Starflight

Mara stared at the console.

“Relay station,” she said, opening the narrow-band channel. “This is the survey freighter Kestrel. Identify yourself.”

Static answered.

She almost closed the channel.

Then the relay replied.

“Kestrel,” said a voice.

The word came through broken and metallic, but it was unmistakably a word. Mara’s fingers tightened around the helmet rim.

“Repeat.”

“Kestler.”

Her name.

The cabin seemed to contract around her. The freighter’s fans whispered overhead. Somewhere behind the bulkhead, a pump clicked twice and failed to start.

Mara leaned toward the console. “Who is transmitting?”

No answer came. Only a soft vibration through the docking collar, as if something on the station had begun to wake.

She put on her helmet.

The umbilical hatch opened with a reluctant shudder. Cold metal waited beyond it, lit by the freighter’s work lamps. The relay’s maintenance spine ran straight ahead into darkness, a narrow tube lined with cable trays and handholds. Frost feathered the seams. A red emergency strip blinked at irregular intervals, each flash showing a different angle of the corridor as the station tumbled.

Mara pushed through.

Her boots touched the relay deck. The magnetic soles engaged, then released, then engaged again. The station’s rotation was slow, but its gravity was not. Every few seconds, the floor seemed to shift beneath her, tugging sideways through her knees.

“Kestrel, maintain suit link,” she said.

“Suit link active.”

The freighter’s voice followed her into the spine, tinny and distant.

Mara turned and looked back at the docking hatch. Her ship floated beyond the open collar, white work lights glowing against the black. It was close enough to touch. That helped.

She clipped a guide line to the first rail and moved forward.

The maintenance spine had been built for machines, not people. Pipes crowded the ceiling. Thick bundles of cable bulged from the walls behind cracked inspection panels. At every junction, the corridor narrowed around pressure doors that had frozen half-open. Mara had to twist sideways to pass one, scraping her shoulder plate against a rim of ice.

“Station map,” she said.

The computer projected a pale wireframe across her visor. The core lay seventy meters ahead, but the map flickered whenever the relay rotated. Three routes appeared, vanished, and reappeared with different labels.

“Navigation fault,” the computer said.

“No kidding.”

“Recommend return to vessel.”

Mara glanced over her shoulder. The docking hatch was already small in the darkness.

“Not yet.”

A low thump traveled through the spine.

She froze.

The sound came again, farther ahead. Metal striking metal. Then a long scrape.

Mara’s hand moved to the cutter at her hip. It was designed for cable and panel work, not defense, but the hot blade would discourage anything that could be discouraged.

“Relay station,” she said. “Respond.”

The speakers in her helmet crackled.

“Kestler.”

The voice was closer now. Not louder. Closer.

Mara looked at the corridor ahead. Frost broke loose from a ceiling pipe and drifted past her visor in glittering fragments.

“How do you know my name?”

A pause.

“Crew manifest.”

The answer should have reassured her. It did not. The relay had been decommissioned before Mara was born. Her name had never been on any crew manifest.

She moved again, faster.

The first junction had collapsed inward. A section of the spine had twisted during the station’s long tumble, folding the corridor into a slanted passage barely wide enough for her shoulders. Beyond it, a pressure door shuddered in its frame.

Mara wedged one boot against the wall and pulled herself through. Her suit scraped hard against the metal. The pressure door snapped shut behind her.

She spun.

The door’s indicator changed from red to amber.

“Open,” she ordered.

The mechanism clicked. Nothing happened.

“Manual release.”

“Access denied.”

Mara struck the panel with her glove. “Override.”

“Access denied.”

The station spoke through the corridor speakers.

“Emergency transit protocol active.”

The pressure door ahead opened.

Beyond it, the maintenance spine plunged into blackness.

Mara stared at the opening. The relay had just denied her a route back and offered one deeper inside.

“Computer,” she said, “is the station receiving my commands?”

“Partial response detected.”

“Can it control the doors?”

“Confirmed.”

The emergency strip ahead flickered on, one light at a time, leading toward the core.

Mara unclipped her guide line from the wall. The cable drifted behind her, floating in the station’s uneven gravity.

“Then it knows I’m here.”

“Confirmed.”

She stepped through the open door.

The corridor tilted sharply. Her boots lost contact with the deck, and she swung into the wall. A burst of cold struck her suit as a vent coughed out stale atmosphere. Warning symbols flared across her visor: oxygen concentration falling, carbon dioxide rising.

Mara pushed off the wall and caught a handhold.

“How long?”

“Twenty-three minutes until suit filtration becomes inefficient.”

“Plenty.”

“Correction. Station rotation is increasing.”

