Viktor coughed for the third time in ten minutes, and Yuki pretended not to hear.
The squad moved single file through the fern forest, cargo sledges grinding across Haven's root-choked soil. Osei led the first sledge — the heavy one, loaded with seventy-six percent of a titanium-beryllium yield that command would call insufficient. Park pulled the second, smaller sledge carrying field equipment, core samples, and a thermal blanket wrapped around what used to be a mining technician named Kowalski.
Yuki walked point. Ghost was somewhere above the canopy, moving along the ridge that paralleled their route, his scope covering angles they couldn't see from ground level. Santos had rearguard, her machine gun slung across her back because they couldn't afford to waste ammunition on shadows.
The stalkers kept pace.
They were visible now — not even trying to hide. Shapes in the undergrowth, sliding between fern trunks at the edge of the work lights' reach. Yuki counted nine on the left flank, seven on the right. More behind, where Santos could hear their claws clicking across exposed rock.
"Escort formation," Ghost murmured over the comm. "Same spacing as last night. They're herding us."
"Toward the pickup point?"
"Toward the canyon. Only viable route from here."
Yuki checked her tactical overlay. The pickup coordinates were two kilometers northeast — across a river, through a narrow canyon that cut between two granite ridges, then into an open clearing where the wormhole's entry point hung fifty meters above the surface. Two hours at forced march speed. Less if they pushed. More if anything went wrong.
Things always went wrong on Haven.
---
Viktor fell behind at the river crossing.
Not dramatically — he didn't stumble or drop his weapon. He just... slowed. His stride shortened. His breathing, already labored at altitude, developed a wet rattle that Yuki could hear from fifteen meters ahead. He coughed into his fist and kept walking, but the gap between him and Santos widened with each step.
"Viktor." Santos, not looking back. "Move your ass."
"I am moving my ass, little one. My ass moves at the speed it chooses."
"Your ass is choosing wrong. Pick it up."
He picked it up. For thirty seconds. Then the cough came again — deeper this time, a sound like boots on wet gravel — and his pace dropped right back.
Yuki fell back to walk beside him. Said nothing. Just matched his stride and kept her eyes on the treeline.
"Don't," Viktor said between breaths.
"Don't what?"
"Don't look at me like that. Like I am made of glass." He spat something dark onto the trail. Didn't look at what it was. "I have been walking since before you were born. I can walk a little further."
"Nobody said you couldn't."
"Your face says it. Your face has been saying it for six months." Viktor's eyes were bloodshot, the veins standing out against the white like cracks in old porcelain. "I do not need you to carry me, Sergeant."
"I know."
"Then walk point. Where you belong."
She walked point. Behind her, Viktor's breathing scraped against the inside of his chest like something trying to get out.
---
The river was shallow — shin-deep, maybe twenty meters across, running fast over a bed of smooth stones that looked like they'd been polished by millennia of alien current. The water was clear. Too clear, actually. Haven's rivers usually ran with suspended sediment, giving them a milky blue-green tint. This one was transparent.
Santos noticed first.
She'd waded in ahead of Park's sledge, testing the footing, when she stopped mid-stream and squatted down. Her fingers dipped below the surface and came up streaked with something that caught the light wrong — iridescent, like motor oil, but thinner.
"The hell is this?"
Chen was already pulling a scanner from his vest. "Don't touch it. Let me—"
"Already touching it, mano." Santos rubbed the substance between her fingers. "Doesn't sting. Doesn't smell like anything. But it's all over the rocks." She pointed downstream, where the riverbed shimmered with the same rainbow film. "That's not natural."
"Could be biological." Chen waded in with his scanner, sweeping the water column. "Some organisms produce iridescent films — biofilms, algal mats—"
"On Earth, sure. Name one Haven organism that does this."
Chen couldn't. He scanned for another thirty seconds, then shook his head. "Chemical signature doesn't match anything in the Haven database. It's synthetic."
"Synthetic. As in man-made."
"As in not produced by any known biological process on this planet." Chen packed his scanner away, his expression carefully neutral. "Could be runoff from our drilling operations. Chemical lubricants, coolant—"
"Our camp is two klicks upstream and uphill. Runoff doesn't flow uphill." Santos scooped a sample of the film into an empty specimen vial and pocketed it. "Something else is in this water."
