Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
DUTCH
The first thing you do when the door becomes unreliable is stop calling it a door.
The submersible bay feed fills the wall in containment control. Red icons on every vessel except the emergency pod. Amber on the pod. Amber is worse than red. Red is finished. Amber wants something from you.
Maren stands at the central console with one bandaged hand flat beside the controls and the other moving across the screen, pulling up Kevin’s last known position, bay damage, vessel integrity, and exterior pressure readings. Her face is pale, but her voice over the channel is steady.
“Dutch. Secure bay access. No one enters except Reyes, me, and whoever he names.”
“Copy.”
I’m already moving.
The corridor outside containment control has two systems techs in it, both staring toward the bay side like looking harder will make the damage less true. I point at the taller one. “Atrium. Help Lina. Nobody leaves rest zone without escort.”
He blinks at me.
“Now.”
He goes.
The other one opens her mouth. “But the pod.”
“The pod isn’t your job yet. Your job is making sure no one panics into a hallway with teeth.”
She goes too.
I switch to the security channel. “All staff, bay access is locked under security command. Rest zones hold. No one moves alone. No one approaches lower spine without my clearance.”
Marta answers from atrium. Her voice is thin but functional. “Copy.”
I reach the bay corridor in under a minute. Reyes is already there with Marta and a bay tech named Sol, both of them looking at the feed on a portable display while Reyes pulls tools from a hard case. He’s running on something past exhaustion now.
He looks up as I arrive. “Emergency pod hull is intact. Shield compromised. Manual launch assist damaged. I need eyes on the cradle assembly.”
“You’re not going in.”
He points at a low case beside his boot. “Remote crawler. It can fit under the cradle mount and give us imaging without opening the corridor.”
I look toward the sealed bay access. “How long?”
“Ten minutes to deploy. Less if no one asks me philosophical questions.”
“Kevin’s position?”
Maren answers from containment before Reyes can. “West basin shelf. Sixty-eight meters from bay approach. Moving slow.”
“Moving away?”
She pauses. “Not exactly.”
I turn to the bay tech. “Sol, get to atrium. Tell Lina I want everyone away from the main viewing glass. Calm language. Something boring like lighting recalibration.”
He goes.
Reyes crouches by the crawler case. Marta joins him, hands steadier than her face. I stay by the bay corridor door and look at the feed.
The bay looks like a battlefield. Luxury subs twisted in their cradles.
Maintenance vessels listing uselessly. Fragments drifting in slow water.
Dark fluid leaking from something damaged and curling through the bay lights.
The emergency pod sits in its recessed cradle behind the partial shield, amber icon blinking beside it.
Maren’s voice comes through the open operations channel. “Dutch?”
“Here.”
“Pod capacity?”
“You know the number.”
“I need you to say it.”
“Twelve nominal. Fourteen unsafe. Sixteen if we strip gear and everyone agrees not to breathe too ambitiously.”
Silence.
Then Holden, from operations. “I’ll update the roster by extraction priority.”
“No,” Maren says.
I look at the camera, though she can’t see me from this angle.
“No priority list yet,” she says. “We’re not deciding who fits before we know if it launches.”
“Agreed,” Holden says.
I don’t have time to appreciate personal growth in an ex-boyfriend with a tablet. I’ll think about that later if later continues existing.
Reyes has the crawler assembled. Small, flat, jointed, built for under-cradle inspection and pipe runs. It has a camera, sensor nose, clamp legs, and enough personality to look offended by its own job. Marta clips the tether to the control unit.
“Crawler going in,” Reyes says.
“Hold,” I say.
He looks up.
I switch back to Maren. “Kevin’s current behavior.”
She pulls the basin feed. I can hear her typing. “Slow movement along west shelf. Not closing. Not retreating. He’s keeping lateral distance from the bay approach. Pattern is irregular.”
“Is he looking at the bay?”
“That’s not a technical observation.”
“Maren.”
A breath. “Yes.”
I nod to Reyes. “Send it.”
Marta opens the low inspection hatch, no larger than a service drawer.
The crawler slips through into the sealed bay-side maintenance channel, tether feeding after it.
On the monitor, the camera shows a tight, wet-dark view beneath the emergency pod cradle.
Scraped composite, bent shield bracket, torn cable wrap.
The pod’s lower hull appears intact from this angle.
Reyes leans closer. “Left.”
Marta guides the crawler.
The camera crawls under the damaged launch assist assembly. One bracket is warped. The manual release arm is half-sheared but not gone. The cradle locking pin looks seated, but the angle is wrong. I don’t know machines the way Reyes does, but I know wrong when it wears that much tension.
“Can you fix it remotely?” I ask.
“Some. Not all.”
“Can it launch as-is?”
“Maybe once. Maybe not on command.”
The crawler moves deeper.
On the bay-wide feed, Kevin remains on the west shelf. Still watching.
The inspection camera reaches the auxiliary release housing. The view is partially blocked by a piece of twisted cradle casing. Marta adjusts the crawler. The machine climbs over the casing, slips once, recovers, and angles its camera down.
“There,” Reyes says. “That’s the part I need.”
The crawler light brightens automatically.
My skin goes tight. “Kill the light,” I say.
Marta looks at me. “What?”
“Kill the crawler light.”
Reyes’s head comes up.
Before Marta can move, Kevin moves.
On the basin feed, the shape leaves the west shelf with sudden, terrible purpose. He drops lower, using the structure’s shadow, then angles toward the approach. Too fast for something that size to feel fair.
Marta kills the light.
Too late.
Kevin enters the bay approach. Kevin doesn’t go for the crawler hatch. He doesn’t go for the tether. He doesn’t go for motion. He goes to the emergency pod’s underside.
