“What is this?” he whispered.

“They’re inside the perimeter!”

Marcus’s hand went to his sidearm. The ship’s alarm wasn’t sounding. The corridor outside his quarters was silent. Too silent.

The file expanded. The X... at the end of the filename began to multiply: — like legs. Like chitin.

He jerked back. The screen showed a trooper in Mark IV armor, visor cracked, standing in a corridor slick with arachnid viscera. But the trooper wasn’t moving. He was staring —directly through the camera, through the years, into Marcus’s own eyes.

The video skipped. Digital artifacts crawled like bugs across the frame. And then a voice—not from the movie’s soundtrack, but from inside the file —spoke his name.

He looked out the porthole. The fleet was gone. The stars were wrong. And somewhere deep in the ship’s hull, a sound he knew too well echoed through the vents.

The invasion had never ended. It had only changed media formats.

The footage was from Station Titan. The Invasion . Marcus had heard the stories—the lost outpost, the breached quarantine, the betrayal that the Federation never officially acknowledged. But this... this was different.

“Marcus. You were not supposed to find this.”

The lights flickered. The hum of the ship’s engines changed pitch. And then the file opened on its own. The screen blazed to life not with a menu, but with a raw, shaky feed. Italian subtitles burned into the bottom— “iTA” —but the audio was battlefield English, ripped from a source that sounded like it had been recorded through a dead trooper’s helmet mic.

The clicking of a Warrior Bug’s mandibles.