Audio logs from the Interstellar Coalition’s deep space archives usually sound like static or silence. But File 77-Alpha starts with the deafening roar of an apex predator—a sound known to liquefy the bowels of seasoned veterans. Then the camera feed stabilizes.

We don’t see a mangled corpse.

Instead, we see Cadet Skyler Pendleton, a twenty-two-year-old kid from Columbus, Ohio, holding a portable field camera. He wipes mud from the lens, pans over to a terrifying six-ton alien monstrosity with razor-sharp mandibles, and says, “Smile for the camera, buddy.”

The folks back at the academy are never going to believe this.

The Interstellar Coalition Academy, situated in the freezing vacuum of the Lunar Mare Tranquillitatis, was designed to break the weak. Its curriculum was simple: prepare humanity to survive a galaxy that actively wanted them dead.

Cadet Skyler Pendleton was not supposed to be there. He wasn’t bred from war heroes. He was an engineering dropout whose father worked as an actuary in Ohio, and his mother was a mid-level manager at a Boeing plant. Skyler was scrawny, prone to motion sickness, and possessed a quiet, analytical demeanor that infuriated his drill instructors.

“Pendleton, you look like a stiff breeze on Earth would snap you in half, let alone the gravity shear of a class-nine world.”

Commander Harrison’s voice echoed off the titanium walls of the staging bay. Harrison was a veteran of the Sirius campaigns, a man missing half his original jaw, replaced with a gleaming steel prosthetic.

Skyler adjusted the straps on his standard-issue Lockheed Martin Mark IV drop suit. “I’ll manage, sir.”

Today was the final evaluation—the crucible. Forty cadets were being dropped onto Gliese 832c, affectionately dubbed “the meat grinder.” It was a tidally locked death world. The designated drop zone was the twilight terminator line, a strip of perpetual dusk where temperatures were survivable—provided you didn’t get eaten by the local flora or fauna.

The objective: survive seventy-two hours with nothing but a survival knife, a distress beacon, and a standard-issue ocular recording rig.

Skyler strapped into drop pod fourteen. The heavy restraint harness locked over his chest. Through the reinforced viewport, he could see the swirling, bruised-purple atmosphere of Gliese 832c rushing up to meet them.

“Drop in three, two, one. Good hunting, cadets. Don’t die on my paperwork.”

The explosive bolts fired. Skyler’s stomach stayed in orbit as the pod plummeted.

Atmospheric entry was a violent car crash. Flames licked the ablative shielding, glowing a furious blinding white. Then a sickening jolt rocked pod fourteen. The telemetry screens flashed crimson.

“Warning: micrometeoroid impact. Guidance system offline.”

Skyler’s hands flew over the manual override console, his engineering background kicking in. But the Lockheed Martin thruster relays were fried. He was deviating from the terminator line—the relatively safe twilight zone. The pod was screaming directly toward the planet’s dark side.

The midnight zone. A place of absolute darkness, cryogenic storms, and things that had evolved to hunt in the pitch black.

The altimeter screamed. The retro rockets fired a fraction of a second too late. Pod fourteen slammed into the canopy of a colossal crystalline forest. Massive glass-like branches shattered against the hull, slowing the descent just enough to prevent Skyler from becoming a thin red paste.

The pod tore through the undergrowth and hit the swampy ground with an earth-shattering crunch, flipping twice before burying its nose in the muck.

Silence descended—heavy and suffocating.

Skyler hung upside down in his harness, blood dripping from a gash on his forehead. He checked his wrist comp. No signal. The distress beacon was shattered. He was entirely off the grid, hundreds of miles from the operational theater. If he waited for rescue, he would rot here.

He pushed open the jammed hatch and stepped out into the midnight zone.

The air was dense, thick with the scent of ozone and rotting copper. Bioluminescent fungi clung to towering obsidian-black tree trunks, pulsing with faint ghostly blues and sickly greens. It was the only light source on a world devoid of a sun.

Skyler dragged his survival pack from the wreckage. Combat knife. Thermal blanket. Three hydration packs. Magnesium fire starter. And his shoulder-mounted ocular recording rig—meant to stream his progress to the academy, now useless for transmission.

He looked at the blinking red light of the camera. Twenty-two years old. Entirely alone. Statistically guaranteed to die in the next twelve hours.

