The upland rainforest did not open for them.
It did not part or welcome or thin into anything that could be mistaken for a trail. It only yielded under pressure, the way wet fabric yields when a shoulder forces through it. Every step was friction. Every surface carried secondary life that did not care who owned the tree beneath it, or who claimed the air above it, or how much money had been spent on the idea that this place could be organized.
The canopy overhead was a layered ceiling, leaf on leaf on leaf, stitched together by vines as thick as cabling and as fine as hair. Between those layers, light broke through in fractured panes, green-shifted and restless. On the ground, the air held moisture like breath. The visors of their masks fogged, cleared, and fogged again. Their boots sank into rot that had been building longer than the oldest chart in their map packs. Each pull free made a sound like tearing cloth, soft and indecent.
They had approached from the south after landing their Samson 16 and leaving the pilot behind to watch the aircraft. They continued on foot.
The lead tech, Mace, kept his voice low out of habit. It was not stealth. Nothing here cared about volume. It was simply that loud speech felt wrong, the way shouting in a museum felt wrong even when no one else was present. Even through the faceplate, his jaw held tight when he spoke, and his eyes kept flicking to the green wall ahead as if expecting it to rearrange itself.
"Signal's clean," he said into the throat mic.
Behind him, Keene swept a handheld scanner probe in slow arcs, data popping on his reader. He moved with the careful patience of someone performing a task he did not trust. The device showed what it always showed in this kind of work: noise with patterns that pretended to mean something. Keene's mouth pulled into a thin line behind his mask when the display failed to settle, and he re-swept the same space as if repetition could force certainty. The only pattern that mattered was that the site still existed.
It was supposed to have been swallowed.
On paper, it did not qualify as a facility anymore. It was a line item in a decommissioned ledger from another century. It had been placed on a sunset list after the program ended. The remaining equipment had been classified as not recoverable. The human cost of retrieving it had been judged higher than the value of whatever it contained. The file did not say "abandoned," because no one in procurement liked the sound of that word. It said "closed out."
"Closed out" meant the same thing as buried, if the jungle was patient enough.
The first visible structure was not a building.
It was a corner.
A right angle caught in growth. A slab of composite alloy that should have been reflective was dull with years of fungal skin. Moss layered it. Lichen wrote pale maps across it. Roots had rounded the edges down, not from kindness, but from persistence. Where metal should have been cold, it held the same ambient warmth as the surrounding bark, as if the facility had been breathing with the forest long enough to forget its origin.
Mace stopped without signaling. The others halted because stopping was contagious in a place like this. His shoulders rose a fraction and stayed there, held. For a moment, no one spoke. The rainforest filled the silence with wet insect rasps and distant calls that did not sound like warnings or welcomes, only continuation.
Keene crouched after clipping his scanner to a hook on his belt and put his gloved hand on the slab. He pressed. The surface did not give. It was solid, but not in the way stone is firm. It had the stubborn density of engineered material. He tapped it twice with the knuckle of his glove, listening, head tilted as if his ears could tell him what his tools would not.
Thok. Thok.
A muted sound came back, deep and wrong, as if the inside had filled with soil and water and something else that changed how sound traveled.
"Structure holds," Keene said. His voice came out flatter than he meant it to.
"Not a collapse," Mace replied. His eyes were on his reader, not on the slab, but his fingers tightened around the device as if it could anchor him. "If it hasn't pancaked, then it's either anchored into bedrock or the roots have made it part of the ground."
They moved east around the corner in single file. There was no doorway in view, no open access, only a wall that had become terrain. A vine as thick as a man's wrist ran up it like a seam. Bioluminescent threads glowed faintly in the dim. They pulsed in slow, lazy waves, not signaling anything, just living. Between those threads, small pale bodies clung in mats, translucent and slick, feeding on the damp and each other. When Mace brushed one with his sleeve, it ruptured soundlessly and left a smear that looked too much like fat. Mace recoiled half a step before he caught himself, then wiped his sleeve once against a leaf with a sharp, annoyed motion.
