The vessel was barely spaceworthy. A retrofitted ore-freighter turned pulse-jump scout, now jammed with patched modules, alien hardware, and Julian's backdoor systems welded in like a second brain.
Inside, the air was dry and thin. Rationed. Every breath had a metallic tang.
They had no backup.
No Earth fallback.
And still, no idea who was truly watching.
But one thing they did have was trajectory.
Mars.
The last location in Julian's encrypted star-map that lit up with cosmic resonance.
Thale stood at the viewport, watching the stars spin in artificial drift. Mina approached, glancing at the projected red orb that filled most of their navigation feed.
"Two hours to entry vector."
"Let's hope the Martian system still honors Julian's codes," Thale muttered. "Otherwise, we're going to burn in their kill zone."
The Martian Periphery – Orbit Approach
Mars hadn't changed. Not from afar.
Still desolate. Still rusted and raw. Still buzzing with underground secrets.
But its atmosphere shimmered strangely—like something behind it was waiting to tear through.
Mina watched the feed as the vessel's AI flickered between handshake attempts and passive scanning.
A message crackled in:
"Unregistered vessel. Identify or be atomized."
Thale flinched.
Mina activated Julian's embedded protocol.
The AI flared violet. The message stopped mid-threat.
A new line formed on the screen:
"Recognition Pattern: ECHO-ROOT-8. Julian Variant Confirmed."
"You are expected. Proceed to Dome Halcyon."
Welcome—or a Trap
They descended slowly over Mars' southern arc, where the old AI research domes had once housed a third of Earth's brightest engineers.
But Halcyon had gone dark after Julian's disappearance.
Now, it flickered alive again.
Faint pulses of light curled across its rim—new, not Earth-made.
Alien patterns layered over human tech.
Mina narrowed her eyes.
"Julian left something here. Maybe even a second vault."
Or, Thale thought grimly, a trap he didn't live long enough to disarm.
The Halcyon Landing
The dome cracked open like a blooming iris. The scout ship hissed and rotated slowly as it entered a rotating cradle of scaffolding and light.
No welcome party.
No threats.
Just a whisper in their comms:
"Echoes remain."
And then nothing.
Inside, they stepped out into silence.
Mars was dead—but Halcyon was dreaming.
Julian's MacGyver Legacy – A System Puzzle
Inside the dome's inner chamber was a bizarre suspended web of energy strands—looping and tangling through a lattice of abandoned drones and semi-organic core matrices.
Mina recognized it instantly.
"He used the early version of his system to build a learning interface here—an autonomous seed garden."
Thale stared. "He grew an AI from memory?"
"More than AI. A teacher. And it doesn't recognize us fully—so we'll need to prove we belong."
Julian's Puzzle: Unlocking the System
The suspended web was laced with chemicals, each one triggered by light or heat. But a single mistake would break the feedback loop—and purge the system permanently.
Mina grinned.
"Julian left chemistry puzzles for his team. One time he told me, 'If you can't remember how to separate calcium from a magnesium alloy with only Martian soil and battery acid, you don't get to touch my stuff.'"
She pointed at the cables.
"This one's trickier."
MacGyver Scene: Chemical Key
Using:
CO₂ scrub residue
Hydrated Martian rust compound (Fe₂O₃·H₂O)
A heat coil from a dead comm-link
A droplet of battery electrolyte
…Mina created a mini exothermic reaction that altered the refraction angle of the topmost data-strand by 6 degrees—enough to polarize the node without triggering a fail-state.
The web shifted. Began to hum.
Lines of Julian's code poured out like stardust:
"You made it."
"Welcome to Halcyon Node 2."
"Now prove you deserve the rest."
The Star Map Expands
As the system opened, new data exploded into view—a holographic planetary overlay of not just Mars… but the moons, Jupiter's orbit, and something beyond Neptune.
And at the very center…
A binary star system marked in glowing red.
The origin of the Hollowed Kin.
The place Julian had never dared send anyone.
Until now.
"It's a gate," Mina whispered. "That's what Mars is hiding."
"A way to get there. And something trying to come through."
Final Scene: Martian Dome Warning
Suddenly, Halcyon's warning lights activated.
A whisper ran through the dome's skeleton:
"False Echo approaching."
"Prepare for infiltration."
Thale drew his sidearm. "They followed us."
"No," Mina said, pulling the star disc close.
"They expected us to come here. This was the plan."
She turned to the team.
"We're done hiding. We're going to that binary system."
