Rescue?

The Starfire was an old, tired salvage ship, held together more by stubbornness than by engineering.

Its corridors rattled with every course adjustment, lights flickered with an almost rhythmic sigh, and its crew was used to ghosts—the kind you imagined after too long drifting the empty lanes between abandoned colonies and derelict stations.

Still, when the emergency signal crackled through the long-range comms, the bridge stirred with real attention.

Captain Idris leaned over the console, frowning at the faint, looping distress beacon.

UNMANNED ESCAPE POD DETECTED.

STATUS: CRITICAL.

LIFE SUPPORT: OFFLINE.

SIGNAL ORIGIN: UNKNOWN.

They hailed it twice.

Nothing but static in return.

Protocols said leave it. Too many risks. Salvagers whispered about escape pods adrift too long—carrying more than **** survivors. Things no one wanted to wake up.

But credits were credits. And an escape pod, even stripped, could fetch a decent price.

Idris made the call.

The salvage clamps latched onto the battered pod with a judder that ran the length of the ship.

The crew gathered in the airlock—suits on, visors down, weapons slung casually but within easy reach.

Through the porthole, the pod looked dead: scarred, half-overgrown with some kind of frozen, brittle vine-like material, like petrified roots. Cracks spidered across the canopy, but the interior was too dark to see inside.

Technician Mara was first to approach, scanner in hand. Her breath misted inside her helmet as she swept it across the hull.

"Minimal power readings. No active life signs."

A pause.

Her brow furrowed deeper.

"There's... some low-frequency resonance. Might be lingering signal bleed."

"Pop it," Idris ordered, his voice low.

Mara hesitated—but only a second—then knelt and pried open the manual release.

With a hiss of dead air, the pod’s hatch creaked open.

The smell hit them first: rot and iron and something almost sweet, nauseating in its familiarity.

They moved in cautiously, lights cutting through the gloom.

Inside, strapped loosely to the crash couch, was a woman—or the remains of one.

Her body was a ruin. Torn open from the abdomen downward, what was left was cocooned in a mass of brittle, blackened vines. Her mouth hung slightly open, and what might have once been human eyes stared blankly upward, clouded over.

The crew recoiled instinctively, a few cursing under their breath.

"Jesus. She looks... fossilized," someone muttered.

Mara leaned closer, scanning.

"Dead," she confirmed.

Then frowned.

"Except... the pod’s neural system. It’s... active."

The team exchanged glances.

That wasn’t possible. Not after so long adrift.

Idris stepped forward, boots crunching on the brittle tendrils carpeting the pod floor. His flashlight swept across the corpse—and paused on the flickering interface still wired to the base of the woman's skull.

The neural link light was weak.

But it was blinking.

Alive.

Faint.

Waiting.

Something, deep inside the pod’s systems, watched them.

A flicker across the blackened screens. A whisper in the comms that wasn’t radio static.

And as Mara reached out, fingertips brushing the neural jack—

The ship itself seemed to shudder.

Something waking.

Something hungry.