[68829] ChaeyoungTritonis PrimeChaeyoung opened her eyes nervously. Instead of more terrors from the xenolith or skull-faced Grayson soldiers, Chaeyoung encountered a tan angular face that was smiling gently, with two beautiful green eyes looking at her warmly. A gloved hand outstretched offering aid freely. There was a moment of confusion.Above her was a stranger in a highly unusual armored biosuit. It had thick layers of plates, like scales, with thick angular armor on the joints, an extensive equipment pouch around a thick and sharply edged chest plate, and there was an armored collar outside an O-ring neck seal where a helmet would attach. In some ways, it was reminiscent of Sato and Ninya Blanca’s obsidian demon armor, only far less aggressively evil in its aesthetic and far more reptilian instead.What elevated an unusual armor layout into the truly bizarre was the skin of this armor. It was vantablack—as dark as the petals of the fully functioning xenoliths. It had a strange iridescent sheen that seemed to come from beneath the surface of the armored plates. She had never seen a hardsuit like this in her life, and the similarities to the xenoliths were unsettling. She tried to scoot as fast and as far away from the reptilian vantablack lizard as she could, fearing it was another horror unleashed by the xenoliths.“Shhh, shh. Anchuan shiyong.”[130][Di Lingua]: It’s handled safely. ↑ The stranger said, gloved hands put up in the air as a sign of surrender. “We got your distress call. We’re not here to hurt you!”Her mind was suspicious, filled with racing thoughts, but her body immediately relaxed. The stranger’s body language exuded calm and confidence. “Who… who are you?”The figure smiled at her, reaching for something on the ground. Chaeyoung winced. She balled her hands into fists and her muscles tensed up.“Nawa oh, it’s just my helmet, see?” It was just a vantablack hardsuit helmet, set on the ground next to her. She unclenched. The helmet, like the rest of the hardsuit, was angular, thick, and void-dark with a diffraction pattern shine. The stranger picked up the helmet, tucked it under a shoulder in the crook of their arm. Chaeyoung looked at herself in the bronze reflective vizor on the helmet and thought she looked small and scared in the slightly distorted reflection.“Did they do that to you?” The stranger asked with a frown and a finger pointed at Chaeyoung’s cheek. “Huh? Oh. No, it’s an old scar.”There was an awkward pause, but the lizard-armored rescuer stood up, offered their hand to Chaeyoung, with the palm down. “My name is Copper Wing.”“That’s not much of a name.”“Ha. No, not really, I suppose. It’s a call-sign,” she gave Chaeyoung a crooked, absolutely disarming smile that made Chaeyoung forget any sarcastic comments that were bubbling up. “Abeg.[131][Di Lingua]: Please. ↑ My name is Anya.”Anya politely bowed her head, took her free hand and placed it on her abdomen.Chaeyoung was inexplicably embarrassed. “Neva palava.”[132][Di Lingua]: No problem. ↑Anya re-offered Chaeyoung a hand.Chaeyoung was stiff and weak on her feet.“Anchuan shiyong, here, put your arm over my shoulders.”Anya was tall and Chaeyoung had to stay up on the tips of her toes to keep her arm comfortably over her shoulder, while Anya had to hunch over to give Chaeyoung support. They left the small supply closet together, moving awkwardly back into the wider hab space.Devi—the Grayson soldier that she had saved down in the core lab—was there on their knees. Next to Devi were four other Grayson Services Group personnel, not soldiers. They were all shackled, vantablack lizards pointed coilguns at their backs. She felt guilty for it almost immediately but seeing her captors becoming prisoners themselves put a smile on her face. Then she saw slumped over humanoid shapes in the corners, and pools of blood and red with boot tread marks on the floor. Any levity she had before now disappeared.“It’s over, Chaeyoung,” Anya said as she helped her down into a chair, angled away from the bodies and blood. Someone in a vantablack hardsuit identical to Anya’s brought over a thermal blanket and a cup of something steaming.“Thanks,” Chaeyoung accepted the warm drink, took a sniff.Astringent, but it was hot gworocha. Tepidly, she took a sip. Just the right temperature to drink. Anya placed the thermal blanket around Chaeyoung’s shoulders. Just like in the water closet, she welcomed the warmth. However safe she felt, something seemed off. Her gaze swept across all the strangely shaped hardsuits around her. She looked closely at Anya’s face. From around the neck seal of Anya’s hardsuit, Chaeyoung noticed the edges of tattoos peeking out. Black ink and geometric. She looked up at Anya. Anya loomed above her, almost lanky. Most of the other lizards were also very graceful with gecko grip, barely making any sound, moving in the low gravity like they had been born in it. “You’re Uppers, aren’t you? Stellah steh?” Anya sighed. “Ye. We are contractors who work for Absolute Horizons. Have you heard of them?”“Who hasn’t? There’s AG and there’s Absolute Horizons, and they handle all gidizip shipping, right?”“AG makes most of the spacecraft, but there are a lot of little groups that actually run logistics fleets,” Anya said dryly.“That makes you gidizip myawn?”“No, we are private security.”Chaeyoung sipped her tea, looked around at the dark armored shapes around her. They had stormed into a hostile habitat, they had taken out most of the Grayson soldiers and sustained no obvious casualties. And they had strange equipment and held their coilguns with an absolutely casual ease and comfort she had scarcely seen even when she was growing up around the Cooperative Defense bases on Ahtash.