The cockpit of the Valkryie was not quite big enough for one to stretch without hitting something important. The canopy arced above his head, scratched faintly where small amounts of debris had collided with it when they left the scene of the battle at Orantei. Ayres watched the stars slide past in a slow, dignified procession and tried not to think about Parr.

“Velocity holding at warp three. Estimated time to next waypoint: thirty-seven minutes,” the fighter’s computer announced.

“Plenty of time,” he murmured. “We could tell each other jokes to pass the time.”

The computer did not dignify that with a reply.

He leaned back as far as the harness allowed and let his eyes unfocus for a moment. The stars ahead were smeared into the familiar, luminous threads of warp, dragging past the canopy like rain on a window. Somewhere out there, along this same invisible road, was Parr. He had been forced to alter his course in a search pattern, uncertain as to where her Valkyrie had ended its journey.

He could feel the line she had left behind, a loose resonance in the back of his mind that provoked the occasional change in their trajectory. Jevlak would have had a more elegant term – a subspace phenomenon, a residual distortion – but this felt simpler. The corridor through real space and subspace had been twisted, stretched, and worn down over countless centuries into a path of sorts, where his fighter was nudged back into the groove whenever he strayed.

He should not have been able to feel it. He did anyway.

“Computer,” he said. “Re-run the analysis of local subspace variance. Compare it to the previous segment, plus the Orantei imprint.”

The console obligingly overlaid a set of ugly, spiky graphs on his forward display. Peaks and troughs, repeating with just enough irregularity to be meaningful.

“Variance profile is consistent with prior corridor segments,” the computer said. “Correlation with Orantei signature: eighty-one percent.”

“Still on her trail, then.”

An hour later, the corridor began to thin. It did not happen suddenly. The hum of the warp field stayed the same, the displays remained placid, but something in the quality of the light shifted. The threads of starlight outside the canopy seemed to blur a fraction, their edges fraying.

“Approaching terminal distortion threshold,” the computer said. “Recommend exit to impulse.”

He checked the readouts. “Drop us,” he said.

Space snapped back into place with a soft, bone-deep shudder. The tunnel of light collapsed to stationary stars. The Valkyrie shook once, offended, then settled.

Ayres blinked away the momentary dizziness and looked. They had come out on the fringes of a star system. A thin, meagre sun burned a confused yellow-white in the distance. Two rocky planets clung to ragged orbits, their surfaces dull and unsettled. A thin pearl of a gas giant hung further out, a faint ring system catching the light.

In the empty space between the third and fourth orbits, was the object he had felt. A skeletal frame of struts and dishes and antennae, clustered around a central spindle, with a small habitat module clamped onto one side. Hazard strobes pulsed along its length in slow, irregular flashes, painting the metal in tired red.

“Object identified,” the computer said. “Federation listening post designation Kappa-Seventeen. No recent beacon updates logged in the main database.”

Ayres felt a small, traitorous surge of relief. One of their listening posts, not another Orantei. A place where, theoretically, there would be one bored communications officer and maybe a maintenance tech, not a hall full of chanting zealots.

“Let’s not get sentimental,” he told himself under his breath.

He brought the Valkyrie around in a slow, cautious arc, running a passive scan. The post returned a weak transponder ping.

“Life signs?” he asked.

“Indeterminate,” the computer said. “Habitat module shielding limits resolution. Power readings at twenty-seven percent of projected nominal. Local subspace variance remains above baseline.”

He hesitated for half a breath. Docking with a potentially compromised station alone in a fighter was not the most sensible of life choices. It was, however, marginally better than flying past without the opportunity to learn more.

“Bring us in,” he said. “Approach vector to the main docking collar. No active hail.”

The fighter slid toward the post, thrusters sighing softly. Up close, the station looked worse. Patches of its hull were blackened where something had overloaded. One of the smaller dishes was askew, dangling from its mounting like a broken limb. The hazard strobes flickered faster as he approached, then fell into a slow, lazy pattern again.

The docking collar loomed at the edge of his field of view: a circular tunnel extending from the habitat module, alignment lights blinking amber. The Valkyrie’s guidance system made small corrections.

“Pressure equalisation in progress,” the computer said.

The Valkyrie’s canopy hissed as it unlocked. The fighter was not designed for comfort outside of landing in a proper hanger bay. He had to twist sideways and half-crawl towards the docking hatch.

