In the black stillness between stars, the ISS Valhalla was little more than a whisper of geometry and light. Her silver hull bore the marks of centuries of travel — scratches from dust storms on forgotten moons, the pitted evidence of micro-impacts. She was humanity’s finest explorer, her Zeklon drive able to twist space itself, folding a thousand light-years like the crease of a page.

Inside, there was motion — soft footfalls, muted voices, the hum of recycled air and nervous anticipation. Captain Elias Corvan stood in the observation dome, arms folded, staring at the small blue sphere on the main screen.

“That’s her?” he murmured.

Beside him, Dr Mirella Voss, the mission’s lead xenobiologist, nodded. Her face, pale under the glow of holographic readouts, reflected both wonder and unease.

“Gaia Thirty-Nine,” she said softly. “Atmosphere nearly identical to Earth’s pre-industrial composition. Nitrogen, oxygen, trace carbon dioxide. Unpolluted. It’s perfect.”

“That’s what worries me,” Corvan said. “Nothing perfect stays that way.”

The bridge was alive now with motion. Lieutenant Rian Kael, the ship’s helmsman — young, quick-tongued, perpetually whistling — worked the navigation console.

“We’re in synchronous orbit, Captain. Stable as she gets. Planet’s rotation matches old Earth metrics almost exactly — twenty-four hours, give or take ten seconds. That’s some cosmic coincidence.”

“Coincidences don’t exist out here,” said Chief Engineer Tamsin Hale, her voice gravelly from recycled air and years in space. She adjusted a panel and frowned. “Magnetosphere’s strong, but I’m getting weird readings. Something under the crust, metallic? Rhythmic?”

Voss’s head lifted. “Rhythmic?”

“Yeah. Like a pulse.”

Silence fell across the bridge for a heartbeat too long.

Then Corvan said, “Prepare the drop shuttle. Recon team alpha: Voss, Kael, Hale, and Lieutenant Rourke. Two-hour ground sweep, then report.”

The Osprey-class shuttle detached like a silver seed from its parent stalk. The descent through Gaia 39’s thin cloud cover was breathtaking — beneath them, endless green forests stretched to horizons veiled in mist. Rivers shone like mercury threads, mountains rose blue and ancient, and on the coasts, bright white sands curved like smiles.

“Hard to believe this place has never been touched,” Rourke muttered. He was security — built like old Earth’s prizefighters, with a jaw that could’ve been carved from granite.

Kael grinned, adjusting the controls. “If I were a god, I’d live here too.”

The shuttle’s landing struts met soil with a soft hiss. The crew stepped out into air that smelled of pine, ocean salt, and rain.

“Christ,” Hale said, looking up at the vast sky. “Smells like home.”

“Home as it used to be,” Voss replied. She knelt, testing the soil with a small probe. “Rich in organic matter. Microbial life. No signs of industrial residue.”

Kael wandered a few paces away, hand shielding his eyes. “You’re gonna want to see this!”

They followed him to the edge of a ridge. Below was a valley carpeted in mist — but it wasn’t mist, not quite. It moved in spirals, almost purposefully, as if stirred by invisible hands.

“What is that?” Rourke asked.

“Thermal inversion? Ground vapour?” Voss offered, uncertain.

But Hale was frowning again, scanning her wrist display. “That ‘vapour’ is radiating a low-frequency signal. It’s not natural.”

Corvan’s voice crackled over comms. “Team Alpha, report status.”

“Landed safely,” Voss said. “Biosphere is stable. We’re encountering something unusual. Requesting permission to remain groundside for extended study.”

“Granted. Stay in communication.” Then, quietly, “And be careful.”

Night came quickly on Gaia 39.

The air grew colder, the trees whispering with a sound like murmured voices. The team set up camp near the shuttle, the lights cutting pale cones through the fog.

Kael set up the comm relay, whistling a tune — the same one he always did when nervous. Hale worked beside him, tightening bolts. “You ever stop to think,” she said, “that maybe there’s a reason no one else found this place?”

Kael shrugged. “Maybe the universe finally threw us a bone.”

Voss and Rourke were cataloguing samples under the ship’s floodlight. She found it difficult to focus. Her instruments picked up faint traces of something biological in the air — not spores, not pollen, but something reactive. The readings fluctuated with every heartbeat. She looked up, staring into the fog beyond the trees. For a moment, she thought she saw shapes — tall, slender, almost human. But when she blinked, they were gone.

“Dr Voss?” Rourke’s voice was close. “You okay?”

