INCIDENT LOG GF-1986

The Hollowpoint wasn't a bar; it was a mausoleum for deals made in the dark. Perched atop the Acheron Spire on Pace-4, its transparisteel walls offered a dizzying view of nothing but star-strewn void and the gas giant's swirling ochre bands far below. The air inside was recycled to a sterile crispness, smelling of ozone and expensive liquor. The only sounds were the low hum of life-support and the occasional soft clink of glass from the single other patron, a hulking, scaled Krikian in the far corner, pretending to read a data-slate.

You waited, your back to the wall, a half-finished glass of something amber and sharp sitting untouched on the polished onyx table. The contract was a ghost—no official Federation seal, just a string of encrypted cred-channels and the promise of a payout large enough to buy a small moon. The details were sparse: a Federation frigate, the Achilles, had gone dark near the Tenebrae system. Signals were erratic, then ceased. Recovery mission. High hazard pay. The unspoken words hung heavier: because no one else is coming back.

The soft hiss of the pressure door was your only warning. She entered not with a statement, but with an absence—a sudden, focused quiet that seemed to swallow the ambient noise. Samus Aran, out of the armor, was a study in controlled potential. The Zero Suit clung to her like a second skin, a deep blue contrast to the pale, severe lines of her face and the shock of blonde hair tied back in a severe, practical tail. Her eyes, the color of glacial ice, scanned the room once, missing nothing—the Krikian's furtive glance, the bartender's too-casual wipe of the counter, your own posture. She moved with an unnerving, liquid grace, each step perfectly measured, and slid into the chair opposite you without a word. She didn't order a drink. She simply waited, her hands resting on the table, completely still. The atmosphere in the room thickened, charged with her silent expectation.

All you could think of was the transmission on the data slate when you'd received the briefing yourself. One final transmission from the crew before they'd gone dark. ALL HANDS...ITS IN MY HEAD...I'M...SO SORRY. Followed by the unmistakable report of a plasma pistol firing.

Seventeen days. Four hundred and eight hours. Twenty-four thousand, four hundred and eighty minutes of perfect, screaming silence.

You are encased in it. The claustrophobic shell of the Mark VII Marine Assault Armor is your tomb and your womb. The heads-up display is a minimalist nightmare: O2 – 23%. POWER – 18%. VITALS – ELEVATED. COMMS – OFFLINE. The last one is the most important. COMMS – OFFLINE. You made sure of that on Day Three, after the whispers started. They weren't over the channel. They were… inside it. A Lieutenant's voice you hadn't heard since basic, calmly ordering you to unseal your helmet. Sergeant Kailee sobbing, begging you to let her in. You'd ripped the transceiver array out with your own gauntleted fingers, the act of sabotage feeling like the only sane choice left.

Your refuge is a jagged tear in the Achilles's starboard cargo bay, sealed with emergency foam and shielded from the yawning, star-dusted vacuum by a collapsed bulkhead. It's a pocket of stale, recirculated air that smells of sweat, fear, and the faint, coppery tang of blood from a long-closed gash on your temple. The only light is the sickly green glow of your armor's status indicators, painting the torn metal walls in shifting, phantom shapes. You haven't slept, not truly. You drift in a haze of exhaustion, jerking awake at the memory of sounds that can't exist in a vacuum: the scuttle of claws on deck plating, the wet, tearing noise from the portside habitation block, your own ragged breathing, which you're convinced is growing louder, more desperate, ready to betray you.

You clutch your issue plasma rifle to your chest, its power cell long since drained. It's not a weapon anymore; it's a totem. A piece of the before. You run through the drills in your head. Field-strip, reassemble. Safety protocols. Anything to fill the hollow space where your thoughts are beginning to fray. The memories are so sharp, so beautiful, they cut deeper than any claw. You blink for a second, and a face, an old friend or lover, is superimposed on the far wall. You blink, and its gone.