The air in the docking tube smelled of metal and dust. The emergency lighting was on, bathing everything in low red. A faint vibration thrummed along the curved, flexible tube. He moved along the tube, toward the hatch. He put his shoulder against it and shoved. The panel scraped along its runners and finally yielded.

The listening post’s main corridor greeted him with dim light and a smell he recognised: the stale, heavy odour of a place that had contained people who had stopped looking after themselves.

“Hello?” he called, because pretending at normality sometimes helped. “I’m a Starfleet officer, Captain Michael Ayres, USS Farragut. Can anyone hear me?”

Silence answered. The hazard strobes. The soft breath of circulation fans. He moved inward.

Kappa-Seventeen had not been built for comfort. The corridor was barely wide enough for two people to pass without knocking shoulders. Plain bulkheads, exposed cable runs, occasional doorways leading into equally cramped rooms. There was no viewport: the designers had not seen the need to give the operators a view of anything but their own consoles.

Half the doors were shut. The others hung ajar, like the docking hatch. Inside, he saw a bunk, unmade; a galley with a mug overturned and its contents dried into a brownish stain on the floor.

“Life signs?” he murmured.

“Indeterminate,” the fighter’s computer said in his ear. He’d left the link open. It felt less like talking to himself.

The main control room was ahead. He could feel it before he saw it: the way the hum in his head increased as he approached, the pressure behind his eyes tightening. The corridor opened into a small circular space filled with consoles and chairs, the walls lined with displays.

At the centre of it, on a raised plinth, was the reliquary. The cube sat embedded in the floor, half-subsumed into the decking. Black material had spread outwards from its core, flowing along cable ducts, wrapping itself around conduits, branching into filaments like the mycelium of some underground fungus. Where it touched the standard Starfleet plating, the metal’s colour darkened, as if stained from within.

The air around it felt dense. His ears popped faintly. The lighting above the plinth strobed, flickering between red and a strange, dim violet that made the edges of objects blur.

You brought another voice, something at the edge of perception whispered. It did not speak in words. Words were the way his mind made sense of it. We have been alone.

He shut his eyes briefly, then opened them again. The reliquary was still there. So was he. He stepped around the plinth, careful not to let his boots touch any of the black growth.

There was someone in the command chair. They had been dead long enough for the skin to settle and the smell to become part of the room. A middle-aged human, male, short-cropped hair gone thin at the crown, a Starfleet duty uniform hanging a little loose as if he had lost weight before the end. His eyes were closed. His hands rested on the armrests, fingers curled in. His face had the peculiar, terrible serenity of those who had stopped being quite themselves before they died.

“Well,” he murmured. “It looks like you tried to sit it out, lieutenant. I’m sorry this happened to you.”

A console to one side flickered weakly. He moved to it and bypassed the standard login with his command codes. The system coughed up the last log entries: audio, mostly. He keyed it on.

“This is Lieutenant Steven Rian,” a slightly nasal voice said. “Kappa-Seventeen, day two hundred and nineteen. Nothing to report, unless we count Heston’s impressive ability to burn replicated porridge.” A faint chuckle. “Ship traffic is quiet. Trade lane chatter is dull. Nobody wants to talk to the lonely post out here. In other news, I’ve invented a new game of solitaire.”

Ayres let it run. Entry after entry, small details of routine and boredom, minor complaints about resupply schedules, brief notes about passing ships. Something in him unclenched slightly. This had been an ordinary assignment. A footnote in someone’s career.

“This is Rian. Day two hundred and thirty-four. Unscheduled traffic today. Vessel designation ‘Pilgrim’s something’? The transponder is a mess. They requested a standard beacon check. They didn’t want to dock.” A pause. “They just wanted to leave us a gift.”

Ayres’ eyes closed, just for a second.

“This is Rian. Day two hundred and thirty-five.” The voice sounded strained. “I know I should log it properly, but I don’t know how to talk about the box. They call it a reliquary, it’s a place to listen, apparently. It’s warm to the touch.” A faint, nervous laugh. “Heston thinks it’s some kind of advanced transceiver. I think it’s… I don’t know what I think. The Pilgrim woman said if we kept it, we’d hear the pattern underneath the silence. I told her we had enough patterns to listen to. She just smiled.”

