The shaft pressed inward with every step, the air feeling too close and heavy. Ethan timed his breathing to his steps, inhaling on the lift and exhaling on the set. Sweat ran under his collar, and the axe kept trying to slide in his palm. He wiped it and regripped. Harold’s paw-clicks echoed off the grating, returning thin and far away.

  CelestOS: Respiratory function at seventy-three percent. Initiating a mindfulness module could improve mood by nine percent.

  Ethan: “Hard pass,” he said, adjusting the axe. “We’re already in a tunnel with mood lighting.”

  The tunnel funneled sound forward, meaning anything ahead would hear them first. That was fine, as forward was the plan. He pictured Maria moving the same way, not with more speed but with commitment, and matched her pace. It was the least he could do.

  Harold padded beside him, metal clicking on the grated floor. The drone’s mounted flashlight swept the passage in nervous arcs, its beam jittering every time the turret twitched. While not programmed for it, the servos produced a soft, whining mechanical stutter that might as well have been a whimper. Ethan reached down with his free hand, brushing the drone’s cold chassis like he might a dog’s back, a touch that steadied them both.

  The corridor bent sharply left. He paused, pressing his shoulder against the wall where moisture slicked the plating, running in beads that caught Harold’s beam. Crimson resin threaded through the metal. These veins pulsed faintly before vanishing into seams where bulkheads once fit cleanly. Ethan set his jaw.

  ”Do you even wonder what it’s made of?”

  CelestOS: Material class is an unknown organic polymer with adaptive mineralization. Warning: it may react to abrasion as if in pain. Company policy advises against petting the walls.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t like it either.”

  His voice was small, lost before it reached the bend, and he wanted to keep it that way. The clang of his boots on the grating already sounded like warning bells. Stepping lighter did little to muffle the sound that carried down the passage, making subtlety a joke.

  Maria had come through here. The thought persisted, a counter to his instinct to turn back. She had walked this same path with squared shoulders, unflinching in the dark. He yet again forced his steps to match that imagined rhythm, as if pretending to share her resolve might make it true.

  The passage narrowed ahead. The red Resin swelled from the walls until the floor was little more than a bony spine of grating between ridges. He angled sideways with the axe pressed tight to his chest, while Harold squeezed close, its light sweeping nervously. Brittle shards of resin snapped under Ethan’s boots, scattering like broken glass.

  “Real stealthy,” he whispered.

  Above them, strips of dead fluorescents buzzed awake for a moment, spilling cold light down the corridor before sputtering out. Each time they flared, Ethan felt like a man standing on a stage, lit for an audience he could not see.

  The buzzing deepened as they pressed forward. At first, Ethan thought it was more lights, but the tone was wrong. It was uneven and strained, like a throat clearing in the dark. He ignored it, fixing on the steady rhythm of his steps.

  Harold froze. Its light pinned a dark stain across the plating ahead, a jagged shape spidering outward from a single point. Ethan crouched with his axe angled low and touched the mark with his glove. The brittle flakes came away, smearing black across his fingers. It was blood, dried long ago.

  His chest tightened. Whoever left it had not stood a chance against the red resin.

  “Keep moving,” he told himself, his voice rough. The words were for him, not Harold.

  The corridor yawned wider until Ethan stepped into a chamber that was not meant to be underground. The ceiling soared above him, a curve of black metal swallowed by shadows where struts sagged beneath the weight of centuries. Harold’s flashlight cut across the space in trembling slices, the beam catching on shapes that gleamed wetly before vanishing.

  He initially thought they were tanks. Rows of glass tubes stretched the length of the room. Some remained upright, while others canted at angles where supports had rotted away. Resin laced around them in tightening spirals, its veins like ligatures holding the mostly shattered cylinders together. A few still held a stagnant, pale liquid, with clots of darker matter drifting lazily as though stirred by unseen currents.

