Unexpected Footprints On Xylar

The first step on Xylar didn’t feel like a landing so much as a decision the ground made for her. Pale dust clung to Mara Voss’s boot sole as soon as her heel left the ramp, soft as ash but tackier, like it had been waiting for contact. Behind her, the transport’s landing struts rang once as they settled into the planet’s uneven crust, then went quiet except for the suit’s internal fans whispering against the thin, dry air.

Her visor caught the landing zone in strips - white haze over dark stone, the habitat dome’s curved ribs half-buried, the thrusters’ burn-scars already frosting over with a gray film. The light had a hard, indifferent angle, bleaching edges and leaving shadows too sharp. Mara crouched instinctively, fingertips hovering over her own track, and the dust gave a faint, granular crumble under the glove.

“Copy,” Jalen Rook’s voice came through her comm, tight with focus. “I’m seeing the same anomaly on range cam. Looks like… footprints.”

Mara stood slowly, letting the suit’s sensors map the ground where her boot had pressed. The strange thing wasn’t her own tread - it was the marks beside it, faint at first, as if someone had dragged a heel through powder and then walked away before the dust could decide whether to settle. They weren’t human. The spacing was wrong, the toe-off too long, the heel strike too broad for any bootprint she’d ever seen in training. They cut across the landing zone like a line drawn by a hand that didn’t understand feet.

She turned her head, searching for the start of them. The pale dust around the ramp edge held a scatter of micro-scars where the transport’s grit had lifted and fallen, but these tracks were clean in their own way - deep enough to catch the light, angled as if the walker had dipped and recovered its weight. They began near the edge of the habitat dome’s shadow and ran toward the landing field’s low ridge, disappearing and reappearing with the kind of certainty that made her skin prickle under layers of composite and seal.

“This happened immediately,” Mara said, hearing her own voice come out steadier than she felt. “After touchdown. Before we moved far.”

Dr. Sato’s breath crackled on the channel, followed by the soft clack of her glove against the dome’s frame. “If you’re right, then someone - or something - was already here. Or it arrived while we were still on the ramp.”

Mara didn’t like the taste of that uncertainty in her throat, even filtered through the suit’s breathing loop. She pointed her helmet down toward the nearest print. The dust inside the impression had a different texture than the surrounding powder, slightly glossy, as if it had been disturbed and then re-set.

“Hold,” Jalen said. “I’m on the perimeter scan. Don’t step into it yet.”

Mara froze with one boot hovering a few centimeters above the dust. The habit of obeying procedure came up like a reflex, but her eyes stayed locked on the print. It wasn’t just the shape. It was the way the dust around it looked… disturbed without being displaced. Like the track had compressed a surface layer and then the material had flowed back just enough to preserve the outline. She’d seen that kind of behavior in lab samples with exotic binders, but this was a planet that had never been catalogued.

“Confirm the suit prints,” Mara said. “I want to be sure it isn’t cross-contamination. Our own landing grit can do strange things.”

“Already checking,” Jalen replied. His tone shifted - less concern, more irritation at the data. “Your tread is clean. Sato’s is clean. Even the rover marks line up with expected wear. These aren’t ours.”

Mara drew in a careful breath, feeling the suit’s pressure equalize. “Then we follow the source. We don’t have time to - ”

A sound cut her off: the habitat dome’s seal system clicked, then screamed once in a rising, mechanical note. The dome had been sitting half-buried, its outer skirt pressed into the pale dust like a collar. Mara watched the seam line around the base shudder and then pull. A strip of darkness appeared where there shouldn’t have been any - an opening that widened with each pulse of the mechanism.

“Seal failure,” Sato said, and in the static Mara could hear the strain in her voice. “It’s not holding. I’m getting particulate intrusion.”

Jalen swore under his breath. “Mara, tell me you didn’t - ”

“I didn’t step near the tear,” Mara snapped, then forced her tone down. “I’m looking at the tracks. They’re over there. Not the dome skirt.”

The comm went quieter for a moment as all of them stared at the same problem. Mara’s gaze flicked to the base of the dome. Dust had collected along the skirt edge in a thin ridge, and now that ridge was breaking apart in little sheets, sliding away as if the ground beneath it had softened. Where the seal had been, the dust line had changed shape....