Chapter 100: Infiltration into Helios-V8

Chapter 100: Infiltration into Helios-V8
The Narak’Tharr slipped into Helios-V8’s orbit without a sound, masked by the interference waves of the old mining-defense belt. It became nothing more than a shadow in a sky saturated with radiation, invisible to standard sensors.

In the cockpit, Kryna murmured real-time altitude corrections, her interfaces fused with the cloaking controls. She compensated for the slightest gravitational variation, keeping the ship locked in the perfect blind spot.

“Approach stabilized,” she announced. “Insertion window in three minutes. Put on your suits. The ground is unstable and toxic in this zone.”

In the cargo bay, the pack finished gearing up. Vykhor tightened his reinforced gauntlets with a sharp click, gaze fixed on the landing ramp. Rax checked the portable jamming beacons. Skye locked her suppressed cannon with a surgeon’s focus. Zeynn, silent, waited near Evelyn, one eye on Kane.

And Kane, for once, had his field boots back on.

“This is where we go down,” he growled, stabbing a fist at the holographic map. “This thermal evacuation duct hasn’t been used in ten years. It leads straight to the rear of the secondary station. Once we’re inside, we move fast. They patrol regularly.”

“How many soldiers?” Vykhor asked.

“Too many if we drag our feet. Not enough if you follow me without asking questions.”

Vykhor held his stare for a long moment, then nodded.

“I like simple rules.”

The ramp opened with a pressurized hiss.

An acidic wind, loaded with burning particles, swept across their armor. Helios-V8’s surface was black and cracked, streaked with glowing fissures. The old mining station, ruined in the distance, threw a jagged silhouette across the horizon.

They pushed into the toxic dust, Kane in front, Kryna’s beacons masking their heat signatures. They moved hunched and silent until they reached a hatch half-buried under rubble.

“There. The entrance.”

Griffin knelt to analyze the alloy residue, then nodded.

“Manual seal. No sign of a trap trigger, but motion detectors are active further in.”

“That’s why we brought you, old man,” Rax muttered as he slid into the opening first.

One by one, they dropped into the dark.

The duct was narrow, groaning, eaten away in places by sulfur and cave-ins. Heat seeped through the walls, as if the planet itself was sweating anger. Low-intensity lamps barely pierced the air, heavy with metallic particulates.

“Welcome to the beast’s guts,” Skye murmured.

Minutes stretched.

The underground passageways tangled into a forgotten maintenance labyrinth. They advanced in silence, every step heavier than the last. The only steady sound was the pack’s controlled breathing, threaded with the hiss of respirator filters.

At an intersection, Kane slowed.

“Here. First airlock. Past it, there’ll be sensors. If we want to stay quiet, we take the secondary maintenance gallery.”

“And if we don’t want to stay quiet?” Vykhor asked, the corner of his mouth lifting.

Kane shrugged.

“Then we blow the walls. But reinforcements will come fast. Your call.”

Evelyn traded a quick look with Vykhor, then with Griffin.

“We do it the way we planned. Stealth. We reach the core without tripping alarms.”

Zeynn nodded, but his gaze returned to Evelyn. He knew her. She was barely shaking… but she was shaking.

Something about these walls… this descent… was reopening old scars.

And deep down, Zeynn felt it: the worst hadn’t even started.

The maintenance tunnel spilled into a wider corridor where steel had lost its shine, dulled to a matte, salt-eaten gray. Cables ran along the walls like exposed veins. The stench of stale disinfectant drifted in the air, mixed with something more disturbing… something organic.

Kane stopped, brow furrowing.

“This is new,” he whispered. “This section wasn’t here when I ran.”

Vykhor moved forward carefully. His Kael’tarian prosthetic deployed in silence, tactile sensors activating a bluish spectral light that revealed fine particles suspended in the air. He scanned the walls.

“Cellular microfibers. Protein residue… This isn’t maintenance. This is… a biological corridor.”

Evelyn stepped closer, her sharp gaze sweeping the surfaces.

She recognized the patterns. Not the details—no. The logic.

A cold, mechanical, inhuman logic.

“This isn’t a testing room. It’s a stabilization corridor. Temperature kept between 18.5 and 19°C. That’s far too specific for simple technical storage.”

Her eyes lifted to a cracked observation dome, almost invisible in the ceiling.

“Someone watched what happened here… without wanting to be seen.”

“What were they watching?” Zeynn asked softly, closer to her than usual.

