Read Chapter 3: First Light

The airlock cycled with a groan that vibrated through the soles of Jack’s boots. He’d expected total silence, the vacuum stillness of a dead station. This was something else—a mechanical wheeze, like the ADRS was breathing through a blocked windpipe. He killed the Barracuda’s exterior lights, letting the red emergency glow of the airlock’s interior wash over the sub’s hull.

Emergency power. Flickering, but alive. That was either a good sign or a very bad one.

He popped the hatch, the seal hissing as it broke. The air that hit him was stale, metallic, with an undertone of processed recyclate that had been cycling too long. No fresh scrub. No CO₂ filter hum. Jack swung his legs out, magnetic boots clanking against the grated deck, and moved with the practiced economy of a man who’d spent too many hours in pressurized skinsuits.

“ADRS, this is Mercer, docked at Airlock Two. Requesting status.” His voice echoed off the bulkheads. Static answered, thick and wet-sounding, like radio feedback drawn through water. He repeated the call twice more before giving up.

No comms. No automated welcome. That meant the station’s AI had degraded or been deliberately silenced. Neither option filled him with warmth.

The inner hatch was manual—a heavy wheel that fought him for a moment before giving way with a screech of unmaintained metal. He stepped through into the habitat corridor, his headlamp carving a pale cone through the dark.

It was a mess. Not the wreckage of a struggle, but the scatter of sudden departure. A coffee mug lay on its side near a bench, its contents long evaporated into a brown stain. A tablet sat face-down on the floor, its screen cracked. A jacket—orange, station-issue—hung from a wall hook, one sleeve twisted inside out as if its owner had been pulled away mid-gesture.

Jack swept the corridor with his light. No bodies. No blood. No sign of violence. Just the aftermath of people who had left in a hurry, leaving behind the detritus of routine life.

He keyed his wrist-com, pulling up the station schematic on his HUD. Living quarters were aft, the main lab forward, and The Scar access shaft a hundred meters below at the seabed interface. He’d expected to find the crew huddled somewhere, survivors waiting out the silence. But the corridor stretched empty in both directions.

“This is Mercer,” he said again, to no one. “Station appears abandoned. Beginning sweep.”

He moved forward, checking each doorway he passed. Crew quarters were a row of small cabins, their doors open. He stepped into the first. A bunk, unmade. A pair of boots on the floor, toes pointing toward the door—placed there, not kicked off. A framed photo on the desk: a woman and a child, squinting into the sun. He didn’t linger. The belongings were too intact, too personal, for a station that had supposedly been evacuated. Emergency evac protocols meant people grabbed what they could. No one folded their boots first.

The lab door was sealed. Jack frowned at the manual release—the indicator above it showed green, but the lock had been engaged from the inside. A deadbolt on a lab door. Unusual. He throttled the release and pushed through.

The lab was a cavern of humming instruments, most of them dark. A row of bioreactors along the far wall showed a single blinking amber light—one still running, pumps cycling softly. The sample pod he’d seen drifting outside was gone from its cradle, nothing but a torn tether marking where it had once been secured.

A console near the center of the room glowed with a single active screen, its display bright against the gloom. Jack crossed to it, gloves squeaking on the metal surface. The screen showed a file list, open to a document labeled: CREW MANIFEST — REV 12.

He scrolled. Twelve names, each followed by a status field. One by one, they’d been updated. Not with medical codes or evac markers. Crossed out. A single red line struck through each entry, stark and deliberate.

*Captain Moreau.* Crossed out. *Chief Engineer Reyes.* Crossed out. *Technician Okafor.* Crossed out. *Dr. Elara Voss.* Crossed out.

He stared at her name, the red line cutting diagonally across the bolded letters. The lead biologist. The one whose research on The Scar sample had been the station’s primary reason for existence. The one mission control had called “essential” to recover.

“Goddamn it,” Jack muttered.

He tapped the screen, trying to access revision history. The system prompted for a command authorization. He tried the default codes, then a few override sequences he knew from his training. Nothing. The station’s ops logs had been locked down tight.

But the manifest wasn’t the only document left open. A second file sat minimized in the corner of the display. He maximized it.

It was a log entry, timestamped three days ago. Text flickered across the screen, half-garbled, the words running together in that characteristic way of a transcription system struggling with a damaged audio feed.

*—partial team retrieval. Sample containment failed. Recommend immediate—* then, a new line, in a different hand—typed, not transcribed: *The Scar has been open for fourteen days. The crew understands the risk. We choose to remain. We are safe here. Do not send anyone. Do not send anyone. Do not—*

The text cut off.

Jack’s blood ran cold. *We choose to remain.* That wasn’t a distress call. That was a quarantine order written by someone who’d already decided they weren’t coming back. And the phrase *sample containment failed*—he glanced at the empty cradle where the pod should have been anchored—that fit too well.

He keyed his radio again. “Barracuda, do you copy? I’m reading a possible containment breach on the station. Repeat, possible biological containment breach. Recommend quarantine protocol.”

His sub’s computer squawked back, automated: *Acknowledged. Quarantine protocol requires operator confirmation.*

“Confirmed. Quarantine protocol active. Do not open external hatches unless I authorize.”

A pause. Then: *Understood. Operator Mercer is now the sole station contact. Communication window: eighteen hours.*

Eighteen hours. After that, the sub would assume him lost and return to surface on its own. He’d have a day to either figure out what happened or become another name on a manifest that no one ever read.

Jack turned from the console, his eye catching a smear on the lab’s far wall. Dark, almost black, a handprint-sized streak that had dried into a rough arc. He didn’t need a forensic kit to know it wasn’t grease. The stain sat too high, smeared downward, like someone had stumbled against the wall and clawed their way along it.

He stepped closer. The smear ended at a vent grille, its cover ajar. The vent was wide enough, just barely, for a person to squeeze through if they were desperate enough.

His headlamp flickered, the battery dipping, and for a moment the lab pitched to near-black. When the light steadied, the vent cover was still ajar. But the smear on the wall had changed—the lower edge, where it had dried into a crust, was now smudged fresh, tacky, glistening under his beam.

Something had touched it. Recently. While he was standing in the room.

Jack’s heart rate kicked up. He drew his utility knife, the blade snicking open, and turned in a slow circle. The lab was empty. The bioreactor pulsed its single amber light. The manifest glowed on the console behind him, twelve names crossed out.

Somewhere in the station’s guts, a vent cover scraped metal.

He wasn’t alone.