Right where the crawler showed us the auxiliary release.
The outer camera catches him in pieces. He slides into the bay like a thought becoming action, stops above the pod cradle, and presses one appendage against the damaged release housing.
Marta whispers, “Oh my God.”
Reyes goes very still.
Kevin applies pressure. He presses again, then releases. He’s touching the place the crawler identified.
The crawler sits dark beneath the cradle.
Kevin turns toward it. Because now it’s served its purpose.
“Retract,” Reyes says.
Marta pulls the control stick back.
The crawler reverses. It catches on the torn casing.
Kevin’s head shifts. He closes on the crawler. One quick movement. The feed from the crawler dies in black and static.
On the bay-wide camera, small fragments drift.
He doesn’t follow the tether to the hatch. He already got the answer.
Kevin moves away from the pod and returns to the outer approach, settling just beyond the bay gate. He positions himself where any repair attempt, launch attempt, or rescue craft has to pass through his response radius.
The water stills around him.
A held position.
Reyes’s jaw is tight enough to crack something. “He knows the release matters.”
“No,” I say. “He knows we think it matters.”
“Difference?” Holden asks.
“Big one.”
Maren’s breath catches once.
Kevin’s learning more than systems. He’s learning us.
I look at the bay feed. “He’s establishing a perimeter.”
Reyes looks up from the dead crawler signal.
“Around the bay?” Holden asks.
I watch Kevin hold position outside the approach, patient and exact, the way men held roads, doors, alleys, bridges, anything the enemy needed badly enough to cross under fire.
“No,” I say. “Around us.”
“Explain,” Maren says.
“He’s not circling randomly. He’s placed where any repair team, launch, rescue vehicle, or maintenance craft has to enter his response range.
He didn’t hit the pod until we showed him the release assembly.
He let the crawler tell him what we need.
That makes the emergency pod a trap as much as an exit. ”
Reyes says nothing. Marta sits back on her heels and looks like she might be sick.
Maren’s voice remains steady. “Can we draw him off?”
“Maybe,” I say.
“Define maybe.”
“Not with another obvious tool. Not with a clean pattern. Not unless we give him something more interesting than the door.”
I hear Holden’s tablet chime faintly over the channel. “Topside is requesting launch status.”
“Tell them launch status is no,” I say.
“Holden, tell topside the emergency pod isn’t currently viable due to active fauna control of the bay approach. Dutch, I want perimeter assumptions on the main display. Reyes, I need pod viability without exposing another tool to Kevin. Marta, step away from the hatch,” Maren says.
Marta obeys.
I look toward the maintenance corridor behind me. I step into the service alcove just off the bay access.
Three seconds. That’s what I allow.
One.
L-2 struck. Four unknown. Kevin in the bay. One pod. Too many people. Maren in the facility. Reyes too tired to stand but still standing. Holden trying to write the truth fast enough to keep up. People in the atrium pretending blankets make a bunker.
Two.
The door is a position held by something old, smart, and patient. The perimeter has moved inside my job. There’s no safe route. Only routes we haven’t lost yet.
Three.
Done.
I step back into the corridor.
Maren is coming down from containment control. I hear her before I see her. Fast steps. She rounds the corner with her tablet in hand and Holden behind her, both of them moving like the facility has started charging rent by the second.
Her eyes find mine first. “You’re sure,” she says.
“Yes.”
She stops in front of me. Close enough that I can see the exhaustion under her eyes, the faint flush from too little sleep and too much spore-thinned air. Close enough that I remember her mouth in my room and the weight of her asleep against my chest for the little time she let herself have.
This isn’t the place for that. The body doesn’t care.
Her voice lowers. “He’s holding the bay.”
“He’s shaping us. Like an enemy.”
Reyes stands a few feet away with dead crawler telemetry on the screen beside him and doesn’t argue. Holden’s expression shifts in that quiet way of his, the report rearranging itself inside his head around a worse sentence.
Maren looks at the bay feed. Kevin holds position in the approach dark. Then she steps closer to me. In the blind angle between a wall panel and the open corridor, where Marta is still looking at the dead crawler feed and Holden is pretending not to see more than he sees.
Maren’s shoulder touches my chest. She leans into me for one breath.
My hand lifts to her back and stays there.
“You’re doing that thing again,” she says quietly. “Making everyone think you’re not afraid.”
“Useful thing.”
“Not with me.”
My hand settles a little more firmly between her shoulder blades.
One breath. Two.
Then she straightens because she’s Maren and the facility is still bleeding. “Give me the rules,” she says.
I start. “No one enters bay approach while Kevin holds position. No remote tools that show him what matters. Every action assumes he learns from it.”
“No clean patterns,” Reyes says, not looking up from the dead telemetry. “Anything we do twice, he solves. Single attempts, irregular timing, or nothing.”
“And nothing topside hears as confident,” Holden says quietly. “If the board reads ‘controlled,’ they’ll order a launch into his radius. The record stays as frightened as the situation.”
She takes all three. Doesn’t thank us individually. She holds the combined thing like it was always one piece and I watch her stop running the facility alone for the first time since the first deviation. Sharing the weight instead of carrying it all.
“Accepted,” she says. To all three of us. “That’s the plan.”
“I can assess pod viability through internal diagnostics and cradle pressure response. No more external tools,” Reyes says.
“Good,” Maren says.
“Not enough.”
“No,” she says. “But good.”
I look back at the bay feed.
Kevin remains outside the approach corridor, not moving much now. Just enough to hold himself in place. A living blockade. A patient thing with no need to spend energy until we make the next mistake.