2025-05-28 22:34:30
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Chapter 60: The Summons
I sat at the console longer than I should have, fingers poised but not pressing. The message would go out soon—Mars Command needed to know the outcome. Officially, we had achieved a “successful tactical victory.” That part was true. The rest—the depth of what we had captured, the implications of Rachel’s connection, the fragile, desperate intelligence trapped in steel and sedation—was a truth I could not yet reveal.I typed carefully, deliberately.“Specimen contained. Mission objectives fulfilled. Recommend immediate human consolidation.”No mention of its origin. No mention of its pain, or the fact that our victory was a misread of desperation. The broadcast went out, coded as top-priority. On Mars, I knew ǂGao and Da’kar would receive it in seconds.On the red sands of Mars, Elder ǂGao read the report first. Relief flickered across his face, but only for a moment. The text was vague, incomplete. His fingers tapped the console sharply, summoning Da’kar. The younger officer’s brow fu
Chapter 59: The First Patient
The crater still smoked when I climbed down its ashen slope. Each step sank into loose gravel, crunching against fragments of stone still warm from the impact. The air was acrid—burnt metal, scorched soil, and something else I could not name but would never forget.Behind me, Ka!ri and !Gareseb moved with careful precision, rifles trained but tension in their shoulders. No one spoke. Even their boots seemed to tread softer, as though the ground itself might bite.It lay where it had fallen, tangled among broken rocks. A long mass of sinew and bone, alien yet unmistakably alive. Limbs bent wrong, twitching sporadically like nerves striking metal. Its chest rose shallowly, unevenly, as though breathing itself was foreign.Rachel stood at the crater’s edge, hands clenched until her knuckles shone white. Pale, sweat-dampened hair sticking to her temples, eyes fixed on it with something I couldn’t name—fear, maybe, or recognition.“Is it conscious?” I asked quietly.“Not like us,” she said
Chapter 57: The Inverted War
The shuttle’s alarm tore me out of the vision like a knife through silk. Stars, halos, Nancy’s crimson glow—they all vanished, replaced by the monstrous outline filling our forward display.The armada.It wasn’t a fleet in any human sense. It was a new sky, a living continent drifting across the void. Bioships the size of moons stirred awake, billions of lights sparking to life like a neural net firing. The sight hollowed me. Everything we’d just fought for felt like a child’s skirmish in the shadow of a tidal wave.I dropped into a jump seat, my throat raw. “It’s over,” I said, the words tasting of ash. “We won a skirmish, and now the whole ocean is here.”Ka’ri didn’t flinch. She was at the console, her hands dancing across alien keys, her gaze locked not on the armada but on the vitals scrolling across Nancy’s cot. The crimson glow pulsing in Rachel’s veins reflected off her face.“The signal’s still there,” Ka’ri muttered, teeth clenched. “Her consciousness… it’s like a severed co
Chapter 57: The Furious Exit
The cavern shook with the Rakes’ relentless press, the Stonebreaker’s wail splitting the air like a knife. I fired blindly into the black tide, metal snapping against chitin, sparks flaring where bullets tore through limbs. The pulse of the weapon hammered in my ears, and still the swarm advanced, driving us backward meter by meter toward the crystalline chrysalis.00:30. A talon slashed through my shoulder armor. Hot blood sprayed into the air, spattering the pulsing walls. I gritted my teeth, ignoring the pain, gripping the AK-X tighter.Ka!ri’s pistols clicked empty. She swore, tossing them aside with a furious flourish, knives rising like silver lightning. She spun, blades carving arcs of desperate precision, cutting a path through the closest attackers.00:28. The cavern’s shadows danced like living things. Rachel knelt, hands clamped over her ears, veins flickering green. Her eyes widened, staring at the chaos around her.“They’re not attacking!” she screamed, voice shredding th
Chapter 56: The Heart of the Swarm
The silence before the mission was heavier than any gunmetal. We sat in the shuttle with weapons stripped and reassembled, packs checked, the Stonebreaker locked inside its shockproof case. No one spoke. There was nothing left to say that hadn’t already been spoken a dozen times in whispers, or carried in the weight of each other’s eyes.I had been on suicide runs before. This one felt different—not because of the odds, but because of the faces around me. There is a cruelty to having something to lose at the end of the world.Rachel was the first to break. She looked up, her glowing veins pulsing faintly in the dim cabin light.“!Guruseb,” she said. Just his name. The syllables landed like a stone dropped in still water. He looked at her, expression unreadable, and she jerked her chin toward the rear of the shuttle.They stepped away, though there was no privacy in a coffin with wings. I turned slightly, pretending to busy myself with the rifle’s receiver, though I listened. We all di
Chapter 55: The Triage Infiltration
The airlock of the Svalbard Vault sealed behind us with a sound like a tomb door closing. I paused for a last look back at the impossible alloy door, a scar on the moon’s dead face. This wasn’t a haven; it was a beautifully appointed waiting room for the end of the world. Anya and Moremi stood watching from the other side of the quartz viewport, their faces grim. No salutes, no waves. Just a shared, silent understanding that they were sending us to a place of certain death. The weight of their last, horrific revelation—the incoming armada—sat in my gut like a shard of ice as I turned my back on our only refuge.The shuttle’s engines whined to life, a higher, cleaner pitch than the ragged sounds they’d made before. We rose from the grey dust, and the vault vanished beneath us, swallowed by the moon’s absolute blackness. The silence inside the cabin was a new kind of heavy. Not the numb despair of before, but the grim, focused quiet of a surgical team walking into an operating room wher
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