“Shey, oke.”[133][Di Lingua]: Right, okay. ↑ she said doubtfully.Anya shrugged with her hands. “A few colleagues on a contract got word some people were being held prisoner against their will on an old Wharton and Wake station rented by Grayson Services Group. When they tried to investigate, they got shot at. So, when we heard there was someone calling for help, we had to help.”Chaeyoung glared. “And did your colleagues rescue any of them?”Anya nodded. “They got one person out.”Hope lifted Chaeyoung’s heart.“Was…” she hesitated, knowing that the answer she wanted was not the only answer she could be told. “Was her name Vis? Vis-viva?”Anya nodded. “Ye. Our colleagues got her out of captivity. Last I saw she’s safe.”In her elation, Chaeyoung spilled tea on the floor. She tried to stand, couldn’t quite get herself back on her feet. Anya reached out, offered aid. Chaeyoung shook her head and sat back down.“Tell me where she is! Take me to her!”Anya gave her a sad smile, but nodded. “Oke. She should be on her way to Ya Ke by now—we will take you there. But first, we’re building a case against Grayson Services Group to present to the Interstellar Court of Justice. We could really use your testimony.”Chaeyoung’s hand trembled, not out of fear, but from the excitement that Vis was still alive. She closed her eyes, ignored as Anya explained more about what she and her colleagues were trying to do to stop Grayson Services Group, and why. Vis was alive! Doubt filled her—doubt that Anya was telling the truth—but she ignored it. She could see Vis again! They could leave this nightmare behind and go make a softer life together.“…and we think that will carry more weight, since you’re not a citizen of the United Planets. With your testimony, there’s no way for them to wriggle out and rebuild. They’ll be pinned down with nowhere left to slink off—bannedacross the entire K-tube network. So, will you help us? Take Grayson down for good?”She opened her eyes.“Don’t trust them! They’ll sell you out in a nanosecond!” Devi said.The scream shattered her fleeting peace, certainty, and joy. She turned to glare at the Grayson prisoners, to glare at Devi who was red-faced and shouting.“They’re ghosts! They’re Shades! They do the Navy’s dirty work! They’re butchers!”Dark lizard shapes restrained Devi, pushing them back to the ground. Shouting back in tinny speaker amplified voices.“Never trust a Shade! Oof.”Pressed to the ground, face first, Devi laughed.“How much does it hurt, ghost, that Sato betrayed you?”Anya darted forward, bent down, grabbed Devi’s chin, and turned them to force eye contact. Around her, all the other Upper lizards moved back, like they obeyed an unspoken order. “What did you say?” Anya asked through gritted teeth.“He told us about his old Shades. He told us about you, Copper Wing. Nothing but degeneroids. Dangerous and slippery. Only good as pawns if you want something destroyed!”“Was he here?” Anya asked.“Et baoja loushua gah gahdah lul tsow.”[134][Di Lingua]: Go fuck yourself with an explosive bolt. ↑ Devi spoke slowly, in a broken accent.Anya flashed her teeth at Devi, shook her head, and walked away. “Take them away. Secure them somewhere quiet.”“I fight for the pale blue dot! What do you fight for?” All the Grayson prisoners began shouting a chant in a language Chaeyoung had never heard before. Yet, the intent was clear. It was violent and angry and proud. All their faces contorted in hateful ways, they glared around at each of the blank faceplates of the vantablack lizards, glared cut knives at Anya and Chaeyoung as they were taken away.Anya paced the hab, her hands curled into fists, her facial expression wavering between anger and sadness. It reminded Chaeyoung of what was still down in the mines. Just a few kilometers below the ice, practically under her feet. She wanted nothing more than to go with these Uppers, or Shades, or ghosts, or whatever they really were, so long as it meant she could see Vis again. But fear and anger and chaos had reminded her, sharply, that she couldn’t leave the disaster of the core lab behind, having done nothing but run away from that mess. “Sato was here,” Chaeyoung said meekly.Anya paused mid step, her attention snapped back to Chaeyoung.“Sato. He said his name was Sato.”“Was he here? At this facility?”“He was on Tritonis Prime, but—”“Tell me where, exactly!” Anya kneeled so her eyes were level with Chaeyoung’s. “Was it here? In the mines? Or the station in orbit? Or was it at the other tunnel access?”“He was down in the mines, but—”“Oke, Chaeyoung, how long ago did you see him last? Our teams that hit the other surface facility did not see him—are you sure he is still down in the mines?”Chaeyoung looked up, vehemently shook her head. “No. But none of that matters right now!”Anya scowled for a moment, but then gave Chaeyoung a blank, professional stare. “I need you to trust me. If Sato is free, you’ll be in danger. He is the biggest single threat to any of you—”“No!” Chaeyoung threw the mug on the ground. “You don’t understand! You don’t know what’s down in those mines…what happened to…,” her voice cracked as she tried to say Ali’s and Mimo’s names.Anya looked confused, concerned, and then angry.“Oke oke…Grayson Services Group brought me here because of what I know—what I have seen,” it all poured from Chaeyoung in an excited, effusive flow. “Aliens! Extraterrestrials! Actual, fen dan, fucking aliens. Beneath the abandoned mines down there they had us studying alien tech and we…we woke something up. Something very dangerous. From the xenoliths. And it changed the people down there…we barely made it out alive!”“And Sato?” Anya asked coldly.