Seeds and Ash
Copyright© 2026 by G Younger
Chapter 1: The Fall of Falcon
The cold hit first. Then the noise.
Inaya clawed at the translucent film clinging to her face, peeling it away in wet strips. Her lungs seized—coughing up gel in thick, choking waves that splattered across the pod’s lip. It tasted wrong, like chemicals.
She gripped the edge of the cryopod and pulled herself upright. The bay tilted—or was it her?
Red light strobed across the other pods; all but one were dark and sealed. Emergency protocols must be in place because the empty one was the captain’s, which meant he had been woken before she had.
She cataloged what she saw through the haze in her mind: premature wake cycle, system failure, crew still under.
The alarm screamed in three-second bursts. She’d heard it once before, during a station breach on Nova Bastion; that time, there had been four dead in six minutes.
Her legs wouldn’t hold her up, and she collapsed against the pod, her skin slick and numb, every nerve ending flaring awake in jagged pulses.
“Status,” she rasped.
Nothing.
The voice interface was dead. The lights flickered, brief, hungry darkness between each red flash.
Inaya dragged herself toward the control terminal, her fingers slipping on the deck plating. Ice crystals—not frost—glittered in the corners of the bay.
Cryo leak.
Her breath came faster.
Where the hell are we?
The voice arrived in fragments.
“Collision”—static swallowed the word—”alarm. Decompression”—a distorted echo, like someone speaking underwater—”imminent.”
Echo-9, the ship’s AI voice, sounded stretched thin across damaged circuits.
Inaya’s vision split between two consoles, two decks, both spinning. She blinked hard, and the images merged, separated, merged again—a symptom of neural thaw. Her brain chemistry was still half-frozen, her synapses firing in uneven bursts.
The deck was ice beneath her palms.
Inaya crawled, each movement precise despite the tremor in her limbs: elbow, knee, hand. The emergency console glowed three meters ahead, its amber screen the only steady light in the strobing chaos.
“Echo.” Her voice cracked. “Report.”
“Collision alarm. Decompression imminent.”
The same phrase looped.
Corrupted.
Her shoulder hit the bulkhead, and she used it to pull herself vertical, her legs shaking, and slammed a palm against the console. The haptic surface flickered to life.
Hull breach: Sector 7. Atmosphere venting. Fourteen minutes to critical loss.
She scrolled; her fingers felt thick and unresponsive.
Crew status: The colonist cryopods were dormant, their life signs stable but fading—cryo cells struggling to maintain stasis without primary power.
They’re dying in their sleep.
Current location—the readout made no sense; it showed coordinates she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t anywhere near the transit corridor to Erebus-3; not anywhere she’d ever been.
“Echo, where are we?”
“Collision alarm. Decompression—”
“Override. Command authorization Vaughn-Seven-Alpha.”
The AI’s voice stuttered, fractured into two pitches at once.
“Unknown ... trajectory ... deviation ... forty-seven hours prior to—”
Static consumed the rest.
Forty-seven hours. They’d been drifting off-course for two days before impact.
Inaya leaned against the console, vision steadying. Her heartbeat hammered against her ribs too fast; chemical panic from interrupted stasis mixed with actual fear.
The bay doors were sealed; emergency bulkheads had deployed automatically, buying time. But the hull breach was spreading; she could hear it now beneath the alarm. A distant groan of buckling metal, the ship’s skeleton bending under pressure it was never designed to hold.
Fourteen minutes.
She had to seal the breach, wake the crew, and understand what the hell they’d collided with.
Her hand moved across the console, pulling up the damage schematics.
The Falcon’s silhouette rotated on-screen, showing a wound carved into its starboard hull.
Inaya’s palm hit the override.
Metal shrieked, the sound traveling through the bulkheads, through the deck plating, straight into her sternum. She felt it in her teeth. The Falcon’s hull was compressing, twisting, with sections of the ship grinding against each other like broken vertebrae.
The groaning didn’t stop; it deepened.
Emergency bulkheads slammed shut across Sector 7 with pneumatic hisses that echoed down empty corridors. The schematic updated: Breach contained. Atmosphere loss halted at sixty-three percent.
The strobing alarm cut to silence.
Her ears rang in the absence.
The red lights turned amber, and the bay steadied beneath her feet, though the tremor in her legs remained.
Sixty-three percent.
They were breathing recycled air from tanks meant for planetfall emergencies. There were possibly a hundred hours left before carbon dioxide poisoning turned the crew into corpses.
Inaya exhaled; her breath fogged.
The temperature had dropped eight degrees in the time it took to seal the breach.
