Chapter 3: Interrupted Research
The sterile hum of the lab’s environmental systems was a poor substitute for silence. Diana stared at the holographic display of a xenobiological sample, a complex, spiral-shaped protein from a Martian extremophile, but the intricate patterns kept dissolving into the memory of touch. The cold, smooth surface of the lab table under her palms became, for a heart-stopping second, the rough fabric of Derek’s flight suit. The faint ozone scent was overwhelmed by the phantom smell of his skin, of sweat and conduit grime and something uniquely male.
She jerked her hands back, clenching them into fists. “Get a grip, Albertson,” she muttered to the empty lab. Her own voice, with its Scottish lilt, sounded small and unconvincing against the memory of the lockdown alarm.
It had been seventy-two hours. Seventy-two hours of debriefings, of structural reports, of pretending the world hadn’t tilted on its axis inside a dark maintenance closet. She’d given her statement a dozen times, meticulously detailing the lab breach, the conduit escape, the terrifying groans of the base. She’d omitted everything that happened after the door slid shut. The official record showed two professionals surviving a crisis. Her memory replayed the scrape of his teeth against her neck, the feel of his hands on her hips, the devastating silence after the alarms cut out.
She’d avoided him. It wasn’t difficult. His duties were elsewhere, and her lab module was still a sealed-off, scarred mess. This was a temporary workspace, loaned from the geology department. It felt alien, and she felt exposed.
The main lab door hissed open.
She didn’t turn, assuming it was a technician. The footsteps were too heavy, too deliberate. They stopped behind her. The air shifted, carrying a new scent into the sterile room: the cold, metallic tang of vacuum, the faint, sweet smell of pre-breathed air, and underneath it all, the undeniable, fresh scent of Earth. Of outside.
Her breath hitched.
“I thought you were on the supply run,” she said, her voice carefully neutral, still facing her console. “The Daedalus wasn’t due back for another six hours.”
“Made good time.”
Derek’s voice was a low vibration that went straight through her. She could feel the heat of him standing close, not touching, but dominating the space. She finally turned.
He was still in his flight suit, the dark blue fabric bearing the faint smudges of a recent journey. His blonde hair was slightly mussed, as if he’d just pulled off his helmet. His blue eyes were intent, fixed on her with an unnerving directness that stripped away all the pretense of the last three days. He smelled of the void and of pine trees from the orbital station’s arboretum. It was a disorienting, thrilling combination.
“The debriefs are over, Captain,” she said, crossing her arms. A defensive posture. She hated that he made her feel defensive. “Unless you’re here to file an addendum about… closet structural integrity.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. He took a single step forward, closing the last of the distance between them. The lab table pressed against her lower back. “I’ve been thinking about regulations.”
“Oh?” Her heart was hammering against her ribs. “Find a new paragraph to quote?”
“No.” His gaze dropped to her mouth. “I’ve been thinking about how little I care about them.”
He didn’t give her a chance to reply. One hand came up to cradle the side of her face, his thumb stroking her jawline with a shocking tenderness that belied the intensity in his eyes. The other hand settled on her hip, his grip firm, possessive.
Then he kissed her.
It wasn’t like the desperate, frantic kiss in the red-lit lab or the hungry, blind collision in the dark closet. This was deliberate. This was a claiming. His mouth was warm and insistent, and it tasted of coffee and resolve. The scent of Earth and space wrapped around her, intoxicating and foreign. A small, shocked sound escaped her throat, and her hands, which had been clenched at her sides, came up to grasp the front of his flight suit, holding on as the world narrowed to this single, searing point of contact.
He broke the kiss, his forehead resting against hers, their breath mingling in the cool, recycled air. “The addendum,” he said, his voice rough, “is that I don’t regret it.”
Diana’s mind was a whirlwind of conflicting signals. The logical part, the scientist, screamed about protocol, about consequences, about the catastrophic unprofessionalism of it all. The rest of her, the part that had felt so achingly isolated for months, was melting under the sheer, undeniable reality of him.
“People could walk in,” she breathed, her protest weak even to her own ears.
“Let them.” His thumb traced the line of her bottom lip. “I’m done with hiding.”
He kissed her again, deeper this time, and any thought of resistance evaporated. Her arms slid up around his neck, her fingers tangling in the short hair at his nape. She kissed him back with all the pent-up frustration and longing of the past seventy-two hours, pouring every confused, electric memory into the present. The lab, with its blinking consoles and humming machines, faded into irrelevance.