He reached up and manually engaged the camera’s local hard drive.

“My name is Cadet Skyler Pendleton.” His voice trembled slightly. “Current location unknown. Gliese 832c dark side. Pod fourteen suffered catastrophic guidance failure. I am stranded. If whoever finds this is human, please tell my parents in Columbus that I didn’t die screaming. Or at least I tried not to.”

He took a deep breath, the cold air burning his lungs.

“I’m going to document everything. Maybe the biology department can use the footage of whatever eats me.”

Skyler’s first priority was shelter. The crushed pod was a beacon for anything curious, smelling of burnt ozone and human blood. He needed to move.

He hiked for two hours through treacherous terrain, the mud sucking at his boots like hungry mouths. Every shadow seemed to writhe. The soundscape was a nightmare—clicks, deep bass rumbles that vibrated in his chest, and sudden high-pitched shrieks that cut off abruptly.

He found a shallow cave formed by the tangled petrified roots of a massive fallen tree. Gathering bioluminescent moss and brittle dry sap, he used the magnesium starter to spark a small fire.

The dancing flames pushed back the encroaching dark. He set the camera on a rock, framing himself and the fire.

“Entry two. Establishing a perimeter. The atmosphere here is hyper-oxygenated. I have to be careful with the fire, but I need it to ward off the cold. Temperature dropping rapidly. Currently negative twenty Celsius.”

Skyler pulled out the ruined remnants of his pod’s internal comms unit. Using his survival knife, he stripped the copper wiring and extracted the micro-capacitors. For the next hour, his hands worked with nerdy precision. He wasn’t a soldier. He was a tinkerer.

He rigged a tripwire around the entrance, wiring it to the capacitors. “If anything breaks the wire, the capacitors will discharge—loud pop and a flash. Not lethal, but it should startle any local predators. Human ingenuity, right?”

He wrapped himself in his thermal blanket, clutching the survival knife to his chest. He didn’t sleep. He lay there listening to the death world breathe.

—

Around 0400 hours, the sounds of the forest abruptly ceased. The ambient chirps and rumbles vanished, replaced by a heavy, suffocating silence. The hair on Skyler’s arms stood up.

*Snap.* A massive branch broke in the distance. Then a low, rhythmic thudding. Footsteps—heavy enough to shake the ground. Whatever it was, it wasn’t trying to hide. It was the apex. It knew nothing in this forest could challenge it.

Skyler held his breath, watching the entrance. He slowly tapped the side of his camera, ensuring the low-light sensors were recording. If he was going out, he was getting it on tape.

The tripwire snapped with a sharp twang. The rigged capacitors detonated—*crack!* A brilliant flash of blue-white electricity illuminated the darkness.

An unearthly, deafening roar tore through the night. A sound of sheer shock and pain. The shockwave actually snuffed out Skyler’s small fire, plunging him into absolute blackness.

He scrambled backward, pressing himself deep into the recesses of the petrified roots, gripping his knife. He waited for massive claws to reach in and drag him out.

The attack never came. Instead, the roar shifted into ragged, wet gasps. Heavy thuds shook the ground—the sound of immense weight collapsing into the mud. Then a low, resonant whimper.

Skyler stayed frozen for what felt like hours. The heavy, ragged breathing outside continued. It didn’t sound like a monster waiting in ambush. It sounded like something dying.

Curiosity—that fatal human flaw—began to override his terror. He was a dead man anyway.

He detached the ocular rig and held it out like a shield, switching the floodlight to a dim red hue—less likely to provoke aggression. Slowly, agonizingly, he crawled out of his shelter.

—

Ten yards away lay the beast.

It was breathtaking. A nightmarish fusion of a Terran dire wolf and a heavily armored theropod dinosaur. Fifteen feet long from its blunt crocodilian snout to the tip of its heavy spiked tail. Thick, carbon-black scales covered its back, its underbelly a dark leathery gray.

What caught Skyler’s eye were the bioluminescent stripes running down its flanks. Currently flashing a frantic, erratic crimson.

The beast was on its side, panting heavily. As Skyler’s red light swept over it, he realized why it hadn’t attacked him. It was already in a fight for its life—and losing.

