The new gear I'd cobbled together felt more like a straitjacket than armor, but at least it held together thanks to some fastenings and padding I'd rigged up. The heat inside this damned ship was still pretty intense, despite the hull breaches the size of my head. But that was nothing compared to the pain that had receded. My dislocated leg and broken rib no longer throbbed so fiercely because the rib was now securely splinted, just like my leg. And I'd even jury-rigged a rudimentary load-bearing exoskeleton out of scrap metal and pipes. It creaked with every step, but it allowed me to put some weight on the injured limb.
I hobbled down the corridor, illuminating the way with the dim, flickering beam of the flashlight built into my makeshift mask. The light seemed to resist – not so much the darkness, but the very idea that anything alive could still be here. The metal around me resembled the insides of a dead beast: rusty, swollen, covered in growths and burn marks, twisted into unnatural shapes in places. Every compartment, every bulkhead breathed the same truth – this ship had died long ago, but its death hadn't been quick.
All along the tunnel were bodies. Not just dead. Torn apart, gnawed, with empty eye sockets and mouths frozen in silent screams. The flesh of many had dried like parchment, stretched taut over bone. In others, decomposition had halted halfway, as if something here hadn't allowed death to finish what it had started. The atmosphere inside the ship remained sealed, isolated from the outside time. No smell escaped, no atom of decay dissipated. Even through the thick filters of my mask, the stench hit me: sickly-sweet and rotten, like a cloying corpse boiled in syrup. It smelled like death itself had gone sour in here.
I didn't try to understand how or why they had died here. Not anymore. I'd seen too much to hope for meaning. I just walked, trying not to look at their faces. But they were everywhere. Sometimes on the walls. Sometimes inside ripped-open spacesuits. Sometimes frozen into the bulkheads, as if someone had tried to leave, to squeeze through, to escape, but hadn't made it. Couldn't. Wasn't human in that moment, just meat.
I passed through what felt like dozens of compartments. Maybe a hundred. I'd lost count. Cabins – empty, with overturned bunks. Armories – bare, as if licked clean by the warp. Storerooms – filled with dust and debris. Medical bays – like torture scenes: chairs, overturned tables, crumpled stretchers, solidified stains of black blood on the walls. Everywhere the same chaos: disorder in which there was no longer fear. Only remnants. Only memory. As if the ship itself was trying to forget that life had ever been here.
I checked everything. Every locker. Every container. Looking for water. Food. Anything. I found packages – decayed, with dried remains inside. Plastic turned to dust. Canned goods, swollen with time, as if something was still moving inside. Even dying of thirst, I wouldn't have dared touch them. This ship had long since passed the point of being edible.
There were no weapons left either. Nothing you could call firepower. Laser modules had rotted away, ballistics had crumbled to dust. My knife and the sharpened piece of debris – that was my entire arsenal. But in one of the partitioned sections – probably an officer's defense point – I stumbled upon a crate. Almost intact. Next to it – a body. A big guy, six-foot-three, maybe more, in the remains of armor that had already grown into his bones. Skull cracked open, but his hands still clutched an empty rifle, broken in half. He'd died fighting. Or maybe after, hugging dead hope.
Inside the crate – a belt of large-caliber rounds. Fifty-cal, at least. For anti-materiel. For creatures. For everything. The belt itself was almost falling apart, but the bullets – they were whole. Heavy, blunt-nosed, like leaden dogmas of war. I filled an empty metal box nearby by hand – forty rounds, maybe a little less. Why? I don't know. There's no weapon for them anyway. But powder is fuel. Lead is weight. Casings are material. And in this hell, everything can become a weapon. Even without a gun.
I slung the box over my back, felt my shoulder twitch in protest from the pain, and walked on. Not because I believed. But because a step was the only thing I had left.
Finally, I came across a hatch. Collapsed, pressed against a shifted wall, and partially melted, as if an explosive wave had washed over it. The metal around it had wrinkled like charred flesh. The compartment was crushed, like a coffin under a press, and the air here was especially thick – dense, pressing, with a taste of technical dust and ancient mechanical fear.
I approached, felt the edges. Everything was sealed shut, like a nail in a sarcophagus. The lock wouldn't budge, the hinges were filled with plastic and fused into a solid mass. But there was no point in going back. Everything behind me was already dead. Forward – at least there was the unknown.
