He had cut the thrusters over an hour ago, gliding silent and frictionless towards the inevitable. An equation carried to a sum, to the grey husk of a space station spinning endlessly through the void ahead.

Carried home. The last place anyone would think to look for him – the last place anyone would want to go. No hail lit the comm, incoming shuttle, do you copy. No running lights marked the bay that stood dark and open like a drained metal abscess on the station’s outer rim. No one would be waiting for him inside, to ask dangerous questions or to welcome him home.

The shuttle’s hum woke around him again as he reversed the thrusters, slowing it towards that dark, airless opening. No questions, no pursuers. No one left alive inside, they said, for almost ten years now.

The shuttle’s forward lights ran across naked metal, stroking the slow curve of the rim and slipping into the emptiness of the bay. Or, what had always been emptiness in his dreams. What should have been emptiness, if most of the station had evacuated the way the stories said. But shuttles, eight, nine, almost a full complement, perched on their landing pads, grey and wrong as birds of prey frozen in the nest.

He gentled his shuttle down onto the only one unoccupied, and when the thrusters died, silence deeper than that of empty space sucked in around him. The silence of a place where there should have been noise, light, life, or else should have been no sign it had ever been there. That place in between, shuttles but no crew, no evac, was quiet as nothing in the universe should have been.

It wasn’t the place he’d come back to in his dreams, the one he’d been counting on. It was still the only place he had to go. Breathing a careful sigh of not enough air left in the shuttle to carry him anywhere else, he left the helm to suit up and see what was out there to find.