The Spider Queen

(Hydra Star System- Lunar Colony Renoran)

(Northern Region- Base Camp)

Qiana let out a heavy sigh of relief as the vehicle shot forward and burst through the closest wall of the building.

The heavy pressure soon disappeared as she escaped the influence of the mysterious yellow eyes.

She could feel the ring in her pocket vibrate twice and then go silent. The heat slowly faded away as well, and it appeared that the mysterious ring had settled down.

Clearly the entity was not pleased that she had managed to find a way out of the situation all by herself.

The young woman got up from the floor with a groan and tried to sit down in the driver's seat.

Currently the vehicle was on autopilot, but Qiana wanted to be in position to take over in case anything unexpected happened.

The base camp got further and further away in the distance until the large tents were blocked by enormous sand dunes.

Qiana did not have the luxury or the time to appreciate the vast beauty of the desert as she desperately checked her wrist communicator.

Come on… come on…

What she had experienced in the base camp would have unnerved any ordinary person and Qiana was not an exception.

Strange yellow eyes… a large monster… missing workers…

What the hell was going on?

[No Signal Found!]

[No Signal Found!]

Qiana was tempted to fling her device out of frustration but took several deep breaths and then calmed down.

Okay… what she needed to do now was go to the spaceport and see if any of the vessels were available for flight.

She should have already left the influence of the localised null field but for some reason her wrist communicator was unable to access the virtual net.

Wait… what if there wasn't a problem with the virtual net but rather…

Qiana furrowed her brows and reached into her storage bag for a small chip-like device that emitted a soft red glow.

She tapped the underside of her wrist communicator and a port opened up. She inserted the chip in the port and began to run a full diagnostic scan.

Qiana kept her eyes on the nearby surroundings as she waited for the chip to finish doing its work.

But there was nothing out of the ordinary.

Just an endless sea of sand dunes stretched across the horizon as far as the eye could see with no traces of people, buildings, or civilisation.

Ding!

Qiana glanced down and saw that her wrist communicator's screen was now covered in strange symbols and lines of code.

She raised up her arm to her eyes to get a closer look when the screen suddenly turned black, and her device shut down.

Just as she feared…

Someone had managed to hack her wrist communicator without her knowing and had installed countermeasures in case she found out.

Qiana would have been impressed were it not for the seriousness of the situation. When had her device been hacked?

Was it done even before she had arrived on the lunar colony?

Or once she had landed… did someone manage to send a hostile code into her device?

The young noble girl removed her device from her wrist and placed it in her storage bag She always carried a back-up device but did not rush to take it out.

It was clear that she was dancing in the palm of an individual or group of individuals. What was their purpose?

She did not know…

The hovercraft drifted over a large sand dune and its passenger was currently lost inside her own mind as she considered what to do next.

Was it even safe to go to the spaceport?

Logically it should be since the spaceport saw a regular amount of traffic from the spaceships taking raw materials away from the mining colony.

If something was wrong with the spaceport, then her family and the leaders of the mining company would have been notified immediately.

The ring throbbed twice in her pocket as if reminding Qiana that she had a better option to choose.

Qiana closed her eyes and listened to the sound of her beating heart.

This was a dangerous situation, but it was not as though her life had never been in danger before.

What she needed to do now was to remain calm and take things one step at a time.

Reach the spaceport and infiltrate one of the spacecrafts in the hangar. Then all she needed to do was to get off the planet and let her father know about the strange events.

It was not a particularly great plan but at this point she was out of options, and it was the only path that she had left.

The spaceport was on the other side of the lunar colony so it would take her around seven hours before she reached her destination.

Qiana opened her eyes and then immediately slammed her fist against the break. The vehicle shuddered to a halt as she looked at the impossible sight.

She was back.

The base camp was on the other side of the large sand dune, and it looked identical to when she had just left it twenty minutes ago.

There was even a hole in the building located at the far corner of the base camp where the vehicles were housed.

No… wait… what?

Chills ran down Qiana's spine as she checked the logs of the hovercraft and discovered that she had been moving in a straight line.

So, if she had been moving in a straight line away from the base camp then… it should be impossible to see this.

There was not a single person walking between the tents and one could only hear an eerie silence that added to the uneasy atmosphere.

Qiana started back up the hovercraft's engine and manually drove around the base camp.

She did not bother to investigate its mysterious reappearance and simply steered her vehicle around the peculiar sight.

A few yellow eyes appeared on the sides of the tents, but the number of eyes were much less than before.

Qiana did not like how the eyes followed the direction of the hovercraft as it made a wide berth around the camp site.

The ground trembled slightly, and a large dust storm rose up from seemingly nowhere. Curiously enough the cloud of dust only covered the base camp.

When the dust settled, Qiana saw nothing but an endless desert as if the base camp's reappearance had just been a strange dream.

"Nope… nope…." Qiana muttered quietly to herself as her fingers tightly wrapped around the steering wheel.

She was getting the hell off this moon immediately!