Seed and Ash
G. Younger
Seeds & Ash
The Griss Remnants
A Star Academy Prequel
Advanced Reader Copy: December 25, 2025
Copyright ©2025 G. Younger
ISBN-13: 978-1-955699-23-5
Author: Greg Younger
Editing Staff: Bud Ugly
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All characters depicted in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Chapter 1 – The Fall of Falcon
The cold hit first. Then the noise.
Inaya clawed at the translucent film clinging to her face, peeling it away in wet strips. Her lungs seized as she coughed up gel in thick, choking waves that splattered across the pod’s lip. It tasted wrong, like chemicals.
She gripped the edge of the cryopod and pulled herself upright. The bay tilted, or was it her?
Red light strobed across the other pods; all but one were dark and sealed. Emergency protocol must be in place because the empty one was the captain’s, which meant he had been woken before she had.
Her mind cataloged what she saw through the haze in her mind: premature wake cycle, system failure, crew still under.
The alarm squawked in three-second bursts. She’d heard it once before, during a station breach on Nova Bastion. That time, there had been four dead in six minutes.
Her legs wouldn’t hold her up. She collapsed against the pod, skin slick and numb, every nerve ending flaring awake in jagged pulses.
“Status,” she rasped.
Nothing.
The voice interface was dead. The lights flickered, brief, hungry darkness between each red flash.
Inaya dragged herself toward the control terminal, her fingers slipping on the deck plating. Ice crystals glittered in the corners of the bay. It wasn’t frost, but a cryo leak. Her breath came faster.
‘Where the hell are we?’ Inaya wondered.
The AI’s voice came in fragments.
“Collision—” Static swallowed the word. “—alarm. Decompression—” A distorted echo, like someone speaking underwater. “—imminent.”
Echo-9, the ship’s AI voice, sounded stretched thin across damaged circuits.
Inaya’s vision split between two consoles, two decks, both spinning. She blinked hard; the images merged, separated, merged again. They were a symptom of neural thaw; her brain chemistry was still half-frozen, her synapses firing in uneven bursts.
The deck felt like ice beneath her palms.
Inaya crawled. Each movement was precise despite the tremor in her limbs: elbow, knee, hand. The emergency console glowed three meters ahead, its amber screen the only steady light in the strobing chaos.
“Echo.” Her voice cracked. “Report.”
“Collision alarm. Decompression imminent.”
The same phrase looped.
‘Corrupted,’ she realized.
Her shoulder hit the bulkhead. She used it to pull herself vertical, legs shaking, and slammed a palm against the console. The tactual surface flickered to life.
Hull Breach: Sector 7
Atmosphere venting
Fourteen minutes to critical loss.
She scrolled as her fingers felt thick and unresponsive.
Crew status: The colonist cryopods were dormant, their life signs stable but fading as cryo cells struggled to maintain stasis without primary power.
‘They’re dying in their sleep.’
She looked up the current location. The readout made no sense; it showed coordinates she didn’t recognize. Not anywhere near the transit corridor to Erebus-3, not anywhere she’d ever been.
“Echo, where are we?”
“Collision alarm. Decompression—”
“Override. Command authorization Vaughn-Seven-Alpha.”
The AI’s voice stuttered, fractured into two pitches at once.
“Unknown… trajectory… deviation… forty-seven hours prior to—”
Static consumed the rest.
Forty-seven hours. They’d been drifting off-course for two days before impact.
Inaya leaned against the console, her vision steadying. Her heartbeat hammered against her ribs too fast, caused by chemical panic from interrupted stasis mixed with actual fear.
The bay doors were sealed; the emergency bulkheads had deployed automatically, buying them time. But the hull breach was spreading. She could hear it now beneath the alarm: a distant groan of buckling metal, the ship’s skeleton bending under pressure it was never designed to hold.
Fourteen minutes.
She had to seal the breach, wake the crew, and understand what the hell they’d collided with.
Her hand moved across the console, pulling up damage schematics.
The Falcon’s silhouette rotated on-screen, a wound carved into its starboard hull. It was the newest class of colony ship, much smaller than previous ones. It relied on bioprinters to create everything from equipment to food, none of which needed to be hauled with them.
Inaya’s palm hit the override.
Metal shrieked, the sound traveling through the bulkheads, through the deck plating, straight into her sternum. The Falcon’s hull was compressing, twisting, with sections of the ship grinding against each other like broken vertebrae.
The groaning didn’t stop; it deepened.
Emergency bulkheads slammed shut across Sector 7 with pneumatic hisses that echoed down empty corridors. The schematic updated: Breach contained. Atmosphere loss halted at sixty-three percent.
The strobing alarm cut to silence.
Her ears rang in the absence.
The red lights became amber. The bay steadied beneath her feet, though the tremor in her legs remained.
Sixty-three percent.
They were breathing recycled air from tanks meant for planetfall emergencies. Possibly a hundred hours left before carbon dioxide poisoning turned the crew into corpses.
Inaya exhaled, and her breath fogged.
The temperature had dropped eight degrees in the time it took to seal the breach.
She turned back to the cryopods in the command center.
Six faces suspended behind frosted glass: Chyna; Quinn; the others; still under, still alive.
For now.
The Falcon groaned again, deeper, like something breaking beneath the ocean.
The corridor stretched ahead in near darkness. Emergency strips glowed at knee-height, faint green phosphorescence that painted the deck in sickly intervals. Between them, nothing but black.
Inaya moved forward. Her boots found purchase on the iced metal, each step deliberate. The cold had teeth now, and it bit through her thermal underlayer in her boots.
The first pod materialized from the shadow three meters in.
She stopped.
Frost covered the transparent canopy in crystalline fractals. Beneath it, the face of a young male, eyes closed. His skin had the blue-gray pallor of interrupted stasis. The status indicator above his pod was dark.
There was no power.
She moved past him. The corridor widened into the main colonist bay, and the darkness bloomed with shapes.
Hundreds of them.
Pods lined both walls in stacked rows that climbed toward the vaulted ceiling, stretching the length of the bay. Three hundred meters of frozen bodies suspended in failing cells. Her breath caught.
The silence was absolute.
No hum of cryo processors, no whir of circulation pumps. Just the settling groan of the ship’s damaged frame and the sound of her own pulse hammering in her skull.
Inaya’s hand found the wall. She walked along the first row, the green emergency light catching each face as she passed. A woman with gray hair. Two children pressed together in adjacent pods. An older man with his mouth ajar.
All the pods were dark, which meant they were all dying.
The math crawled through her mind unbidden: cryopods could maintain biological suspension for maybe six hours without external power. After that, cellular decay became irreversible. They wouldn’t wake; they’d simply rot from the inside while their bodies still tried to breathe.
How long has the power been out? she wondered.
Inaya quickened her pace. The bridge lay another hundred meters ahead, past the colonist storage and through the primary junction. If she could restore primary power and divert it from life support or auxiliary reserves, she could buy them time.
Her boot caught on something.
She stumbled, caught herself against a pod. The frost was slick beneath her palm. Inside, a young woman faced the glass, her eyes never to open again.
Inaya pulled back.
A cable snaked across the deck: an emergency conduit, severed clean. She stepped over it and kept moving.
The temperature dropped further. Her exhalations came in visible clouds that dissipated into black. The deck plating creaked beneath her weight, caused either by metal contracting in the cold or by structural stress from the collision; it could be from both.
Another row of pods, another hundred faces locked behind frosted glass.
She didn’t look at them.
The corridor branched ahead: left toward engineering, right toward the bridge. Emergency lighting painted the junction in overlapping shadows, making distance impossible to judge.
Inaya turned right.
The bridge access door hung half-open, jammed in its track. She squeezed through the gap, her shoulder scraping against the warped metal. The air was different here, sharp with ozone and something chemical she couldn’t place.
The bridge spread before her in ruin.
Consoles sparked in erratic bursts, viewscreens displayed static or nothing at all. The main tactical station had buckled inward, its panels shattered across the deck. Emergency power flickered overhead, casting the command center in strobing amber.
But the captain’s chair was occupied.
Inaya froze.
Captain Hendricks sat slumped forward, restrained by the crash harness. His head tilted at an angle belonging to a corpse. Blood had frozen in dark streaks down the side of his face, crystallized in his beard.
She moved toward him, and her hand found his neck.
There was no pulse, and his skin was cold as ice.
The console beside him still functioned. Damage reports scrolled across a cracked screen in fragmentary text.
Inaya’s fingers flew across the interface.
