The air inside the Vanguard didn't taste like the air back home on the colony. On the mining moon, the oxygen was tinged with the metallic tang of red dust and recycled sweat. Here, inside the belly of the greatest research vessel in the fleet, the air was cold, sterile, and smelled of absolutely nothing.
"Keep your light down, Leo," Jax hissed, his voice echoing too loudly in the cramped maintenance duct.
"I'm trying," Leo whispered back, his fingers trembling against the casing of his industrial flashlight. "But it's narrow in here. My knees are hitting everything."
"Quiet, both of you," Mina commanded. She was crouched between them, the blue light of her modified tablet illuminating her focused expression. "The Vanguard uses a pulse-sync security system. Every ten seconds, the ship 'breathes' a sensor sweep. If I don't time our ghost-signal perfectly, the AI is going to find three stowaways and vent us into the vacuum before we can say 'sorry'."
They crawled further, the corrugated metal of the vent groaning under their weight. They were three miles above their colony, hidden in the "Gut-Works" of a ship that had just returned from the forbidden Sector 9. To the rest of the galaxy, the planet Acheron-V was a graveyard of dead stars. To Jax, it was a mystery he couldn't ignore.
"We're over Cargo Bay 7," Mina whispered. "This is where they hauled the 'Anomaly' from the surface."
Jax reached the vent grate first. He pressed his face against the cold steel, peering down. The bay below was massive, filled with rows of sterile white canisters. But in the center, bathed in a harsh emergency strobe, sat a shattered glass cage.
"Jax?" Leo asked. "What do you see?"
Jax didn't answer. He couldn't.
Suddenly, the world went dead.
It wasn't that the ship went quiet—it was as if the very concept of sound had been erased from the universe. Jax saw Leo's mouth moving, saw the panic rising in his younger brother's eyes, but no words came out. Jax tried to clap his hands together; he felt the impact, felt the sting in his palms, but there was no crack.
The hum of the ship's engines, the whistling of the vents, the sound of their own breathing—all of it was gone. Total, suffocating deafness.
Then, it emerged from the shadows beneath the broken cage.
It didn't have a body. It was a fracture in reality, a shimmering shape made of jagged light and oily shadows that seemed to "glitch" through the air. It moved like a broken recording, flickering from the floor to the top of a shipping crate in a single frame.
As the entity moved, the silence grew heavier, pressing against their eardrums like deep-sea pressure.
Jax watched in horror as the entity turned. It didn't have eyes, but its entire form vibrated. It drifted toward the wall—toward their vent.
Mina grabbed Jax's shoulder, her face pale. She pointed at her tablet. The screen was black, except for one word flickering in white text over and over again:
[ VACUUM DETECTED: SOURCE INTERNAL ]
The entity reached the wall below them. It didn't climb. It simply began to "delete" the sound of the metal grate. The screws holding their vent in place didn't unscrew; they simply vanished into the silence.
The grate began to tilt. Jax reached out to grab the ledge, but he couldn't even hear his own scream as the metal gave way.
Jax's stomach lurched as the floor vanished.
The heavy iron grate tumbled into the abyss of the cargo bay, but it made no sound when it hit the floor thirty feet below. It just... ceased to be part of the ceiling.
"Mina! Leo!" Jax lunged forward.
His fingers scraped against cold, oily copper—a thick bundle of bypass cables hanging from the primary junction box. He squeezed so hard the wire bit into his palms, his muscles screaming under the sudden jerk of his own weight.
With his left hand, he caught Mina's wrist. She swung violently, her boots kicking at the empty air. With his right leg, he hooked Leo's waist, pinning the younger boy against the wall of the shaft just as he was about to slide past.
They hung there in the crushing, absolute silence.
Jax looked down. His arms were shaking, the adrenaline the only thing keeping his grip from failing. Below them, the entity was standing—if you could call it that—right where the grate had fallen. It was looking up. Its body flickered like a dying lightbulb, a jagged silhouette of "nothingness" that seemed to drink the light from the room.
Leo was weeping; Jax could see the tears streaming down his face and the way his chest heaved in a silent sob. He wanted to tell Leo it was okay, to tell him to hold on, but his voice was trapped in his throat, stolen by the thing below.
Mina, even while dangling over a certain death, was the first to react. She pointed frantically at the cable Jax was holding.
It wasn't just a support wire. It was a Power Relay.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her "Ghost-Box" tablet. The screen was still glitching, but she hammered a command into the manual override. She shoved the tablet's charging port directly into the exposed copper of the cable Jax was holding.
If sound doesn't work, her eyes seemed to say, maybe electricity will.
A massive spark erupted from the cable. In a world with sound, it would have been a deafening CRACK. In this room, it was just a blinding flash of white light.
The entity recoiled. The shimmering edges of its "body" blurred and distorted, as if the electrical discharge was jamming its frequency. For a split second, the silence broke. Jax heard a single, sharp ring in his ears—a high-pitched frequency that made his nose bleed.
"CRAWL!" Jax's voice returned for one ragged second. "GO! UP!"
Using the momentum of the shock, he hauled Mina upward toward a secondary maintenance ledge. He kicked Leo toward the small opening, forcing the younger boy to scramble inside.
As Jax pulled himself up last, he looked back down.
The entity wasn't hurt. It was learning. It began to flicker faster, mimicking the rhythm of the electrical spark Mina had just created. It started to glide up the wall, its form stretching out like a shadow at sunset, reaching for Jax's boot.
Jax rolled into the secondary duct just as the silence slammed shut again like a heavy door.
They are safe for the moment, but they are lost in the secondary maintenance pipes. They can't go back the way they came, and the entity is now between them and the airlock they used to get in.