Nobody’s Home
by Michael J. D’Alfonsi
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
As they worked, neither noticed the subtle darkness gathering in the corners of the room, not the absence of light, but something that consumed it. Neither saw how the shadows behind them sometimes moved independently of their bodies, or how the frost patterns left by the entity were slowly reforming into complex geometries on the metal floor.
When they finally turned to leave, both felt lighter, as if surviving an impossible horror had forged something new between them. Vinnie placed a hand briefly on Adelaide’s shoulder, a gesture of solidarity she would have shrugged off hours earlier but now accepted with a tight nod.
“Let’s get back to the ship,” he said. “Set the station’s reactor to overload from there.”
Adelaide agreed, already calculating the minimum safe distance for observation. Neither looked back as they entered the maintenance shaft, leaving the silent tableau of the entity’s victims behind. Their lights illuminated the path ahead, pushing back the darkness that seemed more absolute than it had on their descent.
Behind them, in the shadows they left undisturbed, something watched. And waited.
The maintenance shaft collapsed behind them with a thunderous roar of twisting metal. Adelaide and Vinnie ran through the debris-filled corridor, the ship’s location blinking steadily on their nav displays, so close yet impossibly distant through the station’s suddenly maze-like configuration.
The lights flickered in patterns that suggested intention rather than malfunction, plunging sections of their route into absolute darkness at precisely the moments they needed to see. Neither spoke the truth that pounded in their minds with each racing heartbeat: the entity wasn’t gone. It had merely changed tactics.
“Junction ahead,” Adelaide called, her breath coming in controlled bursts despite their pace. “Two possible routes to docking bay.”
Vinnie glanced at his own display. “Left looks faster.”
“Right has redundant life support and emergency lighting,” she countered. “Probability of maintained illumination seventy-three percent higher.”
For once, Vinnie didn’t argue with her calculations. The darkness behind them seemed to move with purpose now, swallowing the emergency lights one by one. They reached the junction and hesitated for only a second before a sound like wet fingers sliding across metal decided for them.
“Right,” Vinnie agreed, pushing Adelaide ahead of him.
The corridor stretched before them, lit by strips of pale blue emergency lighting that cast everything in corpse-like pallor. They had covered perhaps thirty meters when the station groaned, a sound too organic for a structure made of metal and composite materials. The floor beneath them trembled, then buckled upward as if something massive were pushing from below.
“Move!” Vinnie shouted, shoving Adelaide forward as the floor erupted behind them.
Darkness poured through the breach like liquid shadow, forming tendrils that reached hungrily toward the humans. Adelaide fired her weapon into the mass without slowing her pace. The energy bolts disappeared into the darkness without effect.
Vinnie deployed a portable light barrier — standard equipment for asteroid mining in shadow zones — creating a temporary wall of searing brightness between them and the advancing entity.
“That won’t hold it long,” he said, already moving again. “Go! I’ll be right behind you.”
Adelaide hesitated, her methodical mind rejecting the inefficiency of separation even as she calculated their diminishing survival odds. “Negative. We maintain visual contact.”
“Addy, for once in your life, don’t argue!” Vinnie grabbed her shoulders, his face inches from hers. “I need to set a proper delay on this thing. Five seconds. That’s all. Then I’m right behind you.”
The barrier was already dimming as the entity began to absorb its energy. Adelaide made a quick decision, nodding sharply before turning to sprint down the corridor. She counted her steps, a habit from military training: one hundred twenty-seven steps to the next junction, where she would wait for Vinnie to catch up.
She had reached one hundred eight when she heard his scream.
Adelaide whirled, weapon raised, to see Vinnie suspended in mid-air at the far end of the corridor. The light barrier had failed completely. Darkness enveloped him, tendrils wrapped around his limbs and torso like living restraints. One tendril, thinner than the others, pressed against his forehead, seeming to sink beneath the skin.
“Addy, run!” he managed before his body convulsed violently. The scream that followed contained frequencies no human vocal cords should produce.
For a moment that stretched into eternity, Adelaide stood frozen, her analytical mind warring with instincts she rarely acknowledged. Then Vinnie’s body began to change: his skin rippling as though something moved beneath it, his joints bending in impossible directions. His eyes, locked on hers, flashed from pain to resignation to something like peace.
