The Last Horizon: New Eden

Aftertaste

ELIAS’S POV

The scream cut through comms… raw, human, too close. Then static.

For half a second, every voice on the channel vanished. Just wind, and the low hum of the machines winding down. Then Rhee: “We’ve got another down… north perimeter!”

We ran. Sand sucked at our boots; wind pulled at our suits. The horizon glowed bruise-blue, streaked with motes falling like dust.

By the time we reached them, Osi was on her knees, shaking, one hand clamped against her ear. Blood leaked between her fingers… a dark thread against pale skin. The tether coil beside her smoked faintly, the insulation melted through.

Lyra crouched beside her, no hesitation. “Neural feedback burn. Superficial.” She cut the charred tether free, voice level, movements precise. “She needs med bay, now.”

I looked toward the surf. The motes still shimmered in rhythm, like something remembering its pulse.

We didn’t speak again until the shuttle doors sealed behind us.

The med bay reeked of antiseptic and burnt ozone. The air scrubbers fought the scent and lost. Light from the sterilizers cast the room in cold silver.

Maren worked fast. Her sleeves were rolled past the elbows, wrists slick with disinfectant. Kalen lay half-asleep on the cot beside mine, chest wrapped, IV line humming. Rhee sat against the wall, helmet beside her, eyes half-closed but alert.

Across the room, someone was humming the lullaby. Not loud… just a breath of it, three beats, pause, three beats… until Maren said quietly, “Please don’t.”

The humming stopped.

She glanced at me without pausing the suture. “Your hand.”

I hadn’t realized I’d torn the palm… a split where I’d gripped the control slate too hard. Blood dried along the lifeline, black in the sterile light. I held it out.

She cleaned it wordlessly, needle biting skin. The antiseptic stung. I kept my eyes on the ceiling.

“Minimal tissue loss,” she said, threading the last stitch. “You’ll keep the scar.”

I pressed my thumb against the coin in my pocket. Its edge bit back, reassuringly sharp.

Lyra came in mid-sentence, datapad in hand. “Telemetry’s back. The storm dissipated within three minutes, but readings are inconsistent. There’s a five-second blind spot across all feeds.”

“Blind spot, how?” I asked.

“Corrupted data. Power fluctuation during the spike, according to systems.” She didn’t sound convinced.

Maren sealed the dressing on my hand. “There was no fluctuation in here,” she said. “Monitors stayed green.”

Lyra nodded, already typing. “Then someone scrubbed it.”

Later, in the briefing room, the air still carried that same metallic tang. Every screen glowed with fragments of the field test… light shimmer, storm onset, the moment the tether snapped.

Holt stood at the far end of the table, arms folded. “We’re lucky it wasn’t worse. One more step and we’d have lost Kalen completely.”

Rhee’s jaw tightened. “We didn’t lose him.”

“For now.” Holt turned toward Solan, who watched in silence. “With respect, Captain, this was preventable. We ran a test without understanding the organism’s boundaries.”

Lyra didn’t look up from her screen. “Organism implies intent. You’re assuming too much.”

“And you’re assuming too little.”

Their words hit the walls and hung there. The hum of the ship filled the spaces between.

Solan finally spoke, voice low. “Enough. We’ll run an internal audit. If there’s been data tampering, I want a trace within the hour.”

Holt straightened. “I’ll oversee the analysis personally.”

Lyra’s stylus tapped the table. “That’s not your department.”

“It is now.”

I caught Solan’s glance… brief, unreadable… before he left the room. The door sealed, and the silence afterward felt colder than anything the storm had done.

Hours blurred. Med reports, telemetry fragments, cross-checks. Every terminal on the deck glowed red in patches… DATA REDACTED, INTEGRITY COMPROMISED… like missing teeth in a mouth that used to speak clearly.

Davi found me in the operations bay. She looked as though she hadn’t slept.

“I’ve got something,” she said.

Her fingers danced across the console, calling up the trial footage. Waves, shimmer, Rhee pulling Kalen from the surf. The recording jumped… a flicker… then resumed.

“Here,” Davi said, rewinding. “At timestamp 17:42:09. There’s a five-second gap. All camera angles, even secondary telemetry. It’s clean… too clean to be corruption.”

I leaned closer. The playback scrub bar dipped, then flattened into static before continuing. No artifacting, no distortion. Just absence.

“Could the surge have wiped it?”

“Maybe. But only this segment? No. Someone cut it.”

Her voice was steady, but her eyes betrayed it… the small tremor in focus, the way she avoided my reflection in the console glass.

“Who has access to this level?” I asked.

“Command. Science. And Fleet relay.”

Which meant almost anyone who mattered.

In med bay, Kalen slept fitfully. Osi sat beside him, headphones off, eyes red. Maren moved between cots like a ghost. Every surface gleamed… metal, plastic, the thin shine of disinfectant drying.

Lyra stood at the end of the corridor, reviewing notes. When she looked up, she said quietly, “You’re bleeding through the bandage.”

I checked. A line of red seeped through the gauze. “Just the stitches.”

“Still.” She passed me a fresh wrap, her fingers brushing mine… cold, quick. “You need to rest.”

“So does everyone else.”

Her gaze flicked toward the door. “Not until we know who’s altering the logs.”

Rhee took the first patrol. She didn’t speak as she passed me in the corridor, just a brief nod. Her armor still smelled of salt and ozone. The rest of the ship felt unnaturally quiet… too few footsteps, too many whispers.

Holt’s voice came over comms at 0300: “I want security protocols tightened. If someone’s tampering with records, that’s sabotage.”

Lyra answered before I could. “Or human error. You’re poisoning morale with this talk.”

“Morale doesn’t keep the air clean,” Holt said. “Containment does.”

The channel clicked off.

When the noise of the ship became too much, I went to my quarters. The walls glowed low, the hum steady. I sat at the desk, the fragment of Anna cupped in my palm. It caught the light… faint green, pulsing once every few seconds like it was breathing.

“Personal log,” I said quietly. “Kaen, Elias. Restricted channel.”

The console acknowledged with a tone.

I looked at the fragment and spoke to it as though it could hear.

“Trial complete. One casualty, minor. Data compromised. Crew frayed. I don’t know if it’s external interference or us tearing at our own seams.”

The fragment stayed dark.

“I keep thinking of Vale,” I said. “The way she smiled. The way she said her mother was proud. Maybe we all want someone to tell us that.”

My voice caught on the word proud. I didn’t finish the sentence. The recording ended with static.

Two hours later, Davi called me back to Ops. Her voice carried an edge I hadn’t heard since the beach.

“You need to see this.”

She pulled up the footage again. Same timestamp. Same five-second hole.

“I ran deep retrieval,” she said. “There’s a single residual frame left in the buffer. The purge didn’t clear it.”

The monitor flickered.

For a heartbeat, static formed an image… a thin hand pressed against the glass of the horizon camera, fingers spread wide, palm luminous. It wasn’t ours. The skin shimmered like light through water.

Davi’s voice was barely a whisper. “Someone erased it.”

I leaned in, close enough to see the pixels pulse.

The hand on the screen moved… or maybe it was just the glitch.

But it looked like it was touching back.