The Ghost of Station Erebus
The silence inside the primary comms hub of Station Erebus was heavy enough to crush a man’s chest.
E.g. ：Thrown Out for a Lie: Mother-in-Law’s Brutal Act Reveals Shocking Family Inheritance Secret
- 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.
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He was never meant to take a shuttle back home to the orbital platforms.
The Floor Beneath His Feet
Before the audio file could reach its conclusion, a sharp, metallic screech echoed through the facility’s primary support pillars.
Julian spun his chair toward the central telemetry desk, where the macro seismic monitor suddenly surged with blinding light.
A series of violent needle spikes slammed against the digital boundaries of the screen, marking a massive kinetic disturbance.
The epicenter wasn't five miles out in the mining trench where the drill rigs used to operate.
The massive movement was originating less than twenty meters below the reinforced iron floor of the comms hub itself.
Julian lunged forward to grab his emergency survival kit, but the gravity stabilizers flickered and died.
The floor beneath his boots gave a sickening lurch as the subterranean pressure shattered the secondary load-bearing beams.
Orange emergency lights instantly flooded the control room, casting long, erratic shadows across the rusted bulkheads.
The high-frequency warning klaxon began to howl, its scream mixing with the violent rumble echoing from the depths.
The Rupture
Julian grabbed the edge of the heavy steel console as a violent tremor threw his body sideways against the frame.
Through the transparent visor of his helmet, he watched the central floor plates buckle upward like sheets of paper.
A massive fissure tore straight through the middle of the comms room, snapping thick power conduits like dry twigs.
Blinding clouds of pressurized orange dust ignited by electrical sparks erupted upward through the widening gap in the floor.
He looked down into the dark abyss opening at his feet, expecting to see molten rock or barren planetary crust.
Instead, shining through the cloud of Mars dust, he saw the rhythmic, pulsing blue lights of a massive subterranean mechanical structure awakening.
From the depths of the rift, a automated radio signal locked onto his headset, overriding the static of the dying emergency log.
Elena's final unrecorded line echoed in his ears, perfectly synced with the mechanical pulse beneath him.
"You cleared the access locks from the surface, brother... and now the system thinks we are the invaders."
Julian realized with horrifying clarity that his arrival on the station was the final key required to initiate the planetary purge.
As the room split completely in two, he reached for the emergency override switch, knowing he only had seconds before the subterranean system cleansed the station.
