The Station That Hatched

How it begins

The kitchen wall was warmer than the oven.

Tessa Ren pressed a palm against it, waited, and felt something press back.

She withdrew her hand.

"If this is another ventilation improvement," she told the empty kitchen, "I want it in writing."

The wall pulsed once, gently enough to rattle the spoons.

Outside the service hatch, the breakfast queue stretched past the laundry kiosk. Traders, children, three exhausted dockers still wearing their magnetic boots. Eight thousand people lived on the station, and most expected toast to remain separate from structural emergencies.

Tessa called hull maintenance.

Jonas Imani arrived with a scanner and half a roll in his mouth.

"Where's the vibration?"

She showed him.

He placed the scanner against the wall. Its display filled with a diagram Tessa had never seen in twenty years of people assuring her the station was perfectly sound.

Jonas swallowed.

"That's growth."

"Of what?"

"I'm trying not to answer too quickly."

Beyond the observation window, a docking arm folded inward. No warning bell. No damage report. The motion resembled a sleeping animal drawing a limb closer to its body.

Tessa looked at the station's founding plaque above the hatch.

BUILT TO ENDURE.

She had scrubbed grease from those words every Sunday since taking the job.

Jonas turned his scanner toward the curve of the outer hull.

"I don't think anybody built this."

The wall pulsed again. The queue fell quiet as a low, musical sound traveled through the floor.

At the counter, a little girl held up her empty breakfast plate.

"Is the station hungry?"

Tessa glanced at Jonas. He did not smile at the question.

Somewhere beneath their feet, an ancient shell began to remember what it had been holding.

Tessa switched off the oven, opened the communal channel, and asked every cook on the station to keep the water hot.