She forced a smile. “Just tired. Eyes playing tricks.” But as she turned back to her scanner, the shapes seemed closer.

By morning, Lieutenant Kael was gone. His cot was empty, his comm still on the ground. There were footprints in the soil — one set leading out toward the mist.

“Hell of a time to go sightseeing,” Rourke muttered, slinging his pulse rifle.

“Don’t,” Voss said sharply. “We don’t know what

happened.”

Hale frowned at her scanner. “Signal interference’s spiking. That fog’s acting like a shield. We’ll lose comms in under a hundred metres.”

“Then we stay close,” Rourke said.

They followed the prints down into the valley. The mist swallowed them almost instantly, thick as breath. Sounds grew distorted — footsteps echoing in strange delay, voices overlapping their own.

“Kael!” Hale shouted. “Lieutenant, respond!”

A faint sound answered — laughter.

Kael’s laughter.

But it wasn’t right. It echoed in loops, repeating too perfectly, each chuckle identical to the last.

Rourke lifted his rifle. “That’s a recording.”

“No,” Voss whispered. “It’s imitation.”

They broke through the fog into a clearing. At its centre stood Kael — or what looked like him. His eyes were vacant, skin pale as marble. When he smiled, his teeth were wrong — too smooth, too even, like they’d been grown, not formed.

“Kael?” Voss stepped forward.

He tilted his head, his movements stiff and birdlike. When he spoke, it was in her voice. “Doctor Voss… air quality… stable.”

Then he began to convulse. His body cracked open like glass under pressure, spilling light and vaporous tendrils that reached for them.

“Run!” Hale screamed.

They stumbled back through the fog, the light chasing them, whispering, mimicking their words — run, run, run.

By the time they reached the shuttle, Rourke’s arm was burning where one of the tendrils had touched him. The skin there shimmered faintly, like oil on water.

“Get us off the ground!” he shouted.

But the controls were dead. The ship’s interface blinked with symbols none of them recognised — twisting, organic, as if the planet itself had infiltrated the systems.

Voss stared at the readouts in horror. “It’s learning. Through him. Through Kael.”

The fog pressed closer against the viewport, almost human in shape. And in the comm speaker, Kael’s voice whispered, “Don’t leave. You’re home.”

_____

Inside the shuttle, the air grew stifling. Every system that wasn’t already dead flickered erratically — the hum of the generator now more like breathing than machinery. Hale slammed her hand against the console.

“Manual override’s not responding! The circuitry’s alive — it’s rewriting itself!”

Rourke’s breathing came heavy through his helmet. The patch of iridescent skin on his arm had spread up to his shoulder, veins glowing faintly beneath the surface. “Cut it off,” he muttered. “Before it reaches—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Voss snapped. “We don’t even know what it is!”

“It’s changing me,” screamed Rourke.

Outside, the fog coiled against the windows, moving in slow, sinuous waves. Shapes formed within it — not solid, not vapour, but something in between. They pressed hands, or what looked like hands, against the glass.

“Captain Corvan to ground team,” came a burst of static through the comm. “Report. You’re losing signal integrity.”

Voss grabbed the mic. “Kael’s dead — or… something worse. The planet’s not uninhabited. It’s sentient, or networked. The atmosphere—” The rest vanished into noise.

Hale stared at the readings. “The fog’s interfering with the Zeklon frequency bands. It’s not random. It’s targeting communication spectra.”

Rourke’s voice was hoarse. “You’re saying the damn air’s intelligent?”

Voss met her gaze. “Or something in it.”

The fog pressed harder. The hull began to moan under pressure.

“Out of options,” Hale said. “We head for the Valhalla. On foot if we have to.”

“You think we can walk through that?” Rourke asked.

“No,” she said grimly. “But I think it wants us to try.”

They left the shuttle at dawn. Or what passed for dawn — the sky a strange, liquid grey. The forest looked different now. The trees leaned toward them as they passed, branches curving like antennae. Voss felt it before she saw it — the low hum beneath her feet, resonant, biological, a living pulse moving through the ground.

“Remember Hale’s readings?” she said. “The metallic rhythm under the crust?”

Hale nodded. “It’s not metal. It’s an organism. A planetary-scale neural lattice. This whole place—”

“—is alive,” Voss finished.

They reached the ridge where they had first seen the valley. The fog below was no longer passive. It churned, rising in vertical spirals. Shapes darted through it — echoes of human forms, distorted and pale.

Rourke raised his rifle. “They look like us.”

