Fourteen seconds.
That was all the time left on the detonation clock when Simona Theodorou grabbed my wrist and said she already knew how this ended.
I need to go back. I need to explain what we were doing fourteen kilometers above the dust-red surface of Verath-9, strapped into a gunship with a cracked hull and a bomb in the cargo bay that none of us had put there.
Three days earlier, the Ardent Compass had received a distress signal from Relay Station Orvek, a rusted ring of pressurized corridors and sensor arrays orbiting a gas giant at the edge of the Tethys Drift. We were a four-person crew running courier contracts for the Drift’s independent shipping guilds. Not soldiers. Not heroes. Just people who knew how to navigate without corporate navigation licenses and were good at not asking questions.
Kerri-Ann Dacosta flew the ship. She had a shaved head and dark brown skin and fingers that moved across the flight controls like she was playing music rather than piloting. She had been doing this for eleven years and had the calm of someone who had already made peace with every possible outcome.
Yannis Barbieri handled cargo and logistics. He was broad-shouldered, Ionian-born, with a thick grey streak running through his black hair that he claimed appeared overnight after a docking incident near Calloway Station. He never explained what happened at Calloway Station. We never asked.
Orla Lachlan-Reid was our systems engineer. Young, freckled, precise. She spoke in short declarative sentences and had a habit of narrating what she was doing as she did it, not for anyone else’s benefit but her own. “Rerouting coolant flow. Sealing bypass. Done.” Like a ritual.
And then there was Simona Theodorou. Our navigator. Originally from one of the Aegean orbital communes, she had the kind of face that looked perpetually on the edge of remembering something important. She was quiet in a way that felt deliberate, like she was conserving words for a moment when they would matter most.
The distress signal from Orvek was standard format. A repeating pulse, no voice, no additional data. Standard procedure when a station loses power to its communication arrays but retains enough battery to broadcast the emergency tone.
We docked without incident.
The station was not empty. That was the first surprise. Orvek had a crew of nine listed in the Drift registry. We found them all in the central hub, alive, seated in a loose circle around a portable thermal unit, looking at us with expressions that were difficult to categorize. Not fear. Not relief. Something closer to recognition.
The station commander, a heavyset woman named Grett with mechanical augments replacing both forearms, stood immediately. She crossed to Simona before any of us had spoken a word.
“You came,” Grett said. “Just like you said you would.”
Simona stared at her. “I’ve never been to this station.”
“Not yet,” Grett said. “But you will be. You already told me what to expect. Told me the exact registration number of your ship. Told me there would be four of you.” She paused. “You told me about the bomb.”
The silence after that was the particular kind that fills a room completely.
Kerri-Ann’s hand moved to her sidearm. Yannis stepped back toward the docking corridor. Orla said, quietly, “Scanning cargo bay now.”
We had not brought a bomb. We were certain of that. We had loaded the Ardent Compass ourselves, three days ago, in the busy open-air bay of Portside Tethys, under the amber glow of the station’s industrial lights, surrounded by noise and fuel smell and the distant clang of loading cranes.
Orla’s voice came through the comm a moment later. Flat. Careful.
“There is a device in bay three. Magnetic casing. I don’t recognize the manufacture. It’s active.”
Grett had not moved. Her augmented forearms caught the light, copper-colored alloy over carbon joints, smooth and expressionless as sculpture. She said, “The version of you that came here — the future version — she told me not to panic. She told me the device isn’t meant for the station.”
“Then what is it meant for?” Simona asked.
Grett looked at her steadily. “The Consortium carrier. The Verath blockade fleet. She said you’d figure out the rest.”
WhatsApp
Telegram
Email
Categories
- AI & Technology
- Contemporary
- Corporate Control
- Creepypasta
- Crime Thriller
- Cyberpunk
- Dark Fantasy
- Enemies to Lovers
- Fairy Tale Retelling
- Fantasy
- First Contact
- Forbidden
- Genetic/Body Horror
- High Fantasy
- Monster Hunter
- Mythic/Folklore
- Paranormal
- Portal/Otherworld
- Post-Apo
- Post-Collapse Society
- Psychological Thriller
- Romances
- SCI-FI
- Second Chance
- Slow Burn
- Space Combat
- Spacepunk
- Surveillance State
- Survival Thriller
- Thrillers
- Time Travel
- Treasure Hunter
- Urban Fantasy
- Witchcraft/Curses
Tags
10min stories atmospheric atmospheric fantasy atmospheric fiction contemporary romance Creepy creepypasta crime thriller dark fantasy debt dystopia emotional fiction enemies to lovers ensemble cast epistolary fantasy female protagonist first person forbidden romance framed narrative high fantasy love story magic Memory mystery Paranormal psychological horror psychological thriller romance sci-fi second chance second chance romance short fiction short story slow burn space station speculative fiction supernatural Survival survival thriller suspense thriller travel romance witchcraft workplace romance
Leave a Reply