The void was quiet, but the stars whispered.
Joseph Dalaurza sat in the cockpit of Detachment Pod 14, a single-man scout vessel drifting in orbit of a medium-mass star nicknamed Helios Minor. The glow bathed his viewport in gold.
It had been six months since his deployment to the field—rookie year with the IDC—and most of that time had been spent on low-risk energy gathering runs like this one. Not glamorous, but important. And he was good at it.
“Command, this is Detachment 14,” he said calmly. “Plasma siphon calibrated. Energy flow is stable. Beginning sample collection now.”
He adjusted the draw levels and watched streams of solar matter arc into the collection chamber. Clean energy. Easy work—so long as you didn’t get cocky or stay too long near the burn.
His pod skimmed just outside the star’s corona, held steady by gravitic stabilizers and protected by a quantum magneto-siphon—an advanced collector capable of harvesting charged plasma particles from a dangerously close distance, but only for a narrow time window. Beyond that? You cooked.
“Copy that, Joseph,” came the voice of Command. “Helios Minor’s showing no anomalies. How’s the shield holding?”
Joseph smirked. “Quantum gravity shield’s tight as ever. Pod’s purring like a tiger.”
A second passed. Then a pause. Then—
ALERT: NEUTRINO DETONATION DETECTED
SECTOR: BETA-13 – UNREGISTERED
“What?” Joseph blinked. “Say again?”
“Joseph,” Command’s voice cracked through the speaker again, tense now. “We’re detecting a neutrino burst from a nearby system—star ID unknown, possibly cloaked behind Helios Minor’s magnetic field. It’s—dammit—it’s collapsing.”
Joseph looked up. A flicker caught the corner of his eye—not from Helios Minor, but from behind it.
Then the flicker turned into a light.
A pulse.
A birth of death.
“No—no way—” he breathed.
The star behind Helios Minor had gone supernova. A full-scale core collapse. Plasma, gravity, radiation—all rushing toward him in a wall of annihilation.
“Detachment 14, retreat immediately!” Command barked. “Joseph, you need to break orbit now!”
He was already moving. Plasma siphon disengaged. Engines roaring. The shield shimmered under the increasing wave of radiation.
Then came the shockwave.
WARNING: SHIELD FAILURE IMMINENT.
HULL STRESS AT CRITICAL.
QUANTUM FIELD COLLAPSE.
“Come on, come on—” Joseph grit his teeth as the pod lurched, panels buckling. The starlight grew so bright it bleached the cockpit in white. His bones shook. His breath caught in his throat.
This was it.
His systems failed.
Then—nothing.
Not death. Not fire. Not impact.
Just a soft purple glow.
The cockpit dimmed to silence. No alarms. No lights.
Floating in the violet radiance, a figure stood where space had no floor.
An old man.
A long grey beard. A dark blue shirt, neatly buttoned, with a grey tie and a black vest. His presence made no sense. No helmet. No suit. No explanation.
He simply was.
Joseph couldn’t move. Could barely breathe.
The man’s hand lifted, slow and steady.
“You are not finished,” a voice echoed—not in Joseph’s ears, but inside his mind. “You were chosen to see. Remember.”
A blinding white flash enveloped everything.
Joseph woke with a gasp.
The pod floated, adrift and quiet. Systems were offline but intact. The hull had cooled. The shield was… gone. But he was alive.
Outside, space shimmered.
Where the star had once burned now pulsed a dense, spinning remnant: a neutron star. The newborn core of what once was.
His scans ran diagnostics. There was no trick—this was real. The pod had survived something it shouldn't have.
Back aboard the Tempest Reach, his return signal hit the bridge like lightning.
“His pod’s still intact?”
“But the shield failed—”
“That shockwave should’ve crushed him like glass—”
No one had answers.
And when Joseph finally limped back onto the command deck, dazed and blinking, someone muttered under their breath:
“It’s like the neutron star... spared him.”
And another said:
“Or like he was born from it.”
The nickname came later—half mocking, half legend.
Neutron Starluck.
And it stuck.