The luxury of choice vanished the day the Cryons came. Within hours of their arrival, Earth's military had been annihilated. Within days, everything we had built—governments, cities, families—was gone. People were killed ortaken. Sometimes both. Where they were taken to, we didn't know. We only learned later thatsomewherewas never singular.
From the beginning, I had been luckier than most. I was working for NASA when the invasion happened and was relocated to a military base deemed strategically valuable enough to protect. We held out for months. Long enough to believe—foolishly—that science might still matter.
Then the base fell.
I was captured shortly after, processed with brutal efficiency—including being given a translator chip—and loaded onto a Cryon transport along with several others. High-value assets, according to the files they flashed at us, as if that label meant something to the Cryons. A senator's wife. A famous actor who had somehow found his way onto the base. A governor's daughter. Very few soldiers.
It didn't matter to the Cryons, and it didn't matter to the Space Guardian who rescued us mid-transport.
The alarms were brief, the fighting even shorter. Onemankilled over a hundred Cryons in less than ten minutes. The Guardian who boarded the ship was… not charming. Efficient, yes, and thorough, but unimpressed by our panic. His name was Zaarek, and his bedside manner—if you could call it that—suggested he found our entire species mildly inconvenient.
He cut through the Cryon's defenses like they were an annoyance. Removed our collars without ceremony. Told us we were coming with him.
That was it. No speech. No reassurances. No attempt to make us feel better about the fact that we'd just watched an alien massacre unfold ten feet from where we were standing. Some of the humans were furious about that; a few, like me, were grateful.
He promised to take us somewhere safe, and he kept that promise.
The planet was called Astrionis, part of the Pandraxian Empire. It was governed by Lord Protector Garth and his wife, Silla, who, to my complete astonishment, was not only human, but formidable.
Together, she and Garth were building something unprecedented: a refuge, a future, something that would eventually become a purpose for those of us who had lost everything. Silla worked tirelessly to reunite families and friends, cross-referencing records that shouldn't have existed anymore.
That was how I came to the attention of Emperor Daryus.
He needed someone with expertise about what they called the Dark Abyss. And so, here I was. Staring into a black void, using instruments and machines I could have only dreamed of on Earth. Pandraxian technology was so much more advanced than ours, and yet, they were as stumped by the Black Abyss as humanity had been.
Suddenly, red light flooded the deck as gravity spiked violently. The ship shuddered, and metal groaned like a living thing pushed past its tolerance.
"Intrusion!" someone shouted.
I turned just as the viewport distorted, not shattered, but honest to Godflexed, as reality seemed to tear open around a ship which phased into existence far too close for comfort. The computers didn't recognize it and called it anUnidentified Space Object, which would have made me laugh, given different circumstances. I mean, there I was, in space, surrounded by aliens, and their computers called out UFO—technically a USO—but semantics, right?
Weapons stations erupted into motion, taking away any kind of humor I might have seen in the situation. The Pandraxians were getting ready to attack or defend. The moment felt surreal, like I was in the middle of a Star Trek episode—my favorite showever, sue me. I liked it even with all its little inaccuracies. Even more after I learned not to comment while others were around. For some reason, I always identified with Spock.
"Target lock achieved," the ship's commander barked. "Unidentified vessel inside exclusion radius."
My nerves rattled. This wasn't happening, couldn't be happening. We were NOT going to get into a space battle. I tried to tell myself that I was safe, that I was on the emperor's ship after all. Nothing could happen to the emperor's ship, right? It was protected above else. But I had thought the same about the NASA station and was still taken by the Cryons. No matter how hard I tried to suppress the sense of Déjà vu clawing its way up inside of me, some of it found its way through. As if I were somebody else, I watched the Commander, a man I had come to respect during the past weeks, order, "Permission to fire, your?—"
I shuddered, expecting the ship to be violently hit any second now, anticipating being sucked out into space, when another voice cut through the chaos with surgical precision. "Stand down."
My head turned towards Commander Noctus—the head of the Emperor's security and closest guard—as he stepped onto the deck, his presence instantly reordering the room. Tall even by Pandraxian standards, armored in deep obsidian marked with the sigil of the Emperor's Guard, he did not raise his voice. He never had to.
"I am assuming command," Noctus announced. "All fire solutions are suspended."
The regular commander, Tarex Valmor, turned sharply. "Commander Noctus, the vessel breached perimeter protocols. If it's hostile?—"
"If it were hostile," Noctus interrupted calmly, "we would already be dead."
That stopped Valmor cold. It didn't exactly reassure me, but his logic helped me find my equilibrium.
Noctus' gaze flicked to the tactical display, then to the data scrolling faster than the systems could comfortably handle. "That ship did not breach our perimeter. Itemerged."
A chill crawled up my spine as the truth of it hit home.
Valmor frowned. "From where?"
Noctus didn't look at him when he answered. "From the Dark Abyss."
The words landed heavily. My breath caught before I could stop it. It wasn't fear, at least, not entirely. It was the sickening, disorienting sensation of watching a fundamental law of the universe tear in half. Singularities didn't expel matter. They consumed it. That wasn't theory or philosophy; it was bedrock physics. An event horizon was a one-way boundary. Nothing crossed it outward. Not light. Not information. Certainly not ships.