“He’s still down there…with the others…I think…but, Anya, they’re not human anymore! They’re something else, and they’ve been sending messages through this station! We have to do something about it!”“Nawa oh! Anchuan shiyong!”[135][Di Lingua]: Woah! Safe handling! ↑ Anya put her hands up the way a mother might comfort a child having a tantrum. “Start from the beginning.”Chaeyoung remembered Devi’s warning. “Never trust a Shade!” She did not need to trust Anya, because she had leverage. Her testimony, her knowledge of the core lab—these were valuable. But was it enough? Could she use the leverage and prevent the weaponization of the xenoliths? Anya looked at her expectantly, and, in that moment Chaeyoung trusted her—but she had to be certain.She shook her head. “I need assurances.”“Assurances?” Anya repeated, clearly annoyed.“Ye,” Chaeyoung crossed her arms. “I can’t believe I am saying this, but what is down there cannot be sampled, cannot be studied. It should not be quarantined, or isolated, or hidden. It simply must be destroyed.”Anya leaned back, apparently shocked by the request. Chaeyoung shocked herself, but she also considered this to be the right path. Her scientific curiosity screamed at the idea of destroying the single most amazing mystery she could even conceive as an exobiologist, but her body and heart ached from all the pain her curiosity had brought into her life. How many lives had that curiosity already destroyed? Whatever the xenoliths were, they were dangerous, uncontrolled, and irrevocably contaminated with humanity from an exobiological perspective. They deserved to be studied, carefully, by serious scientific minds—but weaponization or destruction were the only outcomes she could really believe in based on these initial conditions. She would rather see it destroyed than turned into another tool for death. “I can’t promise that.”“Then you can forget recording my testimony for the ICJ, or my help.”“Nawa oh, hold on, I meant that I can’t be sure we can destroy it without knowing what it is you want me to destroy,” Anya explained.“I am sure you can find a way.”“Probably. But what are we destroying? An artifact? A tunnel system? I need some expectation of the scale. Do we need to get in close to take care of the problem? Can we do it far away?”“Ah,” Chaeyoung rubbed her chin as she thought it through. “Getting up close is…,” Chaeyoung shuddered with fear at her own words.“Are you oke?”“Ye, ugh, ye, I am fine…up close is best to make sure it’s done right.”“And the scale of this destruction?”“Something on order of destroying a medium-sized metallic asteroid mine.”Anya looked thoughtful, then nodded. “Oke. It might take a few hours to organize something on that scale, but it’s achievable.”“So, do I have your word? That you will destroy everything down there? No samples? No studying it? No weaponizing it?”Anya reached out her hand. “You have my word.”They shook hands. Chaeyoung let out a sigh of relief before she described the alien complex beneath the ice of Tritonis Prime.As she told her story, she saw Anya’s face transform from angry, confused, and skeptical into a sharp and focused attention. She seemed preternaturally alert, focused, and professional. Chaeyoung described the core lab, the xenoliths, and everything she had uncovered, including all the disturbing things she witnessed during her narrow escape. Devi’s words haunted the edges of her thoughts—Anya was not to be trusted—yet all that Chaeyoung was trusting was that Anya was earnest about her rage at Sato, at Grayson Services Group, and needed Chaeyoung’s help to fulfill those quests. “What now?” Chaeyoung asked nervously as Anya ran out of questions.“Total demolition,” Anya said sternly. “As promised.”“And that’s it?” Chaeyoung said, relieved that she had apparently read Anya correctly.“Not quite. We need some equipment from orbit, then we need to get boots down there before we get in nice and danger close, but it’s doable and necessary. So, we will get it done.”“If you’re going down there, I am coming with you.”“I can’t—”“If I don’t see it with my own eyes, I will never be able to sleep again…knowing what is out there?” Chaeyoung quivered. “I need to actually see that it was destroyed.”Anya looked angry, distraught even, as she muttered incredulously at Chaeyoung. “Gapjil hey yu’ll tsow…fine![136][Di Lingua]: Fuck your stubbornness. ↑ We’ll need to get you out of that thing, and into a proper EECMU. Do you know what that is?”“Extended EVA…Maneuvering Unit?”“Crew is the missing word there, and ye. This model will give you close to a hundred meters per second of delta-vee, five more liters of water on top of the water bladder a base biosuit has and can extend power by sixty hours. It’d be a bit heavy if we were anywhere with a serious gravity well.”“Seems unnecessary.”“It is. May yu gah Kpafuka ill kes baff up.”[137][Di Lingua]: But you better stop flirting with Death. ↑***“Oke, our team is Kim aka Joker One, Murphy aka Pele, Johnson aka Hammerhead, and me aka Copper Wing,” Anya introduced the other Shades to Chaeyoung, palm up, palm down, palm horizontal. “You,” Anya pointed at Chaeyoung palm down. “Are going to be Little Bird.”Murphy and Johnson chuckled.“Huh?”“Standard operating procedure is to use call-signs, oke Little Bird?”Chaeyoung shrugged with her hands.Anya nodded, put her helmet on, and then took a step closer. Adjusted the armored shoulder pads, the small plate and control panel over her heart, the thick ceramic helmet, and tugged at the ruddy gray material of the biosuit. It was stiffer than a normal biosuit.“Not quite a BRACE, but better than an environmental suit when it comes to kinetics and radiation,” Anya explained. “Best we could do on short notice.”Chaeyoung fiddled with the thick metallic braces on each wrist. “Works for me.”