Page 16 of Her Alien Rescued

I drop my pack by the central plinth and slither down to a crouch beside the terminal I need.It’s old—probably one of the original Volderen imports, scavenged from a decommissioned research post—and the status lights blink like the eyes of something waiting out a siege.My breath clouds the screen for an instant before the heat from the processors evaporates it away.

The last logged-in user is ‘LCRD-A5,’ which is probably some dead postdoc, but I find myself whispering a greeting anyway.I tap into the encrypted volume, fingers dancing familiar chords over the ancient keypad, and the display spits up a list of dead-end reports of atmospheric anomalies, seismic events, and network outages.I scroll past them, hunting for the good stuff—the stuff they thought they’d hidden.

There.Clustered near the end of the sequence.Two dozen flagged entries, their metadata scrubbed but not erased.I probe the first at random, and a schematic flares into existence.It’s hazy and half-rendered, but unmistakable.A basalt core sample, sliced open in cross-section and overlaid with a pair of dark spirals etched into the grain.I’ve seen that motif before, not just in the rocks we harvested from the trench, but somewhere less natural.

I flick the schematic onto a nearby panel and dig for the next report.This one’s a series of lifecord diagrams, similar to the organic meshwork making up the outpost’s nervous system.Someone—probably a Volderen—has annotated the branching fractal with the same double-spiral, highlighted in acidic yellow.The pattern repeats, each turn echoing the one before.I pinch the image and drag it next to the rock cross-section.

It’s a match.

My pulse thumps in my throat, thick and uneven.I pull up the most recent comms dump, a log from the wormhole scanner that’s raw and unparsed, but the UI at least lets me graph the power curves.

I run a quick check, and there it is again; a frequency spike at 42.7, peaking exactly as the last rift stabilization test collapsed.The double spiral isn’t just a symbol… I think it’s a signal, a resonance burning itself into everything we touch.

I fumble for my data pad, snap a few shots, and pull up my own files.My last dozen days are a blur of low-res selfies, notes to myself, and fragments of Kael’s handwriting on the back of nutrition rations.I thumb through the files, find a schematic I drew of the base layout, and overlay the spiral patterns.It’s not a clean fit, but the mainline corridors and the power loops mostly match the motif—an echo of ancient geometry, something wired into the rock and steel and flesh of Ares Outpost itself.

A tremor shudders through the floor.It’s faint, but I feel it in my ankles.The edge of a data cylinder rolls off the table, clattering away under the racks.The spiral motifs pulse in time with the vibration, and for a second I swear I see the holograph lines flicker blue.

I can’t keep this to myself.

Toggling into the secure comms, I type out the message in a rush.‘The lines intersect at Nexus Station.We’re on the brink of something bigger.’My hands are shaking.I encrypt the file with a double layer, slap on my hash, and route it directly to Kael’s private channel.For good measure, I dump the supporting images into the same packet.

The moment I hit send, I’m swept with a wave of panic.What if I missed something, what if I just tagged us both for deletion by whatever protocol the Volderen left behind?I resist the urge to recall the message.Instead, I make myself count the seconds until the faint ping comes back.

‘RECEIVED.’

I exhale.My fingers ache from the tension, and I notice I’ve left sweaty fingerprints on the glass of the display.I close the lid, sweep the cylinder remains into my bag, and stand, letting my muscles shake out the last dregs of adrenaline.

As I leave the archives, the door slides shut behind me with a hiss, and the double spirals still burn in my mind.Out in the corridor, the red pulse of the emergency lighting blends with the afterimage of the holo-maps, and for a second I’m not sure if I’m seeing signals or the inside of my own eyelids.

Either way, there’s no going back now.

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