The dust tasted like rust and regret.

  Dr. Elena Kovács knelt in the shadow of the Noctis Labyrinthus, her gloved fingers brushing away a millennium of Martian grit. The excavation site hummed with the static of poorly shielded quantum drills, their vibrations making her teeth ache. Ten meters below, the Vognir glyphs glowed faintly through the regolith—bioluminescent scars left by a civilization that had died before humans invented fire.

  “You’re bleeding through your filters again,” said the suit AI, its voice a nasal mimicry of her dead mother.

  Elena ignored it. The airlock breach warnings had been blaring for hours. Let the thin atmosphere poison her. Let the perchlorates pickle her lungs. She’d promised her mother’s ashes she’d crack the Vognir’s last puzzle before the corporate goons from TerraGenesis arrived to weaponize it.

  Her antique Geiger-counter sang a sudden waltz.

  Clickclickclick.

  “Finally.” She unclipped the 1957 Grundig tube radio from her hip—no quantum scanners, no AIs. Just analog static and vacuum tubes. The archaeologists at Oxford had laughed until she’d proven Vognir signals hid in the white noise between stations. Now the fools were all dead from their own “advanced” tech.

  The radio hissed.

  “—ich bin ein—”

  “—pay any price, bear any burden—”

  “—ashfall will commence at—”

  Elena twisted the dial, her breath fogging the helmet. The Vognir didn’t broadcast in electromagnetic waves. They stitched messages into the quantum foam beneath reality, their language a virus that hijacked any receiver. Even a Nazi propaganda reel from 1943.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  A new voice cut through: guttural, glottal, vibrating her molars.

  “Kóvacs. M???????????other. L??????????isten.”

  The drill team’s chatter died mid-sentence.

  Twenty meters below, something shrieked.

  ——

  The artifact wasn’t a relic. It was a predator.

  Elena stood at the edge of the pit, watching the crystal skull devour the drilling bot. The machine’s tungsten-carbide claws passed through the object like mist, its atomic structure unraveling into glittering confetti. The skull drank them—savored them.

  “Full stop!” she barked. “Kill the qubits!”

  Her team froze. The skull pulsed, its hollow eye sockets birthing fractal patterns that squirmed into afterimages. She’d seen this once before, in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone—a mutated fern growing through a dosimeter, its fronds tracing forbidden geometries.

  “Dr. Kovács?” whispered Nakamura, the xenolinguist. “Your… tattoo.”

  Elena glanced down. The Fibonacci spiral inked on her collarbone throbbed neon green. Her mother’s ashes, sealed in the titanium vial at her hip, hummed in harmonic resonance.

  Oh.

  Oh no.

  The skull rose on strands of anti-gravity, singing in a language that predated stars. Elena’s vision shattered into overlapping realities:

  —A battlefield where soldiers bled equations.

  —A library orbiting a black hole, its shelves stocked with screaming books.

  —Her mother’s funeral, except the corpse wore her face.

  “Run,” Elena breathed.

  Too late.

  The skull unfolded.

  ——

  First contact wasn’t handshakes or laser beams. It was the Vognir’s final joke—a punchline etched in human DNA.

  Elena woke choking on saltwater and diesel fumes.

  The Geiger-counter lay rusting in sand. Not Martian regolith. Beach sand. Waves roared where the drill rig should’ve been. A corpse floated past, its D-Day uniform blooming with bloodflowers.

  “Welcome to Omaha,” rasped a voice.

  Lucas Voss leaned against a shattered landing craft, sucking whiskey from a pre-war flask. His neural scar glowed like a lightning bolt frozen mid-strike.

  Elena’s tattoo burned. “We’re in 1944.”

  “Wrong.” He tossed the flask. It passed through her hand, scattering into Higgs bosons. “We’re the ghosts here.”

  Above them, a squadron of P-51 Mustangs streaked across the sky—or rather, the memory of a sky. Their contrails dissolved into quantum static, revealing the true horror:

  The Martian excavation site still existed beneath Normandy. Two timelines occupying the same space, bleeding into each other like wet ink.

  Lucas grinned, all teeth and trauma. “Ever danced the tango with entropy, Doc?”

  The skull’s laughter echoed across realities.

  Somewhere, a universe began to die.