“Go,” he mouthed silently, before the darkness consumed him completely.
Adelaide ran. Her military training took over, compartmentalizing the horror she had witnessed, focusing her entirely on survival. The corridors blurred past as she executed evasive maneuvers, using her knowledge of station layouts to choose routes with sensor blind spots.
Behind her, the darkness pursued, sometimes as a solid wave, sometimes breaking into smaller tendrils that slithered through ventilation ducts and maintenance tubes to cut off her escape routes.
She reached the docking bay with the entity mere seconds behind her. The Sigma 7 sat untouched, its air lock open and inviting. Adelaide threw herself through it, slapping the emergency close control before rolling to her feet. The airlock cycled with agonizing slowness while darkness gathered outside the external viewport, pressing against the transparent material like a curious predator evaluating its prey’s defenses.
By the time she reached the bridge, the exterior cameras showed the entity spreading across the ship’s hull, probing for vulnerabilities. Adelaide’s fingers flew across the controls, initiating emergency launch procedures while simultaneously accessing the station’s reactor controls. Her face remained composed, though the silver streak in her hair had become damp with sweat, plastered against her forehead like a scar.
“Station reactor overload sequence initiated,” she stated for the ship’s log, her voice clinical despite the tremor in her hands. “Countdown set for fifteen minutes. Minimum safe distance achievable in twelve minutes at maximum thrust.”
The ship’s engines hummed to life. The magnetic clamps disengaged with a shudder that ran through the hull. Adelaide watched the external feeds as the entity recoiled momentarily from the energy discharge, giving her the seconds she needed to maneuver away from the docking port.
“Executing emergency departure protocol,” she continued, guiding the ship with precise movements that betrayed none of the chaos in her mind. “Crew status: one survivor. Vincent Martinez presumed...” — her voice caught for a fraction of a second — “terminated.”
The Sigma 7 cleared the docking bay and accelerated away from the station. On her tactical display, Adelaide watched the reactor temperature climbing steadily toward critical levels. The entity hadn’t pursued beyond the station’s immediate vicinity, small comfort given what it had already cost.
She set the autopilot to maintain course to the minimum safe observation distance, then allowed herself exactly thirty seconds of uncharacteristic behavior. Her fist struck the console once, hard enough that the impact split the skin across her knuckles. A single sound escaped, not quite a sob, not quite a scream, but something between that contained multitudes of emotion she rarely permitted herself to acknowledge.
Thirty seconds. Then Adelaide Jaxson straightened her spine, wiped the blood from her hand, and returned to the methodical execution of her duties.
“Preparing after-action report,” she said, opening a new file on her data pad. “Encountered unknown entity with apparent ability to—”
The communication system crackled to life, interrupting her. Static hissed through the speakers for several seconds before resolving into a familiar voice.
“Addy, come in! I made it to the emergency shuttle. Can you hear me?”
Adelaide froze, her fingers hovering above the data pad. Vinnie’s voice continued, breaking up occasionally but unmistakable.
“Had to take the long way around. Entity cut me off from the main bay. I’m broadcasting on emergency frequency. Please tell me you got out.”
She checked the source of the transmission. It was indeed coming from one of the station’s emergency shuttles, now moving away from the doomed structure on a vector perpendicular to her own.
Adelaide’s mind raced through possibilities. She had seen Vinnie consumed by the entity, but had she actually seen him die? The entity had demonstrated the ability to create illusions, to manipulate perception. What if what she’d seen had been meant to separate them? To ensure she left him behind?
“Vinnie?” she finally responded, keeping her voice neutral despite the hope flaring in her chest. “Confirm identity. What’s my sister’s name?”
The pause that followed lasted three-point-four seconds, she counted them precisely.
“You don’t have a sister. Now can you please help me out before I have a heart attack out here?”
Adelaide’s fingers tapped against the console edge, calculating odds, weighing evidence against instinct.
“The reactor’s set to blow in eleven minutes,” she said finally. “Your shuttle doesn’t have the thrust to reach minimum safe distance.”
“Yeah, I know,” Vinnie’s voice replied, tension clear beneath the forced casualness. “That’s why I was hoping my partner with the fancy military-grade ship might swing by and pick me up.”
