Read Chapter 18: The Message

The signal resolved into text after I stripped the harmonics off the carrier wave. Not audio. Not coordinates. Text.

"Don't trust the pilot."

I stared at the words on the station console, my gloved fingers still resting on the cracked keypad. The message repeated on a loop, cycling through what looked like an automated packet signature. No encryption. No obfuscation. Liang wanted me to see this.

"What did you find?"

Jack's voice came from behind me, rough with exertion. I hadn't heard him come back in. He was standing in the airlock's inner frame, helmet tucked under one arm, his face streaked with grime from the rover's power coupling.

I blanked the screen before he could see it. "Just static. Unmanned relay traffic."

His eyes narrowed. "Elena."

"I said it's nothing."

He took a step closer, and I saw the way he favored his left leg. The limp was worse than it had been an hour ago. He'd been crawling under the rover's chassis in that damaged suit with a torn boot and a knee that was probably screaming.

"You're a terrible liar," he said. "What's on that screen?"

"You fixed the rover?"

"Mostly. The power cell recharged enough to get us maybe two hundred klicks if we're careful. Now answer my question."

I stepped between him and the console. Six inches shorter, half his mass, but I planted myself anyway. "We need to talk about what happens next."

"Agreed. We go west. We find Liang. We end this."

"Jack—"

"He knows about the detonator, Elena. He knows about the core. If we give him time to go dark—"

"If we go west, we're walking into his trap." My voice came out sharper than I intended. "We have one working vehicle with limited range. We have life support at sixty percent. We have a station that's defensible and a relay that can reach Earth if we can get it coded properly. Going after him is suicide."

"He killed people."

"I know he killed people."

"Then why are you defending him?"

The accusation hit like a fist. I felt my jaw tighten, felt the familiar flush of anger climbing my neck. "I'm not defending him. I'm trying to survive him. There's a difference."

Jack moved past me, reaching for the console. I grabbed his arm. He stopped, looked down at my hand, then back at my face.

"Let go."

"Look at me." I held his gaze. "The message he sent us—the breadcrumbs, the wrench, the multi-tool—all of it was engineered to make us follow him. Every step we've taken has been on a path he laid. And you want to keep walking it because you're angry."

"You think I'm reckless."

"I think you're predictable. And Liang knows it."

Something shifted in his eyes. Not anger. Something colder, older. "You think I'm stupid."

"I think you're hiding something."

The silence stretched between us. The station's environmental systems hummed their low, constant note. Somewhere outside, wind scoured the regolith against the hull like static.

Jack pulled his arm free. "Get out of my way."

"No."

He grabbed me by the shoulders—not hard, just firm—and moved me aside. I swung without thinking. My fist connected with his jaw, a glancing blow that made him stumble back. He caught himself on the edge of the console, his bad leg buckling slightly. Pain flashed across his face before he masked it.

We stood there, breathing hard.

"Are you done?" he said.

"Tell me what you're not saying."

"You first. What was on that screen?"

I stared at him. Liang's words echoed in my head. *Don't trust the pilot.*

"I'm not going west," I said. "Not until you tell me the truth about the detonator."

Jack went still.

"You had access to the core," I continued. "You were on duty the night of the explosion. The official report says you were in the mess hall, but I pulled the personnel logs. Your biometric chip registered in the maintenance corridor forty minutes before the blast."

"Those logs were corrupted."

"Were they?"

He said nothing.

"Marcus is dead because of what happened that night," I said. "My friend is dead. The people I worked with for three years are dead. And you have been lying to me since we left the habitat."

Jack lowered his head. For a long moment, I thought he might just walk away. Then he reached into the inner pocket of his EVA liner and pulled out a small memory chip, worn and scratched.

"I planted the detonator," he said quietly.

The words landed like a physical blow.

"But I didn't set it off."

"Then who did?"

He looked up at me. "I was trying to disable the core's safety lock. I'd found evidence that the AI was being tampered with—someone was feeding it false telemetry to cause a pressure cascade. I thought if I could physically disconnect the safety interlock, the system would log the fault and shut down the core remotely."

"You bypassed safeties on a nuclear reactor to *prevent* an explosion?"

"Idiotic. I know that now." He held up the chip. "But I documented everything. The tampering, the false telemetry, the IP addresses routing through a backup server that was supposed to be offline. And when the blast actually happened, I realized someone else had used my access codes to trigger it."

"Who?"

He loaded the chip into the console's port. A live camera feed appeared—grainy, timestamped twelve hours before the explosion. The maintenance bay. Three figures in EVA suits, faces obscured by helmet reflections. One of them was pointing at a junction box with tools that were clearly not standard issue. The other was already prying the panel open.

"Recognize them?" Jack asked.

I squinted at the feed. The third figure turned, and for a moment, the helmet visor caught the light. There was a patch on the suit's shoulder. Not the base's logo. A different mission emblem.

"Mars," I whispered. "That's the Mars mission patch."

"Not just the patch. Look at their movements. Professional. Coordinated. They knew exactly where to plant charges to maximize the cascade." Jack paused. "That's a sabotage cell, Elena. And they've been on the moon longer than we have."

The camera feed showed the third figure pulling something from their utility belt. A small, familiar shape. A multi-tool.

My hand went to the one I'd found at the crater.

"Liang isn't working alone," Jack said. "And the people he's working with have history with you. With your old team. With Mars."

I looked back at the blanked screen behind me, where Liang's message still waited in memory.

*Don't trust the pilot.*

"Then we go west," I said slowly. "But we don't go alone. And we don't go blind."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "You just said it was a trap."

"It is." I pulled Liang's message back up on the screen, let Jack see the words for the first time. "But if there's a sabotage cell operating on this base, we're not safe here either. And I'd rather walk into a trap I can see than wait for one I can't."

Jack stared at the words. Then he laughed, a short, humorless sound.

"He really knows how to pick a lock, doesn't he?"

I met his eyes. "We go west at dawn cycle. But if you try to hide anything else from me—"

"I won't."

I didn't believe him. But I needed him to believe I did.