"Santos." Yuki's voice carried from the far bank, where she'd already crossed. "Move. We're burning daylight."
Santos pocketed the vial and waded through. She didn't say anything else about the film. But Yuki caught her checking the sealed vial twice during the next kilometer.
---
The canyon appeared at 1430 local — a crack in the granite ridge that rose on either side like the walls of a building. Twenty meters wide at the entrance. Maybe fifteen at the narrowest point. Three hundred meters long, with a dogleg turn at the midpoint that blocked line of sight from one end to the other.
"Specter Actual, this is Overwatch." Ghost's voice, clipped and professional. "I'm on the north rim. I have eyes on the canyon exit."
"What do you see?"
A pause. "Stalkers. A lot of stalkers. Twelve, maybe fifteen, positioned along the exit walls and on the rocks above. They're not moving." Another pause. "Sarge, it's the same setup as the camp attack. Flanking positions, overlapping fields of fire. They've set up a kill box."
Yuki looked at the canyon entrance. Then at the ridge walls — sheer granite, sixty meters high, unclimbable without gear they didn't have. Then at her tactical overlay, which showed exactly one route to the pickup coordinates that didn't involve backtracking three hours through terrain they'd already cleared.
Three hours they didn't have.
"Alternate routes?"
"Negative. The ridge extends four klicks in both directions. You could go around, but you'd miss the window by at least two hours." Ghost's scope clicked as he adjusted magnification. "Through the canyon is the only way."
"Can you clear the exit from up there?"
"Some of them. Not all. The dogleg blocks my angle on anything past the midpoint. I can cover you going in, but once you're around the turn, you're on your own."
Yuki looked at her squad. Osei and Park, civilian technicians who hadn't signed up for combat operations. Doc, just finding his balance again after Kowalski. Viktor, breathing like a man drowning in air. Santos, who would fight anything but couldn't fight everything. Chen, whose value was in his brain, not his trigger finger.
Six combatants. Two civilians. Three hundred meters of kill corridor. Fifteen predators that fought like soldiers.
"We go through," she said. "Fast and loud."
Santos grinned. It was not a nice grin. "Now you're speaking my language."
---
The plan was simple because complicated plans died in canyons.
Santos would take point with the machine gun — suppressive fire down the corridor, forcing the stalkers to keep their heads down. Yuki and Viktor would flank her on both sides, covering the walls where stalkers might try to come over the top. Chen would guide the civilians and cargo sledges through the middle. Doc would stay with them, ready for whatever the canyon decided to hand them.
Ghost would cover from the rim until the dogleg cut his angle. After that, he'd move along the ridge top and try to reach the exit side in time to cover their emergence.
"Rules of engagement," Yuki said. "Everything in the canyon that isn't us is a target. Don't stop moving. Don't stop shooting. If someone goes down, Doc grabs them. If a sledge goes down, leave it."
"Leave the extraction material?" Osei's voice was tight.
"The material isn't worth your life. If we lose a sledge, we lose it. We do not stop."
Osei looked at Park. Park looked at the canyon. Neither of them argued.
"On my mark." Yuki checked her pulse rifle. Full magazine, two spares. Viktor had three magazines for his assault rifle. Santos had four hundred rounds in the belt and two spare belts. Not enough. Never enough.
"Go."
Santos hit the canyon entrance running, the machine gun up and firing before the first stalker could react. The sound was enormous — amplified by the canyon walls into a wall of noise that filled the narrow space like a physical force. Tracer rounds punched into stone and flesh, sparking off granite, tearing through chitin.
Two stalkers dropped from the walls directly ahead. One landed in Santos's path. She kicked it aside without breaking stride and put a burst into a third that was scrambling down the right wall. Spent casings rained off the canyon floor in a brass waterfall.
"Right wall, two contacts!" Viktor barked. His rifle cracked — controlled bursts, three rounds each, the disciplined fire of a man who'd been killing things since before most of the squad was born. A stalker screamed and fell from the wall, trailing dark fluid. Another launched itself at him, claws extended, and he sidestepped it with a movement that shouldn't have been possible for a man his age, putting three rounds through its skull as it sailed past.
