Before Rina could ask what that meant, the singularity pulsed.
Captain Rina Voss, a woman with a scar that pulled her left eye into a permanent squint, didn’t look up from the fusion torch’s pressure gauge. “Details, Kael. Not poetry.”
Rina took the controls. The UMS512 shuddered as she nudged it into the gravity well’s outer slope. “Kael, give me a trajectory. A whisper-thin one.”
They were paid in one thing only: a new course, burned into the nav computer by the station’s dying AI. ums512 1h10 natv
“Kaelen,” Rina whispered into the silence. “What’s the mass of a dead ship?”
Kaelen’s fingers flew across the nav computer. “Course plotted. But Captain… the gravity curve isn’t stable. It’s… breathing .”
The singularity’s ring of light flared, and the UMS512 lurched. Time began to crawl. Big Jo moved like a statue. Lina’s scream stretched into a low, endless drone. Only Rina and Kaelen remained in real-time—because only they were touching the ship’s controls. Before Rina could ask what that meant, the
“1H10 NATV,” whispered Kaelen, tapping the flickering screen. “That’s the nav point. A Class-3 singularity core, heavy as a moon, drifting through the Perpetual Wake. And we’re supposed to catch it.”
It wasn’t a glowing orb or a swirling maelstrom. It was a hole —a perfect sphere of absolute black, rimmed by a thin, furious ring of blue-shifted light. It looked like an eye. An eye that was watching them.
“Good.” She smiled. “Debris drifts.” Not poetry
UMS512 1H10 NATV – SURVIVORS. NEXT TARGET: HOME.
It began as a serial number on a shipping manifest, but to the five people crammed into the rusted hold of the UMS512 , it was a death sentence.
When the UMS512 rebooted, the core was gone. But the relay station—now unanchored—sent its distress call.
“It’s alive!” Kaelen shouted. “It’s a predator! ‘NATV’ isn’t Natural Vector—it’s Narrative Vector ! It reacts to conscious intent!”