The hum of Erebus Station had settled into their bones after those first harrowing hours, a frequency that seemed to resonate with their very DNA. To Elara, it felt less like machinery than something organic—a pulse that was neither mechanical nor truly alive, yet somehow wove itself through the station's bulkheads and into their thoughts. She tried to dismiss the sensation as stress-induced paranoia, but the words from earlier refused to fade: You should not have come.
She kept what she'd witnessed in the lab to herself. The rational part of her mind insisted she might have imagined it—hallucinations brought on by fatigue and the psychological pressure of deep space isolation. Yet the deliberate way that console had flickered, sharp and purposeful, told her otherwise. Something was watching them.
In the central command hub, Ryn Calder hunched over terminal after terminal, his angular face carved from shadow and screen-glow. His bloodshot eyes burned from hours of sleepless focus, but his fingers moved across the interfaces with surgeon-like precision, probing the station's encrypted depths.
"It's not random," he muttered, more to himself than anyone else.
Across the chamber, Commander Holt leaned against the curved wall, arms crossed in his characteristic pose of controlled authority. His steel-gray eyes remained locked on Ryn, as if trying to peer through the cascading data streams and into the very intentions behind each keystroke.
"What exactly are you seeing, Calder?" Kieran's voice cut through the electronic whispers.
Ryn dragged a hand across his stubbled jaw before responding. "The transmissions aren't isolated events. That message—you should not have come—it's embedded across multiple encrypted data packets throughout the system. There are others, but the encryption protocol keeps evolving. It's... adaptive."
"Define adaptive," Holt pressed, pushing off from the wall.
"It's not just scrambling information randomly," Ryn said, his voice dropping to an uneasy whisper. "The system is responding to my intrusion attempts. Every time I probe a cipher, it adapts its defenses. I've seen foreign intelligence agencies attempt adaptive cryptography, but this—" His fingers resumed their dance across the keys, and a string of symbols flashed crimson on the display. He leaned back in his chair, shaking his head slowly. "This feels personal."
Holt's eyes narrowed to slits. "Personal to you specifically?"
Ryn went perfectly still. A heartbeat too long passed before he answered. "Personal to... to us being here. To this mission."
The evasion hung in the recycled air like smoke.
Three levels below, Mira Zhao crawled through the maintenance conduits, her small frame navigating the cramped spaces with practiced ease. Her diagnostic scanner pulsed gentle amber against her environment suit, casting dancing shadows on the tube walls.
"CO2 scrubbers operating at optimal efficiency, oxygen circulation steady," she murmured into her comm, recording her findings. "But auxiliary power draws are significantly above baseline parameters..."
The conduits groaned softly around her—a vibration that rippled through the metal and into her gloved palms. Something about the sound raised every hair on her arms, though she couldn't articulate why. It felt too organic, too deliberate.
"Station's breathing," she whispered nervously into her comm unit, more to break the oppressive silence than to communicate anything meaningful.
Static hissed back through her earpiece like angry insects.
She frowned and tapped the communication device. "Hub, this is Zhao reporting from auxiliary bay Charlie. Communications are experiencing interference. Do you copy?"
Silence stretched endlessly, a void where Commander Holt's steady baritone should have been. The absence felt wrong, dangerous. She was about to try again when her scanner emitted a sharp ping.
Mira blinked at the display in confusion. "What the hell?"
An energy signature pulsed beneath the official conduit layout—except it wasn't mapped to any of the station's documented systems. The signal throbbed irregularly, unmistakably organic in its rhythm. Like a heartbeat hidden in the walls.
Following the phantom signal with growing unease, Mira discovered it wasn't routing through the primary power grid at all. Instead, it ran through a hidden architecture embedded beneath Erebus's official circuits—a shadow network that shouldn't exist.
"Commander?" she tried once more. Her comm answered with nothing but static.
A soft curse escaped her lips as she began crawling backward through the narrow tube. "I really, really don't like this—"
She bumped into something solid that definitely hadn't been there moments before.
Heart hammering, Mira spun around quickly, scanner raised like a weapon. The conduit behind her stretched empty into shadow, exactly as it should. But she could have sworn she'd felt something—or someone—blocking her path.
Her scanner warbled again, flooding its display with new data. Three words blinked on the screen before dissolving into static:
DON'T TRUST HIM.
Mira's breath caught in her throat. "Trust who?" she whispered to the empty darkness, not expecting an answer.