“Not us,” Voss said. “Reflections. Mimics. It’s copying whatever enters its ecosystem.”

“Then Kael—”

“Was the first replication. A learning stage.”

Rourke’s hand trembled on the weapon. The iridescence had spread to his neck now, his eyes flecked with light. “And I’m next.”

Before anyone could stop him, he stepped forward.

“Rourke!” Hale shouted.

He turned back, and for an instant, he looked almost peaceful. “If it wants me, let it have me.” Then the fog swallowed him.

The screaming didn’t last long.

_____

Back aboard the Valhalla, Captain Corvan paced the bridge. The remaining crew had gone silent, their transmissions erratic. Voss’s last message had been truncated — something about the fog learning.

“Bring up ground visuals,” Corvan ordered.

The holo-screen flickered to life, showing static, then a distorted image — Voss and Hale moving through the mist, figures forming around them like ghosts. The system identified multiple biological life forms — all of which matched human DNA.

“Impossible,” the science officer muttered. “That many duplicates can’t be…”

“Run bioscan again,” Corvan said.

The readings came back — oxygen levels stable, surface pressure unchanged — but one anomaly stood out: the planet’s magnetic field had spiked tenfold.

Then came the voice.

“Captain Corvan.”

He froze. It was Kael’s voice. But Kael was dead.

“Your world poisoned itself,” the voice said. “You ran from the ashes. Now you bring your hunger here. Gaia Thirty-Nine, as you designated it, is not for you.”

“Identify yourself,” Corvan said.

“We are what remains,” it replied. “Before your kind burned the stars.”

And then, impossibly, every light on the ship dimmed.

Down below, Voss and Hale trudged through thickening fog. The ship’s beacon was a faint shimmer above the canopy, but the signal was unstable. Hale stumbled, coughing. Her breath came in shimmering clouds.

“Voss,” she gasped, “I can hear it… inside my head.”

Voss steadied her. “Don’t listen. It’s mimicking neural frequencies. It wants a connection.”

“But what if it’s right?” Hale whispered. “What if we are the infection?”

The ground trembled. The fog around them coalesced, rising into a shape — vast, translucent, neither human nor alien, but both. When it spoke, it did so through the voices of the dead.

“Your machines pierce worlds. Your hunger consumes skies. You call it discovery.”

Voss’s voice cracked. “We didn’t come to conquer. We came to learn!”

“And you learned nothing,” it said.

Hale screamed as the fog reached for her. Light poured into her eyes, her veins, her breath — and she vanished, becoming part of it, her body unfolding into mist.

Voss stumbled backwards, tears blurring her vision. “Stop! Please—”

The entity paused, its form shifting, softening.

Through the haze, a figure emerged — Kael again, perfect and wrong. He reached for her. “You could stay,” he said. “You could belong.”

Voss hesitated. His hand was warm.

Then she saw it — beneath his skin, light pulsed in time with the ground’s rhythm. His eyes reflected not stars, but countless other faces. She pulled away, ran into the forest, and didn’t look back.

Hours — or days — later, the Valhalla’s crew detected a faint return signal.

“Origin?” Corvan demanded.

“Surface,” came the reply. “One biosignature. Dr Voss.”

They opened the airlock slowly. Voss stood there, suit torn, eyes vacant. She said nothing as they helped her inside.

In quarantine, she sat motionless, staring at her reflection. Her vitals were regular, her brain activity steady — too steady.

“Doctor,” Corvan said softly through the glass, “what happened down there?”

She looked up. Smiled faintly.

“They forgave us.”

He frowned. “Who?”

“The planet.”

And then she blinked — once — and the monitors spiked. Every light on the ship flickered. Systems began to loop in recursive signals.

Corvan stepped back. “Seal this section.”

But it was too late. The ship’s internal sensors showed organic readings spreading through the ventilation shafts, through the hull, into the drive core.

From her chair, Voss whispered something the comm barely caught.

“Gaia’s awake.”

Two weeks later, an automated distress beacon from the ISS Valhalla reached the nearest relay station. The transmission was corrupted, looping endlessly:

Humanity has found paradise. Paradise does not want to be found.

The ship was never recovered.

When a second expedition arrived fifty years later, Gaia 39 was no longer there.

Not destroyed.

Simply missing — erased from all stellar maps, as though it had folded itself out of existence.

Yet in the deep void where it once was, faint radio whispers sometimes echo across the dark. Voices repeating names. Coordinates.

And if you listen long enough,

You might hear them call your own.