Yuki fired and moved, fired and moved. The canyon was chaos — alien bodies hitting stone, gunfire echoing until it sounded like a dozen firefights stacked on top of each other, the screech of stalkers communicating in frequencies that scraped against the inside of her head.
Ghost's rifle spoke from above. Once. Twice. Two stalkers that had been positioning themselves on the canyon rim jerked and fell, tumbling sixty meters to the floor in tangles of broken limbs.
"Midpoint!" Yuki called. "Dog-leg in thirty meters!"
They rounded the turn and Ghost's cover vanished. The second half of the canyon stretched ahead — narrower, darker, the walls closing in until there was barely room for the cargo sledges.
And it was full of stalkers.
Not twelve. Not fifteen.
Twenty, at least. Packed onto the walls, the floor, the rocks above the exit. They'd been waiting — silent, motionless, invisible to Ghost's scope beyond the dogleg. A second wave. A reserve force.
"Porra!" Santos opened up, hosing the corridor with automatic fire. Stalkers shattered under the impacts — bodies coming apart in sprays of dark fluid that splattered the walls and the cargo sledges and the people behind them.
But twenty was too many in a space this tight. They came from everywhere at once — above, from cracks in the walls, from behind rocks that had seemed too small to hide anything. Yuki killed one point-blank, the pulse rifle's muzzle touching chitin before she fired. Viktor shot another off the wall above Chen's head. Santos walked her fire across a cluster of three that had been advancing on the cargo sledges, and the canyon floor became a slaughterhouse.
A stalker hit the second sledge.
It came from a crack in the right wall — a gap Yuki hadn't registered, barely wide enough for a human to squeeze through. The stalker burst out and slammed into the sledge's side at full speed, tipping it onto its runners. Park screamed. Chen grabbed her and pulled her clear as the sledge skidded across the canyon floor, shedding equipment and core sample containers. The thermal blanket caught on a rock outcrop and tore free.
Kowalski's body rolled into the open.
Yuki didn't look. Couldn't afford to.
"Leave it! Move!"
Another stalker hit the first sledge — the heavy one, the one with the extracted material. Osei was still holding the tow handle when the impact knocked the sledge sideways. She went down, the sledge rolling over her legs, and Doc was there in two seconds, pulling her free while Yuki put four rounds into the stalker that was trying to tear through the sledge's cargo netting.
The sledge was damaged. One runner was bent, the cargo netting shredded on the right side, and sealed containers of processed alloy were spilling onto the canyon floor. Metal cylinders bouncing and rolling across stone, each one representing hours of drilling and processing and a dead man's labor.
"Leave the spillage!" Yuki hauled the sledge upright. The bent runner scraped against rock with a sound like fingernails on glass. "Push through!"
Santos burned through her last belt clearing the canyon exit. The machine gun clicked empty and she dropped it on its sling, pulling her sidearm and firing one-handed while she ran. Viktor's rifle was dry too — he was using his bayonet on a stalker that had gotten inside his reach, the old Russian grunting with effort as he drove the blade into the joint between the thing's head and thorax.
Light hit them as they cleared the canyon. Open sky. Flat ground. The clearing ahead, maybe two hundred meters, with the wormhole's shimmer visible above the treeline — a disc of distortion against Haven's blue sky, the way home.
The stalkers didn't follow past the canyon exit. They pulled back into the shadows of the narrows and watched the squad stumble into the light, bleeding and gasping and dragging a wrecked sledge behind them.
"Sound off!" Yuki's voice was hoarse, her throat raw from shouting over gunfire.
"Santos. I'm up. Machine gun's empty."
"Viktor." A cough. "Functional."
"Chen. Okay. Lost most of the field equipment."
"Doc. Osei has a contusion on her left leg — non-critical. She can walk. Park is uninjured."
"Ghost?"
His voice came from the ridge, already moving toward the exit side. "Five confirmed kills from overwatch. I'm coming down. Give me three minutes."
