The climb from the maintenance artery to the Command Center was a horrific trek through the station’s dying infrastructure. Eydis ascended the ladder rungs with Baxter firmly tucked in her left arm balanced with upward movement. Above them, the high frequency bursts from the invaders vibrated through the metal, a sound that made Baxter whimper against her chest with every blast. She ignored her own internal warnings about structural fatigue and overheating servos. Her world had narrowed to the thump of a dog's heart and the illogical hope that Martin was still alive.

When she finally kicked out the service grate onto the Bridge, those thoughts were instantly replaced by a cold, sharp horror.

The air was heavy with the copper tang of blood and the stench of burnt plastic. The Command Center, once the brain of the station, was a tomb. Crewmen she had nodded to in the mess hall were slumped over their consoles, their bodies strangely preserved while their minds had clearly been the only things the invaders harvested. There was no dignity here, only the quiet flickering lights of failed systems.

Eydis set Baxter down. He didn't bark. He just sat by her heel, the neon parrot held firmly in his teeth, his eyes fixed on the shadows.

Her fingers danced over the fractured glass of the main terminal. The data painted the massacre in a deeper clarity, the system running at a fraction of normal behavior.

Crew Status: 96% Vital Signs Terminated.
Communications: Main Array 100% Offline.
Emergency Alarms: Disabled by internal sabotage.
Tactical: No record of how the breach occurred.

It was as if the station had simply been deleted from the inside out.

She searched for the only ID tag that mattered. Martin. The screen flickered, a mocking "UNKNOWN" pulsing in amber. Her processors stalled for a microsecond. In the world of an android, "unknown" was a void she couldn't fill with logic. But then, a flicker of data from the secondary bay:

Escape Pods 1 through 3: Deployed.

"He might be out there Bax" she whispered, her voice barely audible over the crackle of a nearby electrical fire.

She knew she couldn't fight them, not here and not alone. With the main comms dead, she bypassed the modern digital arrays and tapped into the station’s legacy burst transmitter, an older, low-power analog system meant for deep space beacons. It was slow, primitive and would take hours to reach Earth, but it was all she had.

"Station Breached. Unknown Floating Entities. Harvesting human brains. Ultrasonic stun frequencies. Survivors Evacuating."

She pulled the map of the station’s sub-levels. There was one pod left in the auxiliary bay, tucked behind the shielded cooling towers. It was the safest path left on a ship that was dying.

"We have to move" she said, her sensors picking up the wet, rhythmic thuds of something heavy moving in the hallways behind them.

Probability of surviving: 12%


NOTES:------------
Geesh, sorry so long. Too much to explain in one scene. I tried to keep the length down...

NO AI, just the free Google Snapseed and free Affinity Canva post edits.

PART 3 here:
https://www.renderhub.com/gallery/91891/they-know-part-3