Confirmation of their suspicions came much sooner than they would have liked.

Chapter 1

Danilo liked the quiet down in the “Tombs,” as the long-term storage vault was colorfully known to the crew of maintainers. Some found the silence unnerving or even oppressive, but Danilo was able to do some of his best thinking in those dim, subdued depths as he supervised the machines that wordlessly went about the task of collecting any dust that may have settled on the artifacts.

The Tomb, sublevel thirty-eight of the Confederacy’s new archives, housed mostly CENTCOM equipment that was deemed too sensitive or dangerous to dispose of or decommission. Danilo had been medically unqualified to join Starfleet and had been flat-out rejected by the Marines, but his interest in everything military still burned brightly. It made the three-acre level especially fascinating since almost all of it was relics from the recent Phage War. While the war was almost mythology for those that weren’t directly involved, Danilo devoured any scrap of information on the conflict that he could find. Once his security clearance had been granted, the assignment to supervise the Tomb’s weekly cleaning had been nothing short of a godsend.

He stopped and reverently put his hand on a piece of twisted, charred metal that was propped haphazardly against one of the Archive’s support pylons. It was a sort of ceremony he went through every time he stepped off the lift despite the fact he had no idea what the mangled chunk of alloy might be. But he did know what it was from.

“TCS Blue Jacket,” he read reverently off the riveted tag that was still legible. “Captain Jackson Wolfe, commanding.”

“Help … help me.” The voice came as a whisper, so softly that Danilo couldn’t even be sure he had actually heard it.

“Hello?” he called loudly. “Nobody is supposed to be down here!”

“I … help,” the voice came more clearly this time, and loudly enough that Danilo couldn’t ignore it as a figment of his imagination.

“Who’s there?” he called. “Identify yourself immediately! This is a Level Five secured facility!”

“Help!”

“I’m not kidding!” Danilo’s voice was tinged with fear. “Simmons? If that’s you this is not funny!” He began walking slowly forward and towards a barely visible glow that was coming from deep in one of the storage rows.

He steeled his nerves and continued towards the glow, quickening his pace and telling himself over and over that there was no way anybody could get down here who wasn’t supposed to be. It had to be one of his fellow maintainers playing a practical joke on him. When he cleared the corner, however, that hope evaporated.

Sitting back against the outer wall was a black cube that he’d passed by with barely a curious glance dozens of times, but now there appeared to be a monitor of some sort activated on the surface with indecipherable characters tumbling across it.