Event Horizon: Red Echo

Drift Into Darkness

Commander Elara Myles woke to a sound that didn’t exist. In the vacuum of space, there should have been nothing. No thrum. No pulse. No whisper. Yet, somewhere in the back of her skull, something was echoing.

The *Artemis V* had been silent for twelve days. It was supposed to be a simple retrieval mission—investigate the long-lost Erebus, a research vessel that vanished thirty years ago near a collapsing red giant. The final transmission from Erebus had lasted four seconds. Four seconds of static and a single word: home.

Now, the Artemis V floated in the dying light of that same star, caught in its gravity well, orbit decaying. And Erebus—or what remained of it—loomed like a phantom, hull fractured, tethered to nothing but the past.

Ghost Ship

Elara drifted through the connection tunnel, the magnetic clamps echoing through her suit with each step. The interior of the Erebus was preserved eerily well, aside from the ruptured hull on Deck 4. No signs of life. No bodies. No messages. Just walls, scorched and covered in frost, and systems frozen mid-function. It was as if everyone had simply stepped out of time.

Her team—Dr. Halley, Specialist Knox, and Pilot Vora—followed behind in silence, each swallowed by the thick dread that clung to the airless corridors. Elara had seen derelicts before. This was different. This wasn’t abandonment. This was containment. Something had wanted the Erebus to be forgotten.

The Red Room

They found the anomaly in Engineering: a spherical chamber bathed in a red glow, unlike anything in standard ship design. Symbols pulsed faintly along the curved walls—alien, possibly mathematical, definitely not human. In the center, suspended by anti-grav coils, was a device. A black orb, humming silently, orbiting nothing.

Dr. Halley ran scans. No readings matched anything in their database. No energy signature, no heat, no mass fluctuations. It was, by all metrics, a void—an object that existed only as an absence.

Elara approached, compelled by an instinct she didn’t trust. The closer she got, the more she felt… watched. Not from outside, but from within. Something inside the orb was listening.

Whispers From the Void

That night, the team stayed on the Erebus, trying to catalog the device. The first scream came at 0300 hours. Knox. Elara found him in the observation deck, helmet shattered, eyes gone. Not damaged—just empty sockets. No blood. No trauma. As if they had simply vanished.

Vora locked herself in the Artemis shuttle. Said she could hear voices in her head. Not in words, but memories. Private ones. Regrets she never shared. She kept repeating the same phrase: The silence remembers.

Dr. Halley wouldn’t leave the red chamber. She sat before the orb, whispering to it, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “It knows what we’ve forgotten.”

The Signal Beneath Thought

On the sixth day, the transmissions began.

Not through radios or data lines, but through dreams. Elara felt her thoughts invaded by fragments of another intelligence—non-linear, impossibly vast. She saw a star collapsing in reverse, folding inward until it screamed. She saw people—not just her crew, but thousands—floating in red light, faces frozen in awe and terror.

The orb wasn’t alien tech. It was a seed. A fragment of something ancient buried in the event horizon of a dying star, feeding off entropy, broadcasting itself through psychic space. Erebus had found it. Or it had found them.

Either way, the ship was never meant to leave.

The Red Echo

By the eighth day, Elara was alone.

Vora vented herself into space. Said she needed to “unhear” it. Halley fused with the orb, skin melted into metal, body twitching in impossible angles before vanishing entirely. Elara sealed the chamber and initiated the emergency destruction sequence.

But the system wouldn’t comply. It no longer responded to human commands. The orb had integrated—*Erebus* was no longer a ship. It was a vessel for something else.

Now, every corridor echoed with silence. A silence that throbbed like a heartbeat.

Home

Elara recorded her final log inside the observation bay, red light pooling around her like blood.

“To anyone who finds this: do not approach the Erebus. Do not answer the signal. There is no message, no survivors, no data worth retrieving. Only the echo. Only the silence.”

As the gravity of the red giant deepened, Elara sealed herself in the last escape pod. She didn’t know where it would go—if it would go at all. But she had to try. She had to get away from the echo, from the hum, from the thing that now wore her name inside its thoughts.

As the pod ejected, she looked back. The Erebus blinked once—lights pulsing in a sequence. A rhythm. It was sending a message again. One word repeated.

Home.

Final Orbit

The pod spiraled into deep space, power fading. Elara drifted into unconsciousness, knowing she would likely die out here. But better that than return.

And yet, in the final flickers of her mind, she could still hear it.

The silence.

It was growing louder.

It had found her.