The lab was a cage of cold light and colder intentions.We built it beneath the Rim, in the buried bones of a half-finished dome no one ever admitted existed. Officially, it was nothing, a sub-surface “storage unit” on the schematics, a forgotten construction cost. In reality, it was the place we brought the unthinkable. A cleanroom, they called it. But there was nothing clean about it.The walls were white, seamless, humming with filtered air and power conduits hidden behind polymer panels. The glass was one-way, polished obsidian from my side, transparent from the other. Floodlights hummed overhead, clinical and merciless. Everything inside was calibrated for dissection — of data, of behavior, of truth.And at the center of it all lay the girl.Mary Jane.The straps crossed her wrists, her ankles, her chest. Reinforced flex-bonds, rated to hold down a soldier in powered armor. They looked obscene against her skin, like she was less a person than a specimen in a display. Which, of cou

The lab was never quiet. Even in supposed silence, machines whispered, air-cyclers hummed, and the faint pulse of the Red Rock beneath the basalt floor made itself known like a second heartbeat I could never silence. I stood with my hands behind my back, eyes on the observation glass, watching two figures that shouldn’t have been alive and yet were.Mary Jane. Van Dyk.They were specimens by designation, but calling them that didn’t make the sight easier. Mary Jane’s restraints gleamed under the sterile light, her wrists strapped to the frame of the gurney. Her eyes were closed, but her lips moved, whispering words too faint for our mics. Van Dyk sat on his cot, his shoulders slumped, face buried in his hands like a man mourning at his own funeral.Around me, the council gathered. Rachel hunched over a console, her datapad spilling jagged lines of neural activity across its surface. Nancy leaned against the wall, arms folded, but her eyes didn’t leave me. Ka!ri stood like a blade in h

Hayes gave Adebayo a look that could freeze plasma, and the chancellor's fingers drifted to her eyelid, a fleeting gesture of tension relief. Hayes's gaze snapped to the ceiling, his head tilting back in a silent plea to the heavens. The plasma chandeliers above cast an icy glow, and the obsidian floor seemed to absorb the tension in the room. The air was heavy with unspoken accusations. The exosuits along the wall stood like statues, their silence more oppressive than any words could be. There was that urge to say something, fill the space left by Hélène's cold utterance. Nancy shifted her weight, her eyes darting between Hayes and Adebayo. Ka!ri's hand rested on the hilt of her blade, a subtle reminder of the violence that lurked beneath the surface. The silence hung, a challenge waiting to be met. Rachel's eyes narrowed, her mind racing with the implications of Hélène's words. !Guruseb's gaze never wavered, fixed on the commander with a mixture of curiosity and wariness. Elder ǂGao

The void was an altar, and Da’kar sat enthroned upon it. His crystalline citadel hung above the forge-world like a frozen hymn to hunger. The Sons — his Rake Commands — waited in silent devotion, each a different face of the plague he had carved into existence.The chamber was not built but grown. Veins of black stone arced like petrified roots, pulsing faintly with the hive-light. Shadows stirred where no source explained them. The air carried no warmth, no sound except the breath of the Father whose will threaded through them all.And into this stillness, Velirius came.He was white against the dark, armor lacquered and gleaming as though the void itself recoiled from touching him. No helm masked his features. His face was carved serenity: high cheekbones, mouth a line of command, eyes that gleamed with the cold patience of a surgeon. He carried no weapon because he was one.He bowed, and his voice filled the citadel like smoke poured into a sealed room.“My king. The seeds have germ

The firebase was a scar of steel on Martian dust, its perimeter half-lit by the wavering glow of plasma sentries, half-swallowed by the night. Every breath of the wind carried red grit across the watchtowers. Beyond those lines, the desert throbbed with a sound no sensor could ever quite silence: the murmuring swarm of the infected, pressing in from the Rim. Inside Command Pod Alpha, walls pulsed with shifting holo-maps — red blotches for breaches, blue for surviving outposts, green for uncertain blips. The pod smelled of ozone, recycled air, and the metallic tang of desperation. Helene stood at the center, framed by maps as though she herself were the axis of all decisions. The holo-link shimmered before her, and Adebayo’s form flickered into being. Not flesh, not present, but her authority filled the pod. The chancellor’s hair was drawn in its usual austere crown, her eyes the calm calculation of someone who thought in centuries instead of hours. “Commander Helene,” Adebayo said,