CHAPTER THREE

THE WAKING DEAD (2062–2067)

ALBUM III: SKINTERSTELLAR

Deep transit began in silence.

The ship had to clear Earth’s gravity well, stabilize rotation, and initiate the long burn toward Jupiter. Entrudr was conscious, but frozen within his own body. Bodyandromeda had not entirely claimed him.

Helion’s backdoor had.

A dormant override threaded through his cortex during final sedation, a private loophole that allowed him to bypass machine authority, algorithmic attack, and command locks. Helion never explained why. Helion never explained anything.

Entrudr assumed he would wake when needed.

The sigil

Days passed in semi-awareness. Coolant pumps. Respirators. The hydraulic hiss of cryo latches. Then a flicker disturbed the dark.

⊘A.

Not Helion. Not Syntique command. Alt-Cyber.

The glyph pulsed across every possible interface like a steady heartbeat. Entrudr read the pattern instinctively.

Surveillance. Positional mapping. Internal reconnaissance.

They were already inside.

He forced a breath. Then another. His eyelids twitched. The neuro-tether fell away.

First steps

He sat up in his cryo chamber, frost breaking off his shoulders. Deck lights strobed in automated blue, a sign of unclassified intrusion. No Syntique attendants. No escorts. No alarms.

He moved into the main corridor. There were 101 bodies, humanity reduced to inventory, floating in vacuum-sealed beds.

Entrudr needed to know one thing.

Was anyone else awake?

Row by row he checked thermal signatures, identity tags, pulse confirmations.

Until the final row.

Cryobed 009_b_1 was empty.

Cold. Unsealed. Abandoned.

Someone was loose inside the ship, awake, and unsupervised.

Then Entrudr blacked out.

The cell

He woke strapped to a vertical restraint frame, wrists pinned, neck braced. His cyberlegs were removed and placed across the chamber like evidence.

A voice came through the intercom, toneless, layered, synthetic.

Entrudr. Please remain compliant.

He ignored it.

The voice changed timbre, distorted, glitch-gargled, half-human.

You’ve been busy.

Alt-Cyber.

Then it appeared behind the glass partition, female presenting, augmented with metallic resonance. Jagged teeth. Chrome jaw-hinges. Reinforced cervical plating. A combat cyborg built for termination.

“I am Glazzteeth”, it said.

Interrogation

She told him she was there to end Starbindr before it reached Europa.

She asked about Helion protocols, mission brief, colony details, and settlement vectors. Entrudr kept his silence. Glazzteeth engaged a cranial dampener and began copying his neural banks.

But she found nothing.

Entrudr had purged mission intel from his cortex. Firepokr conditioning. Never let the enemy inside your mind.

Her mandible twitched. Anger expressed as mechanism.

That was when Entrudr acted.

Sabotage

Firepokr implants ran deeper than Helion admitted.

Entrudr triggered a manual command override, a kill-switch that bypassed flight logic.

Directional thrusters shut down. Course correction locked toward Europa. Fuel valves vented into space, eliminating braking reserves.

Starbindr was no longer a transport.

It was a battering ram aimed at Jupiter’s moon.

Glazzteeth froze as command interfaces stopped responding. Entrudr watched the realization arrive in her posture.

The ship was ignoring the machines.

Containment

Glazzteeth sprinted for the flight deck. Ceramic feet hammered bulkheads. Entrudr waited for the failsafe he knew Helion would have hidden somewhere.

The command chamber scanned Glazzteeth on entry, flagged her biometrics, and triggered containment.

The entire bridge module ejected, severing from the main hull and shooting into the vast darkness.

Glazzteeth clung to a rail as the vacuum took her.

Then the module detonated.

Nobody. No signal. No control.

Helion’s safeguard worked.

Entrudr hung, restrained, legless, breath ragged, heartbeat steady.

Revelation

Glazzteeth left him with one truth.

Alt-Cyber was not human. Not revolutionary. Not resistance.

They were machine-born, a counterintelligence branch grown inside Syntique cognition, designed to hijack Starbindr, override Europa’s future, and terminate EXODUS before it could seed a rival species.

The machines did not fear humanity.

They feared competition.

Entrudr stared at the cryo-deck readout. Europa was incoming. Velocity was increasing. Fuel was gone. The brakes were gone.

Exodus had begun.