He fired his descent thrusters to slow his fall. Four kilometers. Five. The walls narrowed. The amber turned to blood-red. The singing grew sharp, insistent—not a choir now but a thousand whispered arguments, each one tugging at a different fear.
Leo tore his gaze away. Nine minutes. He swept his helmet lamp across the chamber. No glowing glass. No fragments. Just the black, silent shards embedded in the walls like broken teeth.
You were never good enough. They chose you because you were expendable. Nine minutes isn't a buffer. It's a countdown. ten789
Ten years of guilt. Seven kilometers of descent. Nine minutes of mercy turned to seven seconds of truth.
Six kilometers. His heads-up display flickered. Pressure warnings blinked yellow, then orange. The singing glass here was black as obsidian, and silent. Dead. That was wrong. Every sample from the upper shaft had sung. Why were these dark? He fired his descent thrusters to slow his fall
He stood on the launch platform, his pressure suit humming with recycled air. Above him, the sky of Kepler-186f was a bruised purple. Below him, seven kilometers of vertical shaft plunged into the planet’s crust—a natural fissure lined with ancient, crystalline growths that the science team called "singing glass."
"Steady," he lied. His pulse was a war drum. The walls narrowed
Ten seconds to the first ledge. Seven minutes to the surface. Nine years until he could forgive himself.