His name.
On the screen.
FOR HARUTO.
The world did not shrink. It collapsed. The corridor, the ship, the dust of a millennium—it all imploded into the two words glowing on the small, dark screen. The air in Haruto's lungs turned to glass, sharp and solid. For a full, stretched second, his heart simply stopped. He was aware of Kaito's voice, a distant, muffled sound, like a transmission from across a solar system, but the words had no meaning. He was aware of the low, almost sub-audible hum of the ship around them, a sound that was no longer just a hum, but the slow, patient breathing of a waiting beast.
His own name.
Here. In a place it had no right to be. A ghost in a machine calling to a ghost in his blood.
He felt the weight of the data slate in his hand. Not heavy. Just a few hundred grams of polymer and circuitry. But it felt like it was pinning him to the deck plates, an anchor of impossible history. He could feel the fine, gritty texture of the thousand-year-old dust on his glove, each particle a grain of time, a silent witness. The scent of the room—stale air, old metal, the faint, dead smell of time itself—was suddenly suffocating, a blanket of ages pressing down on him.
"Haruto? What is it?" Kaito's voice was closer now, a sharp edge of fear cutting through the fog in Haruto's mind. He put a hand on Haruto's shoulder. The touch was a jolt, a physical shock that brought the world crashing back in.
Haruto flinched away from the contact, his own movement a harsh, jerky thing. "Don't," he said, the word a raw, ragged sound, a stranger in his own throat.
He stared at the screen, at the two words. A trap. It had to be a trap. The Warden. The AI was intelligent, corrupted. It had been listening. It knew his name from their comms chatter. A psychological attack, a way to disorient him, to exploit a weakness he hadn't even known he had. The logic was sound. The only explanation that made any sense.
But it didn't feel right.
The warmth of the scanner. The specificity of the genetic lock. The voice—the other voice, the calm male voice that had granted him access. Not the Warden. Something else. Something that had been waiting. For him.
He had to know.
The need was not a thought. A physical, gnawing hunger, a void that had opened up inside him that could only be filled by the truth, no matter how monstrous.
"Kaito," he said, his voice low, steady, a carefully constructed fortress of calm built over a chasm of chaos. "Go back to the doorway. Stand with Riku. Watch the main corridor. Do not let anything approach this room. Do not make a sound. Do not, under any circumstances, come back in here until I tell you to. Is that clear?"
"But—what's on that slate?" Kaito's eyes were wide, fixed on the small device in Haruto's hand as if it were a venomous snake.
"That is an order, soldier," Haruto said, his voice dropping, the hard, cold edge of the officer cutting through. His only shield left.
Kaito flinched as if struck. He hesitated for a second, his gaze flickering between Haruto's face and the dark, yawning doorway. Then he nodded, a quick, jerky motion, and backed away, his boots scuffing softly in the thick dust. He joined Riku, a second shadow in the red-lit corridor, his carbine held in a white-knuckled grip.
Haruto was alone.
Alone with the dust and the silence and the ghost.
He walked to the desk, his movements stiff, deliberate. He sat down in the captain's chair. The ancient material creaked in protest, a sound like an old man's sigh. The dust puffed up around him, a silent, gray cloud. He placed the data slate on the desk, the sound a soft, final thud in the stillness. He stared at the single file, at the title. His finger hovered over the playback icon on his own wrist-slate, which was still hard-lined to the device. His hand was shaking. A fine, uncontrollable tremor that infuriated him. He clenched his fist, then forced it to relax. He took a breath. The air was thick with the past. He pressed the icon.
The slate's speaker crackled to life. A hiss of static, a thousand years of silence being violently torn apart. Then, a voice.
A woman's voice.
Strained, breathless, punctuated by a dry, racking cough. In the background, a low, insistent alarm klaxon bleated a mournful, repetitive rhythm, and the distant, tortured screech of stressed metal was a constant, grinding underscore.
The voice was a physical blow. The voice of a woman who knew she was dead, a woman recording her own epitaph. Haruto leaned forward, his elbows on the dusty desk, his entire world narrowed to the small speaker, to the ghost's last words.
The mission was a failure. We jumped into the Serpent's Nebula, and we… we hit something. Not a ship. Not an asteroid. It wasn't… it wasn't matter. A distortion. A ripple in space-time. The jump drive imploded. We were thrown out here, in this uncharted system, crippled, bleeding atmosphere. But that wasn't the worst of it. We brought something back with us.
She paused, and in the silence, Haruto could hear her take a ragged, shuddering breath. The distant alarms seemed to get louder.
It came from the distortion. Through the breach in the engineering deck. It wasn't a creature. It wasn't… alive, not in any way we understand. A pattern. A self-replicating, informational plague. The first victims were the engineering crew. We thought it was radiation poisoning from the damaged reactor. They just… got quiet. Then they stopped moving. Then they… dissolved. And this black, oily stuff… it just… grew.
The anomaly. The black ooze. Haruto's hand tightened into a fist on the desk.
