Avarn-6 was never meant to be a home. It was a dry industrial settlement of pressure domes, freight rails, buried pipes, and water machinery — a work colony built around maintaining the systems that made life possible under a dead white sun.

That dull, productive life ended when an orbital water collector came down across the salt basin. Its wreckage began bleeding moisture into soil that had stayed dry for generations, waking a dormant alien hazard beneath the crust: the Stemonites, a yellow-orange microbial slime that moves slowly, seeps through cracks, follows water, corrodes metal, and digests anything that cannot keep moving.

Bullets do nothing. Fire makes it worse. Cryo foam can only delay it — and when frozen pieces break loose, each chip can become a new contamination point.

A combat engineer team is sent under Pump Spin ...