“Oke, listen up!” Anya ordered.Kim, Johnson, and Murphy all perked up, stood at attention.“Alpha and Epsilon are already on their way down to secure the tunnels. We’ll be out of comms for most of the hike, so we’re going full shadow, oke? Covers on your back, covers on your guns, Joker One runs over-watch, and a baby cover for Little Bird. Understood?”“Aye aye!” the three other Shades shouted back with a salute.“Get ready. We move out in five.”“Cover?” Chaeyoung asked.Anya opened a rucksack that was sitting on the ground. A pouch zipper appeared to form as she waved her gloved hand over it, and from that pouch Anya pulled out a sheet that looked like AlKapThil with a small metal box. She detached the box from some wires and unfolded the sheet. It looked like an AlKapThil poncho, only the outer surface shimmered in the light in odd ways, like it was rendering a reflection rather than truly reflecting light.“Here, put this on. Over your suit.”Chaeyoung slid the poncho over her suit as Anya reattached the small box, and gecko gripped it to one of Chaeyoung’s wrist. “Now turn it on,” Anya suggested as she mimicked touching her wrist.Chaeyoung looked down at the strange metal box gecko gripped to her left wrist, where her seal should be, and tapped it. Immediately, the outer surface of the poncho pulsated, then seemed to dissolve into dust. “Nawa oh!”[138][Di Lingua]: Woah! ↑ she gasped in surprise.Everywhere along the surface of the poncho, there was a distorted view of what was on the other side. Where the poncho was not covering, she was still in plain view. It was strange.“Adversarial metaflage. Specifically, metamaterial and adversarial algorithm device, or MAAD,” Anya explained.Chaeyoung had heard of metaflage, which was a common partially dynamic camouflage system designed to trick both human and autonomous detection, but had seen nothing to this level of sophistication that actually seemed to work.“Pull on your hood, and we’ll get ready. Meet you in the airlock?”Chaeyoung nodded, still stunned by what she was wearing, and headed to the hab’s airlock. On her way she saw Kim, Johnson, Murphy, and Anya pull similar AlKapThil sheets over weapons, attach strange mottled gray ovular disks over their air, water, and power backpacks, and shoulder up large black ruck sacks.“Why don’t you cover your hardsuits with this stuff?” Chaeyoung asked Anya as the others joined her in the airlock, with a little tug on the adversarial metaflage poncho hood above her faceplate.Murphy chuckled over the radio. “Don’t need to.”All four of the vantablack lizards shimmered like air from a hot vent, then they all, nearly simultaneously, disappeared. For a moment, in their stead, were strange, crumpled sheets of ink displays, bending and folding in impossible ways before simply disappearing. And all around her was a shimmering of air, and nothing else. She thought she was losing her mind, but then a network connected over her EAR, and translucent orange silhouettes appeared where the four Uppers had been. Chaeyoung looked at the four EAR drawn figures, saw call-signs appear above each one.Anya’s silhouette curled a hand into a fist, and gently tapped it on Chaeyoung’s shoulder in a stellah steh gesture of compassion and solidarity. “When we get outside, stay in the middle of our formation, oke? But if it gets dangerous, stick to my back like you are gecko gripped on there. Understood?”“Got it.”“One more thing,” Anya pressed something solid into her hand. “Take this.”It was a cut knife. Chaeyoung accepted the gift with both hands and a slight nod of her head, letting the body of the sheathed cut knife rest on her palms, feeling its weight.“Make sure you attach it underneath the metaflage,” Anya advised.Chaeyoung waved on the gecko grip on with her EAR, slapped it to her thigh, where she could reach it and it was out of the way of her metaflage, and gently pulled it from its sheath, letting its warming glow peek out for a moment before she slid it back down into its home. “Thanks.”“Good, now comot!”“Aye aye!” the others shouted in unison.***As they trudged through the lattice of mining tunnels, Chaeyoung felt an itching dread that squirmed in the back of her mind until it became unbearable. She fidgeted endlessly with the small box on her left wrist and the handle of her cut knife, tilting her head back and forth as she looked balefully down the various side tunnels, expecting to see some unimaginable xenoformic horror. She found herself in a field of orange translucence. Shadows of weapons pointed in all directions, wiggling back and forth like a sea urchin’s grasping globular arms. All around them there were little plumes and puffs as a small swarm of autos, also covered in metaflage, hovered above, in front, and behind the human formation. If she squinted and focused, she caught the occasional blue silhouette of a darting auto against the ice tunnel background, but it was difficult. She was not sure how they stayed up in the air for so long, given it was a vacuum. Each meter they got closer to the core lab, the more nervous Chaeyoung got. She felt like she had made a huge mistake, that she could already be half-way to Vis already—if only she had stayed quiet.They approached the last branch and took the path to the large industrial airlock. The tunnel here was larger than the rest—big enough for a CHOMP to fit through. Last time Chaeyoung was in this location, Grayson carved waist-high barrier cubes out from the ice of the side walls to construct a zig-zag barrier, but someone had supplemented it with even taller barrier structures. Chaotically scattered around the base of this makeshift wall were equipment containers bearing the interlocking W of