The upland rainforest did not open for them.
No welcome. No thinning into a trail. It yielded the way wet fabric yields when a shoulder forces through it, then closed again behind the pressure. Every step was friction. Every surface hosted secondary life that did not care who owned the tree beneath it, who claimed the air above it, or how much money had been spent on the fantasy of organizing any of it.
Above, the canopy stacked itself in layers. Leaf on leaf on leaf, stitched tight by vines as thick as cabling and as fine as hair. Light slipped through in fractured panes, green-shifted and restless, never landing clean. Below, the air held moisture like breath. The masks fogged, cleared, then fogged again. Boots sank into rot that had been building longer than the oldest chart in their map packs. Each pull free made that soft tearing sound, like cloth giving up. Indecent.
They had approached from the south after landing their SA-2 Samson and leaving the pilot behind with the aircraft. Half a kilometer inland, the rotor noise fell away. The jungle did not get quieter. It just stopped being their noise.
Mace, lead tech, kept his voice low out of habit. Not stealth. Nothing here cared about volume. Loud speech simply felt wrong, like shouting inside a museum even when no one else was present. Even behind the mask, his jaw stayed tight when he spoke. 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. A comms check and nothing more.
Keene moved behind him with the scanner probe, sweeping slow arcs. The readout popped, then churned, then pretended to settle. The tool showed what it always showed in this kind of work: noise with patterns that liked to impersonate meaning. Keene re-swept the same air as if repetition could bully certainty into existence.
The only pattern that mattered was that the site still existed.
It was supposed to have been swallowed.
On paper, it barely qualified as a facility anymore. A line item in a decommissioned ledger. It had gone onto a sunset list after the program ended. Remaining equipment: not recoverable. Human cost: higher than value. The file did not say abandoned, because procurement hated that word. It said closed out.
Closed out meant buried, if the jungle stayed patient.
The first structure they saw was not a building.
It was a corner.
A right angle caught in growth. Composite alloy that should have thrown back light lay dulled under years of fungal skin. Moss layered it. Lichen wrote pale maps across it. Roots had rounded the edges down, not gently, but steadily. The metal held the same ambient warmth as bark. It looked like the facility had been breathing with the forest long enough to forget what it was.
Mace stopped without signaling. The others stopped anyway. In a place like this, stopping spread.
No one spoke for a moment. The rainforest filled the pause with wet insect rasp and distant calls that were not warnings or welcomes. Just continuation.
Keene crouched, set a gloved hand on the slab, and pressed. No give. He tapped twice with his knuckle.
Thok. Thok.
The sound that came back was muted. Deep. Wrong, like the interior had filled with soil and water and something that changed how sound traveled.
"Structure holds," Keene said.
"Not a collapse," Mace replied, eyes on his reader. "If it hasn't pancaked, it's either anchored into bedrock or the roots have made it part of the ground."
They pushed east around the corner in single file. No doorway in view. No access. Only wall turned into terrain. A vine as thick as a man's wrist ran up it like a seam. Bioluminescent threads glowed faintly in the dim and pulsed in slow, lazy waves that meant nothing. Between them, small pale bodies clung in mats, translucent and slick.
Mace brushed one with his sleeve. It ruptured without sound and left a smear that looked too much like fat. He wiped it off hard, once. It did not come clean. He left it.
Ten meters ahead, something else broke the green. Half-submerged in a slope of compacted earth and vegetation, a circular plate should have sat there. A maintenance hatch. A service cap. 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 rainwater should not have had.
Mace's internal map snapped into place. The archive had included old site drawings. Useless in detail, useful in geometry.
"That's the access cap," he said.
Keene swept it. Low-grade readings. Organic interference like static.
"No power," Keene said. "No active lines. Whatever this place was, it's dead."
That was the job. Confirm dead. Log. Leave.
Mace knelt and brushed aside wet moss. His hands moved with practiced care, almost gentle, the way you handle something that can cut you if you stop paying attention.
Under the moss, it was not stone.
Layered plating, keratin-like. Ridged in shallow arcs. The ridges were clogged with loam and spores. Fungus had fused to it so thoroughly it tried to pass as geology. The texture was wrong in a way his eyes struggled to name. His hands did not.
