Chapter Text

The sea was holding its breath again.

From the outside, seaQuest DSV was little more than a silhouette in the ink-black depths—her massive frame moving with deceptive grace through the pressurized silence. No lights shimmered from her hull. No sonar pulses echoed to announce her presence. The ocean swallowed her whole, like a secret too old and too deep to surface.

Inside, the ship whispered.

A low hum—always there, always patient—vibrated beneath bootsoles and between bulkheads, threading through every corridor like the heartbeat of something vast and enduring. The ship was older now. Not old in the way of scrap and rust, not yet, but worn—seasoned, maybe. Her edges weren’t as sharp as they once were. Panels creaked more than they used to. Systems that once answered on the first tap now thought about it, just for a second, before they obeyed.

Nathan Bridger stood alone in one of those quieter corridors, hands behind his back, eyes half-lidded. He could feel the hum more than hear it. It grounded him, reminded him he was still moving—even when everything else inside felt stuck.

The flicker of light to his left was faint, almost apologetic.

Then came the voice. Warm, worn at the edges, like pages turned too many times in an old manual. “Captain Bridger.”

Nathan turned, slowly. The hologram wasn’t fully stable—his Academy instructor had been dead for over twenty years, and the archival files were held together by duct tape and goodwill. The image stuttered, then held, like it always did. The man had a face like a leather boot, and Nathan knew every crease.

“Still standing watch, sir?” Nathan asked, one corner of his mouth twitching toward a smile.

The instructor inclined his head. “You came back to the chair. I wasn’t sure you would.”

Nathan let the silence stretch before answering. “Neither was I.”

They didn’t need introductions. Bridger hadn’t booted this program by mistake—he never did. This one was personal. He didn’t bring it up on the bridge, or in front of the crew, or even in his own quarters. But sometimes, in corridors like this one, when the lights were low and the pressure on his chest had nothing to do with the ocean outside, he let himself listen.

“Three months since seaQuest was recommissioned,” the hologram said. “You’ve already logged twelve joint patrols, five independent deep recon missions, and one diplomatic incident with Macronesian fringe command. You don’t do quiet returns, do you, son?”

Nathan snorted. “Didn’t have the luxury.”

A beat.

“You’ve always carried more than your rank.”

That landed heavier than expected.

The corridor didn’t seem to breathe for a moment. Then Nathan shifted his weight and leaned one shoulder against the wall, rubbing a thumb along the edge of his cuff. “There’s been… a lot.”

The hologram softened. Somehow, even in flickering pixels, it could look like it was seeing straight through him. “Command is a lonely place. And you, more than most, never let yourself put it down.”

Nathan didn’t argue. He rarely did with this one. “We lost Carol,” he said quietly. “And I’m not sure I ever really came back from that. Not all the way.”

The instructor nodded once, slow. “She was the best of us. You were better with her.”

There was no sting to the words. Only truth.

Nathan let out a breath, steady but tight. “I’ve been working with Kristin Westphalen. Mostly in between systems checks, mission briefings, and keeping Ford from throttling our newest diplomat.” He paused, a faint smile ghosting his face. “It’s been… good. Productive.”

“Kristin isn’t Carol.”

“No,” Nathan agreed. “She’s not.”

Another pause.

“But she reminds you of her sometimes.”

This time, Nathan didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The quiet said it all.

In the brief silence that followed, he glanced away, eyes tracing the rivets along the ceiling panel above. When he looked back, the instructor’s image had flickered again—one shoulder distorted, color bleeding at the edges like a memory too old to be clear.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” Nathan said, voice lower now. “I don’t think I was ever supposed to feel anything like this again.”

“You weren’t supposed to survive her,” the instructor said simply. “But you did.”

That hit harder than he expected.

And maybe, if the call hadn’t come through right then, Nathan would’ve said something. Maybe he would’ve admitted the shift he was feeling. Maybe he would’ve told the old ghost in front of him that something inside had moved and he wasn’t sure if that was good or terrifying.

But the comm pinged. Ford’s voice, clipped and clear: “Captain Bridger, we need you on the bridge.”

Nathan straightened without thinking. “On my way.”

When he turned back, the instructor was gone. The corridor held nothing but quiet.

He stood there for a beat longer, chest tight with something unspoken, and then pushed off the wall and headed for the bridge.

The hum followed him—familiar, steady, almost kind.

And behind that, deeper still, was the sense that something had shifted.

He could feel it in the walls. In the water outside. In the very bones of the ship.

Like seaQuest was holding its breath, too.

The 21st century. Mankind has colonized the last unexplored region on Earth—the ocean. As captain of the seaQuest and its crew, we are its guardians—for beneath the surface lies the future.

ACT ONE

The corridor was just as he remembered it—straight-backed and quiet, polished deck plates underfoot gleaming dully in the artificial light. The hum of the bulkheads provided a familiar background song, punctuated here and there by the soft groan of pressure adjustments rippling through the seaQuest’s reinforced skin.

But time had weight. And it pressed in on everything, even here.

Bridger walked it anyway.

His footfalls were steady but not brisk, hands tucked behind his back in a habit that had once been second nature. Now the gesture felt… rehearsed. His stride had changed—slightly shorter, slightly slower, as if each step were measured against something he wasn’t ready to name.

The walls, he swore, sounded different. Not in function—no warning klaxons or failing systems here—but in tone . The creaks had grown deeper, longer. Not sick, not broken—just tired . Like the bones of the ship were whispering to themselves, too worn out to raise their voices.

He could relate.

A junior officer rounded the far end of the corridor and stiffened instinctively. The kid was fresh—probably just out of training rotation, all sharp edges and wide eyes. Bridger offered the customary nod: precise, distant, nothing more.

No warmth. No grin. No gentle tease about keeping your elbows in when walking past a superior. Those used to come easy. Now even simple kindness felt like another line item in a long day’s ledger.

The kid nodded back—respectful, maybe even grateful, but a flicker of confusion passed behind his eyes. Disappointment, perhaps. Bridger caught it like a ghost in a mirror: there, then gone.

Was this what command had turned him into? Or was this just what age did?

He continued walking, and the silence swallowed him whole again.

Months ago, when he’d stepped back aboard seaQuest, it had felt like something between resurrection and punishment. The bridge had still smelled like ozone and coffee and salt, and he’d told himself it was home. That he belonged .

Carol’s absence had been a hollow ache then. It still was. But back then he thought maybe filling the void with action, with orders and missions and leadership, would soften the edges. Make them manageable.

It hadn’t. Not really.

The missions blurred together now—disputes over territory, collapsed mining platforms, stranded research teams. Every crisis came with a protocol, and every solution seemed to leave something unresolved in its wake. One by one, the idealisms he'd once preached had been swapped for compromise. Political fallout had its own half-life, and the decay didn’t stop just because the headline passed.

He shifted his stride again. Damn knees.

It wasn’t sharp pain—just a persistent ache, the kind that never shouted but never left either. Like an old dog curled up beside you, loyal in its irritation.

Sleep came in shorter bursts these days. Four hours if he was lucky, punctuated by dreams of a bridge that was too quiet or an ocean too still. Waking up felt like rusted hinges protesting their own design.

He knew what this was.

The body doesn’t lie. It just waits for you to stop pretending.

Ahead, a junction in the wall—neutral gray, marked with wear where countless hands had pressed for balance or steadied themselves during drills—caught his eye. Without thinking, he placed his palm against it, fingers splaying over the cool surface like a benediction.

Not to brace himself. Not really.

It was something else. A moment of communion.

The seaQuest had always been more than steel and circuits to him. She breathed in the dark places. She felt . And right now… she felt slow. Off-rhythm. Like a song played a half-beat behind. Not broken. Not lost. Just… waiting.

He let the thought sit there. Didn’t chase it. Didn’t push it away.

Sometimes you didn’t need an answer. Just the silence that came before one.

He pulled his hand back and resumed walking. When he reached the lift, the doors hissed open with the same sound they always had, but even that felt more tired than usual. He stepped inside, turned, and stood still as the bulkhead closed behind him.

The ship carried on. So did he.

And neither of them was quite what they used to be.

The lift doors parted with a low breath, and Bridger stepped into the heart of the ship.

The bridge moved like a living thing. Not loud, not chaotic—just steady . Rhythmic. The sort of pulse you feel more than hear. Fingers on keys. Screens adjusting. Voices low, clipped, efficient. A metronome of purpose.

It pulled at something deep in him. Some old tether, still intact.

Ford stood where he always stood—centered, still, a figure built from calm. The wall of system data behind him flickered in real-time: temperature, trajectory, pressure, damage control. No panic. Just facts. The bones of the ship rendered in light.

Hitchcock was hunched over the secondary diagnostics console, jaw tight, one hand cycling through alert logs. The soft ping of a background alarm rose and fell in irregular bursts—a heartbeat out of rhythm.

“Thermal chip burnout on B-Deck,” Ford said without needing a prompt. “Backup fans kicked in. But the alert didn’t register. System still thinks everything’s nominal. Commander Hitchcock flagged it manually.”

Bridger crossed the deck slowly. The ache in his knees had faded—no time to notice it here. He studied the readout over Ford’s shoulder, eyes narrowing. The display was clean. Too clean.

No fault report. No timestamp. Just a digital lie wearing a functional face.

He didn’t answer right away. Just stared at the screen and felt a small shift in his gut—an old instinct. Something wasn’t adding up. And these days, small failures didn’t stay small for long.

“Get a team down there,” he said, voice low but firm. “Don’t trust the sensors. I want eyes on the wiring, the relays, the whole damn grid.”

Bridger paused, sighed, and then, after a breath, “I’m going too.”

Ford didn’t argue. He almost did. Bridger caught it—the intake of breath, the half-turn of the head—but it passed. Ford knew better. The chain of command had its place, but so did the chain of trust.

He didn’t miss Ford’s tiny grin, though.

Hitchcock straightened at the console, gave a small nod, and turned without a word. She didn’t need to ask why the captain was coming. She already knew.

Bridger wasn’t just here to sit in a chair.

He followed her toward the lift, boots moving with just enough certainty to hide the stiffness in his joints.

The lift doors opened with a reluctant wheeze, exhaling heat and scorched copper.

B-Deck greeted them like a tired lung. The air was heavy, sour with recycled coolant and metallic breath. Overhead, the lights flickered in time with some buried pulse—too slow, too irregular. A warning, not an emergency. Not yet.

Bridger stepped out and felt the change immediately: the deck plating shuddered faintly beneath his boots, a subtle vibration that ran up through his knees. Pipes lined the corridor like ribs, hissing quietly, like the ship itself was sighing in discomfort.

“Feels more like a boiler room than a flagship,” he muttered, wiping his sleeve across his forehead. Sweat. Already.

Hitchcock was already crouching at the base of a narrow maintenance tunnel, pale hair plastered to her forehead, eyes squinting against the glare of her wrist-light. She moved with the kind of grace that only came from muscle memory—one hand on the frame, the other threading through with ease.

Ford followed, ducking slower, hand terminal raised like a compass. His eyes scanned data feeds, the light from the screen casting him in ghost-blue.

Bridger came last. His descent into the tunnel was careful, deliberate. Not out of caution—he just moved differently now. Stiff in the joints, but steady. The sort of movement that made no sound but left a weight in the air.

“You’d think with all the adaptive programming and sensor tech,” Hitchcock said, voice echoing off metal, “she could fix herself by now.”

“She’s not a diva,” Ford said behind her. “Just dramatic. Knows how to get attention.”

Bridger huffed a quiet laugh as he bent to follow. “She was never this needy in the schematics.”

The humor didn’t last, but it bought them a few more steps without the weight.

They reached the panel at the far end of the crawlspace—one of the older ones, tucked behind a utility strut. The kind that wasn’t meant to fail, because it was never meant to be touched.

The thermal control board was blistered along one edge. A thin curl of smoke traced the air above it like a ghost that hadn’t realized it was dead.

Bridger crouched beside it, one hand steadying himself against the bulkhead. His knees didn’t like it. His back liked it less.

