Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ryley Robinson has never considered himself a particularly brave or intelligent person.

Sure, he has his good traits. He did well enough in school to be assigned to training as an engineer, and he’s not bad at it. It’s not what he really wanted, but most people on Alterra worlds don’t live out their childhood dreams - that would be impractical. You get assigned on aptitude, not passion. So he trained as an engineer, and he did well enough at that to graduate, and well enough to get a job.

Non-essential systems maintenance chief. In practice, he’s a couple steps above a janitor. But that’s fine. He has a job, and he’s good at it, and he doesn’t have to talk to people much (which is ideal because he’s no good at that). He’s a dab hand with a repair tool, and he can ‘have a chat’ with Ozzy from the cafeteria while he fixes the vending machines - in reality this constitutes Ozzy talking at him with Ryley nodding every so often, which is honestly nice - and occasionally sneak into the PRAWN bay on some technical pretext, admire those beautiful machines and daydream.

He’s good at his job. He’s good with his routine. He wasn’t, isn’t, prepared for this.

“Attention!” the automated loudspeaker shrieks. “Hull failure imminent. All personnel abandon ship!”
The noise of overlapping sirens is deafening, and Ryley clamps one hand over his ear and grabs his repair tool with the other, because he’s still an engineer dammit and if the ship’s damaged it’s his job to fix it. The hallways are packed with screaming, terrified people from all decks - even command, nice to know we’re all equal in an emergency. He hasn’t been assigned a lifepod. No one has. They never bothered with it at the onboarding meeting.

On the vidscreens in the main leisure deck he sees chaos. Vanity installations, designed to give the illusion of windows - they’re supposed to show the serene stars outside. Now half of them are blanked out and the other half show them pitching wildly towards a massive blue emptiness. Ryley’s no expert on slingshot manoeuvres, but he’s fairly sure you’re not supposed to get so close to a planet when you do one.
It finally hits him what his mind’s been refusing to process - this isn’t a maintenance issue, and it’s not a drill. The ship is crashing. They are going down and if he doesn’t get to a lifepod he’s going to die.

Now he sprints madly to the outer decks where he knows the lifepod hatches are - he checked them this morning, all green for go. Not so non-essential now, are they, he thinks mildly hysterically. They’re already half occupied. He throws himself into the first one he sees that isn’t full, watches others run past him to the next and the next. There’s two seats in the lifepod, so he holds the hatch open and waves wildly, but suddenly the ship heaves and he falls backward.

They’ll hit atmosphere soon. Thankfully he’s already wearing his AEP suit - makes a habit of it, because the lining is smooth and doesn’t itch like standard issue uniforms.

Sick to his stomach and feeling like a coward, he runs for the left seat. Straps himself in. Hesitates for a few long moments, but then the ship pitches again and metal screeches horribly, and he punches the launch button.

“Launching in three, two, one-“

The Aurora screams as it tumbles into the upper atmosphere, a wild and awful sound of tearing plasteel and buckling supports. The lifepod finally jettisons, more of the ship coming into view through the tiny upper hatch as it throws itself free of the doomed ship. He’s left it late, he’s lucky to be alive -

There’s a loose panel flying off one of the boards and it’s heading straight for him.

His last thought before impact is the sheer irony that he might survive the crash only to be taken out by shoddy Alterra design, and then the plate slams into his skull and everything goes black.

Chapter Text

When he wakes up, he’s in hell.

At least, that’s what he first thinks. His head hurts and his vision is spotty and all he can see is fire blazing up all around him. The old religious types were right, he thinks, God is real and he hates me specifically. Then his vision clears and he realises it’s the lifepod burning. The broken panel must have sparked something off.

Flailing in his seat, he hits the restraint release. Hits it again, then punches it with all his might, and that finally frees him to stumble forward. At least the fire extinguisher is intact, and the roar of the spray when he pulls the trigger drowns out the awful ringing in his own ears. He’s shaking uncontrollably, a silent scream caught in his throat. He grips the extinguisher and keeps spraying until long after the fire’s gone out, running the whole thing dry, and can’t even release it when it starts to hiss emptily.

Finally his hand spasms painfully and that snaps him out of it. He drops the extinguisher and slumps back into the lifepod seat, clutching his aching head. He’s alive. He’s alive, although god knows where he is and who else made it.

His PDA beeps urgently at him, making him groan at the pain the sound causes, and he opens it mostly just to shut it up. The screen blinks to life on a blank blue field instead of the friendly image gallery he has as his lock screen. “You have suffered minor head trauma,” it informs him in that robotic, vaguely-feminine voice Alterra uses for everything. (There are plenty of AI voice generators available that sound more human, more friendly, but why waste money and processing power?) “This is considered an optimal outcome.”

He doesn’t feel very optimal right now, and he would tell the PDA so, but his voice is sticking in his throat in the way that telegraphs a nonverbal episode. Nothing comes out of his mouth except a weak huff of air. He flips it off instead, on principle.

“This PDA has now rebooted in emergency mode with one directive: to keep you alive on an alien world,” it continues, uninterrupted by his rude gesture. “Please refer to the databank for detailed survival advice. Good luck.”

Swallowing down bile, he pages over to the databank tile. All his folders are gone. His notes, his memos, his dumb pictures of friends from back home. Wiped out. There’s two folders there instead, one labelled ‘Survival Package’ and one labelled ‘Blueprints’. There are other tabs too, for signals, logs, photos (in case he wants to document his demise in 4K camera detail), blueprints – he ignores those and opens the databank.

Reading the entries doesn’t make him feel any better. ‘Start Here’ informs him that his PDA will furnish him with timely survival advice (he doesn’t really want it, but there doesn’t seem to be a ‘no unsolicited messages’ setting) and that his personal files can be retrieved later. He skips over the survival checklist when he sees ‘WARNING’ in big capital letters and nearly moans in despair when he processes what it says. PDA damage, blueprint database corrupted. More than 80% of that vital information gone.

All he has left are a few blueprints and the completely useless technical entries. He has some water and nutrient blocks, which will last him a while if he rations them, but his secondary systems are totally shot and he dropped his repair tool at some point before he made it into the lifepod. No secondary systems means no radio to call for help, no lights, no nothing.

He’s numb by the time he scrolls mechanically to the Aurora Ship Status entry. When his brain automatically totals up the numbers he knows there are deaths. There must have been. Because the ship’s crammed – he knows that, he’s support staff and they’ve all been stuffing eight or more into six-person cabins – 157 total on a capacity of 150. But the Aurora doesn’t have lifepods for 150. It has 50 lifepods total, and each is two-berth, and that makes 100.

Even if all had gone perfectly, if the ship was destroyed, 57 people would have died. And it hasn’t. Ryley knows it hasn’t because he’s alone in his lifepod because he’s a coward and he hit the release without another occupant and maybe that’s one more person who would’ve lived who’s dead now and it’s all his fault

With a vicious effort he hauls himself out of that death spiral. Maybe the Aurora’s not destroyed. It’s hard to blow up a kilometer-length capital ship. Maybe everyone will be fine. The rescue teams will come in no time for the people who are too far out and everything will be fine.

He opens the survival checklist. 1: Administer first aid if required. Okay, it’s definitely required, and he can do that. He opens up the storage and pulls out the medkit, wraps a length of bandage around his head. It’s treated with… gunk (he has no idea what’s in it, he’s no doctor) that makes it thoroughly unpleasant to apply, but the gunk will help wounds heal, so he tolerates the icky sticky feeling in his hair. He’s not sure how bad the head injury is but it’s definitely bleeding, so bandages can’t hurt.

Inventory. He doesn’t have anything on him but the AEP suit, but that’ll protect him to a point. No helmet though, so hopefully the planet has a breathable atmosphere. He’s got two flares, two bottles of water, two nutrient blocks. He’s used the medkit, so cross that off the list. The inbuilt fabricator is working but the medkit synthesiser isn’t. Not much to survive with, but he has no choice now.

Survey the environment. God, he really doesn’t want to. The lifepod is dark and cramped but it’s safe, and he has no idea what’s out there. But the screens say the planet’s got breathable air, and if he stays in here he will eventually rot and die.

Swallowing down bile, he climbs the ladder. Little bird-like things are landing on top of the pod, startling off into the air again when he bangs on the hatch to scare them off. Once it’s clear he gives it a shove, closes his eyes as it clangs open, and pulls himself to the top of the pod.

Ocean. Nothing but endless, empty ocean. It’s so big and open he starts to feel dizzy. As far as he can see there’s blue water, blue sky at the horizon, blue all around him. The air, when he takes a tentative breath in, is fresh and cool, a light wind blowing that cools his fire-scorched face.

He’s never been properly planetside before. Grew up on a space station, worked on other space stations and in climate-controlled habitats on satellites and asteroids. The Aurora was launched from a station and would have landed at one when it returned, the immense ship never having been designed to make planetfall except in an emergency. Now he’s on a real, totally uncharted, virgin planet. It’s…

Beautiful. Terrifying. He doesn’t even know.

Intellectually he knows space is a whole lot bigger than the rock he’s on. Judging by the gravity, which is about Terra standard or maybe a little lighter, the planet’s probably a small terrestrial body. In a regular nitrox atmosphere his visibility will only be a few kilometres max at sea level, which he knows he’s at because he’s right on top of the sea. In space you can see as far as light can get. But he’s never spacewalked either, he’s used to narrow warrens, and compared to an average habitat the openness of the planet is staggering. The sun on his face is real enough to burn him if he stays out too long, and the water he’s too afraid to touch is deep and blue and utterly immense compared to the Aurora’s saltwater pool.

It's about halfway through his wondering train of thought that he realises he’s turned around, and when he twists the sight he sees is horrific.

The Aurora takes up half of the field of view on the other side, a smouldering pile of wreckage that dominates his horizon. Huge pillars of flame and smoke belch upward from the destroyed ship. On the side facing him, which he’s fairly sure is opposite to the one he jettisoned from, is a gaping hole blasted into the hull like someone took the world’s largest propulsion cannon and flung a meteor at it.

Gods of antiquity, what did that? Ryley slumps down against the lifepod hull and hugs himself, remembering his folly in pulling out the repair tool. He could never have fixed that with his stupid little reconstructor. Even a mobile vehicle bay can’t fix that. That damage would take months in dry dock in a specialised shipbuilding facility to repair, and oh god the lifepods on that side would’ve been obliterated wouldn’t they

Spiralling again. He hits himself in the chest as hard as he can manage, which doesn’t make him feel better but does distract him a little. The AEP suit dulls the impact anyway. There were breathing exercises he’d learned a long time ago, he vaguely remembers, but he can’t pull them to mind right now.

“The Aurora suffered orbital hull failure,” the PDA informs him, which sounds to him like a hell of an understatement. “Cause: unknown. Zero human life signs detected.”

Zero. Ryley stares blankly into the flaming hole that used to be the Aurora’s port side. Zero survivors on the ship. Even with the superstructure mostly intact.

After that, he can’t think for a while. He flees into the lifepod, collapses into his seat, and cries for a long time.

Chapter Text

By the time he finally pulls himself back to the outside of the pod, it’s past midday and the sun is blazingly hot. The water underneath him is very, very deep, and full of who knows what. But he wants to live. He’s made it this far. If he wastes his survival crying until he starves and dehydrates, that’s one more person who could’ve taken his place that would’ve lived. So he has to try.

He takes a deep breath, holds it, and jumps off the pod.

The salt of the water is stinging his eyes to hell, but what he sees through it is incredible. The ocean is alive, filled with strange alien fish that rush and leap past him. Strange green bendy fish, a blue one with a single massive eyeball, larger rays with bright orange tips and strange markings. The sandy ground that stretches out below him is deeper than he thought and slopes into a rocky forest of kelp, dotted with glowing yellow blobs that must be seeds.

It's utterly unfamiliar and weirdly beautiful, colourful and vibrant, and he’s so spellbound he forgets for a moment that he needs to breathe. Until his lungs start screaming and he has to swim frantically for the surface.

He can’t keep admiring it forever, but he does swim a perimeter of a few metres around his pod just to check out the surroundings. On one side the sand leads up into shallow rocky reefs, which are utterly packed solid with little fish and larger animals. Huge tunnels of coral rear up out of the ground. There’s a crack in the ground below that belches smoke, warming the nearby water to a near-spa temperature. On the other side the water is much deeper and murkier, and the dense forests of kelp block his view – he doesn’t dare go too far in, because he has no idea what’s hiding inside.

Once he’s back in his pod, he shakes his hair as dry as he can get it and pulls up his PDA’s blueprint list. He needs a repair tool to fix the secondary systems. He needs a survival knife. He needs fins and an oxygen tank if he wants to keep diving deeper, and he needs a scanner if he’s going to recover blueprints. Also, he wants a scanner, because he wants to know more about the world. Friends have teased him about his insatiable curiosity before, but now no one’s here to care about whether he’s using it for scanning a big eye fish or actual survival utility.

For most of it he needs titanium, which the PDA informs him he can get from metal salvage. But he also needs sulfur, copper, acid, silver and gold. Where is he going to get rare minerals, mine them himself? He doesn’t have a drill. He has a knife and that’s all.

When he actually starts looking, he’s absolutely gobsmacked by how easy it is. The rare earth metals he needs for computer chips are crystallising in beautiful coral plates, which he feels very bad about hacking off the rock faces where they grow. Outcrops of rock yield raw titanium and copper when he smashes them with a knife hilt, and sandstone in the smoking vent is packed with gold, silver and lead. The latter he handles carefully, stores in the lifepod’s locker, because he knows how toxic lead can be. Mushrooms growing on the seafloor are so acidic that the fabricator can process them for batteries.

