Between the calm and the fissure

The silence in the waiting room of the Quetzal Unit was thick, sticky. Unnatural.

They had been at the Gigi-1 moon base for three standard cycles, waiting for orders that were not coming. For an elite team accustomed to the frenetic pace of Nepantla Systems operations, the quiet was more unsettling than a combat alarm. Corinelle had abandoned her training routine out of sheer frustration and was now sharpening a combat knife with methodical, exasperated slowness. Prince of Vael and Lynel were conversing quietly over a star map, but their discussion lacked the usual urgency. Even Eldrinch, normally an ocean of calm, seemed to watch the specks of dust dancing in a beam of light with unusual attention.

Only two people in the room seemed to feel the same electric current beneath the surface of stillness.

Lion, from his seat, looked up from the datapad he had been pretending to read for the last hour. His eyes met, for a split second, those of Airen, who was in the far corner of the room, his paper book in his hands. Airen did not raise his head, but his fingers paused over the page. It was an almost imperceptible signal: a very slight nod from Lion, an almost invisible narrowing of the eyes from Airen. The message was clear and mutual, conveyed in the silent language of those who know that peace is often the prelude to hell.

Something was wrong.

Unable to stand the inactivity any longer, Lion stood up and said, "I'm going to the training center."

The simulation room was his sanctuary. A space of steel and light where thought could give way to instinct. He activated the "Swarm" program, and a dozen chrome and obsidian combat drones emerged from the floor, their optical lenses glowing a predatory red.

The fight began. Lion moved with a fluid, brutal grace, a whirlwind of precise movement. A drone would launch, he would dodge it, using the attacker's momentum to deflect its trajectory into another. A shot of stun energy would cut through the air; Lion would spin, and the projectile would impact the drone behind him. It was a ballet of controlled violence.

But her mind was not there. It was drifting, caught in the echoes of the previous night's dream. Senseless fragments came back to him: the glow of a red medallion, the sound of a universe cracking, a voice whispering a question.... "...save what you still have left, or avenge what you have lost..."

It was an oversight of barely half a second. As his mind became entangled in that echo, his body lagged a millisecond behind his instinct. A drone, which should have been an easy target, pivoted on its axis and unloaded a kinetic pulse straight into his torso.

It was not a brutal blow, he had not been damaged, if not incapacitated. But it was more than enough. The dry, humiliating impact of complacency stole the air from his lungs and sent him sprawling back against the padded floor of the room. The emergency lights flickered and the remaining drones retreated, the droning of the training program abruptly ceasing.

"End of simulation. Security protocol activated," announced the computerized voice.

Lion lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling, more angry with himself than in pain.

"Well, well. Looks like the great leader of the Quetzal Unit has woken up with two left feet." A hand reached out toward him. Lion followed the arm until he found the smiling face of a young man with perpetually messy hair and a couple of coffee stains on his white scientist's coat.

“Kenji,” said Lion, accepting the help to get up. “Don't you have any genes to modify or robots that have escaped you to retrieve?”

“Very funny,” replied Dr. Kenji Tanaka, head of the base's xenotechnology division. “But I didn't come to see your ballet with the bots. Actually, it's good that I ran into you. It saves me from having to go through official channels.”

Kenji's smile faded, replaced by a serious urgency that instantly put Lion on alert. The scientist activated a holographic tablet, blue light bathing their faces.

“I was analyzing the anomalous energy readings from the Kalisto sector, the ones everyone is ignoring,” Kenji said quietly, bringing the tablet closer to Lion. “I compared them to an encrypted file I found on the Nepantla network, an incident report from decades ago... Lion, you need to see this.”

Lion looked down at the screen. He saw diagrams, reports, lines of code... and in the center, an image.

His calm expression shattered. His eyes widened, and a chill that had nothing to do with the blow he had received ran down his spine. 

Lion looked at Kenji with a mixture of disbelief and horror. “...it's not just rumors, is it?