The memory shattered like a pane of glass struck by a railgun slug.
Darian gasped, the freezing ozone and leaking cryogenic fluid of the Gonggong Black Site rushing back into his lungs. The heavy gravity of the lowest vault slammed into his bones, anchoring him to the cold, dark stone.
He was on his knees, his hands trembling.
"I..." Darian rasped, staring unfocused at the frost-covered floor as if it might disappear again. "I... it was..." His lungs struggled to remember how to pull in real air. He dragged a heavy hand across his face, his mind swimming between the memory's phantom echoes and the vault's freezing reality. "Wait... I'm... I'm here."
A few feet away, Dove stumbled backward. The flawless, terrifying composure of the assassin from the Spero Estate massacre was broken. Her white-gloved hand hovered in the air, twitching erratically. The featureless porcelain mask tilted toward him, but the absolute certainty in her posture had evaporated.
"What the fuck is happening... what was that... there's no way," Dove whispered, her distorted voice fracturing into genuine, breathless shock.
She took another unsteady step back, her chest heaving as if she were the one suffocating.
"What was... that?" she stammered, her fingers curling inward toward her mask as her mind desperately tried to stitch its psychic tethers back together. "There's... no... no way." She took another unsteady step back, the painted red eye of her mask fixed on his chest.
Darian's vision swam, the phantom echo of his little sister's face colliding with the stark white of the assassin's coat. A sharp spike of adrenaline cut through his daze. "Wait... Why would she care about my sister?"
Before his fractured mind could process the impossible question, a deafening mechanical roar shook the vault.
Kael had ignored the mutating corpse-abomination writhing near the elevator shaft to focus on the primary threat. His thrusters screamed, flaring bright blue as he launched his massive, rusted iron chassis directly at the assassin.
"I've got her!" Kael bellowed, his voice cracking with raw fury.
Dove snapped toward him. She raised her hands, attempting to project the kinetic pulse that had easily repelled Kael moments ago. But her mind was still scrambling from the feedback of Darian's memory. Her focus fractured.
The pulse flickered and collapsed.
Kael didn't hesitate. He slammed into her like a mechanized meteor.
The brutal impact of his iron shoulder caught Dove in the chest, lifting her off her feet and hurling her backward. She hit the frosted bedrock wall with a sickening crack.
Dove let out a sharp gasp, slipping to one knee. Dark blood spread across the ribs of her pristine white coat.
"Stay down!" Kael roared, raising his massive assault rifle to point-blank range.
But the Black Site had fully fallen.
A terrifying, collective shriek echoed down the miles-deep central elevator shaft, sounding like a descending avalanche of rusted iron and starving animals. Hundreds of escaped prisoners—deranged martial artists, maddened political dissidents, and half-mutated celestial beasts—poured out of the open shaft above. They didn't use the stairs. They simply plummeted through the zero-gravity zones, hitting the heavy-gravity floor of the vault like a rain of rabid flesh.
"They're in the shaft!" Kael yelled, spinning around. He squeezed the trigger, his assault rifle tearing into the tidal wave of prisoners flooding the chamber.
Darian stared at his trembling hands for one last, fractured second. He squeezed his eyes shut, inhaled a sharp breath of ozone, and forced the phantom memories down.
"Right," Darian muttered, shaking his head as his voice found its anchor. "Right. We're not dead yet."
He scrambled to his feet, drawing his POND-issue stun baton. With a sharp crackle, the heavy rod ignited, throwing blue arcs of high voltage into the dim air. He stepped back-to-back with Kael, swinging the electrified weapon in wide arcs to keep the swarm at bay.
A half-starved martial artist leaped at Darian, eyes wild and bloodshot. "The surface!" the prisoner shrieked, his rusted blade slashing the air. "We're finally getting out!"
Darian sidestepped the frenzied attack, driving the crackling tip of his baton directly into the man's chest and sending him convulsing to the floor.
Through the chaos of muzzle flash and flailing limbs, Darian caught sight of Dove.
She was using the blood-slicked wall to pull herself upright. Pressing a hand to her fractured ribs, her painted red eye locked onto Darian one last time. There was no mockery left in her gaze—only a cold, calculated realization that she had completely misjudged him.
"I... need to get answers," Dove hissed. Her voice cut through the gunfire, the synthetic distortion bleeding back into her tone.