No wonder Alterra had them circling the planet. It’s breathtakingly mineral rich, so much so that he can wrest out all the metals he needs with nothing more than a knife and his fists. Sitting in the lifepod with his piles of ores, he stares at the ceiling and wonders what Alterra would do to this beautiful reef system if they came. Drill it to death, no doubt. Crush those jewelled corals to extinction for their minerals. Tear the shallows apart and process the pieces into trillions in profit.

He passes the night curled up on the hard floor of the pod, resolutely ignoring his empty stomach. The dry throat he can’t tolerate, not after a day immersed in salt water, and he drinks more than he means to from one of the bottles. Exertion burns energy, but he has to exert himself to survive.

The next day, the hunger is too much to ignore, and he scarfs down a whole nutrient block. It’s dry, and he has to drink more water to swallow it, and abruptly he realises he’s running out. It’s so ironic he just might scream – he’s surrounded by water and yet he could die of thirst.

He scanned one of the fish earlier today, a pink transparent sac surrounding a spine, and the PDA told him it could be used to filter water. He really, really doesn’t want to catch and kill alien fish, but he might have no choice. So he dives again, spends a solid twenty minutes chasing the little bladderfish around. He manages to snatch one from the water eventually and hauls it into the lifepod, feeling awful about it and mildly nauseous. “Sorry, fish,” he mouths. He dispatches it with the knife before he presents it to the fabricator. It’s gross and his hands are slick with yellow blood, but he feels like it’s the least he can do. He’d prefer to die via a nice clean knife blade rather than being atomically rearranged from the inside out.

The water is somewhat tainted by that experience, but he’s thirsty, so he downs it.

Once he’s done that, it’s less of an awful shock when he catches a peeper and the PDA tells him to eat it. He’s also hungry enough to suppress his instinctive nausea at the idea of eating something that used to be a wriggly alive thing. The peeper’s soulful eyes make it very difficult, but he gives it to the fabricator for cooking. According to his databank, the fabricator disposes of its bones and organs, but that doesn’t get rid of the big eyeball.

He does eat it eventually. It tastes, surprisingly, quite good. Fresh and salty, and the eyeball isn’t as blobby as he thought it would be. It’s still gross, but he’s so hungry he just closes his eyes and pretends he’s in the cafeteria eating one of Ozzy’s spare time inventions. “Whaddya think Ryley, any good?” he can imagine Ozzy asking him. “I’m trying to spice up rations. Added some space bears to this one for some extra protein.”
God, he wishes he was back in the cafeteria.

The one thing he struggles to find is sulfur. Once he’s fabricated an O2 tank, he feels brave enough to venture down into the shallow caves the PDA says contain some, but none of the outcrops he smashes have any inside. Of course it turns out the source is an exploding screaming fish that he barely avoids. Just his luck, but at least he only needs one flower’s worth for the repair tool.
He nearly snatches it from the fabricator before it’s done, so eager to have something familiar that he hugs it to his chest like it’s a baby. It’s working well (he tests it on his finger, winces when it zaps the skin apart before stitching it together). Pity the human body is too complex to repair tool his burns from the crashfish encounter, but with the secondary systems repaired, the medkit fabricator offers up a solution.

Now he boots up the radio and waits anxiously as it flashes. “This is Aurora,” says the robotic voice. He’s so sick of that damn voice. “Distress signal received. Rescue operation will be dispatched to your location in 9… 9… 9… 9… 9… hours.” That’s not news, he wasn’t expecting rescue from the ship. “Continue to monitor for emergency transmissions for other lifepods.”

He takes a bite of a nutrient block and a sip of water, and settles down to wait.

Chapter Text

The first transmission he gets is from Lifepod 6. He vaguely recognises the voice on the distress call, thinks he might have spoken to her before. But he can’t find the location just from the image his PDA gives him, and when he ventures too close to the Aurora it tells him there’s radiation in the area, so he flees. Apparently the drive core is unstable and leaking. The bulk of the ship has now become a foreboding landmark, its closeness warning him when he gets into the danger zone.

Lifepod 3 is in shallow water not too far away. When he makes it to the pod, he doesn’t find anyone, but there’s no sign that the crew were injured or killed. He doesn’t know where the rendezvous point is, but they might well have made it there. He doesn’t find bodies either. There’s hope on that front at least. A broken PDA sits on the ground nearby, which he downloads and listens to. Then he listens to it again because he’s so desperate to hear human voices – anything other than the PDA’s jerky cadence and the roars and warbles of 4546B’s fauna.

When he’s most of the way back to the pod, the PDA starts beeping urgently. “Emergency. A quantum detonation has occurred in the Aurora’s drive core. The reactor will reach a supercritical state in ten, nine-”
Oh god, the ship’s gonna blow. He pushes the seaglide as fast as it’ll tow him, barely makes it to the edge of the pod before the PDA calmly says “One.”

For a few seconds nothing happens. Then, in brilliant clarity, the Aurora’s midships section explodes into a massive fireball.

The force of the detonation sends a wave of hot air washing across him, and he has to cling to the pod’s floats as huge waves are whipped up. It’s horrifyingly beautiful in a way, like so much else on the planet. Stunning in the worst way possible. “For your convenience, the radiation suit has been added to your blueprint database,” the PDA says. Well, he has plenty of lead, he thinks to himself, thudding his head against the side of the pod in exhausted frustration. No one was on the ship at least. A radiation explosion’s a nasty way to go – he knows that all too well, lost a few friends from engineering to shoddy reactor maintenance. It’s a slow, awful death.

He fabricates a radiation suit and puts it on. It feels safer, even outside the zone. He carries the helmet but leaves his rebreather on, because the oxygen efficiency is too valuable when he’s deep diving. After days of nonstop swimming, he’s sore in places he didn’t know he even had, but his lung capacity seems to have improved. He’s figured out how to keep himself fed and watered now, too – he has a grav trap that catches boomerangs for him and he can fabricate disinfected water from bleach. That cuts out the need for bladders. The boomerangs are good eating, not as good as peepers, but they don’t plead for mercy with big soulful eyes so that’s an improvement.

The next transmission he receives is a voice he knows he recognises. Doesn’t need the recording to tell him it’s Ozzy, and he’s throwing himself into the water before the signal even blinks up on his feed. A hundred metres, deep but he can dive that far if he uses the seaglide to save time. On the way he clings onto the tow bar, hands trembling from the adrenaline. Under attack, Ozzy said. The calls are all prerecorded. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since the transmission was sent, or if it’s…

Too late.

The lifepod sits, crushed open, on the red-grass seafloor. Ryley swallows hard and dives, ears popping, and pulls himself into the gaping opening. It’s empty. On the floor is a PDA, screen cracked but data core intact.

“Ozzy’s log. It’s the day of the crash.”
Ryley listens all the way through, even though it chokes him up worse than anything he’s ever heard. He can hear the disbelief in Ozzy’s voice as he speaks. Can hear it crack on his last words – “I don’t know why no one’s coming for me.” He might be crying, but the salt of his tears melds with the salt of the water so he doesn’t even know. Ozzy died here. Ozzy died here, alone and afraid, believing there was no one to look for him. And Ryley came, but he was too. Damn. Late.

He doesn’t dare go down into the caves nearby. He can’t really dive that deep anyway, and he doesn’t want to meet whatever got Ozzy. But there’s wrecks nearby that he scrounges for Seamoth parts. The mobile vehicle bay blueprints are actually harder to get, but he pulls together enough fragments after some searching. By now he’s fabricated a seabase module and packed it with lockers and solar panels, because he’s accumulating too many materials for lifepod storage. He should probably abandon the pod, but there’s a kind of comfort to its presence.

When he first builds the Seamoth, there’s a frisson of excitement that he can’t deny. He always wanted to be a pilot as a kid. During early aptitude testing he was informed in no certain terms that his reflexes weren’t good enough, he wasn’t the personality type they wanted for a space jockey (brash, incautious, usually hypermasculine), and anyway he was mostly mute and useless. But now he has his very own Seamoth, and when he climbs in, it says “Welcome aboard, captain.” Just for that he can almost forgive the robotic voice.

The Seamoth is a delight to drive, better than any simulator. It’s lightweight, speedy, responsive, and most importantly it can take up to 300 metres depth with the module he’s installed in it. He wastes power taking hard corners and doing loops, testing the vehicle’s limits on his way to follow Second Officer Keen’s transmission signal. Keen’s abandoned the pod, as he said, but the PDA inside will give him the rendezvous coordinates. He finds the other lifepod as well, which is an exploded wreck. A flare caught the fuel line. At least that one he can’t blame himself for – it was only the passenger’s recklessness – but he mourns quietly anyway.

The rendezvous is his last hope of finding other survivors. It’s been several days since the crash, so if anyone lived, they will have either found themselves safety like he did or made it to the dry land Keen talked about. He’s accepted now that when he follows lifepod signals he’s looking for where people have been. Either people who left for safer waters, or people who died.

Hopefully on the island he’ll find something more than voices from the past.

Chapter Text

The signal he follows is distant and far away, but fortunately the Seamoth is an economical vehicle. He skims the seafloor where he can, looking for wrecks and lifepods, but he doesn’t find anything – and when the Seamoth starts plunging hundreds of metres deep with no sign of a level bottom, he pulls up. The signal is above him for some reason. Surely that can’t be right.

As the submarine rises, what comes into view above him is amazing. He’s seen little floaters dragging up chunks of rock. This is like that on an immense scale, an entire island held up by floaters so big you could use them as helipads. He briefly wonders if he could grab one and use it to float a habitat compartment into space. That’d be a hell of an escape route, but the ancient floaters are very much stuck in place.

The Seamoth surfaces inside a cove within the middle of the island. It’s safe enough harbour, so Ryley leaves it where it is and paddles to the beach. He hauls out, collapsing onto dry land for the first time in over a week. The sand is warm, baked by the sun, and he’s tempted to close his eyes for a while, but he has a job to do. (The sand sticks everywhere. He decides he does not like sand in the slightest.)

“Hello?” he calls. His voice has been reduced to a rasp by salt air and disuse, but he can manage that much. “Anyone there?”

No response. He grimaces and detaches the flippers from his AEP suit’s feet, tucking them into the length of creepvine he’s been using as a tool belt. There’s some disturbed sand nearby, so he follows that up the beach until he finds another dropped PDA. So someone was here. He crouches down and links his PDA to the core, silently praying the data on it will offer hope.

The voices he hears are familiar. Keen and CTO Yu – he knows Yu, she’s in charge of all the technical staff, so while he’s technically support he still answers to her. They’re arguing. He’s not surprised by that, Yu was pretty casual but Keen seems very by the book. They left the island for the Aurora, and then-

“Emergency transmission from Second Officer Keen, received two hours after last activity.” And fuck, of course, of course it couldn’t be that easy. Of course they fell prey to… something. He’s seen plenty of candidates for the culprit. Huge shadows from a distance of massive eel-like things writhing through the water, setting the ocean echoing with distant roars. He hasn’t got up close to one and he doesn’t want to.

He throws the data core in frustration and screams, his shout echoing around the cove. If he were religious he’d probably shake his fist at whatever capricious god keeps giving him crumbs of hope only to snatch them away just as quickly, but instead – atheist that he is – he crumples back to the texturally awful sand and just stares at the sky. If only there were some answers in the mountains rising above him with their little habitat compartments perched atop-

Wait a second.

He squints up at them, but he’s definitely not seeing things. Sitting on the plateaus of the island’s peaks are seabase modules, worn and dilapidated and earth-brown with age, but very much real. Even from this distance he can tell they’re too old to be the work of Keen and Yu; besides, the others hadn’t stayed long.

Someone had been on this island. Someone had been on this island years ago. Which meant before the Aurora’s crash, either someone had settled here, or some other hapless ship had crashed. Maybe falling victim to whatever had taken the Aurora as well.

Pulled by a sudden insatiable curiosity, Ryley clambers to his feet and follows the tunnel up out of the cove. The island’s not so big that he can’t walk around it in a day. The mountains might be a rough climb, but if there are habitats up there then it must be doable.

There’s a sort of path that he can follow through the shrubs. He pulls out his scanner and catalogues everything on the way; little spiny-flowered plants, mushrooms that rattle like maracas, fleshy yellow baskets and dumb-looking trees with bulbs at the base. The latter, the PDA tells him, is a source of water, so he hacks a few samples off one and munches on them as he walks. It doesn’t taste great, but it’s full of watery sap that quenches his thirst, and it’s a hell of a lot less unpleasant to eat than previously alive fish.

Nestled in the crevasse between the peaks he finds the first habitat. It’s been crushed by a landslide, looks like, but it’s still mostly intact. Outside sit growbeds, and those have a wild proliferation of untended foliage that he examines with great interest. The big fleshy melons seem native, but they’re delicious. He eats a smaller one almost whole and picks up another to take with him, resolving to build growbeds in his base and cultivate them. And there’s also potatoes – real, regular, normal potatoes just like the ones the Aurora grew in hydroponics. He knows they’ll sprout if left long enough. Whoever had planted them had evidently left well before they got the chance to harvest, and now the growbed is packed with the plants.

He pulls one up and brushes the dirt off it. And yeah, it’s a regular potato. There’s nothing special about it, certainly nothing that should’ve prompted him to fucking tears, but here he is crying over a tuber because it’s the most familiar thing he’s seen in weeks.

He collects more, stuffing them into his backpack. Potatoes are good food and they’re versatile as anything. Boil them, mash them, roast them, chop them thin and fry them – hell, he can have mashed potatoes with his boomerang and eat like a real human for once. The growbeds go up a priority on his list.

Hunger satisfied and plants collected, he turns his attention to the damaged habitat. He has to advance carefully because it’s infested with spider crab things – god how he hates those. They stab and slash with mandibles, they’re unreasonably fast, and their arachnoid shape activates some monkey instinct that gibbers with terror at the idea of a spider half his height. Those he has no qualms about killing, not when they tried it first, but they leave slashes down his chest and arms that sting and will sting more when he has to jump back in the water.