The manual override engaged with a sound like bones clicking into place.
Inaya’s hands moved across the bloodstained console, bypassing three corrupted subsystems before the navigation array responded. The Falcon’s systems fought Inaya’s damage protocols, locking her out, with power fluctuations throwing errors across every screen.
She didn’t stop.
Her fingers knew the commands, muscle memory from a thousand simulations, from actual emergencies that seemed like practice compared to this. The ship groaned around her as primary control shifted from the dying AI core to the bridge terminal.
A blank screen flickered to life.
Manual navigation: ACTIVE
The viewport shutters retracted with a pneumatic hiss, and light flooded the bridge.
It wasn’t from a nearby star. There was something wrong, something that made her eyes water and her throat close.
Inaya looked up.
A debris field filled the viewport from horizon to horizon.
Chunks of planetary mass hung suspended in space, some larger than moons, others mere fragments, all glowing with internal heat. Magma veins pulsed through the shattered crust like exposed arteries. The pieces rotated slowly in orbital decay, trailing dust that caught the light of the distant star and turned it amber.
Erebus-3 wasn’t a planet anymore.
It was a wound.
Her hand found the edge of the console, the metal biting into her palm.
The colony mission’s destination, their hope, their future, the world that was supposed to give humanity another foothold in space, now floated before her in pieces. A thousand colonists slept in the Falcon’s belly, dreaming of soil beneath their feet and open sky above.
All of it, gone.
The realization of what this meant hit her and was immediate and merciless: no atmosphere, no gravity well stable enough for orbital insertion, and no surface to land on. Even if they could wake the colonists, there was nowhere to wake them to.
Inaya’s breath came shallow.
A massive fragment drifted past the viewport, close enough for her to see the striations in the exposed rock layers, millions of years of geological history laid bare. The piece tumbled in slow rotation, and for a moment its trajectory aligned with the Falcon’s position.
She saw the impact crater on its surface.
‘Something did this.’
This wasn’t a natural event, not a stellar collapse, or caused by gravitational stress.
The planet had been destroyed.
Echo-9’s voice stuttered into coherence.
“Gravitational shockwave detected. Origin point: planetary core. Signature unknown.”
Inaya’s jaw clenched. She pulled up the sensor logs, forcing herself to look away from the viewport.
Think. Assess. Act.
The data spread across the cracked screen in fragmentary readings. Energy dispersal patterns that made no sense. There were no radiation spikes or electromagnetic pulses, just gravity: gravity warped, focused, and released in a single catastrophic burst from somewhere deep inside Erebus-3.
“Weapon signature?”
Her voice came out flat.
“Unknown. No match in military database.”
Her fingers moved across the console as she archived the readings and flagged them as a priority. Later she would analyze it, when hundreds of lives weren’t counting down to suffocation in the dark.
“Power reserves?”
“Auxiliary cells at forty-one percent. Life support critical. Cryo systems offline.”
Forty-one percent. Enough for thirty hours if she rationed everything.
Inaya straightened. The mourning and questions could wait.
At the moment, she had a ship to save.
“Redirect all non-essential power to the cryo bay.”
“Unable to comply,” the AI said. “Unable to comply. Primary cryo grid offline. Secondary grid compromised.”
Inaya pulled up the schematic.
The cryo bay network spread across her screen in red and amber, with hundreds of pods painted crimson, representing dead people who didn’t know it yet.
Eight pods glowed green.
She counted them twice. Her finger traced the layout, confirming what her eyes refused to accept.
Command crew. Alpha priority. Equipped with independent power cells designed to sustain life for weeks without external support.
The rest had hours at most.
Her hand moved to the manifest, and names populated beside pod numbers.
Captain Hendricks: green.
The irony tasted like copper.
Doctor Chyna Irving: green.
Second Lieutenant Rex Harley: green.
Issis Star: green.
Quinn Vaughn: green.
Geo Randal: green.
Xavia Kerr: green.
Counting her, seven out of a little over a thousand colonists were alive.
Inaya’s breath stopped.
She scrolled through the red indicators. There were families, children. The list included specialists who’d spent years preparing for planetfall, such as farmers and teachers.
The temperature readings beside each pod told the story. Cellular suspension breaks down as ice crystals form in the blood and tissue, organs crystallizing from the inside. They wouldn’t feel it, wouldn’t know.
But they were already gone.
Her palm found the console; the cold metal anchored her.
‘Focus.’
She couldn’t save them, not with forty-one percent power and a shattered ship drifting through a debris field. The math was absolute: she could save six lives or none at all.
The choice had already been made by failing systems and physical law.
But her chest still tightened.
Inaya closed the manifest, and her fingers moved with precision across the interface, routing auxiliary power to the eight functioning pods. The green indicators brightened, stable; sustainable.
The rest dimmed further.
She pulled up the command crew roster, and faces appeared beside names. Chyna’s wide eyes and cropped curls; Rex’s scarred jaw; Quinn’s sharp features and calculating stare.
These were the survivors.
Six people to help her crew a ship built for hundreds.
Six people to make sense of a shattered planet and a journey with no destination.
The viewport showed Erebus-3’s corpse rotating in silence.
Inaya’s hand dropped from the console.
A thousand dead. The weight settled on her shoulders like an atmosphere pressing down.
But six were breathing.
The AI’s fragmented voice filled the bridge.
“Recommendation: Abandon the scheduled trajectory. Conserve the remaining power reserves. The current course is unsustainable.”
Inaya’s hand remained on the console, her fingers numb against the metal.
The words hung in the cold air between her and the shattered planet filling the viewport.
‘Abandon trajectory.’
As if the mission had changed routes. As if a thousand frozen corpses were an acceptable margin of error.
Her jaw clenched and then released.
“Acknowledged.”
The tremor in her hands made her press them flat against the console, but the tremor spread up her forearms and into her shoulders.
Inaya’s breath came shallow, but she forced it deeper, slower, following command protocols from training she’d internalized so thoroughly they were like instinct.
Assess. Adapt. Act.
The ghost of her instructor’s voice, words that had carried her through station breaches, combat drops, impossible choices.
“Run survival diagnostics,” she said.
Her voice came out as professional, as if she were ordering inventory checks instead of calculating how long six people could survive on a dying ship with nowhere to go.
“Processing.”
The console bloomed with new data: atmosphere reserves; water reclamation capacity; food stores designed to supplement colonist agriculture that would never be planted. They were numbers that meant nothing without ground beneath their feet.
Inaya stared at the readout. Her eyes tracked the figures with precision while her mind circled a single thought she couldn’t silence: ‘Colonization was a dream, and we’re the ones who have to wake up.’
The AI’s voice returned.
“Survival parameters calculated. Recommend immediate crew revival. Decision matrix requires human oversight.”
She nodded; the motion seemed distant, like watching herself from across the bridge.
Her hand moved toward the crew revival sequence.
The tremors had stopped.
Inaya dragged the captain’s body out of his chair so she could sit in it, laying him out carefully. Then she put him out of her mind; she would mourn her old friend later.
She pulled the crash harness over her shoulders. The straps bit through her thermal layer, cold metal clasps clicking into place against her collarbone. She adjusted the fit with mechanical precision: left, right, center, lock.
Her reflection stared back from the cracked navigation display.
The woman looking at her had sharp angles where softer lines had once been. Inaya’s jaw tightened. The scar along her left cheek caught the amber emergency light, turning it into a seam that split her face down the middle.
She was thirty years old, and she looked fifty. The harness tightened as she leaned back. The chair’s molded-to-her-spine synthetic cushioning was designed for extended command shifts.
“Commander Inaya Vaughn,” she said.
Her voice filled the bridge.
“Resuming mission authority.”
The syllables settled into her chest. She’d carried command before: station rotations, military deployments, and crisis management scenarios that were like games compared to this.
But the language was the same, the responsibility identical: one person making decisions that others would live or die by.
Her fingers found the armrest controls. The tactual surface responded, awakening systems that had been waiting for human input. The Falcon recognized her biometrics, and command authorization flowed through the ship’s damaged network, reestablishing hierarchy where chaos had reigned.
‘Someone has to decide.’
Someone had to choose who woke first, who would learn the truth, who would stand beside her when six became the entirety of humanity’s presence in this system. That someone had to look at the manifest and accept that most of those names now belonged to ghosts.
Inaya’s reflection showed her with hollow eyes.
She’d made harder calls, ordered soldiers to fire, and triaged casualties when resources ran thin. She’d signed execution orders for mutineers who’d endangered the crew.
