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Chapter 1: The salvage operation that changes everything

[Location: Deep Space - Sector 7, Ancient Ruins]

[Timeline: Ship's Time 1427]

[Reality Status: Normal]

#SalvageOp #FirstContact

<Sarah>

{Keystone:Dormant}

[ShipSystem:Navigation]

The hulk of the ancient ship hung in the void like a broken promise. Sarah Chen had seen plenty of derelicts in her years of salvage work, but something about this one made her shoulder blades itch. Maybe it was the way the hull seemed to absorb sensor scans instead of reflecting them. Maybe it was how the structure defied every known architectural style in the Concordat's database. Or maybe it was just that no one else had claimed it yet, despite being less than three jumps from a major shipping lane.

"Scans are still processing, boss." Lucky's voice crackled over the com from the Starcaller's bridge. "But if you're asking me? This thing's old. Older than the Concordat. Older than the first colonies. Might even be older than Earth itself." He paused, and Sarah could practically hear him rubbing his lucky coin between his fingers. "We sure about this one?"

Sarah adjusted her mag-boots on the observation deck, watching the derelict through reinforced plastics worth more than some small ships. The salvage rights alone would set them up for a year, assuming they could prove first claim. "Yeah, well, I hope it's worth it," she replied, her mind momentarily drifting to recent whispers she'd heard in salvage circles. "I've been hearing rumours about some unrest within the Concordat. Something about factions forming over salvage rights and resource allocations. "Lucky's tone shifted slightly, curiosity piqued. "Unrest? You mean like... civil war kind of unrest?" "Not quite that dramatic," Sarah said, her gaze still fixed on the ship's bizarre geometry. "But there are talks of some higher-ups wanting to tighten control over salvage operations. If we claim this ship and it turns out to be valuable, we might find ourselves in their crosshairs." "Great," Lucky replied with a hint of sarcasm. "Just what we need - political headaches on top of whatever this ship is hiding."

The Starcaller's external lights swept across the derelict's surface, revealing patches of what looked like circuitry but moved like coral. Sarah had seen her share of bio-tech, but nothing like this. The patterns shifted slightly every time she looked away, like an optical illusion playing tricks with depth perception.

"Getting some peculiar readings from the mass sensors," Lucky reported. "Ship masses about right for its size, but the distribution's all wrong. Like someone shuffled the density around randomly. And boss? The numbers keep changing." A pause. "Zara-9 says the quantum readings are giving her a headache. Didn't know synthetics could get headaches."

"First time for everything," Sarah muttered, but she filed that detail away. Zara-9's "headaches" had saved them from trouble more than once. Her suit's heads-up display flickered, showing radiation levels dancing just within safe limits. The derelict's hull temperature read as both absolute zero and slightly above ambient - simultaneously. She'd have to get Krix'tal to recalibrate the sensors. Again.

"Tell Zara to keep monitoring. I want to know if anything changes." Sarah watched a piece of debris float past the ship, then float past again from a different direction, somehow managing to ignore several laws of physics in the process. She blinked hard. "And get Krix'tal suited up - we're going to need an engineer's eyes on this one. Something about these readings isn't adding up, and Krix'tal's good at arguing with reality when it misbehaves."

"Well," Sarah said, watching as her suit's heads-up display flickered between standard numerals and symbols that weren't in its programing, "at least we can't say we weren't warned."

The airlock cycled with its usual hiss and thunk. Krix'tal's environment suit made them look like a particularly well-armed deep-sea creature, extra appendages bristling with scanning equipment. The expensive kind that usually gave straight answers.

"Maintaining visual contact," Lucky's voice came through clear despite the increasing interference. "Though I should mention the ship keeps changing colour every time I blink. Either that or I've developed the most professional case of space madness in Concordat history."

Sarah activated her mag-boots' safety tethers. "Keep your eyes on the readings, Lucky. Professional space madness can wait until after we're paid." The tether locked onto the derelict's hull with a solid chunk that somehow managed to sound uncertain.

"Captain." Krix'tal's translator rendered their clicks into crisp syllables. "The hull material... it's responding to contact. Not like smart metal. More like..." They paused, manipulating controls on their scanner. "More like it's curious."