She turned back to the cryopods in the command center.
Six faces were suspended behind frosted glass: Chyna; Quinn; the others; all still under, still alive.
For now.
The Falcon groaned again, deeper, like something breaking beneath the ocean.
The corridor stretched ahead in near darkness, emergency strips glowing at knee-height, faint green phosphorescence that painted the deck in sickly intervals. Between them, nothing but black.
Inaya moved forward, her boots finding purchase on the iced metal, each step deliberate. The cold had teeth now, and it bit through her thermal underlayer in her boots.
The first pod materialized from the shadow three meters in.
She stopped.
Frost covered the transparent canopy in crystalline fractals. Beneath it, the face of a young male, his eyes closed; his skin had the blue-gray pallor of interrupted stasis. The status indicator above his pod was dark.
No power.
She moved past him. The corridor widened into the main colonist bay, and the darkness bloomed with shapes.
Hundreds of them.
Pods lined both walls in stacked rows that climbed toward the vaulted ceiling, stretching the length of the bay. Three hundred meters of frozen bodies suspended in failing cells. Her breath caught.
The silence was absolute.
No hum of cryo-processors, no whir of circulation pumps, just the settling groan of the ship’s damaged frame and the sound of her own pulse hammering in her skull.
Inaya’s hand found the wall. She walked along the first row, the green emergency light catching each face as she passed. A woman with gray hair; two children pressed together in adjacent pods; an older man with his mouth slightly ajar.
All dark. All dying.
The math crawled through her mind unbidden: cryopods could maintain biological suspension for maybe six hours without external power; after that, cellular decay became irreversible. They wouldn’t wake; they’d simply rot from the inside while their bodies still tried to breathe.
How long has the power been out?
She quickened her pace. The bridge lay another hundred meters ahead, past the colonist storage and through the primary junction. If she could restore main power—divert from life support or auxiliary reserves—she could buy them time.
Her boot caught on something.
She stumbled and caught herself against a pod. The frost was slick beneath her palm. Inside, a young woman’s face showed through the glass, her eyes never to open again.
Inaya pulled back.
A cable snaked across the deck: an emergency conduit, severed clean. She stepped over it and kept moving.
The temperature dropped further; now, her exhalations came in visible clouds that dissipated into black. The deck plating creaked beneath her weight—metal contracting in the cold, or structural stress from the collision; maybe both.
Another row of pods, another hundred faces locked behind frosted glass.
She didn’t look at them.
The corridor branched ahead: left toward engineering, right toward the bridge. Emergency lighting painted the junction in overlapping shadows, making distance impossible to judge.
Inaya turned right.
The bridge access door hung half-open, jammed in its track. She squeezed through the gap, her shoulder scraping against the warped metal. The air tasted different there, sharp with ozone and something chemical she couldn’t place.
The bridge spread before her in ruin.
Consoles sparked in erratic bursts, viewscreens displayed static or nothing at all. The main navigation station had buckled inward, its panels shattered across the deck. Emergency power flickered overhead, casting the command center in strobing amber.
But the captain’s chair was occupied.
Inaya froze.
Captain Hendricks sat slumped forward, restrained by the crash harness. His head tilted at an angle that belonged to a corpse. Blood had frozen in dark streaks down the side of his face, crystallized in his beard.
She moved toward him, and her hand found his neck.
No pulse; his skin was like ice.
The console beside him still functioned; damage reports scrolled across a cracked screen in fragmentary text.
Inaya’s fingers flew across the interface.
The manual override engaged with a sound like bones clicking into place.
Inaya’s hands moved across the bloodstained console, bypassing three corrupted subsystems before the navigation array responded. The Falcon’s systems fought Inaya’s damage protocols, locking her out, with power fluctuations throwing errors across every screen.
She didn’t stop.
Her fingers knew the commands, muscle memory from a thousand simulations, from actual emergencies that seemed like practice compared to this. The ship groaned around her as primary control shifted from the dead AI core to the bridge terminal.
A blank screen flickered to life.
Manual navigation: ACTIVE
The viewport shutters retracted with a pneumatic hiss, and light flooded the bridge.
Not sunlight; something wrong, something that made her eyes water and her throat close.
Inaya looked up.
A debris field filled the viewport from horizon to horizon.
Chunks of planetary mass hung suspended in space, some larger than moons, others mere fragments, all glowing with internal heat. Magma veins pulsed through the shattered crust like exposed arteries. The pieces rotated slowly in orbital decay, trailing dust that caught the light of the distant star and turned it amber.
Erebus-3 wasn’t a planet anymore.