The first sensation was cold. Not the gentle, medicinal cold of cryo-sleep, but a bone-deep chill that seemed to emanate from the metal walls themselves. Commander Oakley Coleman’s eyes snapped open to darkness, his augmented vision systems struggling to adjust to the ship’s emergency lighting. Red strips pulsed along the corridor walls like arteries, casting everything in the color of blood.

His cryo-pod hissed open with a mechanical wheeze that sounded wrong—strained, as if the machinery was fighting against centuries of neglect. Oakley tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. His muscles screamed in protest, atrophied beyond anything he’d experienced in the standard eighteen-month sleep cycles during training. Something was very wrong.

“Status report,” he croaked, his voice barely recognizable. The ship’s AI should have responded immediately. Instead, silence pressed against his eardrums like a physical weight.

Oakley forced himself upright, every joint grinding like rusted machinery. The cryo-bay stretched before him, a cathedral of sleeping pods arranged in perfect rows. Forty-seven other chambers, each containing his crew. His friends. The best and brightest Earth had to offer for humanity’s first attempt at interstellar colonization.

But the readouts on the nearest pod made his blood freeze.

SYSTEM FAILURE. OCCUPANT DECEASED. TIME SINCE FAILURE: 247 YEARS, 3 MONTHS, 14 DAYS.

Oakley stumbled to the next pod. The same readout. And the next. SYSTEM FAILURE. OCCUPANT DECEASED. The dates varied by days or weeks, but all fell within the same terrible window nearly two and a half centuries ago.

“No, no, no,” he whispered, his breath fogging in the frigid air. He ran from pod to pod, checking readouts with increasingly desperate efficiency. Dr. Brielle McCoy, the mission’s chief xenobiologist—dead for 247 years. Lieutenant Wray, their pilot—dead for 246 years, 11 months. Captain Vasquez, his closest friend and commanding officer—dead for 247 years, 2 months, 3 days.

All of them. Every single member of his crew.

Oakley sank to his knees beside Vasquez’s pod, pressing his palm against the frosted viewing window. Inside, perfectly preserved by the failed cryo-system, his captain’s face was peaceful. As if he might wake up at any moment and flash that reassuring smile that had gotten them through the rigorous selection process.

“What happened to us, Jim?” Oakley whispered.

The ship’s emergency klaxon chose that moment to wail, a sound that seemed to tear through his skull and settle in his bones. He forced himself to stand, military training overriding grief. Whatever had gone wrong, he was alive. He was the ranking officer now. He had responsibilities.

The bridge was a tomb of dead screens and flickering displays. Only the most basic life support systems remained online, drawing power from the ship’s nuclear core. Oakley slumped into the captain’s chair and began running diagnostics, his engineering background allowing him to parse the cascade of system failures that had accumulated over the centuries.

The picture that emerged was horrifying in its simplicity. A solar flare had damaged the ship’s navigation array just as they’d entered cryo-sleep for the final leg of their journey to Kepler-442b. The automated systems had attempted to compensate, but without course corrections, the Pioneer’s Hope had drifted past their destination and continued into the void between stars.

His cryo-pod had malfunctioned differently than the others. While theirs had failed catastrophically, killing the occupants, his had simply… kept going. For 247 years, it had maintained his body in perfect stasis while his friends died around him.

But that raised the question that made his hands shake as he scrolled through the logs: if his pod had been maintaining him for nearly two and a half centuries, what had finally triggered his awakening?

The answer wasn’t in the ship’s computers. According to every diagnostic he could run, his cryo-pod should still be maintaining stasis. There was no scheduled wake-up protocol, no emergency that would have triggered automatic revival. By all rights, he should still be asleep.

Oakley spent the next three days—three days alone with forty-seven corpses—trying to understand what had changed. He barely slept, sustained by the ship’s emergency rations that tasted like cardboard and regret. The silence was the worst part. No hum of conversation, no laughter echoing through the corridors, no gentle snoring from the crew quarters. Just the whisper of recycled air and the distant throb of the reactor.

On the fourth day, he found the first anomaly.

It was subtle—a fluctuation in the ship’s sensor array that hadn’t been there in any of the historical logs. Something was actively scanning the Pioneer’s Hope. Something outside.

Oakley ran to the observation deck, the first time he’d looked out at the stars since awakening. What he saw made his breath catch in his throat.

They weren’t alone.

