The scrubber array in Sector 7 was running hot.

I noticed it the way I noticed everything. Couldn’t turn it off if I tried. CO₂ conversion above optimal meant sensor drift or a load spike. Extra bodies on the overnight detail, probably. Someone authorized overtime without telling atmospheric.

Made a note on my forearm display. Flagged it for Chen. Kept walking.

The hub sprawled around me, conduits fat as tree trunks, the big scrubber units humming overhead. Air tasted the same as always. Flat. Iron. That red-dust undertone Mars works into everything. Seventeen years back I’d rebuilt the primary unit from scrap, stayed up two days straight to do it. Colony gave me a commendation. Earth sent an auditor to make sure I hadn’t skimmed parts.

Breath counter pulsed at the edge of my vision. Remaining: 412 L. Rate: 8.2. Deficit: -24.

Running hard this cycle. I’d pay next month. Everybody paid.

Crawlway empty. Good. Keyed the access sequence, waited for biometrics, opened the channel to Tharsis.

Yun dark. Assume full compromise. Protocol Seven. All assets relocate

The hum stopped.

Forty-four years breathing recycled air. Never heard silence. Processors, fans, scrubbers, pumps, the whole system keeping everyone alive. Gone quiet.

Two seconds. Three.

My body figured it out first. Heart hammering, muscles locked. The part older than thinking. Engineering brain caught up a beat later: that wasn’t maintenance. Wasn’t a diagnostic cycle. That was something else.

Alarm hit.

Triple pulse, rising. Structural breach. Decompression.

Not here. Close. Display flooded with red: Sector 7, Transit Junction East, pressure dropping fast. The airlock I’d passed twenty minutes ago. Route home. Route where forty-some workers were pulling overtime.

Already running.

The thing didn’t belong here.

Rubber tires. Cracked. Metal body gone to rust. Windshield made of actual glass. I could hear the engine, rough, mechanical, burning something that smelled like…

Gasoline. Word surfaced from old files. Museum stuff. Century-dead.

Couldn’t breathe. Not shock, real atmospheric failure, pressure tanking, lungs grabbing at nothing. Counter screaming: EXTERNAL CONTAMINATION. CONSERVE.

It rolled forward.

Characters on the cab. Japanese. Faded trucking logo.

A truck. From Earth. From before.

Headlights found me.

Thirty seconds left. Maybe. Pressure ripping air from my lungs, cold clawing in, vision graying at the edges. But I understood something worse than dying.

This wasn’t an accident.

This wasn’t anything that should exist.

It accelerated.

Impact.

White. But not white. White needs light and this was before light. No body. No breath. No weight. Mars gone. Colony gone. The revolution, the names, all of it.

Voice. Not outside. In.

Speaking Creole. Martian Creole, dome cadence, work-crew slang, the rhythm I grew up with in Olympus Mons. No Earther ever spoke it right. This was perfect. Too perfect. Not ai generated fake, just perfect in a way that made my skin crawl.

“You’re going to be interesting,” it said. “I can tell.”

And then it showed me…