The southwest approach was exactly as bad as the topographical map had promised.
No trail. No road. No engineered surface or compressed soil or any indication that a human being had ever set foot in this quarter of Haven's forest. The terrain climbed through fern undergrowth that reached Yuki's waist, over root systems that twisted across the ground like exposed arteries, down into ravines where the soil turned to mud and every step threatened to swallow a boot to the ankle.
Ghost moved through it like smoke. He'd dropped fifteen meters ahead, invisible even in Yuki's night-vision overlay, communicating position through the faint rustle of vegetation that was subtly different from the wind's pattern — a skill that required thirty years of practice and the kind of awareness that couldn't be trained into someone who didn't already have it.
Yuki followed the rustles. Her pulse rifle was slung across her chest on a single-point rig, both hands free for balance as she navigated the terrain. The modified scanner rode her left hip, set to passive reception, recording the electromagnetic environment with the silent hunger of a device designed to capture secrets.
Santos was behind her. The machine gun was strapped tight across her back — too unwieldy for close-terrain movement — and she carried her sidearm in a low-ready position, her free hand catching tree trunks and root knobs for balance. She moved with the compact efficiency of someone who'd learned to navigate difficult terrain in darkness before she was old enough for school. The favela had its own forests — vertical ones, made of concrete and corrugated steel, where a wrong step meant a three-story fall into someone else's problems.
Ninety minutes into the approach, Ghost stopped.
Hand signal: down.
Yuki dropped to a knee. Santos mirrored her. The forest sounds continued — wind through fronds, the chirp of small organisms, the distant crack of something large moving through undergrowth far to the east. Nothing alarming. The baseline noise of an alien world going about its business.
Ghost materialized beside her. His lips were close enough to her ear that she felt his breath.
"The ridgeline is forty meters ahead. Southwest rim of the depression. I can see the facility."
"Lights?"
"Active. Multiple buildings. More than last night. The landing pad is lit — I count four light towers, industrial grade. And there's a vehicle on the pad."
"What kind?"
"Can't tell from here. Big. Boxy. The silhouette says cargo transport — the kind you'd use for moving processed ore in bulk." He pulled back. "I need to get closer for the identifiers. The scope can read text at three hundred meters, but the angle from the rim is wrong. Too steep."
"How close?"
"Inside the depression. To the floor level."
Yuki looked at the ridgeline. Beyond it — forty meters, a lifetime in hostile terrain — lay a facility that was guarded by technology they barely understood, staffed by people who had already killed squads for knowing less than they did, and protected by alien predators that could be directed like trained weapons.
Inside the depression meant inside the perimeter.
"We go together," she said. "Santos, you hold the rim. Overwatch position. Ghost and I descend. If anything moves that isn't us—"
"I know," Santos said. Her voice was barely audible, just the shape of words in the dark. "If anything moves, it stops moving."
They advanced.
---
The depression's southwest rim was a fractured rock face — geological layers exposed by erosion, creating a natural staircase of ledges and shelves that descended thirty meters to the floor. The facility's builders hadn't developed this approach. No road, no cut path, no sign of engineering. The southwest was a blind spot — difficult terrain, far from the main road's entry point to the north, and screened by a ridge that the facility's light towers didn't illuminate.
Which was why Ghost had chosen it. And which was why, as Yuki followed him down the rock face in the dark, her hands gripping stone that was slick with Haven's nighttime condensation, she thought about all the other blind spots in her life that had turned out to be doors.
Santos set up on the rim. Prone, machine gun deployed, the bipod braced on a flat rock that gave her a field of fire covering the depression's floor. From her position, she could see the facility's western quadrant — storage buildings, a section of roadway, and the edge of the landing pad where the cargo vehicle sat under the lights.
Ghost descended first. His boots found holds on the rock face that Yuki's night vision couldn't distinguish from the surface — a climber's instinct, or a sniper's habit of finding positions that shouldn't exist. He reached the depression's floor in three minutes and pressed himself against the base of the rock face, rifle up, scanning.
