Chapter 27: Signals In The Silence

  The silence outside Lab Four felt heavier than the quiet within.

  Maya stood in the corridor just beyond the sealed hatch, breath shallow, weapon still drawn. The words echoed in her comm, not yet. She didn’t need to replay the clip; the voice had etched itself into her mind like a blade across metal.

  Step by step, she turned toward the lift access, checking corners with clinical precision. Training kept her movements steady. But this wasn’t like anything she’d trained for.

  “Jules,” she said quietly, comm crackling. “That thing in the lab, same profile as the figure from Storage 12. And this time it... spoke.”

  The line was silent for a heartbeat longer than she liked. Then Jules responded, tone clipped, professional.

  “You’re absolutely sure?”

  Maya hesitated. “No.” She glanced back down the corridor. “But my gut is.”

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  A pause, then the sound of Jules typing fast. “Alright. Lab Four’s under Level Two quarantine. Internal security’s flagged. You’ll have backup in less than five minutes. Stay put.”

  “No,” Maya shot back. Too sharp, but she didn’t care. “I’m not staying here. This thing isn’t random. Storage, labs... next is command systems. Or life support.”

  Another pause.

  “Then where are you going?”

  “Maintenance Core Seven,” Maya said, pulling up the corridor map on her HUD. “There was an active terminal in the lab. If it touched the internal networks, there’ll be footprints.”

  And if it didn’t... that might be even worse.

  Core Seven was one of Emberfall’s oldest systems nodes, buried deep in the colony’s infrastructure spine, mostly forgotten except by engineers and AI techs. The corridors narrowed as she descended, lights flickering with increasing frequency. Power fluctuations were spiking in this sector. They’d been written off as strain from the asteroid’s rotation torque.

  Now? Now they felt deliberate.

  A flickering sign caught her eye:AUTHORIZED TECHS ONLY.

  Its edges were blackened from an old insulation fire, older than her assignment to Emberfall. Farther in, the systems felt more disconnected. Her comm pinged once—then died. No signal. No netlink.

  Makes it harder for backup to get here, she thought grimly.