Clinging to its thick neck and underbelly were dozens of fist-sized, lamprey-like parasites. Sickly translucent, their bodies pulsing as they drained the massive predator’s blood. The beast pawed weakly at its own neck, too exhausted to dislodge them.

It looked at Skyler. Its eyes were pools of liquid gold, the pupils dilated with agony.

In that moment, Skyler didn’t see a terrifying apex predator. He saw an animal in pain. The same look his childhood golden retriever had given him when it got its leg caught in a fence back in Ohio.

“This is the big bad monster of the midnight zone,” Skyler whispered to the camera. “It’s being eaten alive by oversized ticks.”

Commander Harrison’s protocol was clear: never engage local fauna unless to kill or consume. Never show empathy. Empathy on a death world gets you killed.

Skyler looked at the beast. He looked at his survival knife. He looked at the emergency flare on his belt.

“To hell with protocol.”

—

He pulled the flare and ignited it. Searing, brilliant red magnesium light bathed the clearing. The sudden burst of intense heat caused the parasites to writhe.

Skyler stepped forward. The beast rumbled a deep warning growl, baring teeth the size of combat knives.

“Easy,” Skyler said, keeping his voice steady. “Easy, big guy. Let me help.”

He didn’t know if the alien understood the tone, but exhaustion won over aggression. Its head dropped back into the mud.

Skyler approached the beast’s neck. The smell was a mix of musk, ozone, and copper blood. He brought the burning flare close to one of the translucent parasites. The intense heat was too much—it shrieked and detached, dropping into the mud. Before it could scurry away, Skyler brought his boot down.

*One down.*

He spent the next hour working meticulously. Using the flare to burn the parasites, forcing them to detach, then dispatching them. For the ones dug too deep, he used his combat knife—slicing them open, peeling their mandibles from the predator’s scales.

Through it all, the massive beast remained still. It flinched when the knife dug too close, but it never snapped. As if it recognized the strange, hairless biped was performing a service.

By the time Skyler crushed the final parasite, he was covered in alien blood and exhausted to his bones. His flare sputtered and died, plunging them back into the dim bioluminescence.

He collapsed against a tree trunk, sliding down into the mud. He looked at the beast. The erratic flashing of its bioluminescent stripes had slowed to a steady, pulsing blue.

The beast raised its massive head. It looked at Skyler with unblinking golden eyes. Slowly, it hauled its six-ton bulk onto its four muscular legs, towering over the cadet.

“This is it,” Skyler thought. “I saved it, and now it’s going to eat me.”

The beast leaned down, its massive snout inches from Skyler’s face. Its hot breath smelled like raw meat and electricity. It opened its jaws—

—and gave Skyler’s chest a firm, rough nudge with its blunt nose.

Then it curled its massive body around the tree trunk Skyler was leaning against, completely encircling the human in a protective wall of armored scales. It let out a deep, rumbling sigh, rested its head on its paws, and closed its eyes.

Skyler sat there, pinned between the tree and six tons of lethal alien muscle. He reached over, grabbed his camera, and turned the lens to himself.

“Update log,” he whispered, a wild grin spreading across his exhausted face. “I think I just adopted a dog. I’m going to call him Barnaby.”

—

Skyler woke to a sound like a diesel engine idling against his spine. Barnaby was fast asleep, his massive rib cage expanding and contracting, emitting a low resonant purr that felt like a localized earthquake.

His wrist comp read 0800 hours. External temperature: negative thirty-five Celsius. If Barnaby hadn’t coiled around him, trapping their combined body heat, Skyler would have frozen to death hours ago.

“Day two. Hour fourteen,” he whispered to the lens. “I survived the night. Mostly because my new roommate is a living space heater.”

He panned the camera to capture Barnaby’s massive armored snout resting on paws the size of garbage can lids. The beast’s bioluminescent stripes pulsed a tranquil, slow azure.

“I don’t think the biology department is going to believe this footage. The apex predator of Gliese 832c is currently using my backpack as a pillow.”

Skyler took inventory. Half a liter of water left. Zero food. One survival knife. He was incredibly thirsty, and his stomach was loudly protesting the lack of calories.

“All right, Barnaby. Time to get up. If I don’t find water, I’m going to dehydrate before anything gets the chance to eat me.”