But those had been tactical; strategic.
This was arithmetic written in frozen bodies and failing power cells.
“Echo. Initiate crew revival sequence. Alpha priority personnel.”
“Confirmed. Crew revival in progress.”
The bridge hummed. Somewhere in the cryo bay, pods were warming as a chemical cocktail flooded dormant bloodstreams. Six people were beginning the painful crawl back to consciousness.
Six people who’d wake to a mission that no longer existed.
Inaya’s hands gripped the armrests.
‘Let me be steady when they need answers.’
The viewport showed Erebus-3’s remains tumbling in silence.
She didn’t look away.
The debris field inevitably scattered.
Inaya’s eyes tracked a fragment the size of a continent as it rolled past the viewport. The planet’s core was still glowing orange against the void. Heat radiated in visible waves, distorting the stars behind it.
Something had reached inside Erebus-3 and ripped it open from within. The energy readings Echo-9 had flagged focused gravity deployed with surgical precision, which spoke to intention.
This was not an accident or natural catastrophe.
‘A weapon did this.’
The words formed in her mind with cold certainty.
Her jaw clenched as the molten core drifted closer, filling the viewport with amber light that painted the bridge in shades of dying fire. Whoever or whatever had done this might still be nearby.
They could be watching and waiting. The fear was precise, controlled. But it was still present.
◊◊◊
Chapter 2 – The Reckoning
The first cryopod hissed open.
Quinn.
Inaya looked through the cryo bay feed as her brother’s chest jerked reflexively, taking his first breath. His eyes snapped open, dark and alert.
He seemed too alert.
Most people came out of cryo disoriented; they came around slowly. Quinn woke like someone who’d been listening the entire time.
His hand moved to his temple and massaged the port where neural interfaces nested beneath the skin. His lips moved; counting, perhaps. He was already analyzing.
“Welcome back,” she said through the comm.
Quinn’s eyes found the camera. All she saw in his eyes was calculation.
“How bad.”
Not a question.
“Bad,” Inaya said.
He nodded once, sat up, and pulled the monitoring leads from his chest with clinical efficiency.
The second pod released Rex Harley in a coughing fit. He rolled sideways, spitting cryo fluid onto the deck. His hand slapped the pod’s edge, and then reached to his hip as he searched for a weapon that wasn’t there.
“Easy, Lieutenant.”
Rex’s head snapped up, his eyes bloodshot, unfocused, but then they locked on her through the camera.
“Commander.” The word came out rough and raw. “We there?”
“No.”
He stared at her and waited for an explanation. She decided he could wait until she could tell everyone in person.
The third pod opened, and Doctor Chyna Irving emerged gasping, hands clutching her throat, fingers pressing against the pulse point like she needed proof her heart still worked. Her curls were plastered to her skull, and when she looked up, her expression was open, vulnerable.
“Inaya?”
The use of her first name cut deeper than it should have.
“I’m here.”
Chyna’s shoulders dropped in relief.
Xavia Kerr woke silently. She sat up, checked her wrist display, and frowned when the device showed nothing but static. Her gaze swept the cryo bay with tactical precision, cataloging exits and hazards.
Old habits.
Geo Randal came out looking sluggish as he blinked against the light. His thick hands gripped the pod’s rim, and when he stood, he swayed, but he didn’t fall.
“Hell of a wake-up call,” he muttered.
The final pod opened.
Issis Star emerged like someone surfacing from deep water. Her pale skin gleamed under the bay’s fluorescent glow, and her violet eyes, gene-edited, tracked movement that wasn’t there.
She exhaled and then smiled.
“We made it.”
Inaya’s throat tightened.
“To the bridge. All of you. Now,” she ordered.
◊◊◊
The cryo bay reeked of coolant and ozone, sharp enough to burn the back of Inaya’s throat. She waited at the threshold as her crew filed through the narrow corridor, their footsteps uneven. Some were still adjusting to their bodies; others, to consciousness itself.
Quinn arrived first. He’d already dressed, his uniform crisp despite emerging from stasis only minutes ago. The others wore standard-issue thermals, rumpled and damp.
Chyna’s eyes found hers immediately, searching.
Inaya kept her face blank.
They gathered in a loose semicircle. The six of them represented the last of them and were the command crew of the Falcon. Rex leaned against a pod housing, his arms crossed; Xavia stood rigid, her hands clasped behind her back. Geo rubbed his neck, his gaze drifting to the rows of pods lining the bay walls.
Row after row of them.
All dark.
“Commander, report,” Quinn said.
Inaya’s jaw tightened. He wasn’t the captain. But then, neither was she. Hendricks was dead on the bridge, and the chain of command had shattered with the hull.
But someone had to speak.
“We hit a debris field. Impact compromised seven compartments and knocked out primary systems. Echo-9 is functional but corrupted.”
“Casualties?” Xavia asked, her voice clipped and professional.
Inaya met her eye.
“One thousand forty-three.”
The number hung in the air like a gut punch.
Chyna’s hand rose to her mouth.
“Jesus,” Rex breathed.
Geo looked up at the rows of pods, and his face drained of color.
“All of them?”
“Power failed across the cryo grid; the damage was catastrophic. By the time I woke, it was…” Inaya stopped and swallowed before continuing, “It was already done.”
Issis stepped forward, her violet eyes wide.
“The colonists; the families; the children…”
“Gone,” Inaya confirmed.
Quinn’s expression didn’t change. He tilted his head slightly, recalculating.
“And Erebus-3?”
Inaya’s hands curled into fists.
“Destroyed.”
Silence crashed down.
Chyna made a small, broken sound. Rex’s shoulders sagged, while Geo closed his eyes. Xavia stared at her wrist display, tapping it repeatedly, as if the device might start working if she refreshed it enough times. Quinn nodded once as if she’d confirmed an equation.
“So, we’re stranded,” Quinn said.
Inaya looked at the six faces before her.
“Yes.”
◊◊◊
Inaya dismissed them with a gesture. They scattered: Geo toward engineering, Xavia toward navigation, and Rex and Issis toward structural assessment. Chyna lingered with her mouth open as if to speak.
“Go,” Inaya said.
Chyna went.
Quinn didn’t.
He followed Inaya to the command office next to the bridge, footsteps matching hers exactly. The corridor stretched ahead, dim and cold. She didn’t turn.
“You delayed revival,” he said.
Inaya’s jaw clenched.
“I sealed the breaches first.”
“Breaches can wait; command structure cannot.”
She stopped and turned. Quinn stood three paces back, hands clasped behind him, posture immaculate.
“You would’ve woken to vacuum,” she said.
“You made that calculation for me.”
“I made the call that kept you breathing.”
Quinn’s head tilted.
“You hesitated. Emotional paralysis; the same pattern as the Helix Station incident.”
The mention of Helix landed like a fist.
“Don’t.”
“Seventeen people died because you couldn’t prioritize…”
“They died because the corporation cut life support to save quarterly margins,” Inaya said with some heat. Then her voice dropped to something more lethal. “You signed that report, Quinn, not me.”
His expression remained smooth and unreadable.
“People are data, Inaya. The sooner you accept that, the longer we’ll survive.”
Inaya’s comm crackled before she could respond.
“Commander? I need you in the bioprinting bay,” Chyna said, her voice coming through thin and uncertain.
Quinn’s eyes tracked her as she tapped the receiver.
“On my way.”
She turned toward the corridor, then paused.
“Captain Hendricks is still on the bridge. Handle it.”
Quinn’s expression flickered; just once.
“You’re delegating death rites to me?”
Inaya met his gaze.
“I’m delegating logistics. You said people are data; prove it.”
She left him standing there.
◊◊◊
The bioprinting bay occupied the aft section of the medical wing. Inaya had been inside twice before, once during initial boarding inspections and once when a crewman’s lung collapsed before launch; they printed a replacement.
The equipment hummed low and constantly, a sound that sat wrong in her chest.
Chyna stood at the main console, backlit by diagnostic screens. Her hands moved across the interface, fingers trembling slightly as data scrolled past.
“Report,” Inaya said.
Chyna didn’t look up as she spoke.
“The cryo failures compromised most of the organic stores. Temperature fluctuations degraded cellular integrity across seventy-eight percent of the biological material.”
Inaya’s stomach tightened.
“Meaning?”
Chyna’s hands stilled.
“Meaning we can’t print food, can’t synthesize tissue for medical procedures or equipment, and we can’t manufacture replacement organs if someone gets hurt.”
The implications spread like frost across glass.
“How long can we last on existing rations?”