Sarah looked down at her boots. The metal around the tether points had begun to ripple, forming concentric patterns that reminded her of fingerprints. Or star charts. Or both at once. The ripples spread outward like waves in a pond, but instead of fading, they began to form intricate, swirling designs. Where the patterns overlapped, the metal seemed to shift through impossible colours - shades that had no business existing in normal space.

"Zara, you getting this?"

"Affirmative. Though 'getting this' might be optimistic. The sensor data suggests the hull is simultaneously solid metal and pure energy. Also, possibly a quantum superposition of every material ever discovered. And..." A pause. "And some that haven't been yet."

The patterns spread, elegant and mesmerising, like frost on a window if frost could chart the movements of stars. Beneath Sarah's feet, the hull began to pulse with a soft light that followed their movements, tracking each step with a ghostly afterimage. Where Krix'tal's scanning beam touched the surface, the metal seemed to reach back, forming delicate spires that twisted toward the light before dissolving back into the hull.

Sarah had a sudden, very specific feeling that the ship wasn't just ancient.

It was awake.

"We need to find an entry point," she started to say, but the hull was already changing. The patterns converged ahead of them, flowing together like quicksilver, forming what was unmistakably an archway. Its edges rippled with that same impossible light, and beyond... beyond was darkness that seemed to breathe.

"Well," Lucky's voice crackled through the com. "I guess that saves us having to knock."

Krix'tal's scanners whirred. "Captain, the opening is stable. Atmosphere beyond. But..." Their translator crackled with uncertainty. "The readings suggest the space inside is... recursive. As if it's folded in on itself."

Sarah checked her suit seals one more time. Standard procedure when reality got creative. "Zara, maintain contact. If we go silent..."

"I'll implement the 'everything's gone horribly wrong' protocol," Zara-9 finished. "Though I feel compelled to point out that our contingency plans rarely account for ships that rearrange themselves."

Sarah took a deep breath and stepped through the archway. The darkness wrapped around her like silk, and for a moment, she could have sworn she heard the ship humming to itself. Not mechanical vibrations - this was more like a tune, just on the edge of recognition.

Behind her, Krix'tal's lights cut through the gloom, revealing a corridor that seemed to go on forever. Or maybe it was just a few meters long. Somehow, both felt equally true.

"I think," Lucky said, his voice tight with the kind of forced calm that came with years of professional training, "the corridor just rearranged itself behind us."

Sarah didn't turn around. In her experience, looking back at reality-defying phenomena rarely improved the situation. "Noted. Krix'tal, what are your scanners saying?"

"They are..." Krix'tal's appendages waved in a gesture that their translator didn't bother interpreting. "They are saying many things. All at once. Some of them contradictory." A pause. "Some of them in languages I'm quite certain haven't been invented yet."

The walls around them had taken on a pearlescent sheen, like the inside of a shell that had grown up in deep space. Patterns chased themselves across the surface – star charts, circuit diagrams, mathematical equations that made Sarah's eyes water when she tried to follow them.

"Zara, you still with us?"

"Technically speaking." The AI's voice came through with an odd resonance, as if she was speaking from multiple locations simultaneously. "Though I should mention that according to my sensors, you're currently occupying several different points in space-time. And the ship... every sensor array is reporting different mass readings simultaneously. One moment it reads as a standard freighter, the next as something impossibly massive, then as having negative mass, then as having no mass at all. It's as if our instruments are trying to measure something that exists in multiple states at once."

Lucky's voice cut in, professional calm straining at the edges. "Boss, the navigational computers are having a meltdown. It's like trying to plot a course around a point in space that can't decide where or what it is. Even the backup systems are showing impossible readings."

Sarah took another careful step forward. The floor remained solid under her boots, though the surface seemed to ripple with each footfall, sending waves of geometric patterns racing outward. "Any signs of the original crew?"

"Depends on your definition of 'signs,'" Lucky replied. He'd moved to one of the walls, his helmet's lights illuminating what looked like a control panel. Or possibly a work of abstract art. Or both. "These markings... they're changing as I watch them. But they feel familiar somehow. Like reading something in a dream."

"Captain." Krix'tal's voice had taken on an odd harmonics. "The ship... I believe it's trying to communicate."