He walked her back until the edge of the lab table dug into her thighs. His hands slid from her face and her hip down to her waist, and then he lifted her, setting her down on the cool, polished surface with effortless strength. Data pads clattered to the floor. The holographic protein spiral flickered and dissolved into static.
He stepped between her knees, his hands braced on the table on either side of her, caging her in. The blue of his eyes was almost black with a focus she’d only ever seen him direct at a crisis console. Now it was all for her.
“This is a terrible idea,” she whispered, even as she pulled him closer by the collar of his suit.
“I know.” He dipped his head, his lips finding the sensitive skin just below her ear. She shuddered, her head falling back. “But it’s the only one I’ve got.”
They froze.
Derek didn’t move away, but his body went rigid, his head turning slightly toward the door. Diana’s eyes snapped open. Over his shoulder, she saw Chief Larsen stop dead in the doorway, a data slate in his hand. His expression cycled from surprise to careful neutrality to something that looked uncomfortably like pity.
“Captain,” Larsen said, his voice flat. “Your post-flight report is required at the C&C. Now.”
Derek slowly, deliberately, straightened up. He didn’t look away from Diana, his gaze holding hers for a long, charged moment. The spell was broken, but the connection was not. It hung in the air between them, thick and undeniable.
“Acknowledged, Chief,” Derek said, his voice returning to its professional cadence, though it was several degrees colder than the room.
Larsen didn’t wait. He turned and left, the door swishing shut behind him.
The silence he left was heavy, awkward. Diana slid off the table, her legs feeling unsteady. She smoothed her lab coat, a futile gesture. Derek ran a hand through his hair, the picture of a man grappling with a sudden, violent course correction.
“I have to go,” he said, the words sounding hollow.
“I know.” She hugged herself, suddenly cold. The scent of Earth on him was already fading, replaced by the lab’ sterile chill.
He walked to the door, then paused, his hand hovering over the access panel. He looked back at her, the conflict plain on his face. “This isn’t over.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement, delivered with the same certainty he used to command a starship.
Then he was gone.
Diana stood alone in the humming silence, surrounded by the scattered tools of her science. The ghost of his kiss lingered on her lips, and the memory of his words—I don’t regret it—warred with the chilling professionalism in Larsen’s eyes. She looked at the fallen data pads, the flickering console, and knew with a sinking certainty that the carefully ordered world of Valkyrie Base had just fractured in a way no solar storm ever could.
She knelt to gather the scattered data pads, her fingers trembling against their cool, smooth surfaces. The console’s flickering light cast jumping shadows, mimicking the unsettled rhythm of her heart. Each blink felt like an accusation.
Derek’s scent still clung to the air, a faint, taunting reminder of pine and vacuum that made her stomach clench. She tried to focus on the routine, on reassembling the pieces of her professional composure. But the memory of his hands on her hips, the possessive weight of them, shattered every attempt at order.
For the next several hours, Diana buried herself in work, the only reliable escape she had. She spent most of her time in the lab looking at meteorite samples, analyzing their mineral composites with a intensity that bordered on obsessive. The sharp, metallic scent of the space-rock dust was a welcome anchor, a tangible problem she could actually solve.
She traced the strange, fusion-crusted patterns on a fragment from the asteroid belt, losing herself in its ancient, silent history. It was simpler than untangling the look on Derek’s face when Larsen had walked in. It was safer than wondering what “this isn’t over” truly meant in the rigid hierarchy of the Space Force.
A soft chime from her wrist comm broke her concentration. It was a routine alert, a reminder for the post-breach quarantine decontamination cycle. She came out for a Q-sweep, the mandatory bio-hazard check that followed any lab incident. Pushing back from the console, she felt a dull ache in her shoulders from being hunched over for so long.
The corridor outside was unnervingly quiet, the usual hum of activity subdued. Her footsteps echoed on the grated floor, a solitary sound in the sterile silence. She rounded the corner toward decontamination, her mind still half-occupied with isotopic ratios.
And nearly collided with Chief Larsen. He was standing there, arms crossed, leaning against the wall as if he’d been waiting. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes held a knowing glint that made her skin prickle.
“Albertson,” he said, his voice low. “Just the person I was looking for.”
