Our Own Universe

The screech of tortured metal was the first thing that clawed its way through the thick, throbbing fog in Kael’s head. It was a high, violent sound, the shriek of a dying machine. Then came the alarms—a frantic, pulsing klaxon that hammered at his temples in time with the pounding of his own blood. Red lights strobed across the cramped bridge of the Wanderer, painting the smoke-filled air in hellish flashes. He pushed himself up, his ribs screaming in protest, a sharp, coppery taste filling his mouth. The pilot’s chair was canted at a sickening angle, and through the fractured viewport, he saw not the familiar star-dusted black of the void, but the rusted, skeletal superstructure of a space station, far too close.

His gaze snapped around the cockpit, cataloging the damage. A deep, jagged tear ran along the starboard wall, and sparks spat from a ruined navigation panel. Then he saw her. Elara. She was slumped forward over the secondary science console, her dark hair fanned out across the smoking surface, utterly still.

A cold, sharp spike of panic lanced through him, far more painful than the ache in his skull. Guilt followed, hot and suffocating. His fault. He was the pilot. He should have seen the debris field. He should have—

There was no time for self-flagellation. “Elara!” he croaked, his voice a raw tear in his throat. He stumbled from his chair, his legs unsteady, and lurched toward her. He grabbed her shoulder, felt the unnerving limpness in her body, and hauled her back. Her head lolled, a trickle of blood tracing a path from her hairline down her temple. He pulled her dead weight away from the console, his muscles straining.

The universe answered with a secondary concussion. A violent, gut-punching BOOM erupted from the aft of the shuttle, throwing them both to the deck plating. The emergency lights flickered, died, then came back at half-strength. A new alarm joined the chorus, this one a low, desperate hiss accompanied by a synthesized voice, chillingly calm. “Warning. Life support failure imminent. Hull integrity at three percent.”

The air was already thinning, growing cold and sharp in his lungs. Each breath was a desperate, burning gasp. Through the haze of pain and oxygen deprivation, Kael’s pilot instincts took over. The docking clamp. The status board showed a green light—they were hard-docked with the station. It was their only chance.

He hooked his arms under Elara’s, dragging her toward the airlock. She was a dead weight, her boots scraping against the metal floor. His vision tunneled, the red lights blurring into smears. The air was like ice and razors. He fumbled with the airlock control, his gloved fingers clumsy and numb, slapping the release panel. The inner door hissed open. He shoved her through the opening, stumbling after her, collapsing onto the grating of the docking tube. Behind them, the shuttle’s systems gave a final, wheezing sigh, and the lights went out for good.

They spilled out of the tube and onto the vast, cold floor of the station’s docking bay. The airlock door slid shut behind them with a heavy, final thud, plunging them into a silence so profound it was a physical weight. Kael lay on his back, chest heaving, sucking in breaths of the stale, recycled air. It was thin, metallic, and cold, but it was air. He rolled his head to the side. Elara was a few feet away, stirring with a low moan.

Dim emergency lighting cast long, skeletal shadows across the cavernous space. Dust motes danced in the pale beams. It was utterly, terrifyingly empty. They were alive. And they were trapped.

The low moan solidified into a sharp, ragged gasp. Elara pushed herself up onto her elbows, her eyes wide and unfocused as she took in the cavernous, dimly lit space. Her hand went to the gash on her temple, her fingers coming away slick with blood. “The ship…” she whispered, her gaze finding the sealed airlock door. “The samples… my cryo-seeds…”

Kael scrambled to his feet, the motion jerky with residual adrenaline. “The ship’s gone. The samples are gone. I got us out.” His voice was harsh, a shield against the guilt clawing at his insides.

Her eyes, dark and accusing, finally snapped to his. “You got us out?” she repeated, her voice rising with a tremor that was part fear, part fury. “You got us into this, Kael! What the hell happened? What did you do?”

“It wasn’t my fault!” he roared, the sound echoing unnaturally in the vast, dead space. He gestured wildly at the sealed door. “There was debris. Uncharted. It came out of nowhere.” The lie tasted like ash in his mouth. He’d seen the faint sensor ghosting, dismissed it as interference, eager to shave a few more hours off their transit. He’d been showing off, and he’d killed them, just not completely.

“Debris?” Elara staggered to her feet, her pragmatism fracturing under the weight of sheer terror. “Or were you hot-dogging again? Pushing the engines, cutting corners like you always do?” Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “I told you. I told you to stick to the approved flight path. Years, Kael. Years of work. Our funding. Our charter. Everything we were going to build… it was all on that shuttle.” Her voice broke on the last word, the sound swallowed by the oppressive silence of the station.