The second structure appeared ten meters ahead, half-submerged in a slope of compacted earth and vegetation. It should have been a maintenance hatch or service entrance, a circular plate set into a low rise. Instead, it looked like a boulder that had grown fungal shelves and root bridges and a small garden of spined plants. A thin trickle of water ran down one side and vanished under it. The trickle carried a faint rust tint that did not belong to rainwater.
Mace's internal map clicked into alignment. The archive had included old site drawings. Most of them were useless, drawn before the jungle did its work, but the geometry still helped. His chin lifted slightly as if that small certainty mattered.
"That's the access cap," he said.
Keene's reader brightened as his scanner swept the boulder. The tool returned low-grade readings and a mess of organic interference. Keene's eyes narrowed, and he made a small frustrated sound through his nose.
"No power," Keene said. "No active lines. Whatever this place was, it's dead."
They all knew that. They had been sent here because the site was dead. The point was to confirm it.
There were other teams doing the same thing across the continent, walking through old scars and old projects, marking them for salvage or for forgetfulness. It was a long, dull process. A necessary one. The company faced new needs and budgets, along with old mistakes that still occupied space in the database.
Mace reached the access cap and knelt. He brushed aside a curtain of wet moss. His motions were practiced, almost gentle, the way you handle something that can cut you if you stop paying attention.
Under it, the surface was not stone at all.
It was layered, keratin-like plating, ridged in shallow arcs. The ridges were clogged with loam and spores. A thick mat of fungus had fused with it so thoroughly that it looked like geology. The texture was wrong in a way his eyes could not label, but his hands understood immediately. It was too organized. Too deliberate. Not a hatch. Not bark. Something built to endure and shed damage.
Keene leaned in. His posture tightened; his head moved forward as if he could smell the wrongness through the mask. "That's not the hatch."
Mace's gloved fingers traced the edge, searching for the seam where engineered metal should have met engineered metal. There was no seam. The cap did not meet anything. It was whole.
"Then what is it?" Keene asked. His voice lifted on the last word, despite himself.
"Something that grew here," Mace said, but he did not sound convinced. His gaze kept snagging on the regularity of the ridges, the way they repeated with intent.
He looked up and around. The actual access cap might still exist, buried under meters of roots and compacted rot. The site drawings said there should be a hatch within five meters of this location. That did not mean the hatch would be visible.
He stood and signaled a perimeter check. The gesture was clipped and impatient, like he wanted the forest to obey procedure.
Their security escort, Roa, moved to the right without comment, rifle angled down, muzzle guard on. His shoulders stayed loose, but his head did not stop turning. The visor hid his eyes, yet the set of his neck and the way he planted his feet said he was counting angles, exits, and distances. There was no reason to shoot anything. If something large wanted to kill them, a rifle would not make it fair. The rifle was still carried. Comfort rituals survived longer than logic.
Mace returned his attention to the plated mass. He ran the small field probe scanner over the surface. The device clicked and whined, producing a faint hum. It was meant to read for manufactured alloys and data storage remnants. It returned nothing useful.
The surface was warm beneath the probe. Not sun-warm. Body-warm.
Mace paused. His head turned a fraction, as if the reading had spoken in a language he did not want to understand.
Keene noticed and shifted closer. His hand hovered near the scanner instinctively, ready to take it or steady it. "What?"
Mace moved the probe to a different ridge, then another. The variance held. His throat worked once, a swallow that did not match the dryness of his voice.
"Thermal's wrong," he said.
"Ambient mismatch?" Keene asked, and his shoulders rose slightly as he waited for the answer.
"By a few degrees."
Keene stared at the mass as if looking harder could turn it into something familiar. His brows drew together behind the faceplate. "Could be fermentation. Fungal heat."
"Maybe," Mace said.
He should have left it there. He should have logged the anomaly and moved on. The mission was simple: confirm the site had no salvageable data. Not to solve mysteries. Not to put hands on things that did not ask to be handled.
But the surface pattern irritated his sense of order. The ridges looked like they had been laid down, not grown randomly. The plating looked like it belonged to something that had decided, at some point, to protect itself.
He reached out and pressed his palm against it.
It was not stone. It was not metal. It had a subtle give. Rigid enough to hold shape, but not rigid enough to be lifeless.
Mace held his palm there for a breath longer than necessary. His shoulders stiffened, and his head dipped as if he were listening with his skin.
