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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/MadCowCrazy666 on 2025-08-11 19:00:12+00:00.
Echoes in the Dark - Chapter 10 - Part 1
Earth - Sometime around the 1980s
The air inside the Vostok Station observatory was dry and sharp, the kind that scratches the insides of your throat until you’ve swallow your first cup of coffee. Senior radar operator Dmitriv Alekseyevich had just finished brewing a steaming hot cup of coffee, the first of what he expected to be many that day. He sat at his station with his hands wrapped around the metal mug for warmth, it was sorely needed right now.
He had been there for eight months now, eight out of his nine month rotation. He didn’t envy the personnel that stayed over the winter, their rotations lasted for one and a half years… one and a half fucking years in this barren frozen hellscape that seemingly took delight in plucking at your nerves and patience like it was some sort of instrument out of tune.
It was important to keep yourself busy with something, that something had to occupy most of your attention for the duration of your stay. The worst thing you could do was let your mind wander, many a men had lost their minds in never ending thought circles out here. The last cargo drop had been over half a year ago, and the next was still a month out. With it came the much needed supplies but more importantly, a way out, for those that were scheduled or those that needed it.
Coffee was one of the few luxuries in this frozen exile. Black, bitter, and smelling faintly of the burlap sack it had arrived in, but above all else good, good for the body, heart and soul, all at the same time.
On the shelf above his desk sat todays main distraction, a dented old tin of biscuits, this weeks sweet ration. He reached for it, fumbling with the twisted little metal key soldered to the side. Soviet efficiency was a thing of wonder but this damned packaging left much to be desired. He hooked the tab and began twisting… *Snap*
“Сука блядь!” Dmitriv muttered, glaring at the broken key. It was like this with half the rations, some tins older than he was, stamped with manufacturing dates from before the stations construction had even begun over twenty years earlier.
The lid had split just enough for him to force it open by hand, the sharp edge bit into his index finger like it thirsted for blood.
“А-а-ай! Блядь!” He jammed the bleeding finger into his mouth, tasting iron, salt and generator lubricant.
It wasn’t the first injury he had suffered out here but when compared to the hell of the last twenty-four hours it wasn’t even worth noting. Yesterday, the generators had failed. Ten hours without power… precious heat slowly dissipating as the minutes ticked by. Backups frozen solid, they had been impossible to start without hours of hard work. They’d tried hailing Mirny Station, but atmospheric interference or something had turned everything into garbled bursts of static. As he had stood next to the radio operator and caught pieces of shouting in the background on their end, something about a broadcast, and obvious panic, but it hadn’t made sense at the time.
The wound stopped bleeding quickly enough. Dmitriv sipped, the now, lukewarm coffee to wash out the taste of blood, then bit into a biscuit. It was like chewing stale cardboard, dipping it into the mug to soften it didn’t help, the damned thing disintegrated instantly, turning his drink into a slurry of bitterness and sand.
That was when the radar pinged.
At first, he thought it must have been his imagination, the scan lines rarely pingws off something outside the scheduled resupply drops. The green dot appeared, blinked, and with each rotation of the radar dish, moved slowly across the screen.
*Ping*
He leaned closer. An airplane? No, it was much to fast for that. Some sort of meteor? No, the path was different, it seemed to be slowing down. Not some sort of weather phenomenon either, the signal was too strong.
*Ping*
*Ping*
*Ping*
Dmitriv frowned. The trajectory put it twenty kilometers north of their position. And then…
*Ping* *Ping**Ping*
He sat up straight. Two new returns had appeared, trailing the first. Moving fast.
*Ping* *Ping*Ping*
They were rapidly closing the distance. Pursuit? Escort? Interception?
The pings grew quicker, overlapping into an insistent alarm.
Without thinking, Dmitriv pushed back from the console and ran for the door, he needed to inform the others. He burst into the corridor and took a left, just up ahead was the entrance to the commons room… it completely empty. He looked around the room and through a frost covered window covered he could see several people. He ran back and out the nearest exit, they were just around the corner of the building and as he came closer he noticed they were all staring… north…
“Mikhail! What’s going on?” he shouted as he approached.
