The transit lasted one point three seconds by the shuttle's chronometer and an eternity by every other measure that mattered.
Yuki's body registered it the way it always did — the compression, the silence, the moment where her inner ear lost all reference and her stomach informed her it no longer understood which direction was down. Thirty-nine transits. She'd never gotten used to it. The human body wasn't designed to be folded through spacetime, and no amount of experience could teach her nervous system to accept what physics demanded.
The shuttle shuddered. The hull groaned — a sound that Park had once told her was thermal expansion, the vehicle's skin adjusting to a rapid temperature differential as it crossed from one region of space to another. A sound that meant they were through. A sound that meant they were somewhere.
The cockpit windshield showed stars.
Not the blue-white sun of Haven. Not the fern canopy and alien sky and the planet that had been trying to kill them for three days. Stars — scattered, distant, the cold light of objects so far away that the photons hitting the windshield had been traveling since before humans walked upright.
And between the stars, directly ahead, something else.
Park saw it first. Her hands were on the controls, her body strapped into the pilot's seat, her eyes already scanning the instruments before the transit's disorientation cleared. Her voice came through the internal comm with the measured precision of a pilot reporting conditions that had deviated from the flight plan.
"That's not Station Seven."
Yuki moved to the cockpit. The viewport filled her vision — stars, void, and the shape that hung in the middle distance like a wound the universe had forgotten to close.
A station. Orbital infrastructure — she could recognize the geometry, the modular construction of habitation rings and docking spars and the industrial architecture of humanity's off-world installations. But the station was dark. No running lights. No navigational beacons. No electromagnetic signatures pulsing from communication arrays. The structure drifted in its orbit with the passive indifference of a thing that had stopped being occupied and started being debris.
"Station Seven," Chen said. He was behind Yuki, braced in the cockpit doorway, his hand on his ribs. His other hand held the tablet, and the tablet showed the navigation data — exit coordinates, spatial position, trajectory confirmation. "We're at the right coordinates. That's Station Seven."
"It's dead."
"Decommissioned. Eight months ago, like the records said." Chen's voice was flat. Stripped of the technical enthusiasm that usually carried his explanations, replaced by something that sounded like a calculator running out of power. "No life support signatures. No power output. The reactor's either offline or removed."
Park pulled up the shuttle's sensor suite — limited, designed for atmospheric flight and orbital maneuvering, not deep-space survey. The readings confirmed what the eyes already knew. Station Seven was a corpse in orbit. Pressurized sections had been sealed. Docking ports were locked in the closed position. The station's transponder was broadcasting a single repeating code: DECOM-7, the automated signal of a military installation that had been officially taken offline.
"Can we dock?" Yuki asked.
"The ports are sealed. I can try to force-dock on the emergency coupling, but if the station's atmosphere has been vented..." Park checked her instruments. "The shuttle has forty-six hours of life support. If the station's dead, we're sitting in a lifeboat."
Forty-six hours. A number that sounded generous until you calculated the distance to the nearest active station and divided by the shuttle's maximum velocity, which was designed for planetary ascent, not interstellar travel. The math said weeks. The life support said two days.
"What's the nearest active installation?" Yuki asked.
Chen was already working the tablet. His fingers moved across the screen, pulling data from the shuttle's navigation database — the pre-loaded chart of military orbital infrastructure that every extraction shuttle carried for contingency planning. The database was four months old. Four months of decommissions, relocations, and budget-driven closures that the data didn't reflect.
"Orbital Station Three. Logistics and medical hub. Active as of the last database update." His finger traced a line across the star chart. "Forty-seven light-minutes by direct trajectory. Which means—"
"Which means a wormhole," Park said. "The shuttle can't cover that distance on conventional drive. Not with our fuel reserves."
"Can we open a wormhole from here?"
"The shuttle's wormhole drive is receiver-only. We can transit through an existing bridge, but we can't generate one." Park's hands rested on the controls. Still. The stillness of a pilot who had run out of options that involved flying. "We need an active wormhole network node to open a bridge to Station Three. The nearest node is..."
She checked. Checked again. Her fingers moved across the navigation panel with the precise, unhurried motions of someone who already knew the answer and was confirming it because the answer was bad.
"Station Seven's node. The one attached to the station in front of us."
The decommissioned station. The dead station. The station whose wormhole node might or might not still be functional, whose systems might or might not respond to activation commands, whose infrastructure might or might not have been stripped when the military packed up and left eight months ago.
"Chen," Yuki said.
