"We're moving," Yuki said.
Viktor looked up from his rifle. Chen stopped mid-wire. Santos kept her eyes on the treeline but her head tilted — listening.
"The LZ," Yuki continued. "The shuttle clearing. Two klicks north. It's open ground, better sight lines, and it's where the wormhole aperture opens for extraction. If we're going to hold for twelve hours, we hold there."
"Open ground means no cover," Ghost said. He was cleaning his rifle's iron sights with a strip of fabric torn from his sleeve — patient, mechanical, the maintenance ritual of a man who treated his weapon the way a surgeon treated their hands.
"Open ground means we see them coming. Last night they burrowed into our camp because we were in a forest. In the clearing, they can't dig through root systems and come up inside our perimeter. They have to cross open ground."
"Where Santos kills them."
"Where Santos kills them."
Santos grinned. It wasn't a happy grin. It was the grin of a woman who had been fighting from behind cover all night and wanted, very badly, to fight from a position where she could see everything that was trying to eat her.
"The shuttle has a power supply," Chen said from under the terminal. He'd stopped working and was sitting up, wires still in his hands, his brain visibly running through implications. "If I can get the beacon wired before we move, I can hook it into the shuttle's auxiliary power once we get there. Shuttle batteries have fifty times the output of the field terminal. The distress ping would be strong enough to bounce off the orbital relay satellites."
"How long until you're done?"
"Twenty minutes. Maybe less if someone holds the crystal steady while I solder."
"Doc."
Doc crossed to Chen without comment. His hands — the steadiest in the squad, steadier than Ghost's, steadier than the surgical instruments he'd trained on before the collapse made surgery a luxury and combat medicine a survival skill — took the crystal oscillator between thumb and forefinger and held it at the angle Chen indicated.
Twenty minutes. Then a two-kilometer march through hostile forest with stalkers on their flanks and a mining facility at their backs and twelve hours of daylight between them and the wormhole that would take them home.
"Pack what we can carry," Yuki told the others. "Ammunition, water, medical supplies. Leave the heavy equipment. Leave the drill rig. Leave anything that slows us down."
"The core samples," Osei said. She was sitting against the mountainside, her bandaged arm cradled in a sling Doc had fashioned from a cargo strap. Her face was pale — blood loss and pain and a night spent huddled behind equipment while things with blade-arms tried to kill everyone she was with. "The geological samples are evidence too. They show the deposit's been pre-extracted."
"How heavy?"
"Four kilos. Maybe five."
Yuki looked at the sample case. Five kilos of rock, drilled from a deposit that had already been gutted by people who weren't supposed to be here. Evidence. One more piece of a case that was building brick by brick — photographs on film, chemical analysis from Chen's notes, corporate branding read by moonlight, and now geological proof of unauthorized extraction.
"Pack it. Viktor carries it."
Viktor raised an eyebrow. "My shooting arm is occupied."
"Your non-shooting arm isn't. The case has a strap."
He didn't argue further. The case was five kilos. Viktor had carried wounded soldiers across worse terrain than this. Five kilos of rock was an insult he accepted with the minimal dignity the situation deserved.
---
Chen finished the beacon in seventeen minutes.
The crystal oscillator was a small thing — thumb-sized, quartz-based, designed to survive impacts and electromagnetic interference that would destroy conventional electronics. The kind of component that emergency equipment manufacturers built to military specifications because the scenarios where emergency beacons were needed were, by definition, scenarios where everything else had failed.
He wired it to the field terminal's remaining power cell — not enough juice for communications, not enough for sensors, but enough to drive a crystal oscillator at the specific frequency that the emergency distress band monitored. A pulse. Steady. Repeating. The electronic equivalent of an SOS flag waving above a wrecked ship.
"Ready," Chen said. He looked at Yuki. "Once I activate this, it broadcasts continuously. Orbital Station Prime will hear it within minutes — the emergency band is monitored by automated systems. They'll triangulate our position, flag it as an active distress situation, and—"
"And the facility hears it too."
