Elias forced his team through the pressurized hatch and into the lower level. Level 2 was immediately smaller and colder, dedicated not to structural support, but to the original scientific purpose of the station. This was the main Research and Data Acquisition Hub, a cluster of tightly packed laboratories and server rooms, now dark and coated in fine, dry dust. The air here was drier than Level 1, hinting at better pressure integrity, but the silence was more profound and unnerving.
The painful, high-pitched ringing that had plagued their comms on Level 1 was gone. Marcus, checking his gear, reported the atmosphere was acoustically null—a state achieved only by the Chimera's sophisticated, but obviously unstable, dampening system.
"The isolation is almost complete here," Marcus whispered over the comms, his voice sounding hollow and metallic. "The system is fighting the external pressure and the internal entity, trying to cancel out all measurable sound waves."
"Then the facility is working as designed," Elias insisted, trying to regain the comfort of objective data. He pulled out the blueprints, his helmet light focused on the layout. "Our priority is the central Data Core. We need to find the logs that explain what they were trying to isolate, and how they built the primary containment shell."
They moved through the corridors, their helmet lamps sweeping over banks of archaic, reel-to-reel magnetic tape systems and massive, sealed server cabinets. Everything was abandoned, covered in three decades of dust, looking more like an archeological ruin than a research facility.
Ava, moving ahead, pointed her light at a section of the wall near the Data Core entrance. Strewn across the floor were half a dozen empty, pressurized oxygen cylinders, and near them, two desiccated corpse outlines visible in the dust. The remains of the original crew were long gone, either decayed or removed, but their final resting places were etched into the floor.
"They ran out of air here," Ava noted grimly. "They died waiting for someone to open the core."
Elias knelt beside the outlines. He wasn't looking at the deaths; he was looking at the structure. He noticed a dark, crystalline residue clinging to the wall near the doorway—a substance that looked like frozen, melted glass.
"This residue isn't water damage," Elias observed. "It's fractured quartz. The dampening materials. Something here experienced intense, localized resonance failure—the sonic pressure exceeded the structural limit of the quartz composite."
He realized that the original team hadn't just gone mad from the silence; they had been subjected to a physical, non-audible sound wave so powerful it shattered matter.
As they entered the main Data Core, they found a room dominated by a single, colossal feature: a massive, spherical structure of black, smooth basalt that rose from the floor and extended into the ceiling. It was seamless and utterly featureless, feeling impossibly dense. This was the internal shield of the containment core.
Marcus immediately set up his connection rig, bypassing the broken network to access the emergency logs stored in the core's shielding layer.
While Marcus worked, Elias surveyed the basalt sphere. He ran his hand over the cold, hard surface, feeling a distinct, subtle vibration that was too fast and too rhythmic to be human. His structural integrity sensors confirmed it: the basalt was undergoing internal stress far exceeding its capacity.
Suddenly, Marcus shouted over the comms. "Elias! I have it! A live audio file from the last few hours of the original expedition."
Marcus played the recording. It started with static and hushed, panicked voices, then a clear, terrified voice belonging to the former chief acoustic researcher: "The sound isn't from the crust! It's from below the mantle! It's structured. It's a message! It's non-Euclidean! It doesn't move through air; it moves through mass! It uses the structure itself as a conductor!"
The voice broke off, replaced by a low, powerful pulse that grew in intensity—the 1.8 Hertz throb they had felt earlier, but now amplified. The chief researcher screamed: "It's resonating the quartz! It's making the dampening materials sing! It wants out! It's trying to make us hear it by destroying the structure!"
The recording ended abruptly with a sickening, high-frequency shattering sound, followed by absolute silence.
As the playback finished, the colossal basalt sphere in the room reacted. The rhythmic vibration that Elias had felt escalated instantly, turning into a visible, rapid shimmer that ran across the stone. The air in the chamber grew impossibly cold.
"It heard the playback!" Ava screamed. "It recognized the sound!"
The sonic nullification field, now actively targeting their presence, intensified. Elias felt the air pressure drop sharply, and the glass in his helmet viewport seemed to compress inward. The sensation was paralyzing—a complete denial of sensory input followed by an overwhelming pressure wave. .
Elias, struggling against the vertigo, looked down at his gloved hands. He didn't see the suit material; he saw the skin beneath, turning pale and translucent. He experienced a terrifying visual hallucination: the basalt sphere was no longer a sphere. The angles warped and shifted, defying all laws of geometry, resolving into a colossal, silent mouth.
"R-e-a-l-i-z-e," the whisper hissed directly inside his head, louder than his wife's ghost.
It was a physical attack utilizing the resonance frequency of their own bodies. The sound entity was using the facility as a tuning fork to dismantle their sanity.
Elias fought through the terror, grabbing Marcus and pulling him away from the sparking terminal. "Get out! We have to get to the structural integrity deck! It's going to resonate Level 2!"
They scrambled back toward the entrance, leaving the terrifying basalt sphere to shimmer in the profound, crushing silence. Elias knew that the final, critical levels were dedicated to the deepest anchor points, right above the geological anomaly itself. The Aetheric Preservation Trust hadn't wanted them to repair the structure; they had wanted Elias Vance, the structural expert, to descend to the lowest levels and physically reinforce the chains on something that defied physics and sanity.
They had to descend to Level 3: The Deep Anchor Hull. The door, however, wasn't just sealed; the high-frequency resonance had fused the titanium frame, locking them in.