The descent was a controlled crash. The Sisyphus screamed through a thin, methane-laced atmosphere, carving a black scar across a landscape of frozen ammonia and silicate dust. When the ship finally came to rest, embedded in the flank of a jagged cliff, the reactor’s whine had shifted to a death rattle. She had perhaps thirty hours.

XV-827 wasn’t a planet. It was a vault.

The survey data had said XV-827 was geologically inert. Dead. A frozen husk.