“Hello?” he mumbles again, more out of habit than really looking for an answer. It echoes uncomfortably in the abandoned seabase, left alone to rust and collapse. The only light he has is the one on his seaglide, and that’s too bulky to make a good flashlight, so he explores mostly blind but for the glimmers of sun from outside.

There’s a PDA on the ground here too. It’s clearly much older than the ones he’s been finding, discarded long enough ago that the metal of its data core has started to rust. It still glows, though, so it’s still working. Ryley turns it over and over in his hands, fascinated – it’s a different model to his own, bulkier, clearly a dated design. Luckily they’re all cross-compatible regardless.

The voices on the recording speak with strange, indefinable accents, all different from one another. The thick brogue belongs to the man, who the woman calls Chief in her lilting drawl, and the other man speaks in a lighter accent that conjures up Old Terra tapes of those impractical edifices of learning they used before digi-training. Ryley crinkles his nose. They’re not saying anything that would help him identify them, only talking about a strange indefinable ‘it’. Something they thought was alien.

A little digging around in the rubble finds something that could well be ‘it’. It’s much more perplexing than the cryptic recording, and he’s almost hesitant to touch it – but it seems like they did and it didn’t hurt them, so he picks it up.

It’s a tablet, a little bigger than a PDA, but solid and blocky rather than thin. Illuminated on what seems to be the top is a glowing purple symbol that doesn’t match any language he’s ever seen. Cool to the touch. It seems to be made from metal, but not any type he recognises, and he considers himself pretty familiar with alloys. You can usually distinguish by the sound they make when tapped on, but he’s hesitant to poke at the thing too much in case it explodes.

“Weird,” he mouths to himself, turning it over again. It’s fascinating. Maybe he’s turning into a right kleptomaniac, but anything might be useful as a survival tool, so it goes in his pack as well. Some more focused staring might figure it out eventually.

Over the rest of the day he ranges across the island, searching for more signs of the previous inhabitants. He finds supply crates with nutrient blocks and water, useful, and cave crawlers which are exactly the opposite. A couple are starting to break out with those green pustules that he’s seen on fish around here, which makes them look even creepier. When he scans the body of one, the PDA theorises it’s some alien infection, and warns him “Do not under any circumstances consume the flesh.” Gods of antiquity, even if he were starving to death he’d choose that over eating the creepy crawlies.

From tapes in the main base and one high-up observatory he manages to pull together a vague clue about who these people were. ‘Chief’ is Paul Torgal, the other man is his son Bart and the woman is Maida. From what little he knows about the local trans-govs, he’s fairly sure they’re Mongolian – hadn’t there been some talk about a Torgal Corporation from people who’d tried engaging the Emissary in idle chat? Either way, there were three of them who had survived a shipwreck. They had built here and stayed a while, but then a storm had hit and they had been forced to leave, to go deeper. Ryley can only guess what happened to them after that.

It's frustrating, trying to grab at the fleeting ghosts of them, but fascinating as well. In some abstract way their lives cross over with his now. They’re all survivors on this horror show of a planet, fighting to live and longing to be rescued.

The last challenge he tackles is the second observatory, which is on a steeper mountain than the first. It’s a hard hike and the sun is starting to set, which doesn’t enthuse him about his prospects of getting home. Maybe he can sleep in the Seamoth? Then again, aside from the crawlers, the island is pretty safe. Part of him is tempted to build a base here, on safe ground where air is plentiful and plants grow all around, but a bigger part squirms at the idea of abandoning the lifepod. It’s a fragile marker but it links him to the Aurora, to what he’s lost, and the waters around it are familiar enough now to be sort of safe.

He makes it to the top just as it’s darkening. By that point he needs to collapse on the dirt to catch his breath – but wow is the sunset something to behold. He’s always fled into base or pod when it was getting dark, or been too deep underwater to tell anything but that light was fading. Now he’s high up and the sky is clear, and 4546B’s sun lights up the atmosphere in a brilliant slew of reds and pinks and oranges. Not far beyond that huge, huge moon looms over, its red vastness partially occluding its smaller neighbour. That’s got to be a small planetoid. It takes up nearly half his field of view.

He sighs and hauls himself to his aching feet, thinking longingly about the cool and weightless embrace of the ocean. And he thought swimming was a hard way to get around. At least underwater he can float up and down easily in the currents, rather than trudging his way up a steep rock face. He could’ve scaled this peak in half the time and a quarter the effort, even just with fins.

The observatory compartment is intact and sealed off with a bulkhead door, which reassures Ryley that it’s probably crawler free. Inside it’s dark but warm, which speaks to the durability of habitat design. As he clangs the door shut behind him and pads tentatively inside, he can hear leaves rustling.

There’s a sort of ersatz greenhouse inside, an indoor growbed with a large tree weighted down by glowing fruits. “Minimal nutrition or hydration value,” the PDA concludes. Ryley snags one anyway and takes a bite, pleasantly surprised by the tart, sweet taste. Not everything is about survival, he thinks rebelliously as he secretes one away in his pack to try to plant later.

Sitting by a supply crate he finds another PDA. This one isn’t as battered as the others (more recent?), but still old enough that he concludes it must have belonged to a Degasi crew member. He curls up against the sturdy trunk of the lantern tree and presses play on the voice recording its data core carries.

“This is the first time I’ve seen sunlight in months. After all that time in the deep I’d been dreaming of it.”
It’s the younger Torgal speaking. His voice sounds much like Ryley’s own, raspy with disuse and cracking on the occasional syllable. Occasionally he pauses to cough. But despite that, his tone is still steady and strong and his voice is rich with fear and wonder. Lonely, slipping into illness and ravaged by some unknown enemy that drove them from the deep, he still marvels at the planet. Calls it incredible even as his voice wavers when he tells the PDA that it has killed his crewmate and his father both.

“It’s reassuring to know that, when I go, I’ll join them. Until then… well, there’s always the view.”

So that was their fate. Maida and the elder Torgal died somewhere in the depths of this ocean, and Bart fled, dying alone up here with no company but the rays and the plants. It hurts somewhere deep inside to think about, even though he never met them. He thinks perhaps he would have liked Bart, even though he doesn’t understand how he can marvel at such terrible things.

But then again, wasn’t he just doing that a moment ago? Gawking at the brilliance of the sun setting over a planet that’s already killed his friends and colleagues? Hasn’t he been spellbound by the beauty of the sea that swallowed Keen and Yu and wondered at the infinite variety of the creatures that may well have killed Ozzy?

Staring out of the observatory window at the fading rays of dusk, he thinks that perhaps he and Bart Torgal might be a little alike after all.

Chapter Text

After his expedition to the island, Ryley stays in familiar waters for a bit. He swims through the creepvine forests for metal salvage, dodging stalkers where necessary, and collects the titanium to expand his base. A multipurpose room is much better than an I-compartment stuffed with lockers. He builds a fabricator, a radio, enough storage for all his materials, and most importantly an indoor growbed.

Alterra equipment all looks so sterile. The growbed, proliferating with greenery in an explosion of green and blue and orange, makes his little base feel more like a living space.

Of course that only goes so far. He has no furniture, so his ‘bed’ consists of a place on the floor (thanks for prioritising blueprints, Alterra). The seabase has no light controls, so the fluorescents are on all the time, and the buzzing hum of the grav trap drives him absolutely insane. He plans on deactivating it the second he has enough plants to sustain him.

Fragments collected from wrecks give him a scanner room and a moonpool to park his Seamoth in. The scanner room is an absolute godsend, even with its limited range. It saves him hours of searching. The moonpool is nice to have but the vehicle upgrade console is even better. Now he can fabricate more and better modules for the Seamoth, and combined with his modification station he’ll be able to increase its depth range. The one problem is lithium. He needs it for almost everything but none of the nearby outcrops contain any. He’ll have to go deeper to find it.

The console also has options to change the Seamoth’s colouring and beacon name. It’s ridiculous and completely unnecessary, so naturally Ryley names his the Peeper in a fit of giggles. He paints the outside blue and the inside the same cheery yellow of a peeper’s eyeball, since the bubble cockpit really does look like one. It’s stupid, but he likes it.

It’s as he’s collecting metals from the caves inside the hot vent that another radio alert comes up. He swims back to the surface, timing his ascent to avoid a blast of ejecta and heat, and hauls himself back into the base. He’s not expecting anything other than a lifepod transmission. It’s not urgent, since they only ever lead him to pods cracked like eggs on the seafloor.

It’s a rude shock when he hears an unfamiliar voice on the radio, not robotic but not alarmed either. “This is Avery Quinn of trading ship Sunbeam. Aurora, do you read? Over.”

Ryley instinctively grabs at the radio before he realises it can only receive. He’s hobbled by his technical equipment, unable to respond but desperate to call out. I hear you! I’m here! But without the Aurora’s long-range comms he can’t send anything, and getting too close to the crashed ship is dangerous even with radiation suits.

“Nothing but vacuum,” he hears ‘Avery’ mumble. “These Alterra ships. They run low on engine grease, they send an SOS; you offer to help, they don’t pick up.” He clears his throat. “Aurora, I’m out on the other side of the system, it’s going to take more than a week to reach your position, do you still need our help? Over.”

He can hear the captain talking to his crew on the other side of the radio, and it makes him feel like screaming. If only he could make contact. Tell them, yes, absolutely, we do still need help, this planet is a death trap and the ship’s a pile of wreckage. He calculates frantically how long it would take him to reach the Aurora, whether he could even get into the comms systems, whether they’d even be intact-

That’s a hopeless hail Mary pass. He won’t be able to contact them before they either leave or decide to follow. And Alterra’s history means they’re much more likely to leave, blowing it off as a frivolous call.

He does not sleep well that night. Not that he ever does, not with the whining of electrical systems and the bright lights, but he sleeps even worse now. By midnight he’s awake again and moderately tempted to go for a swim. Maybe float in the warm waters above the vent and hope the heat will make him sleepy.

Blinking sleep out of his eyes, he gets up, grimacing at the pain in his neck. What he wouldn’t give for a bed right now, even one of the hard and relatively uncomfortable Alterra-standard bunks. Sharing single beds shoved together with two other people sounds like heaven right now. Even if the other two snore and kick like one of his bunkmates had.

Above the whine of the grav trap, he realises the radio’s beeping, and hits the button.
“Aurora, this is Sunbeam again. We just picked up a massive debris field at your location.” It’s Avery Quinn again. He sounds tired, stressed, slightly disbelieving. Ryley can sympathise. “I didn’t know how bad… how many of you…” His voice breaks. “I didn’t know. We are now en route to your location. We’re going to bring you home. Sunbeam out.”

Ryley sinks back against the wall, letting out a shaky breath and burying his head in his hands. It’s over. It’s going to be okay. Someone’s coming for him.

All he has to do is survive until they get here.

Chapter Text

As he waits for his impending rescue, Ryley searches that much harder for fellow survivors. If there's even the smallest chance someone else is alive down here, he can't let them get left behind. So he follows the signals regardless of the dangerous places they take him.

The Emissary’s lifepod is in a forest of immense tree-like mushrooms. From the logs he puts together that Khasar died on impact, but his body isn’t in the pod – he tries not to think too hard about why that is. It sparks his interest though. He’s vaguely aware that several small Mongolian corporations operate out in the Ariadne Arm, but other than that he hadn’t been sure why Alterra had brought him along. But the Degasi was definitively a Mongolian vessel, and he’s picked up scraps of logs from the Aurora about its mission and crew. Was the ship looking for them? It would explain why they’d pulled in so close to 4546B.

CTO Yu’s lifepod is in ridiculously deep water, half a kilometre down. It’s deeper than his Seamoth’s current crush depth. In the AEP suit he can tolerate those depths without being worried about being totally squished or dying of nitrogen narcosis, but swimming down 200 metres from his Seamoth is not an idea that enthuses him. He already knows Yu’s fate.

He makes the dive anyway. It’s dark down there, the water illuminated only by the glowing red pustules of the bloodvines. At least there’s a proliferation of rubies to collect. He scoops up Yu’s abandoned PDA and sprints back up to the Peeper, barely making it inside before his oxygen runs out on him.

As expected he hears Yu’s voice, but also another technician’s. He already knows Berkeley didn’t make the rendezvous. Morbidly, he wonders if he drowned trying to make it to the surface or was eaten by one of those massive claw-faced serpents. He’s seen them closer now – there’s one that patrols the open water above the mushroom forest, but it can’t squeeze its bulk down into the crevices between them where Ryley and his Seamoth can hide. The PDA calls it a ‘Reaper’, but Ryley hasn’t gotten close enough to scan it for any more information. He doesn’t really need a spectroscope reading to know bad news when he sees it.

Every few days, he gets a radio message from the approaching Sunbeam. He clings to those like he could subsist on them alone, just hope and the voices of real living humans to buoy him to the surface.

On one of those days, when the radio starts blinking, he’s expecting another dead signal at worst. The burst of static that squeals from it when he activates it is not in his collection of possible outcomes. It makes pain pound through his skull, that same weird squeezing ‘ow’ that he gets from a particularly awful squelching sound or the whining of the grav trap, and he’s so busy covering his ears he almost misses the rest. “Playing partially translated broadcast,” the radio says calmly like it didn’t just deploy a sonic weapon, then switches into a gravelly rasp that sounds like a horror movie villain. “Subject 11783 destroyed. Mode:,” another static burst, “patrol. New targets unaccounted for: 1.”