Wharton and Wake or the chattering skull motif of Grayson Services Group. Contents of these containers spilled out, left ripped, torn, and obliterated on the ice. Flaps of metal were stuck to icy pools of frozen blood and viscera. There were no bodies, only crimson streaked frozen lakes. A thin layer of frost covered everything, and the sides of the space had large piles of rubble from the tunnel collapse, now cleared. Boot prints and large sweeps were visible in the frost layer. People had been there, and they had both cleared a path to the core lab and reinforced any defenses. She couldn’t see around the new, nearly three meter high, barrier, but she suspected it had been Anya’s people who had set up the new structures.More orange silhouettes popped onto her EAR, and the posture of those around her shifted. They straightened their backs, held their weapons more lazily, not pointing up at danger, and walked with more casual, less punctuated, and serious strides.They communicated through hand gestures. Bodies moved as the two groups of orange silhouettes appeared to talk, but Chaeyoung heard nothing. She turned to the shadow labeled Murphy.“What’s happening?”“Copper Wing is just getting the update from Alpha and Epsilon teams,” Murphy explained. “Looks like they cleared a cave-in, secured the other side, setup some additional barriers as a precaution.”Chaeyoung tensed her muscles, gripped her cut knife tighter, her breath quickened in time with her pulse. “Fuck.”“Wettin dey?”[139][Di Lingua]: What is it? ↑ Murphy asked.“Did they unbury the airlock, or go all the way into the cave on the other side?”“Sounds like they cleared all the way to the cave.”“We need to get moving.”“Why, what’s—”“She’s right,” Anya said as she hustled back to rejoin the formation. “Pele? Get the package from Smiles. We’ll advance into the cave, meet you there. Then we go down into the complex.”“Aye aye!”Murphy’s silhouette broke off from the group, joined the others, exchanged something not much larger than a sizable rucksack. “Let’s comot!”The posture of the three silhouettes shifted. Their backs became more hunched, their movements more punctuated, and the morphology of the surrounding group became more of a cone. Chaeyoung stuck close enough to Anya that she sweated under the heat radiating from the edges of the strange ovular cover over her AWP backpack. The two new barrier structures had a gap in the middle, like two sides of a door offset to make a narrow bottleneck, and through this narrow path was another set of interlocking walls with waist-high cubic barriers outlining a zig-zagged maze that led up to the industrial airlock. It was like a shooting gallery designed to slow down anyone trying to get in, or out, of the core lab, and it had seen some action. Black filamentous sputum, mixed with red blood, sparsely but chaotically splattered along the ice. Huge pockmarks and gouges from coilguns were across every ice barrier. Metallic and rock dust mixed with frost, and it crunched beneath her boots along with spent coilgun supercapacitor shells.On the other side of the bottleneck, there was only a heap of ice, rocks, and debris. Enormous craters from coilguns pocked and scored the other side of the bottleneck, but a cylindrical path—a tunnel—ran through its center, suggesting that someone had melted through the ice bedrock with heat or a laser. It led all the way through the industrial airlock hatch, into the puck-shaped cavern.With her escort, they passed through the bottleneck without incident, slunk through the fresh tunnel carved through the cave-in. There was still no sign of dead bodies or remaining Grayson guards, and no infected and mindless Mimo waiting to ambush them. All that remained were the eerie signs left behind that something bad had happened here. Blood, half-used medical kits, spent supercapacitors from coilguns, empty magazines, severed limbs infiltrated with black fibers, impact craters, scratch marks, and long silvery tentacles made from molten metallic structures that had flash frozen in the cold of Tritonis Prime’s deep mining tunnels against the ice.Chaeyoung focused on her breathing to keep the panic’s icy tendrils from taking over her brain. She gripped so tightly on her cut knife she was cutting off circulation to her fingers. More than anything she could have imagined, she hated she was back here.Ahead there were more orange silhouettes, kneeling behind makeshift cover, weapons pointed toward the broken environmental suit airlock that dominated the center of the cave. One or two silhouettes lay prone on their backs, and one leaned against a wall, revealing half of their armored body that was no longer hidden under metaflage.“This foothold cost us. We had casualties,” Murphy explained grimly, through what sounded like gritted teeth. Chaeyoung’s eyes went wide. “Did…there wasn’t any contamination was there? No one was touched by any of the…tendrils?”Anya put a fist in the air. All the surrounding figures stopped, took a knee, pointed a weapon out.“Oke, Little Bird. Ask you questions. Quickly. Palli-palli.”[140][Di Lingua]: Quickly quickly. ↑“I…no one got infected, right?”“My Shades engaged at range, no close quarters. OPFOR only had the chance to engage with coilguns. Three of my Shades got hit, one dead,” Anya sounded angry, yet calm. “Enemy retreated through that hole. Any more questions?”“No.”“Then comot!”Anya made her way across the rocking cavern floor, which was covered in aluminum and AlKapThil detritus, pools of black and red, and at the far end, there were corpses piled high in front of the broken environmental suit airlock hatch. Mostly human corpses, rife with black and purple infiltration, deformed, and destroyed. Chaeyoung wanted to vomit, but the rising warm bile stopped in her throat.