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LaGrange 4- 384,000 km from Earth:
Dr. Emily O’Connor anchored herself to the base of the dead North Start Satellite Antenna, her umbilical cord stretching back to Service Vehicle 9. Fifty meters away, Chris Mitchell vacillated at the mouth of the Mid-Deck airlock, fingers tight around the handrail.
“What’s the hold up,” Commander Jake Sanders’ barked through the COMM.
Emily kept things light. “Give him a minute Cap. You remember your first time, don’t ya?”
She could hear Sanders grinding his teeth through the COMM. “God damn it,” he said, “What a fucking mistake… We screw this up and the WinterField stays down for another two months, minimum. You know how many lives that is?”
Emily flipped back to Mitchell, “Hey, bud,” she said with a comforting, maternal tone, “we only have about ten hours of O2 in these tanks. How ‘bout we pick up the pace?”
Mitchell swallowed hard. Despite his meticulous preparation, his rehearsals of plan and procedure, one singular thought echoed through his mind: I’m not ready for this.
No one could be.
Then—something shifted. the faintest shimmer of blackness just beyond SV9. “Command,” she muttered softly, her voice edged with unease, “are you picking up anything starboard?”
“Starboard?” Sanders repeated, “Hey Dani— “
“Already on it,” Tech Chief Daniella Peña said.
Commander Sanders watched Chris Mitchell vacillate on the overhead monitor from the Command Deck. He opened a line to Houston, “God Dammit Ed,” He spat into the COMM, “Having a Grounder on the team was one thing, but this? This is insane.”
Ed Parker, Director, Houston responded, “Watch the language Jake, it’s not Grounder anymore, they are Subterraneans, and if Chris Mitchell isn’t doing this repair, it’s both our asses.”
“One day, you’re gonna explain this to me.”
“I already told you Jake, the Academy process isn’t working. How many times have they failed?
“I haven’t. Not once.”
“You know what I mean Jake, we need to try something different. If we can’t keep the WinterField working, we’re all dead. Now, for reasons above our paygrade, Washington wants to use this Mithcell.” He paused. “Look, I’ve seen data, Jake—this guy’s has built thousands of NSS parts. I think we’re good.”
“Great. I’m glad you feel that way Ed. Because I’m gonna put that in the log, and when this goes to shit—and it will—it’s gonna be on you.”
Sanders exhaled, “I gotta go. I gotta keep this FNG from puking all over my Mid-deck.” Sanders cut the COM with Houston and flashed a frustrated finger toward the radio. But before he could leave the Command Deck to lean on Mitchell, Emily’s voice snapped across the COMM.
“Well?” She asked again, an uptick of tension in her voice. “You picking anything up starboard?”
Tech Chief Peña shook her head. “Dani says ‘negative.’” the Commander relayed, “What kind of anything are we talking about?”
She hesitated, “I’m... not sure… It’s like a rippling.”
“What’s rippling?” Dani asked.
No response.
“Stand by,” Sanders ordered, his voice shifting to a serious register. Dani ran the scans again but—.
“Nothing on our instruments,” Sanders said, “You still have eyes on it?”
“Affirmative.” Emily’s pulse quickened, “It’s closing in,” she swallowed. “If I didn’t know better…” Her words trailing off as the blackness took shape. “Oh my God.”
“Come again?” Sanders pressed. “What do you see?”
Emily didn’t respond. Words escaped her as the void coalesced into a form, an abandoned ship, drifting silently on gravitational tides. No lights, no thrusters, just an absence, an inexplicable hole in space where no hole should be.
Then, without warning, it was upon them.
Emily’s body locked. She tried to describe the anomaly but couldn’t, not in any way that would matter. Her eyes darted across the expanse, searching for details, but the phantom silhouette blended seamlessly with the nothingness of space. As it approached, glints of light reflected off its edges, offering bits of information about the vessel. Two pill-shaped fuselages, one forward, the other aft, were joined to a central hexagonal hub. The ship bore gaping wounds—craggy holes and twisted metal—a testament to its troubled past.