Taking out the cutter, I slowly, almost silently, began to burn through the side. The blade screeched, melted, spat sparks. I bent over, gritting my teeth from the pain in my side: every movement felt like it was twisting me from the inside out. But I continued, like a damned soul. Because giving up meant lying down by this door and becoming part of the interior.
Finally, the metal gave way. I slipped a piece of pipe into the gap – thick, rusty, barely holding together. I braced myself with my whole body. A creak. A jerk. The crunch of metal. The hatch didn't open – it broke, like a metal maw, forgotten by a forgotten era, and now barely remembering how to unclench. With a crack and a bang, it flew inward, releasing not light, but a stench.
The first thing that hit me was the air. Not wind. Not a draft. Something else. Thick, oily, like old smoke, saturated with soot, melted fuel, dead chemicals, and something else… indescribable. It was like the taste of timelessness. Like the smell of a fallen civilization. Even through the filters of my mask, my head swam. Sweetish, burning, with faint notes of madness – it was heavy as fuel oil and sticky as fear.
I recoiled. Then I pulled myself together.
And stepped forward.
And froze.
There was no exit behind this hatch. No road. Only the abyss.
Before me stretched a landscape where the very desire for order had died. Where not only society, not only a city had perished – the very concept had died. As far as the eye could see, a brownish-black valley stretched out, where the earth had long ceased to be earth. Everything was buried: garbage, machinery, rotting metal, the skeletons of ships, the frames of stations, sections, panels, the veins of burnt-out cables. Mountains not of stone – but of epochs. Of structures that once flew, worked, killed, lived. Now – compressed into chaos.
Some debris jutted upwards like rotten fangs, others lay like dead titans, sprawled out in eternal torment. Somewhere underfoot, water stirred – not real water, sewage, chemical, in which something ancient was bubbling. Vapors rose in clouds, and above the distant slopes, the air shimmered with ashen swirls – not gas, not ash, not… the breath of something that hadn't yet left.
I didn't immediately grasp the scale of it all.
Hundreds. Thousands of vessels. Tens of thousands of starships. Fleets that had crashed here as if someone had decided to dump a box of toys the size of a continent – and forgotten to clean up. Some fragments still glowed from within – not with fire, but with some internal, unhealthy, unnatural luminescence that didn't warm.
I looked ahead – and saw the "mountain."
It seemed part of the terrain. But the longer I stared, the clearer I understood – it wasn't rock. It was the wreckage of a station. Fallen, shattered, but still majestic in its descent. The skeletons of towers, torn platforms, half-destroyed transport arches jutted out from it. It was the size of a city. Or maybe – a continent. Once it had hung in the sky. Now it was a grave, grown into the flesh of this dead planet.
One of the fragments rose upwards at such an angle as if it was trying to take off – but it had been crucified, forever driven into the garbage heap. It resembled a techno-cross. From another era. From a faith that no one practiced anymore.
And all this – in complete silence.
No wind. No birds. No voice of the world. Only a distant echo – somewhere below. Something shifted. Or breathed. Or just reminded me that not everything here was dead yet.
And I stood at this abyss – not as a survivor, but as a witness.
The last of those who can still look at it with human eyes.
I raised my head.
And everything else ceased to exist.
The sky overhead wasn't just alien – it was hostile. Heavy, pressing down, reddish-brown like blood that had absorbed ash. It seemed to burn from within, but not with light – with a belated pain reflected in the clouds. Crimson lightning silently sliced through the thickness of the atmosphere, not tearing it, but cutting it, like flesh that had been denied death for too long. Their flashes were cold as welding and too fast to follow. And yet I watched.
Somewhere between these rifts, the clouds parted, and for a moment, space was revealed – black, cold, indifferent, evenly scattered with stars that didn't look, didn't judge, didn't hope. They were like traces on old metal: a memory of light long extinguished.
But that wasn't what caught my eye.
I saw the ring.
A planetary ring – an orbital structure, a relic of the past, a remnant of some transcendent engineering will. It didn't just surround the planet – it pierced the heavens, occupying half the sky like a giant hoop forever pressed into the flesh of the world. Its size defied comparison – there was no scale to match it. It stretched like a scar. Like a curse that had seized the sky in a death grip.
And it was destroyed.