Too organized. Too deliberate.
Keene leaned in. "That's not the hatch."
Mace traced the edge, looking for the seam where engineered metal should meet engineered metal.
No seam.
The cap did not meet anything. It was whole.
"Then what is it?" Keene asked. His voice climbed despite himself.
"Something that grew here," Mace said, and did not believe the sentence while he spoke it.
He lifted his head, scanning the ground around them. The actual access cap could still be nearby, buried under meters of root and compacted rot. The drawings put it within five meters. That did not mean it would be visible.
He stood and signaled a perimeter check. Clipped. Procedural. A gesture that wanted the forest to obey.
Roa, their security escort, moved right without comment. Rifle angled down, muzzle guard on. His shoulders stayed loose, but his head never stopped turning. There was no reason to shoot anything. If something large decided to kill them, a rifle would not make the situation fair. The rifle still came along. Comfort rituals lasted longer than logic.
Mace ran the field probe scanner over the plating. Click. Whine. A faint hum. The tool was built to read for manufactured alloys and data storage remnants.
It returned nothing useful.
The surface under the probe was warm.
Not sun-warm. Not friction-warm.
Body-warm.
Mace held still.
Keene shifted closer. "What?"
Mace moved the probe to a different ridge. Then another. The variance stayed.
"Thermal's wrong," he said.
"Ambient mismatch?" Keene asked.
"By a few degrees."
Keene stared at the ridges like he could force them to become familiar. "Could be fermentation. Fungal heat."
"Maybe," Mace said.
He should have logged the anomaly and moved on. The mission did not ask for curiosity. Curiosity was how you got assigned follow-up work.
But the pattern scraped at his sense of order. The ridges looked laid down, not random. The plating looked like something that had, at some point, decided it needed protection.
Mace reached out and pressed his palm against it.
There was a subtle give. Rigid enough to keep its shape, not rigid enough to feel dead.
A vibration met his hand through the glove.
Local. Inside.
His hand jerked away. His breath hitched, loud in his helmet for a beat.
Keene caught it immediately. "What?"
Mace flexed his fingers as if the sensation had lodged there. "Nothing."
Keene's posture widened, bracing. "You don't move like that for nothing."
Mace forced himself to slow down. If something was wrong, it stayed wrong whether he moved fast or slow. Better to be deliberate.
He ran the probe again in a tighter pattern over the spot his palm had touched. The device whined. The thermal variance remained. The readout stayed useless. The vibration did not show, because the tool was built for sane environments.
Roa spoke without turning his head fully toward them. Calm voice. Watchful angle. "We're not here for rocks."
Mace kept his tone level. "We're here to confirm the archive is empty."
Keene's voice softened, which was worse than irritation. "Mace. Is it biological?"
"Unknown," Mace said.
Keene pressed gently on a nearby ridge, fingers spread, cautious. The mass did not react. He pressed harder.
"Feels like keratin," he said, and the word came out too tight to be clinical.
"Or calcified bark," Mace offered.
Keene's scanner chirped. He frowned at the display, then frowned harder. "No signal. No active neuroelectronics. Nothing that reads like fauna."
"Then it's just something," Mace said.
He did not make it true. He only said it.
They moved on.
The ruins did not present themselves cleanly. They surfaced in pieces. A fragment of wall. A collapsed corridor. A partial dome that had become a hill. The shapes were recognizable enough to be unsettling. A human structure integrated into the landscape did not look natural, but it did not look foreign anymore either. It looked like a scar that had healed over, leaving a surface that moved when you pressed it and bled when you cut it.
Further east than the schematic indicated, an entrance showed itself.
Just inside the threshold, Mace found a panel face-down in the mud, half-buried beneath creeping roots. He cut the roots away. Clear sap bled out, faintly sweet. Pale larvae spilled with it, writhing briefly before drowning in the sap like insects caught in sugar.
Keene flinched. Roa's head snapped toward the motion, then returned to scanning the corridor.
Mace wiped the panel clean enough to see iconography.
Old RDA mark. Old program tag.
The project designation had been truncated by time and damage, but what remained tightened his stomach.
Whitmore's program.
