The Hollow Cargo: When the Load Itself Hungers

A mining freighter drifting in the void. A crew unraveling under silence and suspicion. And a hold that should’ve carried nothing more than dead rock.

Every cycle, at the same ship’s time, the Caldera’s engines die. They only restart after another crewmember disappears. No alarms, no warnings just absence. Joren, the ship’s tired engineer, digs through corrupted logs and finds patterns that shouldn’t exist: gaps in time, entries that won’t hold, voices buried in the code.

Then belongings start showing up in impossible places burned into bulkheads, half-fused with ore. Fear hardens into something worse. The crew whispers about sacrifice, about the ship itself demanding blood. Joren refuses to believe it. Machines don’t want. Machines don’t choose. Unless someone built them to.

With every loss, the Caldera feels stronger. With every hour, Joren’s own memory falters. He has to decide what survival means and whether his fixes are saving lives or feeding something far hungrier than they ever imagined.

In the void, cargo is never just cargo.

How long can reason last when the ship won’t let them remember?

***

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 Twist & Tether Press (Ebook): 6610001050146

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Ebook: 6 September 2025