Her heart filled throat. “Brace for impact!” she screamed.
Too Late.
The wayward ship ran through Service Vehicle 9. Carbon fiber walls and honeycomb paneling crumpled into nothingness. The collision unleashed a violent cascade of debris. Plates, beams, and cables slung outward, shotgunning downrange toward the North Star Satellite.
Emily backed against the base of the NSS antenna structure. Shrapnel rained over the North Star Satellite, stripping the composite skins from its skeletal structure. A jagged shard of debris sliced through her right thigh, pinning her to the tower. Pain flared, white-hot. Her smart suit snapped into action, constricting around the protrusion as it fought to keep Emily alive.
An explosion from SV9’s lower deck—oxygen tanks. Then black.
Flash blinded, Emily could not see Chris Mitchell cannonball from the blast. His unconscious body shooting from the airlock, spinning uncontrollably into the void.
Time lost.
Emily returned to the sound of distress ringing in her ear. Her eye fluttered open to the surreal image of shipping containers floating by: PROPERTY OF SERVICE VEHICLE 9 embossed on the sides.
Her ship was destroyed.
Stimulus overload. Her senses shut down as Crewmates drifted among the wreckage, their faces frozen in eerie, bloated groans as they tumbled into the abyss.
Ping, ping, ping grew louder.
Emily’s wrist display flared with alerts. Each ping confirming another lost life. PAMS, the crew’s Physical and Medical Information System, fed Emily a relentless stream of data. As the team’s Medical Doctor, she received every grim detail.
Mourning would come later—she needed a plan. “PAM, give me a headcount of survivors,” Emily demanded.
Overwhelmed, the system failed to respond. Teeth gritted, she repeated the command, but PAM delivered a more urgent message. The red words blared out:
SUIT MALFUNCTION – DR. EMILY O’CONNOR
Emily glanced down, surprised to see the hunk of metal stuck in her leg. She moaned as the pain returned. Stay calm. Remember your training. She rocked nervously to quell the rush of anxiety. “Nothing in the fucking training manual about this!” She screamed, lashing out at her own helplessness as another frozen body drifted past. Everyone in their jumpsuits—no pressurization, no thermal regulation. No oxygen. They were all dead.
For a fleeting moment, she considered ending it all—popping her helmet and letting the void do the rest. She scoffed, hating herself for the thought, then turned her focus to something productive. Protocols… Hang on… Someone will be coming.
A rescue team would come; that was certain. But how long would it take? And how long did she have? Faith, hope, luck—these words had no place in her analytical mind. She couldn’t refrain from calculating her odds-even at one-in-a-million, someone had to be the “one”.
Then, there. A single figure floated by. A glint of light skipping over a face shield. She looked closer. It was a body in full-suit. Pressure, temperature, and oxygen—they could be alive. An umbilical cord trailed from their waist, dragging with it a cadre of wreckage.
Only one other person had been tethered.
“Chris!” Emily screamed, reaching, straining, but the shard in her leg held fast. She scrolled through the medical alerts—deceased, deceased, deceased. Where’s Mitchell.
Then, a looming shadow tugged at her periphery.
Her breath stalled.
It was the alien ship, emerging through the swirling storm of debris. It’s forward fuselage bearing down on the NSS structure; bearing down on Emily.
Emily’s heart slammed against her ribs. Pinned down and helpless, she could only brace for impact. “Chris, wake up,” she hollered—her final words before the impact stole her consciousness. Tubes and struts from NSS structure wedged themselves into gaps and cracks of the alien ship. Emily, still pinned to the satellite structure, was now affixed to the alien vessel. Her limp body, just another broken piece of fodder, the latest addition to the vessel’s cursed collection of twisted debris.
