Chapter 9
The Invitation
Kael's words hung in the air, heavier than the silence of the void outside. "I think it knows we're listening."
The three of them stared at the complex, cascading waveform on his datapad. It was no longer a simple, rhythmic pulse; it was an intricate tapestry of data, elegant and impossibly complex. It was the language of an unknown intelligence.
Zana's tactical mind snapped into action, overriding the awe. Her first instinct was survival. "Knows how?" she demanded, her voice a sharp, low whisper. "Is it an active scan? Is it hostile?" She turned to Kael. "Shut it down. Shut down the sensors now."
"I can't!" Kael said, his voice frantic as he tapped uselessly at his datapad. "You don't understand. The systems aren't just receiving the signal anymore. When the full array came online, they… they entered into a resonance with it. They're harmonizing." He pointed to the waveform. "Look. The moment we started listening with the full ship, the transmission changed. It simplified. It's adapting to us. It's not trying to attack us… I think it's trying to teach us."
He brought up another screen, showing a breakdown of the signal's base layer. "I'm detecting patterns. Prime numbers. The atomic weight of hydrogen. It's a first-contact protocol, a universal greeting. But the core message… it's wrapped in layers of mathematics and syntax I've never seen. It would take a team of cryptographers years to even begin to decipher it."
They had found the ultimate message in a bottle, but it was written in a language that had been dead for fifty thousand years. They were at another dead end.
Zana looked from the useless data on Kael's screen to Jax. He was standing silently, his gaze distant, focused on a point on the floor as if listening to a conversation no one else could hear. She saw it then—the slight tension in his jaw, the deep focus in his eyes. He wasn't just looking; he was connected to this, too.
"Jax," she said, her voice softer now, a reluctant admission of their new reality. "You can feel it, can't you? This… message. Can you 'listen' to it like you listened to the ship?"
Jax looked up. He knew what she was asking. She was asking him to dive back into the overwhelming sea of power that had nearly broken him. But this felt different. The signal wasn't a memory of pain and fear like the ship's log had been. It was active. It was alive.
He gave a slow nod. He sat down, crossed his legs, and rested his hands on his knees, mimicking the pose from the carvings in the cave. He didn't need to touch the Core for this. The signal was everywhere now, a song in the Force that the bridge was simply amplifying.
He closed his eyes and listened.
He followed the thread of the transmission, not with his ears, but with his mind, tracing it back to its source deep within the moonlet. As his consciousness drew closer, he wasn't met with complex data or mathematical equations. He was met with a feeling.
It was a flood of pure, undiluted, and soul-crushingly profound loneliness.
It was the emotion of a sentinel, a warden who had stood watch over a silent, sleeping post for an unimaginable stretch of time. It was the feeling of a lighthouse keeper on an empty cosmic shore, patiently beaming a signal into an ocean of silence, waiting for a ship that never came. There was no malice in it, no threat. Only a vast, patient, and weary solitude.
And beneath the loneliness, there was a single, clear, non-verbal concept, an idea projected with gentle but unmistakable intent.
An invitation. A request. A beacon calling him home.
Approach. Descend. Come to me.
Jax's eyes snapped open. The connection broke, but the feeling lingered. He was breathing steadily this time, the experience leaving him not drained and in pain, but filled with a strange sense of awe and melancholy.
"It's not a threat," he said, his voice clear and certain.
Zana took a step closer. "How do you know?"
Jax looked at her, and for the first time, he gave her a glimpse of the truth. "I can feel its intent. It's been… waiting. For a very long time." He paused, trying to put the immense feeling into simple words.
"It's lonely," he said. "And it wants us to come closer. It's inviting us down."
Jax's words settled into the silent bridge, a statement so profoundly strange that for a moment, neither Zana nor Kael knew how to respond. They both stared at him, their expressions a mixture of awe and stark disbelief.
Zana was the first to recover, her pragmatic mind immediately erecting walls of suspicion. "It's inviting us?" she repeated, her voice sharp and incredulous. "Jax, that's insane. It's a fifty-thousand-year-old alien machine. We don't know what it is. For all we know, it's a trap—a siren's call to lure us into a processor to be disassembled." She took a step closer, her eyes hard. "What does 'lonely' even mean for a machine? It could be projecting a feeling, a simple emotion it knows we'll respond to, to get us to lower our guard."
"She's right," Kael added, nervously wringing his hands. "From a scientific standpoint, the transmission isn't hostile. The math, the first-contact protocols… it's all peaceful. But we can't possibly comprehend the motives of an intelligence that old. To it, we might be nothing more than interesting insects it wants to study under a microscope."
The weight of their logic, of their fear, was immense. But it couldn't overpower what Jax had felt.
"I know it sounds crazy," he said, his voice steady. He stood up and faced them, meeting Zana's intense gaze. "I don't understand it either. But I'm telling you what I felt. It wasn't a trick. It was… clear." He gestured around the illuminated bridge. "It's the same 'instinct' that told me which power cells were good. The same instinct that helped me turn on these lights, and the same one that helped me find this ship in the first place."
He let his words hang in the air. "Has it been wrong yet?"