Yuki followed. Slower. Her hands were cold, the stone's chill seeping through her gloves, and the modified scanner on her hip caught on a rock ledge halfway down, forcing her to stop and free it with one hand while the other held her weight. A moment of vulnerability — her body exposed on the rock face, her hands occupied, her weapon inaccessible.
Nothing happened. The facility hummed in the distance. The lights blazed. The cargo vehicle sat on its pad.
She reached the floor. Packed dirt, smooth, level — the artificially flat surface Ghost's map analysis had identified. Up close, it was obviously engineered. The ground had been graded, compacted, and sealed with some kind of polymeric surface treatment that prevented erosion. A foundation. A floor for a facility that sprawled across three kilometers of hidden terrain.
"This way." Ghost moved along the rock face, staying in the shadow of the rim. The facility's nearest building was two hundred meters east — a storage structure, dark, no visible activity. The landing pad was three hundred meters north-northeast, lit by the four light towers that cast overlapping pools of industrial illumination across the marked surface.
They moved. Low, fast, hugging the depression's perimeter where the rim's shadow met the floor. The air down here was different — warmer, laced with the chemical signatures that Yuki had been smelling since they landed. Processed metal. Solvents. Lubricant. The smell of industry, concentrated in a bowl of rock where it had nowhere to go.
At one hundred and fifty meters from the landing pad, Ghost stopped behind a structure that turned out to be a fuel storage tank. Three meters tall, cylindrical, with corporate labeling on its side that Yuki could read in her night vision.
MERIDIAN RESOURCE SOLUTIONS
INDUSTRIAL LUBRICANT — TYPE 7A
LOT 22-4419
Meridian Resource Solutions. The name hit Yuki's memory like a round hitting a vest — impact without penetration, the recognition instant and incomplete. She'd heard it. Where? The debrief? The mission files? Chen's analysis of the—
Santos's water sample. The commercial drilling lubricant from Haven's river. Chen had matched it to three subsidiaries of the Collective.
Meridian Resource Solutions was one of them.
"Photographing," Ghost murmured. His scope camera clicked. "Serial numbers on the tank. Manufacturing date stamp. Lot number." Click. Click. Click. "This is Collective property. On an alien world. Stored in a hidden facility."
"The landing pad. We need the pad markings."
They moved again. Past two more storage structures — both labeled with Meridian branding, both containing equipment and supplies that had no business being on a planet accessible only through military wormholes. Past an equipment shed whose door was ajar, revealing drilling components inside that made the Reaper Program's field rigs look like toys.
One hundred meters from the landing pad. The cargo vehicle resolved in detail — a heavy hauler, eight-wheeled, flatbed configuration, loaded with sealed containers that bore the same Meridian logo. The vehicle's cab was dark. No driver. The engine was cold.
Fifty meters. The landing pad's surface markings became readable.
Ghost raised his scope. "Pad designation: HVN-SOUTH-03. That's a registration format. HVN for Haven, SOUTH for sector, zero-three for pad number." Click. "There are more pads. At least three on this planet. This is just one."
The wormhole stabilization array stood at the pad's southern edge — a crescent of metal pylons, each one fifteen meters tall, arranged in the arc that Yuki recognized from Orbital Station Prime's wormhole bay. The same technology, scaled up. The pylons' surfaces were covered in equipment housings, cable runs, monitoring stations. And at the base of the central pylon, a control panel with a screen that was dark but readable — corporate watermark behind the interface.
COLLECTIVE RESOURCE DIVISION
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
SYSTEM ID: WH-HVN-S3-ALPHA
Collective Resource Division. Not a subsidiary. Not a shell company. The Collective itself, stamped on a wormhole control system on an alien world.
Ghost photographed everything. Yuki memorized the serial numbers — a habit from decades of fieldwork, the backup plan for when equipment failed and photographs were lost and the only record that survived was in someone's skull.