The patterns on the walls had begun to pulse in sync with their heartbeats. Or maybe their heartbeats had begun to sync with the patterns. The distinction felt increasingly academic.

"Through the scanning equipment?"

"Through everything." Krix'tal's appendages moved in complex patterns as they adjusted their instruments. "The metal, the air, the electromagnetic fields... it's all part of a single system. A language, maybe. Or..."

https://youtu.be/2PBeKzVhWHY

They never finished the sentence. The corridor ahead of them suddenly bloomed like a flower made of light and geometry, opening into a space that somehow managed to be both vast and intimate. At its centre floated what might have been a control station, if control stations were designed by engineers who'd discovered some fundamental truth about reality and gone slightly mad in the process.

"Well," Sarah said, her professional demeanour holding steady even as the laws of physics took a creative interpretation of their duties, "I think we found the bridge."

The air around them hummed with possibility. In the depths of the ship, something ancient and patient stirred, like a cosmic library finally discovering its first readers in millennia.

Lucky checked his equipment readouts one more time. "Permission to state the obvious, Captain?"

"Granted."

"This is definitely going to affect our salvage estimate."

The bridge wasn't empty.

Suspended in the centre of the chamber was... something. A geometric form that seemed to fold in on itself, each facet containing what looked like a different slice of space. Deep purple energy coursed through its edges, forming intricate patterns that pulsed in time with the ship's strange heartbeat. Stars wheeled across its surfaces, some familiar, others from skies no human eye had ever seen.

"That's it," Krix'tal whispered, their translator barely able to handle the mix of awe and professional fascination in their voice. "The Cosmic Keystone. The legends didn't do it justice."

Sarah watched as constellations danced across the object's faces, forming and reforming into complex geometric patterns. Where the purple energy met the star-filled surfaces, reality seemed to ripple, creating effects that made her eyes hurt if she tried to follow them too closely.

"Lucky, what are you getting?"

"Everything and nothing, Captain." He was working his scanning equipment with the careful precision of someone who knew they were recording something unprecedented. "It's like... imagine if someone built a map of the universe, but folded it through dimensions we weren't meant to see. The energy readings are off the charts, but they're also suggesting the charts themselves might be more of a polite suggestion than a rule."

The Keystone rotated slowly, each movement accompanied by a shimmer of stellar light and that strange, musical hum that seemed to bypass their ears entirely and speak directly to their minds. Around its edges, space itself appeared to bend, creating a corona of impossible colours that matched the image on their salvage briefing exactly.

"Zara," Sarah kept her voice steady, though her eyes never left the artifact, "please tell me you're recording this."

"Multiple frequencies, Captain. Though I should note that several of them appear to be frequencies that didn't exist until the Keystone created them." A pause. "Also, the ship's internal architecture keeps rearranging itself around you. The good news is that it seems to be doing so in order to maintain optimal observation angles."

Sarah took a careful step forward. The geometric patterns on the floor shifted in response, forming concentric circles that rippled outward like waves in a cosmic pond. Each ripple carried traces of that deep purple energy, creating a path that led directly to the Keystone.

"I don't suppose," Lucky said, his professional demeanour barely containing his excitement, "this counts as 'finder's keepers' in space salvage law?"

Before Sarah could respond, the Keystone pulsed once, bright enough to temporarily overwhelm their helmet filters. When their vision cleared, the patterns on its surface had changed. Now they showed stars they recognized - the exact view they would have seen from their ship's bridge, in fact. But as they watched, those stars began to move, tracing paths that spoke of journeys yet to come.

"Actually," Sarah said, watching as galaxies danced across the geometric faces of the artifact, "I think it might be more a question of whether it wants to be found."

The Keystone hummed in response, a sound like starlight given voice, and the bridge around them filled with possibilities.

Sarah's commlink crackled, Zara's voice cutting through the cosmic symphony with professional urgency. "Captain, we have a problem. Long-range sensors are picking up multiple ships dropping out of hyperspace. Their signatures..." A pause heavy with implications. "Their signatures match Concordat Special Operations."

WORDS: 2233

Visuals and sounds to end off:

https://youtu.be/_7wKjTf_RlI