"Already thinking about it." He was. His eyes had that look — the rapid lateral movement, the dilated pupils, the visible signs of a mind consuming a problem at speeds his body couldn't match. "If the wormhole node's hardware is still installed — and decommission protocols typically leave heavy infrastructure in place because it's more expensive to remove than to abandon — then the issue is power and activation codes. Power I can solve if the node has a backup generator. The codes..." He paused. "I'd need to hack the node's control system. Military hardened. Like the shuttle's nav system, but bigger."
"How long?"
"Unknown. Hours. Maybe more. Maybe not at all — if the system's been wiped, there's nothing to hack."
Santos spoke from the cargo bay. She hadn't moved to the cockpit — she was sitting on the floor, machine gun across her knees, her back against the bulkhead. Her voice carried through the shuttle like a thing that had decided walls were optional.
"So we left Haven. Left the stalkers, left the facility, left Vance's soldiers on the ground. And we ended up in a dead station's orbit with two days of air and no way home." She paused. "This is better how?"
Nobody answered. Because the answer — that this was better because they were free, because Vance couldn't reach them here, because the evidence was intact and the squad was alive — was true and also insufficient. Freedom in a vacuum was still vacuum.
"Santos." Viktor's voice. He was in the cargo bay, rifle across his knees, his breathing audible through the shuttle's recycled air. The dexamethasone was holding. His lungs were buying him the time he'd asked for. "The dead do not argue tactics. We are alive. That is the foundation. Build on it."
"*Merda* to your foundation. I wanted to fight, not float."
"You will fight. This I promise." Viktor coughed. Controlled it. "The universe has not run out of enemies."
---
Park brought the shuttle alongside Station Seven in fourteen minutes.
The approach was textbook — Park's hands on the controls with the automatic precision of a pilot who'd docked with orbital infrastructure hundreds of times. The shuttle's maneuvering thrusters fired in short, calculated bursts, adjusting trajectory, matching the station's orbital velocity, bleeding off relative motion until the two objects — shuttle and station — were moving through space at exactly the same speed in exactly the same direction.
The station grew in the viewport. Close up, the decommission was visible in the details: maintenance hatches sealed with hardened foam, viewport covers locked in the closed position, the external surfaces accumulating the micro-pitting of orbital debris impacts that active stations cleared with regular hull maintenance. A building that had been locked and abandoned, floating in the dark.
"Emergency coupling on the ventral surface," Park said. "Port Three-Charlie. It's universal standard — the shuttle's interface will fit. But the coupling's passive. I can mate with it, but I can't pressurize the connection from our side."
"If the station's sealed sections still hold atmosphere?"
"Then the coupling will pressurize automatically when we mate. Passive pressure equalization. But if the atmosphere's been vented..." Park looked at Yuki. "Then the coupling is just a physical connection. We'd need suits to enter the station, and the shuttle doesn't carry EVA equipment."
"Dock. We find out what we're dealing with."
The docking was smooth. Park guided the shuttle's ventral port into alignment with the station's coupling — the magnetic guides activating on approach, pulling the two ports together with the mechanical patience of infrastructure designed to operate without human intervention. Contact. Lock. The shuttle shuddered as the coupling engaged.
Thirty seconds of silence while the pressure sensor on the coupling did its work.
"Pressure equalization," Park said. Her voice carried the faintest edge of something that wasn't relief but lived in the same neighborhood. "The sealed sections still hold atmosphere. Stale — the readings say the CO2 is elevated and the O2 is lower than standard. But breathable."
Breathable. Air. A sealed station with atmosphere, which meant intact power wasn't strictly necessary for immediate survival. The life support would need restarting for long-term habitation, but the air in the sealed sections would sustain them for days beyond the shuttle's own reserves.
"Doc, check the atmospheric composition. I want to know if that air is safe before anyone breathes it." Yuki turned to the squad. "Chen, Ghost — you're with me. We go in, find the wormhole node, assess the station's condition. Santos, Viktor — hold the shuttle. If something goes wrong in there, you're the reserve."
"What could go wrong in a dead station?" Santos asked.
"It's a military installation that was decommissioned eight months ago. The question isn't what could go wrong. The question is what already went wrong that made them close it." Yuki checked her sidearm — seven rounds, the same seven she'd carried through the ravine and the forest and the killing of two security men and the flight through a wormhole. Seven rounds that had to cover whatever a dead station held.
Ghost had the carbine — the security man's weapon, ninety rounds in three magazines. He checked the chamber, checked the magazine, checked the spare mags in his vest pockets. The motions were automatic.