"And the facility hears it too. Yes."
Yuki looked south. The stalkers in the treeline hadn't moved since dawn — loose perimeter, eighty meters out, patient as stone. The facility's glow was fading in the daylight, but it was still there. Still operating. Still aware of them.
"Turn it on."
Chen pressed the activation switch. Nothing visible happened — no light, no sound, no dramatic moment. The crystal vibrated at a frequency the human ear couldn't detect, generating a carrier wave that climbed into the electromagnetic spectrum and radiated outward at the speed of light, reaching Orbital Station Prime's relay satellites in less than a second.
A distress call. A declaration that something had gone wrong on an extraction mission that was supposed to be routine. A flag that would trigger protocols and responses and questions from people who might or might not have the squad's interests at heart.
"It's broadcasting," Chen said. He slipped the beacon unit into his vest pocket — the whole assembly was barely larger than a deck of cards. "When we get to the shuttle, I'll patch it into the auxiliary power. Signal strength will jump by a factor of fifty."
"Move out. Standard formation. Ghost leads. Santos rear. Everyone else between. Keep noise low and spacing tight."
The squad moved.
---
The fern forest between the camp and the LZ was two kilometers of vertical green.
Giant fronds arced overhead, filtering Haven's sun into a mosaic of light and shadow that shifted with the wind. The undergrowth was dense, knee-high, the kind of vegetation that made footfalls uncertain and sight lines short. Under other circumstances — on a planet that wasn't trying to kill them, with equipment that worked and communications that functioned — it would have been a routine tactical movement through moderate terrain.
Nothing about this was routine.
Ghost led at twenty meters. He moved differently without his scope — his head on a constant swivel instead of fixed behind the optic, his eyes scanning in the rapid pattern of a man relying on peripheral vision and instinct instead of magnified imagery. His rifle rode low, iron sights ready, the bolt handle pre-positioned for a fast first shot.
Behind him, Viktor walked with the sample case strapped across his back and his assault rifle at chest height. His stride was measured, economical, the gait of a man conserving energy he didn't have enough of. Every third step, a slight catch — his right leg stiffening, the old injury reminding him that the body kept its own accounts.
Chen walked beside Doc, the beacon unit in his vest pocket humming its invisible signal into the sky. His hands were cut from last night's work, crusted with dried blood and solder residue, the hands of a man who built things in the dark while other people shot things in the dark.
Park stayed close to Osei. The civilian geologist was watching the forest with wide eyes, her borrowed rifle held across her chest in the cross-body carry that Doc had shown her during a lull in the night's fighting. She hadn't spoken since dawn. The stalker she'd shot was still behind them in the wrecked camp, and Yuki suspected it would stay behind Park's eyes for considerably longer.
Osei walked with her head down, watching her footing, her bandaged arm motionless in its sling. Blood was seeping through the bandage — not fast, not arterial, but steady. The kind of bleed that Doc watched with his medic's peripheral awareness, noting the spread of red across white fabric the way a navigator noted current drift.
Santos brought up the rear. Machine gun across her shoulders, sidearm in hand, moving backward every third step to check behind them. Her eyes caught the stalkers at a hundred meters — shapes in the undergrowth, moving when the squad moved, stopping when the squad stopped. Matching pace. Maintaining distance. Watching.
"They're following," Santos said on the tactical frequency — then remembered the frequency was dead. She raised her voice instead, pitching it to carry to Yuki without broadcasting to the forest. "Southern quarter. Same spacing as this morning. They're not closing."
"How many?"
"I count nine. Could be more in the deeper cover."
Nine stalkers, maintaining their surveillance line, shadowing a squad through the forest without engaging. Daylight behavior. The facility was holding them back — conserving assets, observing, waiting to see what the distress beacon triggered before committing to another assault.
Or setting up something worse for when the squad reached the LZ.
