Something mechanical, patient, cycling through recycled air that hadn't tasted a living man in decades. Then came the pressure, cracking behind the eyes, like someone jamming a knife behind the sockets and twisting it slowly.
I'd been asleep a long time. The kind of long that eats names and memories whole.
I couldn't feel my fingers. Couldn't feel anything, really. Just the slow crawl of warmth bleeding back into my limbs, like someone was pouring motor oil through frozen veins. My eyelids twitched. The world was still dark, sealed behind a pane of reinforced glass and a sheen of frost.
A hiss. Then light. Sharp and sterile. The lid peeled back with a pneumatic sigh.
Air hit me like a punch. Stale. Metallic. Dust and decay. I drew it in through clenched teeth and tried to sit up. My muscles protested like they'd never moved before. I got one hand free and braced it against the edge of the pod. It came away wet, slick with thaw. I blinked against the light. Shapes moved outside the pod, figures. Armor-clad. White and black.
Their helmets were down. Cold eyes behind visors. The kind of men who shoot first if the file doesn't have your name on it.
I tried my voice. It came out raw. Rusted.
"Father?" Of course, He had been dead for long, long time but I could still feel His eyes on me.
They didn't answer. One of them stepped forward, scanning me with a portable datapad. His armor was black and white, gleaming under the lights they'd dragged into the ruined chamber.
I looked past him, out into the hollow of the citadel.
The place was dead. Long dead. Walls stripped for parts, floor slick with old coolant and condensation. Vines from some lunar weed had crept through fractures in the stone, nature reclaiming what war had abandoned.
Cryo-chambers like mine lined the wall in a half-circle. Most were dark. Shattered. Nothing left inside but bone and whispers.
But mine had held.
Of course it had.
They'd built this tomb to last. Sealed it tight and buried it deep, in a fortress wrapped in silence on a moon no one cared to name anymore.
I didn't know how long I'd been under. I wondered if the Empire still existed, if Father's legacy had survived.
All that was left now was the man in the pod. Me.
Caliban. I remembered.
And from the look of the man's expressions, tight jaws and muttered comms, I was something they hadn't planned on finding.
Too bad.
They'd found me anyway.
And now they had to decide what to do with a man who wasn't supposed to exist.