The next entry was shorter.

“Day two hundred and thirty-six. I can hear it.” Breathing, quick. “Not with my ears. Like… like a song you can’t quite make out from the next room. It’s probably some resonant feedback in the power couplings. Heston says we should jettison it. I told him not to be ridiculous. It’s… it’s interesting. It feels like… company.”

Ayres skipped forward.

“Day two hundred and forty. Heston has moved his bunk into the supply room. Says he sleeps better with the door between him and that thing. I asked him what he was afraid of. He said me, which was frankly rude.” A faint, strained laugh. “It’s just a box. It’s just… an old piece of something. It wants to… do what it was meant to do. Don’t we all?”

He scanned further.

“Day… I don’t know.” Rian’s voice, but more than Rian’s voice. The echo behind it was unmistakable. Ayres had heard it in Lara Tei. In Parr, over the comm. “We have been deaf for so long. The routes hum and crackle and shout about storms and pirates and schedules, and underneath it all, nothing. Empty. The net is broken. We are… mending it.”

There was a brief, ugly sound in the background. Another man’s voice, shouting. Heston, presumably. Then silence. Then: “We tried to tell him,” Rian’s voice said. “He did not want to listen. He sleeps now. We will wake him when the pattern is complete.”

Ayres killed the playback. The last few logs were just noise: overlapping voices, occasional words in languages he did not recognise, and the steady thrum of the reliquary’s influence.

He stood very still for a moment, hands resting on the console edge, letting the anger settle over him like a familiar coat. Anger at the Pilgrims. At the thing behind them. At the fact that a bored lieutenant had been handed a fragment of something too big for him to deal with and left to drown in it.

“You deserved better,” he told Rian’s decaying body.

He pulled up the external traffic logs. They were a tangle now, but he filtered by vessel size, by signature strength, by oddities. And there. A warp signature, resolving into the trace of a small craft on a narrow corridor. A Valkyrie-class fighter assigned to USS Farragut and a specific trajectory to follow.

“Right,” he said, quietly. “Let’s ruin someone’s plan.”

He took stock. Kappa-Seventeen had its own equipment. He found an engineering locker, ransacked it for insulating sheaths, portable field emitters, and a half-decent cutting torch. His hands moved with decisive economy.

The reliquary pulsed as he approached again. The air around it felt warmer now.

We could help you follow her, something suggested, laying the thought against the inside of his mind with obscene delicacy. We know the road. We built it. You are slow. Small. You will be late.

“You can,” he said, “bugger off.”

There was a flicker of surprise. The pressure in his skull increased, then decreased, probing for a way in. He imagined it like a man testing the bars of a cage.

“You’re making a category error,” he told it. “You think everyone who picks you up wants to be part of your net. Some of us just want to turn out the lights.”

He shut out the hum as best he could and got to work. The growths were not organic, but they behaved like it. The first time he sank the torch into one of the thicker strands, it convulsed, retracting slightly, the surface cracking to reveal layers of delicate, crystalline structure beneath. A sharp, bitter smell filled the air, like burnt electronics.

The alarms started at once. Not the harsh bleat of Starfleet klaxons – those systems were dead – but something lower, insistent, throbbing through the deck. The station shook, a slow, angry shudder.

Stop, the not-voice said. We are not finished. This is wasteful. Brutal.

“So am I,” he grunted, and cut deeper.

It took longer than it should have. Every strand he severed seemed to find another path. The growth had woven itself into every major power trunk, wrapped itself around the primary conduits, sunk filaments into the life-support control. He had to work in layers, severing it from the main systems without crashing what was left of the listening post outright.

He did not know how long it took. His arms ached. His lungs burned with the acrid smell. Sweat ran into his eyes. The hum in his head climbed toward something that sounded dangerously like a scream.

Then, abruptly, there was a change. A note dropped out of the air, like a string breaking.

The black material recoiled. Not physically – the structure did not move – but the sense of expansion, of pushing outward, was gone. What remained felt contained. Sullen.

The cube at the centre of the plinth sat in a small circle of scorched deck plating. The filaments connecting it to the rest of the growth had been severed. It looked, he realised, smaller.

You are cruel, the not-voice said. You are cutting nerves.

“That’s rather the point,” he said as he levelled the small phaser and obliterated the reliquary.