“Here,” Hitchcock said, working quickly. She twisted the casing open and plucked the chip loose with a gloved hand. It sizzled faintly, like a match dipped in water. She passed it to him.

He took it without thinking, the way you’d take a fragile piece of history. The chip was smaller than his thumb, blackened along the rim, and cracked right through the middle. A clean break. No drama. Just damage.

“Supposed to last ten years,” Hitchcock said, wiping her forehead again with a sleeve gone damp.

Bridger turned the chip in his fingers. It clicked faintly as the hairline fracture shifted under pressure.

“Yeah,” he said, soft. “So was the mission.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

Somewhere behind them, Ford shifted position, tapping a new command into the diagnostic console. Systems flared to life in his wake—cooling fans, secondary relays, a slow return to equilibrium. Hitchcock moved beside him, already laying in the bypass cable.

Bridger stayed where he was. Still crouched. Still holding the ruined chip like it meant something more than it should.

He remembered this junction—its original sketch had lived on his kitchen table for three weeks. Carol used to move it to make room for dinner, never complained. He hadn’t designed the redundancies back then. Those had come later, patched in by someone who didn’t know what this corner of the ship felt like.

The seaQuest had always been more than schematics. She was memory. Muscle. Mood. And now she was aging too.

Cracks didn’t just show up in chips.

He closed his fist gently around the broken part. Not to crush it. Just to hold it.

Then he rose, knees protesting, but legs still his.

Thud.

The sound was dense, sharp, and deliberate—something metal dropped onto wood with purpose. It snapped Krieg out of a half-doze, heart kicking against his ribs like a warning bell.

He sat up too fast, instantly regretting it. His bunk creaked in protest, and a half-eaten protein bar slid off his bare chest, leaving behind a smear of synthetic peanut butter as it landed on the floor with a wet slap. One sneaker was still on his foot. The other had gone missing somewhere under the bed two nights ago and had yet to resurface.

The lights flickered—because of course they did—and then stabilized, revealing the figure in the doorway.

Bridger.

The captain didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His expression was its own kind of storm warning—arms folded, gaze fixed, jaw tight. Not angry, not disappointed. Just... silent. Like the pressure before a depth crush.

On the desk between them sat a blackened chip, still steaming faintly in the artificial air.

Krieg blinked blearily at it. “I take it this isn’t a gift.”

The air in the room was thick with burnt circuitry and over-circulated humidity. His quarters always smelled a little like salvage—old grease, plastic polymers, coffee grounds gone cold. The clutter looked worse in the ship’s emergency lighting: maps folded wrong, comm units stripped down to wire bundles, a precarious stack of outdated data pads threatening to become a landslide if anyone so much as sneezed.

Atop the mess, a tiny bonsai tree leaned toward the nearest light panel like it was trying to escape.

Bridger didn’t move from the doorway. His voice was low, steady. “The chip needs replacing. Its redundancy failed. If it goes completely, we’re looking at a deck-wide systems collapse within a week.”

Krieg swung his legs off the bunk and stood slowly, stretching one shoulder, then the other. His back cracked loud enough to startle the bonsai.

He padded barefoot to the desk and picked up the chip. Still warm. Edges singed. Someone—probably Hitchcock—had scraped off the worst of the soot, but the center was cracked straight through. It looked like a micro-heart attack.

Krieg whistled through his teeth. “This isn’t a standard UEO part. Original series loadout, maybe pre-commission. They stopped making these six years ago. Maybe seven.”

Bridger didn’t blink. “You’ll find one.”

Krieg turned the chip over in his fingers, watching the light catch the hairline fracture. “Sure. I’ll just swing by the Museum of Maritime Disasters. Bet they’ve got a display case next to the Titanic’s deck chairs.”

The captain’s face didn’t change. The humor didn’t land. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to.

“Use whatever channels you need,” Bridger said. “Quietly. If supply hears how bad things are down here, we’ll start losing crew.”

There it was—that flicker. Not panic. Not desperation. Just... weariness, maybe. A line running under the words like a quiet current. Something Krieg didn’t often hear in the captain’s voice.

“You worried I’ll sell the ship while your back’s turned?” he asked, half-grinning.

Bridger’s reply came without hesitation.

“Not yet. Don’t give me a reason to.”

And then he was gone, just like that—vanishing down the corridor like the sea had called him back mid-conversation.

The room felt colder in his absence. Or maybe it was just the shift in pressure.

Krieg leaned back against the desk and looked down at the chip again. Something about the way the crack split the board made his chest ache, though he couldn’t say why.

He let out a slow breath, the kind that betrayed how tired he was and let him truly appreciate the stale air in his quarters. “You’re getting old, huh?” he said to the ceiling, or maybe the bulkhead, or maybe the ship herself. “Aren’t we all.”

He crossed to the wall, nudged aside a hanging towel, and tapped open a hidden panel. The scrambled comms console lit up, blue and green lines dancing across the screen like anxious fireflies.

His fingers hovered over the keys for a second longer than they needed to.

Then, finally, a mutter to no one in particular, “Okay... who still owes me favors?”

ACT TWO

The belly of the ship was burning.

Not literally—at least not yet—but the heat was a living thing, crawling under collars and into joints, hissing out of ruptured vents and pooling in the creases of every sleepless face. Engineering pulsed with chaotic light and the bark of overtaxed systems. Something vital had gone wrong, and it wasn’t fixing itself.

Bridger stepped through the bulkhead and let the scene wash over him.

No fanfare, no barked attention. The crew didn’t freeze when he entered, but they shifted—subtle, unconscious—a sideways glance, a straightened spine, as if some deeper current had shifted course. He didn’t announce himself. Didn’t need to.

Katie Hitchcock stood like a storm anchor amid the churn. Hair tied back, sweat slick on her neck, sleeves rolled and fingers smudged with carbon. Her voice was the sharpest sound in the room—clean, precise commands tossed like lifelines through the noise.

“Bypass that junction or it’ll short the grid again—Patterson, watch that relay!”

Her second-in-command—Lieutenant Tim Patterson, young and wiry and running on adrenaline—ducked under a sparking console and came up breathless.

“Three thermal chips dead. Backup regulators are toast. I’ve got a relay loop echoing through B-Deck like it’s looking for a shortwave friend, and I can’t find the damn entry point.”

Bridger stayed quiet. Watching. Listening.

Patterson swore under his breath, fingers flying across a diagnostic pad. “This isn’t normal decay. We’re getting cross-system failure patterns that don’t even share subroutines. Like someone rewired us in the dark.”

His eyes flicked up toward Hitchcock. Lower voice now. “This looks planted.”

The word hung like a drop of oil in boiling water.

Bridger moved then—just a step. Hitchcock turned to him without flinching. No salute. No formalities. Just the wariness of an engineer who’d stared too long at a machine that no longer made sense.

“We’ve got failures in propulsion, temperature control, and life support circuits. None of those systems should talk to each other, but here we are.” Her voice stayed calm, measured—dangerously so. “These weren’t accidents. Someone wanted these points to go hot.”

She reached for a screen, tapped through error logs riddled with gaps. “The logs have been scrubbed. Not erased, just… blurred. Like someone wanted us to see the mess but not how it started.”

Bridger’s gut twisted. That quiet, internal twist he’d learned to trust more than diagnostics. It wasn’t fear—it was recognition.

He remembered something an old contact in Naval Intelligence used to say, back when secrets had weight and lives hung on quiet instincts:

Trust your gut. It's the only thing that'll still talk when everything else is lying.

He looked at the chaos: scorched components, jury-rigged patches, the sickly flicker of lights too proud to fail all at once. This wasn’t entropy. This was intent.

“Are you saying sabotage?” he asked, voice low.

Hitchcock hesitated. She didn’t want to answer. Didn’t want to be the one who put it into the world. But she gave a slow, grim nod.

“Or someone wants it to look like sabotage. Either way—someone’s playing us.”

Bridger exhaled through his nose, eyes scanning the overhead conduits. They hummed too loud. The ship felt off, like a musician half a beat behind the band.

He thought of Stark. The name rose in his mind like a cold breath across the back of his neck. But there was no proof. Not yet.

He turned to Hitchcock, already walking away. “Log every failure. Secure the data nodes. No chatter outside this room.”

“Aye, sir.”

He paused at the hatch. Glanced back once—at the ship’s wounded heart, at the faces bent under pressure, at the pulse of systems just barely holding.

Then, softer, to himself:

“Someone wants her to fail. I want to know why.”

The medbay lights were dimmed low, meant to calm nerves. 

They didn’t calm Kristin Westphalen.

She sat before a console in the corner, the screen’s glow painting her face in pale, clinical blue. Vital signs pulsed in slow waves. Heart rate. Cortisol. Hematocrit. One by one, the numbers plotted a quiet indictment—less a captain, more a man eroding under pressure.

She didn’t sigh. Kristin didn’t sigh when she was worried. She grew still. Stillness was more dangerous.

The door hissed open.

Bridger entered, shrugging off his uniform jacket with the stiff awkwardness of someone who’d spent the morning contorted under a console. Which he had. He grunted—half exertion, half irritation—and dropped the jacket over the nearest chair like it had personally offended him.

“You know,” he said, voice dry as salt air, “it’s only been eight months since I took command. Bit early for my annual physical, don’t you think?”

Kristin didn’t look up. “It’s not annual. It’s conditional. Your health is under watch, remember?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I passed the initial screening.”

“Yes, and a banana looks fine before it starts going black under the skin,” she replied, standing now, arms folded—not defensive. 

Commanding.

She turned the console so he could see it. “Your cortisol is elevated. You’re borderline anemic. Your circadian markers are irregular, and your stress indicators look like you’re being hunted by something with fangs.”

Bridger squinted at the numbers like they were someone else’s. “Still breathing. That’s got to count for something.”

“No points for breathing if you’re doing it on fumes.”

He sat on the exam table, slow, methodical. Not because he was hurt. Because he was tired. Deep tired. The kind that sleep didn't fix.

Kristin moved closer, voice lowering as she took him in like she was trying to map injuries that didn’t show up on scans.

“This isn’t funny, Nathan. The ship’s failing in ways that shouldn’t be possible. I won’t watch you do the same. You don’t have a backup.”

“Neither does the seaQuest ,” he murmured, voice flat.

“That’s not an excuse. It’s a warning.”

For a long moment, neither of them moved. The medbay hummed quietly. Somewhere in the distance, something clanked—engineering, maybe. Or maybe the ship groaning under its own weight.

Bridger reached into his discarded jacket and pulled out a datapad. “This didn’t start when we launched,” he said. “This started in drydock.”

He handed it over.

She took it without a word. Scrolled.

System logs. Diagnostic skips. Safety overrides manually disengaged. Lines of code rerouted to prioritize speed over stability. All authorized under Stark’s clearance.

Kristin blinked. “These dates… this is the overhaul window. These weren’t corner-cuts. They bypassed deep-dive diagnostics.”

She looked up at him, eyes narrowed—not suspicious. Alarmed.

“If this was intentional, it’s criminal. If it wasn’t… it’s dangerously incompetent.”

Bridger’s voice was ice. “You know Stark. She’s… she was … a lot of things. Incompetent wasn’t one of them.”

Kristin set the datapad down slowly, as if it had weight beyond its size. “So what are you going to do?”

He didn’t answer immediately. His eyes drifted to the wall—blank, sterile white, but a thousand miles deep in that moment.

“I’m going to trust my gut,” he said. “And verify everything.”

The monitor beeped quietly behind them. His heart rate had steadied.

Not calm. Just controlled.

The tick of the analog clock was the only thing not trying to kill him.

It sat on the far end of the desk, squat and stubborn, ticking away in mechanical defiance of everything digital. Carol had given it to him the week before launch—a ridiculous thing, oversized and brass-framed, as if it belonged in a U-boat captain’s quarters from a war the world barely wanted to remember.

Tick.
Tick.
Tick.

Outside the bubble of desk lamp light, Bridger’s quarters were dim. Functional. The kind of place that hadn’t seen a personal touch in months. His boots were lined up with military precision, and the bed was made in that half-hearted way that said no one was sleeping deeply in it.