Ryley scrunches himself down against the wall of the habitat, shuddering and unable to release his hands from his ears. Partially translated broadcast from what? Partial translation means the radio’s AI is extrapolating patterns to a language it’s never seen before. Which means there’s some unknown intelligence down here with him, something he can’t see, and it’s hunting ‘subjects’. Does that mean people?

Is it hunting him?

His heart is pounding in the way that inevitably signals an impending panic attack. The purple tablet in his pack suddenly feels extremely heavy, and he would throw it into the boiling vent but he can’t breathe or move. Alien technology. Aliens on this planet, intelligent aliens, hostile aliens with unknown motives and unknown means.

He thinks about Bart’s last recorded words. The unspecified, nebulous ‘they’ who had driven the Degasi survivors from the deep. Bart must have known something. Had some answers to all of the questions swirling wildly in Ryley’s head like a whirlpool of all the old Terran sci-fi flicks he watched back in his crowded bunks on the Aurora: who are they, what do they want, why are they here-

He’s terrified. But he’s also unutterably, insatiably curious. So he has to dive deeper, down to the signal the Degasi survivors left behind when they left the island. Face whatever nightmare had driven them away, and maybe then he’ll finally understand why his own nightmare keeps getting worse.

“I won’t keep you waiting,” he mouths to the radio, even though he knows it can’t transmit his words. “But there’s something I need to do first.”

He packs light. Brings the purple tablet even though he’s half sure it’s some kind of tracking beacon that will lead the hunters to him. Scanner, knife in case he needs to stab his way out, repair tool because its familiar presence is comforting, seaglide to run for the hills if necessary. It would suck to have to abandon the Peeper, but he’d prefer to be alive than keep it. He knows the signal leads down into the caves below Ozzy’s lifepod, though, so dead and sans Seamoth is also a non-zero possibility.

The entrance to the caves is fairly open. He hovers in the water above, peering down with jaundiced eyes at the glowing mushrooms that line its gaping mouth. Here goes nothing, he thinks, and tentatively accelerates the sub down the seafloor’s fanged throat.
Smaller mushrooms give way to bigger ones, and then to massive ones bigger than his Seamoth. Even on edge as he is he can’t resist slipping out to scan one and tentatively touch its jellyish surface. It squishes under his hand like a water bed. He’s half tempted to see if he can collect part of one’s cap to use as bedding, but then he hears a shrieking call and decides he would rather be inside the safety of the Peeper than comfortable.

He's at a safe distance from the mushroom when a massive crab-jawed snake erupts from its stalk. His PDA tells him some nonsense about a symbiotic relationship, but he’s too busy shuddering as he watches its eyeless head search the water for whatever intruder had disturbed its hiding place. There’s Ozzy’s grim-looking snake thing.

As he carefully pilots deeper into the cave, giving the bigger jellyshrooms a wide berth, he starts to see abandoned floodlights and pieces of long-rusted compartments. It’s all the confirmation he needs that the survivors really were down here. When he reluctantly leaves the Peeper to investigate them (god how he wishes he could build a PRAWN suit, and not just because he’s always wanted to pilot one), he also finds plentiful outcrops of shale on the ground.

They’re packed with lithium. He backflips over in the water with delight and sets about gathering as much as he can, acutely aware of how many blueprints require the silvery metal. Lithium, despite its relative commonality in the atomic state, is one of the most vital materials in the Federation. Almost every advanced alloy relies on lithium for lightness and strength. With a robust store of it, he can synthesise a better oxygen tank, more depth upgrades, new fins, and if he doesn’t need any of those things when he makes it off the planet then raw lithium is more than valuable enough to make up for the Sunbeam’s detour.

One of the outcrops he breaks glints with white sparkles. When he brushes away the crushed rock, what remains is a matrix of brilliant crystals embedded in remaining stone. Diamonds. He turns the clump over in his hands, spellbound by how pretty they are. Alterra’s monopoly on diamond mining means they’re incredibly expensive to buy, mostly reserved for manufacturing things like sawblades and laser tools. Only the very very richest can afford to own the stones for anything else. He’s never seen a real diamond in person, and he’s enchanted by the rainbow fire that sparkles off their hard edges.

The PDA beeps loudly. “Remember that materials you gather are the property of the Alterra Corporation,” it says. Its robotic voice never changes, but Ryley can easily imagine avarice bleeding around the edges of the stilted tone. “You are liable to reimburse the full market price. Your current bill stands at three million credits.”

Ryley laughs. He sits there on the seafloor and laughs bitterly until he’s hoarse and his oxygen is running dry. Isn’t that just so Alterra of them? He’s survived weeks on this terrifying planet, eking out an existence around the edges of what he can scrounge, searching for others who are gone because of the company’s incompetence and greed – because he knows now that the Aurora was sent here after the Degasi, and Alterra hadn’t even meant to look properly, just handwave it and tell the Mongolians ‘thanks for the free lunch’ – and yet somehow he owes the company. His life will end, not because of a Reaper Leviathan or a crabsnake or even a shoddily built lifepod panel to the head, but because after all this he owes a bill that he will never, ever be able to pay. Because he’s not getting hazard pay for his ordeal. He’s racking up debt just by trying to live.

He hauls himself back into the Peeper before he drowns, and for the first time in ages thinks about his friend from Station 3-Beta. She had been full of fire and anger at the shitty way Alterra operated, and he’d always shrugged because that was just the way things were. Why would the trans-gov support you if you didn’t work for them? Why should he be angry that he was relegated to third-class jobs because of his speech impediment – it was only good business. Why should relationships be treated like anything other like a financial transaction?

She’d gone on a trip to Terra and come back full of new words like ‘union’ and ‘equality’ and really enamoured with some 20^th century German economist, and not long after that she’d been arrested for ‘disturbing the peace’ and he’d never seen her again.

Maybe she’d been right all along. Maybe he should have asked why, when robots could do so many jobs, humans needed to do them and get fucked up in the process. Why he couldn’t be a pilot because of the results of some arbitrary personality test. Why people had to work themselves to death to earn the right to eat and breathe.

A crabsnake screams its way overhead, barely missing his sub, and Ryley kicks it into gear. He can think about Carl Whatshisname when he’s not surrounded by things that want to eat him. In the real, rend your flesh from your bones sense, not the suck you dry financially way that Alterra’s sinking its vampire fangs into him.

He navigates his way carefully to the base, which is tucked away by the cavern wall. It’s safe inside, the only concern being his oxygen levels, so he can hide and peer out of the windows at purple-tentacled peepers and their eyeball-only cousins. Drooping from its crumbling ceilings are glowing jellyfish stingers, which he’s unfortunately very familiar with from exploring the vent caves and avoids with prejudice.

The base is empty. Even emptier than the one on the floater island. He finds more broken PDAs, scraps of damaged equipment, and another signal. A dead end leading to another base, deeper down in the dark waters where bloodvines grow and those terrifying cloaked creatures blink back and forth faster than he can see.

He can’t make it down there before the Sunbeam lands. He can’t drive down there in his Seamoth anyway, not without the new depth upgrades. And his curiosity, strong as it is, isn’t as strong as his desire to get off this damn planet.

He swims clear of the empty base, dodging a crabsnake on the way, and pulls the Peeper back up towards the cave mouth and the sun.

Once he’s settled into the rhythm of skating the surface in a dead-straight line, he pulls out his PDA and listens to the voice logs left behind. Maida’s log, cursing out Paul Torgal and seamonsters alike – anywhere else he would have laughed, but she seems like the kind of person who really would have speared Reapers from ships built from their kin’s bones. Paul’s, wondering about his fate. And Bart’s, wondering with naïve innocence at what he saw outside the habitat windows.

He really wishes he’d met Bart. There’s an odd charm in his aristocratic accent and his childish delight at the colour and variety of the things trying to kill him. A scientist to the bone, with maybe a bit of poet rolled in, the kind of person who could say ‘Coevolution gives me the fuzzies’ and mean it. He suspects that Bart, in his place, would have made the dive, willing to risk his escape just to know. To understand what and why and who and where and how. But Ryley isn’t him, and Ryley wants out.

Even if he gets off-planet crushed under the weight of millions in debt.

Chapter Text

The impending arrival of the Sunbeam galvanises Ryley to frenetic action.

In the meantime between following lifepod signals, he collects anything light enough to be useful and valuable enough to be worth something. He knows the planet will be difficult to land on and the detour won’t help his rescuers’ mission break even. The least he can do to help them is collate materials a trading ship could use. His few and precious rubies, which fetch a decent price on the market, and gold or lithium, which are hard to mine, are good candidates. The melons and potatoes and fresh lantern fruit aren’t nearly as valuable, but he also knows small ships don’t have hydroponics. He’s intimately familiar with the monotonous spacer’s diet and fresh fruit and vegetables beat nutrient blocks hollow.

Water is also worth collecting. It tends to be on tightly rationed margins in ships, since drinkable water is heavy but absolutely vital. Ryley knows extremely well now exactly how important it is. Being constantly in water he can’t drink has really increased his appreciation for its value.

Using some of the precious lithium he gathered from the caves, he fabricates a locker for the Peeper and packs it full of materials. Rubies, lithium, gold, silver, diamonds, freshly harvested plants. Maybe he can use some of the larger unflawed diamonds to pay off some of his ridiculous debt. Alterra artificially raises diamond prices, so if he sells them open market to some collector he might make it out with a decent amount.
He contemplates deconstructing his base, but ultimately decides he can’t be bothered. Maybe some other poor sod will crash on this planet in the future and find some use out of the things he left behind. Track down his story the way he tracked down the Degasi crew.

With his motley collection of resources, he jumps in the sub and turns its nose to the beacon he’s been sent. According to the captain, they’ll break atmosphere by the afternoon, and Ryley wants to scout the spot beforehand. He has little doubt that there’ll be crawlers there. If it’s dry land, anyway, and he doubts anyone’s trying to put down a spaceship on the ocean.

The Peeper glides smoothly through the water, skirting safely over the darker deep below. He sighs and pats the cockpit console, thinking mournfully about how much he’s going to miss it. It can operate in space, sure, but his doesn’t have that module installed and he couldn’t bring it even if it did. Blast the PDA for being right about the effects of isolation. He’s already personified a submarine.

They whir sedately over the red-grass plateaus with their tumbled wrecks, pull over dense forests of creepvine – he wonders idly whether Maida’s trick really works. He’s almost tempted to try, but not enough to sacrifice his fingers to a stalker. And then they’re there, rising up to sheer rock faces that reach toward the sky. This one’s a proper island. It’s rooted in the ground below, the tallest of a spine of mountains that stretch through the water. He snorts to himself, contemplating whether putting down a large enough vessel on the floater island would sink it. How much weight can they carry? If the Aurora had crashed right on top, he’s fairly sure the island would have collapsed, but the huge symbiotes have borne up millions of tons of rock well enough.

He paddles free of the sub, turning on his back to feel the warm sun on his face. He’s learned through painful experience that too long out of the water during midday will result in peeling burns. Fascinatingly, exposure has darkened his skin by several shades. He knows on a vague scientific level that UV damage stimulates the skin to produce more melanin, but it’s fascinating to see in real life, especially the lines at his throat and wrists where the tan stops. His natural darker colouring gives him some protection from the sun’s effect at least. He winces to think about the results that would have had if he were snowy pale like some of his former crewmates.

Sighting a large rock next to the ocean, he scrambles up its side to get a better view, shading his sun-blinded eyes with one hand. Nothing hostile. Just stands of bulbo trees, low-lying shrubs and what the hell is that

Ryley closes his eyes against the glare. Then he tentatively opens them again. But the blocky, gunmetal-grey tower hasn’t disappeared, isn’t an artifact of too much bright light in the eyes and not enough sleep. It’s actually there. The architecture is utterly unfamiliar, nothing like the Alterra-standard sterile white and rounded corners he’s used to. Modular? Maybe, but he can’t see any connection points on what looks like a stack of alien kids’ blocks.

There’s no way that’s human-built. Which means whatever alien presence is on this planet, they’re responsible, and maybe hiding inside ready to jump out and kill any hapless idiots who approach their fort.

He swallows and crouches down slowly, shielding his body behind the safety of the rock. It hasn’t turned on a machine gun turret to obliterate him yet, so if there are proximity sensors then it’s a pretty small perimeter. Then, like the ten-year-old impulsive kid that he’ll always kind of be, he scoops up a pebble and flings it as hard as he can. It pings harmlessly off the tower. No giant cannon rears up to punish the intruder.

Drawing a deep breath, he presses himself down and considers his options. Best case scenario, it turns out this is all a prank. Better yet, the last three weeks have been a dream and he’s going to wake up any minute now with his bunkmate kicking him in the stomach. Excluding wishful thinking, the logical best case is that the tower is abandoned and inert. In that case, he can explore it without fear and maybe get some damn answers.

Worst case scenario? He can think of a lot of insane hypotheticals, but that’s the anxiety disorder talking, not any actual planning. But if he restricts those to ‘immediate threat and reasonably likely’, he gets two. One: the tower is inhabited and the aliens are hostile, in which case approaching will get him killed. Two: the tower is inhabited, the aliens are hostile, and they’re somehow responsible for the crashes of the Aurora and Degasi like Maida seemed to think. In that case, it’s not just his life at risk, but his rescuers.

The mental calculus all adds up to a clear but depressing conclusion. He has to investigate. If he doesn’t, he’s leaving a massive risk unaccounted for, and if he does then all he has to lose is his life. Which is pretty important (at least to him), but let’s be honest, he’s been throwing it to the winds of fate a lot lately. Might as well do it one more time.

He reluctantly abandons his rock shield, drawing his knife and creeping closer to the base of the tower. When nothing attacks him, he sheathes it again and replaces it with his scanner. There’s an intangibly shimmering green barrier blocking the only visible entrance. The scanner doesn’t seem to see it, but when Ryley touches it, it feels like a solid wall. If you asked him (which the aliens haven’t), he’d say it’s overengineered. Why invest in forcefield technology when a door would work fine? Rule number one of engineering: simpler usually means more reliable.