"Osei." Yuki fell back until she was walking beside the mining engineer. "The branding on the facility's equipment. Meridian Resource Solutions. You said something on the shuttle, before mission thirty-eight — about commercial drilling lubricants."
"Chen said it. I identified the lubricant type." Osei's voice was flat — the tone of someone running on depleted reserves, pushing words out through pain and exhaustion. "Type 7A industrial lubricant. Standard for deep-bore extraction rigs in hostile environments."
"You identified it fast. Too fast for a military mining engineer who'd never worked commercial."
Osei was quiet for ten steps. Twelve. The forest moved around them — wind, light, the rustle of organisms retreating from seven humans and whatever predators trailed behind them.
"I worked for Kimura Heavy Industries," she said. "Before the Reaper Program. Before the draft. Kimura was a subcontractor."
"A subcontractor for who?"
"Meridian Resource Solutions." Osei didn't look at Yuki. She kept her eyes on the ground, on her feet, on the next step. "I was a site engineer for their deep-core mineral extraction division. I spent four years at Kimura — three on Earth, one on an offshore platform in the Pacific. We provided drilling services to Meridian's exploration projects."
"You worked for them."
"For a subsidiary. Four levels removed from the parent company. I never met anyone from Meridian directly — we worked through contract managers, operational liaisons, people whose names I've mostly forgotten." Osei shifted her arm in the sling, wincing. "But I know their systems. I know how they operate. I know their equipment codes, their maintenance schedules, their safety protocols. The Type 7A lubricant — I knew what it was because I spent four years filling requisition orders for it."
Yuki didn't say anything for a moment.
"You never mentioned this."
"It never came up. I was drafted into the Reaper Program as a mining specialist. My pre-draft employment records are in my personnel file. Nobody asked because nobody cared — they needed someone who could operate a drill rig on alien terrain, not someone with an employment history at a company nobody in the military had heard of."
Nobody had heard of. Because Meridian Resource Solutions was a commercial entity operating through layers of subsidiaries and shell companies, invisible to the military apparatus that it was running parallel operations beside.
"What can you tell me about the facility?"
"Based on what I heard from your debrief?" Osei's mouth tightened. "Thirty structures, commercial-grade ore separation, triple-stack exhaust vents. That's a full-scale processing plant. Meridian only deploys that level of infrastructure for high-yield, long-term extraction sites. The capital investment alone — fabrication, transport, assembly — you're looking at hundreds of millions. Maybe a billion."
"How long to build it?"
"With standard construction crews and equipment? Two years. With their own wormhole for logistics? Faster. Maybe eighteen months."
Eighteen months. The facility had been operational for at least eighteen months — and probably longer, given the maintenance level Ghost had observed on the roads. Two years. Three. While Reaper squads were sent through military wormholes to scratch at surface deposits and die fighting fauna that someone else was using as a security system.
"The equipment codes," Yuki said. "The serial numbers Ghost photographed. Can you decode them?"
"If I can see them. Meridian uses a standardized alphanumeric coding system for all deployed equipment — manufacturer, fabrication date, destination code, project assignment. The lot number on that lubricant tank Ghost photographed? The first four digits are the project code. The middle six are the fabrication date and batch. The last four are the destination."
"The destination is coded on the equipment."
"Everything is coded. Everything is tracked. Meridian's logistics system is the most thorough I've ever encountered — every bolt, every gasket, every liter of lubricant has a paper trail. If we can read those codes, we can trace the supply chain all the way back to Earth."
All the way back to Earth. To the Collective. To whoever authorized a billion-dollar mining operation on a planet that military command didn't know existed.
"When we get to the shuttle," Yuki said. "I need you looking at every photograph Ghost took. Every serial number. Every code. Everything you can identify."
Osei nodded. Her face had changed during the conversation — the exhausted blankness giving way to something sharper. Purpose. A mining engineer's mind engaging with a mining problem that happened to be wrapped in conspiracy and alien predators.