“I saved your life!” he shot back, taking a step toward her, his posture aggressive, defensive. He needed her to be angry. Anger was a fight. Acknowledging her grief meant acknowledging his role in causing it, and he couldn't bear that weight.

“You destroyed it first!” she screamed, shoving him hard in the chest. He stumbled back, surprised by her strength. “This isn’t saving us, you arrogant bastard! This is a tomb! Where are we? Do you even know?”

He didn’t. The station was a ghost, a name on a forgotten star chart. Star-Whisper. An old comms relay, decommissioned for decades. They were stranded, maybe hundreds of light-years from the nearest shipping lane. The truth of it settled in his gut like a block of ice.

The fight drained out of him, replaced by a hollow, ringing exhaustion. He had no more deflections, no more anger to hide behind. He just stared at her, seeing the raw fear in her eyes, the faint tremor in her hands. He had done this to her. To them.

Elara’s shoulders slumped, her own fury spent. The tears she’d been holding back finally traced paths through the grime and blood on her face. She looked around at the skeletal gantries and dust-choked corridors disappearing into the gloom, at the sheer, overwhelming scale of their prison. The fight had been a small, hot thing in the vast, cold emptiness. Now, only the emptiness remained.

Without another word, she turned and walked away, her footsteps echoing. She found a recessed alcove near a massive, silent cargo lift and slid down the wall, pulling her knees to her chest. Kael watched her go, a chasm of silence and recrimination opening between them. He turned in the opposite direction, trudging toward the far side of the main hub. He collapsed behind a stack of rusted, empty supply crates, the cold metal seeping through his jumpsuit. They sat in their separate corners, wrapped in a silence that was louder than any alarm, two tiny points of flickering life in a universe of dead, indifferent metal.

The silence that had settled between them was a heavy, suffocating blanket, thick with unspoken blame and the metallic tang of fear. Elara was tracing the grime on the floor with the toe of her boot, trying to map a future that had just been erased, when the station’s dim emergency lights didn’t just flicker—they died.

One moment, there was the faint, reddish glow casting long, distorted shadows across the main hub. The next, there was nothing. A blackness so absolute it felt like a physical weight, pressing in on her, stealing the air from her lungs. It was the void of space made manifest, and a sharp, involuntary cry was torn from her throat before she could stifle it. The sound was small, swallowed instantly by the oppressive dark.

"Elara?" Kael’s voice cut through the black, closer than she expected. It was rough, but stripped of the earlier anger, honed to a fine point of concern.

"I'm here," she managed to say, her own voice a thin, reedy thing. She heard a scuff of boots on the metal deck plating, a cautious, searching sound.

"Don't move," he commanded, his tone that of a pilot in an emergency, calm and in control. "Talk to me. Where are you?"

"By the… the main console support." She reached a hand out into the empty, cold air, a useless gesture she couldn't stop. Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. Then, his fingers brushed against hers.

His hand closed around her own, and the shock of it was immediate. It wasn’t a tentative touch; it was firm, sure. His palm was broad and calloused, radiating a steady warmth that seemed to push back against the chilling darkness. It was an anchor in the terrifying emptiness, and her fingers curled instinctively around his, clinging to the solid, living reality of him. An unwilling shudder of relief went through her.

"Okay," he said, his voice now right beside her ear. "I've got you. I have my datapad. It's got a manual crank-light."

A moment later, a low whirring sound started, and a weak, flickering beam of light cut a narrow cone through the gloom. It illuminated his other hand, cranking a small handle on the back of his datapad, his knuckles tight with effort. The light played over their joined hands, his skin tanned and scarred against her own pale, trembling fingers. It painted a small, intimate circle of existence for them in the vast, dead station.

"We need to find the primary breaker," he said, his gaze scanning the small area their light could reach. "It should be on a primary conduit wall." He didn't let go of her hand. Instead, he gave it a slight, encouraging tug. "We'll find it together."

She nodded, the gesture lost in the dark beyond their tiny sphere of light. "Okay." The word was barely a whisper, but it was an agreement. A truce. Pulled along by his steady grip, she moved with him, their steps echoing in unison. The shared task, the simple, necessary act of holding on in the dark, began to weave the first, fragile thread between them—a flicker of reliance in the suffocating press of the void.