Date: May 2171
Location: Caliban Station, Asteroid Belt Mining Outpost**
The message went out under full encryption.
A global recall order.
Subject: SynSuit prototype biological substrates
Directive: Total containment. Decommission all field assets. Initiate memory-wipe on unauthorized handlers.
Authorization: Hargreave-Rasch Black Protocol // Code: PaleDawn-72
Most cells obeyed.
They had seen what the SynSuits did—how the Ceph-adjacent neural mesh degraded minds, twisted bodies, warped identities. The ones who survived had nightmares. The others… weren't recognizably human anymore.
But not all radicals bowed to control.
On Caliban Station, a half-forgotten mining hub in the asteroid belt, Commander Thane Errol, a former ATLAS loyalist-turned-radical warlord, laughed as he deleted the recall message.
"They made gods and now want to leash them," he muttered. "They're afraid of what we're becoming."
He looked across the dim, industrial station at the cages—dozens of barely-conscious miners infected with controlled strains of SynSuit biomass, suspended in crude gel tanks. Their bodies pulsed faintly with alien tendrils beneath their skin.
The infection was stable.
But it was learning.
"This is the next step," Errol said into a recorder, his manifesto already uploading across fragmented darknets. "They want to make soldiers. I will make a species."
Three days later, the station went dark.
No broadcasts. No return messages. Cargo shipments halted.
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Back at Hargreave-Rasch, alarms lit up across internal channels. Rasch stood still as he reviewed the data spike.
"He's turned Caliban into a breeding ground."
Hargreave didn't respond immediately.
Instead, he slowly activated a file labeled GLASS-THREAD—an old failsafe meant for exactly this scenario.
A full molecular destabilization code—hardcoded into every first-gen SynSuit seed, including Thane's strain. It would take time to deploy. Time to propagate through the rogue biomass. But it would work.
Eventually.
"Recall wasn't enough," Hargreave murmured. "Now we clean up."
"And if it spreads before we're done?" Rasch asked.
"Then ONI won't be the only ones with containment squads."
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Date: May 2171
Location: Caliban Station – Mining Sector B-4
When the lights went out, Avery Kass knew something was wrong.
A former systems tech turned cargo dispatcher, she had lived through power failures, strikes, even a hull breach. But this was different. The station didn't flicker—it stopped breathing. Doors jammed. Comms died. Air scrubbers went silent.
She crawled out of the service tunnels to a corridor filled with mist. Not steam. Not smoke.
It moved. Like it had purpose.
"Protocol 7… Protocol 7…" she whispered, fumbling for her emergency respirator.
She found her way to the observation deck above Processing Sector, hoping to reach the backup server. But what she saw below froze her blood.
Dozens of miners… changed.
Some moved with unnatural precision—limbs too fluid, heads twitching like they were listening to signals no one else could hear. Others were shambling masses of corrupted tissue, fused with tech and bone. A few were still screaming.
And at the center stood Thane Errol, his SynSuit warped beyond recognition—half-armor, half-organism. He glowed faintly beneath the skin.
"You're witnessing the chrysalis," he said aloud to his congregation. "The gods of this new age will wear flesh like armor and time like breath."
Avery stumbled back into the shadows, bile in her throat.
No one's coming, she thought.
That's when she heard it—soft weeping.
A child. Alone. Locked in one of the old ore carts near the maintenance depot. A girl no older than ten, wrapped in insulation cloth, her voice barely a whisper.
"They took my mom. She's in the walls now."
Avery couldn't run anymore.
She picked up the girl, clutched a battered old sidearm from the supply rack, and disappeared back into the maintenance tunnels. Moving slowly. Watching everything.
Waiting for an opening.
Some part of her still hoped there was an opening. That someone out there still cared.
But even if no one did—
She'd get the girl off Caliban.
Even if it meant carving a path through monsters who once were human.
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Date: May 2171
Location: Caliban Station – Lower Utility Conduits
The girl's name was Lina. She hadn't said much since Avery pulled her from the ore cart—just held her hand with a vice grip and watched the shadows like they might reach out and drag her back.
The station moaned around them. Not the usual metal-on-metal stress sounds, but wet, organic groans—like the bulkheads were being digested.
Avery moved with care through the maintenance tunnels. Her neural torch flickered, its battery on its last hour. The sidearm's grip was slick with sweat. Every breath she took tasted like copper.
The beacon was three decks down—buried in the comms spine near the old relay tower. If she could reach it, trigger the backup transmitter, it might push a signal past the jamming. If ONI was listening, if anyone was listening, it could be enough.
They passed body clusters—people fused into the walls, some twitching, some silent, their veins glowing with faint bio-luminescence. Ceph tech gone rogue. Or maybe not rogue at all. Maybe this was what it wanted to be.
"Why are they like that?" Lina asked, barely above a whisper.
"Because someone fed the wrong thing too much power," Avery muttered.
They crawled through a broken vent shaft and emerged in Hydro Control, where two converted miners floated mid-air—levitated by tendrils of nanofiber muscle threading from the ceiling. Their eyes tracked Avery and Lina, but they didn't move.
Avery raised her pistol but didn't fire. Quiet was life.
They made it to the comms deck—only to find the beacon array guarded.
Thane Errol's voice echoed through the open chamber, calm, curious.
"I always wondered which of you would make it this far. You were close to Grayson, weren't you? Loyal. Smart. Predictable."
He stood by the beacon controls, his SynSuit now fully integrated with the Ceph compound. One arm was fused with living metal, a swarm of nanites orbiting his shoulders like a shroud. He looked… patient.
"You could help us," he offered. "She could grow with us. Be perfect."
Avery stepped forward, shielding Lina with her body.
"No."
Then she tossed a thermal charge from her belt—one of two she'd carried since day one.
The detonation didn't kill Thane. But it blasted the upper relay free and slammed him against a support pillar, disorienting him long enough for Avery to drag Lina through the debris.
She reached the manual override and punched in the distress code.
The red light blinked.
Transmission sent.
Behind her, Thane screamed—his voice no longer fully human.
Avery didn't look back. She just grabbed Lina and ran.