On November 21st, Chen tried to fly the shuttle manually. The ice reached up from the ground and swallowed the landing struts. The craft tilted, and the cockpit glass frosted over in a fractal that looked exactly like a snarling dog’s face. Chen didn’t scream. She just hummed that three-tone chord, her fingers tapping the controls in a rhythm that wasn’t hers.
Thorne shook her head. “He wasn’t listening. He was answering .”
“It doesn’t want to hurt us,” Kovac said, staring at his new, crystalline palm with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “It wants to include us.”
Thorne finally understood. She pulled up the old myth. Cerberus: the three-headed hound that guarded the gate of the underworld. One head for the past, one for the present, one for the future. But the ice didn’t have three heads. It had three phases .
But the ice moon of Hades-9 still sings. And somewhere, in the dark between the stars, a three-headed gate now has five new guardians, waiting for the next ship to answer the call.
The station went silent.
The station logs for —that’s what the crew called it, halfway through the third week—read like a slow-motion scream.