Isolation

The hiss of decompressing gas slithered through the cryopod’s seal, like a serpent exhaling its final breath. A flash of red emergency lights pulsed dimly through the curved glass, painting the narrow chamber in deep, bloody hues. The woman stirred. Her limbs, stiff and ****, twitched against the cold, sterile padding.

Her eyelashes fluttered, clumping together from the frost that had clung to her skin. The world beyond the fogged plexiglass was blurred, but instinct told her something was wrong. Too quiet... too still. Her heart thudded heavily against her ribs, sluggish but waking.

The pod’s door cracked open with a groan of fatigued hydraulics. The air, stale and metallic, rushed in, carrying with it the biting scent of machine oil and something subtler... something like burnt ozone.

She sat up, trembling, her breath a visible mist in the frigid air. Her body was bare save for the thin, papery garment clinging to her damp skin. She hugged her arms around herself, shivering, and looked around.

Rows of cryopods stretched into the distance... dark, silent, and sealed. No lights flickered within them. No signs of life.

"Where...?" Her voice cracked, barely a whisper in the vast, empty chamber. She didn't recognize the ship. Not from this angle. Not through the haze of whatever **** still lingered in her bloodstream.

A flashing console caught her eye: a small display at the foot of her pod, flickering between two words:

BIO-SIGNATURE: SOLO

SHIP STATUS: UNKNOWN ERROR

A knot of fear tightened in her stomach. She swung her legs out, her bare feet slapping onto the cold metal floor with a wet, sticky sound. Every hair on her body stood on end.

Through a porthole above the rows of pods, she caught a glimpse of the void: a black so pure it seemed to swallow the faint stars beyond. No planet, no station. Just endless nothingness.

Her pulse quickened. Think... remember! She pressed trembling fingers to her temple, but her mind was a fractured mirror, shards of memory slipping away the more she tried to focus.

There had been... a mission. A crew. Wasn’t there someone else?

She took a tentative step forward, the floor vibrating almost imperceptibly beneath her weight, as if the ship itself were breathing, slow and dying.

A new sound—a low, irregular clanging—echoed from the far end of the cryobay. Mechanical, but uneven. Something moving... or something broken.

The woman swallowed hard. Her throat was raw, her mouth parched.

You have to move. Find out what happened.

She pressed onward into the shifting, uncertain gloom, the cries of distant metal her only companions.

And somewhere deep inside the labyrinthine ship, in the places the light no longer touched, something else had already begun to stir.