Across the far wall, the projected schematics of seaQuest glowed like an x-ray. Veins of heat and power arced through translucent decks, pulsing in red and yellow. Overlay diagnostics highlighted the weak points—thermal regulators, junction relays, hydraulic boosters—all failing in clean, symmetrical pairs.

Too clean.

He dragged a stylus across the nearest schematic, circling a thermal cluster in the forward coolant grid. The failure pattern looked familiar. He slid to the opposite end of the ship—aft maintenance relays. Same failure, twelve hours apart.

"Nothing spreads that clean unless someone planted the fuse," he muttered, voice low and gravelled, like it didn’t want to echo.

His eyes followed the lines, drawing invisible connections. Every route—the bypasses, the overloaded redundancies, the places where seaQuest had buckled just shy of catastrophic—all traced back to one thing.

The refit.

And one person.

But suspicion wasn’t proof. Not yet.

The commpad chimed. A secure ping, not broadcast. Only a few people could send this signal. Bridger tapped it.

The text from Krieg voice popped up on the screen. Quick, like he was still midway through the conversation. Found a trail. Not a good one .

Bridger leaned forward.

Chip was bought through a ghost supplier—blank registry, flagged import from the Equatorial Trade Zone. Might be an old Deon clearance code… maybe. Could just be coincidence, but …

A pause. The kind that came when someone was about to do something inadvisable.

If I dig deeper, I’ll need to call in old markers. Could get loud. You sure you want me to poke it?

Bridger didn’t hesitate. He typed: Do it. Don’t leave a trail. He tapped the side of his desk, compressing his lips : And Krieg? If you hit something that stinks of politics—don’t play hero. Just send it up the chain.

Krieg’s was simple, and Bridger shook his head. The younger folk loved their emojis, but the meaning was clear. Zipped lips. Krieg knew better than that. Bridger knew that. He wouldn’t have made it as far as he had if he couldn’t keep things under wraps.

The screen went dark.

Bridger sat there, fingers still on the pad. Didn’t move.

Then, almost absently, he reached for the secondary comm terminal—the one buried under layers of outdated encryption and buried memories.

He keyed in a number. Not from the registry. From muscle memory. Burned into the folds of his brain like old scars and call signs that didn’t exist anymore.

The screen blinked: Awaiting destination verification.

His thumb hovered over the final command.

Paused.

“No.” He leaned back. “He’s probably somewhere with a boat, a bourbon, and no desire to talk to old ghosts.”

A beat passed. His voice softened.

“Besides, he’d just say: ‘Trust your gut… but still verify.’”

He closed the comm window. Didn’t delete the number. But didn’t save it either.

The light caught on a second pad—Kristin’s latest health report. Still open next to a mug that had gone cold an hour ago.

Stress profile: elevated. Iron borderline. Cortisol climbing.

“Deep-sea miner” levels, she’d said, scowling at him like she wanted to throw the report and a wrench.

He rubbed at the base of his neck. Tired. Sure. But who wouldn’t be, running triage on a billion-dollar machine being slowly sabotaged by invisible hands?

“Next she’ll want me doing tai chi with the dolphins…”

The joke tasted hollow.

Darwin would probably love that idea , he thought. He exhaled. Long and slow. If it didn’t end up being his idea in the first place .

The ship hummed around him. The familiar pitch of operational systems—filters cycling, engines on idle, the slight tremor of life support holding the ocean at bay.

He closed his eyes.

No alarms. No klaxons.

For now, the ship lived.

His hand reached forward and tapped the old analog clock. Tick.Tick.

“One of us has to hold the line,” he said.

The clock ticked in reply. Unbothered. Unbreakable.

At least, for now.

The cargo bay stretched out like the hollow gut of some ancient sea creature—dimly lit, full of industrial shadows, and echoing with every footstep like a haunted bellows.

Commander Jonathan Ford wiped his sleeve across the back of his neck. The sweat there wasn’t from heat—it was frustration. Frustration and a mounting unease that wouldn’t name itself just yet.

Ortiz, crouched beside a half-unbolted shipping crate, grunted as he pried open another metal panel with the practiced motion of someone used to jury-rigging machinery on the fly.

Ford scanned the data pad in his hand, cross-referencing serial numbers with inventory tags. The numbers didn’t match. Again.

"Feels like whack-a-mole, sir," Ortiz muttered. He pulled a packing foam insert loose and tossed it aside. "I thought we scrubbed all this back when we launched."

Ford didn’t answer. He was staring at the crate’s contents now.

Inside, wrapped in faded thermal shielding and misplaced hope, were thermal regulators —standard-issue, but old stock. Packed tightly beneath desalination pump components. A rookie mistake. Or a very deliberate kind of indifference.

He crouched and reached in, gently testing the edge of a casing. "These shouldn’t be stored together," he said quietly.

Ortiz raised a brow. “EM bleed?”

“Worse.” Ford stood. “Interference fields, proximity decay, feedback resonance—pick your poison. One bad vibration and you’re rewriting a quarter of our environmental controls from scratch.” He frowned, angling the manifest toward the overhead light. “Blank field. No destination. No recipient signature. Just a crate that… exists.”

Ortiz stood next to him now, arms folded. “Ghost cargo?”

Ford’s voice was dry. “Ghosts don’t botch loadouts this badly.”

He turned the manifest pad toward Ortiz. “This isn’t sabotage. Not anymore. But it’s damage. Slow, stupid damage. Leftovers from a captain who never thought she’d be held accountable.”

Ortiz nodded, his jaw set. “We flag it?”

Ford already was—marking the crate, tagging it in the system, assigning a priority audit number. “Crocker can dig through the paper trail. If there’s a rat in the records, he’ll smell it.”

Ortiz knelt to close the crate, pausing to inspect the foam packing. “Want NCIS to poke it?”

Ford snorted. “You mean whatever NorPac’s rebranded alphabet soup is calling itself this week?” He shook his head. “They’ve got enough on their plate chasing ghosts in policy briefings and budget hearings. We’ll wake them if we find something with teeth. For now?”

He tapped the crate with his boot. “Just fleas.”

They stepped back. Silence settled in again, the kind that crept in around bad memories and unspoken suspicions.

The camera would linger here, if there was one—a slow pull in on the crate.

Thermal regulators, designed to control core system temperatures and keep the heart of seaQuest from boiling over.

Stored like afterthoughts in a corner no one thought to check.

The kind of mistake you’d walk past a dozen times… until it killed someone.

The corridor outside the science lab was all clean lines and routine noise—subtle hums of filtration systems, quiet clatter of boots on reinforced deck plating, the occasional low murmur of crew chatter slipping around the corners like seabirds on the wind.

seaQuest was, for once, running smoothly.

Which, of course, was the first warning sign.

Bridger didn’t hear Westphalen approach. He felt her. That unshakable stride, the click-snap of a woman who had long ago stopped asking permission and started issuing ultimatums in syllables of steel.

She didn’t bother with preamble. Just handed him the datapad like she was passing a coffee order and said, perfectly dry:

“You’re going to roll your eyes. I already did.”

Bridger took it without a word. His hands were steady. His expression wasn’t.

He thumbed through the entries with mechanical efficiency, the pages of the report peeling open like familiar bruises.

Stark. Again .

He didn’t ask. He didn’t need to.

Kristin answered anyway, arching a brow like punctuation. “Was there ever any doubt?”

The datapad didn’t scream sabotage—it whispered it, slick and subtle. Logs missing timestamps. Authorization tags wiped like chalkboard scrawls under a rain of acid. But the pings were there. Echoes in the system. Timecodes that matched up too neatly with known activity windows.

Bridger exhaled through his nose, tapping the edge of the pad against his palm. “She made herself a ghost in the system.”

“Again,” Kristin echoed. “Should’ve made a drinking game out of it.”

He leaned against the bulkhead, letting the cool metal sink into his spine. The datapad stared up at him like an old wound that had learned new tricks.

“I thought we cleaned this up when we booted her the first time.”

“We did,” Kristin said, cool and matter-of-fact. “She just left a few parting gifts buried under the deck plates. Like cursed treasure. Only more tedious.”

She took the pad back, turning it in her hands. The screen’s glow caught in her eyes, reflecting quiet fury leashed by years of professional detachment.

“She didn’t sabotage the ship to destroy it. She did it to stay essential. A little entropy here, a pinch of chaos there. Just enough to keep herself the center of the orbit. Until someone else walked in the room.”

Bridger’s lips curved in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “And then it all fell apart.”

Kristin looked at him. “She didn’t expect you.”

“No one did,” he said softly. “Least of all her.”

For a moment, they both fell silent. Not out of reverence. Just fatigue. The kind you feel in the marrow after you’ve fought the same battle too many times with too many different names.

Bridger straightened and passed the datapad back, dusting his hands off like the residue could be wiped away that easily.

“Let’s log it, fix it, and keep moving. Quietly. No ghost hunts. No shipwide memos. If we’re just swatting flies, no need to summon the exorcists.”

Kristin nodded. But her voice, though calm, came laced with iron. “Stirred or not, they’re still ghosts. And this ship doesn’t forget easy.”

He gave her a sidelong glance. “Neither do we.”

A half-step past her, he paused. Tossed the last thought over his shoulder like a dry punchline.

“Next time we do a full systems sweep before launch.”

Kristin smirked. “What, and ruin tradition?”

Bridger paused, and she waited. Then he smiled just a bit before the warning snort caught him. He took one look at her and her too carefully composed face and finally, laughed. “Oh, come on, it’s not a tradition yet. We haven’t stolen the academy donkey or painted it pink.”

She looked at him, one hand on her hip. “What?”

Bridger laughed again but waved it off, finally sighing as he controlled himself again. “Something my son, of all people, may have done with our resident Chief Supply and Morale officer…” he explained and her eyebrows rose but she didn’t say anything else.

They parted without ceremony—two soldiers in lab coats and command uniforms, bound by ghosts neither wanted to name out loud.

And as the corridor returned to its rhythm, the datapad’s screen dimmed in Kristin’s grip.

Last echoes of someone who didn’t know how to lose quietly.

ACT THREE

The air in the alcove was always too still. A little too warm, a little too damp, like the ship had forgotten this corner existed. Panels blinked half-heartedly in a language of delays and backlogs, and the overhead light buzzed just enough to feel like a threat. Ben Krieg leaned against the wall, watching the UEO quartermaster flicker on the aging vidscreen like a man phoning it in from the edge of a dying star.

“I’m not asking for a prototype,” Krieg said, voice low and dry. “Just a thermal bypass regulator. One of the cheap ones. The kind you can usually pull out of a vending unit if you kick it hard enough.”

The quartermaster scratched his temple, which Krieg took as a bad sign. “Commander… I’m telling you, as of the last systems update, that component isn’t listed under seaQuest ’s requisition protocols. Not backlogged. Not discontinued. Just—gone.”

Gone. Just like that. Like the part had never existed, or worse, like it had never been allowed to.

Krieg exhaled slowly, rubbing at his face. “So we’re flying hot and praying the coolant ghosts don’t unionize?”

“I don’t make the lists, sir,” the man said with the apologetic exhaustion of someone who knew they were a mouthpiece for a much dumber machine.

The screen cut to static before Krieg could finish the sarcastic hand gesture he was halfway into.

He didn’t move right away. Just stood there in the low flicker, arms folded, coffee going cold beside him. That damn part was supposed to be a quick fix. One more headache off the checklist before something big broke. But this—it wasn’t just bureaucracy anymore. It smelled like a lie.

He didn’t look up when Patterson came in. Just said, “Unless you’re here with a time machine or a magic parts replicator, I wouldn’t get too hopeful.”

Patterson was already scrolling through a diagnostic tablet. “Actually, I ran the system check again. The part flagged stress markers about eight months ago. I logged it under degradation, standard replacement cycle.”

Krieg’s head lifted. “Eight months ago? That’s before the refit.”

“Right before,” Patterson said. “I sent the report to Stark. She signed off—marked it ‘non-critical under projected conditions’ and routed it under redundancy compliance. After that, it stopped flagging.”