Barnaby stood up, shaking his massive frame like a wet dog, sending mud and crushed leaves flying. The beast sniffed the air, then looked at Skyler and gave a short, commanding bark. He began to trot into the obsidian-black forest.

Skyler jogged to keep up. “Following the giant alien seems like a solid survival strategy.”

—

For three hours they trekked through the midnight zone. The terrain was brutal—jagged crystalline rock formations and deep crevices filled with toxic-looking blue mist. Barnaby navigated with eerie, silent grace, completely belying his massive bulk.

Twice the beast stopped abruptly, his stripes flashing warning yellow. Both times Skyler froze and watched as Barnaby stared down unseen horrors—things with too many eyes or too many limbs that scurried away from the alpha’s presence. Barnaby was Skyler’s VIP escort through hell.

Around noon, they heard it: the rush of moving water. Barnaby led him to a subterranean river bursting through the cavernous root system of a canyon. The water was pitch black but fast-moving.

Skyler pulled out his military-grade filtration pump and began to drink greedily.

As Skyler rehydrated, Barnaby waded into the freezing river. The beast stood perfectly still, a dark statue against the rushing current. Suddenly, his head snapped down with the speed of a striking viper. When he lifted his snout, an eel-like creature—easily six feet long and thrashing violently—was clamped in his jaws.

With a sickening crunch, Barnaby snapped it in half, swallowing the larger piece. He waded back to the bank and dropped the remaining bloody half at Skyler’s feet. Then he sat back on his haunches expectantly.

Skyler looked at the raw, twitching meat. He looked at the camera. He looked back at Barnaby.

“Sushi,” he deadpanned. “My favorite.”

Using his magnesium starter and dried river moss, Skyler managed a small fire. He skewered the eel meat and roasted it until it was charred black. It tasted like battery acid and burnt tires, but it was protein.

“Entry four. Codependence established. He hunts, I cook. I think we’re going to make—”

Skyler stopped. He held up a hand.

*Clank. Whirr.* Faint, but unmistakable. The high-pitched whine of a servo motor. Mechanical. Artificial.

Barnaby heard it too. His stripes immediately flared an aggressive, violent crimson. A deep, guttural growl began to build in his chest.

Skyler grabbed his camera and his knife. “That’s not drop pod telemetry. That sounds like a drone.”

—

They moved silently up the ridge. Skyler stayed low, using Barnaby’s massive form as moving cover. As they crested the hill and peered down into an expansive, sunken clearing, Skyler’s breath hitched.

“Camera, are you getting this?”

Below, illuminated by heavy industrial floodlights, was a sprawling encampment. Two heavily modified, matte-black VTOL dropships—militarized Bell Textron Ospreys, their insignia stripped. Surrounding the ships were portable, high-voltage containment fences. Inside those fences were massive, reinforced steel cages.

Walking the perimeter were men and women in heavily armored, unmarked tactical gear, carrying SIG Sauer XM7 battle rifles modified with under-barrel neuro-stunners.

“Mercenaries. Private contractors.”

But it was what was inside the cages that made Skyler’s blood run cold. Three other beasts of Barnaby’s species. Battered, bloody, heavily chained with thick titanium tethers. One—a smaller female—was lying motionless, her bioluminescent stripes barely a faint, dying gray.

“They aren’t just surviving here. They’re poaching. Someone is paying private military contractors to illegally harvest the apex predators of Gliese 832c.”

Skyler zoomed in on a large crate being loaded into the nearest dropship. It was stenciled with the logo of Apex Biogenetics—a massive pharmaceutical and weapons manufacturer back on Earth.

The Coalition used Gliese 832c as a restricted military training ground. Corporate entities were strictly forbidden. This was a highly illegal black ops harvesting run. If these mercenaries saw a cadet with a live feed to the academy, Skyler would be shot on site.

The smart thing—the only logical thing—was to retreat, find a cave, and wait out his remaining forty-eight hours.

He looked at Barnaby. The beast was trembling, its golden eyes locked on the cages, its massive claws digging deep trenches into the rocky soil. It was looking at its kin.

Skyler thought about his drill instructor. *Empathy gets you killed, Pendleton.*

“Hey, Barnaby.” He reached out and placed a hand on the beast’s snout. Barnaby looked down at him. “You saved my life last night. I guess I owe you one.”

