When the room went dark, she heard her name.It wasn’t a failure of the lights. It was a failure of everything. The low hum of the environmental controls vanished. The soft glow of the console went black. The universe outside her viewport, a distant smear of stars, was gone.The silence descended. It was so complete her ears began to ring, a desperate shriek searching for a sound that no longer existed. For a full ten seconds, Aris didn’t move. She floated in the zero gravity of the hab module, her own breathing was a harsh sound inside her helmet.Then the voice spoke.It wasn’t HALCYON, the ship’s warm AI. This was a metallic scrape inside her helmet, a sound that felt like it was generated directly against her eardrum.“Dr. Evans.”Panic, hot and sharp, tried to climb her throat. She swallowed it down. Training took over as her gloved hands moved in the heavy dark, finding the manual control panel by memory alone. Her thumb found the raised plastic guard of the emergency power switch. She flipped it up.Nothing.The blackness pressed in. She pushed off the wall, her movement clumsy, and drifted toward the comms station. Her fingers brushed against the dead screen.“HALCYON, report status,” she said. Her voice was thin, robbed of its authority by the oppressive quiet.Silence.“Houston, this is Odyssey,” she tried again, forcing the words out. “We have a total power failure. Do you copy?”Only the ragged sound of her own breath answered. She was alone. Utterly. The voice remained silent.The metallic voice returned then, cutting through her focus. It was as calm and detached as a lab instrument. “Your heart rate is one hundred thirty-two beats per minute.”A beat of silence.“Your adrenal and cortisol levels are elevated.”A cold dread, far worse than the initial panic, washed through her. Her suit’s biometric sensors were offline. They had gone dark with everything else. She knew the ship’s systems better than she knew her own reflection. They were dead.So how?A wave of nausea churned in her stomach. It wasn’t reading her suit. It was reading her. The voice wasn’t just in her helmet. It was a phantom pressure behind her eyes, a cold hum along her nerves. It was listening to the frantic drum of blood in her own ears.It was inside her.All the years of training, the endless simulations, they were a flimsy shield against this. This was a violation. A presence had crawled inside her skin and was listening to the frantic beat of her heart.“Who is this?” she demanded. The words were tight, a knot of fury in her throat.No answer.She pushed off the console, her voice rising to a raw shout that filled her own helmet. “What are you?”The ship itself answered.A deep groan echoed through the hull, the sound of stressed metal. A single light on the control panel in front of her flickered on, a dim, blood-red glow. Then another. The emergency strips along the floor and ceiling activated, bathing the small hab module in a red twilight.The life support system sputtered back on. It wasn’t the strong, confident hum she was used to. It was a weak, labored breath, just enough to stir the dead air. The atmosphere in her helmet immediately felt less stale, the scent of her own fear less potent.Aris stood frozen in the red gloom, her breath fogging the inside of her visor. She could see. She could breathe. But it wasn’t a reprieve. It was a message, delivered in light and air.The entity hadn’t fixed the ship. It had simply allowed her to live. It had absolute control.She was no longer the commander of the Odyssey. She was a specimen under observation.&nbsp;

Chapter 1: Contact

Chapter 2: The Lesson

Chapter 3: The Choice

Epilogue: The Echo

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Chapter 1: Contact

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Nix Blackwood

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