The ice never slept.
It groaned, it cracked, it whispered secrets older than stars.
In the outer void of the Morioka star system, Sereph hung like a forsaken pearl, its surface a labyrinth of glacial fissures and howling blizzards. No life dared claim dominion here, only the desperate clung to its crust: frontier miners burrowing for rare cryocrystals, smugglers trading in shadows, and the solitary vigil of the Gamaen Military Intelligence Bureau's listening post. Coldcore Observatory, they called it, named after the elite Forward Reconnaissance Pathfinders that established and operated it. A robust spire of reinforced alloy pierced the ice, its arrays tuned to the galaxy's whispers, guarding Gamaen civilization's frayed edges against the unknown.
On Sereph, the only thing colder than the surface was the certainty that nothing truly eventful ever happened. Except today. Today, something curious was afoot, and personnel had awakened to strange readings coming from the outer fringes of the system.
Coldcore Observatory rose from the glacier like a black needle: four levels above the ice, seven more buried beneath. Officially it was a joint civilian-military installation: meteorologists tracking the planet's murderous storms, astronomers cataloguing the faint smear of the distant Arqon Abyss, engineers keeping the heat exchangers and air recyclers alive so the miners scattered across the equatorial ridges could keep breathing without freezing. Unofficially, it was the GMIB's outermost ear, listening for anything that might threaten the fragile peace in a frontier system infested with bandits and smugglers.
Commander Lareth Yanis stood on the command balcony of Level Super Four, arms folded, watching the holotable paint the Oort cloud in lazy green arcs. Fifty-eight years old, broad-shouldered, the scar across his throat still pale from a Markob blade that had almost ended him on Akerel. He had a calmness that made younger officers nervous. He was looking forward to the end of this rotation, so that he could return to his wife and daughter in the faraway Nemar system for extended shore leave. After that, he had to look forward to only one more field deployment before taking up a strategic consulting position with GMIB Central. One more deployment to ensure that the other ten members of his FRP unit were ready to take on whatever the frontier threw at them, without him. Even now, he was keenly evaluating his second-in-command to see if she was fully prepared to take on the mantle.
"Third ping in six hours," Lieutenant Tya Tor said, stepping beside him. Her voice carried the clipped precision that denoted her Raiku and GMIB training, but the tremor underneath was new. "Same vector. Same modulation. It's not noise, sir."
She was overqualified for her current job, of that Lareth was sure. It gave him comfort knowing that the person destined to fill his shoes had the potential to far exceed his abilities one day. She didn't need to be here; she was royalty after all. Tya of House Tor was the daughter of Queen Seru, reigning monarch of the Gamaen Kingdom. Their civilization was showing signs of readiness to shed the yoke of monarchism. The primary reason that the people hadn't done so yet was the same reason Tya was here, because House Tor believed in duty and servant leadership to its people. For generations, members of the Tor family dedicated themselves to decades of exacting training, intensive education, and humble work before they could go anywhere near the throne room.
Commander Yanis didn't look at her. "Could be a Patisi spoof. Slipjackers love seeding fake beacons to draw patrols away from their runs. Everything from here to the Oort cloud is their playground, you know that," he sighed.
She did know that. Their unit had caught Patisi bandits with their cargo bays full of stolen mining equipment, intercepted Markob insurgents planting long-range beacons, and even apprehended the odd rogue Gamaen smuggler running contraband through the system. Once, they'd stumbled upon all three factions exchanging goods on the dark side of an asteroid. Each time, the FRP team had prevailed due to skill, preparation, and Lareth's excellent leadership, but Tya had learned to recognize the pattern. Just when protocols became routine, when responses grew automatic, something unprecedented would emerge from the void. Like now. And in the vastness of space, complacency killed faster than vacuum.
"Patisi don't have the power budget for a transmitter that size. And the waveform is… wrong. It's using prime harmonics I've never seen before. Nothing close to it appears in any database," she sighed. As she searched her brain for any memory that could act as a frame of reference, an atypical superstitious dread crept up her spine like frost climbing a windowpane. The readout's oscillating patterns, amber lines pulsing in prime-number sequences, stirred something deep in her memory banks. A fleeting recollection surfaced from her Raiku training: Grand Scholar Najan's weathered face illuminated by the blue glow of holographic projections, his trembling finger pointing to frequency patterns etched into obsidian tablets recovered from the sunken continent of Arcoros. The artifacts had been carbon-dated to millennia before the Gamaen calendar. Try as she might, she couldn't connect these ancient dots, the memory slipping through her mental grasp like water through cupped hands. She blinked hard, forcing her attention back to the data swimming before her tired eyes.
Lareth finally turned. His eyes, the colour of winter steel, studied her for a long second. "You're worried."
