Commander Stryker Foxx sat in the command chair of the UFSS Endeavor, savoring a rare lull. Weeks of successful missions had the crew in high spirits—lighthearted banter echoed across the bridge, and even the diligent science officer Alexis Weiss wore a faint grin. Chief Engineer Ayame Tsukihara leaned against an auxiliary station with a ghost of amusement on her lips. For Stryker, seeing his crew relaxed and bonding was gratifying, a hard-won peace after the chaos of war.

His moment of calm shattered when a soft trill came from the communications console. The bridge fell silent. Comms officer Ellie Tahreni turned in her seat. “Captain, I’m picking up a transmission… faint and intermittent. Might be a distress signal.”

Stryker leaned forward. “Origin?”

Ellie adjusted her headset. “Hard to pinpoint, sir. Somewhere in the Carina sector, bearing two-two-seven mark fourteen. It’s on an emergency channel, but there’s some encryption. I can’t get the message content, only fragments.”

“Put it on speaker.”

Static crackled from the bridge speakers, then a broken voice emerged: “…—ayday… zzzt … anyone… research… station… zzzt … help… Xed… shhhk … danger—” The transmission cut off in a wash of static.

“Research station… and ‘danger’,” Alexis said sharply, already tapping into her sensor console.

“I heard ‘Xed,’” Ayame added, pronouncing it like exed. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion.

Stryker felt a prickling at the back of his neck. Xed? The word meant nothing to him, but the fear in that voice was unmistakable. “Locate the source of that signal, now.”

Alexis’s fingers flew over her controls. “Coordinates locked. It’s coming from Outpost Zeta-12…” She glanced up in recognition. “Sir, that’s a deep-space research station—decommissioned and abandoned three years ago.”

“Abandoned, yet sending a mayday,” Ayame muttered. “Could be squatters or pirates. Or an automated beacon triggered by something worse.”

Stryker considered the possibilities: a trap, a ghost signal, an experiment gone wrong. None sat well. The distress sounded genuine. And that word, Xed, lodged uneasily in his mind. “Either someone’s in trouble, or something strange is going on. Either way, we’re duty-bound to respond.” He turned to the helm. “Set course for Outpost Zeta-12, maximum warp.”

The Endeavor’s engines hummed as the crew snapped into action. Stryker tapped the ship-wide comm. “All hands, prepare for emergency rescue operations.” As the stars outside streaked into faster-than-light blur, he felt a coil of anticipation tighten in his gut. Whatever awaits at Zeta-12, he vowed, we’ll face it head-on.

Hours later, an Endeavor shuttle dropped out of warp near Outpost Zeta-12. Stryker got his first look at the station as the shuttle’s running lights pierced the void. It drifted without power, a dark silhouette against a field of stars—a cluster of linked modules and ring-habitats, completely unlit. One entire habitat ring gaped open to space, its metal edges twisted and torn.

“No sign of power,” Stryker murmured from the pilot’s seat.

“Minimal heat signatures,” Alexis reported, studying her scanner in the co-pilot seat. “Internal temp just above freezing—life support’s failing.”

“Thin atmosphere, not breathable,” Ayame added, double-checking her helmet seal. She had traded her coveralls for light armor and a plasma pistol. “We’ll want to stay sealed.”

The shuttle glided along the station’s hull. Scorch marks and blast craters marred the exterior. One communications array hung in melted ruin. As they passed the main airlock, Alexis inhaled sharply. “Captain, look at that—”

A small craft’s prow protruded from the station’s side, having rammed straight through the outer hull. The metal around it was blackened and buckled. Someone had forced their way in, literally.

“Someone really wanted inside,” Stryker muttered. He veered the shuttle toward the station’s hangar bay. The bay doors were jammed half-open, just wide enough to admit them. “Hang on.”

With careful bursts of the thrusters, he slipped their shuttle through the gap. Inside, the floodlights revealed chaos. A utility shuttle was smashed against a wall. Cargo crates and tools drifted in the weak gravity. No welcoming party—just silence and wreckage.

They set down and cycled the shuttle’s hatch. Stryker led the way down the ramp, rifle up. Their helmet lamps cut thin beams through the dusty air. Even through filters, the hangar smelled of burnt plastic and something coppery. Blood, Stryker realized grimly.

The hatch into the station’s interior was sealed and unpowered. Ayame pried open an access panel and found a mess of cut wires. “Door controls are dead. I’ll open it manually.” She drew a laser cutter and began slicing through the lock mechanism.

Meanwhile, Alexis swept her scanner over the area. “No life signs… but there are traces of organic material around us,” she murmured. Her brow creased. Translation: signs of bodies, or what was left of them.

After some tinkering, Ayame managed to crank the heavy door open a few feet. “That’s enough. Let’s move.”

They slipped through one by one, entering a main corridor—and a scene from a nightmare.

Their lights revealed charred walls and dangling wires. Tiny globules of dried blood floated in midair. The deck was dented and buckled in places, as if something had smashed through with monstrous strength. Alexis halted, eyes wide, as her beam found four gouges clawed into a metal bulkhead. The slashes were deep and evenly spaced, and a dark, tarry substance oozed from them.

“Is that… blood?” Alexis whispered. The viscous fluid was almost black, with a greenish sheen. Not quite human, not quite alien.

Ayame scanned it with a handheld analyzer. “Organic residue with human DNA,” she reported softly. “And something else… synthetic polymers. It’s like flesh and machine combined.”

Stryker’s gut churned. Only a being of terrible strength—and grotesque composition—could have left such marks. “Keep moving,” he ordered. He forced himself forward, eyes sweeping the corridor. He had seen battlefields before, but nothing like this.

