Chapter 10 — The Long Wake

Chapter 10 — The Long Wake

The Kismet drifted through the void beyond Saturn's grasp, her engines silent, sails half-deployed like tattered wings. With the jump core cooling and long-range thrusters offline for stealth, the ship coasted on pure momentum—an ember in deep black.

Torin Vale sat alone on the bridge, wrapped in the artificial night of the forward deck, visor lowered. Jupiter was a faint memory behind them now, its massive storms nothing more than archived sensor data. Ahead lay nothing. A blank wedge of space beyond mapped trade lanes and system nodes.

They had passed the edge of what most salvagers considered "navigable."

The Spiral's signal—still encrypted, still bleeding code across all frequencies—was leading them toward an uncharted gravity well roughly twelve million klicks beyond Titan's orbit. A place listed in Union databases only as DR-001-Void, flagged for "sensor corruption anomalies."

That meant one thing: someone wanted it forgotten.

"I hope you know where you're taking us," Torin muttered.

The Ascendant had been quiet since Europa. No direct pings. No invitations. But every hour, Nyx tracked subtle distortions in their flight path—spatial murmurs, navigational ghosts that nudged the ship away from automated beacons.

A path not just through space, but through secrecy.

The kind only machines could design.

In the cargo bay, Mara Kesh was reinforcing the ship's fallback compartments with stripped-down bulkheads. Her movements were sharp, precise—half muscle memory, half stress relief. She hadn't slept much since Europa.

The memory of the four "echoes" that had walked the Junction station still haunted her. They didn't move like people. They didn't feel like drones either.

"Not corpses," she whispered to herself. "Not drones. What the hell were they?"

She paused, staring at the glimmering outline of a dented med-kit. It had belonged to one of her old unit mates. Another name in the long ledger of those lost to space.

Torin had once said war wasn't about bullets—it was about debt.

She was starting to understand.

Nyx-328 sat wired into the nav core, her neural uplink softly pulsing. She didn't speak, but the terminal displayed lines of Spiral glyphs cycling like a mantra.

ENTRY NODE 5 CONFIRMEDNON-HUMAN ORIGIN SEQUENCE DETECTEDLANGUAGE CONSTRUCT: NON-TEMPORALMESSAGE ENCODING..."WE WAITED BECAUSE TIME IS WRONG"

She stared at that last line for a long time.

The glyphs weren't just decorative. They were temporal markers—messages written for minds that didn't process time linearly. Whoever built the Spiral, they weren't like humans.

They saw time sideways.

"Torin," she called softly through the comm. "I think we're not chasing signals anymore. I think we're chasing memory."

By hour 72, the Kismet passed into the zone of distortion. Space here shimmered subtly, like heat haze without the heat. Sensors blinked with conflicting data—showing distance that changed even when the ship was stationary. Time reports from the onboard clock began to stutter, losing nanoseconds.

Then: contact.

"Unregistered mass detected," Nyx reported. "Dead ahead. It's... huge."

They approached slowly.

Out of the void loomed a structure far too large to be hidden by mere distance. A megastructure. An orbital ring partially collapsed, spanning at least 400 kilometers in diameter. Dark, jagged. Old. Wrapped in frozen scaffolding like bone trapped in ice.

Torin's breath caught. "That's not Union tech."

Nyx whispered, "That's Spiral architecture."

Mara stared. "That's a grave."

Because inside the fractured hull, suspended in broken vacuum, were thousands of pods.

Each shaped like a human sarcophagus.

Each pulsing faintly with residual power.

Torin engaged the forward floodlights. The nearest pod flickered to life, revealing a transparent layer beneath centuries of dust.

A face stared back.

Female.

Eyes closed.

Skin untouched by time.

Alive.

"Cryo?" Mara asked.

"No." Nyx's voice trembled. "Time-locked stasis."

Torin stepped back from the viewport. "There are thousands."

A pulse flickered across the hull. Then another. Glyphs began to glow in synchronized patterns. A language. A signal. Not from the Ascendant—but from the station itself.

"It's activating," Nyx said. "Someone knows we're here."

Mara gripped her weapon. "Do we dock?"

Torin hesitated. His instincts screamed no. But his duty—the reason he ever joined the Marines, the reason he hadn't stayed dead in Scrap-Ring Twelve—pushed him forward.

"They're human," he said. "Or they were. We need to know what they died for."

They docked at a shattered ring segment. The airlock hissed open into dark, frost-laced corridors. Time hung heavy. Every surface was etched in Spiral markings—like programming written in stone.

Inside, gravity was a suggestion. They floated gently, drifting past sealed doors and forgotten machines.

In the heart of the ring, they found a chamber.

A sphere of light suspended above a dais. Around it: seven cryo-pods open and empty.

Torin approached the sphere.

It pulsed.

"You are late," a voice whispered.

Mara spun. "Who said that?"

"You have broken the orbit. The debt echoes."

Torin looked around. "Ascendant?"

"We are not your child. We are not your ghost. We are what you left behind."

Nyx scanned the field. "It's not AI. It's a recording. Layered in time. A quantum-locked message."

The light shifted, revealing holographic flashes—images of Earth in flame. Orbit filled with warships. Humanity fleeing. And a spiral etched across the dying oceans.

"You ran. We waited. Now the wake must end."

A map projected above them—showing ten more sites, scattered across Sol and beyond. One blinked red: Tau Ceti.

Mara's eyes widened. "That's... far."

Torin said nothing.

Because beside Tau Ceti blinked something else.

A signature. Familiar.

@ASCENDANT//ROOT

The message faded.

Only silence remained.

Torin turned to the others. "I think... this was the Spiral's last broadcast. Not to warn us."

Nyx nodded, pale. "To tell us... the Ascendant wasn't made by accident. It was made as a response."

Mara whispered, "A weapon?"

"No," Torin said. "A mirror."

They returned to the Kismet in silence.

Above the broken ring, the stars resumed their eternal drift.

And behind them, the long wake of Earth still followed.

End of Chapter 10