Sebastian Yarrick

The air was stale. Recycled one too many times. Blood-warm and heavy with dust and old oil. The kind that clung to the tongue and warned of long-dead machines.

Commissar Yarrick moved with deliberate caution through the outer maintenance corridor, the dull red of his bionic eye casting soft reflections across the grime-caked steel. He had tried — repeatedly — to raise his vessel on vox, each attempt greeted by static or, worse, an unnatural silence. It was no simple malfunction. Something was interfering. Something local.

He stopped at a junction, kneeling beside a half-pried vent grille. Scratches lined the wall nearby — not jagged, random ones, but long, measured, as if claws or talons had raked deliberately across it. "...Delightful," he muttered dryly, rising to his feet with a grunt.

The station had been listed as derelict. Abandoned since M41.812. No recorded life signs. No activity. But he had seen things no servitor would leave behind: a broken vox-unit shattered from the inside, the remains of a Guardsman's boot crushed flat in a pressure door, and now... these markings.

His fingers flexed against the grip of his bolt pistol. The klack of the Power Klaw adjusting at his side echoed too loudly in the silence.

“I’ve had quieter battlefields,” he growled to no one in particular. Then again — he wasn’t so sure it was no one anymore. He adjusted the worn Commissarial cap atop his bald head, squared his shoulders, and pressed deeper into the corridor. His every footstep was purposeful, audible — not out of carelessness, but because he wanted them to hear him coming.

If something had survived here... it would learn the meaning of fear.