Krieg straightened slowly. Something tightened in his chest—not panic, not yet. But the realization of a pattern, of something intentional . “She buried it. Didn’t just wave it off—she rerouted the system so it wouldn’t flag future stress. Took it off inventory watch. That’s why the quartermaster’s system thinks we don’t need it.”

The silence stretched between them, thick as oil.

“She didn’t forget,” Patterson said, quieter now. “She removed it.”

Krieg nodded once. Not to agree, but to acknowledge the weight of it. “Which means the system didn’t fail. It did exactly what it was told.”

The door hissed open behind them, and for a moment, neither man turned. Then they felt it—the shift in pressure, the quiet change in the room that only happened when Commander Ford was nearby.

His footsteps were soft, but not slow. Intentional. Measured.

“What’s the issue?” Ford asked.

Krieg kept it even. “Thermal bypass regulator’s dead. Not dying—dead. But the system didn’t catch it, because Stark approved a workaround. On paper, the part’s not failing. It’s not even real.”

Ford’s eyes narrowed as Patterson handed him the tablet. He scanned fast—too fast for most, but Ford wasn’t most. His expression didn’t change, but his silence darkened.

“She didn’t just sign off,” Krieg added. “She delisted the entire component. She ghosted it out of our supply chain.”

“That’s not a maintenance oversight,” Ford said. “That’s a trap.”

Patterson hesitated, then added, “It would only trigger once the part failed outright. We got lucky it didn’t go during startup. Or combat.”

Ford didn’t speak for a long moment. Then, finally: “Start a full sweep. Quiet. Quiet as hell. Cross-reference everything she touched. If this wasn’t the only ghost part on board, I want to know before one of them kills us.”

Krieg nodded. “You think she was covering her ass?”

“No,” Ford said, already halfway to the corridor. “I think this is what you leave behind when you’re planning to come back.”

He stopped at the threshold.

“And I think we just stepped on another tripwire.”

Then he was gone—just the echo of his boots on metal, swallowed by the hum of the decks.

Krieg didn’t move right away. Patterson shifted beside him, thumb still resting on the edge of the screen.

Krieg reached for his coffee, took a sip, grimaced. Bitter as betrayal. He set it back down like it might explode.

“Well,” he muttered. “That’s one way to say ‘welcome back to the command staff.’”

Patterson gave him a look. “What do we do now?”

Krieg stared into the flicker of the overhead lights, calculating probabilities the way he used to count poker hands. He didn’t like the odds.

Krieg smirked. But this one didn’t reach his eyes.

“Then we stop being the cleanup crew and start being the exorcists.”

The glow of the monitor lit Bridger’s face in fractured hues—blues and sea-glass green, dancing over a week’s worth of beard growth and the slight furrow that never quite left his brow these days. He sat forward in the low, stiff-backed chair, a datapad in one hand, stylus idle in the other. The room was still, the air just shy of cool. Not quite warm enough to be comforting, not quite cold enough to notice.

On the corner of the desk, tucked just beside the stylus tray, a small black-and-white photo leaned against the base of an old power relay. Carol. Not staged—just a candid shot from some long-ago shore leave. She was mid-laugh, sunglasses crooked, wind in her hair. He didn’t look at it often. Didn’t need to. It was like gravity—always there, quietly holding him in place.

The ship murmured around him. Ballast shifting low. Water pressing high. The skeletal hum of seaQuest in her resting state—a living, breathing creature that had learned to sleep lightly.

Bridger flipped through the logs with the casual rhythm of routine. A nightly habit. Old instincts. He wasn’t looking for anything. Not at first. Just dotting i’s. Making sure the boat was still whole.

But then—there it was.

An upgrade request for the forward coolant regulator–Filed six months ago and stamped complete. Signed off with a system-level clearance, no less.

Bridger blinked at the screen. Cross-referenced the timestamp. Opened the maintenance docket. No work crew assigned. No part drawn. And he knew— knew —that regulator had been flagged again just this week.

“That’s not right…” he murmured.

He flagged the entry. Dug deeper. Another upgrade, different subsystem—same story. And another. And another. All buried beneath automated admin routines, each one sliding in just under the critical threshold. Individually, they looked like clerical oversights. Together, they were a map.

Breadcrumbs.

Except Stark hadn’t been leaving a trail. She’d been hiding one.

Half-marked requests. Clearance codes that looked official at a glance, but broke protocol under scrutiny. Work orders marked delayed due to redundancy , even when no redundancies existed. It was elegant, in a grim sort of way. Not sabotage. Not exactly. But sabotage’s smarter cousin.

Bridger leaned back, rubbing the bridge of his nose like the act could ward off the weight pressing against his skull.

“She wasn’t just trying to be indispensable,” he muttered to the dark. “She was trying to make the ship depend on her.”

He stared at the screen, then past it, to the ghost-blue reflection of himself in the glass. How long had it been like this? How many systems were compromised, not in function but in truth ?

He sat forward again, hands moving with the steady grace of someone who’d once rebuilt a ship from its bones. He began tagging systems. Compiling a list. Reassigning diagnostic cycles. Quietly, methodically, routing logs through private channels.

This wasn’t something he could fix in the field. It wasn’t just about the parts.

It was the foundation.

He opened a secure memo log, thumb hovered for a moment, then began to type:

To: Commander Ford
RE: Systems Audit — Immediate Action Required

Begin preparations for drydock at Pearl Harbor. Full diagnostic reset. No exceptions.
Target systems to be isolated and reviewed before approach.
Crew not to be alerted until arrival unless safety compromised.
Will explain in morning.

He paused. Something tugged at the edge of his thoughts—an old instinct, sharpened by years in and out of black ops directives. This wasn’t just a technical problem. It was procedural. Intentional. Measured.

His fingers hovered again. Then typed a final line:

Also loop in Crocker. And someone from NorPac intel oversight.
NCIS, if they still call themselves that.
Use the old channels.

He saved it, encrypted it, and sent.

Silence settled again. Not peaceful. Not quite oppressive. Just the kind of silence that settled in old command centers and aging captains. The kind that knew things.

Bridger rose, stretching the stiffness from his spine. He wandered slowly to the small round viewport. Outside, the ocean was a wall of darkness, streaked with glints of moonlight from the surface above. Peaceful. Deceptively so.

“You were supposed to be clean,” he said to the water. Not angry. Just tired. “Let’s make you clean again.”

He touched the edge of the glass, just for a moment, then stepped back. The screen dimmed behind him, and the soft door-chime of his quarters slid open without a sound.

He stepped into the corridor. 

And the ship, like an old friend stirring in sleep, welcomed him back with the hush of circulating air and the deep, muted heartbeat of its engines.

The moon pool deck was quiet this time of night, when the ship seemed to exhale and settle into the slow rhythm of ballast shifts and hull groans. Outside the curved glass, the ocean rolled dark and deep, flecked here and there with traces of bioluminescence—threads of electric blue winding lazily through the current like some forgotten constellation. Bridger stood at the far end of the room, staring out into that darkness, the hem of his uniform jacket just brushing the back of his thighs.

He wasn’t brooding, exactly. It was quieter than that. A still kind of thinking. The sort that doesn’t chase answers so much as listen for them.

He’d followed the data trails well past midnight, deeper and deeper into the maze Stark had left behind. What had begun as a casual review of old logs had turned into something colder, tighter. Familiar system upgrades—marked approved, logged as redundant, signed off with no signature at all. Each little lie had been buried inside a larger truth, masked by efficiency and just enough bureaucratic sleight of hand to keep from raising flags.

It wasn’t incompetence. It was intention. She hadn’t just tried to make herself indispensable. She’d tried to make the ship hers.

And he had let her.

The door behind him opened with a whisper, but he didn’t turn. He knew who it was before she spoke.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Kristin said, her voice soft enough not to startle, firm enough not to vanish into the quiet.

Bridger didn’t look at her right away. “I didn’t expect to be found.”

She stepped forward, her movements slow and unhurried, the kind of patience that came from years of war zones, laboratories, and the too-long silences between messages from people she cared about. She stopped beside him, not quite close enough to touch, but near enough to feel the warmth of her presence.

“You flagged the ship for dry dock,” she said after a moment. “Ford’s been trying not to speculate.”

Bridger’s hands tightened slightly behind his back. “Stark left ghosts in the machine,” he said. “Invisible ones. Systems that look clean until you really dig. Auto-signed clearances. Delayed upgrades that never existed. It’s elegant sabotage. Quiet. Surgical. And we didn’t see it because we weren’t looking in the right places.”

Kristin nodded slowly. “You think she was planning something worse?”

“I think she already did something worse.” He exhaled through his nose. “She turned this ship into something it was never meant to be. Made us think we were back to normal.”

They stood in silence for a while, the two of them framed against the soft churn of the moon pool. The ocean outside pressed against the thick glass like a memory—weightless but unyielding.

When Bridger finally spoke again, his voice had dropped into something quieter. “This was supposed to be a clean slate. A second chance. I came back to fix things. But the deeper I dig, the more it feels like I failed before I even started. I trusted the wrong people. I let the wrong things slide.”

Kristin didn’t answer right away. She was watching him now—not just his profile, but the way his shoulders carried the weight, the tilt of his chin against doubt. She didn’t say you’re being too hard on yourself , because he wouldn’t believe her. And because it wasn’t the point.

Instead, she said, “I remember the first day you came back. You stood on the bridge like it belonged to someone else. Like you were borrowing time.”

His mouth quirked, humorless. “Maybe I was.”

“No.” Her voice was calm, sure. “You never wanted to command again, Nathan. And yet here you are. You didn’t have to come back. But you did.”

He didn’t respond right away. A soft sound echoed through the deck—just the shift of the ship's internal pressure system recalibrating, a subtle reminder that even in rest, seaQuest was alive.

“I was supposed to build the future,” he said finally, almost to himself. “Not fix the past.”

Kristin turned her eyes to the dark sea beyond the glass. “Maybe it’s the same thing.”

That drew the smallest of smiles from him—brief, tight-lipped, but real.

She didn’t move closer. Didn’t touch his arm or brush his shoulder. She simply sat down on the edge of the observation bench beside him, her hands folded loosely in her lap. She knew better than to offer comfort he wasn’t ready to take.

Bridger looked down at her, thoughtful. Something caught in his throat—something he nearly said, almost voiced—but let fall away instead. There was no urgency to it. No deadline on words left unspoken.

Outside, a school of tiny fish darted past the glass in a flicker of pale green light. The sea beyond them yawned wide and eternal.

“It’s still a beautiful ship,” Kristin said softly. “Even after everything.”

Bridger nodded, gaze steady. “She is.”

The wardroom had the smell of metal and coffee—old coffee, hours off the boil and burning quietly in the bottom of a forgotten pot. The room buzzed with the faint hum of ship systems in the walls, the seaQuest's mechanical heartbeat layered beneath tense conversation and the scrape of boots against the deck plating.

Captain Nathan Bridger leaned forward with both hands on the polished table, the fingertips of one hand tapping an irregular rhythm while the other gripped a mug of something that might have once been coffee. He didn’t drink. He just held it. Maybe for warmth. Maybe because it gave his hand something to do while he listened.

Krieg stood across from him—just far enough not to challenge, but close enough to be heard without needing to raise his voice. He had the half-apologetic, half-eager expression of someone who knew he was about to break the rules, and kind of liked it.

“I’m just saying,” Krieg said, spreading his hands like he was offering the whole table a peace offering, “we don’t have to wait for UEO logistics to pull their head out of… well, you know. We’ve got options.”

Lieutenant Commander Ford leaned back in his chair like the words physically pushed him. “Options like what, exactly? We’re talking about a life-support regulator. That’s not something you pick up at a swap meet.”

Krieg smiled—not smug, but pleased , like a magician about to reveal a hidden card. “No, but you can get one from a guy who runs a swap meet in a sunken barge somewhere off the Java Ridge. They call him the Regulator.”

Ortiz, perched with one hip on the edge of the table, raised an eyebrow. “You’re joking.”

Krieg's eyes twinkled. “I wish I was.”

Silence hung in the room for a beat. Bridger didn’t say a word. His eyes hadn’t left Krieg.