Under the glove, he felt a faint vibration.
Not a pulse. Not a tremor from distant fauna. It was local. It was inside.
His hand jerked away before his mind caught up.
Keene saw it. His head snapped toward Mace. "What?"
Mace flexed his fingers inside the glove, as if the sensation might be lodged there. His jaw worked behind the mask; the denial came too fast. "Nothing."
Keene made a sound of disbelief. He did not move closer, but his stance widened, bracing, like he expected the jungle to respond to the lie. "You don't move like that for nothing."
Mace forced himself to slow down. He was a field tech. He had been on Pandora long enough to learn that panic had no value. If something was wrong, it would still be wrong whether he moved fast or slow. Better to be deliberate.
He lifted the probe again and ran it over the same area in a tighter pattern, concentrating on the spot where his palm had been. His hand was steadier now, but his wrist held tension.
The device whined. The reading still meant nothing in terms of salvage. The thermal variance remained, and the subtle vibration did not show on any tool built for sane environments.
Roa spoke for the first time since they entered the structure's visual range. His voice was calm, but the angle of his head said he had been watching them more than the object. "We're not here for rocks."
Mace glanced at him. Roa's mask was angled toward the tree line, not toward the plated mass.
"We're here to confirm the archive is empty," Mace said. He kept his tone even, but his fingers tightened again on the probe, knuckles whitening inside the glove.
Roa did not respond. He did not need to.
Keene's tone softened slightly, which was more alarming than his irritation. His shoulders dropped, then tensed again. "Mace. Is it… biological?"
Mace did not like how the word sat in his mouth. Biological made it sound like they were dealing with a creature. A creature implied responsibility. It implied they had found something the company had left behind that still lived.
"Unknown," he said.
Keene reached out, not touching the same spot but close. He pressed gently. His hand moved with caution, fingers spread as if he could feel the boundary of wrongness before it bit him.
The mass did not react.
He pressed harder. "Feels like keratin." He tried to make the observation sound clinical and failed; his voice tightened on the last syllable.
"Or calcified bark," Mace said.
Keene's scanner chirped. He frowned at the display, then frowned harder, like the numbers had insulted him. "No signal. No active neuroelectronics. Nothing that reads like fauna."
"Then it's just something," Mace said, trying to make the sentence true. He sounded like he was convincing himself.
They moved on.
The ruins did not present themselves cleanly. They emerged in pieces. Fragments of wall here. A collapsed corridor there. A partial dome that had transformed into a hill. The shapes were recognizable in a way that made them more unsettling. A human structure integrated into the landscape did not look natural, but it also did not look foreign anymore. It looked like a scar that had healed over, leaving a surface that moved when you pressed it and bled when you cut it.
They found the entrance further east than the schematic indicated.
Upon crossing the threshold, Mace found a panel face-down in the mud, half-buried beneath creeping roots. He had to cut the roots away. When he did, the plant tissue bled clear sap that smelled faintly sweet, and threads of pale larvae spilled out with it, writhing briefly before drowning in the sap like insects caught in sugar. Keene flinched as the larvae moved; his hand twitched toward his belt, then stopped, useless. Roa's head turned sharply at the motion, then returned to scanning the corridor.
The panel was cracked. The surface glass delaminated. Mace wiped it clean enough to see the iconography.
Old RDA mark. Old program tag.
The project designation was truncated by time and damage, but the letters that remained were enough to tighten his stomach. His breathing changed, audible for a moment through the mask filter.
Whitmore's program.
He refrained from saying the name aloud.
There were stories about Whitmore's projects, mostly told as jokes in mess halls and maintenance bays. People shared those jokes about old research divisions, now shut down and buried because no one wanted to admit what they had been for. The jokes were vague and often wrong. They were still told, because laughter was easier than recordkeeping.
Mace did not like being inside a joke.
He turned the panel over and found a socket. He pulled a cable from his pack and tried to interface with his reader.
Nothing.
He tried again with a different connector. Still nothing.
Keene watched, leaning forward slightly as if he could will the port to respond. "Any data?"
"Dead," Mace said.
"That's the mission," Keene replied, and his voice carried relief. He exhaled hard, fogging his mask for a second.
