Chapter 332: Down to hell 2

Melendez studied the civilian camp, her experience evident in how she catalogued potential threats and escape routes. “The civilians seem genuine enough,” she said, though her tone suggested professional skepticism. “But you’re thinking there’s something we’re missing.”

“Exactly.” Noah appreciated that she was treating his concerns seriously despite their age difference. “You’ve been doing this longer than me. What’s your read?”

“Honestly? The organization level bothers me. Three hundred people, two days of crisis, and they’re this coordinated?” Melendez shook her head. “Most civilian populations would be in complete chaos by now.”

‘Finally. Someone else sees it.’

The landscape stretched out before them—crystalline formations catching the light, mining equipment sitting silent and abandoned, the distant mountains creating a jagged horizon. It was beautiful in an alien way, but the beauty felt hollow.

‘Three hundred civilians. Organized evacuation protocols. Reasonable explanation for military absence. Standard distress scenarios.’ Noah’s analytical mind turned over the facts like puzzle pieces that should fit together but didn’t quite align. ‘So why does every instinct I have say this is wrong?’

He was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice the young woman approaching until she spoke.

“Excuse me?”

Noah turned to find a girl, maybe twenty-one, with the kind of practical clothing that suggested she worked in the mining operations. She had intelligent eyes and moved with the confidence of someone who wasn’t easily intimidated.

“Yes?”

“I’m Zara,” she said, extending a hand. “I work—worked—in the geological survey division. Before everything happened.”

Noah shook her hand, noting the firm grip and direct eye contact. “Eclipse. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to thank you for coming. We weren’t sure anyone would.” She paused, looking back at the crowd of civilians being organized by his battalion. “But I’m worried about what happens next. We’ve got nearly three hundred people here, and this settlement wasn’t designed for long-term occupation by this many.”

‘Practical concerns. Resource management. She’s thinking like someone who’s used to solving problems.’

“We’re working on evacuation protocols,” Noah said. “Once we establish communication with the other teams and confirm the area is secure, we’ll get you all to safety.”

Zara nodded, but her expression remained troubled. “It’s just… this many people, with limited resources, and if we’re here for more than a few days…” She gestured toward the settlement. “The water recycling systems, the food stores, the sanitation facilities—they’re all stretched past capacity already.”

Noah found himself studying her face as she spoke. ‘She’s genuinely concerned about logistics. That’s not something you fake easily. But why does her concern feel…’

“How long have you been managing these issues?” he asked.

“Since the soldiers left. Someone had to coordinate supplies, organize the hiding protocols, manage the groups.” She looked tired suddenly. “I never thought I’d be running a refugee camp.”

‘Two days of organizational leadership. Resource management. Coordinated hiding. That’s a lot of effective leadership for someone who’s supposedly been in survival mode.’

Behind them, Melendez was coordinating the perimeter establishment with Hendricks and the other senior personnel. Noah could hear fragments of conversation—tactical assessments, resource allocation, defensive positioning. Professional military efficiency at work.

But he could also hear something else. Whispered conversations among the civilians that stopped when soldiers got too close. Glances that lingered too long on weapons and equipment. A level of attention to military procedures that seemed unusual for mining families.

“You’ve done excellent work,” Noah said to Zara, and meant it. But the compliment felt hollow because he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was fundamentally wrong with the entire situation.

“What’s your assessment of the defensive situation?” he asked, testing.

Zara’s expression became more serious. “Honestly? We’re sitting ducks. The settlement’s in a valley, limited escape routes, no natural defensive positions. If the Harbingers had found us…” She shrugged. “We were counting on staying hidden until help arrived.”

‘Accurate tactical assessment. She understands the vulnerabilities. But again, that level of strategic thinking under stress…’

Noah looked out at the horizon again, where the strange crystalline formations caught the light in patterns that almost looked like signals. ‘Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe the stress of the mission, the separation from my team, the general wrongness of this whole deployment is making me paranoid.’

But even as he tried to rationalize away his concerns, his hand unconsciously checked the Ravager rifle’s power indicator. The beast crystal core was fully charged, ready for whatever might come.

He just hoped he was wrong about needing it or anything more powerful than a gun in his arsenal.

“Thank you for the briefing, Zara,” he said finally. “I should check on the perimeter establishment.”

“Of course. And Eclipse?” She paused. “Thank you again. For coming for us. For not giving up on us.”

Noah nodded and walked away, but her words echoed in his mind. ‘Thank you for not giving up on us. That’s an odd way to phrase it. Like she expected we might.’ then again, the former military personnels here did abandon them.

As he walked the perimeter his battalion was establishing, Noah’s mind continued to churn. Every logical assessment said this was a standard humanitarian situation with reasonable explanations. But every instinct he’d developed over months of combat was screaming that something was fundamentally wrong.

Melendez fell into step beside him, her expression thoughtful. “The girl you were talking to—Zara. She’s been asking a lot of questions about our equipment, our capabilities, our planned duration on-site.”