Deeper they went, stepping over fallen debris. A hanging light flickered red, casting distorted shadows. Now and then, something creaked in the distance. Once, a faint skittering noise made them all stop in their tracks. But nothing emerged from the darkness.

At a junction, they found more signs of struggle—a discarded pistol, an emergency axe floating blade-up, a bulkhead door blasted open. “Lab wing should be this way,” Alexis said, her voice hushed as she consulted a flickering station map on her tablet.

They turned down a corridor toward the primary lab. Outside its entrance, the doors were partially torn open. Stryker squeezed through and swept his rifle across the room, but no threat lurked—only destruction.

The laboratory was wrecked. Cabinets and consoles were toppled, glass and equipment shattered. The air stank of chemicals and scorched metal. Amid the chaos, a single console on the far wall still glowed dimly.

“There’s some power here,” Alexis said, already moving to the console. Ayame stepped in behind her, covering the room with her pistol. Stryker advanced more slowly, scanning for danger.

His beam slid over a shape drifting near the ceiling—a human body. Stryker’s chest tightened. He pushed off the floor, gently catching the floating corpse and turning it around. It was a woman in a lab coat. Her eyes stared, unseeing. Stryker guided her down and saw dark veins spiderwebbed beneath her pale skin, and ugly splotches of the green-black residue clinging to her neck and chest. Whatever had killed her had started to… change her.

“One casualty… a scientist,” Stryker murmured. He anchored the body to a table with a strap. There was nothing more they could do for her.

Alexis found a data tablet clutched in the dead woman’s hand. She gently pried it free and jacked it into the console. “Let’s see if she left a log,” she said, voice tight with emotion. Her fingers flew over the console, bypassing the tablet’s security. In seconds, files began to upload. One was an audio recording tagged as a final report.

“Captain, I have a log entry… it might explain this,” Alexis said. Stryker and Ayame stepped closer, their helmet lights illuminating the blood-smeared console. Alexis took a breath and played the file.

A woman’s voice crackled to life, hushed and trembling: “…If anyone finds this— our project… we thought we were helping— but they came out of nowhere… using our own research against us… Station compromised. We’re going to scuttle the station… They’re not human… not entirely. So strong… oh God, they’re through the door—”

A thunderous crash and a short, horrified scream cut across the audio. The woman continued in a broken whisper: “Never should have tried to harness it… Xed… they call themselves Xed… *” Another crash. An inhuman hiss. “To anyone listening… warn them… Xed will—”

The recording died into static.

For a moment, none of the crew spoke. Listening to the researcher’s final moments left them pale and shaken. Alexis wiped her eyes with the back of her glove, jaw clenched. Ayame swore under her breath, anger tightening her features. Stryker realized his own hands had curled into fists. They had confirmation now—this carnage was deliberate. And they had a name to pin to it.

“Not human, not alien,” Ayame said, voice low. “Something in-between did this.”

Stryker exhaled, forcing down his anger. “Whatever Xed is, we’re going to make sure Command hears about it.” He tore his gaze from the devastation in the lab. “Now let’s move. We’ve seen enough.”

As if on cue, a deep rumble reverberated through the station. The deck shuddered beneath their boots and somewhere far below came the dull WHUMP of an explosion. Red emergency lights began flashing.

“They’ve set the station to blow!” Ayame yelled. “Time to go—now!”

Alexis snatched her tablet from the console, slinging it secure. Stryker was already in motion. “Back to the shuttle, double-time!”

They bolted back the way they came. The station groaned as secondary blasts went off in distant modules. Chunks of debris rained from the ceiling. A collapsing bulkhead forced them into a side maintenance tunnel. In the scramble, Alexis slipped off a ladder rung in the low gravity and began to drift upward, but Stryker grabbed her arm and yanked her back down. They kept going without pausing for breath.

Within minutes, the trio hurtled into the hangar bay. The shuttle stood waiting, its lights a welcome beacon in the dimness. “Go, go, go!” Stryker urged, practically pushing Alexis up the ramp. Ayame was last aboard, slamming the hatch control as another tremor rocked the floor.

Stryker dived into the pilot’s seat and hit the thrusters. The shuttle lifted off with a roar. Ahead, the hangar doors were still jammed half-open. “Hang on!” he barked. He aimed the shuttle at the gap and gunned it. The small craft screeched through, scraping the hull—then they were out, hurtling into open space.

Behind them, Outpost Zeta-12 erupted in a chain of explosions. The shuttle bucked wildly as debris hammered its hull, but Stryker clenched the controls and pushed them clear of the blast. In seconds they were racing away from an expanding cloud of glowing wreckage that had been the station.

Inside the shuttle, they finally exhaled. “They destroyed the whole station to cover their tracks,” Ayame growled, ripping off her helmet. She was trembling with adrenaline and rage.

“At least we got evidence,” Alexis panted, holding up the data tablet. Her eyes blazed with anger.

Stryker gave a grim nod. “We’ll let Command know everything. This isn’t over.”

Minutes later, back aboard the Endeavor, Stryker delivered a full report to UFSC Command. The news from headquarters was unsettling: Zeta-12 was not the only outpost to go dark recently. This was no isolated incident—something was targeting remote stations on the frontier.

The Endeavor received new orders to investigate the threat immediately. On the bridge, Captain Foxx and his crew gathered, still shaken by the horrors they’d witnessed yet burning with resolve.

“Whatever Xed is, we’ll find it,” Stryker assured them, his voice echoing in the tense quiet. Alexis and Ayame nodded, determination in their eyes.

As the starship turned toward its next destination, Stryker cast a long look at the stars. Somewhere in that endless night, the Xed were lurking—absorbing, mutating, rewriting life in their path. The crew of the Endeavor had seen a glimpse of the coming storm, and they were not about to back down. However unknown and terrifying this enemy was, they would shine a light into the darkness and stop it before it struck again.