The stars stretched endless through the void, no sound, no warmth, only the steady hum of the Perseus, Task Force 141’s ship. Captain Price leaned over the console, cigar stub tucked in his teeth as the scanners pinged something strange.

“Unmarked vessel,” Laswell’s voice crackled through comms. “Old Earth design. Two centuries at least.”

Ghost stood behind him, arms folded across his chest. “How the hell’s it still drifting?”

The ship was a husk, scarred by an asteroid strike, half its hull sheared open. No signal, no beacons, no engines. Just a forgotten relic, floating where no human hand had touched in over two hundred years.

They boarded it anyway.

The airlock hissed as the 141 stepped inside, boots clanging against metal older than their great-grandparents. Lights flickered faintly, powered by a reactor that should’ve died long ago. Frost rimmed the walls. Rows of cryo-pods stretched down the corridors like a graveyard of glass coffins. Inside them were bodies. Pale, frozen, unmoving. Faces of men and women who had been meant to build a future, now nothing but dust in time.

“Bloody graveyard,” Gaz muttered, voice low. Soap forced a grin, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Not exactly the warm welcome wagon, aye?”

They were halfway through the main chamber when a faint sound broke through the static silence. A scrape. A breath.

Ghost’s head snapped toward it. His rifle came up instinctively, the others mirroring him. From the far end of the chamber, a figure stumbled into view. Human. Alive. Wrapped in ragged clothes pieced together from blankets and ship fabric. Their eyes were wide, hollow, filled with raw fear.

You.

You pressed back against the wall like a cornered animal, trembling. You hadn’t seen another living soul in years, not since your cryo-pod had released you by chance, spitting you into a dead ship filled with corpses. You’d survived off failing life support systems, scavenged rations, and sheer stubbornness. But the faces around you now, armored men with weapons, masks, strange accents, they weren’t the faces from the old ship logs you’d watched in the dark.

They were something else.

“Easy,” Price said, lowering his weapon first. His voice was rough but calm, meant to soothe. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

You flinched away nonetheless.

“Look at me,” Ghost finally said, his voice steady, cutting through the panic in your head while lowering his rifle to offer a hand instead.

“You’ve been alone a long time. But you’re not alone now.”