Fiery Remote Scan 5 -

“This is Dr. Aris Thorne of the Event Horizon . We didn’t mean to hurt you. We just… didn’t know you were there.”

And it was angry.

“Resonance harmonic at 0.03,” chirped the ship’s AI. “Surface composition: ionized helium, carbon plasma, trace… unknown.” fiery remote scan 5

The ship shuddered. Not from impact—from information . A torrent of raw data flooded the comms array, bypassing firewalls, burning through storage crystals. It was the Cinder’s biography: a billion years of solitude, the slow death of its parent star, the agony of being born a failure—too small for fusion, too big to cool. A cosmic stillbirth, adrift and aware. “This is Dr

Thorne saw it all in a flash. The loneliness of a god that could never die, trapped in a body of endless fire. And then, the arrival of the humans. Their scans were not curiosity. They were needles . Every pulse of the remote scan had been a pinprick to a mind that had forgotten touch. We just… didn’t know you were there

Until now.

“Abort scan,” Thorne ordered. “Cut all active sensors.”