Skyler wasn’t a soldier. He couldn’t shoot a rifle with any accuracy, and he certainly couldn’t take on twenty heavily armed mercenaries in a firefight. But he was an engineer. And engineers knew how to break things.

He opened his tactical pack and dumped the contents into the dirt. Copper wire, his life straw, the trauma kit, the magnesium starter, his camera rig, and the heavy-duty micro-capacitors he’d stripped from his drop pod.

He looked down at the encampment. The portable generators powering the fences and floodlights were positioned near the tree line, humming loudly. The mercenaries were relying on the sheer lethality of the midnight zone to keep them safe. Their guns were all pointed inward at the cages.

“All right, buddy. Here’s the plan. I’m going to create a diversion—a big one. When the lights go out and the fence drops, you do what you do best.”

Barnaby let out a low, rumbling huff.

Skyler strapped the camera back onto his shoulder. “Recording active. Let’s make a documentary.”

—

He slipped away from Barnaby, using the dense obsidian underbrush to mask his approach. He crawled on his stomach for twenty agonizing minutes, inching closer to the deafening hum of the Cummins portable diesel generator.

Two mercenaries stood about forty feet away, smoking and complaining in thick Texan drawls.

“This planet is cursed. Soon as we load the last gland, I’m taking my payout and buying a beach in the Caribbean.”

“Just keep your eyes on the cages. These things can snap a titanium chain if they get enough leverage.”

Skyler reached the generator. He couldn’t blow it up—he didn’t have explosives. But he didn’t need to. He just needed to short the main power relay.

He took the bundle of stripped copper wire attached to his charged micro-capacitors and carefully jammed it directly into the generator’s exposed cooling fan housing, wedging it against the spinning turbine and the main electrical output line.

He turned and sprinted back into the dark tree line.

Three seconds later, the copper wire tangled in the turbine. The capacitors ripped directly into the main power relay.

*Boom!*

A shower of blinding blue sparks erupted from the generator. The massive floodlights died. The hum of the high-voltage fences wound down to silence. The entire encampment was plunged into pitch blackness.

“What the hell was that?”

“Generator blew! Night vision—now!”

But before the mercenaries could activate their tactical optics, a sound ripped through the clearing that froze the blood in their veins. A roar so loud, so primal, it physically shook the trees.

Out of the darkness, a six-ton shadow moving at forty miles per hour slammed into the side of the nearest Bell Textron dropship. The impact crumpled the armored fuselage like a tin can.

Barnaby had entered the chat.

His bioluminescent stripes were blazing a terrifying, blinding red, ruining the mercenaries’ night vision instantly. He pivoted his heavy spiked tail like a wrecking ball, taking out three mercenaries and sending them flying into the mud.

“Contact! Heavy contact!”

Gunfire erupted—the staccato crack of XM7 rifles echoing in the dark. Muzzle flashes illuminated Barnaby’s armored scales as the bullets sparked and deflected off his thick hide.

Skyler used the chaos. He darted out of the tree line, sprinting toward the steel cages. He reached the first cage. The electronic lock had died with the generator. He pulled the heavy latch, throwing his entire body weight into it. The steel door swung open.

Inside, a massive, scarred male beast looked at Skyler. It saw a human—the same species that had chained it. It bared its fangs.

Skyler didn’t flinch. He pointed out toward the camp where Barnaby was ripping the mounted turret off a dropship with his teeth.

“Go! Go help your friend.”

The scarred beast looked at Barnaby, then back at Skyler. With a roar that vibrated the fillings in Skyler’s teeth, the newly freed apex predator charged out of the cage and lunged into the fray.

Skyler scrambled to the second cage. He was a twenty-two-year-old engineering dropout from Ohio, standing in the middle of a war zone on a pitch-black alien planet, orchestrating a prison break for six-ton monsters.

He glanced at his shoulder rig. The red recording light blinked steadily through the smoke and mud.

“Academy command!” Skyler yelled over the sound of tearing metal and screaming mercenaries. “If you’re watching this, I think I’m going to need extra credit.”

—

The clearing was absolute chaos.

The freed scarred beast—a six-ton battering ram of teeth, muscle, and rage—slammed into the mercenary line. SIG Sauer armor-piercing rounds pinged uselessly off its carbon-black scales as it swept its heavy tail, sending three heavily armed contractors flying into the high-voltage perimeter fence.

