Read Chapter 18: The Plan

Voss’s hands moved with the economy of someone who had done this a thousand times, but Jack saw the tremor at her fingertips as she adjusted the pressure suit’s collar seals. She didn’t look up at him, just kept working, checking the oxygen feeds, the emergency beacon, the external comm patch that was still blinking red.

“It’s not a broadcast tower,” she said, voice muffled inside the helmet she was testing. “Not in the way you’re thinking. The telemetry array is a relay for seismic and hydroacoustic data. But its emitter coil is tuned to a narrow frequency band—too narrow to wash across a gestalt mind.”

Jack wiped condensation off the inside of his own visor. “But you can retune it.”

“I can overload it.” She set the helmet down with a clatter and finally met his eyes. Her face was pale, the kind of pale that came from days without real light, and there was a cracked blood vessel in her left eye. She looked like someone who had stopped sleeping long ago. “If I feed the peptide sequence from Tanaka’s marrow into the transmitter’s signal modulator, it will output a discordant harmonic on the same electromagnetic band the organism uses to bind minds. Over a large enough area, that harmonics will disrupt the bond. Break its hold on the crew.”

“You said ‘if I’,” Jack said. “You’re planning to do it yourself.”

Voss’s jaw tightened. “The tower is outside the habitat. It’s a sealed unit mounted on the riser frame about forty meters above the main pressure hull, accessible only through a maintenance airlock on Deck 1. But the route to that airlock runs through the partial collapse section we discussed. The one with the two transformed crew members standing guard.”

“And you need to get to that tower with the marrow. That’s the whole plan.”

“That was the whole plan.” Voss pressed a palm flat against the bulkhead, as if steadying herself against the station’s distant groan. “But I can’t do it alone. The suit you’re wearing is rated for external work, but it’s not built for combat. The two crew members out there—they were station engineers. They know the exterior topology better than anyone alive. If they’ve been fully absorbed, they will not simply attack. They will anticipate. They will hunt.”

Jack looked down at the bulky pressure suit Voss had stripped off the rack for him. It was old, scuffed, covered in patched abrasions. The helmet’s visor was scratched but clear. He flexed his hands inside the heavy gloves and felt the mark on his forearm burn, a hot friction along the skin, as if the suit itself was pressing on the infection.

“You said the organism can control my hand,” he said. “What if it decides to use it against you out there?”

Voss’s silence was answer enough.

“That’s why you need me to go first,” Jack said. “Not to help you carry the marrow. To be the target.”

Voss nodded slowly. “You’re the variable the organism hasn’t accounted for. It’s spent this entire time trying to absorb you, but you’re still resisting. Partially. It doesn’t understand why, and that confusion gives us an advantage. It will focus on you, on the puzzle of you, while I take the marrow and get to the transmitter.”

“And if it decides to just take me over completely?”

“Then you’ll have about thirty seconds before I’m dead and the organism has a fully grown, mobile host in an external pressure suit on the most structurally fragile part of the station.” Voss’s voice was flat, clinical. “So don’t let it.”

Jack dragged a hand across his jaw. The stubble felt like sandpaper. He hadn’t slept in what felt like days, hadn’t eaten since the protein bars in the maintenance module, and his body was starting to feel like borrowed machinery. But beneath the exhaustion, there was something else. A wire-thin thread of clarity that had been there since the moment he’d chosen to go up instead of down.

“What about the two engineers?” he asked. “Can you take them down?”

“They won’t see me coming.” Voss tapped a small cylindrical device on the workbench beside them—a handheld flare launcher, the kind used to mark surface dive sites. “This isn’t standard station equipment. I confiscated it from the munitions deck years ago. The organism’s process works through light and electromagnetic frequency. A high-intensity flare in a dark corridor will blind the transformed crew long enough to buy us a window.”

“And after the tower’s retuned?”

Voss hesitated. That hesitation told Jack more than the words that followed. “If the discordant signal works as modeled, the crew’s individual will should reassert itself. They’ll be confused, disoriented, but alive. The organism will retreat to its native state—a dormant, fossilized consciousness with no active host network.”

“But you don’t know that for sure.”

“No,” Voss admitted. “I don’t. There’s a chance the signal will simply sever the connection without killing the bonds, leaving the crew in a permanent fugue state. Or it may not affect the organism at all, and we’ll have just announced our location to a hostile intelligence with control of the station’s entire exterior infrastructure.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

Voss picked up the flare launcher, checked its charge, and clipped it to her belt. “Then the munitions deck remains the only failsafe. But we lost that option when you chose the tower.”

Jack’s teeth ground together. “I made that choice because you told me the tower was the way out.”

“It is the way out,” Voss said. “It was always the way out. But out doesn’t mean safe. It means we’re outside the sealed habitat with a hostile organism between us and the only transmitter capable of ending this, on a section of the riser frame that was flagged for structural failure three years before the station went silent.” She paused, and for the first time since Jack had broken into her quarantine cell, her voice softened. “I’m not asking you to save the station, Jack. I’m asking you to give me the thirty seconds I need to save what’s left of its crew. If you do that, I can handle the rest.”

Jack looked down at the pressure suit’s chest console. The external temp read minus 1.2 degrees Celsius. The riser frame’s structural integrity was listed as degraded. Two transformed crew members were waiting between him and the tower. And somewhere behind him, in the flooded medical bay, Sam was still strapped to a gurney with a live sample of the organism in the same room.

He reached up and sealed his helmet. The hiss of the pressure seal was loud in the quiet module.

“Thirty seconds,” he said. “That’s all you get.”

Voss’s lips pressed into a thin line. She nodded once, sharply, then picked up her own helmet and started for the maintenance hatch that led toward the flooded corridor.

Jack followed, the mark on his arm burning hotter with every step.