Inside the Helldiver ship Vigilant, Sergeant Colin, his black and blue armor bearing the insignia of his long career, was studying the latest updates to the galactic map. Suddenly, the intercom crackled.
"This is Sergeant Colin, what is it?" he responded, his gruff voice betraying years of command.
The soft, clear voice of Shiva, the caramel-skinned android who served as the deck officer, answered him. "The ship has detected an automatic distress signal. Origin: an unknown vessel adrift in sector 7-Gamma. But... there's a problem."
Colin straightened up. "Which is?"
"According to signal analysis, this call was broadcast several centuries ago. Our calculations estimate it at roughly... 500 years."
Silence fell. Five hundred years. A ghost ship, drifting since the Age of Strife, perhaps even earlier.
"I'm on my way. Prepare a team. Six men, full kit."
"At your orders, Sergeant."
Minutes later, Colin faced his team in the embarkation bay. Hard faces, eyes that had seen it all, framed by customized powered armor.
"Listen up, guys," Colin barked. "We have an unknown vessel. Its S.O.S. is five hundred years old. We don't know what's inside. We're taking the landing corvette, we assess the situation, and if there's a danger, we eliminate it. Is that clear?"
"Sergeant, yes, Sergeant!" they roared in unison.
They all boarded the corvette, an aggressively lined ship designed for rapid insertions. The pilot, one of Colin's men, skillfully maneuvered to approach the derelict.
The ship was ancient, of a strange design, its hull worn by centuries of micrometeorites and radiation. Circling it, the pilot pointed his spotlight at the identification plaque on the bow. The letters, half-scoured away, were still legible:
EVENT HORIZON.
"Event Horizon..." Colin murmured. "A name from Humanity's Golden Age. A real fossil."
Inside the Corvette
"So, what's the readout?" Colin asked, leaning over the scan screens.
The Helldiver designated HD2 shook his head. "Nothing, Sarge. The ship is cold. No signs of life, no significant power source, no abnormal radiation. It's like... everything's normal."
But an instinct, honed by decades of high-risk missions, told Colin something was wrong. A silence too perfect. An absence too profound.
"We're taking a closer look. Get ready."
The team donned their helmets and locked their armor. The corvette maneuvered with precision, its docking clamp connecting with a metallic screech to the Event Horizon's external airlock. After a long moment filled only with the sounds of pressurization, the hatches opened, revealing a dark and sinister corridor.
They stepped inside, the lamps on their armor slicing through the gloom.
"Active scans!" ordered Colin. "All sensors on alert. I want everything detected, I don't want to miss a thing."
They powered up their scanners to full. Nothing. No biological signatures, no residual heat. The air was dead, cold, and zero-gravity reigned, dust and debris floating slowly in their light beams.
"Bill, Shaun," Colin commanded. "Check the engine room. Me and the others will sweep the rest of the place. And above all... be careful."
The group split up, the magnetic soles of their boots echoing ominously in the metal carcass.
---
Deep within the ship, in a lair the scanners had been unable or unwilling to penetrate, where the steel seemed to have fused with a black, organic substance, something stirred.
Eyes opened, bloodshot and filled with a madness that defied millennia. A mouth of twisted teeth stretched into a grin that was no longer human.
A guttural voice, a rasp seeming to come from beyond, growled in the darkness, an echo distorted by a nightmare dimension.
"Blood... for the Blood God..."
The whisper repeated, louder, more hateful.
"Skulls... for the Skull Throne..."
On the displays of Colin's team, all the sensors suddenly went haywire at once, showing a chaos of impossible data before shorting out in a crackle of sparks. The lamps on their armor began to flicker frantically.
The ship was not empty. It had never been empty. It had been waiting.