Skyler scrambled toward the third cage. Inside lay the female. Her stripes were a sickly, flickering gray. She was breathing in shallow, ragged gasps. Unlike the others, she was secured to the floor with heavy titanium restraint collars.

“Hey, girl. Hold on.”

He threw open the steel door and dropped to his knees in the muck, inspecting the collars. Magnetic locking mechanism. Encrypted digital keypad. His survival knife was useless.

He looked back at the battle. Barnaby was holding his own, but the element of surprise was wearing off.

“Fall back! Form a firing line by the second bird!” A man in heavy tactical gear with chevrons on his chest—the captain—yelled. “Bring up the Lockheed launcher! Burn that big bastard down!”

Two mercenaries broke from the main group, running toward the surviving Osprey. One pulled a heavy shoulder-mounted weapon from an equipment crate—a Lockheed Martin FGM-220 thermal plasma launcher, designed to melt through heavy tank armor.

The merc hoisted it onto his shoulder. The targeting laser cut a bright green line through the smoke, painting a dot directly on Barnaby’s broad chest.

Skyler’s heart slammed against his ribs. Barnaby was fast, but he couldn’t dodge a localized plasma payload.

He desperately scanned his surroundings. Next to the cages sat a piece of heavy equipment—a Caterpillar 950GC wheel loader, splattered with alien mud. The key was in the ignition.

Skyler bolted for the cab. He ripped open the door, cranked the diesel engine, slammed the transmission into high gear, and dumped the hydraulic levers forward. The massive loader lurched ahead, its heavy steel bucket dropping to form a makeshift battering ram.

The mercenary with the plasma launcher had a solid lock on Barnaby. His finger tightened on the trigger.

“Hey, assholes!”

The Caterpillar slammed directly into the side of the equipment crate the mercenaries were using for cover. The impact was deafening. The six-foot steel crate crumpled, knocking the heavy weapon specialist off his feet. The plasma launcher fired a fraction of a second later, sending a blinding sphere of superheated plasma streaking wildly into the sky.

Skyler threw the loader into reverse, spinning the wheel. He raised the bucket and swung the massive machine around, placing the ten-ton bulk of the Caterpillar squarely between the surviving mercenaries and the cages.

He was a human shield encased in industrial steel.

The captain stared at the loader in disbelief. “What the hell is that? Suppress that vehicle!”

Bullets began to rain against the Caterpillar, shattering the reinforced glass. Skyler ducked beneath the dashboard, glass raining down on his tactical rig.

Seeing Skyler draw the heavy fire, Barnaby let out a roar of absolute fury. His bioluminescence flared into a blinding, strobing crimson. He charged the remaining defensive line. The scarred beast flanked from the right.

A perfectly executed pincer movement by two animals with terrifying, almost human, tactical intelligence.

The mercenary line shattered. “Aborting! Get on the bird!”

The captain sprinted for the open ramp of the surviving Osprey. The pilot was already spooling up the vertical thrusters. Four mercenaries managed to dive onto the ramp as the dropship violently lifted off, leaving their dead and wounded behind.

The Osprey banked hard and disappeared into the bruised purple sky.

—

Silence descended. Broken only by the crackle of fires, the hum of the idling Caterpillar, and the heavy ragged breathing of the beasts.

Skyler killed the engine, pushed the shattered door open, and climbed down. His legs felt like jelly. He unclipped his camera rig—the red light still blinking.

“Entry five. Private military contractors repelled. Heavy machinery applied. I need a vacation.”

Barnaby trotted over, bumping his massive snout against Skyler’s chest. A check-in. Skyler leaned against the beast’s warm scales. Then he remembered the female.

He ran to the dead captain’s gear, found a hardened magnetic skeleton key, and sprinted back to the third cage. He slapped the key against the digital locks. The heavy collars hissed open.

The female didn’t move immediately. She was starving, dehydrated, severely wounded. Barnaby moved into the cage, letting out a soft trilling sound. The scarred beast joined him. They stood over her, nuzzling her flank, communicating in low vibrations.

Skyler watched, adjusting the camera lens. “They’re a pack. A family.”

He needed answers. He walked toward the only structure left intact—a reinforced tactical command tent.

