The warmth of the ship is already dissipating now that the power source is disconnected, and if we didn’t have the enemy’s attention before that awful noise, we certainly have it now. It’s time I got back to my exosuit. I tuck my wrapped prize under one arm and grab my helmet with the other, stepping carefully through the circular door and heading toward the front of the ship.

I’m almost there when something makes me stop. Once I might have ignored the quiet alarm bells ringing in my head, but not after these last three years on Titan. I duck to the side, out of the view of the front chamber, and listen. There—barely audible—is a snippet of what might be a voice outside. But why would a member of my team be out of their exosuit?

A moment later, the hatch creaks, and someone drops down into the entrance chamber. I wait, back pressed to the wall. I touch the comm in my ear, but the device is completely dead, its signal weaker than the one in my suit. If it’s a member of my team coming in, they’ll know that and call out to me any moment now.

I wait a second, two seconds, three. Only silence.

Cold resolve fills me. I’m not surprised; I always knew this was a risk, coming so close to enemy grounds, and the light pulsing from the unburied ship must have drawn them in. I click my helmet’s light out, plunging the room into darkness, and slowly lower it to the ground along with the power source. Then I slide my knife into my hand and wait. After a few moments of shuffling on the other side of the entrance, an enemy soldier steps through.

Up close, the Isolationists don’t look so very different than us. They never mentioned that in training. They showed us the different style of their uniforms—the tapered sleeves and square buttons, the gray armbands and rounded helmets, the points in their bodies that are the easiest to hit. They had us shoot and stab and lob grenades at targets printed with the image, rewarded us for destroying them, drilled it into our heads that this was our enemy. Them versus us. But training did nothing to prepare me for moments like these, when the enemy’s helmet is off and I end up face-to-face with a young man wide-eyed with shock and fear. The Isolationists draft their soldiers quite a bit earlier, another fact they declined to warn us about in training.

It was hard the first few times. Now, I don’t hesitate. The blade cuts cleanly through the skin of his neck. He goes down fast, bloody and gurgling. As gore splashes me, I think again of the black liquid spraying out of those cords in the ship, and my stomach lurches.