25APR3025
There’s a special kind of panic that comes with throwing your ship into an emergency FTL jump without checking literally anything first.
I am currently living in that panic.
Now, for the record, I did have reasons. Very good, very terrifying reasons. When a shadow moves inside your cockpit, and your ship’s logs say the airlock opened itself, you don’t sit around asking questions. You run.
So that’s what I did.
The Problem With Running Blind
The Rust Rat’s navigation was already busted, so I had exactly zero control over where I ended up. I could’ve jumped straight into a star, an asteroid field, or—knowing my luck—a pirate fleet in the middle of a weapons test.
Instead, I landed in a graveyard.
Not an actual graveyard. That would be preferable. This was a ship graveyard. Thousands of derelict vessels, stretching out in all directions, orbiting a dying white dwarf star. Some were ancient, rusted hulks. Others were more recent, hulls scorched from battle. But all of them had one thing in common—
No life signs.
I know because I checked. Immediately. As soon as I stabilized the jump (which took way too long because my stabilizers are still garbage), I ran a full scan. Every single ship was empty.
That’s when I had my next horrible realization.
I wasn’t alone.
The Lights
I was mid-scan when I noticed them.
Distant pinpricks of light, blinking in slow, rhythmic patterns among the wrecks. They weren’t ship beacons. They weren’t distress signals. They weren’t anything I could identify.
But they were moving.
And then my comms flared to life.
A garbled transmission. Static, broken words. Almost too faint to hear, like an old distress call playing on repeat.
At first, I thought it was background noise. Some old ship’s emergency system still broadcasting into the void. But then—
“Pilot.”
The word came through clear as day.
Not a call sign. Not a distress code. Just a single word, directed at me.
I froze.
The comms hissed again, warping between human speech and something else, something I didn’t recognize.
Then, another message. “You are not supposed to be here.”
The Worst Decision (That I Absolutely Made Anyway)
Now, any reasonable person would’ve done one of two things:
Leave immediately.
Leave immediately, but faster.
I did neither.
Instead, I grabbed my helmet, bolted for the airlock, and manually extended my external comms array to see if I could get a better read on the signal.
Why? Because I am an idiot.
And because despite every single survival instinct screaming at me to run, I had to know what the hell was out there.
That’s when the lights changed.
They stopped blinking. Stopped moving.
And then, all at once, they turned toward me.
I don’t know what I triggered. I don’t know what I stepped into.
But I am getting the hell out of here.
Scootch
Quote of the Day:
"When the void says you don’t belong, listen to it."