Ford gave a short, clipped laugh. “You want us to deal with some backwater scrounger instead of going through approved procurement?”

Krieg shrugged. “Look, I know the guy’s eccentric. Unlicensed. Unregulated. Possibly a little unhinged. But he has things nobody else does. Parts. Tech. Stuff that hasn’t existed on any sanctioned manifest for fifteen years. And he doesn’t ask questions.”

“Great,” Ford muttered, “neither do black-market arms dealers.”

Ortiz rubbed the back of his neck, then glanced at Bridger. “Sir, I’ve heard of this guy. I mean, stories . He lives off-grid. Only takes barter. Weird stuff too—like, actual bananas. Military-issue rations. A reel-to-reel tape of Glenn Miller, one time. Swapped a generator for a case of marshmallow crème.”

Krieg snapped his fingers. “See? That’s the kind of outside-the-box thinking we need right now.”

“I don’t think he’s thinking outside the box,” Ortiz said. “I think he ate the box.”

“I’ve got connections,” Krieg continued, undeterred. “I’ve got a line to him. I even have a working trade list. Bananas. Coffee beans. An old Speak & Spell. A signed hockey puck from the 2016 UEO charity tournament. And... maybe something with Darwin.”

That got Bridger’s attention.

“Darwin?” he asked slowly, voice like a warning bell muffled in velvet.

Krieg held up both hands. “He’s a fan, okay? It’s harmless. He just wants a video. Like Darwin playing chess or something. Or singing. He thinks the dolphin’s a genius. And I mean… he’s not wrong. ”

Ford leaned in, voice flat. “You're suggesting we bribe a lunatic with bananas and dolphin home videos in exchange for a life support part that keeps half the lower decks from suffocating?”

“I’m suggesting ,” Krieg said, letting a little steel into his tone now, “that we’re stuck in the middle of a bureaucratic quagmire with a critical system failing and no timeline on replacement. And I’m offering a workaround. One that works. ”

For a moment, no one said anything. The ship creaked faintly as the pressure shifted. A light above the door flickered and steadied.

Then the hatch opened with a soft hiss. Dr. Westphalen stepped halfway into the room, her arms full of data slates. She paused, eyes scanning the room like a battlefield commander taking in casualties. She frowned slightly.

“Did I hear someone say bananas ?”

Three grown men froze like cadets caught mid-prank.

Without waiting for an answer, she sighed, shifted the weight of the slates in her arms, and left again, muttering something about degenerating into a floating zoo.

The door hissed shut behind her.

Bridger closed his eyes. Just for a second. Then he set the mug down gently, precisely.

“Let me be very clear, Krieg,” he said, voice low and thoughtful. “You are suggesting we bypass military procurement, violate two—maybe three—directives on unauthorized vendor engagement, and risk exposing our location to a man who may or may not be entirely sane. ”

Krieg nodded. “That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

Bridger studied him for a long moment. Then leaned back, slow and deliberate.

“And you’ve already assembled a barter package.”

Krieg allowed himself the faintest grin. “Had it ready since the third time they ‘lost’ our request for a new quantum filament array.”

Ford gave an exasperated sigh. “You planned for the system to fail.”

Krieg met his gaze. “I planned for reality. Sir.”

Another pause.

Then Bridger rubbed a hand across his jaw and said, with a breath like resignation laced with reluctant admiration, “All right. But you deal with him, Krieg. I don’t want to know how you got the bananas.”

Ford leaned back with a groan. “Bananas are going to be the least of our worries.”

Ortiz chuckled under his breath. “I can’t wait to see what he wants for delivery. A live goat and a mariachi band?”

Krieg clapped his hands, once. “You guys are gonna love him. He’s got a cyborg parrot and everything.”

Bridger gave him a long-suffering look.

Krieg grinned wider and made for the door.

As the hatch closed behind him, Bridger exhaled and slumped back into his chair. He muttered, almost to himself, “The things I do for this ship…”

Krieg walked with purpose, boots tapping a quick rhythm down the corridor as if the momentum of approval had unlocked something deeper than just permission. He didn’t head straight for the comms station. Not yet. First things first.

He ducked into one of the lesser-used supply holds, a narrow room lined with vacuum-sealed storage crates that wore layers of dust like old medals. The overhead light flickered once, buzzing faintly. He keyed open a crate near the back—one he’d quietly reallocated months ago when he’d first started assembling the “just in case” pile.

The lid hissed open with a sigh of released pressure. Inside, nestled in neat rows like golden bricks of contraband treasure, were bananas—dozens of them, vacuum-sealed in preservation packs stamped with a date that was more of a polite suggestion than a hard rule.

He crouched, ran a hand along the smooth plastic, and chuckled to himself.

Not many people in the military stockpiled bananas. Then again, not many people had friends like the Regulator.

Krieg’s smile deepened, the kind that came from knowing you were one step ahead of the chaos. He straightened, sealed the crate, and tapped the lid twice like it was a done deal.

“Showtime,” he murmured.

The docking bay groaned with the strain of the incoming vessel, hull-mounted lights flickering as hydraulic clamps secured around something not designed for this level of precision. The sub-pod was barely larger than a lifeboat, patched with overlapping plates of mismatched metal and decorated with fading decals from pulp sci-fi magazines. Seaweed had taken root along the underside—actual seaweed. Krieg couldn’t tell if it was intentional or just lack of maintenance.

Probably both.

Krieg leaned on the rail above the docking platform, arms crossed, smiling like a kid who knew Christmas morning was about to get weird.

Ortiz stepped beside him, one brow raised. “Is that… a picture of Elvis in a space suit?”

“Next to the martian pin-up girl? Oh yeah.” Krieg’s grin widened. “The Regulator’s got style .”

Crocker’s voice crackled through the overhead speaker like a man trying to swallow his own misgivings. “Incoming non-UEO vessel, authorized under emergency repair exemption code 14.3C. Stay sharp, people. This guy ain’t standard issue.”

The docking bay doors unlatched with a hiss and parted.

Out stepped chaos in human form.

The man known only as “the Regulator” moved like he belonged to a different rhythm than everyone else—wiry, twitchy, head swiveling like a bird checking escape routes. His jacket was leather, cracked and sun-bleached, covered in stitched-on patches and trinkets: a spoon, a tangle of copper wire, a piece of driftwood tied with red string. His boots were military issue, scuffed to hell and one size too big. He dragged a hover-sled behind him–a device that was like the popular skateboards of the same name in the early 2020’s. A misnomer as it didn’t actually hover but was the one, or perhaps even two, wheels were well hidden underneath to give it the impression of hoverr, piled precariously high with wooden crates, tangled wires, vintage radios, a battered reel-to-reel player, and—for reasons no one immediately wanted to explore—a fruit basket.

And an orangutan.

Ortiz stared, blinking twice.

The ape—wearing mirrored goggles and perched like a dignified hitchhiker atop a stack of vacuum-sealed bananas—let out a low hoot and tapped the crate beneath him, as if announcing his dominion.

“What… is that?” Ortiz asked, stunned.

Krieg’s voice brimmed with affection. “That... is the Regulator.”

The Regulator waved with both hands. “Hello, beautiful ship! I come bearing fruit, nostalgia, and maybe a working plasma modulator.”

The orangutan chose that moment to leap from his perch, swiping a banana mid-air and landing with shocking grace on the scaffold supports above. He let out a delighted screech and vanished upward, dragging the peel behind him like a trophy.

Crocker’s boots pounded the bay floor as he stormed in from the lift, eyes locked on the chaos now blooming above. “We got a loose animal on board—security, intruder alert. Repeat: we got an orangutan on the loose!”

Klaxons blared for a moment before someone wisely silenced them. Red warning strobes lit the bay like a disco from hell. Crew members scrambled as the orangutan swung over the mezzanine, dropped to a support pipe, and disappeared down a side corridor, trailing banana slime and echoes of gleeful screeches.

The Regulator didn’t so much as flinch. He reached down, casually picked up a dropped goggle lens, and blew the dust off it. “He’ll come back when he’s had his fun. Likes aquariums.”

Krieg was already jogging after the trail of mischief, Crocker and Ortiz in tow. “You’ll want to know,” he called over his shoulder, “The guy used to be UEO. Systems savant. Designed half the early sub-grid harmonics before the Carter Drive scandal fried the politics out of him. Brilliant. Paranoid. Went off-grid, started bartering instead of dealing with credits.”

Ortiz dodged a falling banana peel. “This is your guy?”

“He’s got the part we need—if we can figure out what he wants today.”

The orangutan’s screeches echoed again from ahead, followed by the unmistakable plop of something wet and probably important being knocked over.

Their unusual visitor ambled along behind them, hands in pockets, smiling like this was all perfectly normal.

They caught up to the ape at the moon pool. The orangutan had pressed his face against the curved glass of the observation dome, watching the moon pool swirl beyond.Darwin drifted by, paused, and the orangutan made a soft chirping sound, enraptured. His breath fogged the glass.

Farina stepped beside him, leaned a shoulder against the rail. “He likes the water. Calms his nerves.”

Crocker rubbed a hand down his face, as if trying to manually reset his expectations. “You know how many regs we just violated with this monkey business?”

“He’s an orangutan,” the Regulator corrected cheerfully. “Big difference.”

The moon pool doors slid open behind them. The air changed.

Bridger entered like a man bracing for a migraine, hands tucked behind his back. His expression was tight, composed, ready for discipline. 

Then he stopped.

Vern turned.

Recognition bloomed across Bridger’s face like sunlight breaking through storm cloud.

“... Vern? ”

The orangutan ambled over, solemn now. He reached up and hugged Bridger around the waist with a quiet, almost reverent gentleness. His fingers tightened in Bridger’s uniform.

Bridger blinked. “I’ll be damned.”

Vern chirped softly and scampered away again, calm as a monk.

Bridger slowly lifted his gaze—and then found the Regulator. Still leaning against the rail. Still grinning.

“Nice to see you again, Nathan,” the man said, with a mock salute that looked more like a magic trick than a greeting.

Bridger shook his head slowly, the faintest of smiles tugging at his lips. “Leslie Farina. The Regulator. I should’ve known.”

Silence filled the chamber like a drawn breath. Ortiz glanced at Krieg. O’Neill leaned forward slightly. Even Vern paused, perched now atop a floodlight.

Lucas arrived just in time to take in the tableau—the orangutan, the hover-sled of bananas, Bridger looking like someone had just opened a long-forgotten chapter of his life.

He blinked once. “ Cool. ”

Crocker looked at Bridger, incredulous. “You know this guy?”

Bridger exhaled through his nose. “He helped Carol and me escape the mainland six years ago. Got us to the island. On a sailboat held together with duct tape and jazz records.”

Farina gave a proud nod. “Still floats.”

Krieg stepped forward, tapping one of the crates with the toe of his boot. “We’ve got your bananas.”

“Great,” Farina said. “Let’s talk payment. I’ll need vacuum tubes, three Miles Davis LPs… and something soulful. Not sure what yet. I’ll know it when I see it.”

Vern returned to his perch, curling around Farina’s shoulders like a sleepy backpack. The ape adjusted his goggles with one hand and picked his teeth with the other.

No one spoke. Not at first.

Then Bridger, hands still behind his back, muttered with weary affection, “The things I do for this ship…”

And somewhere deep in the storage decks, a case of jazz vinyl started humming with purpose.

The chaos was gone now, tucked back into crates and banana-stained memories. The docking bay had the stillness of a sanctuary after strange worship—distant hums of re-pressurization, muffled footsteps of crew moving on with their day, unaware of the gravity that lingered like humidity.

Bridger stood alone beneath the humming arch of sodium light, watching Farina’s battered shuttle suck in the last of its cargo like a bloated fish. The thing looked older now, if that was possible. Less a vehicle than a confession of madness in motion—patched metal panels, braided wiring that swayed like seaweed, decals peeling like old memories. Someone had scrawled "Eat Jazz, Not War" across the hull in glowpaint.

And there was Farina—ratchet in hand, foot on the sled, humming a Miles Davis riff like it was a prayer.

“Nathan,” he said without turning, “you ever think maybe we peaked during the sailboat days?”

