And they did. Silent. Cold. Invisible to the living horror of 1H10 NATV. For six hours, they floated, until the singularity’s gravity well sighed and shifted, searching for a more interesting meal elsewhere.
The other three crew members muttered. Big Jo, the muscle, cracked his knuckles. Lina, the conduit surgeon, checked her neural splices. And old Dok, the mechanic, just spat a glob of black oil onto the deck.
Before Rina could ask what that meant, the singularity pulsed.
Captain Rina Voss, a woman with a scar that pulled her left eye into a permanent squint, didn’t look up from the fusion torch’s pressure gauge. “Details, Kael. Not poetry.” ums512 1h10 natv
“And if the core shifts?” Kaelen asked.
“Magnetic grapples armed,” Big Jo rumbled, his voice trembling.
When the UMS512 rebooted, the core was gone. But the relay station—now unanchored—sent its distress call. And they did
“It’s a phantom lock,” he replied, pushing his goggles up. “The ‘NATV’ stands for Natural Vector. Means it’s not broadcasting a pilot signal. It’s raw, unshaped gravity. We don’t catch it—it catches us .”
UMS512 1H10 NATV – SURVIVORS. NEXT TARGET: HOME.
“1H10 NATV,” whispered Kaelen, tapping the flickering screen. “That’s the nav point. A Class-3 singularity core, heavy as a moon, drifting through the Perpetual Wake. And we’re supposed to catch it.” Invisible to the living horror of 1H10 NATV
Rina took the controls. The UMS512 shuddered as she nudged it into the gravity well’s outer slope. “Kael, give me a trajectory. A whisper-thin one.”
A wave of distorted space washed over the ship. Alarms screamed. The lights dimmed. And Kaelen’s goggles showed the truth: 1H10 NATV wasn’t a natural object. It was a trap —an ancient, dormant weapon that had just detected mass.
Rina looked at Kaelen. “Plot it.”
Rina finally looked up. Her single good eye gleamed. “We’re not catching it. We’re roping it. There’s a relay station inside the Wake’s outer eddy. The singularity core’s gravity is the only thing holding the station’s orbit stable. We hook the core, tow it a few degrees portside, and the station’s autopilot triggers a distress beacon. Guild salvage rights. We’re paid.”
“Zero relative gravity. We’re just… debris.”