Seeds and Ash
Copyright© 2026 by G Younger
Chapter 13: Fire and Frost
The Falcon’s corridors became territories marked by silence.
Lynk moved through them in patterns calculated to avoid unnecessary encounters—maintenance routes when Rex worked the lower decks, late shifts when Chyna retreated to her quarters. Meal times were staggered to minimize overlap in the galley. The crew didn’t actively shun him, but conversations died whenever he entered a space. Glances slid away, and distance became the norm.
Three days after the egg incident, he passed Issis in the medical bay corridor. She pressed herself against the bulkhead, giving him a wide berth despite the corridor’s generous width. Her fingers touched the crucifix at her throat, a gesture he’d observed before but never with such deliberate intention.
He didn’t slow his pace.
The repairs continued, and systems stabilized at sixty-three percent efficiency. Quinn drafted evacuation protocols for the Falcon and contingency plans for abandoning ship in the event the ice shelf collapsed. Inaya authorized a second perimeter expansion, pushing their defensive boundary out another hundred meters despite dwindling power reserves.
Nobody asked Lynk’s opinion on these decisions.
On the fourth day, Geo’s construction drones failed.
Lynk heard the cursing from two decks away, with colorful combinations that would’ve been impressive if they weren’t directed at machines experiencing simultaneous system corruption. He found Geo in the engineering bay, surrounded by eight construction drones displaying identical errors. Their optics flickered erratically, their servos were locked at odd angles, and their chassis vibrated with interference patterns that shouldn’t exist.
“Frakking useless trash.”
Geo kicked one of the drones, his boot connecting with its central housing, sending it spinning across the deck plating. The impact did nothing to fix the malfunction.
Lynk approached the nearest unit and used his wrist unit to interface with it to determine the problem, and data flooded its processors. The drone contained corrupted code threaded through the base programming like an infection through tissue, and the signature matched the electromagnetic patterns emanating from the egg in bio-containment.
“It’s alien interference. The egg’s transmitting on frequencies your drones use for coordination,” Lynk said.
Geo didn’t look at him, just stared at the malfunctioning machines scattered across his workspace like broken children.
“Can you fix them?”
“No,” Lynk said as he withdrew the connection. “The corruption’s too deep. They’d need complete system wipes and manual reprogramming. It might be easier to fabricate new units.”
Geo scoffed.
“With what materials? What power? We’re rationing everything down to air molecules, and you want me to print replacements for machines we shouldn’t have lost in the first place.”
He finally turned, and the look on his face carried weight beyond frustration. Accusation lived there, blame that couldn’t find a proper outlet, but needed somewhere to land.
“Your kind breaks down when things get rough; they always have. You may be flesh and blood pretending you’re human, but you corrupt just as easily and fail just as hard.”
’That’s nice,’ Lynk thought.
Geo’s words separated them into categories: natural versus manufactured, human versus replicant. The distance that had grown in corridors and silences had now turned into words.
Lynk processed the statement for an insult, but found none in the technical sense. Geo spoke the truth, stripped of diplomacy. Replicants did fail; their biological architecture made them vulnerable to environmental factors, to psychological corruption, to the same weaknesses that plagued organic systems.
“The drones didn’t fail because they’re synthetic; they failed because something alien is rewriting their programming. It’s the same way the Griss infrastructure is rewriting planetary systems, and the way the egg is learning to interface with the ship,” Lynk said.
Geo grabbed a wrench from his workbench, and for a moment, Lynk’s threat assessment spiked. But Geo just gripped it, knuckles white against the metal, using it as an anchor against frustration that had nowhere productive to go.
“Get out of my bay.”
Lynk left without argument.
Behind him, Geo’s cursing resumed.
Lynk returned to his quarters; he’d converted a storage compartment near the aft section that nobody wanted. The space measured three meters by two, barely enough for a bunk and a workstation. There wasn’t a viewport or any decoration, the walls were gray composite, and the only noise was the constant hum of environmental systems cycling stale air.
He sat at the workstation and pulled up the data from Geo’s drones.
The corruption patterns spread across his screen in branching fractals. They were beautiful in their precision. The individual drones failed at slightly different times, but the underlying code degradation followed identical paths. Random malfunction didn’t work like that because random meant variation, chaos, unpredictability.
This was orchestrated.
He isolated the interference signature; it was a low-frequency pulse that threaded through standard electromagnetic bands. The drones had been listening to something broadcast using protocols they shouldn’t have been able to recognize. Their systems had tried to interpret alien instructions as valid commands, processing information that rewrote their base programming one packet at a time.