Adelaide studied the station schematics, noting the shuttle’s trajectory and the rapidly deteriorating reactor containment. The maneuver needed would bring them dangerously close to the station again, with minimal margin for error. It was precisely the kind of improvisation she criticized Vinnie for regularly.
“Hang on,” she said, already adjusting their course. “I’m coming to get you.”
The Sigma 7 banked sharply, its engines flaring as Adelaide executed a high-g turn that would intercept the shuttle’s path. Her calculations were flawless, accounting for relative velocities, the station’s deteriorating gravitational influence, and the optimal approach angle for docking with the smaller craft.
“Approaching your position,” she reported, watching the distance between vessels diminish on her tactical display. “Prepare for emergency docking procedure.”
Through the viewport, she could now see the shuttle. a small, utilitarian craft designed for short-range evacuation. Its running lights blinked in the standard distress pattern. As she maneuvered closer, she noted something odd about its trajectory, subtle irregularities in its course that didn’t match typical autopilot patterns or human piloting.
“Vinnie, I’m reading fluctuations in your navigational system,” she said, frowning at the data. “Are you on manual control?”
“Had to bypass some damaged systems,” his voice replied, the transmission quality degrading slightly. “Don’t worry about it. Just get me out of here.”
Adelaide’s finger tapped against the console edge, a nervous tic she rarely indulged. Something felt wrong. The methodical part of her mind insisted on verifying before continuing.
“I’m scanning your shuttle,” she said, initiating the procedure before he could object.
“Addy, there’s no time,” Vinnie’s voice insisted, now tinged with something that might have been anger or fear. “The reactor’s going to blow. Just dock and get us out of here!”
The scan results appeared on her screen. The shuttle showed minimal power consumption for life support. No detectable heat signature consistent with human presence. And something else: energy patterns similar to those they had observed in the mining level, just before the entity had first manifested.
Adelaide’s hand moved to the engine controls, preparing to abort the docking sequence. Before she could execute the command, the shuttle’s exterior suddenly rippled, its metallic surface flowing like liquid. The craft’s form dissolved, revealing a swirling mass of darkness that immediately expanded toward the Sigma 7.
“Did you really think it would be that easy, Adelaide?” The voice coming through the comm system was still Vinnie’s but layered with something ancient and cold that made her skin crawl. “That I wouldn’t learn from our encounter? That I couldn’t take what I needed from your partner before consuming him?”
Adelaide slammed the engines to maximum reverse thrust, but tendrils of darkness had already reached the ship’s hull, anchoring the entity to the Sigma 7 with impossible strength. The metal where it touched began to frost over, creaking as the cold penetrated deeper.
“He had such interesting memories of you,” the entity continued conversationally, its form stretching between what had been the shuttle and the ship in a bridge of living shadow. “Such complicated feelings. He admired your precision while resenting your rigidity. He trusted you with his life while knowing you would sacrifice him for the greater good, if necessary.” A sound like amused contemplation. “And he was right, wasn’t he? You left him behind.”
Adelaide activated the ship’s defense systems — designed to repel micrometeorites, not paranormal entities — while simultaneously plotting an escape vector that would take them directly through the station’s projected explosion radius. It was a desperate gamble, but the only one remaining.
“He died bravely,” the entity said, its tendrils now seeping through the airlock seals. “But not quickly. I made sure of that.”
The temperature on the bridge plummeted as darkness began to seep through ventilation ducts. Adelaide locked the navigation controls on her desperate course, then reached for her sidearm, useless against the entity but, perhaps, useful for one final choice of her own.
“I wonder,” the entity mused, its voice now coming from the darkness gathering at the bridge entrance, “will you die as interestingly as he did?”
Adelaide Jaxson stood facing the darkness, her military posture perfect, the silver streak in her hair gleaming in the emergency lights. Her expression revealed nothing of the calculations racing through her mind, nor of the grief and rage burning beneath her methodical exterior.
“Let’s find out,” she said and waited as the darkness flowed toward her with hungry anticipation.
Directly in their path, Minerva Station 4 had begun its final countdown to destruction.
Copyright © 2026 by Michael J. D’Alfonsi