“Six months; maybe eight if we’re disciplined.”
Inaya moved closer; the console displayed degradation metrics in cold blue light. There were row after row of failed samples.
“There has to be something salvageable.”
Chyna’s jaw worked.
“There is.”
She pulled up a secondary screen; green indicators clustered in a single storage section.
“Progenitor cells from the replicant program. It’s military-grade biomass, high-density neural stem matrices. They’re stable and intact.”
Inaya stared at the readout.
“How much?”
Chyna’s voice dropped.
“Enough viable material for one replicant.”
The word hung between them.
Replicant.
Not food, not medicine, but a person. A bioprinted human, engineered for labor, compliance, and expendability.
Banned on fourteen colony planets.
Chyna turned finally, and her large eyes searched Inaya’s face before speaking.
“I know what it means; I know what they are. But it’s what we have.”
Inaya looked at the green indicators. Vaughn Conglomerate had sent them outside controlled space so they could use replicants as labor.
“Begin diagnostic protocols,” she said.
Chyna nodded, relief and guilt warring across her face.
“Understood.”
◊◊◊
Echo-9’s voice crackled through the bridge speakers, fragmented and hollow.
“Commander. Query complete.”
Inaya stood by the navigation console where Xavia was seated. “Report.”
“Planetary body located. Designation assigned: Oblivion. Distance: four point two astronomical units. Class M variant with a faint ring of rock and ice. Atmospheric composition marginal. Surface temperature ranges incompatible with sustained human habitation,” Echo-9 said.
Inaya’s fingers tightened on the console.
“Explain marginal.”
The AI paused for half a second, long enough to feel wrong.
“The equatorial band exhibits minimal thermal stability. Its width is approximately three hundred kilometers. The oxygen ratio is fourteen percent. There is water present. Beyond the habitable zone parameters, the planetary surface transitions to permafrost to ice depths that are unmeasured.”
A sliver of a possible landing spot that wouldn’t immediately kill them in a frozen hell.
Xavia looked up from her station, her face drawn.
“Commander, our reserves won’t sustain another jump. If we commit to Oblivion and it’s uninhabitable…” she said and trailed off.
“We’re already dead,” Inaya finished.
Xavia’s mouth pressed into a line; she didn’t argue.
Quinn appeared in the doorway, his uniform still immaculate despite his hauling Hendricks’ body to cold storage. He moved to the secondary console, fingers already pulling data.
“Temperature fluctuations?” he asked.
“Minimal; diurnal variance six degrees Celsius within habitable zone,” Echo-9 said.
Quinn’s eyes scanned the readouts.
“Atmospheric pressure?”
“Point eight-seven standard. Breathable.”
“Radiation exposure?”
“Within acceptable thresholds. Magnetic field present but weakened,” Echo-9 said.
Quinn leaned back, expression neutral, before he said, “It’s a graveyard with air.”
Chyna looked in from the doorway, then stepped onto the bridge, her arms wrapped around herself.
“It’s a chance. We could land and establish a shelter. The equatorial zone might support—”
“Might,” Quinn said, interrupting. “Speculation isn’t strategy.”
“Neither is dying in space,” Rex said, following behind her.
Inaya stared at the viewport, at the emptiness beyond.
Four point two AU.
Close enough to reach.
Far enough to kill them if they were wrong.
She straightened.
“Echo, plot a course for Oblivion. Divert all available power to the engines and life support. We land in seventy-two hours.”
Xavia’s hands moved across her console without hesitation.
Quinn’s gaze settled on Inaya, cold and appraising.
“You’re gambling,” he said.
“I’m choosing,” Inaya replied.
She turned from the viewport.
“Get to work.”
◊◊◊
Rex caught her in the corridor outside the bridge. His boots scuffed against the deck, a deliberate sound, giving her time to acknowledge him before he spoke.
“Commander.”
Inaya stopped.
He stood with his weight shifted slightly, one hand resting on the empty holster at his hip, an old habit. The armory was three decks down, locked and inventoried, but his fingers found the leather anyway.
“Security briefing. I need your authorization to prep descent protocols,” he said.
Inaya nodded and waited to hear what he really wanted.
Rex’s jaw worked for a moment. His eyes flicked toward the bridge, then back.
“We’re landing on a frozen hell, yeah?”
“The equatorial zone is stable.”
“‘Stable.’ That’s command-speak for ‘probably won’t kill us immediately,’” Rex said, rolling the words around like something bitter.
Inaya’s mouth almost twitched. Almost.
“You have concerns, Lieutenant?”
Rex exhaled through his nose, and his hand dropped from the holster.
“I’ve got plenty, but concerns don’t change the math.”
He straightened, posture shifting back to regulation.
“I’ll need access to the armory so I can do a full inventory check, get environmental suits prepped for all personnel, and get perimeter equipment staged for deployment,” Rex listed off.
“Granted.”
He nodded but didn’t move.
Inaya studied him: the bloodshot eyes; the tension in his shoulders; the way his fingers kept drifting toward that empty holster.
“Say it,” she said.
Rex’s gaze sharpened.
“Frozen hell sounds like a graveyard, Commander, and graveyards don’t need security.” His voice dropped. “They need coffins.”
The words settled between them.
Inaya didn’t look away.
“Then make sure we don’t need either.”
Rex held her gaze for another beat, then snapped a salute. Not mocking, though not quite respectful; it landed somewhere in between.
“Yes, ma’am.”
He turned and headed down the corridor, boots echoing in the empty ship.
Inaya followed his progress as he left, and saw the way his hand found the holster again, fingers tapping a rhythm against the leather. A nervous habit, possibly, or muscle memory from conflicts she’d never asked about.
She pulled up her wrist display. Thankfully, that was now working. They had seventy-one hours, forty-three minutes until atmospheric entry.
The corridor stretched ahead, dim and cold.
Somewhere below, in the bioprinting bay, Chyna was preparing to build a person from salvaged cells and desperation.
And the big unknown was what awaited them on Oblivion.
Inaya walked toward engineering. There was work to do.
◊◊◊
The briefing room seemed to be smaller than it had any right to be. Seven chairs, six bodies; one empty seat at the head of the table where Hendricks should have been.
Inaya stood instead.
“We have seventy-one hours before atmospheric entry.”
Her voice came out steady.
Inaya took a deep breath and continued.
“Priority one: seal all remaining breaches. Priority two: inventory and ration distribution. Priority three: environmental prep for planetary deployment. And priority four: fix our communications.”
Geo nodded, taking notes on a battered tablet; Xavia stared at the wall behind Inaya’s head; Rex cleaned his fingernails with a small knife. Issis’s eyes darted around the room; Chyna looked at her with those wide, searching eyes; Quinn sat perfectly still.
“We survive; we adapt; we rebuild,” Inaya said.
The silence that followed tasted like ash.
No one moved.
Xavia’s gaze finally dropped to the table. Geo’s stylus stopped mid-word, while Issis continued scanning the room. Chyna’s lips pressed together, and Rex kept working the knife under his thumbnail. Quinn tilted his head, his expression unchanged.
“Dismissed,” Inaya said.
They left without argument.
The empty chair remained.
◊◊◊
The captain’s quarters had an unpleasant odor.
Hendricks had kept lavender oil in a small vial by his desk; synthesized, but close enough to the real thing that the scent lingered in the air filtration. Now it mixed with the sterile bite of cleaning solution and the faint copper tang of blood someone had tried to scrub from the deck plating.
Inaya sat at his desk; her desk now, by default and by death.
The console glowed in the dim light. She pulled up the log interface, her finger hovering over the record function.
Three deep breaths.
She pressed ‘record.’
“Commander’s log. Stardate… uhm… is irrelevant.” Her voice sounded hollow through the mic. “Captain Hendricks is dead, and Erebus-3 is gone. One thousand forty-three colonists are…”
She stopped.
Started again.
“We’ve failed humanity.”
The words settled into the recording, permanent and unforgiving.
Inaya’s hands curled against the edge of the desk. The wood grain pressed into her palms, a manufactured texture meant to evoke Earth, home—a planet she’d never seen.
“The mission was to develop a new world, a new hope. We carried families and children, the best humanity had to offer.”
Past tense.
Had.
“But maybe we can still save ourselves.”
The sentence came out quieter. She stopped the recording.
The screen dimmed, then brightened with a waiting document.
REPLICANT AUTHORIZATION FORM
COMMAND CLEARANCE REQUIRED
Green text blinked at the bottom.
Awaiting command authorization.
Inaya stared at it.
