The Crucible: Leap of Faith by Odette C. Bell

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camp again.
    She’d tried to give her staff a
pep talk, but it hadn’t worked. So she’d let them rest.
    With two fingers pressing into the
wall she turned around, and she scanned across the room until she
locked onto the camp.
    That’s when she saw something
odd.
    Her mech suit had once belonged to
a mining operation. It was one of the most expensive pieces of
equipment she owned. Still, like everything else she’d managed to
source, it was always breaking down.
    The once perfect targeting sensors
were now shot to pieces.
    Still, there was just enough
computational power to pick up something strange.
    She stared out across that massive
cavern to the opposite wall. All on their own, the hover lifts were
ascending to the surface.
    Nobody was on them.
    They were simply being called back
to their various stations.
    “Shit, it’s a glitch,” she
realized, getting ready to call her engineer.
    The last thing you wanted was for
all of your hover lifts to be stuck on the surface. She would have
to call Hargrove and get his men to fix them, otherwise her entire
crew would be stuck down here in this cavern. And Hargrove would
hate being called out for a simple engineering task.
    She fumbled inside her suit,
thumbing on the controls that would contact her chief
engineer.
    Then she stopped.
    She saw black shapes rapidly
descending the walls of the cavern.
    No larger than people, they were
unsupported by any hover lifts, and simply sailed down to the
bottom of the cavern.
    Her heart leaped into her throat
and she threw herself forward until the hands of her mech suit
locked on the railing of the scaffolding. “What the
hell?”
    The shapes landed. They weren’t
crushed against the bottom of the cavern – instead she saw them
slowly pull up and land gently.
    That’s when she realized they
weren’t objects, but people. Dressed in jet black armor.
    Her heart beat louder and louder,
harder and harder, her hands wrapping so tightly around the
railings she dented the cheap reinforced metal.
    She watched as a few of her staff
popped their heads around from the main camp to see what was going
on.
    And that’s when the firing
began.
    The black shapes brought out guns,
and began to kill her crew.
    Amy Lee screamed. She pushed
herself backwards, her mech suit slamming against the smooth wall,
the sound echoing all around the cavern.
    The black shapes kept shooting.
She could hear her crew screaming, hear they’re terrified shouts
cut out as one by one they were mowed down.
    Nobody had a chance.
    Nobody had a goddamn
chance.
    She fell to her knees, shivering
and shaking inside her suit. Sweat poured off her brow, blanketing
her face until it was hard to blink.
    But with a shaking hand she
acted.
    She punched in the coordinates to
put out a distress call. “This is research manager Amy Lee, we are
under attack—“ she began.
    Then she stared in horror at the
inside of her visor as it told her her message could not be
sent.
    There was a dampening field in
place.
    Whoever those black shapes were,
they had made short work of her team.
    At first her crazed mind thought
it must be Hargrove. Maybe he’d snapped and sought
revenge.
    But she saw those black figures
mow down several Star Forces personnel who’d been at the camp.
Though they tried to fight back, the black figures were simply too
powerful.
    Hargrove wouldn’t sacrifice his
own people.
    She shook so badly that her
fingers kept inadvertently pressing against the controls of her
suit.
    Once the black figures had
murdered everybody in the camp, she saw them turn towards her. Or
maybe they didn’t lock on her – maybe they all stared as one at the
massive alien wall.
    She stared at them.
    Soon, she would die. She realized
this.
    But she was determined not to die
in vain.
    During her years as a student of
the Alliance Archaeology Society, she’d forayed into signal
studies.
    She’d once come across an old
civilization who’d found a unique way to propagate messages