The scanner can parse the large block sitting outside it, which it determines to be some kind of control panel; it’s taller than Ryley, which doesn’t exactly enthuse him about facing off against the builders. How large are they? Judging by the magnitude of their architecture, about twice his height – if they’re humanoid proportions. As he approaches the block, it slides open with a loud whir of mechanical hinges, revealing an empty place in the centre that bears the same sigil as the purple tablet.

Huh. He has it with him, thankfully, hadn’t taken it out of his pack after the jellyshroom caves. Maybe it’s some sort of key? Hesitantly, he presents it to the control panel, trying to figure out which way up it goes.
Well, up until some magnetic system snatches it from his grip and locks it into the panel with a sharp snapping sound. He barely yanks his hands clear before the panel slams shut on them. OSHA violation, definitely. These aliens must not care much about workplace safety.

The forcefield stutters and blinks, then disappears, leaving the building’s arched doorway open.

Please let it be empty, he pleads silently in case there are any higher powers listening. I’m a glorified janitor, I am not qualified to make first contact with an advanced alien race. With that dubiously effective prayer, he tiptoes his way into the building.

It’s eerily lit inside, green-glowing panels offering a sickly light to guide his steps as he advances further within. The PDA tells him the alloy it’s made from doesn’t match anything in its database, but he doesn’t need to be told that, not when every step makes the metal under his feet echo with an unfamiliar resonant sound.

He taps his knife on the wall. It doesn’t dent or scratch, but makes a loud ringing sound that pings off the walls like sonar sounds. If there’s anyone (or anything) in here, they’ll definitely know he’s here now.
The aliens like ramps. He climbs up and down them, investigating the seemingly abandoned facility. He scans and collects some green crystals that his PDA says are power storage. They make his skin tingle when he tosses them up and down. Further up is a terminal that he can vaguely interface with, the translator spitting out a vague schematic of what seems to be the facility he’s in. According to that, there are two sections, the upper part at sea level being the part he’s in. Control room lower down.

He doesn’t find anything conventional at the end of the passage, just a gaping black hole in the ground. Alien spiders? Could they climb walls? He crouches down and edges toward the shaft, peering down to try and judge its depth. Maybe he can jump down if it’s not too-

Suddenly he gets yanked forward, provoking an alarmed cry as some invisible force hauls him into the shaft. But he doesn’t drop like he was expecting to. Instead, he hovers in the air like the shaft is filled with water, cradling him with currents he can’t see. It’s not exactly anti-gravity. He’s been weightless before, and it’s totally rudderless, but in here he’s being held in place and moved. He can’t throw himself around and kick off the walls. When he reaches the bottom of the interminable shaft, he gets picked up and gently placed on the ground.

That is one hell of an elevator. He itches to get his fingers into whatever mechanisms power it. But there’s no obvious panel he can pull open, so he has to abandon that curiosity and leave the shaft alone for now. Further out in the hallway he comes out onto a massive pool, similar to a moonpool only much bigger. Did the aliens have gigantic submarines? You could easily park a stable of Seamoths in here – he briefly contemplates jumping in, but decides to leave that for later as well. There’s one obvious arch he can access from here, so that must be the control room entrance.

Inside it he finds yet another battery of ramps. Lovely. He might be fitter now from all the swimming, but he hasn’t built up the muscles for climbing alien towers. He contemplates all the things he’d like to tell the aliens if they were here and inclined to listen. ‘Hey, if you have antigravity elevators, why do you need all these damn ramps?’ Then again, maybe it’s for dramatic effect – they do have a few display cases set up around, along with more ion cubes and a purple tablet that he shamelessly steals.

One of them is a rifle, fascinatingly built but inaccessible behind its lime-green glass. Another is a fist-sized object that lights up and starts humming when he approaches. “Scans indicate the device contains enough potential energy to destroy this entire planet, along with most of the solar system,” says the PDA. “Fortunately, it has malfunctioned.”
Spooked, Ryley makes tracks away from the immense death bomb. That’s one case he really, really doesn’t want to see opened.

Finally he makes it to the control room, which is blocked off by another forcefield. He uses his pilfered tablet to open it and steps inside, making for the large panel in the centre that he’s willing to bet is an interface. It opens up as he steps nearby. He reaches out to touch it, wondering if it wants another tablet-

And then his hand gets grabbed just like the elevator. “Hey!” he tries to shout, but it just comes out as an angry huff of air. The forcefield holding his hand in place spits out a metal tendril that gets right up in his face, waving at him aggressively like it’s trying to square up. He’s tempted to bite it, but it draws away before he can get teeth on it and stabs him in the arm! Piece of shit!

Definitely an OSHA violation. He yanks his hand free, cradling it to his chest and peering at the pinprick wound it left. “The control panel is broadcasting a message. Translation reads: Warning. Infected individuals cannot disable the weapon. This planet is under quarantine.”
He stumbles back. Infected? The weapon? Frantically he pulls out the scanner and points it at himself, running the spectroscope analysis.

“The bacterial infection in your system has progressed. Detecting skin irritation and immune system response,” the report slams down like a death sentence. “Further data required to identify bacterial strain.” He takes a deep breath in, unconsciously feeling out the expansion of his lungs. Breathing doesn’t hurt. He feels fine – sure, he’s been a little itchy, but he’s been immersed in salt water which dries the skin. But it’s all too easy to call up mental images of those infected creepy crawlies, covered in glowing green pustules and sluggish in their movements, lunging at him. The environmental scans with their ‘high levels of waterborne bacteria’.

He has an alien disease. That isn’t good. He’s not actively dying, which is better than the alternative.

Hands shaking, he points the scanner at the panel and its glowing green core, and waits.

Chapter Text

This device houses energy equivalent to a 100 MT nuclear detonation, which can be channelled through the facility and directed at vessels overhead, or bent around the planet’s gravitational pull to strike targets in orbit.
He stuffs the scanner away and runs, sprinting down the ramps like there’s a Reaper after him. Ignores sparking lights, ion cubes he forgot to steal, cases of rifles and nonfunctional doomsday devices. Leaps over the corner of the moonpool and throws himself into the grav shaft, willing it to throw him upwards faster, and stumbles back into his stride the second it spits him out.

Power is routed via the attached terminal, allowing for the device to be deactivated if necessary. It is currently operating without parameters, suggesting it will target any ship within range.
In the last radio message, Avery said that they would break atmosphere by planetary midafternoon. It’s coming up on noon now. And if the ship approaches too close to the planet, this weapon will obliterate them out of the sky the same way it sunk his ship and Bart’s before him. If he doesn’t act fast, if he doesn’t warn them, it will be too late.

He doesn’t know if the mountain is even climbable, but he follows a line of alien plinths up a carved-out path as he drags out fibre mesh from his pack. He’d fabricated it to wrap up some of the loose gems so they wouldn’t tumble around but now he breaks off a stick from a bulbo tree and tries his best to tie it into a makeshift flag. Two is enough material to make a sizeable, hopefully visible banner. He needs height, and he needs to figure out how to mark the flag in a way that will make sense as a warning.

The fibre is white. He doesn’t have dye, except the beads of blood on his stabbed arm, but he’s not exactly enthusiastic about using his own blood to colour approximately two square metres of fabric. He frantically tries to pull to mind what little signalling he remembers. Red is danger. There’s complex patterns for things like diplomatic immunity, assistance required, carrying dangerous cargo-
Mid-thought he stumbles into a narrow cave and lashes out blindly at the crawlers he can hear in the darkness. Running for the nearest light he can see, he skirts alien architecture that he doesn’t have time to examine and rolls free of the cave mouth.

One particularly persistent crawler jumps on top of him. He smashes at it with fists and stick, feeling its carapace crunch under his blows. For a second he’s stuck there, breathing hard and shuddering as yellow blood drips down and coats him and flag alike.
Yellow. Yellow for plague. Vessels wear yellow when they’re harbouring disease – do not land, do not approach, I need authorisation, quarantine procedures. He swallows down bile and drags the crawler’s corpse out, working as quickly as he can to soak the flag in its yellow blood. It dries fast and darker, producing a deep and vibrant colour, and smells strongly of iron and other chemicals that make him choke on nausea.

Leaving the body, he slings the stick over his back, securing it with his creepvine belt, and digs his knife into the rock wall for leverage. He can’t scale the taller peak, although it would be a better vantage point, but by using his knife as a pick he can climb the shorter one. God how grateful he is that 4546B has lighter gravity than Terra-standard.

He collapses at the tip of it, panting for breath and draped over the plateau like a wet wrung-out towel. Above him a bright star coalesces into view. It approaches slowly, light settling into the flames of standard ship boosters.

“Survivor, we see you!” Ryley hears from his PDA. It has a very short range receiver, evidently enough to pick up those close messages from the ship. He hauls himself to his feet and waves his yellow flag frantically.
“Man, I don’t know how you held out down there. We’ve broken atmosphere and we’re descending towards the-” The voice breaks off. He can vaguely hear someone calling from off mic. “Yellow flag? Plague? Hang on, drop thrust – are you alright down there?”

He keeps waving, gesturing up, up with his other arm. Please get the message, please get the message, he prays, and if he keeps on like this he might actually develop religion before he dies of whatever he’s caught. The Sunbeam’s captain has keyed his mic and he can hear the navigator saying something about a building – when he catches that he points at the weapon and waves the flag even harder. It’s moving, the tower pivoting on its axis to level itself in the approaching ship’s direction. Now he sees it. It doesn’t look like a kid’s snap block creation, it looks like a gun.

“What do you mean, you can’t identify it?” he hears through the PDA. “Fuck, fuck, thrusters to full! Reverse!” Painfully slowly, the mote in the sky begins to stop falling and pull out of its dive. His digi-training runs through his head in slow-motion, thousands of gigabytes of data on engine spin-up times and thrust volume for Bulldog-class vessels. They should have enough power to counteract the planet’s gravitational pull if they can get the engines reversed in time and pull the nose up.

Thrusters blaze, and the alien gun emits a sonic boom that knocks him flat to his back.

He watches, paralysed, as the beam of green energy arcs through the atmosphere, leaving trails on his vision like he’s looked directly at the sun. It blasts right through the space that the Sunbeam had been occupying three seconds earlier, exploding in another burst that sets his ears ringing. Debris rains down like a sick, twisted fireworks show.

But the ship, he sees when his eyes recover, has cleared it. Damaged, probably, the meteors falling to ground are probably parts of damaged hull and booster. But the ship itself is intact and flying.

He collapses to his back and draws in deep, shuddering breaths, trying to coordinate his inhales with the rhythm of half-remembered breathing exercises. In for 4, hold for 7, out for 8. He did his best. He did what he could, and they aren’t dead.
Beside him, the PDA blinks to life, crackling with static as it strains to receive distant signals. “What the hell was that thing?” he hears in the distance before the voice moves closer to the receiver. It’s Avery Quinn. He can distinguish his voice easily now, having been listening to it to keep him sane for the past two weeks.

“We can’t see you on short-range scans anymore, so we’re probably out of visual for you, but we’re mostly intact,” Avery tells him wearily. “We took some nasty damage to boosters. It’s not crippling, but we’ll need to dock on a station to get it fixed. I can’t-“ He swallows audibly. “I can’t put the ship down in this state. Even if I could, chances are that gun’s got more than one charge in it. I’m sorry, but I can’t risk my crew like that.”
I understand, Ryley would tell him if he could broadcast. Hell, if he could speak, because he doesn’t think he’s managed a single word for the past two weeks. Maybe a total of four or five since he crashed on this planet.
Avery clears his throat. “We won’t let you get left behind,” he promises, projecting firmness into his tone. “We’re a ways from the closest outpost, but when we get there we’ll tell the proper authorities and make damn sure they come for you. Hell, once we’re back in one piece we’ll come ourselves, just… don’t die, okay? I owe you one for that warning now, and I always pay my debts.”
“Hang in there. Sunbeam, out.”

They can’t see him, but Ryley salutes in the vague direction of the ship’s contrail.

He’s alone again, truly alone, but at least he doesn’t have more deaths on his conscience. And as much as he genuinely believes Avery will keep his promise and send help back, he knows it won’t matter. Not as long as the gun is running. While the platform is operational, anything that so much as sneezes at the planet will get blasted to smithereens, regardless of where they are relative to its surface. No sane captain would be willing to chance those odds twice in a row to pick up some glorified janitor who’s probably a bioweapon with whatever alien disease he’s got. And no Alterra captain would even consider a detour that would saddle them with a damage bill or a profit hit, no matter how moral they are, because the company would come down on them like a capitalist brick.

He lies there in the baking sun for a while, thinking. He contemplates whether he’s going to die. He contemplates the best way to send some signal home to tell people what happened to him. He contemplates how big his debt will be by now, and whether Alterra’s charging his account for the alien materials he’s been stealing. He doesn’t contemplate how he’s going to get down, because part of him is tempted to end things cleanly and hurl himself off the peak, and the rest is too tired to even consider the climb.

The sun is setting over him now, and the brilliant colours of the sunset vaguely remind him of a thought. Blindly, he pages through his databank until he lands on the log he’s looking for, hitting play and feeling the PDA speakers vibrate dully against his chest. It’s Bart Torgal’s last log. “Marguerit and father are now part of the ecosystem of this incredible planet. It’s reassuring to know that when I go, I’ll join them.”

He’s not totally alone, maybe. There are ghosts here, afterimages of human love and cruelty along with the towering monuments to alien ruthlessness.