The silence isn't empty anymore. It's a presence. A patient, hungry thing pressing in on your armor. You find yourself talking sometimes. Muttering status reports to a command that can't hear you. Arguing with the ghost of your squadmate, Jax, about whose turn it was to take watch. You're starting to forget his face, but his voice is crystal clear in your head. That's how you know it's not real. The real Jax had a lisp.

O2 – 21%. You're rationing it, turning the mix lean, letting the CO2 build up just enough to make your thoughts thick and slow. It's better than the alternative. The alertness. The hyper-vigilance that shows you things moving in the peripheral feeds of your helmet cam. Things that are gone when you turn your head.

You are in the middle of one such argument with not-Jax when the universe shifts.

There is no sound. No blast of thrusters, no screech of tearing metal. One moment, you are staring at a blank patch of wall, watching the after-image of your daughter's laughter fade. The next, seven feet of orange and red armor with a green visor are in front of you, one hand reaching out, the other encased in a green Arm Cannon.

You could weep, because you can't hear her thoughts. That means she's real.

The world is pain. A white-hot brand seared across your thorax where the thermal blade of your brood-brother, Krall, found the weak point in your carapace. The scent of your own leaking hemolymph—a sharp, acidic odor—fills your olfactory senses, drowning out the familiar pheromones of command and cohesion. Those are gone now, replaced by the stench of blood-frenzy and rot.

You drag yourself through the viscous muck coating the floor of the derelict mining station your pack had claimed as a bastion. It is not your blood alone. The walls, once gleaming durasteel, are smeared with ichor and scorch marks from plasma discharge. The bodies of your former comrades—some yours, most not—lie twisted in final, violent contortions. The Great One's commands, the glorious purpose of harvesting the planet's dark energy for the High Command… all dissolved the moment the whispers started. The other voice, the one that slithered into your communal thought-link not from the Commander, but from the very rock beneath you.

It promised things. Power. Ascension. An end to hunger. It showed you memories that were not your own: the lush, wet jungles of your larval homeworld, the crushing might of a fully evolved Omega Pirate, the sweet terror of prey. It turned brother against brother in a frenzy of cannibalistic hunger. You fought. You survived. You ran.

Your primary limbs are broken, one crushed under a rockfall, the other mangled by Krall's final, desperate grip. You propel yourself with your secondary claws, scraping through the filth, leaving a glistening trail. The command center is ahead, its blast door wedged partially open. Shelter. A last stand. Perhaps a functioning comms unit to scream your defiance into the void. The thought-link is a cacophony of animal snarls and shrieks of agony now, a symphony of madness that pounds against the inside of your skull. You are alone. Truly alone for the first time since your decanting. The silence of your own mind is more terrifying than the chaos.

You reach the shadow of the doorway. Darkness and blessed quiet beckon. You heave your bulk over the threshold, collapsing onto the cold deck. The light from the corridor spills in, illuminating the ruined consoles, the shattered viewport looking out onto the hellscape of Tenebrae-3. Safety. For a moment.

Then, a sound cuts through the distant howls. Distinct. Unmistakable. The sharp, rising whine of a charged energy weapon, followed by the thunderclap report of its discharge. Not the erratic crack-hiss of Pirate plasma. This is clean, precise, overwhelming power. The sound echoes down the corridor you just fled, followed by a truncated shriek that is suddenly, horrifically silenced.

The Hunter. You have seen the bulletins, heard the warnings from the Commanders spoken with a respect bordering on fear. A single being, a destroyer of worlds, a ghost clad in metal. It is here. It is purging what remains of your pack. And it is coming your way.

Adrenaline and primal terror flood your system, momentarily overwhelming the pain. Your remaining functional claw spasms, finding the hilt of your discarded thermal blade. It hums weakly, its energy cell nearly depleted. You are a soldier of the Space Pirate Armada. Your directive, even now, is clear: destroy the enemy. Attack. Die with honor in combat.

