Read Chapter 14: Surface Contact

The maintenance module was a lung of stale air and dead metal. Jack slumped against the bulkhead, the respirator hissing its last dregs of oxygen. His glove peeled back. The sheen had crawled past his wrist, a faint oil-slick shimmer that caught the gloom like a warning. His left hand hung at his side, stiff, a dead weight.

He forced himself to move. The module was barely larger than a coffin, a forgotten alcove wedged between pump housings and a snarl of conduit. A rusted comm panel flickered on the far wall, its screen cracked but alive. That was something. That was everything.

He crawled to it, knees scraping on grated decking. The panel was old—pre-habitat retrofits—but the guts were intact. A coil of wire, a spare antenna spool, and a patch cable that looked chewed by something with a grudge. He worked fast, ignoring the tremor in his fingers. The mark didn't hurt, but it itched—a deep, wrong-feeling thrum just under the skin, like a second pulse.

The comm unit's transceiver hummed when he powered it up. A ghost of static. He spliced the antenna, fed the patch cable through a corroded junction box, and hoped the pressure housing held. The station's own comm relay was dark—the entity had seen to that—but this module had a dedicated line, a fail-safe that ran on its own battery bank. Someone had thought ahead. Someone had been afraid.

He keyed the transmitter. "This is Jack Mercer, Aegis Station. Repair diver. Do you read? Over."

Static. The ocean's groan filled the gap, a subsonic pressure that made his teeth ache.

He tried again. And again. Four, five attempts. Sweat rolled down his temple, and his left hand twitched—a sharp, involuntary jerk that nearly knocked the mic from his grip. He stared at it. The fingers curled, unbidden, then relaxed. His own hand. His own.

"Any station, any vessel, this is Mercer. Emergency traffic. Do you read?"

The static shifted. A thin thread of signal pierced it, fractured and distant. A voice—tinny, broken, but human.

"—ercer—repeat—you're—crackling—"

"Director Keane? Is that you?" Jack's throat tightened. He leaned into the mic, breath held.

"—fragmented—need you to—listen—" The voice cut, then returned, syllables landing like shrapnel. "—it is a memory—"

Jack's grip tightened on the panel edge. "A memory? What does that mean? The crew—they're not talking, they're moving like—like one thing. Like they're connected. Keane, do you copy?"

"—they are not—" Static swallowed half the sentence. "—not infected—"

Lines cut through the signal like a blade through wet paper. Jack slammed his palm against the panel. The screen blinked, warning him of power loss. He routed the backup cell, fingers moving before the thought caught up. The mark on his skin felt warm now, almost feverish.

"—remembering—" Keane's voice broke, then resolved. "—waiting for you to—" Another cut. "—she was right—"

"Who? Voss?" Jack pressed the headset against his ear, desperate. "Keane, I'm trapped. The bay is sealed. The entity—whatever it is—it's blocking me. I need a way out. I need answers."

Silence. The static thickened, like the sea itself was pressing down on the line. Jack checked the battery readout. Fifteen percent. Less, if the entity was bleeding power from the junction.

"Keane, if you can hear me—"

"—not infected—" The voice returned, softer now, almost gentle. "—they are remembering—what they were—what we all were—"

A cold chill ran down Jack's spine. Not fear. Something worse. Recognition. The itch in his hand spread, a faint shimmer creeping toward his knuckles, tracing veins like a map.

"Remembering what?" he whispered.

The line crackled, then cleared for a single, horrifying second. Keane's voice was no longer distant. It was close, intimate, as if her mouth were pressed to his ear.

"Everything."

The connection died. The panel went dark. The backup cell was drained, and the module's only light guttered out, leaving him in the near-black, the faint phosphor of the entity's glow on his skin the only illumination. He stared at his hand. The sheen had stopped just short of his middle knuckle, a tide at full surge, waiting.

Keane's words looped in his skull. Not infected. Remembering. He thought of the mess hall, that linked communion, the way their heads turned in unison, the way their eyes had known him. He'd assumed possession. Mind control. A takeover. But if it wasn't a parasite—if it was an awakening—then Reyes's plan to sever them might be an execution.

He pulled Voss's data slate from his harness. The screen was cracked, water-fogged at the edges, but the core data was intact. He thumbed through the log entries, hours of notes compressed into fragments. Voss had been thorough. She'd documented everything—the sample, the extraction, the first signs of change. And near the end, scribbled in a hurried timestamp, a single line:

*If they remember, they will not want to come back.*

Jack set the slate down. His hand was shaking. Not from fear. From something else. A pull, faint but insistent, tugging at the base of his skull. The entity was not chasing him through the ducts or sealing doors to trap him. It was calling him. Patiently. Like a tide waiting for the moon.

He looked at the module's sealed hatch. He'd come in through the shaft; the probe still sat in the bay, unreachable. The keycard weighed in his pocket, useless. But Reyes had said the munitions were on a lower deck, a fail-safe charge that could sever the link at the source. He'd been heading there before the funneling had pushed him aside.

Now he had a choice. Back to Reyes, or forward through the flooded junction, toward the munitions. Toward Voss's fail-safe. Toward the heart of the thing that hummed beneath the station.

The itch in his hand pulsed, once, in answer. As if it had heard the question.

He flexed his fingers. They moved. Stiff, but his. He pulled the glove back on, sealing the sheen from view. Then he gathered the slate, the keycard, and the last coil of oxygen tubing from the module's emergency kit. He checked the hatch's pressure gauge. The corridor beyond was flooded, but the flooded junction ran shallow—chest-high, if he kept his head angled. Doable. He'd done worse.

He paused at the hatch, one hand on the wheel. The module was quiet around him, the hush of dead machinery and stale air. He thought of Keane's voice, soft and close. *Everything.* He thought of the crew, their faces slack, their hands folded, their breath in unison. He thought of Reyes, alone in the storage room, waiting for a plan that might not come.

He didn't know if he was walking toward salvation or surrender.

But he knew the door behind him was sealed, and the water ahead was the only way through.

Jack turned the wheel. The hatch groaned open, and the ocean spilled in, cold and indifferent, up to his chest. He lifted the slate over his head, took a breath, and stepped into the dark.

The corridor stretched ahead, a drowned artery lit only by the faint glow of the entity's growth on the walls—pulsing, rhythmic, like a heartbeat shared by the whole station. He swam with one arm, the other clamped around the slate. The pull at the back of his skull grew stronger, less a whisper and more a voice.

Not demanding. Just reminding.

*You were here before.*

He shook his head, clearing it. Forward. The munitions deck lay below, two decks down, past the flooded lab and the drill site where this all began. He kept moving, one stroke at a time.

Behind him, the maintenance module faded into the black, its dead comm panel a silent monument to a conversation that had offered no comfort. Ahead, the station's ribs closed in.

And beneath the current's cold chorus, he could swear the walls were singing.