The Obsidian Wraith drifted silently in the darkness of the Aldaron Sector. Its engines idled, systems locked into passive drift mode, leaving the ship to float like a solitary speck among the stars.
Ethan sat in the cockpit, the pilot's seat reclined slightly. His boots rested on the base of the console, arms folded across his chest, gaze distant as the stars glimmered beyond the curved glass.
He wasn't rushing to the next relay. Not yet.
"Iris," he murmured. "Keep us dark. No active scans. No emissions."
"Acknowledged, Captain," came the AI's smooth response.
The silence wasn't unnerving, it was necessary. A space to think. A space to feel.
The memory of the handoff lingered like a weight in Ethan's chest. Two stealth frigates, cloaked in veils of military silence, had appeared and vanished with all the subtlety of a ghost's breath.
No grand entrance. No theatrical displays. Just presence, abrupt and absolute, followed by disappearance just as sudden. Their arrival had been fast, precise, clinical. Cold in its professionalism. And unsettling in its implications.
Ethan had played the good mercenary. He'd said all the right things, offered no resistance, asked no questions. He'd followed protocol like a textbook example of Federation civilian auxiliary conduct. In and out. Do your part and move along.
But still… the courier pod.
That old courier.
Torus Norr-len.
Even now, the name had a peculiar weight to it, like a note played in a key his instincts couldn't quite harmonize with. The ID hadn't come easily. It had taken an incredibly advanced AI Iris a few minutes of dedicated decryption, even with a full local scan of the pod's registry.
The encryption had been top-level, layered in a way that resisted brute-force attempts and misled sensor diagnostics. The type of tag that didn't just protect anonymity, but buried the individual beneath layers of legal and jurisdictional red tape. A sealed diplomatic channel under Federation Military Command.
Federation couriers registered at that level weren't delivering letters or orders. They were carrying secrets. The kind that came with contingencies. The kind of cargo too dangerous to entrust to automated delivery systems or civilian channels or even, apparently, to someone like Ethan, despite his growing reputation as a mercenary.
And the cryo-pod itself, it hadn't simply been stored in the ship. It had been buried deep within the courier vessel's infrastructure, hidden impressively well, power signature dampened, masked from all standard scans.
If Ethan hadn't extended his psychic senses across the derelict, hadn't risked reaching into the unseen layers of the environment... he would have missed it entirely. A ghost within a ghost.
Another detail was that the Corsairs hadn't just stumbled upon the ship by coincidence. That much was clear. Ethan knew it in the marrow of his bones. Their timing, their precision, their decision to engage without hesitation.
It hadn't followed the script of scavengers or opportunistic raiders. They hadn't even tried to loot the cargo, hadn't bothered with the black box or hull salvage. They'd gone straight for destruction. As if it were the only thing that mattered.
It screamed of preparation.
It reeked of a termination order disguised as piracy.
And Ethan, despite the calm of space outside, couldn't shake the impression that he had just walked across a tripwire no one expected him to notice.
"Something was threaded through that encounter," he muttered aloud, almost to himself. His voice felt small in the vast silence of the cockpit. "Invisible wires pulling at both ends."
"Speculation or instinct?" Iris asked gently, her tone even but curious.
He didn't answer immediately. He tilted his head slightly, eyes narrowing as he stared out through the wide viewport. One of the stars in the distance pulsed faintly red, not a star, he realized, but a navigational beacon embedded deep within a system cluster. Faint and far, but constant. That was the nearest Federation command station in the Mizanol System, where Iris had sent the official incident report.
But now he questioned it.
Had the report even reached the local chain of command? Or had it been rerouted midstream, captured and redirected by someone with more authority, more urgency? Perhaps even someone like Commander Laa'rosh Deyan herself, acting under a shadow directive Ethan would never see.
He couldn't rule it out.
He'd seen enough manipulation in this galaxy already to know that protocol was as often a smokescreen as it was a structure.
And that was what made him uneasy.
This hadn't been a random encounter. This wasn't a "wrong-place-wrong-time" situation.
No.
It felt orchestrated.
Calculated.
Later, after his usual meal, Ethan retreated to the training room. The soft hum of the rotation core buzzed low under his boots as he moved through the space, throwing out slow shadow punches into the dimly lit air. He wasn't trying to train hard. Just keep his body in rhythm. Burn off the static tension of what they had just lived through.
Eventually, he transitioned into a seated position on the mat, legs crossed. The Astral Slayer lay beside him. Still. Silent. Always there.
Ethan inhaled slowly. Let the breath fill his lungs.
And then he let it fall away.
His mind dipped into focus, a sensation he'd been nurturing for weeks now. Controlled meditation wasn't new to him, but tonight it came easier. Smoother. Like slipping into a familiar current.
And as the ship drifted, quiet and sealed, he felt it.
Something deep inside. A thread.
Not a flash of energy or psychic vision, but a sensation. Steady, subtle, like the pressure of a submerged tether brushing along his awareness.
He didn't reach for it.
He just… acknowledged it.
And it pulsed gently in return.
He opened his eyes after nearly thirty minutes, exhaled again, and rose to his feet. The Astral Slayer hummed faintly as he slid it back into its holster. Nothing had spoken. No voice. No awakening.
But something was coming. That blurry figure that had appeared was getting slightly more vivid.
And he could feel the difference inside him.
Psychic instinct? Growth? Or just readiness?
He wasn't sure yet. But something had changed.
Back in the cockpit, the stars hadn't moved, but the man sitting among them had.
"Iris. Prep for FTL. Let's move to the relay."
"As you wish, Captain."
The Obsidian Wraith began to stir, ready to resume its long trip across Federation space to their final destination, Caryth Sector.