Chen had nothing. His weapon was his mind and the tablet and the receiver in his vest pocket that held the certificate data — the evidence that made all of this matter. He also had two cracked ribs, which he carried with the resigned tolerance of a man who'd added them to his list of problems and moved on to problems he could solve.
Doc checked the atmospheric readings. Ran them twice. "Breathable. CO2 at 1.8 percent — elevated, you'll feel it as mild shortness of breath. O2 at 18.2 — low but functional. No toxic gases detected. Whatever they left in here when they sealed it, it's decayed to safe levels."
"Go," Yuki said.
The coupling opened. The hatch — military standard, wheel-operated, the kind of door that existed on every orbital station humanity had ever built — turned under Yuki's hand and swung inward.
The smell hit first. Stale air and dust and the mustiness of a space sealed for months without filtration. Cold — the temperature inside the station was ten degrees below comfortable, the passive cooling of a structure in space whose heating systems had been powered down. Dark — the corridor beyond the hatch disappeared into blackness, the overhead lighting dead, the only illumination coming from the shuttle's hatch behind them.
Yuki clicked on her chest-mounted flashlight. The beam cut the dark, illuminating a standard orbital station corridor — two meters wide, metal grating floor, conduit-lined ceiling. Emergency markers on the walls, reflective strips catching the light. The dust motes hung motionless in the beam — no air circulation, no ventilation, the dead stillness of a sealed environment.
"Station map," Chen said. He was at a wall panel — a directory plate, the kind mounted at every corridor junction on military installations, showing the layout of the section with department labels and emergency routes. His flashlight found the text. "We're in Residential Section B. The wormhole node is in Engineering — that's three sections forward, through the main concourse."
They moved. Yuki first, Ghost second, Chen third. The corridor was silent except for their boots on the metal grating and their breathing and the small sounds of equipment shifting against bodies. The flashlights painted moving circles on the walls and ceiling, the geometry of the station revealed in fragments — a sealed door here, a blank viewport there, the detritus of hasty decommission visible in the details: stripped nameplates, empty equipment racks, the rectangular shadows on walls where notice boards and displays had been removed.
The main concourse was larger. A central hub, designed as the station's common area — the space where twelve hundred personnel had eaten, socialized, moved between work stations. Now it was a cavern, the ceiling high enough that the flashlight beams didn't reach it, the floor a broad expanse of metal grating that rang under their boots with hollow echoes.
Tables and chairs were still bolted to the floor. The kitchen units were sealed. The large viewport that dominated the concourse's far wall showed stars — unfiltered, unframed, the raw vacuum of space pressing against the transparent aluminum like a hand pressed against glass.
"Engineering is through there." Chen pointed his flashlight at a corridor on the concourse's far side. A sign above it read ENGINEERING SECTION — ACCESS RESTRICTED. The door beneath it was closed but not sealed. The access panel beside it was dark.
Ghost reached the door first. Tried the manual release. The handle turned. The door opened with the heavy reluctance of hinges that hadn't moved in eight months, a groan of metal against metal that echoed through the concourse.
The engineering section was different.
Not stripped. Not empty. The equipment was still here — consoles, cable runs, the heavy infrastructure of a station's power and communication systems. Yuki's flashlight found the reactor housing — massive, cylindrical, taking up the center of the engineering bay like the heart of a machine that had stopped beating. The reactor's status panel was dark. But the housing was intact. The fuel assembly was still in place — she could see the containment seals, the cooling lines, the architecture of a fusion reactor that had been shut down but not removed.
"Chen."
He was already at the nearest console, his flashlight balanced on its edge, his hands on the interface. Dead. No power. His fingers found the emergency boot sequence — a physical switch, hardwired, designed to bring the console online from a cold start using the backup battery that every military system carried.
The console flickered. Died. Flickered again. Caught. The screen came alive with the blue glow of a BIOS initialization — text scrolling, systems checking, the electronic equivalent of a machine waking up and trying to remember where it was.
"Backup battery's at seven percent," Chen said. "Enough for maybe thirty minutes of console time. After that, I need the reactor."
"Can you restart the reactor?"
"In theory? Follow the cold-start procedure, reinitialize the containment fields, bring the fusion process back online. In practice?" He looked at the reactor housing. "I've never done a reactor restart. That's engineering corps specialty. I'm communications and systems."
"But you can read the procedure."
