The Ghost of Station Erebus
The silence inside the primary comms hub of Station Erebus was heavy enough to crush a man’s chest.
- 1、The Ghost of Station Erebus
- 2、A Voice in the Static
- 3、The Subterranean Conspiracy
- 4、The Floor Beneath His Feet
- 5、The Rupture
Julian Vance adjusted his neck seal, pulling his worn thermal fleece tighter against the biting chill of the abandoned Martian facility.
Outside the reinforced observation ports, the rust-colored sands of the Syrtis Major basin slammed against the hull in relentless, rhythmic gusts.
Three years had passed since the corporation officially decommissioned the facility, citing unstable geological strata and unviable mineral yields.
Julian was supposed to be the last ghost on the payroll, tasked with scrubbing the central processing cores before the base was permanently left to the dust.
The salvage contract promised enough credits to buy him a quiet life on an orbital platform far away from the cold dark of space.
Yet every time he looked at the blank display terminals surrounding him, he felt an overwhelming sense of artificial isolation.
The company had told him that the original crew was evacuated safely during the atmospheric collapse of 2088.
He had believed them until his fingers stumbled across a heavily encrypted sub-directory buried deep within the rover's memory banks.
A Voice in the Static
The file had no official header, carrying only a raw timestamp and a security clearance level that exceeded Julian’s clearance.
His weary hands hesitated over the tactile interface as he bypassed the secondary firewalls using an override code he had kept hidden for years.
The console speaker popped with a sharp burst of white noise that made Julian flinch in the empty room.
Through the crackle of a severe electrical dust storm, a woman's voice cut through the silence with chilling clarity.
Julian froze as the sound of breathing filled his headset, ragged and panicked.
"If anyone is receiving this on the upper deck, do not initiate the automatic evacuation protocols," the voice stammered through thick interference.
He recognized that voice instantly, a sound that brought back memories of a sister he was told had perished in a high-altitude shuttle crash.
Elena’s voice echoed off the cold metal walls of the comms hub, carrying a weight of absolute terror that chilled Julian to his core.
"The official survey reports were completely manufactured by the board of directors," she whispered, her breath catching against the microphone.
"We didn't dig too deep into an empty pocket... we woke something up."
The Subterranean Conspiracy
Julian sat paralyzed in his chair, his eyes glued to the oscillating soundwave dancing across the primary screen.
The corporate dossier had sworn that Elena died miles above the surface during an atmospheric transfer accident.
Now, her voice was reaching out from a rover log recorded deep within the lower shafts of the planetary mantle.
She wasn't talking about alien life or ancient monsters buried beneath the sand, as the sensationalist media loved to speculate.
"It’s not a beast, Julian," her recorded voice continued, as if she knew he would eventually be the one sitting at this desk.
"It’s an automated defensive grid left by the early military terraforming program, designed to erase the base if anyone discovered what they were really harvesting down here."
Julian felt his stomach drop as the true nature of his salvage contract suddenly became crystal clear.
The corporation hadn't sent him to retrieve routine operational data cores for standard system maintenance.
They had sent him to trigger the final hard-reset pulse, wiping the entire base—and himself—off the surface of the planet to bury their illegal weapons program forever.
He was never meant to take a shuttle back home to the orbital platforms.
