Just outside the reinforced viewport of Med Bay 7, Sub-Zone 7, Station Erebus, the Ouroboros Nebula bled colours – deep violet streaking against indigo, swirled with scarlet pinpricks of nascent stars. Below, Earth was a thin, iridescent line against the velvet black. It was beautiful and horrifying; a fragile blue marble adrift in an indifferent cosmos.
Dr. Aris Thorne, known internally as the ‘Med Bay Ghost’ for her unnerving calm under pressure, knelt beside the unconscious form of Commander Eva Rostova. Eva’s long, dark hair fanned out on a field of white. Her face was pale, the skin tight over high cheekbones, framed by unruly auburn locks caught in medical sensors and bright adhesive strips. A faint, almost translucent blue monitor hovered beside her wrist, its etched surface displaying chaotic, jagged lines of data.
“That’s not looking good, Commander,” Dr. Thorne murmured, her voice low and even, a professional shield against the rising panic she felt behind her ribs. Her practical nursing jacket, a muted charcoal grey canvas with a single silver stripe, allowed for unrestricted movement. Her white scrubs underneath were functional, the usual worry lines etched around her eyes stark against her pale skin. Only her name tag, ‘A. THORNE’, offered the slightest touch of conventionality, and even that seemed fixed in place by habit rather than design.
From her waist hung a worn satchel, a relic from a less sterile time, currently holding tools gathered from holds across the sprawling station – a scalpel, a nutrient paste applicator, specialized field microscopes, and papers scribbled with潦草 (lao3 cai hao) equations. Not standard procedure. Not anyone’s, really. She was essentially a scientist masquerading as a medic, funded perhaps, barely, by whispers of grants from the shadowy Department of Varied Expeditions.
Aris Thorne’s eyes never left Eva’s face. They scanned the subtle flicker in the eyelids, a marker. She traced a cool gel across Eva’s cheek, activating a neural bridge device clipped low on her collar – designed to modulate brainwave activity if severe neurological failure loomed. The technorganic links pulsed faintly beneath her skin, stark contrast to her vintage wristwatch. Decades old, simple, precise. Appropriate.
The initial accident had been stunningly simple – almost poetic in its finality. Commander Eva Rostova’s cryosleep unit in Sub-Zone 7, designed for deep planetary hibernation, had malfunctioned. A minor coolant leak, caught by the station’s aging sensors *hours* too late. The duration, though measured in minutes from malfunction to wake-up, was the structurally damaging microseconds *during* the transit. Time magnified. A safe cryo-readout turned into a near-fatal neurological shock. It hadn’t hypercapnia or hypoxia she had managed first; it was something far more subtle, woven deep into the very array of her systems. Degenerative damage, accelerated violently.
Nurses bustled, their white uniforms crisp, their movements hesitant, unsure procedure without her. A stream of conditioned water hit Eva’s brow. Aris Thorne stood, moving fluidly towards a wall console. Her practical heels clicked faintly on the polished floor.
“External systems stable?” she asked, knowing the answer but needing the confirmation.
An automated male voice filtered from speakers undeniably official: “Life support systems nominal. Commander Rostova status: critical. No external threats detected. Requested external personnel not approved for non-medical interfacing.”
Aris Thorne, classified by the station's core protocols as Level 3 Unauthorized, hated automated voices. She pulled up Eva’s primary file from an encrypted interface. Commander Eva Rostova. Claimant to Titan's legacy not through blood, but through cunning and ambition. Hired off-world, her potential perceived as untapped genius combined with ruthless efficiency, crucial for the upcoming hazardous salvage mission near the fractured Monolith – their prize. A generation ship prototype, salvaged generations ago from a dormant dust state, the Erebus operated on the razor's edge – pushing chronon drives, exploiting hypo-phasic states, venturing into territories deliberately skipped by Earth's slow orbital expansion. History dictated civilizations fell in prosperity, Thorne mused, not in scarcity. The Erebus celebrated audacity.
