Chapter 21: The unseen intruder

Elias’s Archival Log – Year 54, Month 11 (Day 20,860)

The quiet was broken today. Violently.

I was in the Archives reviewing the atmospheric recycling data when the ship alarm system activated. It wasn't the slow, rhythmic alarm of a systems fault; it was the high-pitched, insistent shriek of an immediate, physical threat.

Hull Breach Alarm: Sector 3, Outer Ring.

For fifty years, the ship's magnetic deflector fields have rendered external impacts a non-issue. Micrometeorites vaporize; larger debris is pushed into a wider, non-critical trajectory. The last physical hull damage was the intentional structural shear during the Slingshot Maneuver.

I immediately ran to the Bridge, where Ryu was already assessing the damage. His face was a mask of confusion.

"Elias, get August up here now," Ryu ordered, his fingers flying across the controls. "External telemetry is showing an impact at Sector 3—precisely at the location of the recent heat shield repair."

"A meteor?" I asked, pulling up the deflector logs.

"It shouldn't have been. The magnetic field strength was nominal. Nothing should be able to punch through that field without triggering a severe power drain first." He pointed to the shield readout. "The drain was negligible. It just... passed through."

Day 20,861

August and Lyra were deployed to Sector 3 to assess the breach.

The damage was thankfully contained. The impact site was the outermost layer of the bow—the newly repaired heat shield. The meteor was small, no larger than a fist, but it punched a clean, circular hole through the primary ablative composite and impacted the secondary pressure hull, causing a minor, localized pressure leak.

The pressure integrity was immediately sealed off by automatic blast doors, isolating the compromised maintenance section.

I stayed on the Bridge, coordinating communications and monitoring environmental controls while my uncle and cousin were on-site.

"The breach is clean, Elias," August's voice reported over the comms, slightly muffled by his environmental suit. "It’s a perfect, almost melted hole. The material shows extreme thermal signature. Whatever this was, it was moving with incredible speed and density."

Lyra’s voice chimed in, clearer than August’s. She was fourteen, but her analysis was sharp. "Father, the damage isn't the problem. The impact angle is almost exactly 90 degrees to our flight path. That means this meteor was stationary relative to us. It wasn't falling with the galaxy; it was sitting in the intergalactic void, and we hit it at FTL speed."

I pulled up the simulation for that scenario. Hitting a stationary object at our current FTL velocity would generate the equivalent kinetic energy of a nuclear blast. The ship should have been pulverized.

"Lyra, hold on," I said, reviewing the shield logs again. "If it was stationary, the magnetic deflector should have pushed it away days ago, or at least caused a catastrophic energy drain when it passed the field boundary. The field didn't register it until impact."

August responded with a heavy sigh. "Elias, this meteor appears to be non-metallic. Or at least, non-ferromagnetic. It's a silicate composite, but the density is off the charts. It's almost... invisible to our current sensor arrays."

The meteor was a ghost. A perfect projectile, undetectable by the ship's most crucial defense system.

They spent the next eight hours sealing the small breach with a portable welding unit and reinforcing the compromised section with a patch of quick-setting polymer.

Day 20,865

My mother, June, is already using the meteor strike in the pilot training simulations. It’s the perfect lesson: the universe still holds variables we cannot model. She’s developing a new visual scanner protocol to supplement the magnetic sensors.

August is preoccupied. He's trying to reverse-engineer the composition of the meteor fragment Lyra recovered. The results are inconclusive. It defies conventional material science.

"It's like hitting a bullet made of pure compacted energy, Elias," August said, running a fragment through the mass spectrometer. "If there are more of these in the void, the ship is blind."

Day 20,870

My archival work felt trivial today, but it is necessary. I was consolidating the daily population reports—a routine task required for resource management and long-term colonization planning.

The population log is usually straightforward: birth date, death date, current count.

I cross-referenced the current manifest against the previous day's report.

Day 20,869 Population Count: 1,807

Day 20,870 Population Count: 1,808

I stopped, staring at the screen. I pulled up the last recorded birth: Lyra's new baby brother, Marcus, born five weeks ago. No one died yesterday. And there were certainly no births logged on Day 20,870.

I meticulously checked the records: the sick bay, the death registry, the birth logs. The numbers were absolute. The current crew manifest showed 1,808 unique individuals with biometric signatures.

I checked the sensor arrays. The ship was fully sealed; all blast doors were secure. There was no way a person could have drifted in from the exterior void.

The crew manifest had gained a single, unlogged entry. The manifest listed the new individual simply as:

Manifest ID: U-01

Status: Uncategorized.

Location: Haven Ring, Sector 1 (Main Corridor).

I immediately pulled up the biometric data associated with the U-01 entry. The file was empty. No face, no height, no mass. Just a designation.

The alarms had warned us about an undetectable object coming into the ship from the exterior. But my records now showed an undetectable person existing inside the ship.

I looked out the viewport at the empty blackness. We were alone, 131 years from Andromeda. And yet, the ship’s log was reporting an unexplained presence.

Elias’s Archival Log – Final Entry for Year 54, Month 11

The meteor strike was the alarm. The hull breach was the distraction. But the unexplained increase in the population count is the real threat. We are no longer alone.

Time to Andromeda: 131 years, 6 months.

Status: Hull Sealed. Population: 1,808 (Unexplained +1).

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