Felix sat back in his seat, chewing absently on the end of his water tube as he watched the console screen pulse. The soft blue glow illuminated his face, casting sharp angles across his features.

Another scan. Another disappointment. Words flashed across the display. He didn’t have to read them to know what they would say.

SCAN COMPLETE.

ITEM IDENTIFIED AS DAMAGED SHIP HULL.

SALVAGE VIABILITY: SCRAP METAL.

The frustrated man exhaled through his nose and leaned his head back against the worn cushioning of his seat.

"Scan number 2,376 complete," he muttered to himself. "And… more crap."

A voice chimed from the console speaker, smooth yet distinctly unimpressed. "Felix, why are we still out here? You haven’t found anything of use, and you know this sector of space is off-limits."

He tilted his head toward the ceiling, as if he could glare at the disembodied voice. "Because eventually, we’ll find something to make this all worth it. And it’s not off-limits—the Imperium has simply designated it as hazardous. That’s not the same thing."

Amy, the ship’s NavCom AI, let out an electronic sigh. "And yet here we are, spending cycle after cycle scanning useless junk in a hazardous sector."

Felix stood from his command chair, stretching his arms over his head until his spine popped. He froze for a moment, evaluating the sensation. Good pop or bad pop?

Deciding it was the good kind, he exhaled and lowered his arms. "The radiation here isn’t hazardous to me, which gives me the edge. I can sit out here and scan as long as I want, feed off the ambient energy, and wait for the hazard notice to be lifted. Then, when everyone else swoops in looking for treasure, I’ll already have the good stuff."

Amy was silent for half a second. Then: "You mean garbage?"

Felix sighed. "You know, Amy, sometimes I question my decision to give the ship’s NavCom a personality."

"You’d have gone crazy out here without me by now."

Felix smirked but didn’t argue. He wondered, not for the first time, if she was right. For almost 180 cycles, he had been drifting through the remnants of an ancient battlefield, scanning wreckage that had long since lost any real value. Sure, there were stories about lost Imperium warships carrying untold wealth, but maybe it was all just myth.

He leaned against the bulkhead, staring at the ceiling as if it held the answers. Why was he still here? Did he actually believe he’d find something? Or was he just too stubborn to admit he had wasted nearly two years on a pointless dream?

"What about thirty more cycles?" he mused. "Thirty more, and if I don’t find anything, we go back to civilized space. Maybe Niro will give me my old job at the Reclamation Center."

A speaker in the corridor sparked to life. "Didn’t you tell him, and I quote, ‘I would rather eat a muffin out of an Arcturian baboon’s waste orifice than work here one more day’ before you left?"

Felix snorted. "It was a blueberry muffin. If you’re going to mockingly quote me, get it right."

Amy’s voice was smug. "Ah, yes. That makes all the difference."

"Besides," Felix continued, pushing off the wall. "Flora says worse to him all the time, and she still has a job."

Amy made a sound somewhere between an amused hum and a scoff—all the more insulting, considering she had neither a mouth nor lungs. "Yes, but Flora also lets him eat blueberry muffins out of—wait."

Her tone shifted. She sounded serious. Sharp.

"Felix, I’m detecting… something."

Felix froze mid-step. "Something? How non-specific."

"A radiation fluctuation. Small, but not random. It looks like a radiation spike."

He frowned and turned back toward the bridge. "That’s impossible. There’s never been an increase in radiation here—just slow degradation. Are you sure it’s not a sensor glitch?"

A pause? Amy never hesitated with things as simple as basic scans.

"No. It’s real."

Felix slid into his seat, his fingers flying across the console. There it was. A sharp radiation spike. Brief, but distinct. It had already started to drop back down, but it was still higher than before. His stomach twisted. That shouldn’t happen. Not here. This was a dead zone.

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"Amy, confirm visual scan of the affected region, and check to see if there are any other ships in the area."

"No contacts," she replied, but there was something in her tone. Something close to concern.

Felix’s fingers tightened on the console. "Something had to cause it."

Silence.

Suddenly there was a a flash of light that overloaded the visual sensors. It was sudden and violent, bursting onto the screen like an overexposed frame. For half a second, Felix’s vision filled with searing white. And back to darkness. The black of space returned. The floating debris fields settled into eerie stillness once more.

Felix’s pulse quickened. "What the hell was that?"

Amy’s voice had an edge of urgency now. "Radiation is stabilizing, but I am picking up an uncatalogued object."

Felix leaned forward, scanning the data. "Can you identify it?"

"I’m a navigational AI, Felix. That’s not really my thing." Her voice carried an uncharacteristic note of surprise. "But I can tell you it doesn’t match any configuration in my database."

Felix’s fingers hovered over the controls. "Yeah, yeah… I’m zooming in."