"I'm cautious," Tya corrected. "There's a difference."
"Good thing we dispatched the Mendora right away, then. She'll get this all cleared up in no time," he said calmly. The Mendora's departure had steadied nerves. A Navy frigate would have drawn attention and wasn't available anyway; a patrol cutter would have insulted miners and smugglers alike. A science vessel, lightly armed but quick, could move without conversation. They had watched it burn a clean line through the storm and vanish into white.
Shortly after, the first fragment came back.
"Coldcore, this is Mendora. We have… interference, not sure if—" Static burst into a musical chord, clear enough that everyone in the room turned their head. In the chord hung nine notes spaced by ratios that no one could name but everyone felt they should recognize.
The second fragment arrived with the last.
"—placing the source at outer shelf, bearing one-three-three, mark two. It's not a point emitter. It's a field. Wait… it's much more than that. It's—"
The voice cut, and the storm filled the gap.
"Relay was good," Lareth said, frowning. "It didn't drop on our end."
Tya's mouth had gone dry. "Could they be sheltering behind a body? A shepherd?"
"If there were a shepherd out there," he said quietly, "we'd see its gravitic wake across the whole shelf."
The Mendora never called again.
Below them, the mixed crew of forty-three souls went about their shifts. Civilians in thermal coveralls argued over storm-track models. FRP operatives in matte-grey armour cleaned rifles that hadn't fired in anger for months. Children of the mining consortium engineers chased each other through the lower corridors, their laughter echoing strangely off ice walls.
The fourth ping arrived stronger. The fifth carried a voice.
Not words. Something that felt like words inside the skull.
Every light in the tower flickered violet.
Alarms screamed bloody murder, a deafening cacophony that drilled into eardrums and set teeth on edge. Every forge-link device erupted in frantic pulses, burning emergency signals directly into retinas. The deck didn't just lurch—it convulsed violently, throwing personnel across the room as though the entire glacier had taken a direct hit from an orbital cannon, ice groaning deep below like a dying leviathan.
"Seismic!" shouted Dr. Halvorsen, the chief meteorologist, sprinting in from the observatory dome. "Magnitude eight, epicentre thirty klicks north-north-east—directly under us!"
"That's impossible," Commander Yanis snapped. "Sereph's tectonics are dead. Have been for millennia."
The holotable dissolved into static. A new icon blossomed in the Oort cloud: a cluster of contacts, distressingly large, decelerating hard enough to turn physics into a suggestion.
"Unknown vessels," Ensign Kael whispered. "Mass reading… off the scale. Bleeding gravitic shear like a black hole with manners."
Yanis hit the all-hands. "Signal high alert! Lock down the civilians. Tya, get me direct telemetry on whatever the hell that is. We may need a potential firing solution if it comes into range."
Tya was already moving. "Sir, judging by what our sensors tell me, our weapons might not do much good against whatever is headed our way."
"Do it anyway! Warm up the launch tubes and charge the rail cannon." Yanis said. "General alert to everyone else, prepare yourselves. Within the next few minutes, we'll know whether we're hunkering down or evacuating."
"Evacuate how, sir?" Ensign Kael cried. "Our dropship hasn't returned from the shipyards yet."
"We have shuttles, and we have ground vehicles. If it comes to it, we'll divide everyone between those two options." Lareth shut down the discussion. He needed his operatives focused on the matter at hand, not dwelling on how to tuck tail and run.
A sudden scurry of activity followed the activation of klaxons signalling emergency preparedness.
"Sir, getting limited telemetry. Two more clusters are appearing on long-range sensors, larger than the first one," Tya's voice wavered. "They're definitely beaming a signal onto Sereph…and they're jamming us too. I can't get the word out."
The tower shook again—harder. Somewhere deep below, Level Sub Six reported a hull breach. Then Sub Seven went dark.
Comms died with a wet electronic scream. Every channel filled with the same pulsing waveform, now loud enough to rattle teeth.
In the lower corridors, the lights failed entirely.
That was when the screaming started.
"Tor, set weapons systems to auto targeting and remote operation. You're with me, we need to get down to the lower levels," boomed Commander Yanis whilst grabbing a rifle from the weapons locker and tossing another to Tya. He checked the charge on his plasma sabre and sheathed it.
The automated lifts hung useless in their shafts, their emergency brakes engaged from the seismic tremors that rattled the station's titanium skeleton. Tya slung herself down the central ladder's frost-slicked rungs, taking them three at a time, her boots clanging against metal. The rifle mag-locked to her back swayed with each descent, its weight a cold comfort against her spine. Yanis followed ten seconds behind, his movements deliberate, each step accompanied by a grimace as his old plasma-burn wound pulled taut beneath his uniform. The air grew colder as they descended, their breath crystallizing before their faces. All the way down there were panicked voices translating over comms. They reached Sub-Level Five together, the hatch wheel spinning under Tya's gloved hands with a reluctant metallic groan.
