The path ahead was barren. Cracked moonrock stretched in every direction, pitted and broken by ancient orbital strikes and the slow, gnawing erosion of time.
Kali's boots crunched faintly with each step. His breath came in short bursts through the respirator, forming tiny clouds that fogged the inside of his helmet visor. They walked in a staggered diamond formation, Brann taking point, Kharv at rear guard, while Sela moved just ahead of Kali.
The moon's gravity was a tiny bit less than that of Theraxis and Earth, but not enough to hinder movement.
No one spoke for several minutes. Only the sound of movement, the low hum of exosuit servos, and the distant groan of wind dragging itself across the forgotten plains.
Eventually, Kharv's voice crackled in Kali's ear through the shared comms link. "You ever done recon in a dead zone before?"
Kali shook his head, then realized the gesture wouldn't be seen. "No. First time."
Up ahead, Sela paused, tapping at the side of her helmet. She gestured toward a cracked spire of obsidian-colored rock protruding from the surface like a fossilized fang.
"Looks like a signal relay," she said. "Decommissioned. Could use it for elevation, get a better scan radius."
Brann waved her off. "Not yet. Stick to the route. We don't want to trigger a dormant minefield or something worse."
Kharv chuckled, trudging forward. He was the most armed of all of them, carrying four weapons on each of his four hands. His exosuit was also bulky and built for heavy artillery.
Brann raised a fist and signaled for the group to halt. "Sela, run a scan. Kharv, watch the high ground. Kali, eyes sharp."
Kali raised his rifle and peered through the scope. Nothing moved in the valley. No birds. No beasts.
They descended into the valley like shadows.
The silence grew heavier with each step. What had once looked like abandoned industrial ruins from a distance now revealed themselves to be the bones of a research colony, SynSpec design, blocky and cold, made of prefabricated cerametal plates and monocarbon shielding. Some of the modules were half-buried in fine lunar dust. Others were split open like eggs.
Kali's breath slowed.
"Movement?" Brann asked through comms.
"Negative," Kharv replied, sweeping the ridge with a slow arc of his rifle. "But something was here recently. Too many fresh drag marks."
They advanced carefully, checking corners and craters. Sela broke off toward a partially collapsed dome and disappeared inside. A few moments later, her voice echoed softly through their channel. "Found something. Get in here."
The others followed.
Inside, the collapsed dome was a shattered laboratory. Burnt-out holoscreens hung from the ceiling like forgotten prayers, and brittle sheets of synthetic paper were scattered across the floor, many of them blackened by fire. Against the far wall, mounted into a cracked terminal stand, was a still-functioning recording node, its pale indicator light flickering in rhythmic pulses.
Brann approached it warily. "Intact?"
"Looks like it," Sela said. "Old security-grade relay. Should be audio and visual. Time-coded." She knelt beside the terminal, fingers brushing dust from the interface. "Basic stuff. Let's see…"
The screen sputtered once, twice, then flared into motion with a hazy image. A man appeared. Middle-aged, gaunt. He wore a Synesthetic Specialties lab coat, tattered at the edges. His eyes were bloodshot. There was dried blood along his hairline, and something behind him crackled faintly, like static.
Nikola Diens.
"If you're seeing this, then I'm either dead or—worse."
He coughed. Spittle hit the lens.
"We made a mistake. The rift was stable—at first. We were tracking an echo signature across fade-space, something we believed was non-hostile. But the resonance shifted. The waveform started reacting to our biometric presence. Like it knew us."
The others were silent, watching.
"My team… gone. Not killed. Taken. Some kind of spatial distortion swallowed them. I heard their voices afterward, but not through the air. Through the walls. Through my own fucking bones."
Kali felt a chill crawl up his back.
"There's a secondary relay node near Sector 7. Coordinates embedded in this file. I left another message there. More… complete. If you're trying to recover me, don't. Just recover the data. And whatever you do—"
There was a loud thump in the background. Diens flinched and turned toward it, eyes wide. His voice dropped to a whisper.
"Don't follow the whispers. They sound like people you know."
Then the screen cut to black. Static.
No one spoke for a long moment.
Brann finally exhaled.
"Alright. Change of objective. We get to that secondary node first. If Diens is alive, he'll be near it."
"And if he's not?" Kharv asked.
"Then we take what he left behind and get the hell out."
Kali spoke slowly. "Whispers that sound like people you know," he muttered. "That's new."
The lunar dust grew thicker the closer they got to Sector-7. A shallow fog had begun to gather, which was strange. It clung low to the ground.
"Sensors are glitching," Kharv muttered. "Rangefinder's shorting out. Anyone else?"
"Mine too," Sela said. "Something's jamming local optics."
"Could be a rift signature," Brann offered grimly.
"Or a trap," Kali added, checking the seals on his helmet.
They moved carefully, cutting between broken corridors of a fallen superstructure, half of what once might've been a communications array. It now resembled a twisted carcass of collapsed alloys, ribs of metal reaching toward the stars.
"You smell that?" Kharv asked suddenly.
"This is a moonscape. There's nothing to smell," Brann replied.
"Exactly," Kharv whispered. "But I do smell something."
Kali's breath slowed again. He tried not to listen to his heartbeat. Then something shifted in the fog.
Sela raised her weapon, quick. A figure stood ahead, just at the edge of visual range. Humanoid. Still. No IFF tag.
"Friendly?" Brann asked.
"Negative," Kali said. "No beacon. No breathing either."
"Could be Diens."
"Then why isn't he moving?"
They slowly approached. The figure didn't react, until they were ten meters out.
It took a single, sudden step forward. Then another. Its movements were wrong, staggered, like frames missing from a recording. Its joints bent slightly backward, limbs moving in slight delay.
"That's not Diens," Sela said tightly. "That's something wearing skin."
The thing turned its head toward them.
Its face was blurred.
Kali instinctively raised his rifle and fired a suppressor round, hitting it square in the chest. It stumbled but didn't fall. Brann followed up with a blast from his plasma scattergun, tearing the figure apart. The pieces collapsed into the dust… but then melted. Into liquid shadow, drawn down into the ground like ink in water.
For a moment, all was quiet.
"Fade anomalies operate like a hive," Brann said, scanning the horizon with the scope fixed to his helm. "If there's more than one, we might already be inside a nest."
Kali tightened his grip on his rifle. The silence that followed carried weight, like the team was waiting for the moon itself to respond.
Kharv glanced sideways, his fingers drumming against his pulse rifle. "So… do we turn back?"
Brann gave a short, bitter laugh, the sound dry inside his helmet. "And lose the payday? Not a chance. We get in, we get the data. SynSpec'll pay a mountain of creds for firsthand records of a Fade breach."
Sela, standing a few paces ahead, turned back toward them. "So what's the plan? We can't just wander in blind."
Brann tapped the map holo floating above his wrist. "We're just outside the perimeter of the old relay station. It's half-buried, but the central tower might still be structurally sound. According to Diens' last transmission, the message node is inside."
He turned to Kali.
"You're on overwatch. Find a vantage point and set up. Eyes on the main breach. Anything moves, anything looks off, you let us know, then put it down."
Kali nodded, already surveying the crumbled rock faces and shattered comms spires around them. "Copy that."
Brann looked to the others. "Kharv, Sela, you're with me. We breach the outer wall and sweep the relay interior. Quick and quiet. We're not here to poke the hive, just rob it."
"And if we already poked it?" Kharv asked, voice low.
"Then we don't stop shooting till we're back on the Helion-9," Brann said without missing a beat. "Move."