Chapter 211: A Plague of Apathy
The victory celebration on the Odyssey was short-lived. It lasted for about five minutes, which was the time it took for the first reports to start coming in. They weren’t reports of attacks or invasions. They were far stranger, and far more unsettling.
Jaxon Ryder’s face appeared on the main screen, his usual confident smirk replaced by a deep frown of confusion. "Ryan, we’ve got a weird situation developing in the Omega Sector," he said, his voice crackling over the long-distance channel. "Three planets have just... gone dark."
"Dark?" Ilsa asked, her tone sharp. "Did they lose power? Are their communications down?"
"No, that’s the thing," Jaxon said, shaking his head. "They’re not down. They’re just... quiet. All of them. We’re still getting basic life-support signals, but all trade chatter, all government broadcasts, all civilian network traffic—it’s all just stopped. It’s like a whole sector decided to take a nap at the same time."
As Jaxon was speaking, more reports began to pour in, forwarded from the Bastion Alliance headquarters. A mining colony in a different sector had missed its weekly shipment, not because of a pirate attack or an equipment failure, but because, according to the colony’s final automated message, the miners had decided that "further work was no longer a priority." A scientific outpost that was on the verge of a huge breakthrough in terraforming technology sent a final, simple message: "Our research is complete. The remaining questions are not important enough to answer."
It was a plague. But it was a plague of the mind. The Herald hadn’t just stolen the Axiom Fragment; that had been a simple theft. His real attack had been far more subtle. While everyone was distracted by the Archive’s near-meltdown, he had used its powerful, galaxy-wide network to upload something. It wasn’t a computer virus that deleted files. It was a memetic virus, a sickness of ideas, that deleted a person’s will to do anything.
Worlds infected by this plague of apathy didn’t fall into chaos and rioting. There was no screaming, no fire, no panic. Instead, they fell into a deep, quiet stillness. People stopped going to work. They stopped talking to their neighbors. They stopped having children. Economies that had been booming for centuries simply flatlined, grinding to a halt because no one could be bothered to care anymore. Exploration ships turned around and went home, their captains deciding that the stars were just too far away and not worth the effort.
It was the philosophy of the Cult of Final Stillness, turned into a weapon. They didn’t need to conquer worlds with armies. They just had to convince everyone that nothing was worth fighting for. The Bastion Alliance was now facing an enemy they couldn’t shoot, an enemy that didn’t have a fleet or a base. Their enemy was an idea: the simple, seductive, and soul-crushing idea that it was easier to just give up.
The weight of this new threat landed heaviest on Emma. Her precognitive abilities, her flashes of the future, had always been her greatest strength. She could see branching paths, possible futures of war and peace, victory and defeat. She could look at a battlefield and see a hundred ways the fight could go.
But now, when she closed her eyes and looked into the future, she saw something new. Something far more terrifying than any war.
She saw gray.
Endless, gray futures stretched out before her, one after another. She saw futures where humanity and the other races of the galaxy didn’t die out in a blaze of glory, but simply faded away. She saw cities where people sat in their homes, staring at blank walls, not hungry or sad, but just... empty. She saw great starships floating dead in space, their crews having simply forgotten why they started their journey in the first place. She saw a universe without art, without laughter, without struggle, without love. Just a quiet, gray, endless nothing.
The sheer bleakness of it all was like a physical weight, pressing down on her chest, making it hard to breathe. The hope that had always been her anchor was being washed away by a tide of utter pointlessness. What was the point of fighting for a future if all futures ended in the same, silent, gray room?
That night, she couldn’t sleep. The gray visions kept coming, each one colder and emptier than the last. She left her quarters and walked through the silent corridors of the Odyssey, eventually finding her way to the ship’s observation deck.
It was a vast, curved room with a window that showed the star-dusted blackness of space. Usually, looking at the endless sea of stars filled her with wonder. Tonight, it just looked cold and empty.
She stood there for a long time, wrapped in her own thoughts, feeling smaller and more lost than she ever had before.
"They’re beautiful, aren’t they?" a voice said from the shadows.
Emma jumped, startled. Ryan stepped out from the side of the room, where he had been standing quietly. He walked over to stand beside her, his gaze also on the stars.
"I used to think so," Emma whispered, her voice barely audible. "Now... they just look like a long way to go for nothing."
He didn’t try to cheer her up. He didn’t say, "Don’t worry, we’ll find a way." He knew her well enough to know that simple words wouldn’t work on a mind that could see the end of everything.
Instead, he just stood with her in silence, sharing the view. After a long moment, he spoke again, his voice soft.
"When I first came here," he said, "to this universe... I was terrified. Everything was new and dangerous. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have any hope for the future. All I had was the next ten seconds. All I could do was try to survive the next ten seconds, and then the ten seconds after that."
He turned his head to look at her, his eyes serious and kind. "You see all the possible endings, Emma. It must feel like you’re drowning in them. But we don’t live in the ending. We live right here. In this moment. In the next ten seconds."
She looked up at him, her eyes shining with unshed tears. The gray visions were still there, at the edge of her mind, but his words were like a small, warm light in the middle of it all. He was reminding her that the present was real, even if the future was terrifying.
He opened his arms, a silent invitation. She didn’t hesitate. She stepped into his embrace and buried her face in his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tightly, securely. He didn’t say anything else. He just held her.
He was her anchor. His steady presence, the solid feel of his arms around her, the slow, calm rhythm of his breathing—it all pulled her back from the cold, gray emptiness of the future and grounded her firmly in the warm, living present. They stood there for what felt like hours, wrapped in a silent embrace, two people holding on to each other against the vast, terrifying emptiness of the universe. The intimacy of that moment was profound and desperate, a quiet act of rebellion against the coming silence.
The next morning, the command team gathered on the bridge. Emma was there, looking tired but with a new, stronger resolve in her eyes.
Jaxon Ryder’s face was on the screen again. He had been working all night, using his vast network of spies and contacts to track the spread of the apathy plague.
"I’ve found a pattern," Jaxon said, pulling up a glowing map of the galaxy. Certain sectors were highlighted in a sickly gray color. "The plague is spreading fastest in the sectors with the most advanced communication networks. It’s moving along the main data highways, like a real virus. But the signal isn’t just one big broadcast from the Archive. It’s being repeated and made stronger by a series of hidden transmitters."
He zoomed the map in on a dark, swirling nebula at the edge of known space. A series of small, bright dots appeared within the swirling clouds.
"I’ve traced the source of the strongest broadcasts to this area," Jaxon said. "The Veiled Nebula. According to the old star charts, it’s supposed to be empty. But my deep-range scans show a network of Precursor communication relays hidden inside. They’re old, powerful, and perfectly placed to spread a signal across half the galaxy."
A heavy silence fell over the bridge. Everyone knew what this meant. The Herald knew they would eventually trace the signal. Hiding the relays in a spooky, uncharted nebula was not a subtle move. It was bait.
"It’s a trap," Scarlett said, stating the obvious.
"Of course it’s a trap," Ryan replied, his eyes fixed on the map of the nebula. "He’s waiting for us. He wants us to come."
"So what do we do?" Ilsa asked, her hand resting on the hilt of her dagger. "We can’t just fly in there blind."
Ryan looked around at the faces of his team. He saw the worry, but he also saw the determination. The gray plague was spreading with every hour that passed. More worlds were falling silent, more people were giving up. They didn’t have the luxury of being cautious.
"We don’t have a choice," Ryan said, his voice leaving no room for argument. "We have to spring the trap. Get the Odyssey ready. We’re going in."