"I can read the procedure." His jaw tightened. The look of a man who was about to attempt something outside his expertise because there was no one else to attempt it and the alternative was floating in the dark until the air ran out.
"Do it."
Chen turned to the console. His hands moved. The screen displayed system menus — navigation, communications, power management, life support. He selected power management. The interface opened into a tree of subsystems, each one labeled, each one dark.
"Okay, so — reactor cold-start is a twelve-step sequence. First, verify containment integrity..." He was talking to himself now, the muttering that meant his brain was processing faster than conversation allowed. His fingers moved through the menus. "Containment reads nominal. The magnetic confinement fields need power to initialize, which means I need to route the backup battery to the containment system first, then—"
"Chen. Tell me when it works."
He didn't hear her. He was gone — deep in the system, deep in the architecture, doing what Chen did when the problem was technical and the stakes were survival. The blue light from the console painted his face in electronic glow, turning him into something that belonged to the station rather than the squad.
Ghost was at the engineering bay's entrance. Watching the corridor they'd come through. The carbine was up — not aimed, but ready, the posture of a man who never entered a room without knowing how to leave it. His flashlight was off. He stood in the dark at the threshold, listening to the station the way he listened to forests and ridgelines and all the other terrain that tried to kill the people he cared about.
"Sarge." His voice was low. Just above a whisper. "Listen."
Yuki listened. The station creaked — thermal expansion, or structural settling, the normal sounds of a metal structure in space. Chen's fingers on the console. Her own breathing. Ghost's breathing, slow and measured.
And something else.
A sound that wasn't mechanical. Wasn't thermal. Wasn't the station's bones settling in the cold. A sound that was rhythmic — irregular but persistent, like footsteps that didn't quite know where they were going but knew they were going somewhere.
Coming from deeper in the engineering section. From behind the reactor housing. From the part of the station they hadn't reached yet.
"Chen." Yuki kept her voice level. "How long on the reactor?"
"Fifteen minutes if the sequence cooperates. Thirty if it doesn't. Why?"
Yuki drew her sidearm. Seven rounds. The weight of it was familiar and completely insufficient for whatever was making noise in the dark of a station that was supposed to be empty.
"We might not have thirty."
Ghost shifted his weight. The carbine came up. His body turned toward the sound — toward the dark beyond the reactor housing, where the engineering section continued into spaces their flashlights hadn't reached. Where something moved in a station that had been sealed and abandoned eight months ago.
Decommissioned didn't mean uninhabited. Sealed didn't mean safe. And a station that the military had closed without explanation, in the same sector of space where the Collective operated its logistics network, might have been closed for reasons that had nothing to do with budget cuts.
The sound came again. Closer. A shuffling rhythm — not boots on grating, not the deliberate footfalls of a person walking. Something different. Something that moved on more than two legs.
Yuki's hand tightened on the sidearm. Her flashlight beam swung toward the sound, cutting through the dark, illuminating the reactor housing and the cable runs and the deck plates beyond, reaching deeper and deeper into the engineering section until the beam found the wall at the far end.
And the wall moved.
Not the wall. Something on the wall. Something that clung to the metal surface with limbs that shouldn't have been able to grip smooth steel, something that was the color of the station's interior — gray, metallic, the perfect camouflage of a creature that had adapted to an environment built by humans for humans.
It turned toward the light. The motion was familiar. Terribly, impossibly familiar.
"Stalker," Ghost said.
One word. Enough. Because a stalker on a decommissioned orbital station three wormhole jumps from Haven meant something that Yuki's brain processed in the half-second before combat instinct took over: the Collective hadn't just been using stalkers as weapons on alien worlds. They'd been storing them. Breeding them. In the infrastructure that the military thought was empty.
The stalker dropped from the wall. Two hundred kilos of chitin and blade-arms and the killing architecture of Haven's apex predator, loose on a station in the dark, in a corridor with no cover and no room to maneuver and three humans who had a pistol with seven rounds and a carbine with ninety and a man with cracked ribs whose only weapon was a tablet.
It charged.
Ghost fired. Three rounds, fast, the carbine's reports deafening in the enclosed space, the muzzle flash strobing the engineering bay into a series of freeze-frames — the stalker mid-charge, blade-arms extending, chitin plates catching the light like sections of armor coming alive. Two rounds hit. One punched through a forelimb joint. The other cracked the thorax plate without penetrating.
The stalker didn't slow. In the open, on Haven's surface, a wounded stalker might hesitate — reassess, circle, probe. In the confined space of a station corridor, the creature had nowhere to go except forward and no strategy except the one that two hundred kilos of mass moving at speed always favored: collision.