They moved deeper, following the slope of what used to be a service path. The path had become a streambed. Water ran through it in a thin sheet, moving with the quiet insistence of gravity. Mace stepped over it and felt the chill through his boot sole. The water smelled clean. It was probably full of things that would eat human flesh if given enough time. Pandora did not need teeth to take what it wanted.
Once they exited the service path, it opened into a large clearing that had served as the central hub of the facility. Now it existed as a remnant of whatever project had once been conducted here, the purpose eroded but the shape stubborn.
At the center of the clearing, the ground rose again.
And there it was.
Another boulder that was not a boulder.
It was the largest single mass in the clearing, positioned as if the earth itself had lifted it into place. Fungal shelves grew along its lower arc. Vines wrapped it in a loose net. A fallen branch lay across its top like a casual barrier. The branch was stripped in places, the bark peeled back to pale wet wood. Something had been chewing it. Something with small teeth and time.
The size of the object was too large to be a rock.
Even in a place that produced megafauna and trees taller than buildings, the density of its presence was noticeable. It made the surrounding ruins feel smaller. It made the clearing feel arranged, like the site had been built around this mass rather than the other way around.
Keene stared at it longer than he had before. His posture went still. His mouth opened slightly behind the mask, then closed. "That's the same thing."
Mace nodded. He did not look away. His head tilted a fraction, as if angles might make it less true.
They approached from a different angle. Mace circled the object, eyes tracking ridges and borders that were not actually seams. The surface pattern repeated in arcs, each slightly offset like growth rings. It did not look like geology. It did not look like any plant structure he recognized. In places, the fungus had worn thin and revealed a glossy band beneath, pale under grime, too smooth to be rock.
Roa stood back, scanning the three branching routes leading deeper into the facility. Even he gave the object a brief glance, then dismissed it with controlled indifference. The dismissal was practiced; his hand hovered a little closer to the rifle grip anyway.
Mace's mind ran through the simplest options. An old containment pod. A dropped industrial component. A section of hull plating. Something the jungle had grown over.
But the shape was too organic, too smooth in the wrong places. It had a subtle asymmetry that suggested life rather than manufacture.
Keene stepped close enough to place his scanner against it. The device clicked and chirped.
"Still no signal," Keene said. He sounded irritated now, as if the lack of signal was the object's refusal to cooperate. He slapped the scanner lightly once, then stopped, embarrassed by the gesture.
Mace looked down at the base.
The ground around it was packed harder than the surrounding soil, as if something heavy had been sitting there for a long time. Roots ran beneath it, not over it. The jungle had not grown through it. It had grown around it, accommodating, as if the mass had been declared part of the terrain by force of persistence.
Mace crouched and brushed aside a curtain of moss near the lower edge. Underneath, the surface transitioned from ridged plating to a smoother band. The glossy strip was faintly stained, as if rainwater had been running down it for years, collecting trace minerals and leaving them behind in thin lines.
He saw a faint border there. Not a seam like a door. A natural boundary between layers.
His stomach tightened. His mouth went dry; he could feel it even through filtered air.
An egg.
The thought arrived without invitation. Absurd, and yet the word fit the shape in a way nothing else did. A single egg the size of a small vehicle, nested in the center of a forgotten human ruin, wrapped in fungus and vine-like camouflage.
His mind tried to reject it, then replaced rejection with assessment.
Pandora produced large eggs. Some terrestrial megafauna laid single heavy clutches. Aerial predators often laid fewer eggs because each offspring was expensive. That was Earth logic. Pandora did not follow Earth logic cleanly, but patterns still existed.
If it was an egg, what was inside?
Keene's voice cut into the thought. "Why would an egg be here?" The question came out too sharp and too human, and he immediately swallowed as if he wished he could take it back.
Mace did not answer. He did not have a safe answer.
Roa shifted. The movement tightened the space. His shoulders squared, and he angled his body so he could see both the object and the nearest corridor. "Mark the site. Leave."
Mace wanted to agree. He wanted to comply with the mission because compliance was the right approach when you did not understand what you were seeing.
But the tablet in his pack was heavy with the reason he was here. He had to mark the ruins cleared for recoverable data. That was the task. He could do it now and walk away.
