Void madness.

Even two hundred years after humanity had established its first permanent settlement on Luna and taken to the sea of space, you could still hear talk of it. In mess halls and spaceport taverns across Sol and beyond, tales were told of men and women who’d stared out into the enormity of the endless black void and just… broken, driven to madness that saw them sabotage their own vessels and turn on trusted crewmates in a homicidal rampage. In the five years she’d served as engineer aboard the Roanoke, Yukiko Urahara had certainly heard the subject come up more than once, but had always dismissed it as little more than ghost stories, no different than the tales superstitious sailors who plied Earth’s oceans on sail-driven ships had shared centuries ago. Never did she believe such things actually occurred.

Never did she believe she’d become one of those victims…

“Mmmmppppggghhh!” Her desperate cry went unanswered in the vast, unlit cavern of the space station’s cargo bay, drowned out by the heavy clanging of malfunctioning machinery in the adjacent workshop and lost amidst the maze of broken pipes and containers she’d been hidden inside. The gag wasn’t helping matters either, for what felt like an entire roll of duct tape had been wrapped around her head, sheathing the lower half of her face in silver and sealing the filthy rag inside her mouth. Yet more tape kept her limbs secure, binding her legs in front of her at the thighs and ankles, arms left wrenched painfully behind her back by the tape securing her wrists. From her sitting position, the pretty Japanese woman looked around for anything she could use to free herself, lithe body squirming in her blue engineer’s jumpsuit, and the first tears began to manifest in her soft brown eyes when nothing of use could be found, the thought that she might die in this horrid place, millions of kilometres from home, fraying at her resolve and letting the terror take hold. “MMMPPPGGGHHH, MMMMMPPPPPGGGHHH!”

The Roanoke was a salvaging ship, its days spent roaming the reaches of the outer Solar System for derelicts to scrap and lost cargos to recover, so upon finding an old, seemingly abandoned space station beyond Neptune, the prospect of a rich payday had left the entire crew excited, Yukiko included. It was an adulterine space station, its construction unauthorized by the central government back on Earth, but the trans-Neptunian gulf had always been the Wild West, too far removed from Terran authority and the reach of the Navy to ever be properly policed. Scans showed a lifeless relic; power minimal, critical systems down in multiple sections, life support offline beyond the central rotating spire, and certainly, no one had been there to contest Captain Alder’s boarding party. They all believed that the station had been deserted, and Yukiko had kept on believing it, right until her survey of the cargo bay had been interrupted by a grubby, strong hand clamping over her mouth and dragging her kicking and screaming into the darkness. She hadn’t even gotten a good look at her assailant, and fearfully, she glanced about, half-expecting a savage blow from an unexpected quarter to end this nightmare for good.

“Intruder,” the voice hissed in her left ear, and Yukiko all but jumped out of her skin at the rough voice, craning her neck to see a pair of bright, crazed staring back at her from out of the shadows. Hands made filthy by rough living aboard the derelict seized her dark ponytail and gave a swift tug, provoking a muffled cry of pain, the feel of his breath rank and hot against her neck causing her to shudder in disgust. “This is my station, all mine! I killed everyone else here when they refused to accept my rule, and I’ll kill all your little friends for daring to trespass. This is my patch of space, no one else’s!” A backhanded slap sent her sprawling onto the deck, head ringing and breath sobbing in pain. “Mine!”

Then from the entrance to the cargo bay, a familiar voice rang out. “Yukiko, are you all right in there?”

“MMMPPGGGHHH!” Yukiko screamed, all thoughts of self-preservation forgotten at the sound of Captain Alder’s voice. Her kidnapper rose, and her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw him pull a wrench from out of his tattered coveralls, the glimpse of dried blood on its head all the warning she needed about what he intended. “MMMMPGGGGHHH, MMMMPPPPPGGHHH!” Silently, he stepped back behind a large cargo container, wrench at his shoulder like a baseball bat, ready to swing, while the beam of Alder’s flashlight burned a path through the darkened cargo bay, seeking her, finding nothing… and coming ever closer. “MMMMPPPPGGGGHHH!”

And in the darkness as black as space, she heard the psychopath whisper in delight. “All mine. You’ll be all mine…”