006.01 – Beneath the Signal
Zea jolted awake in the early shiftlight. His quarters’ morning light routine mimicked that of the natural mornings on Iova; the light cycled through darkness to a subtle umber to an orange sepia to bright natural light. His breath caught in his throat; the dream was already fading, but her voice lingered. Liorah falling into a fissure, an image of his love being eaten by Iova. It was a dream he’d had many times before, each with a different utterance. This time, her mouth had formed the words, “It was never meant for you.”
The morning chime, alerting him that his shift was about to start, went off in his room.
Moving slower than usual, he dressed in silence, skipping his morning shower, and headed toward the bridge.
Zion didn’t believe in ghosts. She believed in signal degradation, recursive echoes, and corrupted registry flags. But the distress ping bouncing off three relay buoys was none of those things.
She leaned over the console, violet eyes narrowed. “It’s authentic, its Iovian signature.”
Rhea hovered behind her, arms folded. “An Iovian signal this deep into space? Thought we were the first and only Iovians ever to venture this deep into this sector?”
“Not just a signal, a distress signal,” Zion continued. “There were twenty-five Wanderer ships heading into deep space to areas we’ve never explored; one might have made its way here.”
Rhea replied, “But why broadcast from a tomb world?”
Zion didn’t answer immediately; instead, she ran another trace. “The signal looped every eighty-two seconds. Too clean for random interference, too messy to be coming from a ship. Could be a relay beacon.”
Zea entered the bridge, the lights low and systems humming like a sleeping lung. He was still moving slower than usual, gaze unfocused for a breath too long before locking on to the display.
The dream hadn’t let go. He could feel it clawing behind his eyes. Liorah’s voice, Liorah’s fall. “It was never meant for you.”
“Zea, you look terrible,” Rhea said.
Zea didn’t say a word; he just made his way to his station.
Hagok sat in the captain’s chair. “So, what does this signal mean?”
“Probably an Iovian ship that crashed, a beacon that was left behind… Don’t know unless we take a closer look,” Zion said flatly. “Or bait, maybe.”
“Bring it up on display,” Hagok commanded.
The projection lit up between them: a world split down the center like cracked glass. Deep canyons, massive tectonic upheaval, no signs of civilization. Yet the signal pulsed from somewhere within the largest canyon mouth.
“What’s the planet’s designation?” Zea asked.
“Our advance drone ships dubbed it Arrah and archived it as a non-viable fragment, with geological instability.”
“And that’s where the signal originates?” Hagok asked.
Zion nodded. “Somewhere deep inside the fracture. It’s narrow, not naturally formed, almost bored out.”
“A tunnel?” Hagok seemed to want all the answers before committing to an expedition crew.
“A throat,” she corrected. “Leading to whatever’s at the heart of Arrah.”
Silence lingered.
Then a footstep broke the quiet. It was Oromi, stepping out of the bridge’s peripheral shadow. He had been listening longer than any of them realized. His gait was slow, hands folded behind his back, a worn data-scroll tucked under one arm.
“I have heard of something like this before,” he said. His voice was soft but carried weight, like gravel shifted by wind.
Zion glanced at him, one brow raised. “A throat-shaped canyon broadcasting Iovian emergency codes?”
Oromi gave the faintest smile. “Not in those words, but in the old records, there were worlds that called softly, subtly pulling ships in with something that resembled hope. The Archive once labeled them siren anomalies. Discredited, of course. Too poetic for data-led minds.”
Rhea looked uneasy. “You think this is one of those?”
“I think,” Oromi said carefully, “that Arrah has waited a very long time for someone to listen.”
Zea folded his arms but said nothing; his mind wasn’t in the conversation, or in the exploring mood.
Hagok activated the ship’s comms. His voice came over, sharp and decisive. “Kolnar, assemble an expedition crew. I want full telemetry and a radiometric sweep before boots touch ground.”
Zion glanced at Zea, expecting some kind of reaction, but he gave none—just stillness, like he was holding something heavy beneath the surface.
006.02 – The Descent Into Arrah
It was beginning again.
Zea sat strapped in, eyes open but unfocused, the echo of his dream still haunting the edges of his thoughts.
The Vaila trembled as it pierced the upper thermals, the hull groaning in protest against Arrah’s fractured atmosphere.
Across from him, Rhea tightened her harness. Getro checked the stabilizer console. Kolnar reviewed the terrain scan with a quiet intensity. Hagok said nothing; he didn’t need to, as everyone knew what they had to do.
Artelle sat silently beside him. She hadn’t said a word since the bridge, and somehow, that was worse than a lecture. It wasn’t judgment, just awareness. Zea had seen that look before from Liorah. It meant I see you, but I won’t pull.
“Descent vector locked,” Getro muttered. “We’ve got a ledge just wide enough to land on, about 180 meters from the source. I wouldn’t get too comfortable.”
“No one’s getting comfortable,” Kolnar replied.
The canyon walls rose to greet them like the jaws of something long buried. From above, the fissure looked like a wound. From inside, it looked like a mouth.
And they were flying straight into it.
The Vaila touched down with a muted jolt, stabilizers stretched against the uneven surface of the canyon shelf. For a long moment, no one moved.
“Telemetry sweep online,” Zion’s voice came through the comms. “Atmospheric composition: argon-heavy, low oxygen trace. Surface radiation is negligible, but… Wait. I’m picking up a pattern. It’s faint but repeating.”
She paused.
“Localized energy bloom about fifty meters below you, yes, but there’s something else. I’m detecting micro-reverberations in the canyon walls. Not seismic, but structured, repeating every 11.2 seconds. Too clean to be natural.”