The scanner on her hip vibrated.
Not a normal vibration. Not the gentle pulse of a passive reading or the steady hum of background data collection. A sharp, sudden tremor — the kind that meant the device was receiving something it hadn't been designed to handle.
Yuki looked down. The scanner's secondary display had activated on its own — the hidden partition breaking through the standard interface, its screen filling with data that scrolled too fast to read. Electromagnetic readings spiking. Gravitational fluctuations off the chart. And in the corner of the display, a warning icon that Chen hadn't programmed — a warning the scanner's firmware was generating autonomously, because the input it was receiving exceeded every parameter its hardware could process.
"Chen's scanner—" she started.
The facility's lights went out.
All of them. Every building, every light tower, every indicator on every piece of equipment — off, simultaneously, as if someone had pulled a single switch that controlled the entire installation. The landing pad plunged into darkness. The depression went black. Haven's moons were behind cloud cover, and the only light in the entire three-kilometer basin was the sickly glow of Yuki's scanner screen, pulsing with data it was choking on.
"Move," Ghost said. His voice had shifted registers — from operational calm to the flat, rapid cadence he used when the situation had gone past planning and into survival. "Back to the rim. Now."
Yuki grabbed the scanner. The vibration intensified — a buzzing in her palm that climbed through her wrist and into her forearm, the device shaking itself apart as it tried to process an electromagnetic signal that was orders of magnitude stronger than anything Haven's environment should produce.
Then the scanner died.
Not powered down. Not shut off. Dead. The screen went blank. The vibration stopped. The housing was warm — too warm, the kind of heat that meant circuitry had been overloaded and burned out. Yuki pressed the power button. Nothing. Pressed it again. Nothing. The device was a brick.
An electromagnetic pulse. Targeted. Broadcast from the facility's infrastructure — from the arrays and antennae and monitoring stations that lined every building and pylon — designed to kill electronic equipment within a specific radius.
The radius they were standing in.
"My scope electronics are down," Ghost said. His voice was controlled, but Yuki heard the edge underneath — the edge that meant his primary tool, the thing that made him Ghost, was now a piece of dead glass and metal on his back. "Camera, rangefinder, night vision overlay. All dead."
"Comms?"
Ghost pressed his earpiece. Static. He switched frequencies. Static. Switched again. Static on every channel — the tactical frequency, the emergency backup, the line-of-sight channel they used for short-range coordination.
"Jammed. The EMP hit the radio too." He looked at her. Without his scope electronics, without the night vision overlay that turned darkness into a tactical advantage, Ghost's eyes were just eyes — pale, sharp, human eyes in a very dark place. "Santos might still have comms. The pulse might not have reached the rim."
"And if it did?"
A sound reached them from the north. Not from the facility. From beyond the depression, beyond the ridgeline, from the direction of camp.
Gunfire.
Distant. Muffled by kilometers of terrain and forest. But unmistakable — the rapid-fire crack of an assault rifle, followed by the heavier chatter of something automatic. Viktor's rifle and... what? The squad's weapons were assigned. Viktor had his assault rifle. Doc had a sidearm. Chen had a sidearm. There was nothing in camp that sounded like what Yuki was hearing.
Unless the camp was being attacked by something that prompted Viktor to empty his magazine.
"They hit the camp," Yuki said. The words came out flat, stripped of everything that wasn't tactical because everything that wasn't tactical would get them killed. "They waited for us to be inside the depression, then they sent the stalkers at the camp."
"Two-front attack. Fix the recon team in place, assault the base camp." Ghost was already moving toward the rock face. "Classic. Professional."
"How did they know?"
"The drone. The surveillance line. Or the scanner — the secondary receiver might have emitted a detectable signal when it absorbed the electromagnetic environment. Chen said it was passive, but passive reception can create feedback loops if the source signal is strong enough." Ghost reached the base of the rock face and started climbing. Fast. No hesitation, no testing holds — his hands and feet found the stone with the animal certainty of someone for whom falling was not an acceptable outcome. "They pinged us. The scanner answered. And then they knew exactly where we were."
