Edert Guidry And Nibiru Secrets

The air in the training hangar tasted like cold metal and burnt coffee, the kind that stuck to the back of Edert Guidry’s throat even after he’d swallowed. Fans chased dust through the light, and somewhere behind the bulkheads a connector clacked like a nervous knuckle. Edert stood with his boots planted on the scuffed deck, helmet under one arm, his other hand still wrapped around the strap of a flight bag like it might pull him out of his own skin. The wall screen across the bay kept cycling through checklists and burn-time windows for Mars-save humanity, the mission called it, like a promise could be typed.

“Edert,” Grace said, her voice low enough that it didn’t bounce off the steel. She leaned in from the docking corridor, hair pinned back, eyes red-rimmed from too little sleep and too much listening. “You’re early.”

“I always early,” he answered, Cajun drawl thick enough to fog the corners of the word. He tried for a joke, but it came out thin. “My brain don’t like waiting.”

Grace’s gaze flicked to the bag, then to his face. “Neither does mine. Not today.”

Behind them, Denis was arguing with a tech over a calibration tool, his hands cutting the air as if he could straighten something that wasn’t straight. Daniel sat on the edge of a storage crate, boots dangling, whispering to himself like the numbers might answer him. Tim and Erica were harder to read-because they were trying so hard to be normal. Tim’s wedding band caught the hangar light when he shifted his weight. Erica’s laugh came a half-second too late, as if it had to travel through a locked door first.

Edert watched them all and felt the familiar rhythm of mission training: the drills, the protocols, the careful way everyone pretended the biggest fear was some malfunction that could be fixed with enough checklists. His objective this morning was simple and brutal-finish the last week before Mars qualification, sign off on the final simulator cycle, and keep his head down long enough to pass. The problem was that his head didn’t belong to him anymore.

The first time they’d come back from their mission, the facility had smelled like disinfectant and wet paper, like the building itself was trying to erase what it had seen. Edert had nodded at briefings, signed forms with a hand that shook just enough to be noticed, and swallowed every question because the answers had teeth. They’d told him there were secrets-super natural secrets-things learned during their mission so terrible they couldn’t be leaked because it would cause a panic around the world. They’d said it like a safety rule, but in the way their voices thinned, it sounded like a warning from someone who’d already watched a crowd turn feral.

And in the silence between words, Edert kept seeing it: a secondary solar system far in the distance, heading toward and entering our solar system-dwarf star, seven planets, a few moons drifting in their own slow clock. One planet, reddish like iron oxides, bigger than it should’ve been, trailing space trash like a tail of shredded metal. A planet called Nibiru, passing within 22 million miles of Earth-close enough that the thought of distance felt like a lie.

Grace stepped toward him, and the hangar noise dropped around their shared breath. “They’ve got you scheduled for the Mars qualification simulator in an hour,” she said. “Then they’ll want you in the debrief room after. Again.”

“Again,” Edert echoed. The word tasted like iron. “What’s the point of training if they’re still pulling the same curtain?”

Grace hesitated, and Edert felt it-like friction before a spark. “It’s not the same curtain.”

That was the obstacle, plain as a warning label: the simulator and the debrief weren’t separate. The last week before Mars wasn’t just about learning to land and survive. It was about getting him to forget what his eyes had already seen.

Denis slammed the calibration tool down on the console with a metallic thunk. “They changed the parameters,” he snapped. “Again. Like the machine doesn’t know what it’s supposed to do.”

Daniel looked up, pale under the hangar lights. “It doesn’t matter what the machine thinks,” he said. “It matters what they don’t want us to say.”

Tim stood too quickly when he noticed Daniel’s tone. “Hey,” Tim said, smiling like he could glue the moment together. His eyes slid to Edert and away again. “We’re all here to finish. That’s it.”

Erica’s fingers tightened around her clipboard. She didn’t look at Tim when she spoke, which was its own kind of confession. “That’s it,” she repeated, softer. “We finish. Then we can-”

“Then we can breathe,” Tim finished, too fast. The laugh he tried to attach to the words didn’t land.

Edert’s stomach turned. He didn’t like the way their secret sat between them like something invisible and heavy. Tim and Erica had been secretly married just before mission launch day. Everybody in the crew had known there was something, but nobody knew how deep it went....