SEMINAL EVENT
CHAPTER 1
Chris Mitchell jolted back to consciousness, caught up in a tempest of confusion. Wreckage churned in his periphery as his body rolled in a sickening spiral. Mitchell blended in with mixture of twisted metal and death, the remnants of Service Vehicle 9 and its crew.
Between spins, he could see the phantom ship looming on, the only refuge in sight. It’s jagged silhouette slipping away, shrinking into the infinite black. His arms flailed as desperation surged through him. A drowning man grasping at emptiness, fighting against the impossible to regain control.
He squeezed the MMU triggers. The mini jets should have fired, stabilizing his spin. Nothing. The controls were shot, destroyed in the explosion that had sent him adrift.
Thirty meters away, Dr. O’Connor fluttered her eyes open to a flood of diagnostic warnings. Beep-Beep-Beep grew from a muffled place. Blinking, screaming: red, red, red. Too many, too fast. None of it made any sense.
Then came a voice—calm and detached, passively cutting through the chaos: "Oxygen level 5%. Please return to the ship.”
Pain came next, sharp and searing. A hot, electric bolt radiated from her leg, twisting a choked gasp from her breath. She had to move, but just the thought of touching the shard in her leg sent bile bubbling up her throat. Then came the nausea as the lack of oxygen began poisoning her blood. Every fiber of her smart-mesh suit clung to her body like a second skin. Intelligent fibers constricting like muscular striations around the protrusion, adapting to the damage and the environment.
She looked down at the precious gas percolating out her wound. Despite its efforts, the suit could not seal cleanly around the jagged shard. Without improvement, the water in her bloodstream would vaporize, and the anoxic fluid building in her veins would initiate a cardiac arrest.
“Oxygen level, 5%. Return to ship immediately.”
O’Connor let out a ragged breath, stabbing at her wrist display to silence the warning. “Return to ship… What fucking ship?”
The number stared back at her, 5%. Lost in a fog, her mind attempted to calculate. Simple math, now impossible.
“Five percent… ten over thirty,” she muttered. “Wait… ah hell…” She swallowed hard, “I don’t know,”
Control your breathing. Thirty minutes if you’re lucky.
Emily eyeballed the jagged shard stuck in her leg. The sight alone sent a wave of nausea rolling up her throat. She averted her eyes from the shard, looking back to Chris Mitchell in the distance.
It can’t be, She blinked her eyes, watching him closely—his arm flailed.
He’s alive.
“Chris!” she yelled over the COMM, her voice, shrill with urgency. “Chris, do you read me?” Nothing.
Like his MMU, the electronics of his audio system were fried. The Communication Carrier Assembly (CCA) that handled voice messages melted along with everything else exposed to the blast. Only his body and the medical diagnostic relay endured, both shielded deep within the suit’s protective layers.
Emily gritted her teeth against the throbbing in her leg and head. She tried the COMM again, nothing but white noise. There had to be another way to reach him. A simple solution dangled on the fringe of her memory. But the blood loss draining her strength also thickened the fog around her brain. Her eyes fluttered. Coherency frayed.
A shrill cascade of warnings jolted her back. Her wrist display strobed. Each beep tagged with red-letters.
If COMMS are down, how am I getting these text strings.
Then it hit her.
As Chief Medical Officer, she received all crew diagnostic data. Even with the ship destroyed, the crew’s diagnostics continued to roll in. The medical system was still active. For safety reasons, they designed it with dual redundancy, operating locally through the astronauts CCAs and remotely through a dedicated SATCOM Link.
The local network was destroyed, vaporized along with the SV9. But the WinterField satellites still managed some functionality. The SATCOM link, still locked on to their location, continued to send intermittent text packets. She had to deal with high latency, but at least they were still coming through.
How could I miss that?
The same network flooding her display with medical alerts provided a way to contact Chris.
She sifted through countless messages: deceased, deceased, deceased. Then, finally, she found what she needed:
CHRIS MITCHELL: ELEVATED HEART RATE.