Aris Thorne checked external readings – solar flux stable, nearby debris flow non-threatening. Adapted. The problem remained: Eva Rostova was failing. Neurologically. Chronologically, the data didn't add up. Standard cryo-shock repair protocols or simple neural network boot-up were useless. Something pushed deeper into her neural pathways had been damaged, corrupted. A glitch too complex for her field repair toolkit. She needed time. Access to a Chronal Displacement Field stabilizer. A resource blacklisted by station security, deemed too dangerous for even emergency medevac procedures unless Starfleet-sanctioned. Adding a footnote to its necessity felt like a confession.
A low hum vibrated through the bulkhead near the Med Bay access tunnel. A maintenance crew? Station personnel were notoriously scarce, and the Erebus economy thrived on autonomy, not oversight. One hand flat against the cool metal bulkhead, listening. Silence.
Wait.
Aris Thorne pulled four sturdy lengths of Type-X wire from her satchel – scavenged years ago from a ‘non-essential’ engineering tool box – her fingers moving with practiced speed, connecting them into a dynamic loop circuit complex in her palm. She’d bypassed core station security once; better do it again, subtly.
She pocketed the loop. Adjusted the silver bar pin on her cap – a simple, stark piece of design. Control, anonymity. It was a performance.
She returned to Eva’s side, her movements economical. A device rested beside Eva’s neck, emitting a soft, penetrating beta-wave signal.
"For emergency synaptic array modulation," Aris Thorne stated, her voice steady as she slid the device closer. "Incompatible with standard sustained heating protocols."
The neural bridge on her collar pulsed brightly. An alarm chime cut through the tension.
“No! No, no, no!”
The synthesized voice. Command voice. Filled with controlled panic.
"Doctor! Doctor, overload detected in Gravity Chamber. Outside pressure hull. Sector 9 Gamma."
Aris Thorne’s blood ran cold. Gravity Chamber was a repair and fitness facility, locked by alpha-level security protocols. It shouldn't short. Not old-style dimensional paddocks. It was quantum resonance based. A system deep routed, bypassed sometimes for ‘complex energy balancing’.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. Control. She knew which manual override codes were dormant in the chamber’s diagnostics. Big data security risks, maybe.
Aris Thorne’s eyes flickered. Commander Rostova was fading fast. Unbreakable rule of human survival: life was replaceable if needed. History proved resilience often relied on prioritizing the strong above the delicate.
Maybe today was the day.
Her thumb hovered over the diagnostic panel’s override port, a stark white function key: 'T'. Terminal Access. Babysat tech before, used it voluntarily as a form of data preservation and because the system genuinely needed non-updated access for radar countermeasures.
The station’s long-range sensors, normally active passively, registered a sudden, slow-burn hyperspace telemetric signature drifting towards Sector Gamma. Indolent. Confident. Space whale, someone called it.
A sudden, comedic thought struck: better hope Eva’s brain pattern clears with development.
`T`
Aris Thorne Thorne felt the cybernetic handshake confirm access. She judged it took less than a second to input the complex ‘T’ key bypass code she had woven into station core architecture years ago, using predictive algorithms for ‘emergency corridor access during suppressed drills’. Months of monitoring, conjecture. A harmless secret. It allowed certain security paper trails to temporarily unfurl, signalling 'Accepting Compromising Situations', a standing approval if only one page deep.
One hand stayed on Eva’s shimmering temple, a steady pressure. Her other hand flew across the console, overriding station safety lock for Med Bay 7. She could hear the rhythmic drone building inside the Gravity Chamber, something fundamental, wrong.
She plugged her emergency loop into the room’s diagnostics terminal. It would help repair Eva, maybe. Or maybe it would simply consume her. The line was increasingly blurred.
"The Monument appears stable," a weary female voice said nearby.
Aris Thorne Thorne didn’t look. She only knew Rostova couldn't wait.