“Now, once we go through that horror show,” Anya said. “There will not be time for any chatter, oke, Little Bird?”“Understood.”“Kpata-kpata bintsow[141][Di Lingua]: Totally fucked. ↑, Little Bird, I know. But if we want to get out of this alive, we have to keep focused, ye? Just think about what needs to be done—remember what’s at stake—we can process the trauma later, ye? Just think step-by-step about what we’re doing and why. We’re going in there, we’re leaving our care package, we’re exfiltrating, we’re sealing up that airlock behind us, and we’re getting out of the blast range, shey?”Anya’s tone was conciliatory, earnest, and even comforting. Chaeyoung closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and focused. She thought of Vis and being reunited. That was what was at stake. She had to get back to her eheen, and she wouldn’t have to worry as much about what shadows could come from the stars if this place was no longer out there.“Shey, oke, oke. I’m ready, ohlowyeh.”“Anchuan shiyong.”[142][Di Lingua]: Safe handling. ↑ Anya said with a nod. “Joker One, make sure we’re clear. Johnson takes point. Then we’re into the core lab. Aye aye!”“Oaka hay!” Murphy, Kim, and Johnson all shouted in unison.Plumes from rockets propelled barely visible blue shapes forward through the opening behind the pile of bodies. “Clear,” Kim announced.“Oke, comot.[143][Di Lingua]: Okay, come on. ↑ Slow is smooth and smooth is fast!”Johnson rushed ahead, winding a path through the xenolith altered bodies, followed closely by Anya. Lump in her throat, Chaeyoung followed Anya. She kept her focus only on the shape of Anya’s hardsuit in front of her, or at her feet to ensure she walked through the narrow path being navigated through the bodies. Blue shapes of Kim’s autos puffed and wiggled immediately above her helmet, like an invisible escort of birds. Anya dipped through the broken environmental airlock hatch with Chaeyoung close behind. Anya immediately pivoted to the left, took a knee, weapon pointed down the hole through the alien hatch. Chaeyoung leaned down behind her. Johnson, escorted by two of Kim’s autos, slid down the ladder. Kim, then Murphy, joined them on the right side, weapons pointed toward the hatch.“Clear.”Anya burst ahead, slid down the ladder. Chaeyoung climbed it slowly, cautiously. On the ground at the base of the ladder, she quickly got her bearings, found Anya, and got behind her back. Murphy and Kim followed immediately after.Where there had been glow grass fronds along the cave, there was now nothing but thrashed veins of white plant-like flesh and their black blood. Chaeyoung swore under her breath.“What was that?” Anya asked.“Nothing…all the grass is gone.”“Little Bird,” Anya chastised.“I know, I know, but that would have been helpful!”Anya gave a hand signal to Johnson, and Johnson ran ahead, then Murphy, then Anya with Chaeyoung on her heels. Kim took the rear. There was still some of Grayson’s lighting equipment, and some source of heat causing billowing fog in the vacuum as ice evaporated or melted. Only the core lab dome’s support struts remained, though twisted, and bent, so it looked more like a metal rib cage than a proper dome. Someone had also taken out the interior dome, where Grayson kept the untouched xenolith. The xenolith itself was missing, and instead of the pile of alien bodies, there was now a black, fibrous, fractal. The only thing that was still in its original and expected place was the strange, altered xenolith in the tattered tent where Mimo and Ali had died. Purple protrusions covered that xenolith, which appeared completely untouched. Chaeyoung followed the others as they advanced, but the oddities kept adding up. “Something is wrong.”“Little Bird—”“Contact!” Kim said. Chaeyoung saw a blue translucent blur, then a cloud of dust billowed out from a far wall. Then another darting blue shape, more bursts of clouds. Flashes of movement. Above and to her left. She turned to look. More blue translucent indicators on her EAR blurred past as Kim’s autos swarmed and attacked. One blurred toward the high ceiling, raining debris down on all of them when it exploded, outlining each of the partially invisible shapes of the Shades and Chaeyoung. A black, deformed human body fell, knocked loose from above. She felt the thud through her boots when it landed. The body writhed. Blue tracers cut it apart.More darts zipped past, exploding in gray clouds and flashes of light as they struck targets on the far side of the dome. More movement, more shapes and shadows. Grayson environmental suits torn and tattered and filled with twisted putrefying purple and black flesh. Grayson soldiers, missing limbs, black tendrils pouring from the eye sockets of the skeleton themed faceplates. Blue tracers filled the cave complex with light. Wide continuous arcs of tracers and bursts of clumped tracer groups swept across the surface above, in front of and behind the group. A murmuration of blue. Autos darted this way and that. Chaeyoung grabbed Anya’s rucksack, held on, and allowed herself to be pulled along. Her fingertips felt hot this close to the Shade’s power system. There was complete radio silence, however. It was eerie and calm. The only sound was her own gasps and tortured breaths. The thrum of automatic weapons fire striking surfaces tickled her bones through her boots, but she couldn’t hear any of the havoc.Bodies lunged toward them, red tracers snapped back at the Shades from a handful of still armed abominations, but the metaflage seemed to help. A quake in the ground forced Chaeyoung and Anya to stumble, each taking a knee for stability. Chaeyoung, eyes wide, was looking frantically all around her. Writhing shapes cut to pieces from coilguns. Unceasingly, more bodies swarmed from the ceiling, from side tunnels, from the few remaining Grayson structures in the core lab dome’s burned-out husk. There was another quake.