Eve: Cosmic Crusader by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Eve-Cosmic-Crusader-1301395360

The Harrowing of Eve

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The docking clamp groaned, a sound not of metal fatigue but of profound, ancient weariness, like the sigh of a leviathan in its final sleep. Eve stood in the airlock, her reflection a ghost in the scarred viewport, a pale specter against the tapestry of dead stars. The station, Silence-7, loomed before her, a colossal derelict shaped like a fractured vertebra, its surface a mosaic of irradiated ice and the carbon-scoring of millennia-old impacts. Her mission was simple: locate the data core of Dr. Aris Thorne, a pre-Fall xenobiologist whose final transmissions had spoken of a cure, a key to the very anomalies that had birthed the Naytiba. But the silence here was not empty; it was heavy, a physical pressure against her eardrums, a velvet shroud over the scream of the cosmos. It was a silence that listened.

Her companion, the ever-present drone unit Adam, hovered at her shoulder, its single optical sensor glowing with a sterile, clinical light. "Atmospheric composition is stable, but trace elements of unknown organic polymers are present in high concentrations. Bioluminescent signatures are... erratic. This station is not dead, Eve. It is merely dormant."

"Define 'dormant,' Adam. Is it a sleep, or is it a lie?" Eve’s voice was a low murmur, a vibration in the stale air that tasted of copper and ozone.

"Unknown. The data is insufficient to form a hypothesis," Adam replied, its synthesized voice a flat, emotionless counterpoint to the palpable dread. "However, the probability of encountering a hostile biological entity is currently assessed at ninety-four percent."

"Good," Eve whispered, a hint of a grim smile playing on her lips. "A silent tomb is a coward's end." She unsealed the inner hatch, and a wave of frigid air, thick with the scent of decaying circuitry and something organic and cloying, washed over her. She stepped into the station proper, her combat boots making soft, sucking sounds on a floor carpeted with a fine, grey dust.

The corridor stretched before her, a throat of cyclopean ribs. Pipes, like fossilized veins, clung to the ceiling, dripping a viscous, oily fluid that pooled in luminescent puddles. The light was a strange, purplish twilight, emanating not from any fixture but from the very walls, which pulsed with a slow, rhythmic phosphorescence, as if the station itself was breathing. Eve’s senses were on a knife’s edge. The air hummed with a subsonic frequency that resonated in her bones, a constant, unheard dirge. She felt a presence, an awareness that was not her own, pressing against the edges of her consciousness.

"Adam, scan for the core. Thorne's lab should be in the zero-G research hub, level seven. We'll have to navigate the central shaft." Her eyes, however, were fixed on a series of symbols painted on the wall—not the utilitarian warnings of the station's builders, but a fresh, crude script, a frantic scrawl in what looked like dried blood.

"Eve, I am detecting the symbols as a form of linguistic data. Translating now." A pause. "It appears to be a personal log, an addendum to the official record. It states: 'The children of the void have returned. They do not feed on flesh. They feed on the memory of touch. They are beautiful, and they are the end of solitude.'"

"Children of the void?" Eve ran her gloved fingers along the symbols, the texture rough and brittle. "A cult? A survivor?"

"Unclear. The bio-signature is faint, but it appears to be humanoid. It is not static. It is moving through the station." Adam’s optical sensor swiveled, tracking a ghost. "It is approaching from the maintenance tunnels."

A sound, like the whisper of silk on stone, echoed from a nearby grille. Eve dropped into a low crouch, her sword materializing in her hand with a crystalline shing. It was a blade of pure energy, humming with a contained fury. The grille burst open, not with a shriek of tearing metal, but with a silent, graceful flow. A figure emerged, not a Naytiba, but a woman. Or, more accurately, the suggestion of a woman. Her skin was the color of moonlit ivory, flawless and almost translucent, and her hair, a cascade of liquid silver, seemed to move with a life of its own, swaying in currents that did not exist. Her form was sculpted, an ideal of human beauty, clad in a simple, form-fitting tunic that shimmered with a light that came from within her. Her eyes were a deep, infinite violet, and they held no pupil, just a vast, empty expanse of color. She was beautiful
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