The air in the deep Chiyou war-tunnels shifted from ancient rust to clinical rot: bleach, old copper, and formaldehyde.
Lin Yan led the way. Captain Halden took point, pulse-rifle sweeping the oppressive darkness. Ravion guarded the flank, his heavy frame tense, while Zeri covered the rear, gritting her teeth against her cracked ribs.
Darian walked in the center, entirely numb. His boots splashed through condensation puddles on pure muscle memory. His polished uniform felt like lead, the rust stain on his chest plate a burning brand.
"You're breathing too fast, Darian," Ravion muttered, golden eyes flicking back.
"I'm fine," Darian snapped, his voice hollow. He dragged a trembling hand through his hair. "Let's just finish this so we can get out."
We need to leave, Darian thought frantically. Before the Court breaches the camp.
Halden raised a fist. "Hold up. Comms are dead. Keep your eyes open."
The jagged tunnel ended abruptly at a massive circular vault door spliced directly into the bedrock. Unlike the sleek hard-light architecture of the modern Expanse, this was archaic: heavy, rusted iron secured by thick hydraulic pistons and a manual locking wheel.
"What is this, a museum exhibit?" Zeri whispered, aiming her blasters.
"Old-school mechanics," Halden noted, eyeing the rusted hinges. "No modern frequencies. No essent networks. Halvek went entirely off the grid."
The vault wasn't locked. It had been violently forced open from the inside, hydraulic arms warped from immense pressure. A blast of freezing, chemically treated air washed over them.
Squad 9 stepped into the nightmare.
The sprawling subterranean laboratory resembled a sterilized hospital from a forgotten century, violently infected by a biological plague. Fluorescent tubes buzzed erratically, casting harsh shadows across yellowed linoleum. Dark-red fibrous webbing crept across the archaic beige plastic of the equipment, pulsing with a slow, sickly rhythm.
"Look at those monitors," Zeri swallowed hard. "They're thicker than my torso."
"Cathode ray tubes," Ravion said, his brow furrowing as his plasma spear swept the room. "Why would Halvek rely on scrap?"
"Because you can't digitally track magnetic tape," Darian said quietly.
He wandered toward the center of the room, ignoring the shattered glass cylinders lining the walls and the viscous green puddles. He stared at the floor tiles.
"Captain," Darian pointed. "Look at the dust patterns. The drag marks. There used to be massive containment units here. Heavy servers."
Halden crouched, running a gloved finger over deep gouges in the linoleum. Her jaw tightened. "He didn't just leave. He packed up."
"We're chasing a ghost?" Zeri lowered her blasters a fraction.
Lin Yan let out a shaky breath, backing away from an archaic surgical table.
Strapped to the rusted steel was a massacre of biology. The massive creature—a celestial stag with ivory fur and golden antlers—had its lower half violently rewritten. Dark, wet bark fused directly to its exposed spine, expanding outward into a pulsating mass of fleshy maws and serrated teeth.
"I've seen the Enforcers do awful things," Yan muttered, knuckles white on her pink rifle. "But what was he trying to build?"
"He left his failures behind," Halden said grimly.
"Found the main terminal," Zeri called out, standing before a massive server rack. Enormous reels of magnetic tape sat behind dirty glass. "How do you even turn this dinosaur on?"
She slammed her palm against a faded green button. The reels jerked. Three bulky CRT monitors flickered to life, scrolling jagged text.
SCREEN 1: LOG 388...stasis is a cage. The Court's sap preserves, but halts evolution. A fly trapped in amber. To achieve true apotheosis, the amber must be violently shattered. The host requires a new directive. It requires... hunger.
SCREEN 2: LOG 394[Heavy analog static] ...the Spero blood sample confirmed volatile. Uncut essence. When introduced to the sap, reality warps. The mutation is aggressive, uncontrollable. A necessary violence to break the divine mold.
Darian's breath hitched.
SCREEN 3: LOG 402The rejects above are mere kindling. When the pathogen fully synchronizes with the Spero catalyst, Phase Two initiates. Project: Carrion Bloom. The true catalyst is ready.
"The monsters in the courtyard," Ravion realized. "They were just fertilizer."
Zeri's eyes widened. "He played us. He needed a distraction to move his gear."
"Check the recording timestamp," Halden barked, stepping toward the console.
Before Zeri could touch the terminal, the reels behind the glass shrieked. They spun at a terrifying velocity, the ancient tape shredding itself to dust.
The heavy iron vault door slammed shut with a deafening crash, sealing them inside. The manual wheel spun wildly on its own, fusing the locking pins into the bedrock.
"Hey!" Zeri fired a hard-light bolt at the door, but it only scorched the rusted iron. "We're locked in!"
The CRT monitors flickered violently. The logs vanished, replaced by a pixelated loop of Doctor Halvek's face.
"If my analog watchdog has triggered, you have found my lab," the recording purred through blown-out speakers. "I must say, it took you longer than calculated. I am already gone."
Halden spat her unlit cigarette onto the floor. "Zeri, find a manual override, now!"
"My work in the Liuli Expanse is concluded," Halvek's recording continued. "Consider this bunker my parting gift."
The fluorescent tubes abruptly shifted to a blinding, violent crimson. A deafening mechanical siren wailed through the cavern.
CRITICAL OVERLOAD. THERMAL RUNAWAY INITIATED. T-MINUS 10 SECONDS.
"It's a bomb!" Yan yelled.
"Captain, it's five feet of solid iron! We can't blast through!" Zeri panicked, aiming pointlessly at the walls.
T-MINUS 5 SECONDS.
The underground lab shook as the archaic servers built impossible thermal pressure. Darian scrambled toward Halden, heart hammering. The realization crashed over him: he had traded the camp's lives to save his team, and now they were all going to die in a hole anyway.
T-MINUS 3 SECONDS.
"We're out of time!" Ravion roared. He planted his feet in front of Zeri and Yan, bracing to take the brunt of the blast.
T-MINUS 1 SECOND.
Halden threw herself into the center of the squad, driving her fist into the linoleum. "BRACE!"
She triggered her hex-gauntlet. A brilliant, segmented dome of solid hard-light erupted from her arm, snapping shut around the five of them just as the servers detonated.
The explosion was apocalyptic.
A shockwave of searing fire and vaporized iron ripped through the bunker. The cavern ceiling collapsed, dropping thousands of tons of ancient bedrock. The roar of fire and crushing stone was absolute, burying the laboratory in an ocean of destruction.
Inside the dome, the impact drove Halden to her knees. She gritted her teeth as the shield groaned under the impossible weight. The glowing hexagonal panels flickered, barely holding back the sea of fire and rock.
Dust violently choked the claustrophobic sphere. They were buried alive, hundreds of feet underground.
As the ringing in their ears faded into the terrifying groan of shifting rubble, the blue light of the shield held. They had survived the blast. Trapped in the dark belly of the dead asteroid, the silence inside the dome was suffocating, broken only by the ragged breathing of Squad 9.