Instead, he reached out again.
His glove hovered a centimeter above the surface. He hesitated. Keene's head turned to him, slowly, as if watching might prevent stupidity. Roa did not speak, but the angle of his shoulders changed, bracing.
Mace pressed gently.
The vibration returned immediately.
Not a tremor. Not fermentation. A faint rhythmic movement, as if something deep inside shifted against restraint. Subtle. Patient. Not trying to be felt, but too large to remain perfectly still.
Mace froze. His breath stalled. His eyes locked on the spot beneath his palm as if he could see through it.
Keene's eyes widened behind his visor. He took one involuntary step forward, then stopped himself. "Mace."
Mace removed his hand slowly, refusing the instinct to jerk away. He wanted control. His fingers spread slightly as he lifted off, like he expected the surface to cling.
"What did you feel?" Keene demanded. His voice pitched high enough to betray him.
Mace swallowed. "Movement."
Keene leaned in, placed his palm on the surface close to where Mace had touched, and pressed.
For a moment, nothing.
Then his shoulders stiffened.
He pulled his hand back. He stared at his glove as if it had betrayed him, as if the sensation should have left residue. His breathing came quicker for two beats, then he forced it down.
"Movement," Keene repeated, quieter now.
Roa stepped closer. The rifle remained down, but his posture changed. His stance widened; his chin dipped. "Step back."
Mace stood. He took two steps away without argument. Keene followed, hands lifted briefly away from his sides as if he did not trust them.
The object sat in the clearing and did nothing. It did not crack. It did not pulse. It did not open. It simply remained.
The jungle continued its slow, indifferent activity. A small insect analog crawled along a vine and disappeared into a seam of moss. A distant call echoed through the trees and vanished. The normality made the wrongness worse.
Mace forced his breath steady. "We're not equipped for containment," he said, more to himself than to anyone else. His voice sounded thin inside his own helmet.
Keene's voice held a sharp edge now, anger trying to cover fear. "Was this… part of the program?"
Mace stared at the ruin's overgrown skeleton, at the broken panel with Whitmore's mark, and at the object placed like a centerpiece. His head shook once, small and automatic, as if denying the implication would make it false.
"It could be storage," Mace said. "A biocapsule. A specimen vault."
Keene shook his head harder. "No power. No lines. No maintenance. If that object is a vault, then it is no longer functional."
Mace looked back at the object.
If it had been dead, it would not have moved.
Roa's tone was flat. It carried no panic, but his eyes, hidden, felt present through the set of his face and the rigidity of his shoulders. "We mark and leave. You want to be the one explaining why you stayed when you found a live unknown in a dead site?"
That was the only argument that mattered.
Mace pulled the tablet from his pack. The screen lit bright and sterile against rainforest green. He navigated to the site file. The interface loaded slowly. In the pause, he felt the weight of time. This place had been forgotten long enough that systems no longer expected anyone to stand here.
The tablet displayed a map overlay with a blinking location marker. A series of checkboxes waited beneath it.
STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED
POWER GRID: INACTIVE
DATA CORES: UNRECOVERABLE
HAZARD RATING: LOW
BIOLOGICAL INTERFERENCE: HIGH
Mace's thumb hovered.
Hazard rating low was a lie if the object was alive. But hazard did not mean alive. Hazard meant immediate threat to personnel. The object had not attacked. It had not opened. It had not revealed itself until they touched it.
He changed the hazard rating to moderate.
Keene watched the screen. His shoulders sank a fraction, relief or resignation. "You're logging it."
"I'm logging what I can justify," Mace said. His voice steadied as he hid behind the process.
He selected the clearance option. A warning prompt appeared.
CONFIRM: SITE CLEARED OF RECOVERABLE DATA.
CONFIRM: NO ACTIVE ASSET RETENTION REQUIRED.
CONFIRM: RETURN VISIT NOT SCHEDULED.
Mace felt a hesitation at that last line.
No return visit.
On paper, this was the end. The transition from potential asset to confirmed loss. That was how the company survived. It shed weight. It did not linger.