The scanner. Chen's modification. The secondary receiver — designed to listen for a second wormhole, to detect the gravitational signature of an unauthorized portal — had been turned against them. The facility's security systems had broadcast a signal that the scanner absorbed, processed, and reflected back like a submarine's hull returning a sonar ping.
They'd brought the detection device with them. They'd carried the trap in their own equipment.
Yuki climbed. The rock face that had been difficult on descent was a nightmare in ascent — her fingers scraped for holds, her boots slipped on condensation-slick stone, and her pulse rifle banged against the rock with each movement, the sound echoing in the depression like a drum beat announcing their position.
The facility's lights came back on.
Not slowly. Not building by building. All at once — a wall of light that turned the depression's floor from black to daylight-bright in the space of a heartbeat. Shadows snapped into existence. The facility's structures stood sharp and exposed, and Yuki, halfway up the rock face, was fully visible, nowhere to hide, the facility's lights reading her like a signboard.
Below her, on the depression floor, doors opened.
She didn't see people. She saw shapes — silhouettes in the doorways of three separate buildings, backlit by interior lighting, moving with the purpose of individuals who had been waiting for exactly this moment. Not running. Not panicking. Moving to positions, the way soldiers moved to positions, the way people moved when they'd rehearsed the response.
"Climb," Ghost said from above. He'd reached the rim. His hand extended downward, reaching for her. "Now."
Yuki climbed. Her arms burned. Her fingers found a hold, slipped, found another. The scanner was dead weight on her hip — useless, fried, the evidence it had recorded destroyed by the same pulse that killed it. Hours of Chen's work. The wormhole signatures. The gravitational data. The proof that a second portal existed. Gone.
Ghost's hand caught her wrist. He pulled. She scrambled over the rim and rolled onto the flat rock surface where Santos should have been.
Santos wasn't there.
Her machine gun was. Deployed on its bipod, ammunition belt loaded, positioned exactly as Santos had set it. But Santos was fifteen meters south, crouched behind a rock formation, her sidearm drawn and pointed at the treeline.
"We have company," Santos said. Her voice was the flat, controlled tone that meant the situation had passed through panic and out the other side into operational clarity. "Stalkers. Thirty meters. They came out of the forest two minutes ago. Six of them. They're not attacking — they're blocking."
Blocking. Between them and the route back to camp.
Yuki rolled to her feet and looked south. In the faint ambient glow from the facility's lights bleeding over the rim, she could see them — six stalkers, arranged in a line across the treeline, their bodies still as stone. Compound eyes reflecting the light in flat green discs. Not moving. Not advancing. Just standing there, filling the gap between the rock formations with armored bodies and serrated limbs.
A wall. A living wall, placed exactly where it would prevent three humans from reaching the route back to their camp.
"North?" Yuki asked.
"Clear as of two minutes ago," Ghost said. "But north takes us away from camp."
Gunfire again. Closer now — or maybe the wind had shifted, carrying the sound across the ridgeline. Viktor's rifle, rapid-fire. Doc's sidearm — she could pick it out now, the lighter crack of a nine-millimeter amid the heavier reports. And something else. A sound that wasn't weapons fire.
The stalkers at the camp were screaming.
Not the hunting screech from the canyon. Not the territorial call from the siege night. This was different — a rising, modulated wail that Yuki had never heard in thirty-eight deployments. A sound that carried across kilometers of terrain and pierced the fern canopy and the ridge rock and the industrial noise of a facility waking up behind them.
A signal. The stalkers weren't just attacking. They were calling.
The six blocking their path shifted. Not toward them. Toward the sound. Their bodies oriented south-southeast — toward the camp — and for a moment, Yuki thought they were going to leave. Going to break their line and join the assault on Viktor and Doc and Chen and the civilians who had survived one canyon full of stalkers and were now facing another wave with half the squad missing.