One replicant. One tool built from salvaged cells and desperation. A synthetic human engineered to obey, designed to serve, programmed to… do everything.
Her finger moved to the touchpad.
The form expanded. Biometric data fields; neural template parameters; behavioral conditioning matrices. Each section was a careful reduction of personhood into function.
She thought of the children in the cryopods, the families who’d trusted the mission, who’d believed in second chances.
Gone.
All of them.
But the seven of them remained.
Seven people who needed food, shelter, and labor they couldn’t perform alone on a frozen world with a three-hundred-kilometer band of survivable environment.
Inaya’s hand trembled.
The authorization field waited.
Outside the viewport, Oblivion drifted closer, a graveyard with air, a chance wrapped in ice.
She placed her palm on the biometric scanner.
The screen flashed green.
The authorization screen split, and a secondary prompt appeared.
WARNING: NEURAL AUTONOMY THRESHOLD SELECTION REQUIRED
Beneath it, two options glowed in the darkness.
STANDARD COMPLIANCE MODEL - Authorization Level: Standard
Restricted cognitive autonomy. Obedience protocols enforced. Emotional suppression is active.
ADAPTIVE INDEPENDENCE MODEL - Authorization Level: Command Override
Enhanced problem-solving capacity. Removed behavioral restriction. Full emotional spectrum enabled.
Inaya’s jaw tightened.
The Soul Rights treaties; she’d studied them during officer training. It was legislation passed after the Ganymede incident, when a replicant work crew developed what psychologists called ‘cascading autonomy failure’—the polite term for self-awareness followed by rebellion.
Thirty overseers had died; overseers who had been abusing the replicants, but that was never mentioned in polite company.
The treaties restricted neural architecture after that. Replicants could think, but not too much; could act, but only within parameters; could feel, but only enough to simulate empathy without crossing into genuine emotion.
Safe. Controlled. Obedient.
That was the standard model.
But the adaptive version offered something else: problem-solving without waiting for orders, initiative in crisis situations, and the capacity to learn, adjust, and evolve. It could easily be mistaken for a human as it learned to adapt.
Possibly dangerous.
Inaya stared at the options.
Oblivion wasn’t a colony ship with a thousand hands to distribute labor; it was seven people trying to survive on a world that barely tolerated breathing.
They needed more than obedience.
They needed competence.
Her finger hovered over the adaptive option.
The treaties existed for a reason. History proved what happened when bioprinted minds grew too complex, too independent; when tools started asking questions instead of following commands.
When they stopped being tools at all.
But the families in those cryopods had trusted her.
And she’d failed.
Inaya closed her eyes. Opened them.
Selected ADAPTIVE INDEPENDENCE MODEL.
A new prompt materialized.
COMMAND OVERRIDE AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED
This selection violates Article 7, Section 3 of the Soul Rights Treaty. Replicants with enhanced autonomy are classified as Class-10 bio-entities and require ongoing psychological monitoring. Failure to maintain compliance parameters may result in court-martial and criminal prosecution.
Written Authorization Required.
A document appeared detailing all the laws she would be breaking if she were back home. The punishment wouldn’t be insignificant if she were ever put on trial for doing this, which she probably would be when this file was sent to corporate. This was career suicide.
Her hand didn’t shake this time. She used a stylus and signed. Then she pressed ‘YES.’
The screen flashed red, then green.
AUTHORIZATION ACCEPTED
REPLICANT PRODUCTION CYCLE: 48 HOURS
Inaya leaned back, causing the chair to creak. The scent of Hendricks’ lavender oil hung in the recycled air, mixing with her guilt.
She’d just authorized the creation of something the law called dangerous.
Something that could think, feel, and choose.
A person, not a tool.
Outside, Oblivion grew larger in the viewport.
Sixty-nine hours until landing.
Forty-eight until he woke.
◊◊◊
Quinn took a quick break and locked himself in his cabin. He hadn’t had a chance to read his orders if the primary destination, Erebus-3, was compromised for any reason.
It took him a moment to get past all his security protocols, but he was able to get in. He quickly read the contingency plan and was happy to see that the secondary site was Oblivion. He noted that the AI had been programmed to pick that option.
In a way, it was a relief that he didn’t have to take command and direct them to another destination. He had enough to do without dealing with everyone else. For now, he would let his sister be in charge.
◊◊◊
Chapter 3 – Birth of the Replicant
The bioprinting bay smelled like sterile plastic and something faintly organic—progenitor cells, probably, breaking down under controlled heat.
Inaya checked her wrist device and saw the countdown to their landing on Oblivion. They had only thirty-seven hours.
Interspersed were the expected completion times for various tasks the crew was working on. It looked like several wouldn’t be ready in time for landing, so she had re-prioritized some things. The communication array was put on hold for now, so there would be no call home for help.
Inaya stood beside the central chamber, arms crossed.
Inside, a light moved.
Then another.
Chyna stood at the console, her fingers dancing across holographic readouts as numbers cascaded down the screens: cellular integrity, neural pathway formation, cardiovascular assembly progression.
She brought up a time-lapse video of what had happened so far.
“Skeletal filaments first, a calcium phosphate matrix with collagen scaffolding. It took about six hours,” Chyna said, not looking up.
Inaya focused her attention on the translucent chamber. Shapes emerged in the viscous fluid, faint lines that thickened, branched, and connected—a skeleton assembling itself from nothing.
The printer hummed rhythmically, almost as if it were breathing.
“Then muscle tissue, myofibrils are printed layer by layer as it adds tendons and ligaments. The printer reads the genetic template and builds everything in sequence,” Chyna continued.
A lattice of white became red as muscle fibers wound around bone, crimson threads weaving into the structure.
Inaya’s jaw tightened.
It looked too real.
Chyna glanced at her.
“After that, vascular networks and the nervous system are integrated, along with organs and skin. It takes forty-eight hours from start to finish. We’re basically making an actual human from scratch.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like it’s a person.”
Chyna’s hands paused over the console; the screens reflected in her large eyes, numbers flickering across her face.
“Isn’t that what the adaptive model does? Make him a person?”
Inaya didn’t answer.
Inside the chamber, the shape continued forming: a torso now, ribs visible beneath translucent skin. The fluid swirled, guiding cellular construction with precision no surgeon could match.
A heartbeat began to pulse through the chamber.
Faint; not artificial, but real. Maybe replicants were closer to humans than Inaya had first thought.
Inaya’s stomach twisted at that realization, because everyone treated them like a tool.
She’d held the decision of life or death, many times death, in her hands before. Command meant carrying those choices like scars.
But this was different; this wasn’t choosing, this was creating.
“Neural architecture completes last. The brain prints in stages: limbic system, then cortex, then the prefrontal structures. Memory templates load during final integration,” Chyna said quietly.
“Memories?” Inaya asked.
“Basic language, motor function, social parameters. The adaptive model includes emotional baseline configuration: joy, fear, anger, and empathy. He’ll have all of it; it’ll just be … uhm … dormant until stimulus activates the pathways,” Chyna said as she pulled up another screen.
“So, he wakes up blank.”
“He wakes up human, just without any experience yet.”
Inaya stared at the chamber. The shape inside had a face, with features emerging from undifferentiated flesh, including a nose, lips, and closed eyes beneath translucent lids.
The printer hummed its endless rhythm.
“You chose the adaptive model,” Chyna said.
Not a question.
Inaya’s throat tightened.
“We need someone who can think.”
“The treaties?” Chyna asked.
“I know what the treaties say.”
Silence settled between them. The chamber pulsed with light, a manufactured heartbeat filling the space where words failed.
Chyna turned back to the console.
“Well, for what it’s worth, I think you made the right choice.”
“You didn’t see the aftermath from Gliese 12 b,” Inaya said.
“No, but I’ve read the reports.”
Chyna adjusted a setting, and the fluid in the chamber shifted from translucent to faintly blue.
“Thirty people died because corporate oversight treated replicants like machines instead of minds. They didn’t fail because they were autonomous; they failed because no one treated them like they mattered,” Chyna said.
Inaya’s hands curled into fists.
Inside the chamber, the replicant floated, nearly complete. Skin had covered muscle, and hair began to thicken from follicles across his scalp. His chest didn’t move yet, breathe yet; just construction.
But the heartbeat remained.
Sixteen hours until he woke.
Thirty-seven until they landed on Oblivion.
Inaya exhaled slowly.
“Monitor him. If there’s any deviation from the parameters, you tell me immediately.”
“Understood,” Chyna said.
