “You knew?”
“Tobias, please.” Lor's voice dripped with disdain as he strolled toward them slowly, unphased by the weapons aimed at him. “You built the security system for this building. Did you really believe you could sneak past your own masterpiece? The moment your little toy interfaced with the outer door, the system flagged a biometric anomaly. It recognized the code but not the user ID. It knew you had returned.”
“We are here to shut you down, Lor.” Tobias announced with a boldness that he didn’t feel.
“Shut me down?” Lor laughed, a dry, humorless sound echoing off the walls. “No, old friend. You are here to turn the resonance interface on.”
Confusion danced in Tobias’s gaze. “What are you talking about?”
Lor’s cold smile widened as the lights in the room flickered to life, blinding them momentarily. When their eyes adjusted, a massive holographic map dominated the space, thousands of nodes blinking in amber, each pulse a silent harbinger of doom. He recognized it. Each of those dots were the people connected to the neural chips produced by Alion. Those chips were mass produced and most of the core worlds had people who implanted them. This must be only a small sampling of them.
“We have been stuck at ninety percent for six years,” Lor explained, gesturing to the map with an air of serene authority. “We possess the hardware. The captured Kyeran assets sit modified, ready for processing. But we lack the catalyst—the code that stabilizes the psychic echo. We tried to extract it from your notes, but you deleted them. We attempted to extract it from your brain, but you were more clever than we anticipated.”
Tobias frowned, the weight of Lor’s words pressing down on him. “What are you talking about?”
“The memory wipe,” Lor said, stepping closer despite the weapons pointed at him. “You think we did that to you? No, Tobias. You did that to yourself.”
The world tilted on its axis, and Tobias staggered, grappling with the implications. “What?”
“Six years ago, when you comprehended my intentions, you panicked.” Lor’s voice oozed condescension. “You knew you couldn’t fight us. As long as you remembered the code—the fundamental key that merges human and Kyeran consciousness—we would torture it out of you. So, you employed a prototype memory scrambler to protect those equations. You buried the code deep in your own subconscious and then wiped the map.” Lor smiled cruelly, “You turned yourself into a potato to protect a mathematical equation. Noble, stupid, and incredibly annoying.”
Tobias fell to his knees, memories flashing like lightning behind his eyes—fragments of pain, sorrow, and desperation swirling within him. He had not just been an unwilling accomplice or a victim; he was a martyr who had forgotten his own sacrifice.
“Did I hide it?” Tobias whispered numbly, the realization crushing his chest.
“In the only place no one looks,” Lor said, leaning down, his face inches from Tobias’s. “In the junk data, in the reflex centers. That is why you excel as a mechanic. You were not merely fixing broken systems. You were subconsciously trying to reconstruct the code.” Lor tapped his finger on Tobias’s forehead then straightened, a triumphant glint in his eye. “We didn’t toss you to that derelict station and forget about you. We have been watching and waiting.”
Realization hit him like a punch to the gut. The doctor. No wonder he had always expressed such interest in Tobias’s dreams, in the fragmented memories that now threatened to overwhelm him. Alion had recorded everything and they were looking for the code in his dreams.
“But now,” Lor continued brightly, pacing away, “You have reconnected to the foundation bloodline. Those six little runts you’ve been playing daddy to have awakened the dormant code. You carry it right now, nestled snugly in your frontal lobe. And I am going to take it.”
With a snap of his fingers, the guards lunged forward, armor shining like dark stars, their guns leveled toward Tobias and his companions. Nina and Vekra fought valiantly, but the elite guards moved with lethal precision, subduing them swiftly.
Tobias struggled, rage igniting within him. “You won’t get away with this!”
“Oh, but I already have,” Lor replied coolly, observing the chaos with detached amusement. He motioned for the guards to secure Tobias. “Within moments, we will unlock a potential that has lain dormant for too long. Imagine the power, the efficiency we could achieve. Your resistance is futile, old friend.”
As the guards restrained him, a deep sense of betrayal filled Tobias. All those years spent in exile, thinking he had failed, thinking he was to blame, and all along, Lor had been behind all of it. And then he had orchestrated his return. Finding the kids. The attack on the space station. Giving Nina access to the schematics. It had all been Lor.
“I will stop you,” Tobias spat, refusing to yield even as despair clawed at his insides.