The corridor beyond was a slaughterhouse painted in blood and viscera.
Two engineers—Holit and Kinseel, by their name patches—lay contorted like broken dolls, their environment suits split open at the seams. Their spines had been wrenched backward until vertebrae erupted through flesh, white bone glistening under the flickering emergency lights. Their blood pooled across the ice floor in spreading lakes that steamed in the subzero air, the heat of their bodies still dissipating into the frozen corridor. Parallel grooves scarred the floor where something had dragged them—claw marks four fingers wide and two centimetres deep, gouging through reinforced polymer into the metal beneath.
"Pirates," Yanis growled. "Has to be. They've tunnelled through from the old mining shafts."
Tya knelt beside a body. The wounds weren't clean. Edges cauterized and frozen at the same time. No blade did this.
"Commander—" she said with panicked breath.
The lights came back, strobing emergency hues.
Something moved at the far end of the corridor. Tall. Wrong angles. Skin like oil on water, shifting between matte black and starlight. It had too many joints. When it opened what might have been a mouth, the sound that came out was the same waveform that had murdered their comms.
It rushed them.
Yanis fired first—full auto, armour-piercing caseless. The rounds struck centre-mass and vanished, swallowed by the thing's skin. The thumping projectiles staggered the creature as it shed highly viscous fluids from the entry wounds. There were no exit wounds, and the shots did not put it down. It regained its stance and bellowed an ear-shattering screech that seemed to physically knock Tya and Lareth back and overload their senses. The creature charged in a menacing zig-zag towards a stunned Tya. She got off an unnerved burst of shots that grazed the creature's shoulder but did nothing to slow it down. In less than an instant, Lareth drew his plasma sabre and carved a molten furrow across its torso. The creature staggered, then split open like a flower made of knives, still screeching but now at a different tone. It became immediately apparent that its death cry was meant to summon help as a clattering of sounds converged from several angles. Through the air vents, they could hear the frenzied clamouring of many limbs and claws.
They fell back in a desperate scramble, Commander Yanis slamming his fist on the emergency seal as Tya emptied her magazine through the narrowing gap. The blast doors crashed together with a pneumatic scream—and three heartbeats later, the entire frame buckled slightly inward, metal shrieking as something impossibly strong hammered against it. Claws like industrial drills punched at the reinforced alloy, furious beating atrophied the door. The walls themselves began to warp and groan as the creatures tested every millimetre, hunting for structural weakness with a terrible, patient intelligence.
Upper levels reported the same. Things rising from the ice. Things that wore the shapes of nightmares no sentient mind had ever dreamed because no mind had needed to.
Lareth dragged Tya into the armoury on Level Sub Three. The door hissed shut behind them. Gunfire sounded from levels above and below.
"Well, I guess we're not arresting any pirates today," Tya quipped facetiously, her textbook coping mechanism.
"Listen to me," he said, voice raw. "Whatever this is, it isn't pirates. It isn't Patisi or Markob. It isn't anything we have a name for. All I'm sure about is that they've been here for a long time, buried beneath the ice. Those vessels approaching from the system's fringe are activating them."
Tya's hands shook as she slapped a fresh magazine into her rifle. "I know, sir. But then what are they?"
"Doesn't matter. You're getting out. Shuttle bay, Deck Super Two. The jamming field drops beyond low orbit. You break atmosphere, you beam everything we've seen to Morioka Prime. Understood?"
"I'm not leaving you."
"Not a debate, Lieutenant." Lareth gripped her shoulders hard enough to bruise. "I've buried too many sons and daughters already. Not you. Never you."
Tya slammed her fist against the bulkhead and winced at the pain. "I can't just leave you to die!" she screamed, her voice cracking as tears carved clean tracks through the grime on her face. "There must be something—anything—I can do!"
Lareth's voice dropped to a ragged whisper. "Our people need to know what's coming. That's your mission now." His eyes locked with hers, and something in them broke. "And if fate allows... my daughter. Lavari. She'll have no one left who understands both duty and mercy. No one who can show her both steel and softness."
Their gazes remained firmly locked, and the only sound was the heavy beating of their hearts. Tya remembered Lavari's face from their single meeting—the same determined jaw, the same penetrating gaze as her father. Something twisted in Tya's chest at the thought of Lareth never returning home, of Lavari growing up without his steady hand. Her breath caught. She wanted to refuse him, to drag him with her by force if necessary. Who was she to guide another's child? What right did she have to survive when others wouldn't? Yet beneath her anger, a cold certainty formed. Two missions crystallized before her: sound the alarm to the Gamaen Kingdom, and somehow become worthy of the trust Lareth had just placed in her.
