The sound of the alarm wavered before other alarms joined in: higher, sharper tones layering over one another until the whole station juddered with audible discord. Lights flickered above them, the warm gold of Orantei’s immaculate illumination collapsing into a dim amber, which in turn shuddered and sank into a smothering twilight.

Ayres steadied himself, catching Parr’s elbow as the deck trembled. This was a structural convulsion, the sort of deep wrench that came from a blow or a catastrophic system failure. A distant screech followed the tremor, metallic and raw, as though something large and mechanical had been forcibly twisted.

“What the hell was that?” Parr asked, breath tight, her eyes sharp in the flicker.

“No idea,” Ayres replied, though he watched the darkness with grim awareness. “But it’s nothing good.”

Another tremor rippled along the corridor, a long, rolling motion like the station flexing its spine. Parr’s comm-badge crackled uselessly beneath her attempting fingers. She tried again, and again, until even hope sounded impatient in her voice. “Parr to Farragut, respond.”

All she received was static.

Ayres ran his own familiar tap pattern against the badge. It produced the same silence. They exchanged a look before Ayres nodded down the corridor. “Docking ring. Quickly.”

They set off at a brisk pace. The long corridor, once serenely lit and almost decorative, now pulsed with weak strips of light at knee height. Everything above their thighs was plunged into murk so complete that the ceiling dissolved into blackness. The environmental systems wheezed intermittently, coughing out uneven currents of air that pressed in rhythmic pulses against their ears. Every few moments, the pitch shifted, creating a deeply unsettling sensation.

Just ahead, a ceiling panel gave way and slammed onto the deck with a spectacular clang, scattering sparks. Ayres guided Parr around the debris as they passed, both scanning the ceiling for further collapses.

They had gone only a few dozen metres when a strange, anguished shriek echoed through the shadows behind them. Not a voice – too distorted and mechanical – yet not remotely like machinery either.

Parr paused, the sound hollowing her breath for a moment. “What was that?”

“Let’s focus on getting out of here.”

The corridor sloped downward and widened into an area lined with decorative panels, which flickered with sporadic fits of static. Sometimes they displayed fractured light patterns like constellations dissolving into white noise; other times they went wholly black. Briefly, one panel showed a shape like a human silhouette dissolving into pixels.

Parr slowed to look more closely. For a moment, she thought she saw a ripple of motion across the panel’s surface, something like a hand pressed against the distortion from the inside. Then it flickered and died, leaving her staring at her own faint reflection.

A whisper brushed across her hearing.

Emilia.

She froze.

Ayres noticed and turned back. “What is it?”

She blinked, swallowing down her pulse. “Nothing. I’m just scared.”

He held her gaze a heartbeat longer than necessary before nodding toward the next junction. Darkness loomed ahead. A patch so utterly void of light that it felt less like a corridor and more like a great black mouth.

“This whole section’s dead,” he murmured. “We’ll have to cross it.”

Parr nodded, though unease slid cold fingers up her spine. She followed him into the darkness. Their footsteps rang sharp against the metal, yet the air swallowed each sound too quickly, as though sound itself dissipated unnaturally.

The station groaned again, deeper this time, reverberating through their bodies. A tremor that did not entirely feel mechanical.

“You feel that?” Parr whispered.

“Hard to miss,” Ayres said, though he seemed to sense she meant something more than vibration.

They almost stumbled into a maintenance drone, its casing torn open and wiring unspooled across the floor. Its optical sensors blinked feebly through a colour cycle: blue to red, red to green, green to violet, before dimming into nothing.

Ayres crouched, studying the machine. “This isn’t damage from the power outage. Something ripped it apart.”

“A weapon?” Parr ventured.

“No,” Ayres poked at the machine, “it’s like it was torn from the inside out.”

The drone convulsed once, as though some final impulse drove its broken limbs, then fell still. Ayres stood and gestured them forward again.

They moved on.

The corridor spilled into a large circular chamber overlooking the docking ring. Normally this space would be alive with movement. Orantei had been bustling earlier with its mechanical inhabitants. Now the chamber felt hollow, the whispering darkness crowding in.

The enormous viewport revealed row after row of ships suspended eerily outside. All dark. All with their power gone. The Farragut drifted among them, familiar and unmistakably lifeless. Only the faintest glimmer of emergency lights could be seen through the many windows.

Parr pressed her palm to the glass with an aching instinct. “My god.”

Ayres joined her. “We need to get back to the ship.”

He moved to the viewport controls, running his fingers across the dead interfaces. Nothing responded. Nothing obeyed.

“I don’t know how to,” he said, an edge of frustration and despair in his voice.

Before Parr could form a reply, something flickered outside. Not light but movement. Three ships clamping to the station’s hull. Sinister silhouettes of cobbled-together armour and technologies, their shapes unmistakeable from the past weeks.

Pilgrims.

Parr’s breath faltered. “Ayres.”

“I see them.”

She felt it again, a pressure at the edge of thought, like fingers tapping the back of her mind. A whisper reshaping itself just beyond comprehension.

The emergency lighting flickered again and the drones around the chamber jerked suddenly to life, juddering with tortured movements. One collapsed onto the floor, limbs thrashing for a moment before snapping still. Another convulsed, then hurled itself violently into the far wall where it exploded in a shower of sparks.

The third stood upright, twitching in irregular spasms as though fighting unseen restraints. Its optical sensor flared violet, then black, and Parr felt the breath catch painfully in her throat.

Ayres placed himself between her and the machine, instinctive, protective. “Back away.”

The drone collapsed into a heap, its mechanical death seeming almost theatrical, as if ordered.