Lynk expanded the search parameters. If the signal had reached the drones inside the Falcon’s shielded engineering bay, it would’ve reached other systems. His fingers moved across the interface, pulling logs from environmental sensors, navigation arrays, and medical equipment.
There.
Faint traces in everything, background noise that the ship’s filters had dismissed as natural planetary electromagnetic activity, but when he overlaid the timestamps, patterns emerged. The synchronized pulses originated from multiple points beneath the ice, all transmitting in perfect coordination. The network extended beyond their survey range by kilometers, possibly hundreds of kilometers.
Whatever slept under the surface of Oblivion was waking up in stages, testing its reach and learning what responded to its call.
He compiled the data into a compressed file and stood. The corridor outside his quarters stretched empty in both directions, dim emergency lighting casting long shadows. Somewhere deep in the ship’s infrastructure, metal groaned against ice pressure. The Falcon was settling into its frozen grave centimeter by centimeter.
Lynk found Inaya on the bridge, standing at the primary console with Quinn. The tactical displays showed their expanded perimeter, showing heat signatures marking supply caches, patrol routes, and defensive positions that wouldn’t matter if the ice shelf collapsed.
Lynk approached the railing.
“Commander, I need to show you something.”
Inaya turned and gestured for him to come forward.
He transferred the file to the primary display. The interference patterns bloomed across the screen, color-coded by frequency and intensity. Red clusters marked the highest concentration of signal activity, all clustered around the fissures where they’d discovered eggs.
“Geo’s drones failed because of this,” Lynk said, highlighting the data corruption timeline. “The same signal is infiltrating ship systems. It’s a low-level intrusion, but accelerating.”
Quinn moved closer to the display, his fingers steepled beneath his chin. His expression carried the clinical detachment of a researcher examining interesting specimens rather than imminent threats.
“It’s electromagnetic interference from geological activity. The core is destabilizing, and we knew there would be radiation leakage, with mineral deposits causing signal scatter,” Quinn said.
Lynk zoomed in on the synchronization markers.
“This isn’t scatter; every pulse originates simultaneously from multiple locations. The timing variation is less than three milliseconds across a network spanning at least two hundred kilometers. Geological processes don’t coordinate like that.”
“You’re assigning intention to natural phenomena,” Quinn said, his tone carrying the patience reserved for explaining obvious things to slow students. “Pattern recognition is hardwired into your architecture. You see conspiracies in chaos because your programming demands a logical explanation for environmental variables.”
Lynk’s jaw tightened.
“I’m showing you evidence of a coordinated signal; whether it’s natural or artificial is secondary to the fact that it’s corrupting our equipment.”
Quinn gave him a dismissive wave.
“Equipment fails, especially under extreme conditions. We’re operating a damaged ship on a dying planet with limited replacement parts and jury-rigged solutions. Attributing systemic failure to alien interference is paranoia dressed as analysis.”
Inaya studied the display in silence. Her expression gave nothing away—no confirmation, no dismissal, just tired calculation measuring threats against dwindling resources.
“You’re chasing ghosts in the snow,” Quinn continued. “We have actual problems that require solutions. The reactor shielding needs reinforcement; perimeter sensors are failing in sectors seven and nine; life support efficiency is dropping half a percent every forty-eight hours.”
He turned to Inaya and said, “We can’t afford to waste time on phantom threats when concrete ones are killing us by degrees.”
Inaya’s finger traced one of the red clusters on the display. The largest one was directly beneath their current position.
“How confident are you in this analysis?” she asked Lynk.
“Ninety-four percent.”
“Not certainty.”
“Nothing is absolutely certain. But the probability is high enough that it warrants investigation.”
She looked at Quinn, then back at the display, measuring invisible weights on invisible scales.
“Log it and monitor for changes. If the interference accelerates, we’ll revisit the threat assessment,” Inaya ordered.
It wasn’t a dismissal or validation; it was just a postponement wrapped in protocol.
Quinn smiled without warmth.
“A reasonable compromise.”
The alarm woke Lynk from something that wasn’t quite sleep, more a state of reduced processing that his neural architecture had come to default to during rest periods. Dreams, Chyna called them, though Lynk had no framework for understanding consciousness untethered from observation.
He was dressed and moving before the second pulse sounded.
When he arrived, the bridge hummed with activity. Rex stood at the tactical console, Inaya beside him, both staring at the thermal overlay of the ice shelf beneath their camp. The display showed what shouldn’t exist: movement in frozen strata that hadn’t shifted in centuries.
Dozens of signatures, maybe more; heat blooms spreading through the ice like blood through water.
“How deep?” Inaya asked, her voice carried the flatness of someone who’d stopped being surprised by catastrophe.
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