Her breath hitched. This was it. The official reprimand. The end of her career before it even properly began. She forced her voice to stay level. “Chief. I was just heading for the Q-sweep.”
“I know.” He pushed off the wall, standing to his full height. He didn’t smile. “Walk with me.”
It wasn’t a request. He started down the corridor, and she fell into step beside him, her heart hammering against her ribs. They walked in silence for a moment, the only sound the whisper of the air recyclers.
“McCall’s a good officer,” Larsen said finally, his tone conversational, but with an edge. “One of the best pilots we have. But he’s got a history of being… impulsive. Especially when he thinks something is his.”
Diana kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, on the endless, repeating doors of the residential wing. “I’m not sure what that has to do with me, Chief.”
“Don’t you?” He stopped, turning to face her. “What happened in that lab stays in that lab. For now. But if I see so much as a hint of it again, I’ll have you both on the next transport back to Earth. Understood?”
The threat was clear, cold, and utterly professional. She just nodded, her throat too tight to speak.
“Good.” He gave a curt nod. “Now, about those meteorite samples. The initial analysis from your last upload flagged an anomalous energy signature. I need you to prioritize it. And I need you to do it alone.”
He turned and walked away, leaving her standing in the corridor. The order hung in the air, a deliberate isolation. This wasn’t just about the rocks; it was a warning, a wall being built around her. She looked down the empty hallway, the weight of his words settling deep, and knew the fracture had just become a chasm.
The realization was a cold, sharp instrument. He could hurt Derek, but not her. She was under the Science Division, not the Military side. Larsen’s threat was a blunt weapon, but its reach had limits, and its edge was meant for Derek’s career. The asymmetry of it was suddenly, brilliantly clear.
If anything, it made her think of ways to get to Derek. A more subtle war. She was sure he got the same warning, the same promise of being tossed off this dead rock. Her own desire for a job back on Earth, with the Pacific Ocean Expedition, now felt less like an escape and more like a strategic objective. A way out she could control. But she had to think of Derek. His entire life was welded to the frame of a starship; being grounded on Earth would be a different kind of prison.
So she worked. For a few days, she became a model of quiet efficiency, her head down, her reports flawless. She finished two of them ahead of their due date, the data impeccably organized, the conclusions sharp. She turned in the final report on the anomalous energy signature with a sense of cold satisfaction, giving Larsen exactly what he’d asked for and nothing more of herself.
The stifling silence of the lab finally drove her out. She needed noise, the mundane sound of other people, a reminder of a world that existed outside of clandestine kisses and veiled threats. She headed for the mess hall, aiming for the simple, forgetful chaos of lunch with the crew.
The rec area was quieter than it should have been. The usual low din of conversation was replaced by a tense, hushed murmur. She collected a tray of rehydrated pasta and looked for a familiar face, finding a group from her xenobotany module sitting at a far table. Their postures were rigid, their food mostly untouched.
“What’s going on?” Diana asked, sliding into a seat. The synthetic tomato sauce smelled vaguely of tin.
“You haven’t heard?” asked Liam, a geologist, his eyes wide. “It’s Patel and Chen. From Atmospherics.”
“Heard what?”
“They’re gone. No one’s seen them since last night’s shift change. Their quarters are empty. Comms are dead.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Security’s sweeping the lower decks now. They think maybe a hull breach in one of the old maintenance tunnels.”
The fork felt suddenly heavy in Diana’s hand. She looked at the worried faces around the table, at the uneaten food, and felt the cold of the moon’s surface seep through the base’s walls and into her bones. Two of her crew mates were missing. And the only thing she could think was that this changed everything.
The pasta turned to glue in her mouth. Two missing. Not a lab leak, not a systems failure, but people. Vanished. The rec room’s artificial brightness seemed to mock the sudden void in the base’s population. Diana pushed her tray away, the clatter unnaturally loud in the hush.
She needed to move, to do something. Her feet carried her out into the corridor, its sterile silence now feeling menacing. Every shadowed alcove, every humming service panel seemed to hold a new, dreadful possibility. Her own problems with Derek, with Larsen, shriveled into insignificance.
A familiar, broad-shouldered figure rounded the corner ahead, his stride eating up the grated floor. Derek. His face was a mask of controlled intensity, the same look he’d had during the solar storm breach. He didn’t see her, his focus entirely on the command wing.
“Derek,” she called out, her voice smaller than she intended.