Bridger let the corners of his mouth twitch. “Still got that sailboat?”

“Retired her. Duct tape gave out in ‘23. She went down with dignity and half a bottle of rum. Still dive there occasionally.”

They stood there a moment, the silence between them filled with all the unsaid. Somewhere far overhead, a WSKR drone buzzed—its pattern disrupted just for a flicker. Bridger noticed it. Farina didn’t seem to care.

“You’re back in uniform,” Farina said, voice light but aimed like a harpoon.

“Temporarily.”

Farina glanced up with the kind of expression only old friends earned—half-smile, half-sadness. “That what you told yourself when you signed the papers?”

Bridger didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

Farina leaned on his sled like it was a pulpit. “You were free, Nathan. Really free. That island was wild. Pure. No pings. No politics. No dead kids in sealed rooms with badge numbers stapled to their files. Just you, the sea, and a dog that tried to eat my boot.”

“I had my reasons.”

“We all do. Mine involved a rocket pack and a Saint Bernard named Eloise.”

Bridger chuckled despite himself. But Farina’s grin didn’t reach his eyes.

“The world doesn’t stop spinning when we jump ship,” Farina said, his voice dropping like an anchor. “It just keeps turning without us. And if we come back… we better know who we are when we do. Or we end up owned by the very rules we walked away from.”

Bridger glanced down at his sleeves. The stripes there. The UEO insignia. How long had it been since he wore them and felt anything but obligation? They felt tight now. Like armor put on out of habit, not purpose.

“You think I let myself be tamed?” he asked, quieter than he meant to.

Farina didn’t answer right away. He just let the question hang, like salt in thick air.

“I think,” Farina said at last, “you miss being wild.”

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was full of something that scraped at Bridger’s ribs from the inside. A memory of wind, maybe. Or a dog barking down a beach where no one ever walked in boots.

Then the moment passed.

“Well,” Farina said, slapping the side of the sled, “I’m off to trade bananas for solar panels with a guy who thinks he’s Nikola Tesla reincarnated. Smells like pickles. Terrifying intellect.”

Bridger managed a tight smile. “Stay safe.”

Farina gave him a look—a real one, the kind that says you’ve always been my friend, even when I didn’t like you .

“The sea’s always watching, Nathan,” Farina said. “And sometimes… so are the wrong people.”

A chill scraped up Bridger’s spine, subtle as the change in current before a storm. Farina clapped him on the shoulder like a farewell, not a warning.

“Tell Lucas that if he ever gets tired of being a prodigy, I’ve got a friend in the Azores who raises kelp and teaches guitar. Not bad with metaphysics either.”

Bridger laughed. It wasn’t forced. But it faded fast.

Farina climbed into the shuttle without fanfare. Vern swung up into the seat beside him, already nibbling at a harmonica someone had tossed into the trade pile. The hatch hissed closed behind them.

Above, the WSKR drone flickered again—brief, almost lazy. Just as the shuttle detached and slid out into the water like a dream in reverse, a blip pinged at the edge of the system’s awareness. Ortiz noticed it. Furrowed his brow.

“Huh. That’s odd. Probably just distortion from Farina’s patch job. It’s gone now.”

Nobody on the bridge looked twice.

Except Bridger. He watched the place where the shuttle had gone, stared into the dark too long for comfort.

No such thing as just sensor distortion , he thought. 

He didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t need to.

ACT FOUR

The ship was quiet. Not silent— seaQuest never was—but quiet in the way a house settles after the party’s over. Voices softened to murmurs. Footsteps took on a deliberate, unhurried rhythm. Monitors pulsed with low light, a pulse like breath—like the heartbeat of something large and alive, resting beneath the weight of calm seas.

Bridger walked the corridor alone, uniform pressed, posture straight. Too straight. His gait—normally fluid, practiced from years at sea—stuttered now and then, as if his thoughts dragged at the edges of each step.

He nodded at a passing ensign, returned a salute from a comms officer. Familiar faces, capable hands. The ship was running smooth. The mission was over.

But something wasn’t sitting right.

They’d returned intact. Nobody dead, nobody bleeding. Farina was gone, off into the blue with his ridiculous shirts and that chipped grin—and Bridger should have felt a sense of closure. Should have. He didn’t.

A soft chime sounded overhead. WSKR 3 docked in its cradle, a whisper of metal on metal. The drone reported no anomalies. No movement outside sonar range. But Bridger knew better. The ocean never stayed quiet for long.

He turned a corner, hand brushing the edge of a bulkhead—familiar contact with the steel. The ship’s skin. Steady. Cool. Real.

The hatch to Lucas’s lab hissed open, and warmth greeted him: the warm scent of warmed circuit boards, the hum of open panels, the faint static smell of solder. Lucas was bent over a tangled array of components on the far bench, hair even messier than usual, sleeves pushed up.

Bridger stepped in and immediately felt the shift—Lucas didn’t look up, but his voice greeted him with that trademark blend of irreverence and instinct.

“Checking up on me, or just bored of being responsible?”

Bridger’s mouth quirked. “Little of both. What are you doing to that poor power cell?”

Lucas held up a jagged bit of metal with wires sprouting in all directions. “Making it sing jazz, obviously.”

They shared a chuckle—easy, familiar. But it didn’t last long. The undercurrent returned. The things unsaid.

Lucas glanced up from his work, hands still busy. “I liked Farina. He was kind of cool… for a pirate. Sort of like if Han Solo wore Hawaiian shirts and had a potato chip addiction.”

Bridger snorted. “I seem to remember you trying to hide behind me when he showed up.”

“That’s a tactic, not cowardice.”

A pause. Then, quieter: “He said something to you before he left. About being tamed.”

Bridger didn’t answer right away. His gaze drifted to the far wall, to the rounded observation glass framing the moon pool below.

A whistle echoed up from the water—short, sharp, familiar.

Darwin surfaced with a rush of bubbles and that inevitable sparkle in his eyes. Bridger hadn’t heard him come in. Of course he hadn’t. Darwin always knew when to show up.

“You don’t splash anymore,” the dolphin said with a click and a chirp.

The words were simple, but they hit like a depth charge. Bridger smiled despite the weight in his chest.

“I’ve been busy.”

Darwin swam a tight circle and flipped his tail just enough to splash a thin arc of water across the platform. Mischievous. Expectant.

“Excuse. No splash. No fun. You sad.”

Bridger crouched at the edge of the moon pool, one hand resting on the warm steel. “I’m not sad, Darwin. Just… distracted.”

Darwin’s gaze held his—impossibly intelligent, heartbreakingly earnest.

“Swim soon. You promise.”

Bridger hesitated. Then nodded.

“I promise.”

The dolphin dove again, disappearing in a spray of light and movement.

Above, Lucas had stilled. One arm rested against the workbench, his expression unreadable. Then, softly:

“You know, I used to think Darwin followed you around because you gave him snacks or something.”

Bridger tilted his head. “And now?”

Lucas didn’t look away. “I think he knew.”

A beat.

“Knew what?”

Lucas set the tool in his hand down gently. “That you were alone. That you needed him.”

Bridger didn’t respond. Couldn’t. The silence said enough.

Lucas’s voice dropped lower, gentler. “About that ‘tamed’ thing? I don’t think you’re tamed, Bridger. I think you’re… trusted. That kind of responsibility—it’s not chains. It’s something people choose to carry.”

He looked down, brushing a wire aside, almost like it embarrassed him to say it.

“And some of us are really glad you do.”

Bridger blinked. The boy had grown into something else entirely, hadn’t he? Not the prodigy with a chip on his shoulder. Not the punk hacker with something to prove. This—this was something different. Loyalty, raw and real. An anchor.

He finally spoke, voice low.

“Farina and I… we both walked away from the world. But maybe I came back because I realized it wasn’t done with me. Or maybe because you all weren’t.”

There was short pause. Nothing more than the single beat of a heart.

“That’s not the same as being tamed. But it sure isn’t wild either.”

Lucas grinned. “Well, if you ever do decide to go rogue, at least let me grab my laptop first.”

Bridger laughed—this time, it reached his eyes.

A splash erupted beside them. Darwin popped up again, clicking insistently.

“Swim now!”

Bridger gave an exaggerated sigh, peeling off his uniform jacket and rolling his sleeves. “All right, all right.”

Lucas leaned back, arms folded. “You going in with the uniform on, or should I log this as a ‘scientific emergency swim’?”

Bridger shot him a look and dove clean into the moon pool, slicing through the water with the ease of someone who had spent more of his life beneath the surface than above it.

Darwin chirped and spun beside him, triumphant.

For a moment, there was nothing but the water. Nothing but laughter and light and bubbles. A breath of peace.

But not for long.

Far away, the ocean rolled over a silent ridge. Farina’s vessel floated, engines cold. A signal blinked—static. Broken. Intermittent.

Just beyond the ridge, cloaked in shadows, another ship waited. Watching. Power thrumming low, like a held breath.

Then, the screen flickered black.

The seaQuest breathed like a sleeping leviathan, soft lights glowing along her consoles, humming with the low, steady rhythms of a ship returned to life. Systems that had groaned under stress now purred in tandem. The bridge wasn’t silent—far from it. Status reports murmured through the air like background music, punctuated by the whirring spin of holographic displays. The evening shift had settled in, and for the first time in what felt like days, the crew allowed themselves to exhale.

Miguel Ortiz leaned back in his chair with a quiet stretch, spine popping with the satisfying protest of a man who’d been hunched over sonar for too many hours straight. He adjusted the collar of his uniform and tapped a rhythmic pattern into the console, summoning telemetry from the network of WSKRs fanned across their patrol zone.

“Alright, boys,” he murmured, a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth, “let’s see what’s hiding out there in the big blue…”

WSKR-1 to -3 returned clean readings—topography, current vectors, thermal shears. Routine. Comforting. But WSKR-4…

His brow furrowed.

From behind him, a voice rasped through the ambient calm like gravel across steel plating.

“I swear to you,” said Crocker, leaning his weight onto the edge of Ortiz’s station, “if I’d had to share space with one more ensign, I was gonna start issuing toothbrush inspections.”

Ortiz didn’t turn. “You survived,” he said dryly.

“Barely,” Crocker muttered, sipping from a stained coffee mug that had likely survived every refit since the Clinton administration. “Kid, I shared a wall with O’Neill and his Underwater New Age Dolphin Mix . You know what it’s like waking up to sonar pings and didgeridoos playing like it’s freakin’ Atlantis Radio Hour?”

Ortiz snorted. “That explains the twitch and the sudden nosebleeds.”

A chuckle rose from the ops pit—just enough to remind them they were alive. That peace, fragile though it was, could be real.

Ortiz returned to his screen. The smile faded. “Hmm…”

Crocker caught the shift in tone. “Uh-oh. That’s not a sound I like from you.”

Ortiz leaned closer. The red flicker was subtle, barely dancing along the edge of WSKR-4’s return. A ping had been sent to the ocean shelf just beyond Farina’s former hideout. It should’ve bounced back like sonar always did in that region—clean, distinct, almost musical.

It didn’t.

No echo. No bounce. Just silence.

Ortiz frowned and adjusted the scan range by microseconds, combing through the data in finer threads. Still nothing that made sense.

“Reflections should be coming off that coastal shelf,” he murmured. “Instead, it’s like... it’s being swallowed. Or smeared.”

Across the bridge, O’Neill’s head turned.

HIs curious squint settled into his eyes as he pushed up from his terminal. “You seeing that too?” he asked, sauntering over with the loping, unpredictable energy of someone who’d once tried to wire a toaster to his VR rig because science . “Tell me you’re not chasing sea ghosts again.”

Ortiz half-laughed. “Just tell me I’m not crazy.”

O’Neill tapped into the telemetry feed without waiting for permission. Fingers danced across the screen, and a new overlay formed—a layered spectral analysis, tuned low enough to detect changes in pressure from a whale sneeze.

Then… there it was. Faint. Barely distinguishable from ambient static. A pulse. Like a heartbeat pressed beneath layers of white noise.

Ping. Pause.

No return.