“Practical concerns for resource management,” Noah said, but his tone suggested he wasn’t entirely convinced.

“Maybe. Or intelligence gathering.” Melendez’s voice was quiet but firm. “Sir, I’ve been in enough humanitarian situations to know the difference between desperate civilians and people with an agenda. Before entering the academy, I worked with NGOs and the works,”

‘Melendez sees it too. The wrongness. The coordination. The too-perfect explanations.’

“What’s your recommendation?” Noah asked.

“Heightened alert status. Discrete weapons checks. And I think we should establish rotating watch schedules tonight, not just perimeter security.”

Noah nodded, appreciating her experience. Despite the age difference, despite the obvious awkwardness of a nineteen-year-old commanding older soldiers, Melendez was treating him as a professional equal.

The sun was beginning to set over the crystalline landscape, painting everything in shades of amber and gold. Beautiful and peaceful.

Too peaceful for a world that was supposed to be under siege.

As darkness approached, Noah found himself thinking about his scattered teammates. Lucas dealing with whatever was happening at the primary mining facilities. Sophie, Diana, Lyra, and Kelvin spread across different operations, all of them isolated from their support network.

‘Pierce separated us deliberately. The question is why.’

From somewhere in the civilian camp, a child was crying—the sound carrying across the temporary shelters with heartbreaking clarity. Normal. Human. Genuine distress.

But underneath it, Noah could swear he heard something else. Whispered conversations in that strange dialect, coordination that sounded too organized for random refugee management.

‘Tomorrow we establish proper communications with the other teams. Tomorrow we get answers. Tonight…’

Tonight, Noah would sleep with certain phrases like “Storm Fall” and “Nyx Ascend” not fa from his lips and trust that his instincts were wrong.

But he didn’t think they were.

Not by a long shot.

____

Meanwhile somewhere else, Kelvin stared at the blinking red lights on his communication array and felt his eye start to twitch. Not the good kind of twitch that meant he was about to crack an impossible encryption. The bad kind that meant something was fundamentally screwed up and he couldn’t put his finger on what.

“Well, this is just fantastic,” he muttered to himself, pulling up diagnostic after diagnostic. “Pierce sends me to babysit a glorified weather station and I get the cosmic equivalent of a dead phone battery.”

The “weather station” was actually a mining survey outpost on Sirius Beta’s western continent—a collection of prefab buildings housing atmospheric processors, geological scanners, and enough computing power to make Kelvin drool under normal circumstances. The kind of tech paradise where he could lose himself for hours optimizing systems and improving efficiency ratings.

Except nothing about this felt normal.

“Pithon!” called out Pearl Adams, the twenty-four-year-old squad leader who’d been assigned to manage their little tech expedition. “How’s the communication situation looking?”

Kelvin looked up from his workstation, his hair falling into his eyes behind his glasses in that perpetually messy way that drove neat freaks crazy. “Oh, it’s looking absolutely stellar, Adams. By which I mean it’s looking like a dumpster fire that someone threw glitter on to make it sparkle while it burns.”

Adams raised an eyebrow. “Translation for those of us who don’t speak fluent sarcasm?”

“Every single communication channel is being jammed harder than a rush-hour traffic jam in Neo-Tokyo,” Kelvin replied, gesturing dramatically at his screens. “Long-range, short-range, emergency frequencies, even the weird experimental channels I’m not supposed to know about—everything’s getting blocked by something that’s really, really good at blocking things.”

The other members of their tech squad—eight specialists in various fields of electronic warfare, communications, and system analysis—looked up from their own workstations with varying expressions of concern and confusion.

“Could be atmospheric interference,” suggested Tommy Richard, a communications specialist who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. “This system’s star puts out some weird electromagnetic signatures.”

“Tommy, my sweet summer child,” Kelvin said with exaggerated patience, “I’ve analyzed seventeen different atmospheric interference patterns since we landed. This isn’t Mother Nature having a bad day. This is artificial jamming with a sophistication level that makes my brain hurt in the special way it hurts when something is very, very wrong.”

From across the room, their small group of rescued civilians looked up with interest. They’d found twelve people holed up in the outpost’s emergency shelters—a mix of researchers, maintenance staff, and a few family members who’d been visiting when everything went sideways.

Dr. Lena Rodriguez, a middle-aged geologist who seemed to be the unofficial civilian leader, approached their workstations. “Is there something we should be worried about?”

“Well, Doc,” Kelvin said, spinning in his chair with unnecessary flourish, “that depends on how you feel about being completely cut off from the rest of human civilization while sitting on a planet that’s supposedly crawling with nightmare monsters from beyond the stars.”

“Kelvin,” Adams said with a warning tone.

“What? I’m being honest! Honesty is a virtue! My grandmother always said—”

“Your grandmother always said a lot of things,” interrupted Marcus Cole, their electronic warfare specialist, “but she probably never said anything about Harbinger communication jamming.”

