Chapter 10 #2
Images filled the secondary screen — the asteroid surface, grey and cratered.
Drill sites. Sample collection points with numbered stakes.
And in the background of several photos, visible at the edge of the frame: a structure.
Metallic. Enormous. A lattice of filaments rising from the asteroid’s surface, intricate and organic-looking, dozens of meters across.
“What is that?” Levi asked.
Owen read from the survey notes. “Metallic crystalline lattice, non-standard growth pattern. Electromagnetic emissions detected. Classified as non-biological — too large and too integrated with the subsurface to extract.” He scrolled. “The team collected samples from around its base.”
“From around its base.” Levi’s voice was even. “The seventeen geological specimens. They were collected from the area directly around that structure?”
“Within a fifty-meter radius, yes.”
The room went still for a moment. Levi stared at the photos — the lattice on the asteroid, the creatures on the sensor display, the eleven dots all heading the same direction…
god, he would have killed for a how-to guide about now.
Usually, he liked a game with a ton of lore and menus to read in-game books in, but he wasn’t looking to get lost in the Easter eggs of a developer hiding a joke book for once.
He was trying to get out of this place as fast as possible.
Breathe. What would Ethan tell you to do if you were stuck on a game like this? He’d ask more questions.
“Owen. Pull up the crew profiles of everyone confirmed dead since the breach.”
The list appeared on a screen, each of the nine confirmed dead with pictures, duty assignments, and personnel details.
Levi scanned the list, looking for a pattern that connected them, something that explained why these nine and not others.
Shift assignments. Sector locations. Physical proximity to the initial bay they breached from.
He couldn’t find it. Reynolds was on the command deck.
Two engineers in the lower decks. A medic halfway across the ship.
A junior officer in the galley. Their deaths were scattered and Levi couldn’t see the thread.
He clenched his hands into fists, feeling his face flush.
He needed a way out. He needed to get out of the game and take Asher with him while Asher was still calm.
The longer it took him to figure out, the more chances there were for Asher to backslide and panic.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, what is it? What does the game want me to figure out?
Tyler wandered closer to the main screen while Levi was scanning.
He was looking at one of the asteroid photos — the lattice structure, the enormous antenna growing out of rock, then at an image of one of the creatures on a security screen.
He tilted his head. “Their faces look like satellite dishes.”
“What?” Levi asked.
“The creatures.” Tyler gestured at the screen.
“Their faces. They’re satellite dishes. Like, actual satellite dishes.
And those things—” he pointed at the lattice in the photo, “—those things look like signal towers. Big ones.” He glanced at Levi.
“I used to install them in high school, before I blew my knee out.”
The entire room looked at him.
“What?” Tyler asked defensively. “I’m just saying, if you’ve got a face shaped like a dish and you’re walking around a ship, maybe you’re trying to pick up a signal.
Maybe that’s why they’re all going the same direction.
That array thing is a big-ass signal, right?
So they’re just... looking for a clear channel. ”
Owen’s fingers froze over his data pad. “A clear channel.”
“Yeah. Like when you move the dish until the static goes away. Maybe they’re doing that.” Tyler shrugged.
Owen’s fingers started moving faster than his mouth could service — “The broadcast gradient, the frequency differential, if they’re phase-locking to an EM source, then the array would be the strongest signal, but there’d be noise, static from other broadcasts on the ship — oh. Oh. Oh.”
“Owen,” Levi said. “Dumb it down. Please.”
“The ship’s comm network.” Owen was already pulling up the network map.
“Every crew member on duty has a comm badge. Every badge broadcasts on the ship’s internal frequency.
The signal is tiny compared to the array, but it’s close — it’s in the same band.
If the creatures are trying to phase-lock to the array, the badges are interference.
Like loud static, right next to them, every time one of us walks past.”
“So they kill them to stop the noise?” Asher asked.
“To clear the channel. Or to communicate.” Owen put three frequencies on the screen — the array, the creatures’ signature, and the badge broadcast. The badge signal sat between the other two.
“They’re not hunting. They’re troubleshooting.
Every badge is a piece of interference between them and the closest signal they might have to home. It doesn’t explain the spine thing—”
“I might know that one,” Maddie said as she ran her scanner over the last of the crew.
“If they’re looking—or whatever their version of looking is—for signals, the human brain is just electrical signals sent through the spine and around the body.
What if the badges get their attention, but the brain’s natural activity makes them want to attempt to communicate? ”
The silence that followed had a different weight than the silence before it.
“Who in here right now is wearing a comm badge?” Elliot called as his finger went to his badge, the small device no bigger than a thumbnail. Maddie had hers. Two of the unnamed crew members. “Badges off. Break them if you have to.”
“Holy shit, Tyler,” Maddie breathed as she stepped up to the console, looking like she was about to kiss him. “Did you actually figure something out?”
Tyler grinned. “I guess I did, didn’t I?”
Honestly, if Asher wouldn’t murder him, I’d kiss this idiot on the mouth, too. It was just another reminder: save as many NPCs as possible. They weren’t in this game for no reason. They had a purpose.
“What do we use instead?” Elliot asked.
Jasper was already pulling open a storage locker beneath his console.
“Analog, baby. It’s a different electromagnetic broadcast — just radio waves, low power, point to point.
” He pulled out a rack of handheld radios, battered and military-surplus-looking, the kind of equipment that didn’t belong even on a ship this beat-up.
“These have been sitting in here since the Daedalus was commissioned. No network integration. No signal profile. To those things, they’re just plastic and metal. ”
He handed them out. The radios were heavy in a way that modern equipment wasn’t — the weight of physical components rather than digital miniaturization. Levi took one, turned the dial, and heard the static hiss. Walkie-talkies. We’re fighting alien creatures with walkie-talkies.
Levi turned to the ship layout and started tracing paths with his finger. “If we seal the right corridors at the right time, we control which paths stay open. They’re already funneling themselves. We just have to narrow the funnel until there’s only one way through.”
“And the one way through leads where?” Jasper asked, though his face said he already knew.
“Cargo Bay Two.” Levi tapped it on the schematic. “It’s on the heading. Large enough for all of them. Does it have its own purge system?”
“It does.”
“We herd them in and cook them,” Tyler said, grabbing Levi’s shoulder too hard and shaking him. Asher batted his hand away, but Tyler looked too excited to care.
“The junction seals have to hold through the purge, meaning we need people to perform a manual override,” Owen said, looking at Jasper. “If the cascade drops the doors for six seconds—”
“The funnel breaks and they scatter.” Jasper was already pulling up power routing. “I can isolate the junction doors on a separate feed, but someone still needs to physically override the doors during the purge so they’ll hold.”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes from here.” Jasper grinned. “Engineering, to the rescue, as usual.”
Owen ran the power math. “Concentrating all available purge capacity into one section — the temperature exceeds biological tolerance by a factor of four. But the draw takes everything else offline for ninety seconds in that area. Gravity, lighting, life support at fifty percent.”
“But the funnel holds during the purge?” Elliot asked.
“The funnel holds,” Jasper confirmed. “We need three volunteers to stay at each junction through the purge.”
“That’s either brilliant or insane,” Elliot breathed as he sighed. “Okay, let’s figure this out, every step of the way. We’re not losing anyone else.”
Levi felt a glimmer of hope as Elliot, Jasper, and Owen began to work out the plan.
He was tired. He knew the hope was dangerous, but he let himself keep it anyway.
Maybe he was finally getting better at this game, and he would find a way to the end faster.
But even as he stepped back to let his friends work out a plan and pressed against Asher’s side, just to feel something he knew was solid, fear crept into the back of his mind.
There’s no way it is going to be this easy.