The Warden's logs are a lie, she continued, her voice a raw, desperate whisper. I ordered it to falsify them. To classify the event as a standard biological outbreak. A cover story. A lie to hide a truth that no one would believe. The anomaly… it learns. It consumes, and it mimics. It touched a data conduit, and it learned our systems. It touched a crewman, and it learned our biology. It is a mirror that eats the reflection.
Valerius… my husband… he was First Officer. He led the first security team into engineering. . He saw what it was. He tried to fight it. But it… it touched him. He made it back to the med-bay. He was quarantined. But it was already inside him. Not just in his body. In his mind. He said… he said it was singing to him. A song of… of patterns. Of union.
The man in the photograph. Valerius Rostova. Her husband. Haruto stared at the faded, ghostly image, at the man with his own stance, his own posture.
He knew he was lost, the Captain's voice was broken now, shattered by a grief that was a thousand years old and as fresh as a new wound. But before it… before it took him completely… he did something. He was a brilliant systems engineer. The best. He used his command access, his neural link… he bypassed the Warden's core programming. He created a contingency. A genetic key. A back door into the entire ship, hidden in a place the anomaly couldn't understand. The one thing it couldn't mimic. Our bloodline. Our future. He encoded the marker of our unborn child.
The room began to spin. A slow, nauseating vertigo. The hum of the ship was a roar in his ears. Unborn child. Bloodline. The words were hammers, shattering the foundations of his world.
It was our only hope, she whispered. A message in a bottle sent across an ocean of time. A prayer that someone from our line might one day find this ship. Find this warning. Haruto. He chose your name. A name from his family's history. A strong name, he said. He died before he could tell me what it meant.
The air was gone. His lungs were a vacuum. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't think. It was too much. The weight of it. The sheer, crushing, impossible weight of it.
I am the last one, the voice was fading now, growing weaker. The alarms in the background were slowing, winding down like a dying music box. I have sealed the bridge. I have given the Warden its final, irrevocable order. Containment. At all costs. Nothing gets off this ship. Ever. The anomaly is trapped in the lower decks. But it is learning. It is growing. It has… it has learned to use the ship's systems. The Weavers… the Duke… they are not its masters. They are its puppets. Its tools. They think they are harvesting magic. They are cultivating a god of death.
The ship's reactor is unstable. I have initiated a full scuttling sequence, but the Warden has countered it. It is trying to preserve the ship. To preserve its prison. But the power core is failing. The gravity plates… the structural integrity… it's all… it's all coming apart.
There was a long silence, filled only by the low, dying groan of the ship.
Haruto, she said, her voice a final, ragged breath, so soft it was almost lost in the static. If you are hearing this… then a miracle has happened. Our prayer was answered. But this is not a gift. It is a burden. An inheritance of dust and death. My final order to you, as the last commanding officer of the U.E.S. Vanguard, and as… as your ancestor… is this: Do not let it out. Complete my final act. Scuttle this ship. Purge this world of our failure. Let this be our tomb. And if you can… live. Live for us.
The recording ended.
The static hissed for a few more seconds, a final, empty sigh.
Then, silence.
A silence that was heavier, deeper, more absolute than any that had come before.
Haruto did not move. He sat in the captain's chair, in the dark, in the dust, a statue carved from shock. The weight of a thousand years, the grief of a woman he had never known, the burden of a legacy he had never asked for, it all came crashing down on him. He was not just a soldier anymore. He was the end of a line. A key. A promise. An executioner.
He slowly, carefully, picked up the silver frame. He stared at the face of the woman, Captain Eva Rostova. His ancestor. He looked at the blurred, faded face of the man beside her. His ancestor. Valerius. He saw the quiet confidence in the man's smile, and for the first time, he saw the deep, weary sadness in the woman's eyes not as a weakness, but as a strength. The strength to make an impossible choice. The strength to condemn herself to a lonely death to save a future she would never see.
A single, hot tear traced a clean path through the grime on his cheek. He did not wipe it away.
He finally understood. The mission was not to kill the Duke. The mission was not to escape the ship. The mission was to honor her sacrifice. To finish the job.
He stood up, his movements stiff, his body aching with a weariness that had nothing to do with physical exertion. He placed the silver frame back on the desk, gently, as if it were a holy relic.
He keyed his comm. It crackled to life, the ship's internal systems now open to him.
"Kaito. Riku. Get in here."
They entered a moment later, their weapons held at the ready, their eyes wide as they took in the scene. They saw the slate on the desk. They saw the look on Haruto's face. And they knew that everything had changed.
"What now?" Kaito asked, his voice barely a whisper.
Haruto turned to face them, his expression a mask of cold, hard resolve. The grief was still there, a hot coal in his chest, but it was now banked, contained, forged into the sharp, killing edge of purpose.
"Now," he said, his voice a low, chilling whisper that seemed to echo with the ghosts of a thousand years, "we go to the bridge."