I woke up with no memory of where or who I was. Standing up, I took in my surroundings, soft white light illuminated lustrous golden panels that made up a long hallway. Long thin lights were placed intermittently where the floor and ceiling met the walls. The hallway seemed to stretch when I gazed down its length, as if some mechanism was lengthening while I watched. Looking down at myself, I'm wearing a black uniform though it's strangely patchy, like some fire has burned holes in it without leaving burnt edges. On my belt an empty holster sits, forlorn of whatever it held. With no idea what to do, I start to walk forward not even sure if there's an end or exit.

The air smells fresh yet too clean, as if it had been vigorously scrubbed of a foul odor then pumped back into the room. A lingering sense of something watching me won't let me relax; a feeling of just before I had come along, someone had hidden themselves and I could still feel their presence. Every so often the hallway would cross another, however I never deviate from my path. I feel I will eventually reach the end of this hall if I trudge onwards. After what feels like days of walking, I spy a scrap of cloth, no larger than my hand on the yellow metal of the floor. A blue fabric of some kind and almost immaterial in thickness lies there just to the side. As I reach to grab it, the cloth disintegrates into a blue dust as my fingers graze it. As the dust slowly drifts across the floor disturbed by some faint breeze I can't feel, a thought comes unbidden to me. "That was the same color as the engineer's uniform."

With that a wave of hazy memories sweep over my mind. Remington, the engineer fawning over a new power converter. His blue flight suit rumpled and dirty from frequent trips through the crawl spaces. Without noticing, I had slumped against the wall, my head in my hands. I had a crew! But with no idea where they were or where I was. That scrap of uniform gave me a feeling of unease as to the fate of my crew.

I continued onward for sometime until at last the hallway ended. A great hangar of gold metal and bright white lights lays before me. A black void occupies the far right wall, blue energy crackling across the surface. No stars can be seen but in my gut I know that beyond that void the vacuum of space sits. On a rail set in the floor, poised to be launched into that black expanse sits a strange craft, pearly white and trimmed with the same golden metal that dominates the room. There are many more empty rails, I could even make out wear marks on them from previous launches.

To my left a bank of terminals and lockers are arranged, most of the lockers have their doors ajar and are empty. The room has a feeling of some emergency has just passed and the frantic rush of activity just ended. As I walk to the terminal an ethereal echo raises the hair on my neck and arms.

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"The Artemis weapon will fire again. "

A primal growl escapes from my throat, as some internal part of me recognizes that name and that it's the reason I'm isolated here in this labyrinth of gold. I go to a terminal that's active, its screen a pale Robin egg blue, and try to find a map or something to help me. My fingers fly across the screen, apparently knowing how to use this machine despite my lack of memory. Soon I've found a map of where I am, a vast maze of lines intersecting, joining then splitting, overwhelms my mind as the screen zooms further and further in. I can't read whatever alien script is displayed on the screen but I have an impression of a massive space station. I must be at one of many hangars, pressing an icon resembling a beam rapidly pans the map to what must be a massive room on the edge of the map. Another icon of two points connected by a line makes a path for me. It leads out from the black void in this room though.

That small ship must be a shuttle! I rush over to it, not even wondering how I know to access the terminal or the ship. Entering the cockpit, all I can think is that I must stop the Artemis weapon from firing! Feverishly I start mashing buttons, one of them must be the launch control. After what felt like an hour of frantic button combinations, pulling a lever under the instrument panel propelled the craft violently forward, slamming me against the uncomfortably shaped seat.

The black void of the hangar exit cascaded over the cockpit, rippling like water over a mirror. I hear a stoic, authoritarian voice in my mind say "We have no other choice, if we don't stop that weapon from firing all life in the galaxy will be snuffed out."

From outside the hangar I can see the smallest portion of the giant labyrinth I had been in. Bare rock is scarred with craters, gleaming metal corridors and arcane machinery. I can see my destination ahead, surrounded by impact marks, and husks of thousand ships like the one I'm in right now, a monolithic array of unknowable age dominates the horizon. It was no station I had been in, but rather a planet converted to a dark cruel purpose. Thinking about the sea of ancient and new shuttles, battered to bits below me brings dark thoughts to my mind. What if I'm too late? Did the weapon fire already, is that why I can't remember anything? How many times has it fired before?

The thought that I'm not the first to try to disable the weapon doesn't phase, but the chance I may be the last to try terrifies me. The terror that I may fail even if it fired before I awoke, that if I don't stop it now that it will fire again and continue snuff out the galaxy of life is too horrible to dwell on.

Pushing the small shuttle as fast as it can go, I dismiss any thoughts of failure. I aim the shuttle for a damaged section in the giant array. The acceleration starts to make me black out, my last sight is that the damage has been caused by hundreds of impacts, and a crack has taken hold. My vision fades as the looming wall of gold fills the view screen, and all is dark.