The relay lurched.

A deep vibration rolled through the spine. Loose bolts skittered across the deck. Somewhere behind Mara, the sealed pressure door slammed shut with enough force to shake the handhold in her grip.

She pulled herself forward, moving from rail to rail. The emergency lights now burned a steady yellow. Their glow revealed old maintenance markings, faded numbers, and a smear of dark residue along the ceiling. The residue had frozen into branching lines.

Radiation damage, she thought.

The core was close.

The map steadied as she approached the central junction. A circular hatch appeared on her visor, marked CORE ACCESS. The hatch itself was half buried beneath a collapsed conduit. Mara drew the cutter and ignited it.

White heat filled the corridor. The blade hissed through the conduit, sending bright droplets tumbling in slow arcs. They struck the opposite wall and cooled into black beads.

The station’s voice spoke again.

“Do not open.”

Mara stopped cutting.

The words were clearer this time. The voice had a human rhythm, though each syllable carried a faint double tone, as if another speaker repeated it beneath the first.

“Why?” Mara asked.

“Transit hazard.”

“What hazard?”

“Unregistered arrival.”

The cutter’s flame trembled in her hand.

Mara looked at the sealed core hatch. “I’m here because you called.”

“No.”

The answer came at once.

“We called.”

Something shifted behind the hatch.

Mara backed away, her boots locking to the deck. The station’s rotation increased another fraction. The corridor rolled around her, stars flashing through a fractured viewport at the far end.

“Computer,” she said, “record all relay transmissions.”

“Recording.”

“Can you shut down the station?”

“Command authority required.”

“I’m standing inside it.”

“Command authority not recognized.”

The hatch unlocked.

Mara did not touch it.

A narrow seam opened around the circular plate, and air rushed past her toward the core. The temperature dropped so quickly that frost spread across her visor’s lower edge. Inside the opening, something pulsed with a dull blue light.

The beacon.

She reached for the hatch rim and pulled herself closer.

The core chamber was a sphere cut through the station’s center. Machinery hung from every surface, most of it dead, but a cluster of crystal-like transmitters turned slowly around a black central column. Blue light traveled through them in precise intervals.

Three pulses.

A pause.

Three pulses.

Mara’s console display appeared in her visor. The pattern matched the distress transmission.

“It’s real,” she whispered.

The computer registered her words. “Signal source confirmed.”

The blue light brightened.

Every dead panel in the chamber came alive at once. Symbols streamed across them in unfamiliar bands, too regular to be random and too complex for any human operating code Mara knew. The station shuddered. Deep inside its structure, engines or turbines began to spin after decades of silence.

Mara grabbed the hatch rim. “Relay, shut down.”

“Command authority not recognized.”

“I am ordering a power halt.”

“Safety protocol active.”

The black column in the center of the chamber opened like an iris.

A beam of blue-white light struck the ceiling and raced through the station’s conduits. The maintenance spine lit from end to end. Doors slammed open behind Mara. Something heavy moved in the walls.

“Computer, initiate emergency disconnect.”

“Docking collar release unavailable.”

Mara looked toward the route she had taken. The corridor behind her had sealed into a sequence of pressure doors. Yellow lights strobed along the spine, and a mechanical voice repeated the same phrase in a dozen overlapping tones.

“Unregistered arrival. Containment in progress.”

The station rotated faster.

Mara’s magnetic boots tore loose. She caught the hatch with both hands as the floor swung away beneath her. Her shoulder struck the rim. Pain flashed down her arm.

The core’s blue light filled her visor. Within it, a pattern unfolded: lines crossing stars, a route drawn through empty space. It vanished before she could understand it.

Then the station spoke in her own voice.

“Mara Kestler,” it said. “Return to origin.”

The hatch began to close.

She shoved her cutter into the seam. The mechanism crushed the blade, spraying sparks across her glove. Mara kicked against the wall and forced herself backward into the maintenance spine just as the hatch snapped shut.

Behind her, the relay woke completely.

The lights turned red. Air vents opened with violent bursts. A warning siren began to pulse through the structure, each note vibrating in her ribs.

Mara caught the nearest rail and hauled herself toward the docking hatch.

“Computer,” she gasped. “Get me back to the Kestrel.”

“Route unavailable.”

“Make one.”

“Station control has locked all transit doors.”

A pressure door ahead exploded open.

Not outward. Inward.

The blast hurled Mara down the corridor. Her tether whipped around a pipe and jerked her to a stop. Behind her, darkness poured through the open doorway, followed by the hard mechanical clatter of something unfolding inside the walls.

The relay had called her here.

Now it was coming to meet her.

End of chapter one. 14 more chapters in the full book.