The ship—if it could be called a ship—defied every principle of engineering Oakley understood. It was vast, easily ten times the size of the Pioneer’s Hope, but it seemed to shift and flow like liquid metal. Geometric patterns crawled across its surface in hypnotic spirals, and it maintained a perfect distance of exactly one kilometer from his vessel.

It had been there the entire time he’d been awake. Watching. Waiting.

“Hello?” Oakley broadcast on all frequencies, his voice cracking with desperation. “This is Commander Oakley Coleman of the Earth vessel Pioneer’s Hope. Please respond.”

The response came not through the communication array, but directly into his mind.

You are awake.

The voice—if it was a voice—seemed to emanate from the walls themselves, from the air in his lungs, from the beating of his own heart. Oakley stumbled backward, his hand instinctively reaching for the sidearm that hadn’t been at his hip for over two centuries.

We have been waiting.

“Waiting for what?” Oakley managed to say aloud.

For you to be ready.

The lights in the observation deck began to dim, and Oakley realized with growing horror that the patterns on the alien vessel were synchronizing with his heartbeat. The geometric spirals pulsed in perfect rhythm with the blood in his veins.

You have been prepared.

“Prepared for what?” Oakley shouted, but the alien presence was already receding from his mind, leaving behind only the echo of words that weren’t quite words.

The next phase.

Oakley ran back to the bridge, fingers flying over the controls as he tried to establish some kind of meaningful contact with whatever intelligence commanded the alien vessel. But his instruments were going haywire. The ship’s sensors were detecting impossible readings—energy signatures that violated the laws of physics, gravitational anomalies that shouldn’t exist, and underneath it all, a low-frequency signal that seemed to burrow into his brain and nest there like a parasite.

Days blurred together. Oakley found himself spending hours staring at the alien ship, trying to discern patterns in its ever-shifting surface. He began to notice that his reflection in the observation deck’s windows looked wrong somehow. His eyes seemed darker, his skin paler despite the ship’s artificial lighting. When he tried to sleep, his dreams were filled with geometric patterns and whispers in languages that predated human speech.

The signal in his head grew stronger.

It was on the fourteenth day after awakening that Oakley realized the truth. He was reviewing the cryo-pod diagnostics for the hundredth time when he noticed something that made his blood run cold. The power consumption logs showed that his pod had been drawing significantly more energy than required for basic life support. Not just maintaining his body—modifying it.

The genetic scanners confirmed his worst fears. His DNA had been systematically altered over the centuries of his sleep. Not randomly, but with surgical precision. Sequences had been added, others removed or modified. He was no longer entirely human.

Now you understand.

The voice in his head was stronger now, more intimate. Oakley could feel it spreading through his nervous system like an infection, rewriting his thoughts even as he tried to resist.

You were chosen. Prepared. The others were… unnecessary.

“You killed them,” Oakley whispered, but even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t entirely true. The alien presence hadn’t killed his crew—it had simply allowed them to die while ensuring he survived. While ensuring he was transformed into something that could serve its purposes.

They served their function. As will you.

Oakley tried to fight against the growing influence in his mind, but his resistance was crumbling. Part of him—a part that was becoming stronger each day—wanted to surrender to the alien consciousness. It promised knowledge, purpose, an end to the crushing loneliness that had been eating at him since he’d awakened to find his crew dead.

Come to us.

The command was irresistible. Oakley found himself walking to the airlock, his hands moving of their own accord to initiate the docking sequence. The alien vessel responded, extending what might have been a docking tube or might have been something far more organic.

As the airlock cycled open, Oakley caught a glimpse of his reflection one final time. His eyes were no longer brown—they had taken on the same shifting, geometric patterns he’d observed on the alien ship. His skin had a translucent quality, and underneath, something that wasn’t quite blood pulsed in rhythm with signals from beyond the stars.

The last coherent thought that was entirely his own was a prayer that Earth would never know what had become of the Pioneer’s Hope. That no other ships would follow in their path and find themselves drifting in the void between worlds, their crews slowly dying while something ancient and patient prepared them for purposes beyond human understanding.

The corridor beyond the airlock stretched into darkness that seemed to whisper his name. Oakley Coleman—or what remained of him—stepped forward into the embrace of something that had been waiting between the stars for humanity to venture far enough from home.

Behind him, the Pioneer’s Hope continued its long drift through the void, its emergency lights painting the tomb of forty-seven dreamers in the color of blood. And in the depths of space, signals began transmitting toward Earth, carrying coordinates and promises of worlds ready for colonization.

The harvest would begin soon.