"We find the truth, or we burn trying."
Mars – Halcyon Dome, Interior Web Core[Timestamp: T+09 minutes since alert trigger]
"False Echo approaching."
"Prepare for infiltration."
The words rang across the chamber's crystalline ceiling, bouncing between light nodes like signals trapped in a spider's web.
Thale stepped forward, weapon drawn.
"We lock it down—now."
Mina was already working the system interface, her fingers dancing across violet strands of refracted code that formed the command grid. Each movement triggered a reaction in the dome—shutters slamming shut, temperature shifts, pressure recalibration.
But it was too late to go full lockdown.
Something had already entered.
System Feedback – Ghost Presence Detected
Mina's breath caught.
"It's not physical."
Thale blinked. "What?"
"Whatever infiltrated the dome… it came through the dataweb."
"It's an echo-clone. A synthetic projection riding the same architecture Julian built."
"And it's hijacking nodes as it moves."
That was the thing about Julian's tech. It could evolve.
But so could those who stole it.
Contact – Echo-Clone Materializes
The air near the old drone well shimmered. Then snapped—light folding inward like reality was being crumpled.
And then it was there.
A figure made of corrupted light. No face. No movement. Just a flickering humanoid silhouette with burning eyes and pixelated edges that hissed as it stepped forward.
The voice was mechanical, layered over a whisper:
"He made you weak. He left the door open."
"Now we inherit what should be ours."
Julian's First Countermeasure – Shock Lattice
Mina didn't hesitate.
She yanked a heat coil and jammed it into a fiber link.
"Julian's code loves ionizing metals."
With a flick, the current surged.
A copper lattice near the entry node erupted—arcs of electric blue dancing like a Tesla field. The echo-clone stumbled backward, shrieking in fragmented tones.
But it didn't vanish.
Instead, it began splitting—fragmenting into multiple shadows.
"Thale! They're going for the core chamber!"
"They want the map."
The Dome War Begins
All across Halcyon, lights began to shut off one by one.
Mina rerouted emergency energy to the dome's central intelligence—the Neuron Tree, a six-story AI mainframe built with silica bone cables and grafted alien tech.
"Julian warned about this. He called it a 'mirror burn' attack—where your own system's reflections start acting like predators."
"So let's give them something they can't digest."
Thale's Trap – Electromagnetic Javelins
While Mina held off the spreading shadow fragments using Julian's data-firewalls, Thale began crafting a defense system using:
Broken carbon spears from discarded maintenance bots
A capacitor bank from the shuttle's fusion bay
Ionized metal rods from Julian's anti-grav anchors
Each piece came together into a jury-rigged electromagnetic rail spike—an improvised weapon capable of flinging heated rods at over Mach 2 using compressed plasma bursts.
"MacGyver's got nothing on me," Thale muttered.
The Battle Turns
The first spike hit a clone fragment mid-phase.
It didn't just disrupt it—it caused it to fold in on itself, blinking out of the dataweb entirely.
"Confirmed: They can't survive particle destabilization."
"They're frequency-locked!"
Mina smiled.
"Then let's burn their frequency."
Julian's Final Trick – The Memory Scream
The dome's core shuddered as Mina activated Julian's memory vault—a reserve of encoded emotional memories tied to physical states.
"He told me this would be the last line of defense."
She opened the vault.
The room screamed.
Not in sound—but in vibration, like grief and brilliance and trauma had been poured into a frequency only AI could feel. The echo-clones howled, recoiling from Julian's legacy imprinted in code.
One by one, they shattered.
And the dome fell silent again.
Aftermath
Scorch marks ran across the floor. Thale leaned against a cracked column, breath ragged. Mina stood in front of the Neuron Tree, her fingers trembling from adrenaline.
"That was only one test," she whispered. "A probe."
"Next time they'll come in waves."
A new alert pinged from the system:
STAR GATE PREPARATION SEQUENCE UNLOCKED.
AUTOMATED LAUNCH VESSEL: 67% COMPLETE.
ETA TO BINARY GATE: 12 EARTH DAYS.
Final Scene: Distant Observers
Far above, in a stealth orbital outpost hovering behind Mars' largest moon, a figure in silver-red armor watched the feed.
Its eyes blinked with two time-locked pupils.
"He's still moving pieces."
"Then we shift to Phase Black."
Behind it, a dozen bio-synthetic agents loaded their weapons. Engines hummed.
Mars would not be silent for long.