Mace glanced at the top of the tablet screen. The system header displayed automatically:
RDA FIELD AUDIT LOG
DATE: 2150-02-14
REGION: AUSTRALIS UPLAND BAND
SITE ID: WHT-AU-03 (DECOMMISSIONED)
The date sat there, clean and undeniable.
Mace confirmed.
The tablet accepted the input. A green banner slid across the screen.
STATUS: CLEARED.
NOTES: ORGANIC OVERGROWTH. NO DATA RECOVERY.
RECOMMENDATION: NO FOLLOW-UP.
POSSIBLE BIOFORM.
Mace's thumb hovered over the notes field. He could add a line about movement, about warmth, about vibration under his palm. That would trigger a protocol. That would mean a return team. That would mean questions. That would mean ownership.
Ownership was always the beginning of a new mess.
He typed two words anyway.
POSSIBLE BIOFORM.
He saved the note without elaboration. It was a seed, not a report. Sufficient to protect him if someone asked later. Not enough to force action now.
Keene read the words and exhaled, long and shaky. "That's it."
Roa nodded once. "We're done."
They backed away from the object. They did not turn their backs on it, not because they expected it to move, but because their bodies refused vulnerability in a clearing that felt arranged for them. Keene kept glancing sideways at the shell as if it might pivot. Mace watched it like a man staring at a closed door he did not trust. Roa moved last, his steps measured, placing himself between them and the corridors.
The object remained still.
As they withdrew, Mace felt the sensation again, not through touch, but as a subtle pressure in the air, as if the clearing had shifted by a degree. The hairs on his forearm lifted under his sleeve. His breath caught, then steadied.
He stopped and looked back.
The object looked exactly the same. The fungus shelves were unchanged. The vines still hung like draped cables. The branch still lay across its top.
No crack. No opening.
Only presence.
He had no proof of awareness. Only the memory of movement under his palm and the way his instincts insisted that something inside had registered contact.
Keene called softly, strained. "Mace."
Mace forced himself to move.
They left the clearing through the same tight corridor of vines. Once they exited the facility ruins, the jungle closed behind them with immediate indifference. The ruins vanished from sight within twenty meters, swallowed by green. If he had not marked it on the tablet, he would not have been able to find it again. The landscape did not hold their footsteps. It erased them.
After half an hour, they reached higher ground where the Samson was parked. The rotors were already spinning, roaring as the pilot spotted their approach. Wind ran through the canopy in longer, cleaner streams. Once seated, Mace paused to drink from his tube. The water tasted faintly of metal from the filter. His hands were steady now, but his shoulders remained too high, held there by something that had not released.
Keene spoke without looking at him. He kept his gaze fixed on the forest line, as if watching would prevent it from following. "That wasn't a rock."
"No," Mace said.
"What is it?"
Mace stared into the green. His eyes narrowed slightly, not in anger, but in the instinct to reject responsibility. "Not my problem."
Keene made a small sound, neither agreement nor disbelief.
Roa signaled from the gunner's seat, then returned to his sweep. His posture did not loosen until the canopy began to drop away beneath them.
None of them spoke again.
But as they lifted off, Mace could not shake the sensation of contact.
It was not fear. Not yet.
It was the feeling of having pressed a button he did not know existed and then walking away before the machine could show him what it did.
Behind them, deep in the ruins where human metal had become terrain, the object held its shape and its silence.
Under the fungal skin, beneath the ridged plating, something shifted.
Pressure that had been accumulating for years finally crossed a threshold.
Not small.
Structural.
The vibration that followed was not rhythmic. It did not repeat. It traveled down the length of the shell, through layers meant to insulate and dampen, carrying force where none had been allowed before.
Microfractures formed along the inner lattice. Invisible from the outside. But the balance was gone.
The shell had been built to endure neglect.
However, that first instance of contact had changed the distribution of stress, and the system inside did what systems always did when disturbed.
It adapted.
Inside, pressure redistributed. Fluids surged. Muscles that had never contracted before tightened for the first time. The tissue held in arrested process began to move, slowly at first, then with a steady insistence that did not require panic to be unstoppable.
No sound reached the clearing.
No crack split the surface.
But the process had begun, and it would not stop.
By the time the jungle finished closing over the path the humans had taken, the shell was already fracturing from within.