The ship drifted silently through the vacuum of space, its frame a towering behemoth, larger than any vessel Dr. Dew had ever designed alone. It was four stories tall, ten stories long, and half a football field wide, a mobile fortress powered by the medium Erchius crystal buried deep within its reinforced core. Inside, thirty newly trained crew members, along with Celeste Starfire Cassidy, her original five-member crew, and the founding minds—Dr. Dew, Leonardo da Vinci, Paracelsus, and Tesla—stood in silence, peering through the observation deck's thick crystal window. The planet below looked like a graveyard. It made Fallout Earth seem lush by comparison. There were no signs of green, no oceans, no weather systems, no movement—just sand, ash, and devastation. Worse still, looming like a decayed monument to forgotten ambition, a hive city so massive it could be seen from orbit towered out of the wasteland like the skeletal ribcage of some long-dead god.
Despite the lack of visible life, the scans showed no traces of radiation. No nuclear fallout, no ambient decay, no toxins in the upper atmosphere. Just dead land—and one unknown anomaly: an energy signature that garbled half their readings. The scanners couldn't penetrate the planet's crust without interference. The moment the laser hit the surface, it fractured into static and fed back corrupted data streams. Whatever this unfamiliar signal was, it wasn't natural, but it was invisible to the naked eye. Dr. Dew frowned at the console as the readouts scrolled erratically. "We're not getting anything reliable beyond that signal. It's scrambling the deep scans." Tesla, curious but cautious, leaned in beside him. "It's not electromagnetic. Not dimensional. Something else entirely." He couldn't place it—and that worried them all more than they admitted.
To be safe, they established a fallback protocol: Celeste and her crew would remain aboard the ship in orbit, maintaining communication and ready to extract them if something went wrong. Dew's parents, the remaining conduit crew, and support specialists stayed behind as well. Of the forty-three aboard, only five would go down—Dr. Dew, Leonardo, Paracelsus, Tesla, and one of Celeste's crew, armed with backup telemetry. They prepped in the ship's armory: Fallout Chinese stealth armor that rendered them nearly invisible when crouched, EPP backpacks calibrated to block pathogens and environmental toxins, Matter Manipulators, sidearms, melee weapons, and surveillance tools. Dew took point, stepping onto the teleportation pad. With a flicker of digital static, they blinked from orbit to the planet's surface—several kilometers away from the hive city to avoid detection.
Heat hit them like a wave. Not from radiation, but from the sheer exposure of a world with no atmosphere regulation. The sky above was a pale ochre, sickly and cloudless. The sand underfoot crunched dry like bone dust. The land was still. Too still. They moved quickly, spreading out and activating their stealth fields. Their footsteps left no print, their shadows vanished. The journey to the hive city took two hours of slow, cautious hiking. Once there, they split off in pairs and trios, eavesdropping from rooftops, alley shadows, and beneath broken ledges. The inhabitants were human—or had once been. Emaciated, ill, and fearful, they moved like ghosts between the structures, whispering to each other in tight, desperate huddles.
Snippets of overheard conversations painted a fractured picture. "The tithes increased again... we don't have enough left for food." "My daughter's got the shakes. Fever too. They said the cult's spreading it." "The governor's just trying to protect us." "They're killing us by inches." It was clear there was a war going on—between the ruling authority of the hive city and a group of disease-spreading cultists. The citizens didn't know where the sickness came from, only that it spread faster than any virus they'd ever seen. Some whispered that it was punishment. Others blamed heretics. The term "tithe" came up constantly. But what it was—money, food, resources—remained unclear. The city had no forest, no livestock, no visible agriculture. Dew took notes in silence, mind racing. He was reminded of the early days of post-war Earth, when broken governments pushed impossible burdens onto their people.
While Leonardo and Paracelsus slipped between sectors gathering environmental readings, Tesla analyzed structural decay patterns and recorded energy fluctuation fields coming from the hive's core. He narrowed his eyes. "That energy—same interference pattern as what we scanned in orbit." Dew glanced over. "Still no idea what it is?" Tesla shook his head. "No. It doesn't behave like anything in our records." He didn't call it warp. He didn't know to. And that was fine. Because they didn't know yet what they were walking into. They regrouped near the hive's outer maintenance tier, overlooking one of the central causeways. Despite the stealth field, Dew felt something. A pressure. Like something brushing against the edges of his perception. He looked up. The sky above was still. The signal, still unreadable. They returned to the extraction point undetected and signaled Celeste for retrieval.
Minutes later, they were back aboard the ship, suits sealed away for decontamination, data banks overflowing with fresh input. "We'll need more time to decipher all of it," Paracelsus said, already parsing environmental anomalies. Dew nodded and turned to the viewport, staring down at the dead world again. "Whatever happened down there... it wasn't natural." He didn't say what he was thinking. That the energy reminded him of the day they summoned Tesla, the first time they'd truly felt watched. But this wasn't the time to jump to conclusions. All they knew for certain was that this planet was once alive. Now it was dying. And if they weren't careful, they could bring whatever killed it back home.
End of Chapter Thirty