He did not say the name aloud.
Keene watched Mace turn the panel over and find a socket. Mace pulled a cable from his pack and tried to interface with his reader.
Nothing.
Different connector. Still nothing.
Keene leaned forward, as if proximity could coax electrons to behave. "Any data?"
"Dead," Mace said.
Keene exhaled hard. The mask fogged for a second. "That's the mission."
They went 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 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 time.
Pandora did not need teeth to take what it wanted.
Not a metaphor. A reminder.
Beyond the streambed, the corridor widened into a clearing that had once been the central hub. The purpose was gone, but the shape remained stubborn. Three route mouths opened from it like choices waiting to be made.
At the center, the ground rose.
And there it was again.
Another boulder that was not a boulder.
Largest single mass in the clearing. Fungal shelves along its lower arc. Vines draped like a loose net. A fallen branch lay across the top like a casual barrier, bark peeled back to pale wet wood where something had chewed it over time.
Even here, on a planet built for megafauna and trees taller than buildings, its presence had weight. The surrounding ruins felt smaller. The clearing felt arranged, like the site had been built around this thing rather than the other way around.
Keene stared. "That's the same thing."
Mace nodded once. He did not look away.
They approached from the south edge of the clearing, keeping the nearest corridor mouth in sight. Roa stayed back far enough to watch all three exits at once.
Mace circled the object, tracking ridges and borders that were not seams. The pattern repeated in arcs, each slightly offset, like growth rings. In places, the fungus wore thin and revealed a glossy band beneath, pale under grime, too smooth to be rock.
His mind threw options at it. Old containment pod. Dropped industrial component. Hull plating. Something the jungle had grown over.
The shape refused all of them. Subtle asymmetry. The kind that belonged to life, not manufacture.
Keene pressed his scanner to it. Click. Chirp.
"Still no signal," Keene said. He slapped the scanner once, lightly, then stopped, as if embarrassed to have shown irritation to an object.
Mace crouched at the base.
The ground around it was packed harder than the surrounding soil, as if something heavy had been sitting there for years. Roots ran beneath it, not over it. The jungle had not grown through it. It had grown around it.
He brushed aside a curtain of moss near the lower edge. Underneath, the surface shifted from ridged plating to a smoother band. Rain lines had stained the glossy strip in thin mineral threads.
A faint border sat there. Not a door seam. A boundary between layers.
An egg.
The word landed and refused to leave. A shell the size of a small vehicle, nested in the center of a dead human ruin, wrapped in fungus and vines.
Keene's voice cut in, too sharp. "Why would an egg be here?"
Mace did not answer. There was no safe answer.
Roa shifted, angling his body to keep both the shell and the closest corridor in view. "Mark the site. Leave."
Mace wanted to agree. Compliance was the lowest-cost solution when you did not understand what you were seeing.
The tablet in his pack carried procedure. Clear the site. Confirm unrecoverable data. Walk away. That was the mission. He could do it now.
Instead, he reached out again.
His glove hovered a centimeter above the surface. He hesitated. Keene watched him like observation could prevent stupidity. Roa braced without speaking, shoulders changing angle, stance widening.
Mace pressed gently.
Movement met his palm.
Not a tremor. Not fermentation. A slow shifting under the shell, as if something deep within had adjusted against restraint. Subtle. Patient. Too large to mistake.
Mace froze. His breath stalled.
Keene took one involuntary step, then stopped himself. "Mace."
Mace lifted his hand slowly, refusing the urge to snatch it away.
"What did you feel?" Keene demanded.
Mace swallowed. "Movement."
Keene placed his palm near the same spot and pressed.
For a moment, nothing.
Then his shoulders locked.
He pulled his hand back and stared at his glove as if the sensation should have left residue. His breathing quickened for two beats, then he forced it down again.
"Movement," Keene repeated, quieter, as if saying it softer made it less real.
Roa stepped closer. Rifle still down. Stance wider. Chin dipped. "Step back."
They did. Mace first. Keene second. Hands lifted briefly away from their sides, a reflex that said they did not trust their own bodies not to touch it again.
The shell sat in the clearing and did nothing. No crack. No pulse. No opening.
