Read Chapter 35: The Final Dive

The control room stank of ozone and burnt plastic. The computer core I’d smashed was a blackened husk, its innards spilling acrid smoke into the recycled air. Voss sat slumped against the wall, her arms wrapped around her knees, her eyes fixed on something I couldn’t see.

“Dr. Voss,” I said, shaking her shoulder. “Listen to me. You hear that?”

The groan came through the deck plates, deep and resonant, like a whale singing its death song. The station’s skeleton was settling, warping under stresses it had never been designed to hold. The core might be dying, but it was taking the whole habitat with it.

She didn’t respond. Her lips moved silently, counting something. I didn’t have time for this.

Three options. Escape pods were on Deck B, but there were barely enough for the nominal crew. The station’s self-destruct sequence required commander codes I didn’t have. And the entity—the part of it that lived in the network, the fragment of its consciousness Voss had tried to upload—still had roots.

I could feel it now. Not in my head, not like the voice that had worn my brother’s face. But in the way the lights flickered in patterns that weren’t random. In the way the air circulation hummed in a pitch that climbed and fell like breath.

It was still here. Lingering like gas in a mine shaft.

“The primary core,” I said, more to myself than to her. “I need to flood the primary core.”

Voss’s lips stopped moving. She looked up at me with eyes that had lost all their fire. “You can’t. The blast door is hydraulic. Twelve tons of reinforced—” She stopped, blinking. “Seawater pressure.”

I pulled the wrench from my tool belt. Heavy, steel, forged for cracking bolts that had seized with two decades of rust and mineral buildup. It weighed more than the hope I’d buried in the Atlantic.

“Hydraulic lock,” I said. “Got a manual override.”

“You’d have to hold it against the feed pressure.” She shook her head. “One person can’t—you’d need to route the seawater through the primary intake manifold. Do you know where—”

I was already walking toward the door. “Show me the station schematic. And stop talking like I’m gonna survive this.”

She followed. Not with urgency, but with the shuffling gait of someone who had already decided her story was over. Her hand was trembling when she unclipped the tablet from her belt, but her eyes sharpened as she pulled up a cutaway of the station’s lower decks. The main core sat below the ballast tanks, a cathedral-sized reactor housing that had originally been designed to withstand a direct submarine-torpedo strike.

That was before the entity had cracked it open like an egg.

“There.” She tapped a point on the schematic where a thick red line crossed the housing. “Inlet manifold C. It feeds directly into the heat exchanger. Flood that and you’d quench everything inside. But the fail-safe valve was fried when the core tried to vent.” She looked at me, something almost like pity moving behind her eyes. “You’d have to bypass the valve entirely. And the pressure from the ocean outside is pressing in on that door like it wants to kill you itself.”

“It does,” I said. “We just happen to want the same thing.”

The blast door to the core shaft was twelve feet tall and three feet thick, the kind of door that belonged on a submarine’s torpedo room aft of the pressure hull. Its hydraulic actuator groaned against the flooding pressure on the other side, sealant weeping from its edges.

The manual override was a hexagonal socket in the frame, recessed six inches into the metal, originally meant to accept a fitted crank operated by two men in full safety harnesses. I had neither. I had a wrench and a dead man’s watch stuck at 3:33.

I wedged the claw of the wrench into the socket. It fit the way a hangnail fits—barely, precariously, enough to turn only if I put everything I had into it and didn’t flinch when something snapped.

The wrench bit. Metal screamed against metal.

“Jack.” Voss’s voice came from behind me, small and thin. “The station schematic just updated. The core’s heat signature is spiking.”

I cranked harder. My shoulders burned. “That’s it fighting.”

“It’s not fighting,” she said. “It’s feeding. The water you flooded above—the entity is converting it into thermal energy. It’s growing. If you open that door now, you’ll be pouring fuel directly into its fire.”

I stopped. Looked back at her. “You said flooding would kill it.”

“I said flooding would quench it.” She was shaking again. “That was before I understood what it actually was. It doesn’t die from water, Jack. It *absorbs* it. The heat flash you described, the steam, the way the core resisted—it drinks energy, converts mass. It’s not a biological organism. It’s a reaction. A chain reaction.”

The wrench felt heavier. The watch on my wrist ticked one quiet second past 3:33, and I felt it happen—that tiny movement—like the world itself had flinched.

I looked at the blast door, at the weeping sealant, at the schematic in Voss’s trembling hands.

“Then I don’t flood it,” I said.

Voss stared at me.

“I *scuttle* it.” I dropped the wrench, reached for the emergency panel, and tore it open. Inside, behind a red plate, was a bank of four breakers. I’d seen this setup before, on decommissioned rigs. They routed seawater into the station’s auxiliary power cells—the ones crammed full of lithium-ion backup batteries that had been sitting here for years, slowly degrading, building up pressure, waiting for a spark to make them into a bomb.

I armed the plunger.

“Jack.” Voss’s voice cracked. “You understand what this means?”

The station groaned around us. The lights flickered. Somewhere below, the entity pulsed with heat, feeding, growing.

“Yeah,” I said. “It means I don’t plan on leaving with you.”