"I'll need light," she said. "And my left hand, which I currently don't have."
"Doc will sort the hand. I'll get you light."
---
The LZ appeared at 0847.
The clearing. Two hundred meters of open ground where the shuttle had landed forty-eight hours ago, the fern forest falling back to create a bowl of flat terrain ringed by treeline on three sides and the mountainside on the fourth. The shuttle sat where they'd left it — intact, undamaged, a military transport vehicle with dormant engines and a power supply that Chen needed.
Ghost had gone ahead to clear the approach. He was waiting at the tree line when the rest of the squad arrived, his rifle resting in the crook of his arm.
"Shuttle's clean. No signs of interference. No tracks around it, no damage, no evidence of fauna approach." He glanced at the stalkers in the forest behind them. "They left it alone."
"Why?" Santos asked. She didn't trust gifts. Favela upbringing. Gifts came with prices, and the prices were always worse than you expected.
"Because the shuttle is the extraction vehicle," Viktor said. He'd set the sample case down and was leaning against a tree trunk — a posture that looked casual unless you noticed his left hand pressing against his ribs, applying pressure to something beneath the body armor. "If they destroy the shuttle, we have no way off this planet. Orbital Station Prime sends a rescue mission. A rescue mission means more Reapers, more attention, more scrutiny of why a routine extraction ended with a destroyed shuttle and a distress beacon."
"They want us to leave," Ghost said.
"They want us to leave *quietly*. With a yield report that says seventy-four percent and no mention of facilities or wormholes or corporate equipment." Viktor's voice was steady but his breathing wasn't — shallow, controlled, the respiration pattern of someone managing discomfort they wouldn't name. "The stalker attacks are persuasion. The message is simple: go home and shut up."
"And if we don't?"
Viktor looked at the treeline. At the stalkers that had followed them — still there, still watching, their surveillance line extending to cover the clearing's perimeter. "Then the persuasion becomes elimination."
They crossed the clearing to the shuttle. Chen went straight for the engineering panel, pulling the auxiliary power coupling with the speed of a man who'd been thinking about this connection for the last two kilometers. The beacon unit came out of his vest pocket. Wires connected. Circuits closed. The crystal oscillator's signal leaped from field-portable to orbital-grade, the shuttle's batteries driving the carrier wave with enough power to reach every relay satellite in Haven's orbital envelope.
"Boosted signal is live," Chen said. "If anyone on Orbital Station Prime is paying attention — and they are, because the emergency band triggers automated alerts — they've already triangulated us. They know we're on Haven, they know we're at the LZ, and they know something went wrong."
"How long until a response?"
"Protocol says four hours for an emergency evaluation. But protocol also says command reviews all distress signals before deploying rescue assets, and command—"
"Command is Vance."
"Command is Vance." Chen's hands stilled on the wiring. "So the response time is however long it takes Director Vance to decide what to do about a distress signal from a squad that's been digging around in places she doesn't want anyone digging."
Doc touched Yuki's elbow. A light touch — the kind he used to get attention without drawing it. She followed him to the shuttle's far side, out of earshot.
"Viktor," Doc said. One word. No preamble.
"How bad?"
"The hemoptysis is new. Blood in his sputum — he's been wiping it on his sleeve, thinks I haven't noticed." Doc's voice was the professional calm of a man describing a clinical situation, but his eyes said something different. "Combined with the increased cough frequency and the respiratory pattern changes — he's decompensating. The radiation damage to his lung tissue is progressing faster than I projected."
"How fast?"
"Days, not weeks. The exertion from last night's combat accelerated whatever process is eating his pulmonary function. He needs imaging, he needs treatment, he needs to be somewhere that isn't a hostile alien planet with no medical facilities."
"He won't stop."
"No." Doc looked toward the shuttle, where Viktor was lowering himself onto the ramp with the careful movements of a man negotiating with a body that had started refusing negotiations. "He won't. And if I tell him publicly, he'll take it as an insult. But you should know. For planning purposes."