Just presence.
The jungle continued around them as if nothing had happened. A small insect analog crawled along a vine and vanished into a seam of moss. A distant call echoed, then died.
Normality made the wrongness worse.
Mace forced his breath steady. "We're not equipped for containment."
Keene's voice sharpened into anger to cover fear. "Was this part of the program?"
Mace looked at the ruin's overgrown skeleton, at the broken panel with Whitmore's mark, and at the shell placed like a centerpiece in the hub.
"It could be storage," Mace said. "A biocapsule. A specimen vault."
Keene shook his head. "No power. No lines. No maintenance. If it's a vault, it's not functional."
Mace looked back at the shell.
Dead things did not move. That rule had already been proved today. Twice, if you counted the first plating.
Roa's tone stayed flat. "We mark and leave. You want to explain why you stayed when you found a live unknown in a dead site?"
That did it.
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, time felt heavy, like the place resented being remembered.
A map overlay blinked. A series of checkboxes waited.
<< STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED >>
<< POWER GRID: INACTIVE >>
<< DATA CORES: UNRECOVERABLE >>
<< HAZARD RATING: LOW >>
<< BIOLOGICAL INTERFERENCE: HIGH >>
Mace's thumb hovered.
Hazard low was a lie if the shell was alive, but hazard did not mean alive. Hazard meant immediate threat to personnel. The shell had not attacked. It had not opened. It had only moved, and only when touched.
He changed the hazard rating to moderate.
Keene watched the screen. "You're logging it."
"I'm logging what I can justify," Mace said, and his voice steadied because process was a shield.
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. >>
No return visit.
Mace paused on that line. A small hesitation, then gone.
The header at the top of the screen displayed automatically.
<< RDA FIELD AUDIT LOGDATE: 2150-02-14 >>
<< REGION: AUSTRALIS UPLAND BAND >>
<< SITE ID: WHT-AU-03 (DECOMMISSIONED) >>
Clean. Denial in a neat font.
Mace confirmed.
A green banner slid across the screen.
<< STATUS: CLEARED. >>
<< NOTES: ORGANIC OVERGROWTH. NO DATA RECOVERY. >>
<< RECOMMENDATION: NO FOLLOW-UP. >>
Mace opened the notes field and typed the only line he could defend without triggering a protocol that would come back on his name.
<< POSSIBLE BIOFORM. >>
He saved it.
Decision made.
Keene read the words and exhaled, long and shaky. "That's it."
Roa nodded once. "We're done."
They backed away from the shell. They did not turn their backs on it. Not because they expected it to lunge. Because their bodies refused vulnerability in a clearing that felt arranged.
They left through the same tight corridor of vines, then worked back west and south by the route they had cut in, using the corner slab as a landmark when it reappeared through the growth. Within twenty meters, the ruins vanished behind green. If Mace had not marked the coordinates, he would not have found the place again.
The landscape did not hold their footsteps.
It erased them.
Half an hour later, they reached higher ground where the Samson waited. The rotors were already spinning as the pilot spotted their approach, chopping the air into a roar. Wind ran through the canopy in longer, cleaner streams. Once seated, Mace drank from his tube. The water tasted faintly of metal from the filter.
His hands were steady. His shoulders stayed high.
Keene spoke without looking at him. His gaze stayed fixed on the forest line, like watching could keep it from following. "That wasn't a rock."
"No," Mace said.
"What is it?"
Mace stared at the green and narrowed his eyes, not in anger, in refusal. "Not my problem."
Keene made a small sound that was neither agreement nor disbelief.
Roa signaled from the gunner's seat and returned to his sweep. His posture did not loosen until the canopy began to drop away beneath them.
None of them spoke again.
Behind them, deep in the ruins where human metal had become terrain, the shell held its shape and its silence.
Under the fungal skin, beneath the ridged plating, pressure redistributed.
Not a crack. Not an opening.
A shift.
Something inside adjusted the way systems always adjusted when disturbed. Slow at first, then with an insistence that did not require panic to be unstoppable.
No sound reached the clearing. No visible change betrayed it.
Still, the balance was gone.
The site had been cleared. Contact had been made.
The stillness would not be the same again.