He stopped, his eyes snapping to hers. The professional mask didn’t slip, but something flickered in his gaze—a quick, shared understanding of the shifted gravity. “Albertson. You heard.”
“Is it true? Patel and Chen?”
“Their locator beacons went dark forty minutes ago. No distress call.” He took a step closer, his voice dropping. “Larsen is containing the narrative. Calling it a ‘systems anomaly.’ I don’t buy it.”
The cold in her bones deepened. “What are you going to do?”
“What I should have done days ago.” His jaw tightened. “I’m done taking orders from a man who prioritizes secrets over his crew.”
He didn’t wait for a reply, turning on his heel and striding toward the Command & Control center. Diana watched him go, the certainty in his movement both terrifying and exhilarating. She followed, not closing the distance, but needing to see this.
The C&C was a controlled chaos of low voices and blinking alerts. Crew members hunched over consoles, their faces illuminated by the cool blue light of status reports. In the center of it all, Chief Larsen stood with his back to the door, pointing at a schematic of the base’s lower levels.
Derek didn’t hesitate. He walked straight through the organized frenzy, his presence causing a ripple of silence in his wake. He stopped a foot from Larsen, his posture rigid.
“Chief. A word. Now.” Derek’s voice cut through the hum of machinery, flat and hard.
Larsen turned slowly, his expression carefully neutral, but his eyes held a warning. “Captain McCall. This is not the time. We have a situation.”
“That’s exactly why it’s time.” Derek didn’t raise his voice, but every word carried. “You’ve grounded the search teams. You’re telling people it’s a glitch. Two of our people are missing, and you’re treating it like a paperwork error.”
“We are following protocol, Captain. Panic doesn’t find missing personnel.” Larsen’s gaze flickered toward Diana, who hovered near the doorway, then back to Derek. “And this is not a public forum.”
“Then let’s make it private.” Derek took another step forward, invading Larsen’s space. The other crew members deliberately looked away, pretending to be engrossed in their screens. “You and I both know the lower deck schematics are outdated. There are sections off the grid since the last expansion. Sections you deemed ‘low priority’ for upgrades.”
Larsen’s jaw tightened. “That is a maintenance issue, not a security one.”
“It is now.” Derek’s voice dropped, becoming dangerously quiet. “And while you’re busy containing the ‘narrative,’ I’m wondering what else you’re containing. This isn’t about you catching me in a lab with a scientist. This is about you failing to do your job.”
The air left the room. Larsen’s face flushed a dull red. “You are out of line, McCall.”
“Am I?” Derek leaned in, his words for Larsen alone, but Diana could read the fury in the set of his shoulders. “Or are you just scared someone will find out what’s really down in those tunnels? You want to threaten my career? Fine. But you will not use my crew as collateral.”
For a long moment, they stood locked in a silent battle, the unspoken history of warnings and closets hanging between them. The only sound was the persistent, soft alarm from a nearby console.
Larsen’s eyes narrowed. “Stand down, Captain. That’s an order.”
Derek didn’t move. “I’m leading a team into the lower decks. With or without your permission.”
He turned, his gaze sweeping the room, catching Diana’s for a fractured second—a look of grim resolve—before he strode out, leaving a stunned silence in his wake. Larsen watched him go, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists.
Larsen watched him go, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. The silence in the C&C was brittle, broken only by the frantic tap-tap-tapping of a junior officer trying to look busy. Every eye was fixed on a screen, avoiding the Chief’s simmering rage. He turned slowly, his gaze sweeping the room before landing, with predatory focus, on Diana. "Albertson. My office. Now."
The walk felt like a march to an execution. His office was a sterile, windowless box that smelled of stale coffee and antiseptic. He didn’t offer her a seat. "You think this is a game? Your little... distraction just declared war on my command."
"He's right about the lower decks," Diana said, her voice steadier than she felt. "The schematics are a lie. I've seen the energy flux readings from the old atmospheric processors. They don't match the official maps."
Larsen’s lip curled. "I don't care what you think you've seen. You will return to your lab and you will stay there. If I find you've so much as looked at a access terminal, I will personally ensure you spend the rest of your career counting dust mites in a Martian archive." The threat was absolute, its specificity chilling.
Derek moved through the base’s arterial corridors with a purpose that cleared his path. Crew members pressed themselves against bulkheads to let him pass. He didn’t head for the main lifts; instead, he ducked into a service corridor marked ‘HYDROPONICS SUPPLY – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.’ The air here was thicker, humid and rich with the smell of loam and growing things.
