The silent battle began. Nakamura's fifteen volunteers, representing the hope of humanity, gambled their lives in the first direct confrontation with extraterrestrial biology.
These Martian life forms possessed no intelligence, yet they were the apex survivors of billions of years of brutal natural selection. Against them stood fifteen humans armed only with courage and intellect.
"The pathogen is confirmed to be viral in scale, possibly more complex than terrestrial viruses. All samples originate from the uranium mining site," Nakamura noted in his journal. He dedicated the left page to facts and the right to hypotheses.
He knew his time was running out. He had to focus on the fundamentals.
