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Stardust's Wake ⬆️

Stardust's Wake: Echo in the Dust: First Contact

Locale

⌚: Standard Galactic Date: 2387.156.14:47
📌: Outpost Echo-7, Central Sector, Deck Seven
☢️: 6.2 rads/hour - Increasing

The quantum echo of Ace Stardust's transmission still reverberated through Ashryn's neural pathways as they descended deeper into Echo-7's corrupted anatomy. Each deck brought them closer to the signal source and further from any hope of easy escape. The station's superstructure groaned around them, a symphony of stressed metal and failing containment fields.

("Now, this is what I call an expedition!" Ace's voice murmured in their mind, distinct from their own thoughts yet intimate as breath. "No fiddling with wires, no tedious repairs. Just pure, unadulterated exploration into the heart of the unknown! Though, a little more... flair, perhaps? A dramatic entrance is always appreciated, even by the dead, wouldn't you say?")

Ashryn ignored the phantom's commentary, their focus razor-sharp on the task at hand. The salvager's first rule: stay alive long enough to profit from your discoveries. Everything else was philosophical luxury they couldn't afford.

"Hold tight, Spark," they murmured, voice low in the cathedral silence of the dead station.

The drone's optical array swept the corridor ahead, painting thermal ghosts on Ashryn's retinal display. Safe passage through a maze of crystalline growths that had erupted from the bulkheads like frozen screams. Each step was calculated, each breath measured against the rising radiation count that made their teeth ache.

Into the Heart

The path led them to a vast chamber that had once served some industrial purpose—fabrication, perhaps, or atmospheric processing. Now it was a temple to entropy, its ceiling lost in phosphorescent shadows, its floor carpeted with the organic machinery of the Corruption.

At the chamber's center stood a pillar of twisted metal and pulsating tissue, a fusion of technology and biology that hurt to perceive directly. It sang with harmonics that bypassed the ears entirely, speaking directly to the quantum foam of reality itself. This was the source—not just of the signal, but of something far more fundamental and wrong.

Before they could process the full implications, Ashryn heard it: the wet scrape of claws on metal, the labored breathing of things that had forgotten how to die properly. Movement in the shadows, slow and purposeful.

Three shapes shambled into the phosphorescent light. Once, they might have been human. Now they were architectural sketches of anatomy rendered in corrupted flesh and salvaged machinery. Too many joints in their limbs. Too few recognizable features in their faces. They moved with the terrible patience of the already-dead, their attention focused on patterns only they could perceive.

Ashryn's tactical systems engaged automatically, parsing threat vectors and escape routes with the cold efficiency of military-grade software. The creatures were large, physically powerful, and appeared to be conducting some form of patrol around the central pillar. More importantly, they hadn't yet noticed the intruders.

("Oh, we're not just going to stand here, are we?" Ace's echo chimed impatiently. "This is the perfect moment for a bold maneuver! Surprise and awe, my friend!")

But Ashryn had survived twenty-seven years in the void by ignoring such advice. Instead, they moved with surgical precision toward a cluster of derelict conduits, their augmented hands already parsing the possibilities for tactical advantage.

Preparation and Betrayal

The next few minutes passed in a blur of technical expertise and desperate improvisation. Power cells rerouted. Sensor arrays jury-rigged back to life. A holographic overlay suddenly painted the chamber in tactical clarity, revealing not just the creatures' positions but their patrol patterns, their weaknesses, their terrible, predatory intelligence.

("Ha! See? I told you! Brilliance, pure brilliance! Though, a dash more flair next time, eh?")

But the sensors revealed something else—something that made Ashryn's quantum-scarred nervous system scream warnings. The central pillar wasn't just alive; it was aware. And one of the creatures, the largest, had paused in its shambling patrol to focus its eyeless attention directly on Ashryn's hiding spot.

Recognition. Impossible, terrible recognition.

Working with the desperate efficiency of the condemned, Ashryn constructed their trap. Conduits became tripwires. Unstable support structures became potential weapons. It was elegant in its simplicity, deadly in its execution—or would have been, if not for one small, exposed component that glinted in the bioluminescent light like a signal flare.

The lure was simple: a piece of shrapnel, carefully aimed, striking a loose grate with percussive finality. The sound echoed through the chamber like a gunshot, shattering forty-three years of silence.

Two of the creatures responded as predicted, shambling toward the sound with renewed purpose. But the third—the one that had recognized them—began to circle with predatory intelligence, moving not toward the distraction but toward Ashryn's true position.

The moment stretched like a quantum event, probability waves collapsing into certainty. Then Ashryn triggered the trap.

Nothing happened.

The conduits sputtered. The tripwire snapped with a pathetic ping. The carefully calculated collapse became a shower of harmless debris. And in the sudden, terrible silence that followed, the exposed component of Ashryn's failed engineering began to pulse with betraying light.

All three creatures turned toward them with the synchronicity of a firing squad. The hunt was on, and Ashryn was the prey.

▶ Gameplay Log: Part B - First Contact

Next Time: Part C - "Mounting Cost"

The trap has failed. Three corrupted horrors converge. And in the quantum spaces of a damaged mind, Ace Stardust whispers the mathematics of violence...