The alarms died simultaneously.

The silence that followed was even worse. It pressed into their ears and lungs, suffocating in its completeness. Parr felt her own heartbeat echo too loudly in her ears.

Then the ventilation ducts emitted a slow, vibrating hum. Not a mechanical tone, but something pitched strangely, a resonance that crept beneath the skin. The conduits flickered with pale light, pulsing rhythmically.

The station was speaking. Parr felt it in the back of her mind.

Ayres lowered his voice. “Whatever’s controlling this place, it’s not Tei. Or not all of her.”

Before Parr could reply, the overhead speakers crackled. Lara Tei’s voice came through in broken, overlapping fragments. Not quite unified. Not quite real.

“Please. Disruption. Unstable. Intrusion detected. Do not. Please. Stay. No. Come closer. Don’t. Come. Come.”

The voice stuttered, crumpling into static punctuated by a sound that might once have been a scream. Then the channel cut abruptly.

Parr pressed fingers to her temples. Something heavy and resonant pulsed beneath her skull, matching her heartbeat with uncanny synchronicity. She closed her eyes, but that only made the sensation worse. A dark echo sliding through the folds of her thoughts.

Ayres caught her shoulders. “Parr. Look at me.”

She forced her eyes open. There was worry in his gaze, shadowed by urgency. She tried to answer, to insist she was fine, but the words wavered.

“I’m just, affected, by the power fluctuations,” she said, though she heard the lie in her own voice.

He did not believe her.

Above them, metal shifted. Something heavy clamped to the outer hull. Then another. The vibrations passed through the deck, the walls, and into Parr’s thoughts.

Ayres turned sharply to the viewport as three more Pilgrim ships clamped onto the station. The lights shifted in hypnotic rhythm, and Parr’s breath slowed in time with them.

“No,” Ayres said softly, “don’t look.”

Parr dragged her gaze away with visible effort. Sweat beaded along her forehead.

The docking arms began to twitch, slow jerking movements as they reactivated with unnatural coordination. The conduits above them flared violet, the colour spreading like bruising light.

“Mike,” she whispered. “We can’t stay here.”

“I know.”

“We need to get back to the ship.”

“Agreed.”

“But we’ll have to go through the station. Those ships, they’ll be here any minute”

She struggled to articulate the sensation. Not an attack. Not entirely. Something more invasive. Something like an infection.

“You’re feeling something?” he asked.

She hesitated. The presence in her mind pulsed satisfyingly at her pause.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Something’s inside the systems. Slipping into them. Manipulating them.”

“And you?”

She did not answer.

A sudden violent tremor hurled them against the wall. The station shuddered again, more violently, and a few panels burst in showers of sparks. Smoke curled from ruptured conduits. The Pilgrim ships outside shifted position, their engines thrumming with unsettling synchrony.

The docking arms extended further.

Ayres gripped Parr’s hand tightly. “We’re moving. Now.”

They ran through the concourse, pushing back into the narrower corridors. The lights flickered erratically, casting sickly blushes of colour across the walls. Each pulse felt like a breath drawn by the station, an inhalation followed by a long, ominous exhale. Metal underfoot vibrated, not with chaos, but with an eerie, purposeful rhythm.

Deep beneath the station’s structure came a bass-pitched moan, resonant and slow, like something waking from ancient sleep.

Parr stumbled once, clutching her head. Ayres caught her again, steering her forward.

The whisper in her mind sharpened.

Emilia, you are ready, open…

She gasped. “Make it stop,” she murmured.

Ayres held her tighter. “You focus on me.”

They reached a half-jammed door that juddered in violent spasms. Ayres ducked beneath it, hauling Parr with him. Behind them, the door snapped shut hard enough to dent the frame.

The corridor curved toward the central spine. They hurried toward it, boots ringing against the metal.

Behind them, the station thrummed in a rolling pulse. The pulse grew stronger. Closer. More insistent.

At the stairwell, Parr’s knees buckled. Ayres grabbed her again.

“Parr, stay with me.”

Her eyes unfocused. “It’s loud,” she whispered. “It’s so loud.”

“Parr!”

Her gaze snapped back to him. Not entirely clear, but fighting.

He cupped her face briefly, grounding her, his touch steady even as the station trembled like a living organism around them.

“You listen to me,” he said. “Nothing else.”

She nodded. Barely.

Another tremor rolled through the deck. The lights went black. When they returned, they were violet.

“Move.”

They began to ascend. Parr and Ayres kept moving, breath ragged, hearts pounding, their silhouettes small against the pulsing violet light.

“Tei’s broken,” Parr said, breathless.

“The whole station is broken!” he answered.

They climbed. The second landing gave way to a choice of three corridors. Two lay in broken shadow. The third throbbed with a violet light. Parr’s eyes drifted. Ayres’s hand found her wrist and his touch was a small, reassuring warmth.

She let him steer her left, their shoulders close enough that the proximity of his body steadied the tilt of the floor. Here the walls had developed a matt, granular quality in contrast to the smooth surfaces in other parts of the station.

They rounded the bend and found the administrator.

She was where the corridor narrowed, precisely centred, precisely still. Lara Tei wore the same charcoal silk as at dinner, but the lines of it seemed to sit too exactly with her limbs. The mouth smiled. The expression occupied the right parts of the face in the right proportions. And yet the eyes did not blink for too long. Her face was too symmetrical, the image too perfect. Her hands folded with an uncanniness that made them think of a painter skilled in landscapes rather than people but attempting one nonetheless.

“Please,” she said, “You need not run. All is being arranged.”