Inside, a Dell rugged extreme military-grade laptop sat on a folding table, still booted up. Skyler cracked his knuckles. Data systems were his native language.

It didn’t take long. The folder was labeled *Project Alpen Glow — Harvest Manifest*.

“Camera, you’re getting this right? These are shipping manifests. They’re extracting the beast’s spinal fluid and adrenal glands. Apex Biogenetics is synthesizing it into a combat stim called Aegis-7. Drastically increases human reaction times and regeneration. But the synthesis requires *live* harvesting. The beasts die in the process.”

He clicked on the next folder: *Acquisition Protocols*.

“To find the beasts, they need bait. The predators are highly intelligent. They avoid mechanized patrols. But they are fiercely territorial. They respond to foreign biological intrusions.”

Skyler scrolled down to a sub-file. A list of names appeared.

*Cadet Jenkins, R.*
*Cadet O’Malley, T.*
*Cadet Pendleton, S.*

It was the roster for his drop class. Next to each name were active GPS coordinates. Live telemetry.

“They’re tracking us.” A profound sense of betrayal washed over him. “The drop pod malfunction wasn’t a micrometeoroid. It was a remote override. They intentionally drop cadets outside the safe zone every cycle. The panic, the blood, the distress beacons—we ring the dinner bell. We draw the alphas out so the mercenaries can ambush them.”

He clicked the final document. A digital payment ledger routed through a shell corporation bank on Mars. The authorizing signature on the Coalition side—the man signing off on the acceptable training fatalities and providing the telemetry to Apex Biogenetics—stared back at him in stark black pixels.

*Commander Elias Harrison, Head of Academy Training.*

Skyler slumped back in the chair. His drill instructor—the man who told them never to show empathy—was selling his own students to a corporate meat grinder.

“The Crucible final exam is just a cover for an illegal poaching operation. They aren’t coming to rescue me. Standard extraction is in forty-eight hours, but if my pod deviated this far, they’ll send a cleanup crew to make sure the bait didn’t survive to tell the tale.”

Skyler pulled an encrypted flash drive from his vest, jammed it into the Dell, and began copying the entire hard drive—manifests, telemetry logs, Harrison’s signatures, the bank routes.

Once the transfer was complete, he secured the drive and picked up the camera.

“Command, if any honest officer is watching this on a delay, hear me now. Commander Harrison is compromised. He is trading cadet lives for corporate payouts. I have the data to prove it, but my orbital transmitter is destroyed. I can’t broadcast from down here in the mud.”

He pulled up a topographical map. Sixty miles north, piercing through the stormy atmosphere of the midnight zone, was Mount Erebus. At its peak sat an old, abandoned orbital relay tower left behind by the initial survey teams. If he could patch his transmitter into that dish, he could broadcast the data packet directly to Coalition High Command on Earth—bypassing Harrison entirely.

“I’m heading for the Erebus relay. I’m going to blow this entire operation wide open.”

He walked out of the tent. The three beasts were waiting. The female was on her feet, leaning heavily against the scarred male. Barnaby stood at the front, his massive tail swishing slowly.

Skyler looked at the six-ton alien predator. They had both been used. They had both been marked for death by the same corrupt system.

“Hey, Barnaby. I have to take a walk—a long one—up that mountain. There’s going to be a lot of guys with guns trying to stop me.”

Barnaby let out a low rumble. He looked at Skyler, then turned to the other two beasts. He let out a sharp, commanding bark. The scarred male nodded, guiding the female gently into the dark brush, disappearing into the safety of the deep forest.

Barnaby turned back to Skyler. He lowered his massive shoulder to the mud, dipping his head.

Skyler stared. “You want to give me a ride?”

Barnaby huffed impatiently. Skyler climbed up the thick scales, straddling the beast’s broad back, gripping the heavy ridge spikes like saddle horns. He clipped the camera rig securely to his shoulder.

“Entry six. New objective: the Erebus relay. Mode of transport: six tons of pissed-off apex predator. Harrison, if you’re watching this—you messed with the wrong cadet.”

Barnaby roared—a sound that echoed for miles across the dark canopy. With a powerful lunge, the beast carried the human off into the obsidian forest.

—

The trek up Mount Erebus was a brutal vertical nightmare. As they climbed higher, the temperature plummeted, the air growing perilously thin. If Skyler hadn’t been pressed directly against Barnaby’s massively radiating six-ton form, his blood would have frozen solid hours ago.