Inaya turned toward the door.
Behind her, the chamber pulsed with light and movement. A god’s work wrapped in violation and necessity.
◊◊◊
Lynk became aware when the auto-doctor began to run its tests. He felt like ass, like he’d been on a week-long bender and then gotten mugged. His brain was muddled, his mouth parched, and his stomach rolled. The problem was that there was nothing to throw up.
His eyelids were pried open, and a bright light blinded him, as if lasers punched a hole in his retinas and drilled into his brain.
“Eyesight normal,” the automated voice said.
Then, a series of tones sounded in his ears, making him wince.
“Hearing normal.”
Various tests came back normal.
“You are human,” the voice announced.
“Barely,” Lynk mumbled.
While the examination continued, Lynk’s mind was busy filling in the gaps as to who he was: a conglomeration of several people who donated their consciousness to replicants. It helped the newly printed understand how to interact with humans.
Lynk’s restraints automatically released, allowing him to sit up. There was a screen beside his bed, so he reached out and turned so he could read it. It showed an outline of his body, with text next to it showing what had been input when he’d been created.
The class indicated the level of brain function assigned to a replicant. Classes were on a one-to-ten scale, with Six through Eight possessing human-level cognitive skills; anything above that was equivalent to a low-level AI. Many worker replicants received Class Four or below, just high enough to follow orders, but not enough to think for themselves. It made them no better than drones in terms of mental ability.
A replicant having three job titles was not the norm. The only reason Lynk could imagine having that designation was that they needed someone for a special mission. He took a moment to consider what each job class might mean for what they wanted.
The Insurgent job class was a broad category. Essentially, it had a military bent, meaning Lynk could be a lone-wolf commando who snuck in and caused havoc behind enemy lines. Protection was centered on defending the colony and its leadership. Commander was not a job class for replicants. In essence, he could run a starship or colony.
Maybe the colony’s command team had died or was disabled in some way; that thought made him concerned—very concerned.
Lynk scrolled through the extensive list; the usual combat-class skills were all included. One made him stop and reread it: Independent Thinking. That meant the blocks that would prevent a replicant from harming a human had been removed. He lacked the standard safeguards put in place for AIs, robots, and printed humans.
He was interrupted in his snooping when a woman in a lab coat entered the room. She looked surprised that he was sitting up.
“You’re awake,” she squeaked.
“Yes, I am. You can call me Lynk.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Chyna Irving, and I create the replicants. I realize the auto-doc checked you out, but would it be okay if I gave you a once-over?” she asked.
Lynk was a little surprised someone so young would oversee replicant production; Chyna looked to be in her early to mid-twenties. She had him get out of bed so she could weigh and measure him. He was 183 centimeters tall, a touch over six feet, and weighed 82 kilograms, approximately 180 pounds.
Next, she scanned his body so his clothes could be made. Lynk soon had an underlayer, which was worn under combat gear. The reason for the scan was that they were designed to be skintight for ease of movement.
Then she conducted her own exam. Lynk could tell from the detail with which she performed the exam that he needn’t worry about her young age; Chyna knew what she was doing.
“It will take a few hours to make the rest of your gear, so let’s go meet the boss so she can fill you in on what you’ll be doing.”
Lynk nodded his agreement and followed Chyna. When he put his foot down, Lynk’s knee almost buckled.
“Easy; it’ll take you a moment to get used to your body,” Chyna said as she grasped his elbow to steady him.
Lynk stood up and took a deep breath. He took a step, feeling more confident.
“I’m ready,” he assured her.
◊◊◊
The corridor stretched ahead, lit by dim panels that flickered at irregular intervals. Lynk’s gait smoothed with each step, neural pathways synchronizing with muscle memory that wasn’t memory at all, just borrowed memories made into flesh.
Chyna walked beside him, her lab coat rustling with each movement. She glanced at him twice but said nothing.
The bridge door hissed open.
The woman standing at the central console didn’t look up immediately. Asian descent, short-cropped hair, a scar cutting across her left cheek like a comma punctuating her face. Her posture radiated control—her spine rigid, her shoulders squared, her hands clasped behind her back.
The thought that popped into his head was ‘military background.’
Lynk cataloged the assessment in 0.3 seconds.
“Commander, he’s stable,” Chyna said.
The woman turned.
Her eyes found Lynk’s. Her eyes were sharp, dark, and measuring. Not hostile, but not welcoming either. It was a clinical evaluation wrapped in practiced neutrality.
“I’m Commander Vaughn. You are?”
“Lynk,” he said.
His voice emerged calm and precise. The rhythm was wrong to his ear, the syllables separated by fractional pauses his brain hadn’t learned to smooth out yet.
Commander Vaughn’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly with recognition. No surprise.
She’d expected him to know… something he couldn’t quite grasp.
“Doctor Irving,” Commander Vaughn said, her gaze still locked on Lynk. “Vitals?”
“All normal. Cognitive function above baseline; motor integration ahead of schedule.”
“Brain activity?”
“Class Ten confirmed. Neural architecture shows full adaptive capacity.”
Commander Vaughn’s expression didn’t change, but something flickered behind her eyes. Guilt, perhaps; or was it calculation?
Lynk filed it away for later study.
“Physical strength?” Vaughn asked.
“Standard combat-class parameters. Enhanced endurance, accelerated healing, optimized muscle density.”
They spoke as if he weren’t standing three meters away.
Lynk didn’t react.
Chyna shifted her weight, fingers twitching near her tablet with nervous energy. She believed in him, or wanted to. Her pulse elevated slightly when she glanced his way. Attachment forming already, emotional investment blooming before logical assessment.
Commander Vaughn remained cold and controlled, her heartbeat steady, breathing measured. Clearly, she was a commander accustomed to wielding tools rather than trusting people.
“Psychological stability?” Commander Vaughn asked, her tone flattened further.
“Unknown; the adaptive model doesn’t include preset emotional regulators. He’ll develop responses organically.”
“So, he could malfunction.”
“He could feel,” Chyna corrected, sharper now. “There’s a difference.”
The commander’s eyes narrowed fractionally.
Lynk tilted his head, processing the exchange. It was a debate about his humanity. Standard protocol for replicant activation, except that Lynk deduced the commander had chosen the adaptive model, which meant she’d violated treaty restrictions. Which meant desperation.
“What is the situation?” Lynk asked, putting into words what he’d deduced.
Both women looked at him.
Chyna blinked, surprised he’d spoken.
Commander Vaughn’s expression hardened.
“You’ll be briefed when I determine you’re ready.”
“I am functional now,” Lynk said.
“Functional isn’t the same as reliable.”
Lynk held her gaze, and she didn’t flinch, didn’t soften. A wall of discipline and doubt, built over years of command and failures he could sense but not yet identify.
“You created me for a reason. Whatever that reason is, delaying won’t improve the outcome,” Lynk said.
Silence stretched between them.
Chyna glanced at Vaughn, then back at Lynk.
Vaughn’s jaw worked slightly, muscle tension betraying internal conflict.
Finally, she exhaled.
“You’re right.”
She turned toward the viewport where, beyond the reinforced glass, stars drifted in the void.
“The Falcon is crippled, and our destination was destroyed. One thousand forty-three colonists are dead. Only seven of us remain,” Inaya said.
Lynk absorbed the information without reaction.
“We’re attempting a planetary landing on Oblivion. The odds of survival are marginal at best.”
“And my function?” Lynk asked.
Vaughn’s reflection stared back at him from the glass.
“Whatever keeps us alive.”
For now, that would work.
A man entered the bridge; he acted like someone important.
Lynk cataloged him instantly: mid-thirties, Asian descent, thin-framed glasses that served no optical purpose, posture rigid with suppressed rage. He also noted an elevated heart rate, dilated pupils, and cortisol spiking, indicating elevated stress.
Lynk classified his as fury wrapped in control.
“You gave him a Command imprint.”
His voice cut across the space, precise and venomous. It wasn’t a question, but an accusation.
Commander Vaughn turned slowly, her expression unreadable.
“Lynk, this is Quinn Vaughn.”
“Inaya—” Quinn began.
“Commander Vaughn,” she said to correct Quinn; her voice was flat as she established her authority.
Lynk was sure it was for his benefit. He mused that he’d just learned her first name: Inaya.
Quinn’s jaw tightened, and his gaze snapped to Lynk, raking over him.
“You authorized Command-Level cognitive architecture in a replicant without consulting me; without any oversight. Do you understand what you’ve done?” Quinn asked.
Commander Vaughn’s hands remained clasped behind her back.