She stared at the screen in disbelief. That’s it?
After the explosion, the wreckage, the carnage… his only status is “elevated heart rate.” No concussion, no hemorrhaging, it was as though he missed the entire thing, or more accurately, it missed him.
Hands trembling, she toggled the network settings on her wrist display, redirecting it to two-way SATCOM Med-link.
She had never used the two-way feature before, never needed to. It was cumbersome, barely functional, designed for emergency use only. It wasn’t intended to be used from outside the spacecraft, and with gloves on, it was nearly impossible to operate. Switching networks consumed valuable time, and with each passing second, Chris drifted farther from her grasp.
The backup system lacked the sophistication of the primary equipment; no bio-securities or voice activation, just good old username and password. She entered her credentials to access the system:
ERROR MESSAGE: USERNAME NOT FOUND
“No, that’s not what I put.” She checked Mitchell’s trajectory and tried again.
‘Incorrect password,’ the screen reported.
“For fuck’s sake,” she yelled, “That’s not what I typed.”
She tried again. Error again, “What do you mean it doesn’t match my username? Are you kidding me?” She glanced at Chris slipping further still.
Fretting made things worse. “You better not fucking lock me out.” She said through grit teeth trying a fourth time.
Access granted.
She checked Chris’s location. “Fifty meters?” The words barely left her lips before a soft defeated “No,” punctuated her thought.
Her fingers fumbled over the tiny display as she hammered out a message, clumsy as hell, and hit send.
Chris Mitchell thrived in the fray, but even steel had a breaking point, and maintaining sanity, at this moment, required more strength than the moment would allow. He could hear space whispering in his ear, “surrender.”
Then, his wrist display flickered with a new message:
MESSAGE FROM DR. EMILY O’CONNOR: OM AKLIVE
Chris welled with relief. The garbled message made no sense, but it communicated the only thing that mattered—he was not alone. The revelation shattered the grip of despair, thrusting his mind back to action.
Next steps, he needed bearings. Not an easy feat when spinning wildly, and nearly impossible without a fixed reference. Then, amid the chaos, something identifiable. The twisted remains of the SV9 Command Deck. It anchored his gaze, guiding his focus. The folded structure became his lighthouse in the storm. Using the Command Deck and the alien ship as markers, he triangulated his trajectory.
His gut clenched. He was drifting away, fast.
Reactively, he tried the MMU again. Shit. He glanced down to check his inventory. An assortment of tools in his pouch, nothing helpful. His eyes gravitated to his safety tether dragging a chunk of the Mid-Deck—his only possession, laughably inadequate.
Still, it sparked an idea.
His eyes darted to the coiled cable. Its housing assembly dangling at the end, still bolted to the section of Mid-Deck wall. A hundred meters of Kevlar cable. He would need every meter of it.
Emily watched as he reeled in the line, her stomach knotted as his intention became clear; he would use the tether to try and hook the passing alien craft. So many ways to fail, the sheer audacity of it stilled her lungs.
Any attempt and Newton would exact his toll: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. However far Chris cast his hook, his body would undoubtedly be shoved backward with equal force. Even a perfect throw could send him drifting out of reach.
He needed to act and deal with the consequences later.
Without a way to counter his torque, the tether would veer off course. He’d have to account for angular velocity, compensate for drift, and time his release to the millisecond. No calculations could help him, it would come down to instinct, to a single, educated guess. One thing for certain, Newton would make sure there were no second chances.
Emily analyzed the risk. Success unlikely. She could improve his odds, perhaps catch his tether, but first, she had to free herself. Her stomach grew nauseous at the thought. Timidly, she placed her hand on the metal rod pinning her to the ship. The mere touch triggered hot shocks of pain. Cold sweat trickled down her spine. “Come on,” she hissed through clenched teeth, furious at her own hesitation. She forced her eyes back to the rod. Failure, far worse than pain.