Before anyone could answer, the world hit them.
A concussive blast wave rolled over the frozen tundra. It knocked Dmitriv and the others to the ground and he could feel the ice vibrating beneath them. In the distance, over the horizon, a column of dark smoke rose upwards. Faint sounds of jets could be heard flying overhead, just above the grey clouds covering the sky as far as they could see.
“What the hell was that?” Dmitriv shouted.
“Invasion!” Mikhail, the radio operator, yelled back, eyes wild. “It’s all over the broadcasts! We couldn’t hear it yesterday with the power out, but-” He broke off, glancing toward the smoke and pointing. “They’ve come. They’ve found us!”
“What? The Americans?” Dmitriv demanded. “Nuclear bombers?”
Mikhail grabbed his shoulders with both hand, shaking him slightly as he frantically tried to explain. “No! Aliens, Dmitriv! They took over every frequency! Said they had found us and had come for us!”
Dmitriv stared at him. “You’ve been drinking the disinfectant again…”
A third voice cut in. “He’s telling the truth.” It was Captain Yuri Antonovich, the station commander. “Get your gear. We’re moving out.”
Confusion turned to urgency. Dmitriv sprinted back inside, yanking his fur lined parka from the rack and made sure his insulated gloves were in it’s larger pockets. Everyone had spent the night geared up, they had all tried to sleep in thick clothing due to the cold caused by the generator failure. In this cold, exposed skin froze in minutes and it had taken hours to reheat the structures once power was restored and they could finally remove a bit of clothing.
By the time he reached the vehicle yard, the two Kharkovchanka transports were already loaded and moving, their enormous red hulls grinding across the snow on wide tank treads. Mikhail waved him toward a smaller Sno-cat idling nearby. Dmitriv climbed in, and they took off, the bigger vehicles tracks easy to follow once they lost sight of them ahead.
They drove for nearly ninety minutes across the white void. The Kharkovchankas eventually came into view, having stopped on a rise. Their crews outside, clustered along the edge of gorge up ahead.
As Dmitriv and Mikhail approached on foot, the scale of it hit him. A long, hundred meter long gorge had been gouged through the ice by the impact, hot steam instantly turning to mist in places. Pieces of twisted metal could be seen scattered around the crash site… this was a crash site but this was no aircraft wreck Dmitriv recognized.
Yuri waved them over. Up close, the debris looked… wrong. No bolts, no rivets, it was all smooth and seamless. Like most of the parts had been cast as a single piece. Some of the metal pieces were also wrong, it looked like iron but shimmered faintly in the sunlight. This was not a metal Dimitriv had ever seen before.
“We hold here until support arrives.” Yuri ordered. “They’ve been tracking it for hours. We have aircraft inbound.”
Thirty-eight minutes later, the first plane came in low through the cloud cover, an Antonov An-12, Dmitriv thought. The side doors and rear ramp were already open before it fully touched down. A hundred soldiers in white camouflage spilled out, spreading into a defensive perimeter. Within moments, the transport was throttling up to leave, no doubt to fetch more.
The next aircraft heard but it’s sound came from the wrong direction. High above the clouds as it passed over them, Dmitriv never saw the plane itself but shortly after the flyby he could see shadows erupting through the ceiling of grey.
Vehicles of some sort.
He blinked, unable to process it as parachutes began to bloom, dozens, then hundreds, carrying men and machines alike.
Mikhail’s voice was tight with dread as he noticed the insignia. “Americans!”
Yuri’s order was immediate. “Back to the vehicles. Move! We can’t let them take them. Let the cold kill theirs and freeze the troops. We fall back and wait. It’ll take hours at most.”
They manned the vehicles and quickly retreated about two kilometers before stopping. Through binoculars, Dmitriv tried to see what was going on at the crash site. Two figures: One Soviet, one American, walked out from their lines, meeting in the middle. After a tense few minutes, they shook hands.
The radio crackled. “Return to site. Agreement reached.”
Dmitriv felt a strange hollowness as they rolled back. Agreement or not, he knew one thing for certain, whatever had fallen from the sky was not of human origin. Whether it had crashed or been shot down he had no idea b…
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