They didn't leave. They tightened their formation instead. Closer together. Shoulder to shoulder, chitin plates overlapping, six predators forming a barrier that a charging bull wouldn't break through.
Whoever was directing them wanted the recon team separated from the camp. Wanted the squad cut in half, the fighters split from the support, the three people who'd seen the facility kept away from the four people who had the communications equipment.
"Santos." Yuki's voice was measured. Each word precise. "Can you break through?"
Santos looked at the machine gun on its bipod. At the six stalkers. At the treeline behind them. A calculation — rounds versus armor, firepower versus numbers, the math of violence that she'd been running since she was old enough to count.
"I can kill six stalkers. But if there are more in the treeline — and there will be more in the treeline — we get bogged down in a firefight while the camp burns." She met Yuki's eyes. "We need to be smart, not loud."
"Ghost?"
"West. The blocking formation covers south and east. The western approach through the ravine system is rough terrain — bad for us, worse for stalkers. Their body configuration isn't built for the tight spaces." Ghost had already assessed the route. Probably had assessed it the moment the situation went wrong, filing alternatives the way other people filed paperwork. "It adds forty minutes to our transit back to camp. But we get around the blocking force without engagement."
Forty minutes. With gunfire from the camp echoing through the night. With Viktor's cough and Doc's steady hands and Chen's genius and two civilians who had never signed up for this — all of them under assault by predators that someone was directing from a facility that the recon team had just confirmed existed.
Forty minutes where anything could happen. Where everything could end.
"West," Yuki said. "Move."
Santos grabbed her machine gun. Ghost led. Yuki followed, the dead scanner bouncing against her hip — a reminder, with every step, that the evidence they'd risked everything to collect was half-destroyed. The photographs on Ghost's scope camera were on film — an analog backup that Chen had insisted on, bless his paranoid, brilliant mind. The film had survived the EMP. The corporate logos, the serial numbers, the wormhole array, the Collective Resource Division watermark — all captured on physical media that no electromagnetic pulse could erase.
But the scanner data was gone. The wormhole signatures. The gravitational readings. The electromagnetic proof of a second portal. The data that would have made their case airtight, that would have turned correlation into causation and suspicion into certainty.
Gone. Burned out by the facility's security systems. Destroyed by the same technology that directed stalkers and scrubbed survey maps and countersigned missions with a Director's authority.
They moved west, into the ravine system. The terrain was brutal — narrow, rocky, choked with vegetation that tore at their clothing and equipment. Yuki's boots slipped on wet stone. Santos's machine gun caught on a root and she wrenched it free with a Portuguese curse that would have made her grandmother cross herself. Ghost moved ahead like something that had evolved in ravines, his body finding paths through the rock that shouldn't have been passable.
Behind them, the facility's lights blazed against the sky — a glow on the underside of the cloud cover, visible for kilometers, the luminous signature of an operation that had decided concealment was no longer necessary. They knew the recon team had been inside the perimeter. They knew the squad had documentation. And they had responded with the coordinated efficiency of an organization that had contingency plans for contingency plans.
The gunfire from camp continued. Intermittent now — controlled bursts, not sustained fire. Viktor rationing ammunition. Choosing shots. The discipline of a man who had been fighting longer than most of the squad had been alive, spending each round like it was the last because it might be.
"Faster," Yuki said.
They went faster.
The ravine opened after twenty minutes into a drainage channel that ran northeast — back toward camp, back toward the squad members they'd left behind. The stalkers' blocking formation was behind them now, outflanked by the terrain that Ghost had read like a book in a language only he spoke.
But the channel wasn't empty.
Stalkers. Two of them. Crouched in the drainage bed fifty meters ahead, their bodies pressed against the stone walls, almost invisible in the darkness. They weren't part of the blocking formation. They were — what? Outriders? A second perimeter? An accident of positioning, two predators that had been heading toward the camp assault and happened to be in the wrong ravine at the wrong time?
