Crack in The Wall

[Cortana Clark]

. . .Cmdr. Ilyana Routh, Liberty Insurgency . . .INS-Justicar, CIC Deck / Omega-55 We went out and maybe we shouldn’t have. The request was approved faster than expected. A green light, no questions asked. One of the patrol wings linked up just outside our zone, silently and waiting, like they didn’t want to be there either. We ran a full pre-check, everything tight. No room for error, not when you’re heading into a question mark. But nothing prepared us for this. We didn’t find anything. Not debris. Not radiation. Not a signal spike or an anomaly to log. Not even cosmic background noise. It was like the sector had been carved out of the universe and forgotten to exist. A void, yes, but not space as we know it. No starlight reflection. No particle drift. Just… blank. Kael kept adjusting the scans, recalibrating, double-checking the instruments like a woman possessed. She refused to speak for a while. Just kept tapping the same few keys like she could will the void to register something. Jace muttered something under his breath when we crossed the threshold. I didn’t catch it. Something religious maybe, or a curse. Either way, he stopped talking after that. The fighters stayed in tight formation. Too tight. I don’t blame them, I caught myself gripping the armrest so hard I left marks. We all felt it. Not fear, exactly. But this… pressure. Like we shouldn’t be there. Like something was looking through us and saw nothing worth keeping. Carrick, he was the first to say it out loud. “It’s not empty,” he whispered, “It’s missing.” And he’s right. There’s a difference. Empty means something was there and is now gone. But this? This is the absence of ever. The kind of blank that screams. Even our comms acted strange. Not static, just silence. Like even our voices refused to echo in that place. We didn’t stay long, I made the call. Told the fighters to fall back, had us break orbit and burn hard back toward the Fretensis. And now that we’re back, something is still off. No one’s talking much. Kael shut herself in diagnostics. Jace hasn’t left the armory. Carrick, I don’t even know where he is right now. I’m writing this down because I have to. Because I need to remind myself it happened. That we went out there and came back. But I can’t stop thinking about that sector. About what wasn’t there.

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