Read Chapter 13: Damage Control

The water inside the Remora’s hull was ankle-deep and cold enough to bite through Elias’s sea boots. He stood in the forward cargo hold, a flashlight beam cutting through the murk, watching the patch crew work. Two of them—Bennett and a young deckhand named Reyes—were wrestling a sheet of reinforced rubber over the gash in the hull plating. The hole was the size of a dinner plate, punched inward like a fist through tin. Saltwater wept through the edges, a steady, rhythmic pulse that matched the swell outside.

“Pressure’s holding on the starboard side,” Aiko’s voice crackled over the radio. She was on the Artemis, still. Elias had ordered her to stay there—safer, he’d said, though neither of them believed it. “But we’re taking on water faster than the pumps can clear. You’ve got maybe four hours before the bilge overtakes the engine room.”

“Engine room’s already useless,” Elias said. He waded closer to the breach, squinting at the torn metal. The claws had sliced through like it was tinfoil. Three parallel grooves, each as wide as his forearm, running up and over the hull plating. He traced one with his gloved fingers, feeling the ridged, almost serrated edges.

Bennett grunted, hauling the rubber sheet into place. “This won’t hold forever. We need a drydock, not a patch job.”

“We need a propeller,” Reyes muttered. He was young, mid-twenties, with the kind of face that hadn’t yet learned how to hide fear. “We’ve got neither.”

Elias said nothing. He stepped back, letting the crew work, and moved toward the ladder that led up to the main deck. The Remora rolled gently on the swell, a dead thing now, no thrum of engines beneath his feet. The silence was the worst part. A ship without power felt like a corpse, and Elias had spent too many years around corpses already.

On deck, the fog had thickened. It pressed against the railings like a living thing, swallowing the prow of the ship and the distant, hulking silhouette of the Artemis. The two vessels were linked by a single, slack tow cable that now hung useless in the water. The creatures had been circling beneath them for hours. Every so often, a dark shape would roll near the surface, a fin or a tail breaking the water before disappearing again. Waiting.

Okafor’s body was gone. They’d wrapped him in a tarp and lashed him to the deckhouse, but the creatures had taken him during the night. Elias hadn’t told the crew. He didn’t need to. They knew.

Larsen was still missing. Taken, pulled over the side by something that moved faster than a man could run. Elias had seen it happen. One moment Larsen was at the winch, the next he was gone, a strangled cry cut short by the splash. There hadn’t been time to react. There still wasn’t.

He walked aft, past the sealed forward locker where the screaming had finally stopped. He paused there, hand on the latch. Inside, the creature Aiko had found—the translucent, mutated amphipod—was quiet now. But it had been screaming for hours, a high, thin shriek that had set his teeth on edge. It had only stopped when the attack began. As if it had been calling for help. As if it had been answered.

Elias moved on.

The crew had gathered in the mess, a tight, grim cluster of men and women in oilskins and life vests. They looked up when he entered, eyes tracking him like birds watching a cat. The air was thick with the smell of diesel and fear.

“What’s the plan, Captain?” That was Hargrove, the bosun, a heavyset man with a beard like a storm cloud. He’d been with Elias for six years, through worse than this. But even Hargrove’s voice had an edge now.

Elias leaned against the bolted-down table. “We patch the breach, we keep the pumps running, and we wait.”

“For what?” Reyes asked. “For that thing to come back?”

“For help,” Elias said.

“From who?” Hargrove pressed. “We’re dead in the water, halfway to nowhere. You changed course away from the Faroes. Away from rescue.”

Elias met his eyes. “Because the thing that attacked us was waiting for us to head that way. It’s been herding us. Like we’re livestock.”

A murmur ran through the crew. Someone cursed, low and bitter.

“So what then?” Hargrove said. “We sit here and let it pick us off one by one?”

“No,” Elias said. “We think.”

He left them with that, stepping back out onto the deck. The fog had gotten thicker, if that was possible. He couldn’t see the Artemis at all now. Just the pale gray nothing, punctuated by the occasional shape of something moving in the water below.

Aiko’s voice came over the radio again. “Elias. I have an idea.”

He keyed the mic. “Go.”