“Someone’s talking,” O’Neill said, eyes narrowing. “Tightband transmission. Folded under the ambient. You’d miss it if you blinked.”

Ortiz muttered, “Signal that faint… you’d only see it if you were looking.” He glanced at the readings again. “I wasn’t looking.”

Crocker’s easy posture stiffened. The smile dropped off his face like a weight. “Which means someone out there really doesn’t want to be seen.”

Ortiz tapped a command into the console, marking the coordinates and encrypting the log with a note: Anomaly – Passive Signal Layer Detected. Monitor Closely.

“We raising an alert?” O’Neill asked, but his tone already knew the answer.

Crocker shook his head. “Not yet. Not until we know what kind of hornet’s nest we’d be poking. Ghosts don’t kill you. Alarms might.”

Ortiz nodded, slow and measured. “Already tagged. I’ll babysit it.”

“Any other ship would’ve missed it,” O’Neill said softly, with just enough wonder in his voice to remind them of seaQuest’s teeth beneath her elegance.

Ortiz didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. The unspoken truth settled across his shoulders like cold seawater.

That was the point.

Whatever was out there… meant to be invisible. And something about that presence had been watching them long before they noticed.

The bridge went quiet. No one said it, but the laughter from earlier felt far away now.

O’Neill toggled off his external audio feed and leaned in close. His voice was barely above a whisper.

“You think it’s pirates?”

Ortiz stared at the flicker, still lingering like a ghost on the screen.

“…Or worse.”

The bridge thrummed with controlled energy, that fragile quiet born from a crew balancing professionalism with unease. Every creak of metal and ripple of sonar felt louder in the hush that followed the last discovery. Ortiz leaned into his screen again, fingers dancing along the sensor array with muscle memory and growing tension. Beside him, Crocker stood just off his hip, arms folded, eyes narrowed at nothing in particular.

Then O'Neill’s console flared.

Not a scream, not an alarm—just a flicker. A pulse. Something quick and ugly.

O'Neill’s brows snapped together. His fingers flew across the display, isolating waveforms, dissecting noise from signal. Then he froze, jaw tightening.

“Ortiz—check the relay logs again. I’ve got a burst transmission. Two of them. Just now.”

Ortiz slid over without a word, scanning the timecode. “That’s…” His voice dropped. “That’s not us.”

O'Neill magnified the digital spike. What they were looking at wasn’t interference. It was deliberate . Compact, precise, and wrapped in layers of encryption.

“Tactical,” he said flatly. “Tightbeam, encrypted. It’s a raider net. They’re mobilizing.”

Crocker gave a low whistle that cut through the tension like a blade. “Well, ain’t that just a bouquet of bad news…”

The bridge door hissed open and Ford stepped in, pulled by the change in air pressure—the kind only trouble made.

“What’ve we got?” he asked, already halfway to O'Neill’s station.

O'Neill didn’t look up. “Stealth comms just spiked. Based on packet density and frequency—it’s a raid coordination. They’re going for Farina.”

Ortiz added grimly, “They must’ve been watching the whole time. Probably waited for us to leave.”

“Because we were there,” Ford murmured, anger tightening in his shoulders. “They knew something was worth protecting if seaQuest showed up to trade for it.”

No one said anything, but the implication settled thick across the room. They’d marked Farina by their very presence.

Ford didn’t let it sit long. He stepped to the comm station and keyed in the command.

“Bridge to Captain Bridger. Sir, we’ve got a situation.”

A few decks away, Bridger was crouched beside Darwin in the corridor’s alcove, Lucas smiling as the dolphin nudged the captain’s shoulder like a giddy child wanting a swim. Bridger had just opened his mouth to agree when his commlink chirped.

He listened. His spine straightened. The warmth dropped from his face like a curtain.

“I’m on my way.”

The bridge doors slid open and Bridger walked in—not fast, but with intent, the weight of command settling on his shoulders like an old cloak. The tension, already taut, realigned itself around him.

“Status.”

Ford didn’t hesitate. “Pirate chatter, sir. Burst encryption. Looks like Farina’s location just lit up like a target.”

Bridger nodded once. His jaw was set. “Bring us about. Full flank. Sound general quarters.”

The words hadn’t even finished leaving his mouth before the bridge moved. The lighting shifted to red, soft but ominous. Alarms pinged. Somewhere behind them, the heartbeat of the engines deepened as the helm shifted course.

Crocker snapped upright. “Should I prep a team?”

“Do it,” Bridger said. “Get the shuttle loaded. We’ll go in quiet—but fast.”

Ortiz’s voice cut through the thickening air, sharper now.

“We’ve got visual—Farina’s base is under attack.”

Every screen locked onto the incoming feed. WSKR-4’s edge-captured footage trembled slightly with movement, but the image was clear enough: dark shapes flitting like shadows across a concrete outpost, flashes of heat blooms and muzzle bursts. The defensive cannons glowed hot and desperate.

O’Neill, voice just above a whisper: “Sir… he’s not going to hold out long.”

Bridger stepped forward until he stood just behind Ortiz’s console. He didn’t speak right away. He just watched, eyes narrowed at the screen, shoulders squared like a man staring down a storm.

Around him, the crew moved with silent, determined precision. They didn’t need orders to know what this was.

Bridger finally said, quiet but certain: “We gave him that target.”

Then, as the camera flared with another explosion in the distance, he added, “We’re not leaving him to face it alone.”

The sound of thunder was wrong—too sharp, too regular, too angry. It wasn’t weather. It was war.

Farina pressed his back to the cold, blistered bulkhead and exhaled through gritted teeth. His breath came shallow, edged with pain. Blood had dried in a tacky line down one side of his face, crusted near the corner of his eye. His right leg dragged with each step now, every muscle screaming in protest, but there was no time for pain. Not yet.

He adjusted the rigged oxygen tank in his grip, fingers tight on the jury-rigged detonator he’d slapped together from copper wire and a thermal igniter. Behind him, faint cries echoed through the corridors—one of the traps had gone off. Maybe the one near the hydroponics. He didn’t flinch.

He ducked around a rusting support pipe, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist, and shoved a stolen raider comm-unit into his ear. Static. Then a clipped voice—“Team Delta, east flank, corridor D-3, sweep for fallback—”

Farina smirked. “Poor choice.”

He yanked a scorched datapad from a wall recess and keyed in a manual override. A moment later, seawater howled through the D-3 corridor vents, flash-flooding the passage. The raider comm barked static and a short, cut-off scream. Then silence.

His grin cracked into something feral. “Didn’t come this far to get picked off by backwater thugs.”

He staggered forward, the faint scent of rust and coolant thick in his nostrils. His hideaway—once a sanctuary cobbled from a decommissioned oil rig and old black-market tech—was now a siege point. Twisted metal lay in pools of smoke. Hall lights flickered like failing stars. Every room had become a battleground. Every step he took was bought with ingenuity, luck, and a willingness to turn anything— anything —into a weapon.

In the launch bay of seaQuest , the shuttle thrummed like a heart under pressure. Steam hissed in the cold air as Hitchcock finished the final calibration on the flight controls. Her fingers moved fast but steady. There wasn’t time for second-guessing.

Crocker stepped into the shuttle’s low interior, his silhouette framed in the amber bay lights. He wore half-armor, battered and old, but reliable. A sidearm at his hip. A recon scanner slung over one shoulder. His eyes met hers for a breath.

“We’re running dark,” she said. “Drop speed on approach. They’ve got eyes now.”

Crocker nodded as he strapped in. “Just get us to the door. We’ll take care of the rest.”

Two other crewmen filed in behind him—an engineer with a portable weld-torch pack, and a medic with a case too small for the weight it carried. No one spoke after that. They didn’t need to.

The hatch sealed with a final clunk . And then the shuttle slipped into the black, falling away from the hull like a shadow unmoored.

Bridger stood at the heart of the bridge, hands behind his back, the weight of command etched into the lines around his eyes. No theatrics. No shouting. Just focus.

On the left, Lucas hunched over a console, fingers flying as he worked with O’Neill to decrypt the latest pirate coordination bursts. Ortiz rerouted sonar feeds in tight circles, carefully tracking the hostile vessels without sending a ping. Every movement was calculated, every breath held.

Lucas muttered, almost too quiet to hear, “Come on, old man... don’t get dead now.”

Farina’s foot caught the edge of a broken access panel and he almost went down. His shoulder slammed into the wall. He shoved himself upright with a grunt and stumbled through the threshold of the salvage chamber—the last stronghold of his little kingdom.

The room was a junkyard’s shrine: pressure suits hanging from chains like silent sentries, defunct droids half-buried in crates, old welding masks piled in corners like discarded skulls. A maintenance console flickered faintly at the far end, casting a pale wash of green light over the mess.

He shoved a barrel aside with a grunt, jammed a high-pressure regulator into a coolant line, and twisted the valve with both hands until it hissed open. The liquid pooled fast—high-salinity waste fluid, thick enough to scald and blind. A nice little welcome mat.

He flipped the raider comm on again and spoke, voice dry as ash. “If you come through that door, bring marshmallows.”

They didn’t answer.

The door exploded inward a heartbeat later, and Farina triggered the trap. A shriek tore through the air as the corrosive spray engulfed the first raider. He dropped, writhing and howling.

“You picked the wrong washed-up smuggler, boys!” Farina shouted.

But even he could hear the strain in his voice now. His legs were trembling. The wound in his side had started bleeding again. Two more raiders burst from a maintenance duct near the ceiling and opened fire.

The world tilted.

Farina dove behind a crate, felt the sting as a ricochet tore through his thigh. He hit the ground hard, the pain white-hot and sudden. His pulse slammed against his ears.

He crawled, dragging himself behind the console, teeth clenched so tight they ached. The console blinked quietly, almost mocking.

“Alright, Nathan…” he murmured, barely able to hear himself. “Time to see if that Boy Scout routine of yours actually pays off…”

The shuttle was nearly there, gliding just below the sonar range of the rig. Above them, the old oil platform loomed like a skeleton temple, struts like ribs reaching into the murky sea. Its lower decks flickered with bursts of heat signature—gunfire. Death.

“Five seconds to breach,” Hitchcock said. “Still fighting inside. Thermal shows three hostiles in the salvage bay.”

Crocker rose, rifle in hand. His voice was gravel.

“Let’s go earn our pensions.”

The shuttle surged up, nose breaching the lower access hatch. The breaching charge fired—precise, surgical.

The door blasted inward.

The first thing Farina saw was light —white-hot and blinding. He flinched, tried to raise his weapon, but his hand was slick with blood and refused to close properly. He could only slump back, slumped against the console, barely breathing.

Then the shadows came—broad-shouldered and moving fast, weapons drawn.

Crocker’s voice cut through the haze.

“Farina! Don’t you die on me, you ornery son of a—”

Farina blinked, coughed, and managed to bare his teeth in something like a grin.

“Took you long enough…”

And then the black took him.

Salt and smoke hung in the air like ghosts—tangible and bitter. The sea had crept back in through broken seams in Farina’s base, whispering through twisted corridors where the firefight had ended hours ago. Still, every footfall echoed with tension, like the walls hadn’t yet decided if the battle was over.

Commander Jonathan Ford moved with the measured pace of a man trained to listen to walls. Every sound mattered. Every silence more so.

“Check that junction,” he said, voice low but crisp, as he motioned down a corridor that had partially collapsed. Steel piping jutted like broken ribs from its frame. “If anyone’s holed up, they’ll be funneled through there.”

Krieg nodded, hefting a sidearm with one hand and a portable scanner in the other. His eyes, sharper than usual, flicked to the shadows. The jokes were gone. In their place, the steady alertness of a man who knew what unfinished business smelled like.

“And if I find a nest of raiders?” Krieg asked over his shoulder.

Ford didn’t hesitate. “Remind them who owns this ocean.”

Crocker and a pair of marines swept past them at a different junction, fanning into what used to be a maintenance wing. Their helmets were clipped to their belts—not out of cockiness, but to hear better. These were soldiers trained for silence. For shadows. They didn’t bark orders; they moved like current—fast and unseen until it was too late.