She stepped backward into the shadows of the shattered cryogenic pods. The darkness instantly folded inward, swallowing her white coat.
Dove was gone.
"Hold them back!" Kael grunted as his rifle clicked empty. He didn't bother reloading, simply using the heavy weapon as a club to cave in the skull of a leaping beast.
"We're getting overrun!" Darian yelled, his lungs burning as he shocked another prisoner away. The endless swarm was crushing them under sheer numbers. "The control booth! Kael, fall back!"
Kael didn't argue. He shoulder-charged a path through the rabid crowd, shoving Darian toward the reinforced glass booth at the base of the central stanchion. Darian threw himself through the threshold, Kael heavy-stepping right behind him.
Kael slammed his fist into the bulkhead panel. The blast doors slid shut, locking with a magnetic clank just as a dozen screaming prisoners crashed against the thick permaglass. The deafening roar of the vault was instantly muffled to a terrifying, rhythmic thudding of bloodied fists and weapons hammering the glass.
As if waiting for the quiet, the encrypted POND comms channel in Kael's earpiece cracked to life, slicing through the static. Darian could hear the bleed-over from where he stood.
"Cadet Kael. Status report," Instructor Jax's voice rumbled. His usual laid-back drawl was gone, replaced by a heavy urgency over the sound of suppressing fire.
"Instructor Jax!" Kael yelled, his tone fiercely disciplined despite the adrenaline. "We've lost the lower vault! We intercepted Seraph—she triggered the breach, but she escaped!"
"Seraph?" Jax cursed through a burst of static. "Dammit. Listen to me, Cadet. The situation topside is a total collapse. A Chiyou Dominion heavy squadron just penetrated the upper block."
"Are they looking for Halvek, Sir?" Kael asked, his eyes darting to the blast door's structural integrity readouts.
"Negative, Halvek is nowhere to be seen," Jax replied grimly. "Intel says they're diving deep. They're here for General Taotie. If they break that warlord out and he takes command of this army of monsters... the Expanse won't survive the week."
"Instructor, we need immediate evac," Kael pressed, his armored shoulders heaving. "We're sealed in the lower control booth, but the doors won't hold forever."
"Negative on extraction, Kael," Jax said, his voice hollowing out. "The fleet is tied up with the Dominion armada, and the orbital guns are down. We can't stop them from the top. If Taotie and this army reach the surface, it's over."
Kael leaned back against the glowing command console dominating the center of the booth. He wiped a smear of blood off his rusted visor and glanced down.
He froze. The realization hit him like a physical blow as he stared at the readouts.
Lunar Propulsion. Orbital Stabilizers.
Kael keyed his comms.
"Instructor Jax." His breath hitched in his chest. When he spoke again, the frantic edge was gone, replaced by a chilling, absolute calm. "The orbital stabilizers. The lunar thrusters... If we kill them, the moon drops out of its locked orbit. The whole prison falls into the system's star. Taotie never leaves."
Darian missed a breath. He spun around, staring at Kael with wide, disbelieving eyes. A cold, suffocating grip closed around his throat. No.
A long, terrible silence stretched over the line.
"The remote relays were destroyed in the riot, Cadet," Jax said quietly. "We can't trigger the de-orbit sequence from the surface."
"But there's a manual override down here," Kael replied, staring at the heavy mechanical switches locked into the console. "In the lowest vault."
"Cadet Kael..." Jax's voice cracked, the hardened instructor suddenly sounding terribly old. "To trigger that sequence manually... the dead-man's switch has to be held in place until the orbital lock fails. If you let go, the override cancels."
Kael didn't hesitate. "Understood, Sir."
Darian stumbled a half-step backward, bumping into the glass. Outside, a mutated prisoner shrieked, hammering a rusted pipe against the permaglass inches from Darian's head. Darian barely heard it.
"Someone has to hold the switch," Jax whispered, the comms breaking up under orbital interference. "I'm sorry, boys. We're not bringing you home."
The transmission cut to dead static.
Darian's breath hitched in shallow, rapid gasps. His hands, still gripping the deactivated stun baton, began to tremble uncontrollably. His eyes darted away from the glowing console, tracing the blood-slicked glass to desperately search for an exit that didn't exist. He was completely consumed by the terrifying reality: he was trapped in a coffin at the bottom of the world.