The scanner pulsed once with malevolent red light, then died completely.
Dr. Elara Vance maintained her silence through the evening meal. The four-person crew sat in Erebus Station's cramped mess hall, their ration packs arranged with military precision yet largely untouched. Through the panoramic viewport, Jupiter's colossal presence dominated half the visible universe, its storm bands churning hypnotically while Europa's ice-locked surface gleamed far below.
Commander Holt consumed his meal with mechanical efficiency, every bite measured and purposeful. Mira pushed synthetic proteins around her plate with obvious distraction, her usual animated chatter replaced by nervous fidgeting. Ryn studied his data tablet with laser focus, his food growing cold and forgotten. The atmosphere pressed down on them like a physical weight.
Finally, Elara shattered the oppressive quiet. "Has anyone else felt like the station is... aware of our presence?"
Ryn's head snapped up, his dark eyes locking onto hers with startling intensity. Kieran set down his utensil with deliberate precision.
Mira was the first to crack. "Yes! God, yes, I felt it too. In the maintenance tubes. The power circuits run deeper than the schematics indicate, and there are systems that shouldn't—" She stopped herself abruptly, as if realizing she'd said too much.
"Shouldn't what?" Holt's voice carried the weight of command.
Her eyes flickered to the commander, then quickly down to her untouched meal. "Just... architectural inconsistencies. Nothing concrete."
Elara studied the young engineer's expression, recognizing the telltale signs of concealed truth. She was being equally dishonest—she hadn't told them about the message that had appeared on her laboratory console: We see you. Something about the cold terror that had seized her in that moment made her hold back the information. The others would question her mental stability.
As if summoned by her thoughts, the mess hall lights flickered ominously.
The central monitor activated without input from any of them, filling the chamber with electronic static. Then words materialized—stark white letters burning against the black screen:
HE WILL KILL YOU.
Absolute silence descended like a shroud. Mira's sharp intake of breath echoed in the small space. Elara felt her pulse explode into overdrive. Holt's jaw clenched with barely contained fury.
"Calder," Kieran barked, his voice like a whipcrack.
"That wasn't me," Ryn said immediately, shooting to his feet with indignant energy. "I swear on my life, I didn't initiate that transmission. The station is generating these messages independently—and it's encrypting them using human protocols specifically so I can decode them."
"Why target you specifically?" Holt demanded, rising to match Ryn's stance.
Ryn's posture stiffened defensively. His eyes darted briefly to Elara before returning to face the commander's interrogation. "Because I have the skills to understand it. Because someone wanted me on this mission. God only knows how far back this conspiracy reaches."
Mira's voice emerged as barely a whisper: "What if it's true... what if one of us really is—"
"Enough," Holt's voice cut through her words like a blade. He turned toward the flickering screen, fists clenched white at his sides. "This is textbook psychological warfare. Someone—or something—is attempting to destabilize our mission through manipulation and paranoia. We don't take the bait. We follow protocol and complete our objectives."
No one openly challenged his assessment, but acceptance wasn't written on any of their faces. The message burned in their minds like a brand, lingering in the air like smoke after an explosion.
Hours later, Ryn remained alone at the command hub, multiple monitors casting pale luminescence across his haggard features. He traced lines of code like an astronomer mapping constellations, searching for patterns in the digital chaos. After what felt like an eternity of failed attempts, he finally penetrated one layer of the adaptive encryption.
A cascade of decrypted text flowed across his screen with crystalline clarity. Not random gibberish. Not system diagnostics. Something far more disturbing.
ENCRYPTED FILE RETRIEVED
Date: 12/02/2023
Origin: Deep Space Node - Classification Unknown
Entry: "PROJECT RELIQUARY — ACCESS LEVEL OMEGA RESTRICTED"
Ryn's heart stuttered in his chest. December 2023—that was over a decade before Erebus Station had even been approved for construction, let alone launched to Europa. How could this data exist here?
As he scrolled deeper into the recovered files, more text materialized with chilling deliberation:
PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILE: SUBJECT R. CALDER
RECRUITMENT STATUS: CONFIRMED
MISSION PARAMETERS: CLASSIFIED
CONTINGENCY PROTOCOLS: ACTIVE
Then, as if the station itself was speaking directly into his soul:
"CALDER. WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU."
Ryn's hands froze above the keyboard, every muscle in his body locked in terrible understanding. The station wasn't just communicating with all of them randomly.
It was speaking specifically to him. And it knew exactly who he was.