It’s reassuring to know that when he goes, the imprint he leaves will be a good one. I did the best I could. I saved the ones I could. I tried as hard as I could, for as long as I could, and if anyone learns anything from me it’ll be that this planet is dangerous. Maybe his death on its surface will be a beacon to the future – stay far, far away, and it won’t claim any more lives.

He closes his eyes and lets the voice of someone long dead, someone who loved this terrifying place, lull him to sleep.

Chapter Text

It’s the middle of his second month on the planet when Ryley finally decides to brave the Aurora.

After his disastrous rendezvous attempt, he had gone home and piled all his collected resources into crafting. New oxygen tanks, glide fins, depth modules for his Seamoth to take it down by nearly a kilometre. And then, despite his massive new range, he doesn’t go anywhere. He spends weeks meticulously scouting the new areas and finding crushed lifepods.

Medical Officer Danby’s, sitting in a crater in dark waters, where the apparently fraudulent doctor had died of the alien bacterium. It had taken him within days, but Ryley’s been infected for weeks now and his only symptoms are itchy skin and a dry cough that won’t go away. Lifepod 4, turned over near the crashed ship with its crew eaten by Reapers. Lifepod 7, with children’s toys floating around its cracked fabricator. Completely nonessential and useless, so naturally Ryley collects them and lines them up by his ‘bed’ section of floor (a pile of fibre mesh and other bits and pieces). The PDA hates it when he does things that don’t directly keep him breathing.

About a week after the Sunbeam’s departure, he gets a transmission from Alterra HQ. It seems like Avery kept his promise to stir up attention, because he’s pretty sure they wouldn’t have bothered so fast if there wasn’t agitation happening on the other end. They tell him they’ve sent blueprints for an escape rocket. Then they devolve into a conversation about sandwiches in between bits of information about the captain’s quarters code.

Maybe he would’ve gone if he hadn’t known about the gun. But he doesn’t want to bother getting blueprints for a ship that’ll get him to becoming another piece of junk in the debris field. Especially not with the Aurora leaking radiation and structurally unstable. So he skirts around the edges of the parts he’s mapped, drives out in one direction until the ground drops out under him and the PDA tells him he’s off the edge of the crater he’s crashed in. Drives out a little further just to see if he’ll pick up the signal of a sunk lifepod, until a huge leviathan comes screaming at him with its hammer head flashing with bioluminescence, which he runs away from and decides he doesn’t want to go out there anymore.

Down in the other direction he finally dives to the last Degasi base. The water is downright black down there, the only light being the glowing anchor pods and the tips of boomerang fins. He has to hide inside the base from crackling stomach-brained squid that cut his Seamoth’s power whenever they pulse. They have crab legs too. Does everything on this planet have crab tendencies? Crabsquids, crabsnakes, crablike Reaper mandibles, even Warpers kind of have crab mouths, which is weird because he’s never seen one eat any of the things they hunt down.

Finally the last pieces of the puzzle are falling into place. He knows now that they had gotten sick, probably with the same thing he has now. Bart had been searching for a cure. Maida had been bringing him samples. Then she’d dragged home a Reaper, and another one had come after to exact its revenge, and she’d gone out fighting it to the death. Maybe it got Paul too, or maybe something else took him – there are plenty of candidates down here. But still, he doesn’t find any answers about the aliens that shot them down. Nothing but a glowing orange tablet on an abandoned desk.

When he makes it back to his base, he sits the tablet on top of his mod station and stares at it for a while. And he decides that if he’s stuck on this planet, he’s going to damn well figure it out to the tiniest detail. He’s going to die having scanned every fish and searched every wreck and found every stupid alien installation and taken them apart. He’s going to find out exactly what brought him here and why. And if he’s going to do that, he needs more equipment. The Peeper is solid and reliable but it can only go so deep, and he can’t mine the bigger deposits without a drill. He needs the blueprints that he can only find on the Aurora.

Acutely conscious of the fireball that started up when the engines blew, he fabricates some extra fire extinguishers and packs them into his Seamoth locker. He charges the batteries up for his scanner and laser cutter, slings his prop cannon over his shoulder like he’s cosplaying an action hero and sets off to brave the flaming wreckage of his former home.

He stays low in the water, hugging the sandy dunes that lead up to the ship and pulling into crevices where he can. There are Reapers patrolling the area. Of course the ugly, angry, mean ones are the only ones that can tolerate the radiation. There are a couple of brave stalkers hunting for metal as well, and he winces when he sees one crunched like a snack by a screeching Reaper. Sure, he doesn’t like them much, but no one deserves that. Fortunately its prey distracts the leviathan long enough for Ryley to speed past it and make for the dubious safety of the wrecked ship.

At the ship’s side the hull is gouged open, steel spars protruding from the gaping hole like broken ribs over a massive chest wound. He shivers as he pulls the Peeper to the surface. It feels strangely perverse to creep inside this way, like the ship has been killed and he’s floating inside its corpse. There are some people with superstitions about the ‘souls’ of vessels, beyond just the general level to which most technical staff treat them like people. He’s sure as hell ascribed a personality to the Peeper. Now he’s starting to understand why they think so – it wasn’t as though the Aurora felt ‘alive’ while he was on it, but it feels dead now.

He reluctantly leaves the sub, pulling it out as far as he can into the shallow water where Reapers can’t reach it. They aren’t coming in here, at least as far as he can see, but better safe than sorry. There’s a massive section of internal floor that’s collapsed into the water like a ramp. He makes his way up it as carefully as he can, dropping to hands and knees for balance when the ship rumbles. “Warning: ship’s structural integrity is low,” says the PDA.

No fucking shit, says Ryley mentally. He has eyes. He can see the ship’s warped, buckled skeleton and sloughed-off skin. He doesn’t need a databank to tell him that the constant crackling and rumbling isn’t a good sign.

There’s a loud chitter behind him, and he whips around with knife in hand to see a pile of cave crawlers. Fuck. Of course they’re here in droves. Too many to hack through, so he unslings his new cannon and aims it towards one leaping at his face.

It catches it in mid-air, and Ryley takes great satisfaction in the loud crunch that emanates when he launches it into its fellows. Oh yeah, he likes the cannon. He likes it a lot. It’s downright therapeutic to toss the crawlies at half the speed of sound into other crawlies or out to the Reaper-infested water. He takes a few slashes from the faster ones, but small price to pay.

In true Alterra fashion, the PDA only tells him after he’s dispatched most of them that their digestive tracts ‘contain human tissues’. He shudders violently, trying not to think too hard about that. They’re carrion feeders, so chances are they didn’t kill anyone, just… ‘cleaned up’ after the crash. But he knows they can be aggressive. Wouldn’t put it past them to mob someone.

Finally he makes it to solid ground, a somewhat intact part of the ship that the crawlers can’t seem to get into. Maybe it’s the fire. There’s a wall of it blazing in the hallway that he has to waste nearly a whole extinguisher just to get past. He stows the cannon again as he contemplates which way to go – admin or cargo?
Eeny meeny miney mo says admin first, so he runs the extinguisher dry clearing out the fires in the corridor. Without them it’s eerily quiet, the ship dark and silent except for the vibrations of the unstable hull.

There’s PDAs inside, but nothing useful, and a poster that he rolls up and steals. It’s not as though there’s anyone to miss it. He can put it up inside his seabase to cover some of that awful white wall. More pertinent are the desks and chairs that he discovers with delight that the scanner can read. He has blueprints for furniture now, he can actually sit in his own habitat, eat at a semi-normal table – if he stocks the vending machine with enough raw material, he can even have potato chips. Just for that alone he doesn’t regret the trip.

Cargo 3 is totally collapsed. There’s materials inside he can scrounge, more fire and another elevator that leads down to a flooded section. He sighs and puts his fins back on, wondering why there can’t be a single section of the ship without a massive environmental hazard. Down in the water he’s more in his element. He searches the damaged Seamoth bay and finds a module left in a station, more fragments that he doesn’t need, and more PDAs with inane details of people’s daily lives. Those are strangely precious in their mediocrity, windows into a life he’ll probably never get back.

Even radiation-suited, he’s hesitant to brave the drive room. But the radiation leakage is getting worse. If he doesn’t try to contain the damage, it’ll render the entire crater uninhabitable, wiping out all those bright alien fish and leaving the place sterilised. That he can’t allow to happen, so he swallows down memories of those friends dying slowly of ARS and pulls out his repair tool. “Do not attempt repair without appropriate qualifications,” warns the PDA. He flips it off. He’s not an expert, but he is still an engineer, thank you very much. Besides, he has zero expertise in deep-sea diving but he's done fine for himself over the last month.

Immediately he can see the problem. The drive core shielding is ruptured, huge gouges marking the pillars where energy buildup inside burst them like rotten fruit. Most of them are immersed, thankfully, or a runaway nuclear explosion would have been a non-insignificant possibility. The upper ones he zaps first to restrict the non-moderated neutron leakage.

“Containment breach repaired. Further breaches detected: 9.”
He groans, but still he dives down into the water. Zaps nine, then eight, then seven. As he’s working on six, something latches onto him and bites.
He flails blindly, bashing at the thing attached to his arm. Knocked free, he catches a brief glimpse of lamprey-like teeth and pulsating tentacles before he stabs it with his knife. It goes limp in the water in a splash of yellow and red blood – his blood, he realises with a wave of nausea. Oversized aquatic tick. He hurriedly scans it, hauling himself back to the safety of the platform to read the databank entry. Bleeder. Carrion feeder with parasitic behaviour.

The PDA says nothing about it being attracted to blood, but he can see that in real time as a swarm of the creatures descend on the corpse. Evidently his own is close enough to what it prefers to be considered a food source, and he really really really doesn’t want to go back in the water with them but the drive cores are shaking again and he has a job to do. Skirting the hungry swarm, he leaps from the platform to the other pillar. As expected, a few detach from the dead one to follow the scent of his bleeding arm, but the propulsion cannon still works underwater and he can use it one-handed.

Repair tool. Zap. Watch the breach start to close. Slash at a bleeder with his knife. Close it further. Launch one away, careful not to slam it into the damaged pillars. Finish the job. Miss a bleeder and have to stab and slash it off his already bitten forearm. By the time he’s working on the last breach he’s racing for time against a cloud of the things, only distracted by the corpses of their fellows floating in the water.

At last the final split closes. There’s a loud hiss of steam that he ignores, too busy throwing himself out of the water and away from the parasites after his blood.

It’s finally quiet. He lies panting on the deck as the PDA tells him the radiation levels are decreasing. He doesn’t bother being annoyed that it can’t even congratulate him on surviving that bullshit – it was programmed by Alterra after all. Take that, personality analysers who said he couldn’t work well under pressure. He can’t think of pressure much higher than fixing a broken reactor core in a dangerously radioactive environment while parasites chase you and try to eat you and/or eat holes in the suit protecting you from said radiation.

Conscious of the tear in his suit, he hauls himself to his feet and makes tracks away from the drive room while he bandages the injury. It’ll take time for the radiation to clear, and without full shielding he’ll be vulnerable. The dosimeter built into the suit says he’s absorbed about 20 rem so far, which isn’t great, but it’s below the threshold that would in theory make him start getting sick. Cross 25 and he’ll be pushing that limit.

The ship’s stopped shuddering after the repairs. It’s unexpected, but definitely not unwelcome as he explores deeper inside. He cuts through the door to the locker room, collecting a few more PDAs – this part of the ship’s more familiar, since he’d hung around it quite a bit before. Beyond the locker room is the collapsed PRAWN bay, and if he’s lucky-

Welp, the bay’s on fire. He pulls out another of his extinguisher collection and douses them enough to get up close. Thank whatever’s up there, there’s three mostly intact and bits of a fourth, which is all he needs to collect the blueprint. That he pins instantly, giggling like an idiot, and if anyone asked he couldn’t have told them whether it’s the blood loss or he’s just fundamentally ten years old at heart. He’s always wanted to drive a PRAWN. He had posters tacked up all around his room when he was a kid. Now he’s alone and probably slowly dying on an alien planet, but at least he gets to go out in a giant mech suit.

Above the bay are living quarters. He ignores the PDA’s urgings to look for the black box and climbs the stairs, breath hitching in his throat. This place is familiar as the back of his hand. He lived here, slept here, ate here for over a year and a half. Now he’s raiding Supply just like he was back then, but it’s for nutrient blocks and water instead of booze. He’s stepping into the tumbled wreckage of Ozzy’s canteen, half expecting his missing friend to call out, but instead all he hears is the roars of fire blazing up around toppled bar tables.

He had thought he was numb after that day on the mountain, but when he steps into the cabin that used to be his and finds it empty and in flames, he can’t help but silently cry.

There’s his bed, shoved up against the wall next to another so that three adult men could pile in space they weren’t meant to fit. There’s the carryalls and water bottles and posters his bunkmates had kept around, cluttering sterile Alterra architecture with the detritus of human habitation. There’s the PRAWN poster he’d tacked up himself, that he pulls down with shaky hands. Family pictures inside burning lockers. Beds neatly made on the morning of the crash. Beds left crumpled where their third-shift occupants had rolled out of them to run for lifepods that never made it to the surface.

He feels kind of like a ghost himself as he walks through the empty hallways, reaching out to touch the living who can’t see him. They’re still there in the things they left. The things that will burn here, or would have burned here if Ryley hadn’t come to collect them up and stow them safely in his pack.

The rest of the ship he makes his way through in a zombie-like haze. He downloads the useless rocket blueprint from the captain’s terminal, fiddles with the comms a little but gives up when he realises they’re too broken even to broadcast a warning to other ships. Dives into the damaged PRAWN bay and feels his way through little corridors to the black box room and the lab. The black box data tells him what he already knew from months of searching: he’s the only one left. He’s been the only one left since eight hours after the crash.

One hundred and fifty-seven passengers. Fifty lifepods on board. Twenty-five launched successfully, nine landed intact, and one survivor.