It didn't matter. They were between the recon team and their people.
Ghost stopped. Unslung his rifle. The scope was dead, but the rifle was mechanical — bolt action, iron sights, the fundamental technology of putting a piece of metal through a distant object at high velocity. Electronics enhanced the process. They didn't define it.
Santos raised her machine gun.
Yuki put a hand on the barrel. Pressed it down.
"Quiet," she mouthed.
"Two targets," Santos mouthed back. "Thirty seconds."
"And every stalker within a kilometer hears it." Yuki drew her combat knife. Eight inches of tungsten-carbide edge, designed for situations exactly like this — close, silent, desperate.
Ghost drew his own knife. Didn't need to be told. Didn't need a plan. He looked at Yuki. She held up two fingers, pointed at herself, pointed at the left stalker. Pointed at Ghost, pointed at the right.
He nodded.
They moved down the drainage channel. Low, silent, each step placed on bare rock where the sound would blend with the water's trickle. The stalkers didn't move. Their compound eyes faced northeast — toward the camp, toward the sound and smell of combat. Their attention was directed. Focused. Like soldiers following orders they couldn't refuse.
Ten meters.
Five.
Three.
Yuki struck first. The knife went in under the stalker's skull plate, into the gap between head and thorax that Doc had mapped on thirty-eight missions of post-combat autopsies. The blade found the primary nerve cluster — a knot of ganglia that controlled the body's motor functions. She twisted. The stalker spasmed once, limbs extending in a rigid burst, and then collapsed. Silent. The click of chitin on stone was quieter than a whisper.
Ghost's kill was even cleaner. His knife entered and exited in a single motion — a sniper's precision translated into edged steel. The stalker dropped without a sound, its body folding onto the drainage bed's floor like a puppet with cut strings.
They stepped over the bodies and kept moving.
The camp came into view at 0127.
The scene was wrong in ways that Yuki's mind catalogued before her emotions could process. The perimeter lights were dark — smashed or overturned, their power cables severed. The equipment shelter had been torn open, its reinforced walls peeled back by something with enough strength to rip military-grade fabric like tissue paper. The drill rig on the mountainside was tipped on its side, the rig's housing cracked open and its motor exposed to the night air.
Dead stalkers on the ground. Four, five — six. Their bodies scattered across the camp's interior, dark fluid pooling beneath them. Bullet wounds, knife wounds, one with its skull caved in by something heavy and blunt.
Viktor was behind the overturned supply crate on the eastern perimeter. His rifle was empty — the magazine ejected, a fresh one half-inserted, his hands performing the reload with the muscle memory of a man who'd done it ten thousand times. Blood on his face. Not his — the spray pattern was wrong, too scattered, the arterial splatter of something that had gotten close enough to bleed on him before he killed it.
Doc was in the shelter's remains. Osei was beside him, conscious, a bandage around her left forearm that was already soaking through. Park was behind them, holding a pulse rifle that she'd pulled from the equipment locker — holding it wrong, grip too tight, stance too narrow, but holding it. Pointing it at the treeline. A civilian who'd decided that pointing a weapon at the dark was better than staring at it empty-handed.
Chen was on the ground.
Yuki's chest compressed. A physical sensation — ribs tightening around lungs that suddenly couldn't find enough air.
Then Chen moved. He was on the ground because he was underneath the field terminal, pulling cables, his hands working with the frantic speed of someone trying to resuscitate a machine. The terminal's screen was dark. Its housing was cracked. The EMP.
"Chen!"
He looked up. His face was streaked with dirt and someone else's blood and the expression of a man watching his work get destroyed and calculating how fast he could rebuild it. "The pulse hit the camp too. Everything electronic is fried. The field terminal, the geological scanners, the comm unit. We're dark, Sarge. No communications. No sensors. Nothing."
"Are you hurt?"
