Chapter 22
T he wreck rose out of the seabed like the carcass of a long-forgotten war machine.
Greta slowed her tail strokes, hovering twenty meters away, gills flaring as she took it in. It was massive — easily two hundred and fifty meters from bow to stern — but not the sprawling hulk she had first imagined.
Half-swallowed by black volcanic sand, the hull canted at a thirty-degree angle, its port side buried deep while the starboard side jutted upward like a broken spine. The metal was dark gunmetal gray, pitted and scarred by centuries of saltwater corrosion and micrometeorite impacts.
Where the hull plating had torn open, she could see layered composites and reinforced alloys. Old. Crude. She wondered what species could have built such a thing.
Her engineer brain lit up like a diagnostic panel.
She circled slowly, tail moving in cautious arcs. The forward section had crumpled on impact, the nose cone flattened and cracked like an eggshell. Jagged breaches gaped along the midsection where something — perhaps an explosion, perhaps the pressure of the deep itself — had ripped the ship open.
Coral and tube worms had colonized the wounds, but the core structure still screamed starship : the clean lines of former thruster housings, the faint grid pattern of long-dead sensor arrays, the skeletal remains of what might have been landing struts now fused into the sand.
Faint emergency lighting strips still glowed in places, weak amber and blue, powered by some stubborn backup cell that refused to die after who-knew-how-many years.
Power, she thought. Even a trickle could mean tools, doors, maybe a distress beacon if I can reach the bridge.
The timer inside her chest tightened another notch. Thirty-eight minutes, maybe thirty-five. She could feel it like a tightening spring behind her ribs.
Caution tried to whisper swim away , but curiosity and desperation were louder. She swam toward the largest hull breach — a torn gash near the midsection, edges curled outward like melted plastic — and slipped inside before second thoughts could stop her.
The interior was a flooded metal maze.
Corridors stretched in every direction, some completely submerged, others with pockets of trapped air that created shimmering, mirror-like interfaces where water met atmosphere.
The walls were lined with peeling panels of composite and dull metal, etched with alien script she couldn’t read. Debris drifted lazily in the weak currents: broken consoles, tangled bundles of fiber-optic cabling, shattered viewports that opened onto nothing but sand.
Emergency lighting strips flickered in irregular patterns, casting long, shifting shadows that made every corner feel alive .
The whole place set her nerves on edge.
Greta moved deeper, pink scales catching the weak amber glow and reflecting it back in soft rose hues. She kept one hand trailing along the wall, feeling for vibrations, testing the structural integrity the way she would test a prototype frame back home.
The ship was big enough to get lost in but not so vast she couldn’t map it in her head — central corridor, branching side passages, what looked like crew quarters and engineering bays.
She passed an open hatch marked with faded hazard symbols and peered inside: rows of empty acceleration couches, one still occupied by a bleached skeleton strapped in place, long-dead fingers curled around a control yoke.
She suppressed a shiver and kept moving.
If there’s any residual power in the core, I might be able to ? —
A sharp click echoed behind her.
Greta froze mid-stroke.
The sound wasn’t random. She recognized it.
It’s them. One of the males.