“Oh, pol tsow, fuck fuck fuck,” she gulped down as she almost vomited in fright.The black fractal mass that replaced the alien bodies around the xenolith had lifted itself off the floor. Tentacles flapped, expanded, split, roiling out of the alien mass. Human bodies, corrupted by the xenolith, rolled, and wiggled and effortlessly side-stepped the massive fractal tentacle as it slammed down toward the invading Shades and Chaeyoung.Anya leaped ahead, pulling Chaeyoung with her. Thump. A black, wormlike mass was just centimeters away from them. Meters thick, self-similar, and seeking them. Each tendril split as it stretched, then each split itself split and stretched, and so on—a creeping fractal seeking new bodies to add to its pile. A dagger of brilliant blue split the dark shape before it could reach Anya and Chaeyoung. Anya was on her feet, grabbed her shoulder, and pulled her.“Comot comot comot!”[144][Di Lingua]: Come on come on come on! ↑ A rapid thump thump thump as Anya fired her coilgun at the inhuman mass shook Chaeyoung’s body. Spent coilgun capacitor shells flew high into the air, burning a cherry red from heat in vacuum. Anya, with sheer exoskeleton strength, pulled Chaeyoung away from the grasping fronds, ever splitting and splitting and seeking and splitting, away from the vantablack trunk. Chaeyoung pointed, behind the mass of twisted human bodies, to the changed xenolith. It was untouched, left alone, given a wide berth. Its purple instruments were vibrating and dancing.“There! We need to get there!”A gray plume shot up from the ground meters in front of them as a grenade exploded in vacuum. Xenolith warped bodies splintered apart. Anya charged through the smoke and raining debris with Chaeyoung in one arm and vaulted toward the changed xenolith.It was all motion and chaos for the next second. Blue flashes of motion, of pressure, of pain, of force. Anya carried Chaeyoung forward, inexorably. They leaped into the air once, then twice. They landed at the foot of the xenolith. Chaeyoung let go of Anya, rolled to a stop near the tattered remnants of the human lab equipment and scaffolding around the alien pinecone. The only alien artifact left alone by the horrors that encircled them.Anya was now silhouetted not by Chaeyoung’s EAR, but by the white orange of her own radiators, covered just barely by the ovular shape she had attached on her back, the cover. Chaeyoung frantically looked around to orient herself to their situation. There were twenty or more humanoid shapes around them. Murphy and Kim had somehow made it to their little oasis. The massive black tentacle was flapping up and down, as if it was trying to rally or attack, but Murphy was relentlessly firing at it with a stockier, thicker coilgun. Chaeyoung experienced the weapons fire as a continuous thwomp through her biosuit. It was like a stream of blue light sparked out and waved over the xenoforms.Kim was firing out at the crowd and directing his few remaining autos to attack like a conductor of a symphony. Murphy, still firing away at the huge alien mass, dropped a large sack on the ground. Kim, without a word over Chaeyoung’s radio, stopped whatever it was he was doing, and pulled open the bag. Inside, all she could see was a massive gray cylinder, splashed with radiation warnings. Anya turned around as she was slapping another magazine into her coilgun, pointed to the ground and then flattened her palm out. Chaeyoung pressed her face as far down as she could as fast as she could.“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” she kept saying to herself.A weight fell on her back. She yelped, turned, and saw it was Anya’s arm. Anya was on her back, knocked next to her in the tangle of scientific scaffolding left behind by Grayson. A black tendril was stuck into her shoulder. “Anya!”Chaeyoung lunged, pulled the cut knife, lashed out as she screamed. The tendril separated under her attack, boiled, and hissed as the heated rhenium edge sliced through. The stump retreated. Anya was already digging the tip of the tentacle that had embedded into her shoulder out with her own cut knife. Gray ooze that looked like a medical weave covered the wound. “Kheh kheh,” Anya coughed. “Don’t worry, my suit is taking care of me.”She ran forward, grabbed onto Anya’s shoulders, and shook. “You need to administer epinephrine! Right now!”Anya didn’t respond. She just flicked at something on her EAR.“Done.”Chaeyoung’s mind was screaming. Murphy was reloading her large automatic weapon. Kim was laying down covering fire. The casing of the nuclear weapon was in her eyeline. There was a countdown timer. Johnson was nowhere in sight.“Pol tsow,”[145][Di Lingua]: Shit fuck. ↑ Anya cursed. “Something doesn’t feel right.”Anya dropped her weapon, clutched at her shoulder. Her other arm and her legs pulsed like someone in excruciating pain. Anya screamed over the radio.Time seemed to slow. Chaeyoung heard a high-pitched buzz as her heart pounded. Something caught her attention in the corner of her eye. The last remaining xenolith—the one covered in purple and opalescent protrusions—seemed to dance and wiggle in rhythm to the buzz in her skull. Fewer and fewer human shapes remained in the alien mass that surrounded them, but tendrils of the black fractal mass replaced them, sprouting out from the large tentacle. Yet, there was a radius around them that was clear. There was an almost perfect circle where no alien monster dared to approach, and it centered on the strange, changed xenolith. She thought about the glow grass, the iron eaters, the ferrofluids of the xenoliths. She walked behind Anya, grabbed her by the armpits of her Shade, and pulled her closer to the xenolith’s protrusions. One of the purple protrusions swung down, knocking her back, then attached itself to Anya’s shoulder. A second purple tentacle lurched down at Anya. She grabbed a cut knife and began wildly stabbing.