"Move!" Yuki grabbed Chen and pulled. The tech specialist came away from the console with a sound that was part protest and part pain, his ribs screaming as Yuki dragged him sideways behind the reactor housing. Ghost was already moving — lateral, fast, the carbine still up, still firing.
The stalker hit the console Chen had been sitting at. The impact crushed the interface, drove the mounting bracket backward, sent sparks spraying across the deck like a fountain of stars. The console died — the blue screen winking out, the seven percent battery and thirty minutes of access time destroyed in a single collision.
"The console—" Chen started.
"Later."
Ghost fired again. Two rounds into the stalker's flank as it pulled free from the ruined console. One round bounced off chitin. One found a gap — the joint between thorax and abdomen, the vulnerability that Doc had mapped on Haven and that apparently applied just as well in zero-gravity-rated orbital stations.
The stalker screamed. The sound in the enclosed space was a physical assault — a frequency that hit the eardrums and vibrated the deck plates and made the loose equipment on the workbenches rattle against their surfaces. The creature pivoted, fast, its body rotating on the smooth deck with the friction-defying agility that made stalkers the apex predators of every world they inhabited.
It oriented on Ghost.
He fired twice more. Controlled. Aimed. The rounds went into the skull plate and the skull plate held — the chitin was thicker there, evolved to absorb impacts from prey species that fought back. The stalker closed the distance between them in two seconds, blade-arms extending, the killing configuration that Yuki had seen end soldiers' lives on thirty-nine missions.
Yuki stepped out from behind the reactor housing and fired.
Three rounds. Fast. Not aimed at the skull or the thorax — aimed at the legs. The limb joints where chitin was thinnest, where Haven's evolution had sacrificed armor for mobility, where seven millimeters of pistol ammunition could actually do damage.
Two rounds hit. One severed something structural in the front right leg. The limb buckled. The stalker's charge faltered — not stopped, but disrupted, its geometry shifting as the damaged leg failed to support the weight of its body through the turn.
Ghost used the half-second. He stepped inside the blade-arm's arc — too close for the limb to deploy, inside the kill radius where the creature's reach became a liability — and pressed the carbine's muzzle against the gap between the skull plate and the thorax.
He fired.
The round went through the nerve cluster. The stalker's body locked rigid, blade-arms frozen in full extension, the death spasm that Yuki had seen on Haven replicated exactly in the engineering bay of a dead orbital station. It toppled. Hit the deck with a crash that rang through the hull. The chitin scraped against metal as it settled.
Silence.
Not silence. The echoes. The ringing in Yuki's ears from gunfire in an enclosed space. Chen's breathing — fast, shallow, his ribs punishing him for the sudden movement. And beyond those sounds, deeper in the station, more sounds.
More shuffling. More movement. More than one.
"How many?" Ghost asked. He was already reloading. Magazine out, fresh magazine in, the old one going into his vest pocket. Sixty rounds remaining.
Yuki looked at the dead stalker on the deck. At the darkness beyond the reactor housing. At the engineering section that stretched deeper into the station, where the sounds of movement multiplied.
"Enough," she said.
The station wasn't just dark. It was a nest. The Collective had used the decommissioned installation as a breeding facility — a controlled environment where stalkers could be contained, conditioned, and stored for deployment through the wormhole network. The military closed the station because the military was told to close it by people who needed the space for something else.
They'd flown through a wormhole to escape the trap on Haven and landed in the kennel.
Four rounds left in her sidearm. Sixty in the carbine. An unknown number of stalkers between them and the wormhole node that was their only way out.
Chen looked at the ruined console. At the dead stalker. At Yuki. His face held the expression of a man who had just watched his exit strategy die.
"There's a secondary engineering console," he said. "Section C. Past the reactor housing. Past..." He gestured at the dark. At the sounds. "That."
Yuki looked at Ghost. Ghost looked at the dark. The carbine was up. His breathing was steady. His face showed nothing except the concentration of a man who was already calculating angles and distances and the exact number of rounds per target that the math required.
"Through, then," Ghost said.
Yuki checked her sidearm. Four rounds. She thought of Santos in the shuttle with her machine gun. Of Viktor with his rifle. Of the cargo bay that was fifty meters behind them, through the concourse and the corridor and the coupling, where the rest of the squad waited for news that had just gotten considerably worse.
"Through," she agreed.
The shuffling in the dark grew louder.
