The dropship Argus-12 cut through the ash-gray clouds above Vostrix-9, engines howling against the polar winds. Below, the research station lay buried beneath centuries of glacial accumulation—forgotten, sealed, and still transmitting.
Dr. Elen Rourke sat strapped in near the aft bulkhead, fingers tightening around the data slate in her lap. The transmission had been faint. Fragmented. But it was real.
And it shouldn't exist.
"Final approach," came Rhys Callen's voice from the cockpit. "Touchdown in thirty."
The team stirred. Arden Reyes, their stoic security lead, adjusted the magnetic clasp on his rifle with a click that echoed too loudly. Brecht Hal, head of neural architecture, mumbled something to himself and didn't look up. His breath fogged the inside of his visor—hands twitching in rhythm with a private, unheard song.
Talia Vane was calm. Too calm. Systems engineer and survivor of two failed deep-ice recoveries, her heartbeat barely rose.
Elen watched them all, one by one. Profiles, records, psych screenings—each vetted. Yet none of them could explain the dread she felt beneath her breastbone.
That signal—it had said her name.
---
The station greeted them with silence.
The exterior hatch hissed open without resistance, untouched by time. Lights flickered on in sequence as they moved inside, motion-activated systems blinking like they had been waiting. Not dormant—anticipating.
No dust. No decay. Just cold steel and humming systems. As if the station had never been empty.
"Atmosphere is within norms," Leena confirmed, reading from her medscanner. "Oxygen levels low but stable. No contaminants."
"No signs of struggle," Arden added, scanning with infrared. "No bodies. No blood. No anything."
They entered the main corridor.
Then Brecht stopped.
"Wait," he said. "Did you hear that?"
The team paused. No one had spoken. No sounds, except—
A whisper.
It came from deeper in the station.
Then gone.
---
Hours passed. The station unfolded before them like a familiar nightmare. Subsections powered up without input. Holographic logs looped blankly—some with no record of prior deletion, but clearly missing content.
In the engineering hub, Talia found a disconnected neural port labeled NULL—its surface coated in a substance that shimmered like mercury but clung like blood.
Rhys remained on the ship, scanning telemetry. But something kept pulling his eyes to the external camera feeds. The ones facing the ice.
He swore, at 03:41 station time, he saw movement.
Nothing on playback.
Elen stood alone in the command tower, reviewing old project logs. One name appeared more than once—classified and scrubbed in most places:
"NULL_ORIGIN."
And then:
> "She's back."
The text appeared in a message window.
Typed by no one.
---
That night, as the storm sealed them in and the lights dimmed, Brecht spoke in his sleep.
A single sentence:
> "We've never left."