Page 48 of A Mate For Matrix
He hit the floor hard, his massive form collapsing with a heavy thud.
“K-Nine!” Jana cried out, dropping to her knees beside him. She pressed her hand to his side, her eyes wide with alarm. “What’s happening? Matrix—what did you do?”
“He’s okay,” Matrix said, his breath still catching in his chest. “He’s just… unconscious. I had to sever the link.”
Jana looked up at him, a crease between her brows, but said nothing.
Matrix turned back to the console and slowly expanded the connection K-Nine had initiated. He extended his own mind into the ether, through the threads of energy and neural pathways K-Nine had touched. At first, there was only silence.
Then—
Something moved.
A pressure, like fingers on his skull. Cold. Invasive. Ancient.
A pulse vibrated through the connection—not of sound or thought, but presence.
Alien. Unrelenting. A whisper without breath. A scream with no throat.
Matrix’s spine stiffened. His hands clenched.
He was no longer on the bridge.
The world around him shifted with a flicker—like a screen cutting to black before revealing another scene. One second, he was standing over K-Nine’s body. The next, he was elsewhere.
Dark corridors stretched before him. Metallic. Silent. Seamless.
He floated—weightless—his body more shadow than substance.
Figures moved ahead.
Matrix narrowed his eyes.
There were beings aboard the ship approaching The Nebulosity. They moved in eerie synchronization—step for step, breath for breath—like marionettes sharing a single string.
It wasn’t just telepathy.
It was… worse.
He didn’t feel their thoughts as individuals.
He felt a single awareness pulsing through every one of them. They were bound, not to each other, but to something else. Something outside.
Something watching.
A flicker of instinct told him to pull back, to retreat—but he couldn’t move.
The connection had him.
His incorporeal form surged forward, drawn along the current like a thread on the tide.
No—No, stop?—
His resistance only made the pull stronger.
Then—impact.
Matrix gasped as his ghostlike body slammed into a second bridge.