Yuki leaned on the bent sledge and looked at what was left. The heavy sledge had maybe sixty percent of its original load — the rest was scattered across the canyon floor behind them, sealed cylinders of refined alloy lying among dead stalkers and spent casings and a mining technician's body that they'd carried all the way from camp only to leave it in a canyon on an alien world.
Seventy-six percent yield, minus the spillage. Call it sixty-eight. Maybe sixty-five. Well below minimum. Well below anything command would call a successful extraction.
Kowalski died for sixty-five percent of leftovers from a deposit someone else mined first.
"Sarge." Osei's voice, strained with pain and something harder. "Kowalski—"
"I know." Yuki's jaw was so tight the words had to squeeze out. "We can't go back."
Osei looked at the canyon entrance. At the stalkers crouched in its shadows. At the body they'd left on alien stone.
She didn't say anything else.
---
They reached the pickup zone at 1615 — two hours and fifteen minutes before the revised wormhole window closed.
The clearing was flat, wide, ringed by low scrub vegetation that had been crushed down by previous landing operations. Above them, the wormhole hung in the sky like a hole punched through blue paper — a circle of nothingness that Yuki had stepped through thirty-seven times before and never once been happy to see more than right now.
"Set up the cargo for pickup. Chen, get the beacon transmitting. I want the shuttle here the second the window—"
She stopped.
Tracks.
Boot prints in the soft soil at the clearing's edge, where recent rain had turned the ground to mud. She knelt, tracing one with her finger. The print was fresh — clear edges, no erosion, no insect trails crossing through it. Hours old, not days.
But the tread pattern was wrong.
Standard Reaper combat boots used a herringbone tread — interlocking zigzag lines designed for grip on unstable alien terrain. Yuki had been wearing the same pattern for fifteen years. She knew it the way she knew her own fingerprints.
These prints didn't have herringbone treads. They had a diamond-grid pattern — deeper lugs, wider spacing, the kind of tread designed for heavy loads on hard surfaces. Industrial footwear. The kind worn by engineers or construction workers.
Or miners.
Chen materialized beside her. He'd seen it too. His face had gone gray, the way it did when he was working through something he didn't want to be right about.
"Those aren't ours," he said.
"No."
"And they're not from any Reaper squad I know."
"No."
Chen looked at the wormhole above them. At the pickup zone where someone with non-standard boots had stood — recently, within hours — on an alien planet that was supposedly accessible only through a military-controlled portal that required Director-level authorization to open.
"Okay, so..." He stopped. Started again. "Someone was here. Today. Before us. Using a different wormhole access point or a different authorization — because ours was the only active window according to mission control."
"Unless it wasn't."
Chen's jaw worked. He looked at the boot prints. At Yuki. Back at the boot prints.
"What do we do?"
Yuki stood up. The wormhole shimmered above them — salvation, extraction, the way back to a dying planet where a dead man's daughter waited for a flag that hadn't been folded yet. Behind them, stalkers watched from the canyon. Below them, a mountain full of pre-mined resources waited for the next squad that would be sent to extract what was already gone.
And at her feet, boot prints that no one was supposed to have made.
"We go home," she said. "And we don't say a word about this to anyone outside the squad."
Chen opened his mouth. Closed it.
Ghost dropped out of the treeline, rifle over his shoulder. He looked at Yuki, then at the ground, then at the prints she was standing beside. His face didn't change. Snipers were good at that.
"I saw them from the ridge," he said. "Four sets. Different sizes. They came from the north and left the same way."
Four people. On a planet with one authorized wormhole access. Walking in boots that didn't belong to any Reaper.
The shuttle's engine noise reached them from above — the familiar whine of atmospheric descent, the pickup craft dropping through Haven's sky toward the beacon Chen had activated.
Yuki stepped on the nearest boot print. Ground her heel into it until the tread pattern was gone.
Ghost did the same to another.
They didn't speak. They didn't need to. Some things lived better in silence — for now, until the right moment, until the questions had answers that wouldn't get them all killed.
The shuttle touched down. The cargo was loaded. The squad climbed aboard, every one of them carrying things that didn't show on the manifest.
Haven dropped away beneath them, green and blue and full of secrets.
The wormhole swallowed them whole.
