The low hum of the turbines slowing down was the first thing I heard. Initially, my eyes were struggling to focus and reset as I slowly came to. It wasn't until a few more minutes passed and I became fully aware that I realized what had happened. As my finer senses returned and I noticed the flashing light in the hibernation chamber, I began to panic. "Something is wrong... This isn't right." I said this to myself over and over with each repetition getting slightly more flustered. I began to scramble around the pod looking for the emergency exit lever. I finally found it after what seemed like forever, and pulled it to the left, just as I had been taught during our trial runs at SouthPoint. The door fell off my pod and hit the ground. The crash of it slamming against the floor should have been quite loud, but as soon as the door opened and I could hear the sirens blaring, I became unaware of almost everything that didn't pose an immediate threat.

I looked quickly to see if Alexa was still in her pod, but it was empty so I turned to leave the hibernation chamber. The sliding metal door had already been opened, but the main power had been shut down so it would have had to have been opened manually. The hydraulic doors are one of the first things to shut off when the power goes out. Something seemed odd about this, and because I doubted that even I would have been able to pry that door open manually, I was fairly confident Alexa hadn't been the one to open the door. Regardless, it was open, and I ran into the hallway to try and figure out what was going on. There weren't many windows in The Hyperion, so initially I had no idea where I was at all. that is, until I got close enough to the cockpit of the ship to see out the main window and realize that we weren't in space anymore. We had crash landed onto a planet, but it was hard to tell any of the planets apart after The Darkening because they were all engulfed with snow and ice.

I needed to find Alexa and make sure that Luma was okay, so I ran down the hallway to the safe-room. Just like in the hibernation chamber, the sliding metal door had been pulled away and the room was empty. The panic began to set in as hundreds of questions flooded my brain. At this point my senses were becoming aware of the small things again. Finally noticing how loud it was in the hall, I walked to the control panel and pulled out the cable to the emergency siren. Now, in the quiet, I had to figure out what to do. As I sat trying to figure and refigure what could have possibly gone wrong, I became so absorbed in my thoughts that I failed to notice the person walking up behind me until they had already injected me with the needle. I fell to the floor immediately and watched as my vision slowly faded and I began to lose consciousness.

I awoke in a well-lit room. The process of waking up went much more quickly than it had when inside the pods of the hibernation chamber. The room was small and had lots of windows, but it was too dark to see out of any of them. And although I was sitting in a chair, I was free to get up, as whoever had brought me here hadn't attempted to restrain me. However, they did have cameras in every corner of the room to keep an eye on me. They must have been watching me pretty intently, because it didn't take long for a person to come through the door after I had woken up.

"Hello, you’re Abram, correct? My name is Lt. Khan Rheeves, but you can just call me Khan.” The stranger said. “Do you have any idea what happened or where you are?"

I shook my head slowly. Something was odd about this whole situation, and I didn't trust this man just yet. "Your ship crashed into the runway of our base around five hours ago. We boarded the ship and neutralized you in case you posed a threat, but while you were asleep we discovered that you are a member of the SouthPoint team of Earth. Is this correct?"

I nodded. Something was still weird.

"I'm sorry to inform you, but you are the only survivor of your team. The other two were presumed to be dead on impact."

"And where exactly am I?" I interrupted. The news of my partner's death hadn't had time to sink in.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Khan replied, "You are at the Elmcroft Outpost on Mars."

I grew quiet. Mars was only one planet away from Earth, but it still took months to travel the distance between them. Perhaps that explained why we hadn't woken up, but I still didn't understand why SouthPoint would have chosen not to intervene if something had begun to go wrong while we were in transit. All they had to do was flip the emergency switch to deactivate the pods and wake us up. I was still rolling the evidence over in mind and trying to piece together what happened when Khan continued.

"I have more bad news, Abram. At this point you're probably wondering why SouthPoint didn't wake you up at the first sign of danger. The Order lost contact with SouthPoint as well as the rest of Earth about two years ago."

A chill shot up my spine as his next words would prove to be even more alarming than his previous statement.

"What's worse is that every team we’ve sent to Earth since ends up getting killed before we can even make contact and figure out what's going on.”

I had been asleep for almost seven years, and if you add up both hibernation periods and my time on Triton, I had been away from Earth for collectively almost fifteen years now. Yet I still couldn't bring myself to believe Earth had just broken off from The Order and was now killing any people of Mars who attempted to contact them. Equally unlikely was the idea that a foreign predator had taken over Earth and was holding them captive from The Order.

Khan had to be lying. I could tell that something else was going on, and I didn't know it yet, but my intuition was correct. For behind the words of Khan, there was something much more sinister happening. Something that I may have never noticed if I didn't catch a glimpse of what was painted on the doors down a hallway to our left as we exited the room I had initially woke up in. The preceding characters were all the same, but there was a seemingly endless order of numbers following it. PRI-13 was as far as I could read down the hall, but I was much more surprised to see the sequence PRI-09 because I knew exactly where I had seen that pattern before. That was the pattern tattooed on Luma's arm and as it would turn out, that pattern meant much more than I thought.