He stopped at a nondescript panel, its seal streaked with lunar dust. This was it. An old maintenance hatch, decommissioned after the last expansion, its existence scrubbed from the active logs. He pried the cover open with a sharp, metallic screech that echoed in the narrow space. Beyond was darkness, and a breath of cold, stale air that carried the faint, coppery scent of static.
Diana stood frozen in the hallway outside Larsen’s office, his words echoing in her skull. Dust mites in a Martian archive. The image was absurdly vivid, a lifetime of irrelevance. She thought of Derek’s face in the lab, the raw certainty as he kissed her. She thought of Patel’s easy laugh in the mess hall. Her feet were moving before her mind had fully formed the plan, carrying her away from the science wing, toward the one place she might find an answer Larsen hadn’t sanitized.
She slipped into the deserted geology lab, the scene of their earlier confrontation. The console where he’d lifted her onto the table was now just a console. She called up the data from the anomalous meteorite sample, the one Larsen had told her to prioritize. The energy signature wasn't natural decay. It was a pattern, a repeating, low-frequency pulse that matched nothing in any database. And its point of origin wasn't deep space. The triangulation was crude, but it pointed straight down. Into the moon's crust. Into the unmarked sections of the lower decks.
The ladder down was cold, its rungs biting through Derek’s gloves. He dropped the last few feet, his boots landing with a crunch on a floor of compacted lunar regolith and discarded wiring. His wristlight cut a swath through the absolute black, revealing a tunnel that curved away into nothing. The air was dead here, unmoved by circulation systems for years. He pulled a handheld tracker from his thigh pocket, its screen glowing a soft green. No life signs. No comms signal. Just the faint, persistent hum of something drawing power far below.
He followed the tunnel, the beam of his light dancing over conduit pipes thick with brittle insulation and walls scarred by ancient welding torches. This was a ghost of the base, a skeleton everyone pretended didn't exist. Then he saw it. A scuff mark in the dust. Then another. Not the random patterns of decay, but a trail. Someone had come this way, and recently.
Diana found the access code for the secondary maintenance shaft in an old, unarchived project file from her first week on base. The door, hidden behind a stack of empty cargo containers near the recycling plant, hissed open reluctantly. The air that wafted out was cold and carried a strange, ozone-and-clove scent that made the hairs on her arms stand up. It was the same scent she’d detected on the meteorite sample. She took a deep breath, stepped into the darkness, and let the door seal shut behind her.
Derek’s tracker flickered. The ambient hum was growing louder, resolving into a distinct, rhythmic thrum that vibrated up through the soles of his boots. The scuff marks led to a junction where three tunnels met. In the center of the floor lay a discarded, empty hydration pouch. It was the kind issued to engineering teams for long extra-vehicular repairs. Patel’s team.
He picked it up. The plastic was cold. He shone his light down the left-hand tunnel. Nothing. The right-hand tunnel was partially collapsed, blocked by a fallen support beam. The central tunnel, however, showed the clearest path, the dust disturbed by multiple pairs of boots. And at the edge of his light, something glinted. A small, silver object. He moved forward and knelt, picking it up. It was a woman's hair clip. Chen always wore her hair up.
A sound echoed from deep within the central tunnel. Not a hum. A voice. Muffled, distorted by distance and rock, but unmistakably human. It was followed by a sharp, percussive crack that wasn't machinery.
Derek was already running, his hand going to the sidearm he wasn't supposed to be carrying this deep inside the base. The thrumming intensified, a physical pressure in his ears. The tunnel opened abruptly into a vast, cavernous space, and he skidded to a halt, his light beam stabbing into the darkness.
It wasn't a natural cavern. The walls were fused smooth, glazed as if by tremendous heat. And in the center of the chamber, surrounded by a spiderweb of cables that pulsed with a sickly orange light, was a structure. It was low, metallic, and utterly alien, its geometry all wrong, its surfaces seeming to drink the light from his torch. The cloying scent of ozone and cloves was overwhelming here.
The voice came again, a weak cry for help. It was Patel. He was slumped against the base of the strange structure, one hand pressed against a dark stain on his coveralls. His eyes were wide with terror, reflecting the pulsing orange glow.
Derek took a step forward. "Patel! Don't move."