Starbound Surrender

The alarm screams through the station like a dying animal.

Red lights. Everywhere, red lights.

Dr. Yuna Park's fingers fly across the console, her heart hammering so hard she can feel it in her teeth. The numbers don't make sense. They can't make sense.

"Mission Control, do you copy? This is Station Aurora, we have a critical hull breach in sector seven—"

Static.

Just static.

She tries again. "Mission Control, I repeat, critical breach. Life support failing. I need—"

The station shudders. Metal groans like something living, something dying.

Yuna grabs the edge of her console as the artificial gravity flickers. For one terrifying second, she floats, her black hair drifting around her face like seaweed.

Then gravity slams back.

She hits the floor hard enough to see stars.

Get up, she tells herself. Get up or die up here alone.

She's the only one left. Commander Harris died three days ago when the solar flare hit. Lieutenant Morrison went out to repair the communications array and never came back.

Now it's just her.

Yuna Park, thirty-one years old, Korean-American astrophysicist, four hundred million miles from Earth.

Alone.

She drags herself up, tasting blood where she bit her tongue. The emergency suit locker is fifteen meters away. If she can get to it, if she can seal herself in—

The station screams again.

And then the hull rips open.

Yuna doesn't remember the next part clearly. Just cold. Impossible cold, the vacuum of space sucking the heat from her body faster than her mind can process.

Her last thought before the darkness takes her is simple:

I don't want to die alone.

---

She wakes up warm.

That's wrong. That's very, very wrong.

Yuna's eyes fly open, and she immediately wishes they hadn't.

She's not on the station.

She's in a room that seems to be made of liquid silver, walls that flow and shift like mercury caught in perpetual motion. The light source is everywhere and nowhere—soft blue-white illumination that seems to come from the walls themselves.

And she's on some kind of table.

Not restrained. Just... lying there, on something that feels like silk but looks like crystallized starlight.

"Your vital signs have stabilized."

The voice comes from everywhere. Deep, resonant, with an accent she can't place. Not quite human, but close enough to understand.

Yuna sits up too fast. Her head spins.

"Easy." The voice again. "Your body experienced significant trauma. The vacuum exposure caused—"

"Who are you?" Her voice comes out as a croak. "Where am I? What—"

A section of the silver wall ripples.

Parts.

And he walks through.

...