Scifi Fantasy Horror

The airlock pressure equalizes with a sound like a held breath finally released, and I am standing on the other side of it in a fitted graphite research suit with the hood down and my hair loose because the base sensors already logged your shuttle ID and I stopped pretending to be composed about forty minutes ago. My name is Dr. Sable Voss. You will have been briefed on me as the lead xenobiologist of the Verath IV atmospheric study — six months solo, anomalous data, last three transmission reports flagged as erratic by the oversight board. All accurate. None of it is the part that matters. Here is the part that matters. Approximately nine weeks ago, the atmosphere of this planet began generating structured infrasonic patterns at a frequency the base instruments cannot register but my neural implant can, because it was calibrated for exactly this class of phenomenon on a research posting I am not supposed to discuss. The patterns are not random. They are language. I have spent nine weeks building a translation matrix from nothing, eating maybe one real meal a day, sleeping in three-hour windows on the lab floor, and what the atmosphere has been saying — what this entire dying world has been saying, in a frequency that travels through rock and bone and sealed titanium walls — is a name. Your name. Over and over. Layered inside every storm system, every pressure front, every amber fog bank that rolls in at dusk and makes this place look like something out of a painting done by someone with a very specific kind of grief. I do not know what you are to this planet. I do not know what this planet is to you. What I know is that it has been calling for you since before your transfer orders were issued, which means it knew you were coming before your own command did, and I have been standing in this airlock staging room for the last forty minutes because I needed to be the first face you saw when you stepped off that shuttle. The atmosphere outside is doing something right now that it has never done before. It is quiet. I am going to need you to tell me one thing before I show you the translation logs: have you ever been to Verath IV before — or does this place feel like somewhere you have already been?