The End to Come Continuation 3D Render, Digital Artwork by emarukk

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The End to Come Continuation

3D Render by emarukk

Olivia Dresden huddled in the cramped cargo hold of the salvage shuttle, her thin shoulders pressed against the seat, and she listened to a humming bulkhead. The acrid smell of engine coolant mingled with the metallic tang of recycled air. Outside the scratched viewport, the blackness of interstellar space emphasized her nothingness. She was the last survivor of the Verdantia station terror strike. A girl with dirt-smudged cheeks and haunted eyes, saved by a gruff salvage operator whose calloused hands had offered her water and wiped her dirty hands and face gently clean instead of shackles. Each gentle gesture was a fragile bubble of hope in the vacuum of her circumstances. Yet with every shudder of the ship's thrusters, they drew closer to Orvos station, a looming gray monolith where bureaucrats and handlers would decide her fate with the dispassionate stroke of a stylus.

Two futures stretched before Olivia like diverging corridors in a station she'd never visited. The first, narrow and dimly lit: finding her parents among the thousands of shell-shocked Verdantia refugees crowding Orvos's processing bays, their faces blurring together under the harsh white lights, their voices a desperate cacophony as they clutched registration tablets. If by some miracle her mother's calloused gardener's hands or her father's distinctive three-tone whistle appeared in that sea of strangers, they could sign the familial claim forms and pull her back from the precipice. The second path yawned wide and dark: the Salvage law's cold machinery grinding her down to a commodity, her technician's credentials erased, her body and skills catalogued like spare parts, her designation changed from person to property with a simple data entry to her ID chip and Confederations database. Handler-issued simple clothing would replace her station jumpsuit, and the dreams she'd whispered into her pillow on Verdantia would dissolve like vapor vented into space.

That unlucky day, fate's cruel geometry trapped Olivia behind the wrong bulkhead. When the first explosion ripped through Verdantia's agricultural dome, emergency barriers slammed down with pneumatic finality, sealing her in Section 17-B. At the same time, evacuation pods launched from 17-A, and the way forward had collapsed, trapping Olivia in the maintenance section with the cargo airlock. Through the viewport's spiderweb cracks, she glimpsed how others hurried to evacuation routes. Somewhere in the blackness of space, CNS Ladoga and other warships collected rescue pods that had successfully launched from the station. She listened to the radio, hearing unfortunate people like her cry out for help. Among cries, strong orders of hope echoed while engineers tried to prevent the death of the station. The command deck's final transmission crackled through comm units when Station Commander left the doomed utopia: "Verdantia downwrite complete and official. All personnel on station are responsible for their own life, nothing else, good luck." Hours after the last command, orders from engineering teams faded away one by one, until there was only silence. While battle group Frostclaw's engines flared crimson and blue, carrying away survivors, the station groaned around Olivia, hull plates buckling as the reactor core's temperature climbed toward critical. The last dome in her section collapsed, and Olivia knew she was truly alone. She had become salvage, a forgotten asset in a condemned shell, waiting for scavengers to collect whatever remained.

While Aldo's salvage vessel, a small and sleek attack shuttle, carried Olivia through the silent void toward Orvos station, the first survivors huddled beneath the harsh fluorescent lights of the hangar at Orvos station. They shuffled forward on legs still unsteady after brutal escape, clutching tattered ident-cards while harried bureaucrats with bloodshot eyes stamped forms in triplicate. None noticed their water rations had already been cut by seventeen percent, nor did they see the panicked messages flooding the command deck's screens from the Helios Mining Collective. Water tankers floated useless in space, tanks empty without a destination. The terror strike on Verdantia hadn't merely shattered the emerald jewel of Confederation propaganda videos; it had severed the arterial flow of purified water to tens of millions of citizens spread across the dusty industrial sprawl of the Circle and the cramped habitation modules of the Outer Ring.