Yuto Kisaragi never meant to break the peace in Belt City, out past Jupiter’s rings. He only came out here looking for his brother, lost one year ago during a hull breach on the infamous mining ship Kotobuki.
But some calls can’t be left unsettled, don’t you think? When a faint signal matches with a living codec on that lost ship, there’s nothing else for Yuto but to try—if his rag-tag team doesn’t come undone before dock.
This arc opens with Yuto drifting his one-human, one-droid skiff, the Starpiper, near the Oort spike. Dakota, his patched-up mechanic, scans for anything weird. M1CR0, Dakota’s droid, parses shadows more deftly than the star charts. “There’s life out here, boss. But the numbers don’t add up. The signal bends light.” Can you trust what these ships broadcast, or could they twist the desperate into ghosts?
It only takes a spark to light hope, or fear. When Yuto’s long-lost brother Hari calls from a shadow sector where no crew should still breathe, they’re drawn in. Emotion tangles the scanners. Ghost ships aren’t myths here; they eat the unwary.
“Don’t like this,” Dakota mutters as they pull up plans from the Kotobuki. Sections of the map flicker, replaced by fractal glitched data. Another mystery—instrument virus or warning?
You ever find yourself braving what you swore you’d never revisit? For Yuto, it’s the last place he promised to avoid.
Inside the Kotobuki, the team finds half-lit halls stiff with growing vine-rooted crystals—odd, soft-green things that seethe despite vacuums. “What grew these?” Dakota whispers. They pulse when approached. Deep in the flight deck, Hari’s old suit sits, life signals weak but steady. He gasps: “Yuto? Couldn’t save everyone. Heard you each day.”
Flashbacks cut through—the breach twenty months ago, Hari pushing Yuto to a pod before losing his helmet. How could he have lived, held down by these alien-rooted things?
Around them, Nomad Swarmers start pouring in—jelly-like, metal-eating organisms that swarm derelicts hoping for drifting crew. The spores worked with Hari, but now want new vessels. “This is why you shouldn’t have come,” Hari chokes.
As the swarm troubles M1CR0’s controls, cold code leaks through comms, taking over doors and vent ports. Yuto grabs Hari, but Dakota cuts him off. “We need you both to live,” she screams while hotwiring their escape into smaller airlocks.
Can you count on hollow ties or do they crack when you lean too hard? Each has secrets—the bigger one is why Hari survived.
Starpiper’s systems fray. M1CR0 reroutes impulse drives at the last instant, blasting the Swarmer mist aside. Dakota’s barely alive by the time they patch into distant backup lights—one emergency flamethrower is all they have left now.
As Starpiper limps from the breach, comms don’t clear Hari’s guilt. He reveals the real reason they broke code: an ancient seed core lies in the Kotobuki’s depths, humming out the fake distress and keeping its creations tied to distant broadcasts. Out where they float, those broadcasts bind other drifters low on hope and lure them into the dark webs inside Belt City’s older ships.
Hari stares at Yuto. “Can you destroy something humming with so many voices? Or do we leave them?” The silence answers first.
In a final shot, Starpiper vanishes behind pulsing flares—Yuto’s shaken but unbroken, Hari whispering dire warnings. Belt City falls away as comm static tells of other signals, new seeds growing yet unseen.
The arc splits wide in the void, with no answer for how deep these things might root in drifting souls. The team glimpses one last fractured call—the echo’s not just family. This could be way darker than ghosts.