Evelyn moved forward. Her steps carried her to a large opaque glass door.

Griffin joined her in silence. She lifted a hand toward the side interface, but hesitated. Her breath caught in her throat for one second—just long enough for Zeynn to notice.

Then she pressed it.

The door slid open with a hiss of recycled air.

And hell welcomed them.

A lab. Vast. Silent.

Stasis tanks, half-dimmed, stretched into the distance like statues in formation. Inside were human shapes—unfinished. Some without skin. Others without faces. Others still were nothing but torsos suspended in a yellowish amniotic fluid.

Skye took a step back, weapon raised.

“What the fuck is this nightmare?”

Evelyn didn’t answer at first. She moved between the tanks, taking in every detail. The numbering. The failure rates. The technical annotations written directly onto the glass.

Her mind was running at full speed. Her semantic hypermnesia rebuilt patterns, connected the terms used here to those she’d read years ago in the original lab’s archives.

“These aren’t prototypes,” she finally murmured. “These are genetic alignment trials. They’re trying to stabilize a complex genome. Too complex for simple cloning.”

Griffin, frozen, listened without interrupting.

Rax scanned an active interface at the far end of the room.

“I’ve got a project name. Fragment 9. No attached files, but it’s running. Very running.”

Evelyn stopped in front of one tank.

Inside: a barely finished form. Female, thin, inert. But something in the face structure, in the bones beneath the flesh, felt painfully familiar.

Too familiar.

She took a step back.

“That’s not possible…”

Vykhor saw her go pale. He moved in, bringing his cybernetic arm across her in immediate protection.

“Evelyn. What do you see?”

“I… I’m not sure. Not yet. But this isn’t a standard lab.”

She swallowed hard.

“It’s an incubator. A creation matrix.”

She turned to Griffin, jaw tight.

“Did you know?”

Griffin lowered his gaze, throat tightening.

“I knew he was still experimenting. But I didn’t know… it had reached this level.”

Vykhor stayed silent. But his prosthetic snapped as it retracted, like a weapon being forced back into its sheath. His eyes never left Evelyn.

Evelyn, brow furrowed, looped through the evidence in her mind. Every report she’d ever dissected. Every term she’d retained for life. Every genetic sequence burned into memory.

And she understood one thing.

What she was looking at wasn’t a side project.

It was the heart of the Master’s plan.

And she still didn’t know why she was part of it.

A low hum—almost inaudible—vibrated through the floor.

Skye’s head snapped up, rifle aimed at the ceiling, but the sound was coming from below.

“Something just activated,” she whispered.

Rax moved toward one of the powered consoles, but Evelyn stopped him with a sharp gesture.

“No. Wait. Let me.”

She knelt at the interface, fingers sliding over the controls with methodical ease, almost cold. A secondary panel lit up, revealing a recent activation log.

One word appeared, in red letters:

PARTIAL AWAKENING.

Before she could read the next line, a glacial creak split the air.

At the far end of the lab, one tank lit up abruptly. Not like the others. This one wasn’t cracked, empty, or half-filled. It was intact.

And occupied.

The silhouette inside moved.

First a finger. Then a hand. Slowly—like something rising from a long sleep.

“Back up,” Vykhor said, his prosthetic snapping with a metallic hiss.

The amniotic fluid began to boil inside the tank. A face emerged from the dimness—still indistinct… but in the curve of the nose, the shape of the jaw, there was something chilling.

Evelyn’s chest tightened. She knew those features.

“It’s—”

The clone opened its eyes. Black. Empty.

Devoid of any human emotion.

It pressed a hand to the glass, and that single gesture triggered a security lockdown across the lab. Red lights flashed along the ceiling. A silent alarm rang through their auditory implants.

Kryna confirmed instantly: “Containment protocol active. Unstable genetic code detected. Access locked.”

“We move,” Kane growled. “Now.”

“Wait,” Evelyn breathed.

She stepped closer despite the danger, unable to tear her gaze away.

The creature in the tank… was looking at her. Fixedly.

And in that stare there was something.

Not consciousness. Not a soul.

But a connection.

A resonance.

Griffin set a hand on her shoulder. She barely flinched.

“It’s not you, Evelyn.”

She nodded, but her eyes stayed locked on the unfinished copy, frozen behind the glass.

“Not yet,” she whispered.

Then she backed away slowly.

And they left the room behind, carrying with them the mechanical murmur of a world that refused to die.