The group hallucination in the temple only lasted a couple of minutes in real time. About halfway through, the crew of the Barbarossa knew something was wrong.

Captain Andersen had felt a bit like a spare part to begin with. She’d remained in the staging bay with her officers, even as most of the scientific staff had been rushed down to the forward operating base.

The rows of harnesses were quiet now, with just a few people and drones attending them. So, they’d clustered around the workspace that was feeding through telemetry from the simulation. Andersen didn’t understand most of it, so she contented herself with listening in on comms chatter between the rig and the real world team.

She grew fidgety when it became apparent the rig had lost comms with the team inside this alien temple, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it too long. A holo of her XO, stationed on the bridge, appeared on the table facing her.

“Ma’am, we’ve uncovered a signal originating from outside of this system! They’re sniffing our connection to the FOB, and hacking into our mainframe.” Andersen’s eyes widened. She looked at Rareth, who appeared on the surface as surprised as she. “What!? How is that possible?” She asked her second in command.

“It looks to be piggybacking on the simulation’s connection, ma’am.” her XO replied.

“Well shut it down!” Andersen snapped.

“We can’t close the connection now. Our team will be trapped inside.” The sole awake Human scientist from Freyr’s team who stayed behind on the Barb protested. Andersen was in her personal space almost immediately. “Well you tell them to pull out then, NOW!”

Andersen whirled around as the scientist rapidly got in touch with the FOB. She stormed past Rareth with her staff in tow, towards the waiting buggies. “I’ll contact you from the bridge, Rareth ‘Jharn.”

[hr]595 blinked furiously, her mind full of scorpions. She felt confused and extremely hungry. She eventually realised Vreta was talking to her. Her mind cleared a little bit, as one of her newly configured implants administered chemicals to level out her brain activity. She forcefully pressed her need to feed to the back of her mind. “Uhh...yeah. I can move. What just happened?”

The ground beneath them shook violently. 595’s ultra sensitive hearing picked up the sound of rocks falling in the distance. “Ground team to the rig. What’s your status?” … Nothing. 595 looked at Vreta.