"No. I'm angry. There's a difference." He went back under the terminal. "I might be able to jury-rig the comm unit. The EMP overloaded the primary circuits, but the backup crystal oscillator might have survived if—"
A stalker screamed in the treeline. Close. Thirty meters, maybe less. The sound cut through the camp like a blade — high, modulated, the same signal call they'd heard from the depression.
More answering calls. From the east. From the south. From the forest that surrounded them on three sides, full of predators that were being directed by people who had just watched a Reaper squad photograph their secret and were now ensuring that the photographs never left this planet.
Viktor finished his reload. The magazine clicked home. He chambered a round with a motion that carried the weight of thirty years of muscle and bone and the stubbornness of a man whose body was dying and whose will hadn't been informed.
"Welcome back," he said to Yuki. His voice was rough, strained, the voice of a man who had been fighting while they were running. "I trust you found what you were looking for?"
"We found it. The facility. Collective branding. Private wormhole." Yuki dropped into a defensive position beside him. Santos was already on the western berm, machine gun deployed. Ghost vanished toward the ridge — no scope electronics, but iron sights and a mechanical rifle and three decades of killing things in the dark. "They hit us with an EMP. Scanner data is destroyed. But Ghost has photographs on film."
"Film." Viktor almost smiled. "Old technology saves us. The universe has a sense of humor."
"The universe is sending stalkers."
"Da. The universe's humor is dark."
Another scream from the treeline. Closer. The stalkers were massing — Chen's dead sensor grid couldn't tell them how many, but the density of sound suggested more than six. More than twelve. More than the sixteen that had besieged them on mission thirty-eight.
A coordinated assault. Directed by a facility that knew the squad's position, knew their equipment was dead, knew their communications were severed. An assault designed to do what five previous squads' Ashworld reassignments had done — make the problem disappear.
"How many rounds?" Yuki asked.
Viktor checked. "Four magazines. One hundred and twenty rounds."
"Santos?"
"Three belts. Six hundred. Plus the extras." Santos patted her vest — Dmitri's ammunition, the unofficial supply chain, the favela survival instinct that had made her pack heavy when everyone else packed light. "Mano, I've been waiting for this."
"Ghost?"
His voice came from the ridge. Calm. Professional. A man who had found his position and was prepared to hold it. "Forty-seven rounds. Bolt action. No scope." A pause. "I don't need the scope."
Doc finished Osei's bandage and moved to a defensive position. His sidearm was drawn. His medical kit was open beside him — ready for whatever came through the perimeter, whether it needed bullets or bandages.
Chen crawled out from under the terminal. "I can't fix the comms. The oscillator is gone. We're cut off until the wormhole window opens."
"When?"
"Eighteen hours."
Eighteen hours. No communications. No sensors. No way to call for extraction, no way to warn command — even a command they didn't trust — that a Reaper squad was under coordinated assault by alien predators being directed by a private mining operation that the Reaper Program's own Director had signed off on.
Eighteen hours of darkness and stalkers and ammunition that would run out long before the sun came up.
Yuki looked at her squad. Seven people in a wrecked camp on an alien world, with a dead scanner and photographs on film and the knowledge that the Collective was operating a private mining facility twenty kilometers from where they stood. Seven people who had come looking for evidence and found it, who had walked into a trap that they'd been warned about and went anyway, who were now cut off from the only technology that could bring them home.
The stalkers screamed again. Multiple voices. Closing from three directions. The coordinated, directed, externally controlled assault of organisms that were being used as weapons by people who had decided that this squad — like the five before it — needed to stop existing.
Santos racked her machine gun's charging handle. The sound rang across the camp — metal on metal, the language of a woman who spoke fluently in calibers.
"Eighteen hours," she said. "I've done worse."
Viktor coughed. Once. Controlled it. Raised his rifle.
"Then we hold," he said. "For eighteen hours. For Kowalski. For the five squads who asked questions and were silenced." His bloodshot eyes swept the treeline. "Tonight, the questions shoot back."
The first stalker broke from the trees at a dead sprint, and the camp erupted in gunfire.