Back in what passed for a command center, Farina stood with one hand braced against a bulkhead, bandaged shoulder wrapped tight. Sweat matted his curls to his brow, and though his mouth had the set of someone trying not to wince, he didn’t sit. Didn’t even lean.

“This is what UEO protection looks like?” he muttered, watching a flickering monitor stream the tail-end of a raider’s retreat. “Little late, but effective.”

Ford spared him a glance. “You’re lucky Bridger likes you.”

Farina’s grin was dry. “No. I’m lucky Bridger’s the kind of man who doesn’t give up on people. Even idiots.”

O’Neill’s fingers danced across his console, pulling apart encrypted signals like thread from old rope. “Heat blooms northeast. They’re moving in clusters—but some of the emissions aren’t from anything pirate-built.”

Ortiz grunted. “Masking tech. Not good enough to fool us, but slick for black market. Someone taught them how to hide.”

On screen, the ocean was a pale-green overlay of sonar returns, and on that map, predators moved like ink dropped into still water. But seaQuest moved faster.

At Hitchcock’s command, a launch squad shot from the lower bay in two sleek arrowhead formations, silent as reef sharks. One pod dropped low to intercept a boarding attempt on a drifting cargo platform. As the pirate skiff locked onto its prey, a sonic burst slammed through the water. The raider’s stabilizers collapsed with a hydraulic shriek. Its crew didn’t even have time to surface.

Elsewhere, a garbled distress beacon flared from an underwater commune—already under attack. A WSKR drone hit full thrust, projected the massive silhouette of seaQuest overhead like the face of a wrathful god, and deployed a non-lethal pulse that fried targeting systems and scrambled nav compasses.

Within an hour, the shape of the region had changed. Where raiders had crept and scattered, seaQuest ’s shadow fell. And wherever her name passed, it passed with weight.

Crocker, now personally embedded with a secondary response team, leaned from the open hatch of a mid-range sub-launch. Non-lethal suppression fire crackled into the dark. His grin was lopsided and mean.

“Y’all picked the wrong day to play pirate,” he said. “We’re the storm now.”

The last skiff made a desperate run—an old model, patched and bleeding coolant as it fled across sonar grids. Bridger watched without blinking.

“Drop a beacon in front of it,” he ordered. “Sonic. Cut their comms and give every sonar operator in thirty clicks a look at their shame.”

Ortiz executed without needing to ask twice.

The beacon dropped like a guillotine. It lit the water in a cascade of rippling energy—too powerful to miss, too precise to be luck. The skiff’s engines sputtered, then shut down entirely.

“Target their engines,” Bridger said quietly. “Nothing lethal.”

Ortiz tapped once. The shot fired silent and sure. In the next heartbeat, the skiff listed in the water, dark and drifting.

Ford stepped beside him. “They came here thinking we’d gone soft.”

Bridger nodded once, slow and grim. “We showed them otherwise.”

The rest of the pirate fleet didn’t regroup. They scattered—some into deep water, some into neutral zones where the UEO had no reach, but all with the same message echoing in their ears.

You do not trifle in seaQuest’s waters.

Bridger turned away from the screen. His face held no triumph. Just the weary set of someone who knew this wasn’t over. That it never really was.

Let them run , he thought. Let them remember .

Ortiz’s voice cut the hush like a drawn blade. “Captain… some of those signals? They weren’t just raider bands. There was a carrier-ping in there. Encrypted. Not one of theirs.”

Bridger’s eyes didn’t move from the viewport.

“Save the telemetry. Log it with Command.”

O’Neill glanced up from his station, fingers hovering over the console. “You think this was more than just pirates?”

Bridger finally spoke. His voice was low. Tired. Certain.

“I think someone wanted us distracted. And they found the one man who’d guarantee we’d come running.”

The medbay still smelled faintly of sterilizers and singed metal. Not smoke, exactly, but the memory of it. The memory of alarms and shouting and boots thundering down decks that now sat hushed and flickering under low emergency lights.

Farina lay propped against a cot's angled frame, his left arm immobilized in a nest of gauze and biofoam. The IV line snaked from the crook of his elbow, feeding him something clear and cool. His orangutan—greasy, soot-smeared, and visibly annoyed at the enforced stillness—had curled up beside him like a living weighted blanket, twitching occasionally in its sleep.

The door hissed open, quiet and unimposing, and Ben Krieg stepped through.

He looked like hell—bruised cheekbone, torn cuff, the stubborn set of someone who hadn’t quite processed that the crisis was over. His trademark swagger had been left somewhere between the collapsed corridor on C-Deck and whatever argument he’d lost to an ensign in sickbay. Now he walked like a man unsure of his purpose here—just that he’d been pulled by a gravity he couldn’t name.

Farina’s eyes tracked him as he entered. “Figured I owed you a thank-you,” he murmured.

Krieg stopped at the foot of the cot, one brow arching in mock surprise. “Thought that’s what the fruit basket was for.”

Farina gave a lopsided grin. “Fruit’s for the crew. This...” His good hand reached under the cot. “This is for you.”

What he retrieved looked like it had been through three wars and a garbage compactor. A sealed plastic pouch, sun-bleached and cracked at the corners, the kind used by survivalists or smugglers trying to keep something dry and untraceable. With a quiet solemnity, he passed it over.

Krieg accepted it warily, brows furrowed. He opened the pouch, peeled back the waterproof sleeve.

Then he stopped breathing.

Inside was a photograph. Timeworn. Edges curling. The surface bubbled from old water damage. But the image was intact enough.

Katie Hitchcock in a simple, elegant dress—not the kind officers wore, but the kind you said I do in, just once in your life. Next to her stood Krieg himself, younger by years, less weathered by sea and politics, caught mid-laugh, still half in disbelief the moment was real. And between them—smiling faintly, hands holding a velvet box—stood Robert Bridger.

He looked impossibly alive. Uniform crisp. Presence unmistakable. The steady, quiet core of the photograph.

The room faded around Krieg. His ears buzzed like pressure had dropped out of the world.

“…This is from the wedding,” he said finally, his voice rough.

Farina nodded. “Didn’t know it was your wedding until today.”

Krieg sat, not bothering with ceremony. Just dropped to the cot beside Farina, eyes fixed on the ghost captured in his hands.

“This photo vanished years ago,” he murmured. “Storm off New Brisbane. We lost half the damn luggage bay. I figured it was gone. Just a stupid picture. But we…” He trailed off.

Farina let the silence stretch. Then, softly: “Found it years back. I was running freelance ops. No flag. Just jobs that didn’t want to exist on paper. One was a blacksite evac—Macronesian territory, but deeper than deep state. Whole facility was off-books. Ghosts all the way down.”

Krieg’s jaw clenched. He didn’t look away from the photo.

Farina continued, voice careful. “We exfiltrated three targets. Quiet. No records. One of them dropped that photo in the dust and blood during triage. I kept it.”

Krieg swallowed hard. “And you saw him ?”

Farina nodded. “Didn’t know who he was then. No names. No ranks. But the guy in that picture?” He nodded at the man between bride and groom. “Yeah. He was one of them. Didn’t say much. But the other two listened to him. Hell, I listened to him. He gave orders like they weren’t up for debate.”

Krieg laughed once. Sharp. Humorless. “That tracks.”

He tilted the photo, caught the glint of the light off the water stains. It shimmered like it might dissolve.

“He was the best man at our wedding,” Krieg said quietly. “Katie asked him. I didn’t even think twice. Then he was just... gone . No accident. No wreckage. Just erased.”

He looked up. His face had gone still, empty in the way a person’s could only be when every emotion was fighting for purchase.

“Nathan kept asking questions. Pushed too hard, too long. UEO brushed him off. Eventually he stopped asking. Said the silence was louder than the answers.”

Farina leaned back, exhaling slow. “Then someone wanted him gone. And had the power to make sure he stayed that way.”

Krieg didn’t answer. He stared at the photo like it might blink back.

Finally, with hands that had begun to tremble, he slid the picture back into its sleeve. Tucked it inside his jacket like something sacred.

“You going to tell his old man?” Farina asked. “If I were Nathan…”

He trailed off. 

Krieg didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice had flattened, grown hard at the edges. “I don’t know. What if it’s a mistake? What if it’s not?”

He stood slowly. No rush. No drama.

“But this…” he patted his chest once, over the hidden photo, “this doesn’t belong in Navy hands.”

Farina nodded once. There was nothing more to say.

“If you go digging into this,” he said, not as a warning but as a witness, “you won’t be able to stop.”

Krieg turned toward the door. “Then I dig alone.”

The mess was nearly silent now. The overhead lights had dimmed, casting the room in a soft amber glow, like sunlight filtered through deep water. The late-shift crowd had long since scattered—off to duty, off to sleep, off to find comfort in routines that hadn’t been cracked open by memory and ghosts.

Ben Krieg sat alone near the back wall, one chair tilted on two legs, boots braced against the floor like he was keeping time with an invisible beat. The table before him bore a tray untouched: half a sandwich drying at the corners, coffee long gone cold, its surface filmed over.

In one hand, he idly rolled an orange across his knuckles. Back. Forth. Back again. A simple, tactile motion. The kind people used when the rest of their body wanted to run.

His gaze wasn’t on the food. Or the orange.

It was on the inside of his jacket.

On the pocket.

On the weight of the photograph folded within.

A snapshot from another life. A man long presumed lost. Not just presumed— buried . Grieved. And now? Now the world was quietly tilting underfoot.

“You’re out there,” he murmured, not to the room but to the memory. “I know it now.”

The words weren’t meant to be heard. But they hung there just the same—spoken into a silence too deep to swallow them.

Movement at the entrance broke the moment.

Krieg glanced up as two figures stepped into the mess, voices low, steps unhurried. Bridger and Westphalen. Their rhythm wasn’t the flirtation of strangers, nor the comfortable affection of lovers. It was something quieter. Older. A slow-burning gravity that had drawn them together through distance and war and grief, and hadn’t let go.

Kristin gave Nathan a look—a surgical blend of bemusement and fond exasperation—and Nathan returned it with a faint smile, the kind only she ever seemed to get from him.

They weren’t here for Krieg. They didn’t even see him at first.

But he saw them .

And for a second, something broke loose in him. A thread of feeling, old and soft and raw at the edges. He smiled—almost. Then it faded.

“He’d have been okay with this,” he said under his breath, watching Bridger. “I think.”

A pause. Then he chuckled once, quiet and rough.

“Probably would’ve cracked a joke and slipped her a bottle of scotch.”

In his mind’s eye, Robert Bridger sat across the table with that crooked grin, eyes gleaming, leaning in to say something ridiculous at exactly the wrong moment. The kind of chaos only Bobby could pull off.

But the smile didn’t last.

If Bobby was okay with this… That meant he knew . That meant he might still be out there too. Krieg blinked hard, then gently set the orange down on the tray. The chair legs thudded softly as they hit the deck. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, eyes distant.

The hum of the ship filled the silence. Constant. Familiar. But louder now, somehow. Like the pressure had shifted and the sea itself was waiting.

His hand drifted to his jacket pocket, resting there.

Do I tell him? Do I tell anyone? Lucas? Ortiz? 

He shook his head, just once. No. Not yet. This needs to stay buried. Until I know for sure.

He took one last sip of cold, bitter coffee, as if it might anchor him. Then he stood. Left the tray. Left the orange. Left the half-eaten sandwich that had nothing to offer.

He walked out without a sound, swallowed by the corridor, and the silence came rushing back.

Bridger stood at the command rail, the bridge mostly dark around him, save for the muted glow of instruments and steady blink of status lights. Kristin had long since gone to her quarters. The watch crew moved softly, respectfully—aware of the captain’s presence but not intruding.

Bridger’s fingers tapped idly along the edge of the rail. His eyes weren’t on the monitors.

They were looking aft.

Somewhere down that corridor, Ben Krieg had just disappeared into shadow.

Nathan didn’t know why. Didn’t know what . But something was off . Like the sea just before a storm. That hush. That pull . “What are you not telling me, Ben…” he murmured, almost inaudible.

He stood still a moment longer. Then straightened, turned back to the main screen.