Rhea said, “For a planet that’s supposed to be a tomb, it seems very much alive to me.”
“Could just be geothermal,” Getro offered. “Or something else punching through the crust.”
Kolnar scanned the instrument panel. “Temperature steady, gravity at .93. Visibility is low. There’s some kind of vapor haze all around. Not toxic.”
Hagok opened the cargo bay, and the door cracked, allowing the dead plants to breathe into the Vaila. The ramp extended out as the wind rushed in, and he moved to the ramp. “Prep for external survey.” As he started to head out, he added, “Let’s make history.”
006.03 – Into the Throat
Zea stepped down last, boots crunching against black stone. The surface was pitted, brittle in some places, as if scorched by something long gone. A jagged ridge loomed just ahead, and beyond it, the deeper throat of Arrah yawned open.
“Seismic’s flat,” Getro said, eyes on his handheld. “But this stone… it’s absorbing resonance. Like it wants to stay quiet.”
“Spread out,” Kolnar ordered. “No more than ten meters apart. We move forward… slow and clean.”
They fanned out in a semi-arc. Artelle moved deliberately, her gaze trailing the hazy air. Rhea scanned every rise and shadow with her weapon raised. Hagok led the point.
Zea hung near the rear, not out of caution but due to dissonance. The place felt off to him. It wasn’t fear; it was familiarity. Not his own, but something echoing through him. That same tightness he felt the day Iova cracked.
He adjusted his visor. “How far to the signal?”
“One-eighty downhill,” Getro said. “Through that gap. See the ridge split there? Could be natural erosion, but the slope’s too perfect. Feels carved.”
Zion’s voice broke in over comms: “G.I.Z.I.’s showing motion. Very faint, not biological, just ahead of you.”
Kolnar turned. Rhea raised her weapon. The haze shifted but revealed nothing.
Zea felt it then. That same phrase, uninvited, rising in his mind like a whisper scraped from memory:
It was never meant for us.
Then the canyon floor trembled—just once. Enough to knock the dust loose.
And behind them, the Vaila’s lights blinked out.
006.04 – The Trap Springs
The canyon swallowed sound.
Kolnar didn’t wait. “Back to the Vaila! Go!”
Boots scraped across fractured stone. Getro reached the hatch first, slamming the manual override. Nothing. The door remained sealed, no lights, no hydraulic hiss.
“It’s dead,” he shouted. “Full system failure!” Getro tapped rapidly at the console, frowning. “Wait… Every system’s trying to reboot at once. That’s not a power failure—that’s interference.” He looked up through the windshield and squinted. “There—on the hull. That’s a signal clamp. We’re being jammed.”
Zion’s voice crackled over comms, fragmented. “…here they come.”
Something screeched above them. Not an animal, not wind. The sound of metal twisting.
Shapes emerged through the haze, low to the ground, cloaked in patchwork armor. Not designed but harvested. Zea looked up and saw one of them. It was like no species he’d ever seen, its head a splintered panel of scavenged tech, eyes glowing with data not its own. It turned its head, almost curiously, and launched toward him.
“Scavengers!” Rhea warned.
The scavengers advanced forward, encircling the Vaila and the expedition.
“Hold your fire,” Hagok ordered. “We are seriously outnumbered.”
“Hagok to the Savasu, this will be the last transmission for a while. Hold your ground. Repeat, hold your ground. That’s an order. We will be taken prisoners.”
006.05 – It Was Never Meant for Us
“We need to go in after them!” Zion said, pacing back and forth in front of the main display.
“You heard the captain. We need to stay,” Rotan replied, arms crossed, voice tight.
“They’ve been out of contact for over ten minutes,” she snapped. “The Vaila’s dead. Something took them.”
Rotan didn’t flinch. “And if we follow, that something could take us too.”
Zion stared at the faint, flickering telemetry on her console. “We’ve still got life signals… barely. Scattered. Could be interference, could be real.”
“Or could be bait,” Rotan said grimly. “Same as the signal.”
She turned sharply. “You’re afraid. You always have been. Every time the mission gets hard, you pull back and run to your lab like that’s where you matter most.”
Rotan’s jaw tightened. “At least I know when to think. You? You dive in headfirst and fix it after everything’s on fire. You trust the system until it breaks—and then you act like it betrayed you.”
“Oh, don’t turn this around on me,” Zion said. “You think fear makes you wise, but all it’s ever done is keep you on the edge of being useful.”
“And all your confidence?” Rotan snapped. “It’s a mask for the fact that you can’t stand not being in control. If G.I.Z.I. stopped talking to you for five minutes, you’d unravel.”
The words landed hard. Neither of them moved.
A quiet breath broke the silence.
Oromi had stayed quiet, listening, waiting for the right moment to interject, and the moment was now. He placed his hands behind his back and looked between them, not with judgment, but with something older, something patient.
“The first thing a storm does,” he said, voice low and steady, “is try to convince the trees they are alone. That their roots no longer matter.”
Zion looked down. Rotan shifted uncomfortably.
“You are not alone,” Oromi continued. “You are frightened, as am I. You are angry, and rightfully so. And still, you are together. That is where our strength has always come from. Neither one of you can bring them home alone. But together? You just might.”
He walked to the edge of the display and gently adjusted the main console’s filter settings. The telemetry cleared slightly, still scrambled, but unmistakably active. “The captain gave us an order, and we will follow it. But we must also bring them home. Now… how can we do both?”
Rotan glanced at Zion. “What can we do to help them?”
Zion’s eyes went to the console. “We start by widening the scanner parameters. All frequencies.”
Rotan nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
