The Artifact That Echoed Every Voice Below Meridian Outpost

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The chopper rattled low over the ice field, sonar pinging blind in the teeth of a coming blizzard.

My headset filled with white hiss, pilot on comms, most of his words chopped away by gust and static spitting off the belly radar.

All I caught was no one's responding, last signal ended two days ago, they said you're waiting till extraction window, good luck.

The craft set down hard enough to jar my molars, skids screeching against iced over steel.

He thumbed the hatch and motioned me out with practiced efficiency.

Stepping onto the pad I squinted through stinging snow.

Meridian outpost rose up, an ugly stilt-legged mass shivering on the edge of the boreal plain, half its lower modules already drift buried.

The snow was blinding, driven in knife-blade sheets, snatching my breath, swirling around the battered antennae and floodlights that jerked on and off with each pulse of the failing grid.

No one at the gate, no yellow-jacketed tech waving behind the safety glass.

I toggled my belt radio, no reply, just a distorted recursive loop on channel 6, a recorded distress ping repeating every 30 seconds.

Don't let them in.

The words were painted two meters high across the airlock's inner door in somebody's frantic trembling scrawl.

The paint, dried maroon, almost black looked like it had been slashed on with numbed fingers in the last moments before flight.

Under my boots, the mesh entryway buzzed with static discharge, little blue sparks skidding from metal to my skin when I keyed my credstick to cycle the inner hatch.