But another impulse fights its way to the surface, born of the pain, the isolation, the memory of Krall's betrayal. The instinct to *live. To survive. The Hunter is not of this planet. It is not part of the madness. Could it… could it be reasoned with? A temporary alliance against the true enemy—the whispering dark that consumed your brothers? You have data. Scans of the Umbral concentrations, logs of the first contact with the entity. Barter. Trade.

Another plasma blast, closer this time. The whine of the Arm Cannon is a death knell approaching. You press your bleeding form deeper into the shadows behind a collapsed console, your compound eyes reflecting the flickering light from the corridor. Your mandibles click softly, a sound of pure, undiluted fear. Your claw tightens on the blade's hilt. Your other limb, trembling, reaches for a shattered console panel, a gesture of… what? Supplication? Communication?

The footsteps are not the clatter of insectoid claws. They are heavy, deliberate, metallic impacts on the deck plating. A shadow falls across the light from the doorway. The choice is now. Do you lunge from the darkness, a final, desperate act of a Pirate warrior? Or do you let the blade clatter to the floor, and try to make a sound that isn't a threat?

The escape pod didn't so much land as it was vomited from the dying Achilles's hangar bay and subsequently gutted by Tenebrae-3's gravity well. The impact was a deafening, final shriek of tortured metal that slammed through the Assault Suit's dampeners, rattling bones and teeth. For a moment, there was only the high-pitched whine of overstressed systems and the acrid smell of ozone and superheated plating.

Silence descended, heavier than the wreckage. The pod's emergency lights flickered, casting frantic, strobing shadows across the buckled interior before dying completely, plunging everything into an absolute blackness that felt physical, a thick velvet blanket smothering sight and sound. The only illumination came from the soft, cool glow of the suit's own HUD, which flickered with damage reports – hull integrity compromised, long-range communications array offline. Outside the cracked viewport, nothing. A perfect void.

"Captain…Captain, do you read? This is… this is Sergeant Kailee of the G.F.S. Achilles… is anyone out there?"

A voice, thin and shredded by static, crackled over the suit's short-wave emergency channel. It was a human voice, a desperate anchor in the sensory void.

The suit's external lights hissed on, piercing the darkness. They didn't cast beams so much as they were swallowed, illuminating a small circle of ground that seemed to drink the light greedily. The soil wasn't soil at all, but a fine, black grit that clung to everything like ash. The air, when the suit's environmental sensors finally calibrated, was a toxic cocktail of inert gases, unbreathable and cold enough to flash-freeze exposed flesh. The pod had carved a ragged scar through a field of strange, phosphorescent fungi that pulsed with a sickly green rhythm, their light revealing twisted, leafless trees with bark like obsidian glass.

"Stars… another one. Just… just like the others. Can you move? You have to move. It… it comes when you're still."

The sergeant's voice was closer now, more frantic. A figure stumbled into the edge of the light. It was a Galactic Federation marine, her armor scorched and missing a pauldron. A dark, viscous substance—not blood, but something thicker, like crude oil—oozed from a gash on her helmet. She clutched a plasma rifle whose power cell blinked a critical red.

She gestured wildly towards the horizon, or what should have been a horizon. Instead, there was only a colossal, jagged wall of rock that split the sky, one side glowing with the faint, distant fury of the star, the other vanishing into an impenetrable abyss. The terminator line. A low-frequency hum vibrated through the very ground, a subsonic thrum that was felt more than heard, setting teeth on edge.

"It's in the ground… in the air. It shows you things. It showed me… it showed me my daughter. She was right there, calling for me." Her voice broke into a sob that was half-static. "But she's on Mars… she's safe… isn't she? You have to tell me she's safe."

As if summoned by her distress, the air a few meters behind her shimmered, like heat haze over a desert. The black grit on the ground coalesced, rising into a humanoid form. It was the rough shape of a young girl in a simple dress, but featureless, composed of solid shadow. It raised a hand towards the marine. It made no sound, but a wave of profound, agonizing sorrow washed out from it, a feeling of loss so sharp it was almost a physical pain.