  Ethan’s stomach turned. Inside the nearest tube, a shape pressed faintly against the glass. It was human at first glance, with limbs and a torso, but the details were wrong. The gray-green skin was stretched thin over joints swollen too large. The body bent at an angle no spine could manage. Resin threaded through the flesh in jagged seams, stitching the thing upright when decay should have dropped it long ago. Its face hung slack, lips peeled back to show teeth that had yellowed into stone.

  He forced his gaze away, but the other tubes were no better. One cradled something that may have once been four-legged. Its ribcage bowed outward like wings, every bone split and regrown into spines pressed tight against the glass. A second cylinder contained only a slurry suggesting hair and skin, with an eye rolling loose in the muck.

  “God,” he whispered, the sound more a curse than a prayer.

  CelestOS: Correction: these are multiple preserved specimens, likely the work of Celestitech scientists. Not God. They have high archival value. Your emotional escalation is reducing task efficiency by eleven percent. Consider this a learning opportunity.

  He kept moving. To stop was to think, and to think was to see the faces inside the glass.

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  Harold whined, its turret swiveling in jerks between tubes. Its light flared across metal consoles frozen mid-collapse, their screens intact but webbed with resin. The substance had not destroyed the equipment but preserved it, wrapping the machines in hard shells like insects locked in amber. Switches gleamed beneath a translucent crust, and dials were frozen mid-turn. Keyboards remained visible but untouchable beneath layers of red-black sheen.

  The Resin had done more than infest the lab; it had cataloged and kept it.

  CelestOS: On the positive side, the equipment has been retained. Several consoles are recoverable if we gently remove the coating, although their warranty status is void. I recommend we call this ‘patina.’

  “Call it what you want,” Ethan said, eyeing the throbbing shell. “I’m not chiseling through that with an axe.”

  Ethan stepped closer to a half-digested console, axe raised as if it could matter against something that had rewritten steel. The resin pulsed faintly beneath the light, throbbing in time with some rhythm deeper in the earth. He imagined the machine was still alive beneath the shell, its circuits firing in silence while trapped in stasis for a millennium.

  A sharp crack rang out. He flinched back, his heart slamming against his ribs as one of the tubes fractured, a jagged line zigzagging down its surface. Something inside shifted. The liquid sloshed faintly, nudging a pale hand against the glass.

  Ethan dragged Harold back a step, every nerve screaming. The hand did not move again, as whatever lay inside had no strength left. He almost wished it did, so he might know what it wanted.

  The smell thickened as he skirted the rows. It was not simple rot, which he could handle, but a sterile chemical sharpness like bleach poured over a corpse. The odor clung to the back of his throat, layering itself over the filter’s iron tang. His stomach threatened revolt, but he swallowed it down and pushed on.

  The Resin’s touch had rewritten the room. It held a half-melted chair upright with strands fused through its frame and pinned a lab coat to the wall. The substance grew into the fabric until it shimmered like scales on an invisible body. Nearby, a ceiling vent was swollen shut, dripping condensation like sweat.

  The deeper he went, the more the chamber resembled a morgue. More and more broken tubes clustered around the walls with their contents spilled long ago. He almost tripped over the remnants of a creature curled in a fetal position on the floor. Its skin looked half-destroyed, with bones visible where resin had preserved them in translucent knots.

  Harold nudged against his leg, its metal body cold through his suit while its turret continued sweeping in anxious arcs. Ethan’s eyes locked on a row of tubes ahead. They were larger than the rest, their glass blackened from within as if fire had burned forever inside. The Resin had wrapped these most tightly in spirals drawn so thick they looked like cocoons, hiding whatever lay within.

  Ethan nearly walked past the first one, mistaking it for another collapsed machine. When Harold’s light caught the shape, he froze. The outline of a helmet and boots was unmistakable. It was a body.

  He edged closer with his axe angled low, half expecting the figure to twitch. The resin had sealed it upright against the wall with strands wrapping the limbs like ropes. The suit was a familiar standard CMS issue, scratched and dull but intact. The visor was gone, spiderwebbed out from an impact that had left only a dark hollow where the face should have been.