He adjusted the sensors, the screen flickering as the object came into focus. At first, it was just a silhouette, a jagged outline against the distant stars. The sensor overlays struggled to map its dimensions, flickering between inconsistent readings. Felix squinted. "It looks like… some kind of crustacean?"

"You sound ridiculous right now."

He exhaled slowly. "I know. But still…"

The ship—because that’s what it had to be—drifted eerily in the void. It was large in comparison, easily twice the size of Felix’s vessel, its hull ridged and irregular, resembling the segmented shell of some deep-sea predator.

A pulse of energy flickered along its form—not lights. Not thrusters. Something else. It was metallic, but not anything he was used to seeing in a ships hull. Felix’s throat went dry. Nothing he had ever seen, nothing he had ever heard of, looked or registered like this.

Amy’s voice came very, very quietly through the speakers. "Felix… I don’t think we’re alone out here."

He began a standard scan of the object, his brow furrowing in confusion.

"I think it’s a vessel of some kind, but I can’t get a solid look at it." He tapped a few controls, switching to a higher resolution long-range scan. The readings made no sense. "It’s got some kind of energy field hugging the hull, but no power signature. And it’s not any type of energy the scanner can identify."

The NavCom's response was unusually slow. "That’s not possible. Our scanners are covering all bands."

Felix shook his head. "Yeah? Well, neither is a crab ship showing up in the middle of a dead zone."

The screen flickered as the sensor suite struggled to process the anomaly. It was there—real—but wrong somehow.

"Trying infrared," he muttered, flipping the visual spectrum. The display shifted, layering the object’s heat signature over the raw image. Nothing. It was cold—too cold for a vessel with living occupants. No internal temperature fluctuation, no heat from propulsion systems.

"Okay, that’s weird."

"Define ‘weird,’" Amy prompted.

Felix rubbed his chin. "Either it’s an old, gutted wreck… or it’s using a tech I don’t understand."

Amy was quiet for a moment. "Maybe try basic radio?"

"Already on it."

Felix adjusted the comm frequencies, cycling through a range of standard hailing signals. No response.

"Alright, let’s go broader." He widened the transmission to an open-frequency distress hail. Even uncontacted species usually recognized an SOS ping. Still nothing. A faint distortion crackled through the audio feed.

Felix sat forward. "Amy, are you hearing this?"

"I am. But it’s not a reply."

The static wasn’t random white noise. It had… a pattern.

Felix’s pulse quickened. "Run an analysis."

Amy processed for a few nanoseconds and responded, "It’s not a transmission."

Felix frowned. "Then what is it?"

Amy hesitated. "...I think it’s interference. I just don't know how it is interfering."

The sound crackled again—brief and uneven, like a whisper at the edge of hearing. Felix’s skin prickled. Something about it felt... intentional. Felix switched the ship to silent running, cutting emissions to a minimum. If there were life signs onboard, he didn’t want to startle them.

His small salvage vessel, the Fortuna, drifted closer, its navigation thrusters firing in brief pulses. The crustacean-like ship filled the viewport now. It was even bigger than he’d thought, the curved ridges of its hull resembling the plated exoskeleton of some massive, ancient creature. The surface pulsed faintly with energy, shifting in places like… breathing.

Felix swallowed. "Amy… are you seeing this?"

"I’m recording this," she corrected. "Because no one is going to believe us."

Felix leaned closer to the viewport. "No markings. No insignia. No docking ports."

Amy processed. "Confirmed. I detect no visible propulsion systems. No standard access hatches."

Felix drummed his fingers on the console. "But it’s not natural. It’s too structured. Too… deliberate."

A beat of silence. Then Amy asked the question they were both thinking:

"Felix, do you still think it’s a ship?"

Felix’s throat burned as he tried to swallow. "...I don’t know."

His fingers hovered over the external light control. If they weren’t receiving standard transmissions, maybe they used visual signals. Some early space faring civilizations had relied on light pulses before they developed subspace communication. Worth a shot. He tapped a three-pulse pattern—a standard first-contact signal.

The ship didn’t react.

He tried again. Two short pulses, one long.

No response.

"Either they’re ignoring us," Felix muttered, "or they don’t understand."

"...Or they don’t see it," Amy added.

Felix’s hands hovered over the controls. "What are you saying?"

She paused for a moment, then spoke up. "What if their technology doesn’t focus on the same bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, or broad range? Some species don’t even see in the same band as you and they may not be looking for what you consider visual light."

Felix’s stomach twisted. What if they weren’t seeing him at all? The left him at a loss. Slowly, he leaned back in his seat.

"Then what the hell do we do?"

Amy paused. "...we keep transmitting and… we wait."

Felix exhaled and rubbed his face. He hated waiting. But for the first time in 180 cycles, he wasn’t waiting for scrap.

He was waiting to unravel the truly unknown.