“There’s a research station on the Icelandic shelf. Small, automated mostly. Bjarnarhöfn. It’s about forty kilometers east of our position. They have a comms array strong enough to reach Reykjavik.”

Elias was quiet for a moment. “A research station. Run by who?”

“University of Akureyri, nominally. But their funding—” She paused. “Their funding comes from a private marine biology foundation. Deep Blue Initiative.”

Meridian Deep’s public-facing arm. Elias had seen the name in Lena Hart’s logbook, buried in a footnote about equipment suppliers.

“So we’d be asking for help from the people who made the thing that killed Okafor and took Larsen.”

“Or we’d be asking for help from people who might not know what their money is being used for,” Aiko said. “Elias, we can’t stay here. The pumps are barely keeping ahead. Another hour and the water reaches the battery banks. Then we lose lights, comms, everything.”

Elias stared into the fog. Somewhere out there, the Watchman was waiting. He could feel it. The patrol vessel had been tracking them for days, dogging their wake. Now that the Remora was dead in the water, it was only a matter of time before it closed in.

“If we call for help on an open frequency,” he said slowly, “Meridian Deep will hear it. They’ll know where we are.”

“They already know where we are,” Aiko said. “They’ve been following us since the Faroes. The only reason they haven’t boarded us is that they’re afraid of the thing in the water. We’re bait, Elias. We’re sitting on a hook, and they’re waiting for the fish to swallow us whole.”

Elias closed his eyes. He could feel the weight of the decision pressing down on him, like the pressure of the deep against a hull. Every choice he’d made since they’d first touched the Artemis had been wrong, or so it felt. Every turn had led them deeper into the trap.

“We don’t call,” he said finally. “We send someone.”

A long pause. “What?”

“The lifeboat. It’s still intact. Oars, not motor—too much noise. Two men can row to Bjarnarhöfn in a day, maybe less if the current holds.”

“And the rest of you?”

“We stay with the ship. Keep the pumps running. Keep the creatures interested in us instead of you.”

“Elias, that’s suicide.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But it’s the only play we’ve got.”

He looked down at the radio in his hand. The cracked flip phone he’d taken from Lena Hart’s office was in his pocket, still loaded with her SIM card. He hadn’t turned it on yet. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what messages might be waiting for her.

“Aiko,” he said. “I need you to stay on the Artemis.”

Another silence. When she spoke, her voice was tight. “Why?”

“Because if the crew here gets taken, someone needs to know what we found. Someone needs to tell the story that isn’t Meridian Deep’s version. You’re the only one who can.”

“I’m not a historian, Elias. I’m an engineer.”

“And you’re the only one who decoded Lena’s drive. That makes you the record keeper now.”

He could almost hear her jaw tighten. “Fine. But if you don’t come back, I’m telling everyone what I know. And I’m going to make sure Meridian Deep burns.”

Elias almost smiled. “That’s the spirit.”

He clicked off the radio and headed for the boat deck. The lifeboat was a small, hard-shelled craft, one of two on the Remora. It was rated for eight people, but it would carry two comfortably. He found Bennett and Reyes coiled rope on the aft deck, both of them looking at him with the same question in their eyes.

“Bennett,” Elias said. “You know how to navigate by the stars?”

“Not well,” Bennett admitted.

“Reyes?”

The young man shook his head.

Elias sighed. “Then I’ll go myself.”

“Captain—” Bennett started.

“I’m the only one who’s made this crossing before. You two stay here. Keep the pumps running. If the Watchman comes alongside, don’t resist. Tell them whatever they want to hear. Buy time.”

Bennett’s jaw worked. “And if that thing in the water comes back?”

“Then you run for the Artemis. Aiko will take you in.”

He didn’t wait for a response. He climbed into the lifeboat, checked the oars, and looked back at the dark shape of the Remora, barely visible through the fog. The crew had come out on deck, a ragged line of silhouettes watching him go.

Hargrove stepped forward. “You’re really doing this.”

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Elias said.

But the words tasted hollow in his mouth. He pushed off, the lifeboat sliding into the water with a soft splash. The fog closed around him almost immediately, swallowing the Remora until it was nothing but a memory.

He set his back to the oars and began to row.

Behind him, somewhere in the gray, a shape broke the surface of the water. Briefly. Quietly. Then it was gone, sliding back into the deep to wait.