Stardust's Wake ⬆️

Stardust's Wake: Echo in the Dust: Descent into Echo-7

A Whisper from the Void, a Vow in the Dust

The tomb that had once been Outpost Echo-7 exhaled its poison into the void with mechanical persistence. For forty-three years, seven months, and sixteen days, the station had been spinning its solitary vigil through the Kepler Void, its corridors choked with the metallic tang of recycled death and the phosphorescent rot of things that should never have lived.

Ashryn Rook moved through the sepulchral halls with the fluid economy of motion that marked those born to the dark between stars. Their breath misted in the chill air, each exhalation a small rebellion against the station's dying life support. The patchwork synth-leather of their coat—a genealogy of repairs written in carbon scoring and molecular patches—whispered against bulkheads that wept condensation like tears from a metal god.

The Aetherial Corruption had claimed this place during the Third Expansion, when humanity's reach had exceeded its wisdom by several orders of magnitude. Now the station was a mausoleum of ambition, its every surface bearing the quantum scars of that first, catastrophic contact with the spaces between spaces.

Spark-7, Ashryn's utility companion, preceded them through the gloom—a matte-black ovoid no larger than a human fist, its sensor array painting invisible geometries across surfaces that had forgotten the touch of living hands. The drone's quantum processors hummed at frequencies just below human perception, a technological mantra against the void's encroaching madness.

Ashryn's augmented vision parsed the decay with the cold precision of long practice. Stress fractures in the tritanium superstructure told stories of explosive decompression. The prismatic shimmer of residual aetheric contamination warned of spaces where reality had worn thin. And throughout it all, the bioluminescent pseudo-fungus that had claimed the station's walls pulsed with the slow, alien rhythm of something that had learned to mime life without ever truly understanding it.

The salvager's creed was simple: everything had value to someone, somewhere. But some things, Ashryn had learned, extracted their own price merely for being witnessed.

A ghost-frequency flickered across Spark's sensor array—not the usual electromagnetic detritus of a dying station, but something more purposeful. More aware. The signal resonated with the quantum entanglement node buried deep in Ashryn's temporal lobe, the one that had been bleeding phantom memories into their consciousness for the better part of a decade.

Ace Stardust. The name arrived unbidden, carrying with it the taste of stellar plasma and the memory of a voice that had never spoken to Ashryn directly, yet somehow defined the architecture of their dreams.

The neural ghost stirred, sending familiar needles of discomfort through Ashryn's left eye. "Easy, Maverick," they whispered to the presence that might have been madness, might have been quantum echo, might have been something worse than either.

The Discovery

The signal led them deeper into Echo-7's necrotized heart, past chambers where emergency lighting had long since failed and only the corruption's sickly phosphorescence provided illumination. Here, in what had once been the station's primary communications hub, the salvage told a story written in molten metal and quantum fire.

The main console array had been reduced to slag—not by time or neglect, but by something that had needed to die quickly and thoroughly. Yet beneath the destruction, protected by layers of radiation shielding and military-grade encryption, a single data node remained intact. Its surface bore the tri-helix logo of the Terran Exploration Consortium, and beneath that, stenciled in regulation font: PRIORITY ALPHA - SOLACE'S CRADLE - STARDUST, A.

Ashryn's augmented fingers found the node's access ports with the unconscious grace of long practice. Twenty-seven years working the void's graveyards had taught them to read the archaeology of disaster, to parse meaning from the scattered bones of human ambition. But this—this felt different. Personal, in a way that made their quantum-scarred nervous system sing with harmonic resonance.

The diagnostic reader's screen flickered to life, casting pale blue light across Ashryn's weathered features. Static resolved into voice, impossibly clear, impossibly familiar:

"This is Ace Stardust, on Solace's Cradle! The Starfall... it wasn't an event, it was a release! The Aetherial Corruption is alive! It mimics, it consumes! It's here! It's—"

The transmission died mid-scream.

The silence that followed was absolute, profound as the vacuum between stars. Then the quantum node in Ashryn's skull flared, phantom pain lancing through their left eye as the Haunted connection triggered. The stress of recognition, of confirmation, of terrible understanding settled into their bones like radiation sickness.

("So it was real," Ashryn rasped, their voice swallowed by the station's mechanical wheeze.)

Spark chirped, its holographic display painting impossible geometries in the stale air. The signal source wasn't here—it was deeper, always deeper, in the station's core where something patient and vast was singing songs older than human speech.

In the quantum spaces behind their eyes, Ace Stardust's voice whispered like a prayer, like a curse, like a summons:

"Deeper, my friend! Always deeper!"

Gameplay Log: Part A - Descent

• Move: Begin a Session → Strong Hit (Action 9 vs 4, 2)
• Outcome: Momentum reset to +2
• Move: Delve (Follow the Signal) → Weak Hit (Action 7 vs 8, 6)
• Outcome: Found the recording but triggered Haunted connection
• Haunted Asset Triggered: -1 Spirit (now 4)
• Current State: Health 5, Spirit 4, Supply 5, Momentum +2

The signal calls from Echo-7's heart. Something vast stirs in the station's core. And in the darkness between decks, three shapes that were once human begin to move...