Echoes in the Hull: A Research Vessel’s Descent into Paranoia

The research vessel Artemis Echo was designed for silence gliding through the void, listening to the stars. But silence doesn’t hold forever.

Strange sounds creep into the comms. At first faint, almost easy to dismiss. Then sharper, too specific. Maren swears she hears her brother’s voice, dead for years. Kael picks up pieces of conversations he never had. Neither trusts the other, and suspicion spreads across the crew like fire in a sealed hull.

The ship itself begins to speak. Bulkheads groan with broken phrases. Corridors carry sobs and low laughter that no one claims. The crew fractures into believers and skeptics, and order collapses fast.

In the endless dark, Maren and Kael must work together. Yet every answer they chase pulls them further apart. Is the danger in the ship’s bones or in their own minds?

Every echo feels intimate. Every sound cuts too close. And every step toward the source blurs memory, madness, and something far worse.

When a vessel remembers, what chance does its crew have to forget?

***

And within this tale, as in the others, a fleeting trace emerges easy to miss, impossible to forget.

In the dark between stars, silence is never complete. Every journey leaves a mark odd glitches no system can explain, fragments that wedge into memory and refuse to leave.

Derelict Dreams brings together five unsettling stories of ships that disappear, fracture, or turn on their crews. In narrow corridors, suspicion spreads fast. Friendships snap under pressure. The line between human failure and something far stranger begins to blur.

Each tale stands on its own, yet a careful reader may catch the same echo returning from one nightmare to the next a quiet warning that nothing drifts alone in the void.

© 2025 Velvet Ink Press (Ebook): 6610001049034

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Ebook: 5 September 2025