Three sharp breaths. Another pull. The rod shifted, tearing a guttural scream from her throat. Tears blurred her vision. No going back now. She rolled the shard back and forth, opening the hole in both the structure and her leg. Searing agony reduced her to a quivering mess. She pulled back her trembling hands, wishing for another way.
None came.
Through pursed lips, she let slide a long sobering breath. Gritting her teeth, she dug her fingers into the rod and pulled. She moaned. Even her smart suit resisted.
Meanwhile, Chris coiled the last of his tether and prepared to cast. He needed a target, a perfect target, and an even better throw. Between rolls, he caught a fleeting glimpse of the North Star antenna, hanging precariously off the leading edge of the alien ship.
The truss tower that once held the Nadir antenna loomed toward him like a desperate hand reaching from the wreckage. It’s web of triangular members and twisted metal offered the perfect snare for his hook.
No time for calculations. With every barrel roll he marked his timing. Now. Now. Now. Then let the grapnel fly.
The action sent him backward, but neither he nor the reel moved very quickly. Between spins, he watched his cast inch toward its target, painfully aware he was inching away.
Time crawled, as if the Universe were deliberately prolonging the inevitable. When the reel finally struck, it clanked silently against the ship's hull and wrapped around the truss tower. Chris braced for tension, however slight, but none came.
The reel slid loosely along the metal, then unwound.
The bounce-back freed the wheel from the structure, leaving him adrift, his last desperate attempt shattered in an instant.
Dr. O’Connor watched in horror as he faded, dwindling against the endless void. If she didn’t act now, he’d be lost forever. She stared at the rod in her leg, this time with purpose. Not like this. Not like some fucking coward.
Rage filled her heart. She inhaled sharply, seizing the jagged shard and yanked with everything she had.
Pain flared and Emily wailed. Her leg, a trembling bloody ruin. Despite being free, she still felt pinned to the structure. Her entire body trembled, an auto response to the shock and loss of body heat.
With the chard removed, her smart suit could seal properly, but the effects of blood loss were fast and unforgiving. Simple thoughts became foggy, keep it together she told herself, but the thought of surrender lurked at the edge of her mind, offering a warm embrace.
Mitchell was almost beyond reach. A futile objective for sure, but it gave her purpose. Dragging herself forward, she fought through the wreckage and pain toward his tether. Almost there. Then, a sudden, violent jerk. Her tether managed to do what Mitchell’s could not—entangle itself to the twisted structure.
Panic surged. She fumbled with the carabiner, her weakened grip and fogged brain struggled against the mechanism. So simple, yet impossible. Darkness encroached on her vision, shutting her down from all sides. Mitchell was vanishing.
“Lock it down,” she growled, forcing her clumsy fingers to obey. The hook released.
Dizzy, she wavered. Even the slightest effort exhausted her energy. Emily’s eyes fluttered, fainting now would mean certain death. With her remaining strength, she coiled her good leg; her last thought before losing consciousness: Push off.
Emily launched. A human projectile, her aim, barely a guess. Amidst the tumbling wreckage—luck. Emily’s trajectory, a collision course for Chris Mitchell.
Had Mitchell succumbed to despair, he would have missed his chance. But resignation did not reside in his heart. His relentless drive to find a solution kept his eyes sharp and his mind alert. Had he given up, he would have missed it, that faint shape drifting amid the chaos of death and despair.
A blur. A shadow. Her.
Acting on instinct, Chris contorted his body mid-spin. Arms flailing, fingers stretching, he made contact.
His hand clamped around her waist, wrenching her from freefall. Emily’s momentum added to his chaotic spin, launching the two into a chaotic spiral. He maneuvered her unconscious body over his shoulders, lacing his arms with hers. His hands quickly found her MMU controls… hers worked. With calculated bursts, Mitchell arrested the erratic roll and set a course back toward the alien craft.
Boarding their only option.