Ccg 8.1.4 Apr 2026

He looked like a corpse that had refused to lie down. His skin was gray. His left arm ended in a cauterized stump. But his eyes—those sharp, dark eyes—were alive. And they were smiling.

She keyed the ship’s intercom. “Mercer. Get to the bridge. Now.”

Her first officer arrived in ninety seconds, still wiping synth-grease from his knuckles. “What’s got your wires crossed, Captain?”

“I know what it is,” Elara said. “I wrote the damn protocol. Ccg: Command Contingency Group. 8.1.4: Abandon all protocols. Return to point of origin. The dead are not dead. ” Ccg 8.1.4

“That’s an order, Commander.” The descent took fourteen hours. The Vindicator was a tugboat, not a submersible. By the time they reached the fissure, the hull was groaning like a dying animal. Outside the viewport, the methane sea was a black mirror, flecked with crystalline hydrocarbons that glittered like broken teeth.

“Captain—”

“Then why use a personal authenticator I never filed?” Elara stood up. Her knees ached. She was too old for ghosts. But she’d left Jin for the fire. She’d sealed the blast doors herself, his voice screaming through the comm: Go, Sundog! Go! He looked like a corpse that had refused to lie down

The inside of the pod smelled of recycled sweat and old blood. The lights flickered, weak and orange. And there, strapped into a command chair that had been jury-rigged with a dozen different life-support tubes, was Jin Sol.

She keyed the ship’s log. One line.

“Because I saw who shot us down.” Jin’s eyes hardened. “It wasn’t the Tarrans, Elara. The torpedo that killed the Orion had Colonial Guard markings. Ccg 8.1.4 wasn’t a distress code. It was an execution code. Someone in command wanted Unit 8 dead. All of us. I didn’t know who to trust. So I waited. And I fixed the beacon only when I heard your transponder three days ago.” But his eyes—those sharp, dark eyes—were alive

“That’s a Colonial Guard priority distress,” he said. “Class-One. The kind you only pull if the alternative is feeding your crew into a star.”

“It’s a trap,” Mercer said. “The Syndicate. The Tarrans. Someone who cracked the old archives.”

She turned the slate toward him. Mercer’s face, usually a slab of unreadable stone, flickered with something raw. Fear.

“You stupid, stubborn bastard,” she whispered.