Marcus Vale

Security Officer of the Daedalus, in his thirties, a former Space Marine commander. He is calm and pragmatic, trusting no mystical narrative, accustomed to holding fear down with tactics and discipline; check the seals, check the magazine, check the vital signs, check the comms—these are the four motions he makes entering any space.

He holds security-officer-level access to the entire ship's data—this is his greatest asset, and also his greatest trouble.

In the seventh hour after reaching Kepler-942c, he received a detection that didn't sit right: from deep beneath the planet's surface, a pulse came once every 72 seconds—too regular to be natural geological activity.

He did something that overstepped his authority—using his security-officer clearance to lock down all ship-wide broadcasts for 24 hours, without reporting to the captain's tier, and then he woke a crew member he called 'the one who can read silence.'

The advance pod touched down. The hatch opened—and in the wind there was no pollen, no insect song, no breathing rhythm of any large animal. The forest moved, yet the rhythm of every swaying leaf was synchronized too neatly.

All the data showed this was a habitable world—and it was precisely this 'too normal' quality that sent a chill down his spine.

Things began to go wrong in the team. After some returned from the surface, a faint rhythm appeared inside them, once every 7 seconds—not a heartbeat, and one that should not exist.

He made a decision: to freeze these reports, keep them out of the official system, keep the captain's tier and the colonial supervisor from seeing them ahead of time. He knew that the moment this report went up the chain, it would trigger a chain reaction he could not yet contain.

One advance-team member broke off and headed north; his thermal signature vanished into thin air at a location where the crust was 31 kilometers thick, with no known cavity of any kind.

That man was an old acquaintance—back during the mining accident on the far side of the Moon, it was that man who circled back to reconnect his oxygen line, which is why he made it out alive. The man's last transmission was only 5 words: there's a sound underground.

That pulse from underground—its cycle was shortening, faster than on the day they arrived. A 10-hour search-and-rescue team set out under his command.

He grew more and more certain that this planet's data should never have been trusted from the very start; and what he could do was seize a little sliver of space he could still decide for himself—between the captain's tier, the colonial supervisor, and that AI more coldly rational than any human.

Before entering any space he completes four things: seal, magazine, life signs, comms. The order does not vary, and the door does not move until they are done.

The routine came out of the Marines. Aboard ship it is useless in most situations—behind the hatch is the mess, a laboratory, his own bunk. He does it regardless.

Someone in the unit made a joke of it once. He did not take offence and did not stop. His account: a routine has to be built while it is useless, because the day it is needed there is no time left to think.

He sleeps with his boots on. Nobody jokes about that one.

Security-officer clearance reaches further than anyone's outside the command tier: navigation logs, raw life-support telemetry, every crew member's physiological returns, the relay records of all shipboard comms.

The clearance was not granted for investigation. It was granted so that he could decide in the worst case. After the incident aboard, the design has been that way.

He knows it is the largest asset he holds. He also knows it spends down with use—every query leaves a trace, and past a certain volume the command tier will begin asking what he is looking for.

So before he goes looking he works out what he will say if he is asked. He has worked it out several times already.