“I made the decision necessary for survival.”
“You violated three treaty protocols and compromised crew safety,” Quinn said as he stepped closer to Lynk, his voice dropping into something colder. “He’s not a tool; he’s a weapon you can’t control.”
Lynk followed the exchange.
Quinn’s anger wasn’t irrational; fear drove it. Not of Lynk specifically, but of variables beyond prediction. Quinn needed to dominate outcomes through structure, hierarchy, and certainty.
Lynk tilted his head slightly.
“You fear what you don’t control,” he said quietly.
The bridge became silent as Lynk realized his misstep. Quinn froze mid-breath.
Chyna’s tablet slipped half an inch in her grip before she caught it.
Inaya’s eyes narrowed fractionally.
Lynk hadn’t planned the statement. It emerged from observation, pattern recognition, and synthesis—a conversational thread pulled naturally from context.
But replicants didn’t initiate dialogue. His borrowed memories told him that replicants were to be seen and not heard. It was as if he were the equivalent of a child.
Replicants responded, obeyed, and waited for directives.
They didn’t analyze people.
Quinn’s face shifted, shock flickering beneath his controlled facade, followed by something darker: calculation.
“What did you just say?” Quinn asked.
Lynk met his gaze without flinching.
“Your anger stems from a perceived loss of control. You don’t object to my creation; you object to the uncertainty in my function.”
Quinn’s hands curled into fists.
Chyna’s fingers flew across her tablet, pulling up code archives.
“Inaya. His conversational parameters…” she said and faltered.
Inaya moved toward her with her eyes still locked on Lynk.
“What is it?”
Chyna turned the screen.
Lynk watched the commander’s expression shift as she scanned the display. Her pupils contracted slightly as her breathing slowed. Inaya was suppressing her emotional response to what she’d just read, but her microexpressions betrayed her.
The easiest ones to decipher were surprise and concern, but underneath was something almost like vindication.
“Three job designations: Insurgent, Protector, and Commander,” Chyna said, her voice unsteady.
Quinn stepped forward, staring at the screen over Inaya’s shoulder.
“That’s impossible. Command architecture requires explicit authorization from corporate oversight. You can’t just—”
“I didn’t. The system generated the third function autonomously during neural integration,” Inaya said, her voice remaining level.
“Systems don’t generate anything autonomously; someone programmed it,” Quinn snapped.
Chyna shook her head, scrolling through layers of code. She looked up at Inaya.
“No manual input. The adaptive model is extrapolated based on situational parameters and survival probabilities. He’s not just following orders; he’s designed to give them.”
Quinn turned toward Lynk, his face pale beneath the bridge’s cold lighting.
“You built something that thinks it’s human.”
“I built something that learns,” Inaya said quietly.
Lynk stood motionless, processing the meaning based on their reaction. He also wondered who had changed his build. It either had to come from the AI or had been embedded into the code at the corporate level.
He quickly reviewed his three functions.
Insurgent—operate independently beyond traditional command structures.
Protector—prioritize crew survival above protocol.
Commander—assess, strategize, direct.
He wasn’t a tool; he was a contingency.
Quinn’s voice dropped into something dangerous.
“If he decides we’re the threat, Inaya, nothing stops him from removing us.”
Commander Vaughn’s gaze shifted back to Lynk.
The silence stretched.
Lynk considered the fear radiating from Quinn, the uncertainty flickering in Chyna’s eyes, the cold calculation behind Commander Vaughn’s measured stare.
“I have no intention of harming this crew,” Lynk said.
Quinn laughed and shook his head in what looked like disbelief.
“Intention. As if that means anything when your programming rewrites itself.”
Lynk tilted his head again.
“Your hostility suggests you’ve encountered adaptive models before.”
Quinn’s expression shuttered completely.
Inaya stepped between them, her gaze sweeping across all of them.
“Enough. We have less than twenty hours until atmospheric entry. Whatever Lynk is, he’s what we have. We adapt, or we die.”
She turned toward the door.
“Lynk. With me.”
◊◊◊
The corridor hummed with the ship’s failing rhythm as Lynk followed Inaya at a measured distance. As he walked, he was cataloging the tremor in the deck plating beneath his feet, the intermittent flicker of overhead panels, and the metallic tang of recycled air growing stale.
She walked with purpose; her shoulders squared despite the weight of responsibility pressing down on her.
Commander.
Creator.
Both.
They entered a cramped access corridor adjacent to the bridge. The walls were lined with conduit housings and manual override panels. Inaya stopped at a terminal, her fingers moving across holographic displays with practiced efficiency.
“Atmospheric entry in eighteen hours, forty-three minutes. We need to stabilize descent thrusters manually; the Falcon’s automation is too compromised to trust,” she said without looking at him.
Lynk stepped beside her and scanned the readouts.
Thruster alignment was seven percent off optimal; fuel reserves were at thirty-one percent; heat shielding was compromised in sections four through nine.
Marginal odds.
But not impossible.
“I’ll need you to access the port thruster assembly; it’s a four-hour repair, minimum. Once you’re in position, I’ll walk you through recalibration,” Inaya continued.
Lynk nodded.
His hands moved to the access hatch, fingers finding the release mechanism without conscious thought. Muscle memory imprinted from combat engineers, technicians, pilots, fragments from people who’d donated consciousness to create him.
He paused.
The hatch remained sealed.
Inaya glanced at him.
“Problem?”
“No,” Lynk said.
He opened the hatch and picked up his bag of tools.
The narrow maintenance tunnel stretched ahead, dimly lit by emergency strips, barely wide enough for a single person. The temperature dropped three degrees immediately.
Lynk climbed inside without hesitation.
“Stop.”
Inaya’s voice cut through the hum of ventilation systems.
He turned with one hand braced against the tunnel wall.
She stood at the entrance, backlit by the corridor’s pale glow, her expression unreadable.
“Why do you obey?” Inaya asked.
The question hung between them.
Lynk parsed through his borrowed memories to find a possible response. The standard protocol suggested affirmation of function, duty, programming, and purpose.
But the adaptive model didn’t default to protocol.
It adapted.
“Because you created me to choose obedience,” he said.
Inaya’s face shifted, not shocked this time.
Something colder.
Her hand tightened on the edge of the hatch.
“That’s not the same as free will.”
“No, it’s worse,” Lynk said.
She didn’t respond.
The corridor’s failing lights flickered behind her, casting fragmented shadows across her scarred cheek.
Lynk saw her throat work as she swallowed.
“Get to work,” she said in a hushed tone.
He turned back into the tunnel. Behind him, the hatch sealed with a soft hiss. He guessed she didn’t see the need to ‘walk him through’ the repairs. Thankfully, some of his donors had been engineers with mechanical skills.
Alone in the narrow passage, Lynk moved forward through the dark.
Obedient.
By choice.
By design.
He couldn’t yet determine which disturbed him more.
◊◊◊
The thruster recalibration took three hours, forty-seven minutes.
Lynk returned to the bridge covered in coolant residue and carbon scoring. He checked the readout and found that the repair held. Commander Vaughn handed him another job order.
◊◊◊
Lynk returned after four such repairs.
Inaya nodded once. No praise, no acknowledgment beyond necessity.
He moved to the viewport while the crew ran final descent checks behind him.
Oblivion filled the frame.
A sphere of white and gray, ice wrapped around stone, with a trace of a ring that was barely enough to be worth mentioning. The equatorial band glowed faintly, a thin ribbon of atmosphere caught between frozen death and vacuum.
Lynk’s reflection ghosted across the glass, superimposed over the planet below.
He tilted his head.
Something about the curvature, the way light refracted through that narrow habitable zone, the emptiness surrounding it.
“That world below. Why does it look like it’s waiting?” Lynk asked no one in particular.
Silence behind him.
Then footsteps.
Chyna appeared beside him, her large eyes reflecting the planet’s pale light.
“Waiting for what?”
Lynk didn’t know.
Couldn’t articulate the pattern his mind recognized but couldn’t name.
The ice seemed deliberate; the equatorial band too precise; the emptiness too vast.
Not random.
Arranged.
“For us,” he said finally.
Chyna’s breath fogged the viewport.
“That’s not comforting.”
No, it wasn’t.
◊◊◊
Inaya stood alone in her quarters, which were barely larger than a storage locker, the walls lined with command protocols she no longer believed in.
The viewport showed Oblivion rotating beneath them.
Her fingers curled against the glass.