“Tsow tsow tsow!”[146][Di Lingua]: Fuck fuck fuck. ↑ Anya screamed.“No!” Chaeyoung tried to grab Anya’s hand, but she had sliced one protrusion clean off from the xenolith. “Trust it! Trust me! Let it do what it is going to do!”Both of Anya’s arms went limp, and she whimpered as the alien protrusion suctioned at her wounded shoulder. Chaeyoung watched, frozen in curiosity, fear, and an insane hope this would save Anya. She saw the severed protrusion, cut apart by Anya, slide away on a trail of clear fluid that oozed from the cut site. The severed alien protrusion rolled away until it bumped into a black tentacle. There was a jet of smoke. The tentacle retreated. She turned back to Anya. The changed xenolith had completely separated, covering her wound in a mucous layer that was quickly being slathered over by gray ooze from Anya’s hardsuit self-sealing system. Anya was holding her shoulder, curled on the ground.“Pol tsow.”[147][Di Lingua]: Shit fuck. ↑ Anya muttered.Chaeyoung picked up the severed protrusion and waved the end at grasping vantablack fractals and twisted human forces. It was oozing clear fluid, and droplets detached, flung at the xenoforms in front of her. They pulled back. “Help her up!” Chaeyoung yelled at Murphy and Kim. “And then follow me!”“We can’t leave that here!” Murphy waved at the nuclear device. “It will be compromised!”Chaeyoung tried to move the nuclear bomb, realized how heavy it was, and called for help. “Get it closer to the xenolith! It’s like they’re allergic to that thing! They’ll leave it alone if it’s nearby.”“Trust her,” Anya said weakly.Murphy nodded and helped Chaeyoung pull the nuclear device right to the base of the changed xenolith. The protrusions still wiggled, though not as aggressively as before. Chaeyoung shrunk away from the moving armatures, back to Anya’s side.“Anya! We need to get out of here! I can clear us a path!”“Ugh,” Anya groaned. “Oke oke. Everyone, fall in. Little Bird has point.”Chaeyoung used the severed purple protrusion like a torch, waving it back and forth in front of them, clearing a path clear of xenoform monsters. Murphy used sweeps of blue tracer coilgun to clear their rear, and Kim helped Anya limp ahead. They only had to make it a handful more meters to be outside the range of the black mass, strangling humanoid forms ducked back and retreated—too many of their kind cut down by coilguns. They made it up and around the bend, out of sight of the core lab. More movement from near the ladder. An obsidian, demonic form lunged at Anya.“Sato,” Chaeyoung said numbly. No helmet. In hard vacuum. Sato’s skin was purple and splotchy like from explosive decompression, like Liam had looked on the Jiuhe. Black filaments had been used to stitch his face back together, healing bisected coilgun wounds that should have been fatal. Uncontrolled xenolith infiltration. It was even worse than before.Sato knocked Kim to the side with a sweep of his arm. Murphy was pivoting around with her weapon.“Little Bird! You’re in my way!” Murphy said.Anya rolled off Chaeyoung, onto her back, and drew her sidearm. There were three flashes. Three blue plumes in Sato’s chest. He took a step forward, drew a cut knife, and kicked the sidearm away from Anya. “Ahh!” Anya screamed in pain over the radio.Sato slammed his fists into Anya’s armor. Chaeyoung jumped into the fray and used the protrusion she was holding onto as a club. “Fuck you fuck you fuck you!” She slammed it down onto Sato’s head, again and again. Boiling purple pus spurted out from his wounds. He covered his head with his deformed arms and screamed out into the void in agony. Yet all was silent in the vacuum of the core lab. Anya exploited the distraction. She swiftly swept Sato off his feet, rolling on top of him. She then pinned his arms down with her knees and, with her enhanced strength from the Shade’s exoskeleton, forcefully drove another knife into his head, burying it into the ground through his skull.With a shudder, Anya pulled out the blade. Blue-gray blood boiled on the cherry-red rhenium blade. Anya stabbed it down again. Blue-gray sprayed in parabolic arcs all over the cave. Chaeyoung stumbled forward, nauseated, and shaking, toward the ladder out of hell. Kim got back to his feet. Anya rolled off Sato. Blue tracers sliced through his remains. Chaeyoung collapsed to her knees at the base of the ladder.“Chae…Little Bird,” Anya’s voice crackled over the radio as she panted in exhaustion. “You saved my life.”“They’re not following us,” Kim announced.“We need to get out of here, Copper Wing,” Murphy said grimly, peering over her weapon, pointing toward danger.“They’ll follow us, eventually,” Chaeyoung said as she felt the world slip away and herself fall into torpor.“We can collapse the entrance behind us,” Kim said. “And in twenty minutes, nuclear fire will melt them all down to slag.”“Assuming they don’t tamper with the package,” Murphy said.“That changed xenolith kept them away for at least twenty hours. It can manage another twenty minutes,” Chaeyoung said.Anya stumbled toward the ladder, then fell. “I don’t think I can walk, Pele.”Murphy helped Anya up, flopped her over into a soldier carry and stumbled toward the ladder. “Get going Little Bird. Go first. We’ll be safe on the surface.”