Alien pov:

Space is supposed to be quiet.

Not silent—never silent. Hulls creak. Engines hum. Radios hiss. Your own breathing echoes inside your shell.

But quiet. The kind of quiet that stretches forever.

I've been counting the days by power cycles. I think it's been nine. Or twelve. Maybe more. The emergency clock stopped after the radiation surge, and I haven't bothered fixing it. What's the point? I already know I'm stranded.

The Prospector is gone. I watched her disappear until she became another star.

One loose coupling. One careless impact. One moment outside the hull tightening a damaged collector arm, and my maintenance shuttle was knocked off just far enough away that the retrieval cables couldn't reach me. Then a field of tumbling ore smashed through the gap between us.

The captain tried. They all did. But space doesn't care how hard you try. Now it's just me. One engineer. One maintenance shuttle. Enough recycled water for another few weeks. Enough geodes for... not nearly long enough. I keep pretending the cargo samples are meals instead of rations. I tell myself I'm saving the good crystals for later. That rescue will come before I have to crack open the emergency reserve.

Engineers are good at lying to themselves.

We're practically trained for it. "The damage isn't that bad.", "I can fix this.", "Just one more repair.". None of it changes the numbers. Eventually, I will starve. Just like the rest of my planet probably will.

I wonder if my family already held the mourning dance. If my sisters argued over who inherited my workshop. If Mother is pretending not to cry because she always said an engineer should expect dangerous work. I hope they found my favorite geode to use for the music.

I tried not to think about home. About the empty gemstone fields. About why we'd come all this way searching for new food deposits in the first place. Instead I counted stars. Recalculated my trajectory. Ran repairs that changed nothing. Slept when exhaustion forced me to. Woke to the same endless darkness. Eventually, hope became another system that shut down. I remember wondering if I'd simply drift forever.

Then the universe answered.

Something enormous slammed into my shuttle. Metal screamed. The cockpit folded around me like crushed shell. Warning lights flashed once before exploding into darkness. Then there was nothing beneath me.

No shuttle.

No floor.

Only space. I tumbled through the void, my six arms grasping for something that wasn't there. Fragments of my shuttle spun around me like glittering debris. I should have been terrified. Instead... I laughed. Of course. Of course my rescue would involve another collision. The object that destroyed my shuttle floated nearby, impossibly massive. It wasn't Kepteian. Its hull was too smooth. Too angular.

Too... strange.

An alien vessel. My horns twitched. We weren't alone. Every scientific academy on Kepteia had debated intelligent life for generations. Every expedition dreamed of first contact. None of them imagined it beginning with one species accidentally running over the other. I drifted helplessly toward the enormous ship. There was a transparent section near the front. Glass?

Why would anyone put glass on a spacecraft? I struck it with a dull thunk, my claws instinctively grabbing onto the smooth surface. Something moved inside. I froze. There... Standing just beyond the glass... Was the smallest intelligent creature I had ever seen. Four limbs. Only four. Pink skin completely exposed without shell or scales. Strands of... something... growing only from the top of its head. It couldn't have reached much higher than the middle of my torso.

It stared at me. I stared back. Its eyes became impossibly wide. Mine probably did too. By every star in the galaxy...

I wasn't alone anymore.