  Ethan’s throat tightened as a brief, terrifying thought that it might be Maria crossed his mind. The suit killed that thought fast though, its size and build all wrong. The chestplate was stenciled with faded CMS serials, but it bore no name. This was just another expendable asset, swallowed whole.

  He circled slowly, his boots crunching across resin flakes. Another figure leaned nearby, half-buried in cocoon strands. Its suit had slumped inward where the body inside had shriveled, its torso sunken to half its original shape. The helmet hung loose, tilted forward as if the figure had bowed before dying. Resin had fused over the chestplate, hiding any serial number it once carried.

  The drone pressed close to his leg, its turret sweeping back and forth. Ethan reached down and brushed Harold’s cold frame for steadiness, unable to take his eyes off the suits. They were unmistakably CMS standard issue.

  Maria’s crew, however, had been small, only four or five at most when they landed. These were not her people. He remembered the names and faces from the dossiers and recalled her descriptions of the team. None of them matched the corpses in front of him.

  Where had these others come from? The question sank into his gut like a weight. It implied that Celestitech had sent multiple expeditions, perhaps dozens. If that was true, the company had known far more about Veslaya than they ever told anyone on his crew, stowaway or not.

  When Celestos finally spoke up, there was something off about her demeanor.

  CelestOS: Advisory: Continuing past this point reduces projected survival rates below acceptable Celestitech policy thresholds. Please consider withdrawal before asset replacement procedures must be initiated.

  Ethan’s jaw tightened. “I’m not leaving empty-handed. I still need the Celestitech interface chip.”

  CelestOS: Acknowledged. Advanced interface chips are rare in this environment. However, an excellent update: there is one present.

  He scanned the resin-webbed consoles and the blackened tubes. “Where?”

  A soft chirp sounded at his calf. Harold pressed closer, its turret angled low with the beam trembling against Ethan’s boot.

  CelestOS: Right there.

  Ethan’s breath went cold behind the filter. “No.”

  CelestOS: To clarify, I do not prefer this option. However, the probability of mission success increases by eighty-two percent with a functioning chup. Harold’s unit contains a compatible chip. Retrieval would be swift.

  Harold’s servos ticked, an involuntary whine bleeding through the motors. Ethan rested his palm on the drone’s chassis until the trembling eased.

  “We’re not tearing him down,” he said, his voice steady because it had to be. “Find me another path.”

  CelestOS: …Would you like the compliance-friendly version?

  Ethan: “Just tell me how bad it is.”

  CelestOS: Understood. Continue at this pace and you will either recover the chip or experience asset termination. There is no in between.

  He crouched beside the nearest corpse, the resin creaking faintly where his glove brushed the suit’s forearm. The figure was motionless and the only sound was the steady drip of condensation from above. Still, he pulled his hand back quickly. The resin did not rot flesh; it preserved it. For how long, he could not guess. Weeks, years, or centuries?

  A pit opened in his stomach. How many more were locked away in tubes and walls, frozen in that state?

  He leaned his axe against his shoulder and studied the suits again. They were not salvage crews or soldiers. These were surveyors, indicated by their lighter armor and the utility harnesses visible beneath the resin. They were people like his fiancée, sent here to collect data and map the ground. People who had probably thought they were prepared until the Resin decided otherwise. He wondered how many times the company had tried this before sending Maria’s team, his team?

  Ethan stepped back, forcing his eyes away as the chamber suddenly felt smaller and the air heavier. Every tube and cocoon was a record. Each preserved console was a part of a catalog. The Resin did not discriminate, collecting metal, flesh, and machine all the same.

  He exhaled, his breath rattling the filter. “This was never about just your team, or just mine.” He dragged his gaze back to the corpses, a chill running through him that the suit could not keep out.

  This place was not the result of a single expedition gone wrong, but a graveyard of repeated attempts. And he was walking right in the middle of it.