“Actually, she did have some choice words about things that go bump in the night, but that’s neither here nor there,” Kelvin replied, then his expression became more serious. “Look, the real issue is that this jamming pattern isn’t random. It’s adaptive. Every time I try to punch through on a different frequency, it adjusts within minutes. That’s not atmospheric interference—that’s intelligence.”

The room fell quiet except for the humming of various electronic systems. Adams moved closer to Kelvin’s workstation, her expression shifting from mild concern to professional alertness.

“How intelligent are we talking?” she asked.

“Smart enough to make me wish Noah was here,” Kelvin admitted, his usual comedic bravado dropping slightly. “He’s got this freaky ability to see patterns that everyone else misses. Right now, I’m looking at data that makes sense individually but feels wrong when you put it all together.”

He pulled up a series of readings on his main screen. “The jamming started approximately six hours ago—right around the time we lost contact with the mining operations. But here’s the weird part: the civilians here say the military evacuation happened three days ago.”

Dr. Rodriguez nodded. “The garrison received emergency orders to redeploy to the primary mining sites. They took most of the heavy equipment and left us with basic supplies and instructions to maintain communication schedules.”

“Which you’ve been doing?” Adams asked.

“Every twelve hours, as instructed. Until this morning when everything just… stopped working.”

Kelvin’s fingers flew across his interface, pulling up communication logs and cross-referencing them with system timestamps. “So we’ve got a three-day gap between military redeployment and communication failure, but the jamming signature suggests the interference started when the main crisis began.”

“What does that mean?” asked Dr. Rodriguez.

“It means either the Harbingers have really good timing, or someone’s been planning this whole clusterfuck for longer than we thought,” Kelvin replied, then immediately looked apologetic. “Sorry about the language, Doc. I get creative with my vocabulary when I’m stressed.”

Tommy Richard looked up from his own diagnostic equipment. “Could be worse. Last deployment he went on, when he returned and was telling his tales of triumph, he called a malfunctioning comm array a ‘electronically constipated piece of space garbage with delusions of competency.'”

“That was poetry!” Kelvin protested. “And it was accurate! That array was definitely having digestive issues with data packets!”

Despite the tension, a few people chuckled. Adams shook her head but smiled slightly. “Pithon, can you break through the jamming or not?”

“Oh, I can break through it,” Kelvin said with renewed confidence. “It’s just going to take time. Whoever set this up is good—really good—but they’re not technopath good. I can feel the patterns in the interference, the way it flows and adapts. It’s like… imagine trying to have a conversation in a room full of people who are all trying to talk over you, but they’re really polite about it and keep adjusting their volume based on how loud you’re talking.”

“That’s a very specific analogy,” Adams observed.

“I’m a very specific kind of genius,” Kelvin replied with a grin. “Give me four hours, maybe six, and I’ll have us talking to the outside world again. The question is whether we’ll like what we hear when we do.”

He turned back to his workstation, fingers already flying across holographic interfaces as he began the delicate process of digital warfare against an unknown opponent. His technopath abilities let him feel the electronic landscape like a physical space—every data stream, every interference pattern, every attempt at communication flowing through his consciousness like currents in a vast ocean.

And right now, that ocean felt stormy.

“Adams,” he said without looking up from his work, “you might want to have everyone do weapons checks and perimeter sweeps. I don’t know what’s happening on the other continents, but something tells me we’re not going to like the answers when I finally crack this thing.”

“You think we’re in danger here?”

“I think,” Kelvin said, his voice uncharacteristically serious, “that if my buddy, Noah, was here, he’d be getting that look he gets when his brain starts connecting dots that nobody else can see. And right now, I’m starting to see some of those same dots.”

He paused his typing and looked around the room—at the rescued civilians who seemed almost too organized for people who’d been in crisis mode for three days, at the perfectly intact facility that showed no signs of hasty evacuation, at the communication equipment that was being jammed by something far more sophisticated than random Harbinger interference.

“Yeah,” he said finally, returning to his work with renewed intensity. “Definitely do those weapons checks.”

As Kelvin dove deeper into his electronic battle against the communication jammers, he found himself wishing more than ever that his best friend was there. Noah had a way of looking at impossible situations and finding the one detail that made everything else make sense.

Right now, surrounded by data that felt wrong in ways he couldn’t quite articulate, Kelvin really could have used that particular brand of analytical genius.

The jamming pattern shifted again, adapting to his latest breakthrough attempt with almost organic fluidity.

“Oh, you want to play games?” Kelvin muttered to himself, cracking his knuckles. “Let’s play games. But fair warning—I cheat.”

His fingers began flying across the interface with renewed determination, technopath abilities reaching deep into the electronic landscape to find the cracks in his opponent’s defenses.

Somewhere out there, Noah and the others were dealing with their own problems. Kelvin just hoped they were all smart enough to figure out what was really going on before it was too late.

Because the more he worked, the more convinced he became that this whole operation was wrong from the ground up.

And if Kelvin Pithon, certified genius and professional overthinker, was worried about something, then everyone else should probably start worrying too.

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New novel!! New novel!!