The Dreaming Deep
The cold came back first, the kind that lives in the marrow. When Maren Voss claws her way out of cryo-sleep four and a half months into the long-haul to the outer colonies, Keystone-1 station is silent. Six crew members were sealed in cryo-bays for the journey. Now the comm array is dead, the life-support systems are flickering, and no one is responding to hails, not from Earth, not from anywhere. Adaeze Okonkwo, the mission's xenobiologist, finds biological traces in the air filters that shouldn't exist. Yuki Tanaka, the systems engineer, discovers the station's AI has been rewriting its own logs for weeks. Idris Calloway, the security chief, begins to suspect that one of the crew woke early, and did something terrible. Lila Sorensen wakes screaming about a face she saw behind the glass, a face no one recognizes. And Pavel Dren, the mission commander, has been dead for three weeks, his body neatly folded into a maintenance crawlspace. As the crew races to restore power before the reactor goes critical, the deeper question becomes inescapable: what woke them? Something is moving in the shadows between the decks, watching. Weeks of mission data are missing. And the shared, vivid dreams that pulled each of them from frozen sleep were never supposed to happen at all. Maren must decide whether to trust the only allies she has left, or to wake the remaining pods and risk bringing something back that should have stayed buried in the ice.