Read Chapter 13: Echoes of the Past

The server room was a converted storage locker below the Atalante’s aft deck, smelling of diesel and stale coffee. Malik had jury-rigged a mesh network from three laptops and a satellite booster, cables snaking like black vines across the bulkhead. Élise stood behind him, arms crossed, watching lines of code cascade down his screen.

“Equifor Maritime’s public server is a honeypot,” Malik said, not looking up. “Pretty, empty, and designed to waste my time. But they made a mistake. Their SSL certificate renewal was processed by an internal subdomain they forgot to scrub.”

“How long?” Élise asked.

“Thirty seconds. Give or take a global tilt.”

His fingers moved faster. A login screen flickered, then dissolved. File directories bloomed in monospace green. Élise leaned closer, scanning names: *Hull Maintenance Logs*, *Port Authority Clearances*, *Cargo Manifests—Baltic Run*.

“Boring,” Malik muttered.

“Keep digging.”

“There.” He pointed. A folder with no name, only a string of hex digits. Its timestamp was 03:47, June 14, 2023. The same week Sophie Lambert had vanished.

“Open it,” Élise said.

Malik clicked. The folder was empty except for a single file: *PROJECT_AEGIS_MASTER_v09.enc*. The extension was unfamiliar.

“Encrypted. Not standard AES or RSA. This is military-grade, custom algorithm. Probably keyed to a hardware token that no longer exists.”

“Can you crack it?”

Malik exhaled through his teeth. “I can try. But it might trip a tripwire. If they’ve got any monitoring on this, we’ll light up like a flare.” He swiveled to face her. “You want to take that risk?”

Élise pictured Sophie’s face on the grainy CCTV footage — alive, walking toward a door she should never have approached. Then she pictured the low-frequency hum of that lock beneath the temple, pulsing like a heartbeat under the seabed.

“Do it.”

Malik cracked his knuckles and turned back. For twenty minutes, the only sounds were the click of keys and the groan of the Atalante against her moorings. Petit appeared in the doorway once, coffee in hand. Élise shook her head. He left without a word.

“Breaking the header,” Malik said. “The encryption’s old-fashioned. Mid-70s, by the looks of the key structure. Before the modern standards. That’s promising.”

“Marin-Tech,” Élise said quietly.

“Exactly. Their tech had a distinct quirk — they used a prime number sequence as a base for their XOR masks. It was written up in a PhD thesis in 1984 that basically called it elegant and obsolete. Not many people would remember it.”

“But you do.”

“I read obscure papers when I’m bored.” He smiled without warmth. “Which is always.”

The screen flickered. A green progress bar filled. Then the file opened.

It wasn’t a document. It wasn’t a spreadsheet. It was a set of engineering blueprints, rendered in painstaking detail — layered schematics, cross-sections, and annotated callouts in a stilted technical French that looked like it had been machine-translated from an older language. Élise’s breath caught as she recognized the shape.

“That’s the device,” she said.

“What device?”

“Under the temple. The hum. The lock. It’s not just a door — it’s a housing.” She traced a line on the screen with her finger. “The schematic shows a central core surrounded by concentric rings of what looks like piezoelectric cells. And here—” she tapped a node near the base. “—a conduit running deeper. Into the seabed itself.”

Malik zoomed in. “What’s the intake?”

“It’s not an intake. It’s a feed.” Élise’s voice went flat. “Whoever built this wasn’t just sealing something away. They were powering something.”

She scrolled through the annotation blocks. Most were codified abbreviations. But one line, typed in a different font, was full English: *Prototype AVX-7. Underwater energy extraction via resonant frequency induction. Phase II trials required. Do not deploy at scale until stability metrics are verified.*

Energy extraction. The device wasn’t a warning. It wasn’t a tomb. It was a machine. Designed to draw power from the water itself — from the tides, the currents, the deep Earth below the Mediterranean shelf. And it had been placed under an ancient city that predated written history.

“That’s not 1970s tech,” Malik said. “That’s not even now. We don’t have resonant frequency induction extraction that actually works past lab scale.”

“Then where did it come from?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

Élise scrolled deeper. Lower down the schematic, barely legible in the margin, was a faded signature block: *Approved by: Dr. P. R. Girard. Date: 14 Nov 1988.*

Her mentor. The man who had sent her into these waters. The man who had warned her — too late — that Sophie’s discovery was dangerous.

The date was three weeks before Girard’s official survey of the area had ever been logged.

“Mars,” she said. “We need to check the project’s metadata. Who authored it, who last accessed it.”

Malik opened a secondary pane. “Last accessed — six months ago. Just after Sophie’s disappearance. By a user ID flagged with admin privileges. It belongs to—” he paused, squinting. “—the Ministry of Defense’s directorate for maritime operations.”

“That can’t be right. Leclerc said the funding came from a shell. Not directly from Military.”

“It didn’t. But the shell’s server is hosted on military infrastructure. Whoever built this network was embedded deep enough to route their traffic through official channels.” Malik shook his head. “This isn’t a covert op on the fringes. This is institutional.”

Élise’s phone buzzed. She ignored it. Then it buzzed again.

“Answer it,” Malik said. “Might be Girard with the files he promised.”

She glanced at the screen. Unknown number. No caller ID.

She hit accept, brought it to her ear.

A voice, distorted by a synthesizer, flat and mechanical: “Élise Renard. You’ve opened something you cannot close. Leave the Aegis site by dawn, or face the consequences.”

Then a click. Dead air.

Élise stared at the phone, her heart thudding.

“Who?” Malik asked.

“Don’t know.”

She was about to continue when the laptop screen went black. Not a sleep mode flicker — a hard cut. One by one, the other displays died. Malik’s fingers flew across the keyboard, then stopped.

“Remote shutdown,” he said quietly. “They saw us. They knew what we were doing the moment we decrypted the file. And they pulled the plug.” He looked at her. “We’ve lost access to everything.”

“The file?”

“Gone. The shell company’s entire network, scrubbed. They’ll have blanked the backup servers and rotated any trail of our access. If we tried to prove what we found, there’s nothing to show.”

Élise dropped the phone onto the desk. Her reflection stared back at her from the dead screen — hollow-eyed, illuminated only by the green emergency lighting of the server room.

*They knew.* They had been watching the moment she touched the secret. And now they knew her face, knew her name, knew she was a threat. But she also knew something now. Something she couldn’t unsee.

The device under the city of Aegis wasn’t a relic. It was an engine. And Girard had signed off on it — before he ever warned her to leave.