The airlock hissed shut, a sound of finality that sealed them inside the abandoned bio-dome on Europa. The air that filled their lungs was stale, thin, tasting of dust and the metallic tang of failing electronics. Before them, a graveyard of failed ambition stretched out under the sickly yellow glare of emergency lighting. Dead trees, their branches like skeletal fingers, clawed at the curved polymer ceiling. The data-key they’d pulled from the Ganymede pocket watch had led them here, to this forgotten corner of the system, chasing the fourth fragment of a dead man’s mind.
Walter Bell moved with a silence that was unnerving, a column of matte black composite plating that absorbed the weak light. His amber optic swept the scene, a single point of warmth in the cold ruin. Kaelen followed, his boots crunching on a thin layer of crystalline frost that covered the floor tiles. The Ghost-Eater Shunt at the base of his neck was a quiet, steady hum, the presence of Aris Volkov a coherent thought running parallel to his own, no longer the screaming static of a ghost but the quiet observation of a fellow prisoner.
They advanced through the wreckage of a simulated forest, the path illuminated by the narrow beams of their suit lights. The dome was a tomb, and the silence was heavy, broken only by the groan of stressed metal from somewhere high above.
— Structural integrity is nominal but degrading, — Walter’s synthesized voice cut through the quiet. — Maintain pace.
Kaelen nodded, his eyes scanning the decay. He felt the wrongness of the place not just in the groaning structure, but as a faint pressure against his senses, a system slowly tearing itself apart. They passed what was once a research station, its consoles dark, its chairs overturned. The place had been evacuated in a hurry.
They found the central control room at the heart of the dome. A bank of consoles faced a massive, dark viewport that would have once looked out onto the Jovian sky. Dust lay thick on every surface, a fine gray powder that recorded the passage of years. On the main console, resting beside a datapad that had long since died, was a single, starkly white rectangle of polymer. A lab keycard.
— Found it, — Kaelen said, his voice a low rasp. — Central console.
He reached for it, his gloved fingers brushing away a decade of dust. It was cold, inert, a simple piece of plastic that held a fragment of a man’s soul. He had it. The fourth piece of the puzzle was in his grasp. As his fingers closed around the keycard, the emergency lights flickered once, twice, and then died.
A deep, resonant groan echoed through the dome, the sound of a giant turning in its sleep. The main power grid had failed. Total darkness swallowed them, a profound and absolute blackness broken only by the red emergency strips that now pulsed along the floor, casting everything in a bloody, infernal light. Dust rained from the ceiling. Then a crack like thunder, sharp and immediate, directly overhead.
The world dissolved into noise and motion. A section of the ceiling, a ten-meter span of metal supports and polymer panels, tore free. It fell not as a single piece but as an avalanche of shrieking, twisting metal. Kaelen threw himself back, landing hard against a console as debris rained down around him, the impacts echoing like hammer blows. The floor shook, a violent, grinding shudder that vibrated up through his bones.
When the noise subsided, replaced by the hiss of settling dust and the drip of unseen fluid, Kaelen pushed himself up. His light cut a swath through the thick, choking haze. The control room was destroyed. And where Walter had been standing, a massive I-beam, thick as a man’s torso, now lay angled from the ruined ceiling to the floor.
Walter’s chassis was pinned beneath it. The raven Uplift was motionless, his slender frame crushed against the buckled floor plates. Only his head and one arm were free. The amber optic was still lit, a single, defiant point of light in the wreckage. Kaelen’s breath caught in his throat. He scrambled over twisted conduits and shattered panels, his light dancing across the scene of destruction.
— Walter? — he called out, his voice tight.
The amber optic swiveled to face him.
— Mobility is zero, — the synthesized voice was flat, devoid of panic, a simple statement of fact. — Chassis integrity at 70%. The primary leg actuators are crushed.
Walter’s free arm strained against the immense weight of the beam. The metal of his chassis groaned in protest, the sound of a machine being pushed past its breaking point. The beam didn’t move. Not a millimeter.
— Negative, — Walter stated. — Brute force is ineffective. The mass is beyond my servomotors’ capacity.
Kaelen’s mind raced, cycling through options. Levers. Counterweights. There was nothing here but wreckage. He was a disgraced Empath, not an engineer. His skills were for tearing minds apart, not for putting the world back together. He looked at the massive beam, then at Walter’s trapped form. He was the only one who could act.
He rushed to Walter’s side, his boots slipping on the debris-strewn floor. The red emergency light pulsed, painting the scene in rhythmic flashes of crimson and shadow. He placed a hand on the cold steel of the beam, feeling its dead, immovable weight. They were trapped. Two men in a tomb, one of them dying.