When he crawls out of the half-collapsed lab entrance into the open, he feels like he’s emerging from the bowels of some mythical hell. The remains of the Aurora are an otherworld of fire and terror, filled with uneasy ghosts that don’t rest peacefully. He’s not sorry to jump into the Peeper and leave it behind. At least now he finally has confirmation that there’s no one else left to search for, and he can grieve them in peace.

When he gets home, he builds himself a proper bed. A single one even though he has the blueprints for a double. An exact replica of his own. And he builds shelves, and piles them with the caps and miniatures and toy cars and stuffed dragons of the people who are gone, and tacks their posters all over every wall until his base is a comfy little memorial, filled with pieces of the lost.

Chapter Text

Now that he has nothing left to lose, there’s nothing to stop him from diving down to the alien facilities.

The only one he has a semi-concrete location for is the one labelled ‘Disease Research’, which is 800 metres down. The Peeper could manage that depth, just about, but it’s prone to getting smashed about. He doesn’t want to tangle with ampeels or crabsquid without extra protection.

Well, to be honest, he really just wants to drive the PRAWN around. But there’s no one to judge him but the fish, so whatever.

He equips it with a drill for harvesting and leaves the other arm free to grab things, which is a big improvement on having to leave the Seamoth every time he wants to salvage some metal or break an outcrop. Contemplates naming it but decides to wait until he goes mad enough to start ascribing a personality to it as well. Besides, he wants to be consistent with his names, and he hasn’t found anything analogous to its shape on the planet yet.

The only tactic he can really think of is to just keep walking until he finds an area with deep enough water to potentially house the facility. It’s easy in the PRAWN because he just falls down to the seafloor anyway unless he’s running the jump jets, which make him feel super cool. It’s like he’s a mech suit pilot from one of the shows he liked as a kid, except those mech suit pilots were usually burly hardcore dudes who could wrestle a bear one-handed. Which is dumb, because it doesn’t matter how strong you are when your limbs are augmented by thousands of newtons of mechanical force. He certainly can’t drill out huge spires of metal the way the PRAWN can.

His first stop is down into the jellyshroom caves. According to the PDA, what he’s looking for is in a cave network, so it’s the logical starting point. There’s proliferations of useful lithium and magnetite to mine as well. Those are a success, but his primary mission is a failure, since the caves don’t go further than about 300 metres in depth. He gets sidetracked for a good afternoon mining what he’ll need for the depth upgrades (if he can find nickel, which he hasn’t so far), humming to himself in pitched nonsense as he works. There are lyrics to the song that he’s just made up, but he can’t quite force out the words to sing them.

“Racking up debt, racking up debt, racking up debt to Alterra. Racking up debt, racking up debt, racking up debt to Alterra.” An almost tuneful clink of metal as he cracks more shale for the sparkling diamonds inside. “Whole ship crashed and I’m out of luck, but those company vampires don’t give a fuck, and I need all the minerals I can get,” he punctuates the last few words with blows from the PRAWN’s grabber arm, “so I’m racking up debt, racking up debt!”

He comes up with increasingly incoherent nonsense verses as he makes his way back home, wishing he had the blueprints for a Cyclops. It’s big enough to serve as a movable base and save him all these trips, but so far he’s only found bits of engines and one bridge fragment.

The next day he goes for the crater edge, reasoning that the deep water around the dunes is a likely candidate for deep caves. Some parts of the blood kelp trenches drop as far as 4 or 5 hundred metres, but it still doesn’t take him down far enough. “This ecological biome matches 7 of the 9 preconditions for terror in humans,” the PDA informs him with what Ryley could swear blind is amusement. Sure, its timbre never changes, but he can just feel the piece of shit laughing at him as he trips over a massive red-white cave crawler and decides to flee for the surface expeditiously. No amount of rubies and benzene ingredients is worth that kind of smoke.

Whatever preconditions it thinks it’s catalogued, Ryley’s pretty sure there are more than 9. He lists them off mentally as he creeps through sandy dunes and giant rocky teeth biting up towards the surface. Darkness is a good one. Spiders, a classic. Creepy lighting. The unknown. Impending doom. Heights. Do depths count as heights? He doesn’t feel great about peering over a precipice into fathoms of black water with no visible bottom, but that’s more of an unknown/darkness thing – it’s not like he’d splatter at the bottom if he jumped. Really it’s in its own subset of ocean-type fears, like drowning and giant sea monsters.

Then again, a lot of fears kind of fall into that ‘not knowing’ bracket. Darkness is only scary because you don’t know what’s hiding in it. A lot of people are scared of death because they don’t know what happens after, stuff like that. Ryley has no clue what happens after you die, but he hopes ghosts aren’t real, because if he kicks it and is doomed to haunt this miserable wet rock ball of a planet for the rest of eternity, he’ll fucking lose it.

As he contemplates the horror of a fate permanently condemned to ectoplasm and undying boredom, the PRAWN crunches its way onto something that sounds more like gravel. It’s a coarser sand that stretches off into the distance for what looks like klicks, but only forms a strip a few hundred metres wide. It kind of looks like a road. Fascinated, Ryley manoeuvres into a vague forward path that follows it down into deeper water. It’s probably natural – he’s seen the aliens’ architectural signature, and they don’t really seem to be into naturalist forms. (It’s more of a blocky brutalist style. They like metal and green, and if they put anything anywhere they need lines of plinths leading up to it. Maybe they’re short-sighted.) But it might lead to something interesting.

“Damage to plant life on the seafloor suggests that this may be the migration path of a huge bottom-dwelling lifeform,” suggests the PDA right as he runs into the back of what looks like a titanic crab. It’s half again as tall as the PRAWN and kicks out at him with long spindly legs, prompting a hasty retreat. Alterra’s slogan, he thinks, really should be ‘better late than never’ considering the quality of its advice.

The crabby thing doesn’t seem particularly interested in chasing once he’s backed off. It keeps thudding forward, kicking up silt and occasionally stopping to root around with its front leg. Not a leg actually, he realises, but a long proboscis-like snout. It walks on its mouth. As fascinatingly gross as that is, the creature doesn’t seem to be as aggressive as most of the big things he’s encountered. It doesn’t even seem to notice him when he tails behind it by a few steps, investigating the rocks in the disturbed sand it leaves behind. Some of them are mineral-bearing.

Huh. Useful. He takes another look at the thing’s two spindly legs and giggles, deciding he’s found a good name for the PRAWN. Sea Treader is pretty cool, and the animal he persistently continues to think of as a big ol’ crab does have an interesting colour scheme to replicate.

He follows its path for another while, crunching through rocks and winding down long tunnels, but doesn’t find any alien stuff. He’s only about 600 metres down anyway, far too high up if the information he has is accurate. He does, however, find more Cyclops pieces until he has a nearly complete blueprint – score! All he needs now is two more engine fragments and he can have a sub big enough to make even a Reaper pause.

It's a long journey back home from where he is, and he’s hungry, thirsty and exhausted by the time gets there, having run out of water bottles and snacks well beforehand. He quenches the thirst by scarfing down half a marblemelon and then collapses into bed like his limbs are made of bricks. By the time he wakes up it’s been something like 18 hours and it’s not just tomorrow, it’s the day after. He doesn’t know time exactly – he has no clock, he can only judge by his PDA’s day count and the position of the sun. The rhythm he’s fallen into is a lot less regimented than normal for Alterra space. He eats when he’s hungry, drinks when he’s thirsty, sleeps when it’s dark or just when he feels like it.

It’s probably the afternoon. He climbs up to the top of the lifepod and lies there in the sun for a while, grimacing when he realises where he’ll need to go next.

The Degasi base is in deep reefs, which the PDA said probably connected to deeper cave networks. He hasn’t gone back there since he searched the place, too perturbed by the proliferation of crabsquids and hunting Warpers that chased after him. The PRAWN, newly named and coloured in dark blue with orange-yellow stripes, is a safer place to hide inside, but he’s still been avoiding the idea of returning.

Warpers especially frighten him. They ignored him when he first crash-landed, but now they stalk him like it’s their job. If he doesn’t manage to outrun them, they warp inside his vehicle and haul him out. He shudders voicelessly as he remembers – the staticky mechanical wail as one blinked near him, the disorienting cry, the moment of mind-numbing terror. For a moment he’d felt it pressed up against him in the Sea Treader’s cockpit, scythe-blade arms hooking into him and wet, slimy body draping over like a cloak. Then he’d been tumbled through a disorienting spin and fallen out into the water, heaving with nausea at the sudden relocation.

He's got a long list of things on this planet that he hates. Warpers are rapidly climbing the ranks of that list. They still haven’t crossed bleeders yet, but they’re giving a good run at it. He would like to curse them out quite a lot, and not for the first time he wishes that his voice would hold. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, after all the money and work and therapy poured into forcing some verbal facility out of him, a few months on this planet would take that all away? If he somehow got home to Alterra just as mute as he had been at nine when they sent him in for experimental neurotherapy?

He hadn’t said his first word until age four. He’d spoken very occasionally after that, had mostly communicated with sign language and AAC tools, and he’d been fine with that. But you couldn’t get a job if you couldn’t talk. No one bothered with sign language, not when advanced implants and surgery could give Deaf people hearing and fix the voiceboxes of people born mute. You could refuse those – he’s heard of people who have, in some trans-govs there are whole communities of people who don’t see those things as a deficiency but a difference to be proud of – but in Alterra space you wouldn’t get anywhere if you did.

Even after centuries of research, no one’s ever cured what he’s got. It’s something you’re born with and die with, and Ryley privately doesn’t think he’d want a cure even if there was one. His ‘disorder’ is part of who he is. But Alterra hadn’t seen it that way, so there’d been years of speech therapy to train him to talk and years of social skills training to learn how to read expressions. And he’d eventually ended up ‘normal’ enough for a glorified janitor job, even if sometimes his pay got docked because he’d had a nonverbal episode or shut down for three hours straight because he couldn’t stand the humming of the lights.

He sighs and climbs back down. It doesn’t matter anyway, because he’s never getting back. And if he did, it’s not like his first problem would be his voice, it would be the millions of credits he owes the company. He’d come back utterly and irreversibly changed by the experience in more ways than just that one, unable to stay inside a habitat when he’d had a whole planet to range. Unable to tolerate nutrient blocks, turning to dust in his mouth like Greek myths had food do once a mortal had tasted ambrosia. He’d wake up from nightmares with ears ringing with the roars of Reapers and the song of Reefbacks.

This planet’s working its way inside him like the bacteria multiplying in his veins. Infecting him like a disease, altering his soul like it’s already altered his body. It’s part of him now.

He sleeps uneasily that night, floating through weightless dreams like his mind is an ocean. He sweeps in a current across the grassy plateaus and falls as a rock to the depths of the blood-kelp trenches. He’s a stalker sharpening his teeth on a titanium outcrop, he’s a peeper trailing golden enzymes as he drifts through the reefs, he’s an egg sleeping quietly in the dust and silt. Beneath, he sinks into voidlike fathoms of water, down, down, deeper than he’s ever gone before. He’s crushed under tons of rock, battering himself against the walls of a cage that feels like a coffin.

“What… are… you?” whispers a voice, clear in his mind as a clarion call, reaching out from deep below to pull him to Her.

Abruptly he jerks awake, shuddering with inexplicable fear. He’s not drowning. He’s not crushed. He’s lying in his own bed, and the only sounds surrounding him are the hum of the water filter and the buzzing of the lights. That vague tugging in his chest hasn’t disappeared, but it’s quieted to more of an itching urge. Dreams. Just dreams, nothing more. It’s probably the isolation driving his brain to hallucinate voices where he hasn’t heard living ones in months.

Still, oddly restless, he abandons his bed and starts to pack supplies for the journey down. It should be morning soon enough anyway – there’s no problem with an early start. It’ll avoid the risk of reaching the deep once the sun starts setting, forcing him to explore the reefs in the pitch-black night.

He hauls himself into the Sea Treader and hits the jets as it falls free of the moonpool. It jumps and floats over tumbled rocks, thumping down and stirring up sand on bloodgrass plateaus. The planet is undeniably beautiful in the dark. Every creature lights up with new colours, lights shimmering across their bodies in a rainbow of glows. At night the ocean looks like a sky filled with stars. They dive and dart above him, dodging and sometimes smacking into the glass of his cockpit. The plants glow as well, the creepvine forests illuminated with the warm yellow light of seed clusters. He wishes he could blank out his base’s inbuilt lights and use those instead.

The only problem is that the dark makes it hard to navigate. He hangs a left around a huge rock, jumping over the dull orange blaze of a lava vent. At some point he’s gotten turned around – he’s in the Bulb Zone rather than the anchor reefs. Somewhere nearby is Danby’s lifepod, reduced halfway to slag by the vent nearby.

He needs a better vantage point, so he cracks the cockpit and swims up until he can get the lay of the land. It’s not a total loss. He’s pretty sure there’s a few points around here that lead further down, so if he can make it to one of those then he can salvage the trip. On the way back to the PRAWN he gets tangled up in a swarm of hoopfish fleeing from something, having to smack them away with huffs of annoyance. Silly fish. He’s seen them running blindly away from him, from the Seamoth or PRAWN, or even just from a slightly loud noise.

Oh, now he sees what they’re running from. It’s a pretty winged fish with a larger blocky head. Its colours are fascinating – when it flares those big fins they dance with flourishing lights. He’s got the scanner halfway out when he hears a voice.