“Camera battery at twenty percent.” His lips were cracked and bleeding. “Elevation roughly fourteen thousand feet. The Erebus relay is just over the next ridge. But we’ve got company.”

Below them, cutting through the eternal darkness, were the sharp, synchronized beams of searchlights. A hunter-killer squad. Commander Harrison had realized his files were copied. He had deployed his own black ops retrieval team—Echo Actual—armed and explicitly ordered to leave no survivors.

Skyler could hear the high-pitched whine of Boston Dynamics mechanized combat hounds leading the pack. Autonomous quadrupedal drones armed with twin-linked rotary cannons and thermal optics.

“They’re tracking my suit’s residual thermal signature.” He looked at his wrist comp. “We need to break their line of sight, or those drones are going to paint us for an orbital strike.”

Barnaby let out a low rumble, his golden eyes scanning the treacherous, icy cliff face. He moved toward a massive overhang of glacial ice balanced perilously over the narrow pass the mercenaries had to use.

Skyler saw what the beast was planning. “You want to drop the roof on them? I can help with that.”

He dismounted. He had one emergency fragmentation grenade left—standard issue, for clearing fortified bunkers. He wedged it into a fault line in the crystalline ice directly above the pass, tied the pin to a length of copper wire, and ran the line back behind a heavy outcropping of basalt rock.

“Come on, you bastards.”

Five minutes later, the mechanical clatter of the Boston Dynamics hounds echoed off the canyon walls. Three of them trotted into the pass, thermal sensors sweeping. Behind them marched a dozen elite operatives in heavily insulated whiteout combat armor, carrying Heckler & Koch magnetic rail rifles.

Leading them was Captain Griggs—a man whose reputation for brutality was well-known.

“Spread out. The thermal trail ends here. The kid is close.”

Skyler pulled the wire. The grenade detonated deep inside the glacial fault. For a second, nothing happened. Then the mountain groaned. A spiderweb of massive fissures shot through the ice overhang.

*Crack.*

With a sound like thunder, a thousand tons of ancient compressed ice sheared off the cliff face.

“Avalanche! Look out!”

The ice and rock slammed into the pass. The combat hounds were instantly crushed, their metal chassis flattened. Half the mercenary squad was swept over the edge. Griggs and a few others barely managed to dive into a shallow cave, pinned down by the debris field.

Skyler vaulted back onto Barnaby’s back. “Go, buddy, go.”

Barnaby lunged upward, his heavy claws finding purchase on the sheer rock, carrying them over the final crest and onto the frozen, wind-blasted summit of Mount Erebus.

—

The summit was a desolate graveyard of jagged ice and petrified basalt. Rising from the frozen plateau was the Erebus relay—a brutalist monolith of rusting titanium and heavy parabolic dishes, abandoned a decade ago.

Skyler slid off Barnaby’s shoulder, his legs giving out as his boots hit the ice. He crawled the last twenty feet to the base of the relay tower. Barnaby followed slowly, limping, his sides heaving like giant bellows. His bioluminescent stripes were a dim, pulsing indigo.

“Almost there, buddy.”

Skyler dragged himself to the mechanized bulkhead door. Beside it was an external access terminal—screen shattered, entombed in permafrost. He drew his survival knife and brought the pommel down on the access panel, shattering the frozen casing.

He ripped the damaged paneling away, exposing the ancient fiber optic trunk lines and copper analog relays underneath. His hands were shaking so violently he could barely hold the knife.

He unclipped the dead Dell laptop from his harness, ripping the motherboard free just to salvage the input/output ports. He pulled the encrypted flash drive from his vest.

“Okay. Think.”

The relay was powered down. He needed to trick the ancient analog system into accepting a localized power surge to wake up the transmitter. He grabbed the heavy-duty power cable connecting his drop suit to its primary lithium-ion battery, sliced the cord, and jammed the live wires directly into the Cisco power relay board.

Sparks showered over his visor. A low, subterranean hum began to vibrate through the deck plates. The geothermal taps were waking up. A small emerald green diagnostic screen flickered to life.

*Local uplink established. Waiting for handshake protocol.*

Skyler jammed the flash drive into the salvaged port and