For planning purposes. The military euphemism for the ugliest calculation a squad leader had to make — factoring a teammate's deterioration into tactical decisions, adjusting plans around a gap that was opening in real time.
"Copy that."
"When, not if, Sarge. He gets worse. The only variable is how fast."
Yuki returned to the group. She said nothing about Viktor. She checked defensive positions — the clearing offered good sight lines, the shuttle provided hard cover, and the mountainside at their back eliminated one approach vector. Better than the camp. Not good, but better.
Ghost had already found his position — a slight rise at the clearing's eastern edge, where a rock formation gave him elevation and cover. Iron sights. Twenty rounds. The economy of a man who'd learned to make everything count.
Santos set up on the shuttle's roof. The machine gun's bipod braced on the hull, giving her a three-hundred-sixty-degree field of fire across the entire clearing. She couldn't be flanked. Couldn't be surprised. Couldn't be reached without crossing open ground that she'd already zeroed.
Park sat inside the shuttle with Osei, working through Ghost's photographs by the light from the shuttle's emergency panels — the only electronics that had survived the EMP, hardened against electromagnetic interference by military specification. Osei held each film negative up to the light with her good hand, squinting at the serial numbers and lot codes, her mining engineer's brain decoding the equipment language that Meridian Resource Solutions stamped on every piece of hardware it deployed.
The morning passed. The stalkers watched. The beacon pulsed.
At 1103, the beacon received a transmission.
Chen was the first to hear it — his ear pressed to the shuttle's comm panel, where he'd rigged a passive receiver to monitor the beacon's frequency band. His body went rigid.
"Incoming signal. Not orbital. Local origin." His voice was thin. "It's on the emergency band. Someone is responding to our beacon from the surface."
"Station Prime?"
"No. The signal origin is..." He checked the directional indicator he'd jury-rigged from spare components. "South. Bearing one-seven-zero. Range approximately twenty kilometers."
The facility.
"Audio?" Yuki asked.
Chen flipped a switch. Static crackled through the shuttle's overhead speaker — then resolved into a voice.
Male. Calm. Professional. The tone of a man reading from a prepared script, each word enunciated with the corporate precision of someone who'd been trained in crisis communications.
"—receiving your distress signal on emergency band seven. This is Meridian Resource Solutions, Haven Operations. Station Manager Garrett speaking. We are a civilian research installation located south of your position. We have medical facilities and communications equipment available. Do you require assistance? Repeat, this is Meridian Resource Solutions offering assistance to distressed military personnel. Please respond on this frequency."
The message looped. Repeated. The same words, the same calm corporate voice, the same offer of help from the people who had spent the last twelve hours trying to kill them with electromagnetic pulses and directed predators.
Santos looked at Yuki from the shuttle's roof. Her hand was on her machine gun's grip.
"Mano," she said. "Tell me we're not actually considering this."
Yuki stared at the speaker. Garrett's voice cycled through its script again — medical facilities, communications equipment, assistance, the language of corporate responsibility delivered with the steady confidence of an organization that had rehearsed this exact scenario.
The facility knew they had a distress beacon. Knew command would hear it. And now the facility was offering help — positioning itself as a Good Samaritan, a civilian installation reaching out to soldiers in trouble, creating a narrative that would look very different on an official report than "private mining operation that attacked a Reaper squad with directed alien predators."
If command investigated the distress signal and found that a nearby civilian facility had offered assistance, the story changed. The squad wasn't being hunted. They were being helped. Any claims about directed stalkers and EMP strikes would be weighed against the fact that Meridian Resource Solutions had reached out, on the record, with an offer of aid.
"They're building a cover story," Ghost said from his position on the rise. He'd heard every word. "In real time. Before command responds."
Garrett's voice looped again. Medical facilities. Communications. Assistance.
Viktor coughed — wet, rattling, the sound of tissue that was failing — and wiped his mouth on his sleeve without looking at what came away.
