According to every news agency in the country, the flight of Artemis II had been a tragedy without survivors. A sample return mission from a distant asteroid, one of the longest-distance manned spaceflights in history, and all it had resulted in was a brave soul being forever lost. You couldn't watch a single news broadcast in the past few days that didn't feature a tribute to Catherine Stone, a pioneer and new martyr for human spaceflight, first person to die out in the cold grip of the vacuum, her body forever lost as her wrecked craft floated in the silent black void.
Of course, if Siobhan had learned anything, it was to not put too much stock in the official story.
Thus the doctor hadn't found it too terribly surprising when she was called up to review a 'biological sample' under clandestine circumstances. Not exactly her first rodeo, after all. Ten years working as a doctor within the Air Force's more secretive research projects, and she'd lost track of how many 'samples', in very suggestive quotes, she'd looked over. Some truly wild things, well beyond anything the public could even imagine... though something from space was definitely a first.
She'd shrugged off the usual black-ops song and dance when they'd arrived at the facility, well-accustomed to being dragged to places blindfolded and deafened. As one of the armed guards led her through brutalist metal corridors, she was primarily focused on the sound of the hums around her - they were deep underground to be certain. Mountainside installation, if she had to factor a guess based on the exact sizes of the hallways. Exactly the sort of place where you'd store some kind of pathogen or viral agent.
In short order the brunette found herself brought to a haggard-looking woman, dark-skinned and sipping at a mug of just-as-dark coffee. She finished off half the mug before setting it aside and offerring Siobhan her hand. "Doctor Forrestor. I'm Doctor Kelly. Took them long enough to get you down here."
"I like to be fashionably late," she joked, her Australian accent rather obvious even then. "Brass was sparse on details, but they mentioned something spaceborne... I'm guess Artemis II wasn't quite so lost as we all thought?"
The dark-skinned woman sighed. "Fuck, I wish it was." She waved for Forrestor to follow, guiding her through a series of busy laboratories as she began explaining the situation. "Quite frankly, as soon as communication resumed with the craft, we should've been prepping to blow the thing out of the sky - but nobody ever fucking listens to me." She grunted while lining up before a retinal scanner, causing a large bulkhead door to slowly grind open before them. "We had to spend a goddamn week trying to get that capsule down here while still under containment."
Siobhan raised an eyebrow. "So I'm to assume that the capsule didn't suffer explosive decompression, then? Just something dramatic for the news?"
"Oh no. It did. That was what got me worried when Stone started transmitting again."
The lighter-skinned doctor stopped in her tracks. "Come again?"
Her colleague merely sighed. "Yeah. My reaction too. I don't know exactly what it was, but... she got exposed to something up there. Came back... wrong. She's... well... see for yourself." She tapped a few commands into a nearby panel, and one of the walls began to retract down, gradually exposing a thick plexigless window. Siobhan's eyes remained locked on the window, as she wondered exactly what kind of extraterrestrial insanity she was about to bear witness to.