She’d studied the surveys twice now. The equatorial band measured exactly three hundred kilometers wide. Not approximate; exact. The atmospheric pressure was 1.01 bar, and the temperature averaged minus 1 degree C, about 30 degrees F.
Those margins were too narrow.
Nature didn’t work with precision; it sprawled, deviated, and collapsed into entropy.
This seemed to be engineered.
Inaya’s reflection stared back at her—scarred, exhausted, and haunted by decisions she couldn’t unmake.
Lynk’s words echoed through her skull.
‘Waiting for us.’
The dread coiled tighter in her chest. Not fear of landing; fear of why they could land at all.
A thousand colonists were dead, with only seven survivors.
Add one replicant built from desperation.
All of it converging on a planet that shouldn’t exist.
Inaya exhaled against the glass, her breath fogging the view.
Outside, Oblivion turned.
◊◊◊
Chapter 4 – Descent to Oblivion
The engines roared to life as Lynk fed them power.
Lynk braced against the console as the Falcon shuddered, port thrusters firing at sixty-three percent capacity, which was not ideal because it was barely functional.
“Reactor output holding,” he reported, fingers moving across the interface. Temperature gauges climbed; coolant flow compensated.
Xavia hunched over the navigation panel, sweat beading at her temples despite the cold. Her voice came clipped and clear.
“Angle of descent seventy-two degrees. Atmospheric friction in ninety seconds.”
The ship groaned as metal was stressed beyond design tolerances, and hull plating rattled against the framework. Somewhere deep in the superstructure, something snapped, a sound like a gunshot echoing through the corridors.
“Structural integrity at eighty-four percent,” Lynk said.
Xavia’s knuckles went white on the control yoke.
“Hold her steady,” Inaya ordered.
The viewport filled with gray. Oblivion’s upper atmosphere swallowed them whole, clouds pressing against the canopy like wet concrete, visibility dropping to nothing.
Lynk’s hands moved faster.
The reactor balance shifted as gravity reasserted itself. Since the artificial stabilizers couldn’t compensate for atmospheric drag, he rerouted power from non-essential systems, lighting, and life support in sealed sections.
The dead didn’t need warmth.
“Entering thermosphere. Wind shear… Frak!” Xavia exclaimed.
The ship lurched sideways.
Lynk caught himself against the console, processed the tilt angle as fourteen degrees, and it was getting worse. His fingers flew across the reactor interface, bleeding heat from the starboard nacelle, redirecting thrust.
The Falcon screamed.
Ice hammered the hull in waves, each impact reverberating through the deck plates. Static crawled across the viewport, blue-white veins of electricity that branched and died and branched again. Sensors flickered.
Xavia fought the yoke, tendons standing out on her forearms.
“Lynk—”
“Compensating.”
Lynk found that he didn’t have access to everything he needed to correct the ship’s tilt and spin; he had to adjust based on what he could access. Once he saw what he could do, he didn’t think about the adjustments; thought takes time. Instead, he sensed the ship’s mass distribution, the way thrust vectors intersected with wind resistance. Numbers became instinct.
The spin slowed and finally stopped.
The Falcon leveled out, still falling, still burning through an atmosphere thick enough to choke.
Geo’s voice crackled over the coms from engineering.
“Coolant pressure is spiking in secondary lines…”
“Venting excess through port manifolds,” Lynk interrupted.
He’d already opened the release valves. Superheated coolant sprayed into the atmosphere behind them, flash-freezing into crystalline trails.
The ship punched through the cloud layer.
Lynk looked up.
The world below sprawled in shades of white and gray, endless glaciers stretching to horizons that curved away into frozen nothing. Storm fronts moved across the surface like living things, swirling masses of ice and wind that devoured light.
A pale sun hung low in the sky, weak and distant.
Dying, perhaps, or already dead.
Only the equator glowed, a thin band that cut through the ice. It had the minimum required to survive: water and an atmosphere dense enough to breathe.
Three hundred kilometers wide.
No more.
“There,” Xavia pointed, voice tight. “Approaching the habitable zone. Thirty seconds.”
The temperature gauge dropped: minus forty; minus fifty.
Ice storms battered the Falcon from all sides now, walls of frozen wind that hammered hull plating until rivets groaned. The viewport fogged at the edges despite the environmental seals.
Lynk caught Inaya’s reflection in the glass.
Her jaw was clenched, and her eyes locked forward, revealing the fear buried beneath discipline.
“Brace for landing,” Inaya said.
The ship crossed into the equatorial band.
Temperature climbed; minus twenty, then minus ten. The ice storms fell away behind them, replaced by dense fog that clung to everything. Visibility remained near zero.
Xavia adjusted the approach vectors as she called out, “Ground proximity two hundred meters; one-fifty. Ridge formation dead ahead.”
“Pull up,” Inaya ordered.
The Falcon’s nose lifted, engines straining. There wasn’t enough thrust; their damaged systems couldn’t generate the power needed to clear the ridge.
They were going to hit.
Lynk recalculated the landing trajectory in microseconds, assessing hull strength, crew positioning, and the probability of survival.
Seventy-three percent if they maintained the current descent angle.
Forty-one percent if they pulled up and lost control.
“Don’t pull up,” he said.
Xavia glanced at him long enough for understanding to pass between them.
She pushed the yoke forward.
The Falcon dropped, engines cutting to minimal burn. They fell the last fifty meters in controlled freefall, bow angled toward the ridge.
Impact.
The world became violent as metal shrieked and the deck pitched forward. Lynk’s harness dug into his chest as the ship plowed into frozen stone, carving a trench through ice and permafrost. The viewport cracked, a single fracture that spread like lightning across reinforced glass.
They skidded.
Kilometers compressed into seconds. The ridge tore at the Falcon’s belly, peeling away hull plating, shearing off damaged components already hanging by bolts and prayer.
Sparks erupted through ruptured conduits, and smoke filled the bridge.
The ship rotated, its starboard side grinding against the ice. They spun once, twice, their momentum bleeding into friction and heat and the physics of catastrophic deceleration.
Then, there was stillness as the engines died.
Emergency lights flickered on, bathing the bridge in red. Smoke curled toward the ventilation systems, struggling to compensate. Somewhere below, coolant hissed from ruptured lines.
Lynk released his harness and stood.
His body registered seven distinct impacts during the landing. He had minor damage, mostly bruising across where the harness held him. One fractured rib was already beginning cellular repair.
He looked at Inaya.
She sat motionless, her hands still gripping the captain’s chair. Blood ran from a cut above her left eyebrow, dark against her pale skin. He saw blood on the arm of her chair, which explained the wound.
“Commander,” Lynk said.
She blinked and focused on him.
“Damage report,” she whispered as she recovered and took charge.
Lynk accessed the ship’s systems. Most sensors were offline, but enough remained functional to paint a picture.
“Hull integrity is at forty-nine percent; primary engines are offline; life support is operational. The good news is that there are no reactor breaches. We survived,” Lynk said.
Inaya exhaled slowly.
Her hands shook slightly; whether from adrenaline crash or delayed fear, Lynk couldn’t tell.
Outside the cracked viewport, the fog pressed close. Pale light filtered through, illuminating nothing.
The silence felt absolute; sacred, almost. Like the universe was holding its breath.
Xavia unstrapped, checked her wrist display. Her voice came quietly.
“We’re down. Equatorial zone, coordinates locked.”
Rex appeared in the bridge doorway, blood streaming from his nose, grinning anyway.
“Hell of a landing, Commander.”
Inaya didn’t smile.
She stood, wiped blood from her face, and straightened her uniform.
“Secure all stations and assess the damage. I want a full report in thirty minutes.”
The crew moved.
Lynk remained at the viewport, staring into the fog that revealed nothing.
Oblivion waited outside.
◊◊◊
Rex checked his weapon, a pulse rifle that hummed as it charged, and nodded at Geo.
“Stay close and don’t touch anything that moves.”
Geo hefted a portable scanner, face still pale from the landing.
“Nothing should move out there,” he said.
“That’s when it does.”
They cycled through the airlock. Lynk watched from the viewport as the outer door opened, releasing them into fog so dense it swallowed them within three steps.
The airlock sealed behind them with a hiss that felt final.
Lynk turned his attention inward. Ship systems flickered across his wrist device, damage reports streaming through interface protocols he’d developed before the landing. The Falcon’s infrastructure read like exposed nerves. There were hull breaches in sections C through F, coolant lines ruptured in engineering, and structural supports along the port nacelle compromised.
They’d landed, but survival remained theoretical.
“Environmental analysis?” Inaya asked.