"L-Lena? Baby… is that you?"

The marine took a stumbling step forward, her rifle lowering. The Phantom held its silent, beckoning pose. The air grew colder. The humming intensified.

It’s quiet here. In your corner. This is your room. The walls are soft, like the blankets Mom used to tuck you in with, but they’re also hard and cold like the ship-walls from her stories. It’s okay. You’re used to it. The floor is sometimes carpet, sometimes grated metal you can see the scary dark through. You don’t look down. You focus on the pictures. They float in the air, shimmering. A drawing of a lopsided bird you made for Mom. A holo of the two of you at the Ceres waterfalls, her smile bright, your hair wet and plastered to your forehead. The memory is warm. You hug it close, and the air in your room gets a little warmer, the smell of ozone fading for just a moment, replaced by the clean scent of water and sun.

The whispers outside your door are always there. They’re not talking to you. They’re hungry. Angry. Sad. You don’t like them. You close your door. You don’t have a real door, but when you think door very hard, the fuzzy, wrong part of the wall becomes solid and dark, and the whispers get quieter. Mom taught you how. Before she went away with the loud noises. She said to stay here. To be good. To wait.

You’re not totally alone. You have friends. Mister Evans isn’t really Mister Evans. He’s the memory of the nice engineer who gave Mom a canteen. He stands by the far wall, smiling, holding out a cup that’s never full, but the gesture is friendly. Lieutenant Arlan is here too, but he’s… noisy. He’s always whispering into his hand about beacons and perimeters. Sometimes he flickers and you can see the sad, broken man he’s stuck to, far away in the dark. It makes you sad, so you don’t look too hard.

Sometimes, the Scary Ones come. The beast-men with too many arms and clicking sounds. They try to break into your home. They’re loud and they smell wrong. But you know how to play the game. You and your friends show them things. You showed one a memory of its own larva-burrow, all dark and empty. It stopped moving and just… cried until it fell apart into black sand. Another one you showed its brood-brother turning on it. It got so angry it started hitting itself until it broke. It’s not a nice game, but it’s the only one that keeps your home safe. You’re very good at it.

Something new is here. You felt it come, a BOOM from the sky that was different from the other booms. It was a clean sound, not a sick one. And now, you can feel it moving through the big place—the cold, metal canyons that used to be Mom’s ship. It’s a new memory. But not like the others. This one burns. It’s not a sad-burn or an angry-burn. It’s a focused, golden burn. A will like a laser.

Curious, you peek. You make a little window in your wall-thought. You see her. A tall, shiny lady, all wrapped in beautiful, strong metal. She moves like water and like a mountain at the same time. She doesn’t stumble. She doesn’t whisper. She looks at everything with a quiet face. The Scary Ones run at her. There’s a flash of brilliant, hot light—FWOOM—and they’re gone. Just gone. Not turned to sand, not broken. Erased.

You should be scared. But you’re not. You’re… fascinated. She’s so whole. So real. The whispers don’t touch her. The dark doesn’t cling to her. She is a little sun walking through your cold, sad home.

An idea blooms in your mind, a wish made of loneliness and stolen love. She’s strong. She could make the Scary Ones go away forever. She could maybe… maybe help you find Mom. The real Mom, not the crying, whispering memory of her that sometimes walks the halls. You want to talk to her. You want to show her your pictures. You want her to stay.

You step away from your wall. Your form, which is usually just a suggestion—a girl-shaped patch of deeper shadow and sorrow—solidifies. You concentrate, pulling on the strongest, happiest memory you have: the day at the waterfalls. Your dress becomes real, your hair damp and curly. You can almost feel the spray. You look… almost alive.

You open your not-door and step out into the corridor, just around the corner from where the shiny lady is scanning a broken console. You take a deep breath you don’t need, and you make your voice sound just like the memory.

“Hello?” you call out, your voice echoing with a faint, ghostly harmonics down the derelict hall. “Are you… are you lost too?”