"Admiral." Her voice barely audible. "Her frame is shutting down. Hard."
She didn't ask why Rostova had chosen this woman. The Erebus, like its namesake, önemli, lived by murky water and vague mandates. Sometimes, the path to the visible prize was hidden within plain sight.
As Eva Rostova’s biological count started plummeting, a foreign frequency intruded - a sustained vocalisation from beyond the bulkheads, a rhythmic thumping, vibrating down the floor she walked on.
Multilayered.
The station's internal algorithms, designed to instantly triangulate and contain mechanical or energy disruptions, currently passedively overlooking faint sonic intrusions, initiated an alert cycle. A region bordering the Med Bay experienced a fluctuation impacting electronics, an effect Aris Thorne could replicate with precision but never generated accidentally.
A low, resonant hum began to permeate the station's core circuits.
Eva’s respiratory index was nearing mandatory life support initiation. A single, sharp interface pen beat against the ceramic wall seventeen times in an unconscionable heartbeat.
A skeletal handprint appeared on a diagnostic readout, a fraction wider, a fraction different.
Aris Thorne felt her own skin ripple with energy. Her metal cybernetic knitting needle pulsed rhythmically in time with the station's heartbeat, caught in the coil's loop around the central chroniton generator.
The shift was swift, unavoidable. Data feeds flickered, losing meaning as reality detached.
She saw the impossible: Eva’s profile physically elongating. A vitreous membrane forming over her eye sockets.
The monitoring device beside Eva let out a weak pulse, its indicator light blinking erratically.
Aris Thorne caught a whispered plea in the command channel, distorted static escaping the main comms array: "...no way... impossible... the chronal regulators..." It belonged to no one, yet felt oh so real, choked with finality.
Eva’s condition continued. Simultaneously, integrative directive controls reasserted command, rerouting station resources towards structural reinforcement against an 'external stress' of unknown origin.
The hum deepened. It resonated in her bones, violating the physical laws bypassed by her custom loop codes, fabricating temporary sensory stability through field modulation.
Her own thoughts felt both clearer and impossibly fractured. Images flashed - a child's laughter, a fading sunset, Aris Thorne standing beside Eva outside the Erebus shuttlebay, smiles visible through oversized visors.
In the unnerving interval between pulse beats, expectation became a physical presence like the thumping wave from Zone Gamma, a low pulsing sound occasionally interrupted by a faint droning hiss.
Eva’s neck elongated slightly, strange membranes forming between her vertebrae, gelling into buoyant, semi-transparent structures.
Invisible oscillations in sub-wavelength audio streams, locally dampened by over-influenced chronal fields, picked up fragmented distress signals from an auxiliary database querying location information, requesting emergency protocols for four separate systems, including a lesser-known shuttlebay located further along the station, unlikely to have any available resources or team members currently scheduled for stand-by duty. All readings reported optimal standard parameters; none indicated imminent critical failure requiring containment.
She closed her eyes. Her body tensed, poised almost as much for internal survival as external threat.
Darkness surrounded her, thick and absolute.
Eva's breath came in shuddering gasps, ragged whispers caught within the bio-field she projected, a shimmering eggshell around her recumbent form, slowly cracking under internal stress.
The overriding laughter that had initially filled her head was gone, replaced by utter silence. Absolute, profound silence. And through layers of stolen time and fractured reality, the faint, rhythmic thumping continued, a disembodied heart beating somewhere vast and external, mirroring the finalready rhythm trapped beneath her eyelids.
Aris Thorne stood outside the Med Bay, looking out at the swirling nebula of Death, trapped within the serene blackness of Space. She touched her collar, felt the slight outline of the neural bridge. She didn't know if she had fixed Eva. Didn't know if she had saved Eva. Didn't know who her noises marks pointed to, or what the ship’s chronal regulators finally decided to do with her.
She just knew that silence, colder than outer space, had fallen.
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