Torn. Ripped apart not by time – by something else. Emptiness yawned within it like ragged wounds on the body of a giant. Some sections looked as if they had been torn out – not broken off, but ripped out by the roots, wrenched away in haste, as if someone had tried to stop its work… or use it. Between the surviving sectors hung skeletons – gravitational wakes, a fog of constructions, meaningless arches, twisted bridges leading into the void.
This wasn't a station. It was a catastrophe preserved in time.
But even that wasn't all.
Far away, at the edge of visibility, in a break in the clouds, something hung in the sky. A body? No. A moon. Or what was left of it. Once, it had probably been whole – spherical, as it should be. Maybe it even had an atmosphere. Maybe it served as a home, a colony, an arsenal, an archive, a memory. Now – just fragments. Pieces torn to shreds, held together not so much by gravity as by the inertia of destruction.
Some fragments rotated. Others drifted, creating the illusion of unity. But between them yawned voids – so large that an entire city could be placed there. Around them slowly revolved debris, sparks of light, metallic snow. It all glowed with a deathly luminescence, reflecting the light of that distant star that I couldn't even see.
I looked at it and felt something crack inside me. Not from fear. From incomprehension. This world wasn't just dead. It had been ripped apart. Turned inside out. Defiled. And left in this state out of spite – or as a warning.
The meaning of this picture wasn't obvious. But the message was felt in every fragment.
Something happened here that shouldn't have.
And now all that's left is garbage, scars… and me. One of those who arrived too late to understand. But still alive to see.
Hopelessness squeezed my throat as if trying to push it inwards, to break me from the inside, slowly, without fanfare. I stood among the mountains of debris and couldn't breathe – not because there wasn't enough oxygen, but because there was no point. This world wasn't just dead – it had been destroyed as an idea. Wiped clean. And even its ashes were heavy as a curse.
How the hell am I supposed to survive? How do I walk hundreds of kilometers across this scorched, poisoned earth, among dead machines and forgotten gods? Where is the water? Where is the food? Where is even a hint that it's possible to live here, not just slowly fade away?
I gritted my teeth, but inside I was empty. Too empty.
Why me?
The world didn't answer. It was silent, like old mistakes that no one wants to remember.
I thought – how many people died here five hundred years ago? How many of them held out to the last? How many didn't just die, but chose to die because there was no other way? They held the line. You could see it. By the positions, by the bodies, by the locks on the doors. The last battle. The last faith. The last lie.
And then – the creatures. Those who came for them. Those who killed. But… did they die themselves? Did they disappear, dissolve into these ruins, or just lie low, waiting for life to appear again so they can extinguish it? The monsters that met me when I woke up were terrible. But not these. Not like in the descriptions. And the corpse in the repair bay… it was one of them. Or became one. Or was turned into one.
This world wasn't just fallen. It had been melted down into hell.
And yet… what was it like before?
I looked up again at the torn ring in the sky. Structures like that aren't built by accident. This isn't a defense station. It's not a factory. It's a statement. A world with such a ring was important. Significant. Majestic. Surely there were cities here. Oceans. Towers. Light. The noise of life. Art. Meaning.
And now?
Ashes. Metal. Dust.
I took a heavy breath, trying to swallow it all. Not to break. Not now.
I closed my eyes. Clenched my fists. And started moving.
Gathering the remnants of my will, I cautiously descended the side of the dead frigate. It lay like a discarded animal, dug into the pile of iron shit. The surface of the ship was uneven, dented, but the descent was gentle – almost a path to the underworld.
Underfoot – rustling metal, cut beams, shards of glass, melted communications. All from the past. All – a resource, if not for the body, then at least for the mind. If so many ships crashed here, then there must be something useful inside. Some kind of capsule with water. Canned rations. A piece of copper wire. Chemicals. Batteries. Any trifle could be a jump to another day of life.
I walked in the direction the device indicated. Alien. Cold. Nameless. The only thread that somehow stretched through this hell, and I didn't know if it led to salvation… or to a new abyss. But it was there. And I had nothing else.
I didn't look back. But maybe I should have.
Because I wasn't alone.
In the shadow of another ship, mangled as if it had tried to crawl and died in agony, something flickered. Not a creature. Not a human. Just a figure. Rags. Dust. Two eyes – pale amber, like burnt-out amber. Glowing. And watchful. They weren't just observing. They were waiting.