The tower lurched again. Somewhere beneath them, the glacier cracked with a sound like the planet itself screaming.
They fought their way up.
Deck Two was already burning, acrid smoke coiling in tendrils that stung the eyes and scorched the lungs. Civilians pinned down behind overturned supply crates, their faces streaked with soot and terror, knuckles white as they clutched makeshift weapons. The remaining FRP troopers laid down disciplined three-round bursts at the rapidly encroaching shadows that refused to die, their kinetic projectors firing desperate flechettes at the oncoming wave of monstrosities. Dr. Halvorsen lay slumped against a bulkhead, his lab coat saturated crimson, chest cavity splayed open like an anatomy textbook, viscera glistening wetly under the emergency strobes. Impossibly, his trembling fingers still clawed at the deck plating, trying to drag his dead colleague to safety.
Tya saw Commander Yanis hesitate for the first time in her life. Sensor readings from their wristbound forge-links alerted them that up in space, a handful of bogeys had broken away from the main clusters and were rapidly vectoring toward the facility.
"Go," he said. "That's an order."
He kissed her forehead once—quick, fierce, the way a father might—and shoved her toward the shuttle.
The last thing she saw was Lareth turning back to the stairwell, rifle raised, roaring orders into his brass forge-link to direct automated fire into the atmosphere in the hope of clearing the way for Tya.
As the shuttle's ramp sealed with a pneumatic hiss, something slammed against the viewport—a writhing mass of obsidian chitin and sinew. Its face peeled back like wet paper, revealing a cluster of gelatinous orbs that pulsed with hunger. Tya recoiled as the thing's appendages scrabbled against the reinforced glass, leaving trails of iridescent slime. A staccato burst of pulse rifle fire from outside shredded its cranial cavity, and viscous midnight-black ichor exploded across the viewport, sliding down in glutinous rivulets that steamed against the cold surface.
Tya punched ignition. The little craft clawed free of the burning pad, engines howling against gravity and grief.
Coldcore Observatory died behind her. She watched it on rear sensors: the tower folding in on itself, swallowed by a chasm that opened like a mouth in the ice. For one impossible second, she thought she saw shapes rising from that chasm—titanic, angular, ancient—stretching wings of living metal emerging from the icy fissures.
A few hundred meters from the main spire, she saw the last salvo fire from the surface-to-orbit torpedo launchers towards far-off spectres entering the atmosphere. Cobalt fire stabbing upward into the descending dark.
The rail cannon followed suit with a steady jolt erupting every five seconds, each slug leaving a glowing ion tail, visible even through the blizzard.
As the observatory site faded into the distance, the shuttle changed vector, picked up speed and cleared the jamming field.
Having curved around the horizon, she cleared Sereph's terminator, that knife-edge between day and night, to put the bulk of the frozen planet between her and whatever hunted from beyond. The shuttle's engines screamed as she punched through the thinning atmosphere, ice crystals sublimating across the viewport in fractal patterns. Once in clear orbit, the stars no longer wavered but became hard, unblinking points against the void. With trembling fingers, she calibrated the tight-beam array toward Morioka Prime and began transmitting everything: sensor logs that scrolled like obituaries, visual feeds still stained with midnight ichor, and that terrible waveform, the one that continued to claw at the inside of her skull like something trying to birth itself through bone.
Halfway through the burst, warning klaxons flared again.
Three ships dropped out of FTL on intercept vectors. Patisi raiders—ugly patchwork hulls bristling with illegal weapons. The Grimace crest glowed on their prows.
Of course. The universe had one more cruelty left. Somehow, these vagrants had decided that this was the time and place to meddle in her plans.
Tya armed the shuttle's single torpedo, set the autopilot to ram the nearest bogey, and entered the escape pod. She couldn't defeat them, but she was going to give them hell anyway.
The leading vessel was obliterated by the suicidal shuttle's impact. The last thing she broadcast before the remaining pirates, now extremely agitated, clamped her pod was a single statement, declared until her voice cracked:
"This is Lieutenant Tya Tor, Coldcore Observatory. Sereph is lost. Something is waking under the ice. Something worse is approaching from the edge of the system. Tell High Command—"
Static swallowed the rest.
Far below, on a planet now cracking open in dozens of disparate locations, an ancient army stirred. Their herald had tasted blood.
The silence was over. The war had begun.
And somewhere in the black between stars, Tya Tor floated in a pirate cell, alive, alone, and carrying the only warning her people would ever get.
She closed her eyes to pinch back the tears for the people she'd lost, and began to plan.
Because grief is a forge.
And she still had fire left.
Coldcore Observatory - Sereph