The question hit its mark. Zana's jaw tightened. He had backed her into a corner, using her own pragmatism against her. Every time they had faced an impossible problem, his inexplicable 'instinct' had provided a solution. Her logic told her this was a trap. Her experience told her that Jax was their only reliable guide.
She let out a long, slow breath, the sound of a commander making a decision that went against everything she had ever learned.
"Alright," she said, her voice tight with reluctance. "Against my better judgment… against every tactical rule I know… we accept the invitation."
Kael looked at her, shocked, but she raised a hand to silence him.
"But we do this on our terms," she continued, her voice regaining its familiar, authoritative edge. "We gear up for a deep-world expedition. Full power to our suit lights, we take the multi-tools, extra ration packs, and I'm taking the blaster. Kael, use the ship's active sensors. Find us a path down. I want the largest, most stable-looking access tunnel that heads in the direction of that signal. We are not crawling through cracks in the rock for this."
Kael, given a technical task, nodded and scrambled to a console. Zana turned back to Jax.
"And we set one rule," she said, her eyes boring into his. "The absolute second it feels wrong, the moment anything seems hostile, we are out. No questions asked. We turn and we run. Understood?"
"Understood," Jax agreed.
A few minutes later, Kael found it. "There," he said, pointing to the panoramic viewport. "A massive shaft, about half a kilometer from our position. Looks like a primary service conduit or a ventilation shaft. It's perfectly circular. It goes straight down."
Their path was set. They gathered their gear in silence, the air thick with a new kind of tension—not the fear of being stranded, but the fear of the unknown they were now actively seeking. They left the relative safety of the bridge and made their way back out of the ship, onto the silent, dusty surface of the moonlet.
They found the shaft easily. It was a perfect, dark circle cut into the rock, at least twenty meters in diameter, descending into absolute blackness. There were no stairs, but the walls were lined with a series of massive, pipe-like conduits and service ladders.
The three of them stood on the edge, their suit lights piercing only the first few meters of the immense, vertical tunnel.
"Well," Zana said, her voice grim over the comms as she checked the charge on her blaster one last time. "It invited us down. It would be rude to keep it waiting."
Zana didn't hesitate. She unclipped a high-tension cable from her utility pack, secured it to a thick, metal support at the edge of the shaft, and tossed the rest of the coil into the darkness. "I'll take point," she said over the comms, her voice all business. "Kael, you're in the middle. Jax, you take the rear. We'll use the service ladder. Stay on my six, watch for loose rungs."
She swung her body over the edge, her mag-boots locking onto the massive metal ladder that ran down the side of the shaft. Her suit light cut a clean path below her, descending into the seemingly bottomless dark. Kael followed, his movements clumsy but determined. Jax took one last look at the star-filled sky before following them down, the darkness swallowing him whole.
The descent was unnerving. The silence was absolute, broken only by the rhythmic scrape and click of their boots on the rungs and the sound of their own amplified breathing. Their suit lights sliced through an ancient, undisturbed darkness, occasionally glancing off other massive conduits or faded, alien glyphs that marked the different levels of the shaft. The scale of the place was staggering; it felt less like a tunnel and more like the throat of a colossal, sleeping beast.
For Zana and Kael, it was a purely physical challenge. For Jax, it was something more.
With every meter they descended, the presence he had felt on the bridge grew stronger, clearer. The steady thump… thump… of the transmission was no longer a faint pulse in the back of his mind; it was a resonant hum that seemed to vibrate in his very soul. He could feel the profound loneliness he'd sensed before, but now it was mixed with a new feeling, a building sense of… anticipation. Of hope. It wasn't a trap. He was more certain of it than ever. It felt like he was being welcomed home.
After what felt like an hour of steady descent, Zana's voice crackled on the comm. "Bottom. I'm at the bottom."
Jax's feet touched solid ground a moment later. They stood in a cavern so immense that their suit lights couldn't find the walls or the ceiling. The floor was made of the same seamless dark metal as the ship's bridge. They had reached the heart of the moonlet.
In the center of the vast, dark space stood the source of the transmission.
It was a colossal, perfectly spherical structure, at least thirty meters in height, that rested on a complex metal latticework. It glowed with a soft, internal white light, pulsing in time with the beat that now filled Jax's entire consciousness. It was a miniature, contained star, a heart of pure energy.
"The power core…" Kael whispered, his voice trembling with awe. "The entire moonlet… it's not a moon. It's a power station. Or… a cage."
As they took a few hesitant steps closer, the light within the sphere began to change. It swirled, coalesced, gathering in the center. A shape began to form within the light, a figure made of pure, shimmering energy.
It was one of the beings from the ship's log. Slender, with four long, graceful limbs. But this was no memory. It was vast, ancient, and powerful, its form woven from the very light of the core itself. It was the sentinel. The warden. The lonely intelligence that had been calling to them across fifty thousand years of silence.
The luminous being fully formed within its sphere of energy. It raised a long, graceful arm, and though it had no face, no eyes, Jax felt its full, undivided attention settle upon him.
It did not speak in words. It did not have to. A single, clear, powerful concept, overflowing with ancient weariness and a dawning, brilliant hope, bloomed directly in Jax's mind.
Welcome.