Chapter 245: Ashwood
The outpost’s interior, when they finally crossed into it, felt subtly, unsettlingly different from Rohan’s first exploration weeks earlier. Portable lighting rigs had been installed along the main corridors, harsh and industrial compared to the outpost’s own long-dead fixtures, evidence of a considerably more thorough, better-resourced investigation than anything Rohan and Corven had managed on their own.
"They’ve been busy," Corven murmured, studying a cluster of unfamiliar equipment left abandoned near a junction point. "Survey drones, environmental scanners, considerably more sophisticated gear than anything we brought on our first pass."
"Voices," Dr. Farr said suddenly, freezing mid-step, one hand raised in warning.
They pressed themselves into the shadow of a side alcove as a small group passed through the junction ahead — three figures in matching, well-equipped tactical gear, moving with the disciplined efficiency of trained corporate security rather than the desperate improvisation of independent raiders. Their conversation, fragmented and distant, carried just enough detail for Rohan to catch the words "containment protocol" and "Director Ashwood’s timeline" before the group moved out of earshot entirely.
"Director Ashwood," Dr. Farr repeated quietly, once the corridor had fallen silent again. "I don’t recognise the name specifically, but the title suggests someone with genuine operational authority. Whoever’s running this expedition, they’re not simply scouting. They’re actively working toward securing the fracture."
"Then we need to move faster than they’re expecting," Rohan said.
They pressed deeper into the outpost, moving with considerably more caution than their first exploration had required, avoiding the main corridors where Meridian’s security teams seemed to be concentrated, working their way instead through the same maintenance crawlways and service routes Rohan remembered from their earlier retreat.
They very nearly didn’t make it past the second junction.
A patrol of two security personnel rounded the corridor ahead just as Rohan, Corven, and Dr. Farr were crossing an open stretch between maintenance access points, close enough that retreat would have meant certain discovery. Rohan reacted on pure instinct, catching Dr. Farr’s arm and pulling her bodily into a narrow equipment alcove barely large enough for the three of them to press themselves flat against its rear wall, spear held motionless against his side, breath held tight in his chest.
The patrol’s footsteps grew louder, unhurried, their conversation carrying clearly now in the corridor’s enclosed acoustics.
"— still reading elevated energy signatures from the primary chamber," one voice was saying.
"Director wants a full sweep of the adjacent sections before she authorises anyone closer to that platform."
"Waste of time, if you ask me," the second voice replied. "Whatever’s generating those readings, it’s been sitting here four years without moving. Not going anywhere before we finish securing the perimeter properly."
The footsteps passed within arm’s reach of their hiding place, close enough that Rohan could make out the texture of the tactical gear’s fabric in his peripheral vision, close enough that a single wrong movement, a single indrawn breath too loud, would have ended their approach before it ever reached the laboratory at all.
Then the footsteps continued on, fading gradually back into the outpost’s ambient quiet, and
Rohan allowed himself, finally, to exhale.
Too close. Far too close.
"That was nearer than I’d like to repeat," Dr. Farr whispered, once the corridor had fallen silent again, her voice carrying a tremor she was visibly fighting to control.
"Wasn’t planning on repeating it," Corven murmured back, already easing out of the alcove, checking the corridor in both directions before gesturing them forward. "Move quickly, quietly, and let’s not test our luck a second time."
They reached the boundary of the Primary Research Wing roughly an hour later, the same faint, veined light bleeding through the corridor walls exactly as Rohan remembered it, though considerably brighter now, more insistent, pulsing with a rhythm that had noticeably quickened since his first encounter with it.
"That’s not the same intensity you described from your first visit," Dr. Farr said, studying the light with a mixture of scientific fascination and genuine alarm. "If this represents a natural escalation toward the resonance spike I theorised, it may be occurring considerably sooner than any of my models predicted."
Rohan checked the portable resonance detector Dr. Farr had built, watching its readout climb steadily upward even as they stood still, studying the corridor ahead.
"It’s building," he confirmed. "Faster than it did during our approach last time."
"Then whatever window we’re waiting for may be arriving considerably sooner than we’ve prepared for," Dr. Farr said. "We need to reach the central laboratory quickly, and we need to be ready to act the moment that spike occurs, however soon it happens."
They pushed forward with renewed urgency, and it was there, rounding the final corner before the laboratory’s entrance, that they finally encountered Meridian’s operation directly.
The central laboratory had been transformed since Rohan’s last visit — additional equipment arrayed around the fracture’s shimmering platform, cables and sensor arrays feeding data toward a portable command station manned by two technicians in the same tactical gear Rohan had glimpsed earlier, banks of monitoring displays casting a cold, clinical light across walls that had, weeks earlier, been illuminated by nothing but the fracture’s own strange, veined glow. The place felt less like a research site now and more like a corporate acquisition in progress — efficient, thorough, utterly indifferent to the weight of everything the survey team’s final logs had described.
At the centre of it all, studying the fracture with an expression of intense, proprietary focus, stood a tall, silver-haired woman in a considerably more formal version of Meridian’s corporate uniform, flanked by two armed security personnel. She held herself with the particular unhurried authority of someone who had never once needed to raise her voice to be obeyed, her attention fixed on the fracture with an intensity that made Rohan’s skin prickle even before she’d registered their arrival.
Director Ashwood, presumably.
Rohan felt the resonance detector’s readout climb sharply in his hand, the pull in his chest surging in time with the fracture’s quickening pulse, and understood, with sinking clarity, that whatever window Dr. Farr had theorised was drawing closer with every passing second — precisely the moment their presence would inevitably be noticed.
It was Corven’s boot, catching against a loose cable trailing from the command station, that finally gave them away.
The sound was small, barely audible over the fracture’s own low, resonant hum, but Director Ashwood’s head turned toward it immediately, her composed expression sharpening into focused, immediate attention the instant her gaze found them at the corridor’s edge.
"Well," the woman said, turning toward the laboratory’s entrance with an expression that suggested she’d been expecting exactly this interruption, or something close enough to it. "I was beginning to wonder whether you’d actually make the journey a second time, Mr. Roy. Renna Voss’s network is thorough, but so, I’m afraid, is mine."
Rohan’s stomach dropped, every instinct honed across seven months of genuine danger snapping instantly to full alertness.
"You know my name."
"I know considerably more than your name," Director Ashwood said, unhurried, entirely composed despite the tension radiating from every other person in the room. "I know you’re not from this universe. I know you’ve spent seven months searching for exactly this fracture. I know, courtesy of a rather illuminating conversation with a parts dealer on the Anchorage’s mid-ring, precisely what equipment you’ve assembled in preparation for attempting a crossing." She studied him with the particular cold, assessing interest of someone evaluating an asset rather than a person. "Meridian Holdings has waited a very long time for genuine confirmation of exactly this kind of phenomenon. I don’t intend to let a stowaway with a spear simply walk through it unsupervised."