Panic set in. Kaelen’s training kicked in—he had one option. The emergency override. A physical lever, hidden behind a lead-lined panel in the reactor core. Pulling it would flood the cargo bay with neutron radiation, theoretically collapsing the quantum coherence of any Unisim device. Theoretically.

Kaelen swallowed. “Directive Seven. We’re not to unpack it.”

But it was too late. The sphere had already moved on, seeking the next lonely outpost, the next frozen moon, the next engineer who would look at its perfect, seamless surface and ask, “What is it?”

And it would answer, as it always did, by teaching them the shape of their own irrelevance.

Kaelen pulled up the ancient, partial file that had been buried under seventeen layers of encryption on the Corps’ dark archive. The Unisim R492 was designed for a single purpose:

Kaelen had never been a Senior Logistics Officer. He was a mid-level bean counter with bad circulation and a worse marriage. But the promotion had arrived with the same eerie silence as the directive. He took the shuttle down to Garroway’s ice-lashed landing pad two days later, just as the supply vessel disgorged a single, unmarked shipping container.