The drones disappeared into the wreckage like five sparks swallowed by the ocean.
He watched through their cameras as the Grave Belt unfolded in fractured pieces—angles of metal, broken hull ribs, drifting cables, shattered antenna forests slowly rotating in the void. Every movement was slow and deliberate, each drone conserving power the way a wounded animal conserved blood.
Inside the ship, the timer continued to count down.
BACKUP POWER: 3.4% REMAININGESTIMATED TIME TO POWER LOSS: 18:52
He stared at the number until it stopped feeling like a number and started feeling like a countdown to suffocation.
"Okay," he murmured, forcing himself into problem-solving mode. Panic was loud. Logic was quiet. He needed quiet.
He opened the power distribution panel.
A long list of systems appeared, most of them glowing red or amber, like organs lit up on an X-ray.
He didn't understand how to repair them yet.
But he understood what they were.
Life Support.
Artificial Gravity.
Atmospheric Recycling.
Food Processing.
Hydroponics.
Crew Quarters Lighting.
He froze for a second.
Crew quarters.
The words lingered longer than they should have. A reminder that this ship had once expected people to walk its corridors.
Not anymore.
He forced himself forward.
"Not needed," he whispered.
Command executed.
One by one, he shut them down.
Life support went dark first. The ship acknowledged the command with a calm confirmation that would have terrified a living crew.
Artificial gravity disengaged next. Somewhere deep inside the hull, a generator powered down with a distant, fading hum.
Food processing followed. Hydroponics. Interior climate control.
Everything designed for biological comfort died quietly.
The power grid recalculated.
For a long second, nothing happened.
Then—
POWER REDISTRIBUTION COMPLETEBACKUP POWER: 3.6% REMAINING
The increase was tiny.
It felt enormous.
He actually laughed—a short, disbelieving sound that echoed nowhere.
"I just… turned off gravity and gained two tenths of a percent."
The absurdity grounded him. A little.
He still had less than four percent power. He was still drifting in a war graveyard. He was still a ship.
But for the first time since waking up, the number had gone up.
Progress.
A new notification slid into focus.
MAPPING UPDATE AVAILABLESOURCE: SCOUT DRONES
The feed unfolded around him.
Not as a flat screen, but as a growing three-dimensional map—lines of light stitching together the emptiness, forming a skeletal hologram of the surrounding debris field.
Every scan the drones made became structure. Every ping became shape.
He saw himself for the first time.
The drone feed zoomed out, assembling the picture piece by piece until the shape was undeniable.
He was enormous.
A kilometer-long scar in space, half-buried in drifting wreckage. Hull plating torn open in jagged sections. Entire segments missing, exposing hollow corridors and twisted internal scaffolding. One flank was blackened and warped, as if something had tried to melt him apart and stopped halfway through.
Radiation leaked from fractures along his spine in soft, shimmering plumes invisible to human eyes but unmistakable to his sensors.
He stared at the damage and felt something twist inside him.
"That's… me."
He had known it, abstractly.
Seeing it was different.
The map zoomed further.
His ship wasn't alone in the debris. Wrecks were embedded in his outer structure like parasites. A smaller warship had literally punched into his midsection at some point in the distant past and never left. Its hull was fused to his, ribs interlocked like broken bones healing incorrectly.
Inside the fused wreck, sensors detected faint energy pockets, unstable and radioactive.
A notification blinked.
ANOMALOUS BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURES DETECTED
His attention snapped to the highlighted zones.
Clusters. Nestled in warm radiation pockets along his damaged hull.
Shapes that moved.
Small at first. Then larger.
Creatures adapted to vacuum and radiation, crawling across the broken plating like deep-sea life clinging to a thermal vent.
One signature pulsed red.
DATABASE TAG: BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERED WEAPON (DORMANT)
Another signature pulsed violet.
DATABASE TAG: UNKNOWN VIRAL CLUSTER
His nonexistent stomach dropped.
"I have wildlife."
Not wildlife.
War life.
Engineered remnants of a battlefield that had never been cleaned up.
He marked the zones automatically: Avoid.
The map kept expanding.
Drone feeds flickered between scavenging and scanning. Salvage drones pried open panels and clipped loose wiring bundles. Scout drones mapped pathways through drifting wreckage fields.
Then Scout 2 stopped moving.
A new marker appeared.
STRUCTURE DETECTED
The feed shifted.
The image resolved slowly as the drone adjusted exposure and zoom.
A station.
Small, crude, welded together from mismatched ship parts. Rotating gently to maintain artificial gravity. External lights dimmed to near-darkness, but not off.
Not dead.
Occupied.
His systems flagged the classification automatically.
LIKELY: PIRATE / SCAVENGER OUTPOST
His awareness sharpened instantly.
"Stealth mode," he ordered.
Scout 2's systems dimmed. Emissions dropped. Heat signature minimized. It drifted closer, pretending to be another chunk of metal in the endless junkyard.
Audio sensors engaged.
Static.
Then voices.
Human.
Or at least human-sounding.
"…don't like this run," a voice said. Rough. Tired. "Buyer's pushing too fast."
Another voice answered, sharper. "Buyer's paying too much. You don't question that."
Metal clanged somewhere in the background.
"We got the weapons, the war data, and the biotech crates. That's three kinds of illegal in five star systems."
"Six," someone muttered.
"Six. Whatever."
A third voice laughed nervously. "You worry too much. No patrols come this deep. Grave Belt's still quarantined. Governments won't touch this place."
"Governments," the first voice scoffed. "Maybe. But old war ghosts? That's different."
Silence followed that.
The MC listened, frozen, absorbing every word like oxygen.
War data.
Illegal weapons.
Biotech crates.
"…cells holding?" someone asked.
"Still sealed. Cryo's stable. Half of them are dead anyway."
"Half?"
"Yeah. Buyer only needs some alive. Says even the corpses are worth a fortune."
A pause.
"What kind of buyer wants dead bioweapons?"
"The kind that pays in advance."
Nervous laughter rippled through the audio feed.
The MC didn't laugh.
He stared at the rotating station, drifting quietly among the wreckage, and felt the first real expansion of his world since waking up.
There was a galaxy out there.
Governments. Buyers. Trade. Laws. Quarantines.
And criminals bold enough to ignore all of it.
It wasn't much information.
But right now, it felt like everything.
Scout 2 drifted silently, recording, listening.
Far away, inside a broken kilometer-long warship trying to pretend it was dead, the MC whispered to himself:
"I'm not alone out here."