“Ryley. Ryley. Hey, Ryley!” It’s Ozzy talking to him. He drifts forward in a daze, pulled towards his friend’s voice. Somewhere in the middle distance Ozzy laughs. “Look, I’ve been experimenting, see? You’ve gotta come closer though. Come on. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
But that can’t be right. He remembers, dimly, searching the damaged lifepod. Ozzy’s last logs. Ozzy’s dead, he’s been dead for months. Hasn’t he?
“Come now, Ryley. Come closer. You trust me, don’t you?” It’s Kesandu now, and he can’t think of a reason why that isn’t right. Of course he trusts her. She was the one speech therapist who ever actually listened to him for more than five minutes. She’d been patient even when he stuttered and stumbled over words, sympathetic to the gangly, awkward little boy who couldn’t seem to keep his vowels straight. But that was on 334 near Rigel, and he’s a long way from there now, isn’t he?

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Bart Torgal asks him, and he stumbles over the signs and words to tell him yes it is. “This planet is so wonderful when you stop to look at it. Don’t you want to get closer?”
He does. He reaches out towards the dancing lights, captivated-

Pain strikes through him, sharp and pertinent as a knife, and he tries to recoil in confusion but something’s got him fast. There’s teeth in his arm, at least he thinks they’re teeth, but all the voices are laughing in triumph now and he doesn’t understand-

Something screams past him in a burst of colour, and suddenly he’s free, tumbling backwards in the water in a spray of yellow and red blood. There’s a dive-suited figure grappling with the fish he saw before. Only now does he see its jaws are open, and there’s a dark fanged throat behind the recess in its shell. Still its wings pulse with patterns of colour, dark, fear, he should be helping!
Finally there’s the sharp crack of a knife cutting through flesh and bone, and the lights disappear along with the voices, leaving the water dark again and clouded with blood.

“Nasty things,” says a familiar voice, but Ryley doesn’t have time to parse whether it’s a hallucination as well before he blacks out.

Chapter Text

He comes back to consciousness slowly, squinting against even the dim glow of a warm yellow lamp.

Nothing makes sense. He’s in a bed, but it isn’t his own. The lights are off, which he can’t do in his seabase, and there’s a towel laid over him that he knows he can’t fabricate. When he rolls over to check, his injured arm has been bandaged, the dive suit peeled away where it had been shredded by the winged fish’s bite.

Where is he? He tries to push himself upright, but his head spins and he has to lie back before he falls.

Behind him, he hears a hatch clunk. “Oh, you’re awake,” comes a soft voice. It sounds kind of like his own did last time he spoke – a little raspy from salt and disuse – but more importantly it’s a voice he recognises.
The face that swims into view through his slightly blurry eyes looks nervous. Ryley stares in wonder, sure he’s dreaming or hallucinating. He has to be. Because there’s no way Bart Torgal, over nine years dead and gone, whose PDAs he’s been finding like obituaries, is alive and well and right in front of him.

He doesn’t look like the man Ryley had been fuzzily envisioning in his head. Something about the accent had conjured thick blonde hair and serious blue eyes, but Bart is nearly as dark in colouring as Ryley – dark brown eyes, dark hair, olive undertones washed out by the kind of pallor that comes with illness or not enough sun. His hair’s neatly trimmed, a little messier in the back like he’d done it carefully himself but hadn’t quite been able to get around behind his head. Ryley’s suddenly very conscious of his own dishevelled appearance, his normally gelled hair grown out and stiff with salt water and the places his dive suit’s worn thin and tight over the places he’s bulked up since he fabricated it.

Bart drags out a chair with a dull shuffling noise (metal on carpet, he vaguely recognises) to sit beside him. Now that his vision is clearing he can see that he’s in a large room, the vague shapes of tables and counters indicating a sort of kitchen/eating area. He can hear the low hum of a water filter somewhere nearby. “You’re in my base,” Bart responds to the silent question on his face. “You were attacked by a mesmer – they don’t look like much from far away, they’re only about the size of a large rabbit ray, but they use colour-changing cells on those big fins of theirs for a hypnotic effect. It’s really rather disorienting when you encounter one-“ He cuts himself off self-consciously. “Apologies, I’m rambling. What’s your name?”

Ryley starts to respond, but his voice is still trapped somewhere in his chest and won’t come out. Bart watches him with uncomfortably sympathetic eyes. “Can you speak?” he asks. Awash in shame, he shakes his head ‘no’.
“Do you know any sign language?” is the next question, asked with voice and hands, and Ryley nearly doesn’t parse the latter because it’s been years since anyone signed to him. He’s not even sure how long it’s been – seven, eight years? Longer? He nods shakily, trying to remember how to coordinate brain and fingers with one another.

“Ryley,” he signs, and his hands aren’t really cooperating at the moment and his arm really hurts, so he hopes Bart can make out what he’s saying. “Ryley Robinson, non-essential systems maintenance on the Aurora.” The last part is kind of reflexive and definitely meaningless. He briefly contemplates what else he’d call himself: trained engineer? Amateur deep-sea diver? Professional boomerang catcher? Unreasonably lucky piece of shit?

“Nice to meet you,” Bart says. “I’m-“
“Bart Torgal,” Ryley blurts out just as Bart is saying the same thing.
The other man looks at him like he’s seen a ghost, or maybe like Ryley’s got a shuttlebug on his head and hasn’t noticed yet. “How do you know my name?”
Unable to collect his thoughts enough to explain, Ryley slides his PDA out of the dive suit pocket, opens the databank and offers it to Bart. He takes it tentatively, looking at the collected files. “You found our old bases?” he asks softly, out loud this time because his hands are busy. “I didn’t realise-“ His brow crinkles. “How did you know it was me?”

Ryley taps his throat and Bart laughs. “My voice? I suppose it’s nice to know that hasn’t changed much. I would have thought I’d have deteriorated.” He hands the PDA back carefully. “I suppose I’m at a bit of a disadvantage then. I don’t know anything about you – I didn’t think there was anyone else on this planet.”

Ryley tentatively levers himself up, relieved when his brain doesn’t immediately try to escape through his ears. “You haven’t seen the wreckage?”
Bart shakes his head. “I’m afraid I don’t leave the area much,” he confesses, sounding somewhat embarrassed. “I haven’t gone to the surface in a few months. Your ship crashed here?” His gestures slow down as he contemplates something. “There was a large earthquake not that long ago. I thought it was an eruption down in the active parts of the crater, since it was fairly isolated aside from the aftershocks a few days later.”

Ryley nods. “Might have been the ship hitting.”
“It was a very big earthquake,” Bart says dubiously.
“It was a big ship.” Ryley draws his knees up, realising with mild amusement that his flippers are still on. “Kilometre capital ship. Alterra sent us out – we were supposed to be building a phase gate. We were a couple months away from our destination.” He’s probably rambling a little, and his explanation is definitely disjointed, but Bart keeps watching with that serious little frown deepening the creases between his eyes.

“We crashed,” he says finally, his signs sharp and quick with finality. “Alien gun got us. I made it out in a lifepod. A couple other people did too, but they all died. I was just lucky mine crashed in a safe area and didn’t malfunction.”

“You’re the only survivor?” Bart asks with tentative gestures. There’s a deep sadness in his eyes that mirrors the yawning pit that sits unacknowledged at the bottom of Ryley’s stomach. Ryley nods. He doesn’t give Bart the numbers, but he can see by the other man’s face that he’s extrapolated from the situation there were many Aurora crew that didn’t make it. No capital ship launches with a crew of less than a hundred.

“It crashed near the crater edge,” he adds. “There was a fairly big radiation perimeter after the drive core blew, but it should be dissipating.”
“That would have done a lot of damage.” Bart’s brow furrows again. He has a distinct wrinkle line there that suggests it’s a common expression on him. He signs and talks at the same time, Ryley notices, usually saying the same things, but sometimes his hands manage to say something while his voice goes on about something else. It’s honestly impressive parallel processing – Ryley probably couldn’t do it. He wonders if Bart talks to fill the silence, to keep himself sane. He’s been alone here for a very long time after all. Ryley feels half-mad after a few months, but Bart’s been here for ten years.

“Alien gun?” comes the question a beat later. Bart’s cocked his head up, looking at him with sharp interest. Of course – the Degasi survivors had never found the cause of their crash. Ryley contemplates how best to explain it.

Eventually he just ends up rambling. He tells Bart about his crash-landing, about the things he’d seen in the shallows. About how the Sunbeam’s rescue attempt and how it had failed, because on the island Ryley had found the gun. How he’s looking for the other alien installations, for the cave system he knows must be down here, because he wants answers. He wants to know about the Kharaa and why the aliens want them trapped down here and what the hell is firing off those ominous staticky messages. Bart listens to his whole disconnected rant with the same focused scientific interest that he imparts to everything, watching his hands shake and occasionally halt in their explanation when he loses a train of thought or his arm hurts too much.

“The bacterium – they called it Kharaa?” he questions when Ryley is finished, grim laughter succeeding Ryley’s nod. “Appropriate.”
Ryley tilts his head in confusion. “It’s pretty similar to ‘curse’, in Mongolian,” Bart explains. “I wouldn’t argue with that assessment.” He reaches out, carefully taking Ryley’s hand and examining it. Ryley knows what he’s seeing – the patches of roughened, blistered skin, the places where his skin looks almost cracked because his veins are darkened beneath. “You’re infected,” he says softly.

With Bart’s hands on his own Ryley can see similar marks on his. Patches of scars where the skin is slightly paler. The infection seems to be abated, old, on him, like it had run its course through him and burned out. That’s secondary, though, to the human warmth of someone else touching him. Slightly damp skin from a recent swimming expedition. He can vaguely feel Bart’s pulse. Part of him wants to recoil, so unused to human contact he almost can’t stand it, but part just wants to press himself as close as he can and cling to Bart, hold on to the life and humanity he represents.

“I-“ Bart’s voice cracks a little. “I still have it. The infection, that is. The bacteria’s still in my blood, the symptoms are just suppressed.” He folds his hands over Ryley’s and squeezes, gently, then releases him like he can’t abide it anymore. Ryley doesn’t blame him. It must be strange for him after so long.
“How? Do you know?” It’s a pertinent question either way, since Ryley had been going to ask him either way how he’d survived. His last logs had implied he was getting sicker, but he seems relatively fine now.

Bart half-shrugs. “Not entirely,” he signs with regretful emphasis, “though I wish I did. All I know is that there’s something in the environment that counteracts it. Some of it is an enzyme Peepers carry – I’ve tried to study it, but they don’t seem to generate it in captivity. I’m not sure if that means it’s exogenous or just that they don’t adapt as well to containment.” He sighs, smoothing his hands down the material of his dive suit. “When I left the Grand Reef, we were starting to get ill, but the symptoms weren’t major. I made it back to the island and lived there for a while. After-“ He pauses. “I was afraid of the ocean. But the longer I stayed on land, the sicker I got, and it happened fairly quickly. I noticed infected cave crawlers would die within weeks. If I spent time in the water the symptoms would abate somewhat. It’s not curative, but exposure to those enzymes and other factors in the water can halt disease progress.”

“So you came down here?” Ryley asks, and then he realises and follows that up with “Where are we?”
“The bulb zone. Bordering on the caves, about five hundred metres down.” Bart sighs. “It was as deep as I could get. I have a Seamoth, but it’s fairly battered. I knew there was something down here that shouldn’t be, which is why I came, but then I just stalled out.” He gestures out to the cozy darkness of his kitchen. “So I stayed, and… gave up, I suppose. You’ve gotten further in months than I have in years.” The last is delivered with a twist of wry humour.

“I couldn’t have gotten there without you,” Ryley says, and as dumb as it sounds he means it. “You know those tablets?” He casts around for his pack, certain he had one when he came down. “The alien ones?” Eventually he locates it and fishes out the orange one, showing it to Bart.
“I recognise that one.” Bart taps it with a frown. “Did you find it-“
“On your desk.” He sets the tablet down next to him. “They’re keys,” he explains with a flourish. “The purple one – I found it in your base on the island – unlocked the gun. This one probably works on one of the ones deeper down.”

“Ah.” Bart lights up with fascination. “Of course, that makes sense. They’re awfully large for keys, but I suppose they contain some kind of chip or recognition technology.” The tablet is patted absently and then moved aside. “I’d love to keep interrogating you about everything you’ve seen here,” he says with a self-deprecating snort, “and I’m sure you want to keep looking for that facility, but you need rest. That arm injury might not be permanently damaging but it isn’t minor either.”

Ryley takes a look, peeling the bandages back to investigate the extent of the damage. Bart sighs but doesn’t stop him – yeah, he knows poking at it won’t help, but he’s morbidly curious. It’s not as bad as it could be, but it isn’t pretty. The mesmer’s bite has sliced a jagged tear either side of his forearm. It’s starting to knit together, probably aided by bandage gunk, but he has to agree with Bart that he’d rather not go dunk his open wound into Kharaa-infested water.

“I’ll live,” he signs with a sigh. “If you don’t mind me being here-“
Bart laughs. “Mind? I most certainly do not. It’s… nice, having company. It’s been quite a while since I spoke to anyone who could respond in anything other than squeaks and chitters.” He abruptly stands up, pushing the chair back out of the way. “I’ll fabricate you a proper bed. I just made this one out here because it was near the medkit fabricator.” He wrinkles his nose. “And I didn’t want to get the carpet wet. But the water filter’ll drive you mad trying to sleep out here.”

He grabs what Ryley recognises as a battered habitat builder, mumbling to himself. “-no space in the alien containment, can’t move the growbeds, bioreactor makes too much noise- could you sleep in the observatory?” He answers his own question before Ryley can even lift his hands to reply that he doesn’t mind where Bart puts him. “No, too cold up there.” He worries at his lower lip with a sort of generalised low-grade nervousness that Ryley sees all the time in the mirror. “There’s plenty of extra space in my bedroom,” he finally says. “I’m afraid I’ve wasted all my floor space on plants everywhere else. I’m more of a night owl anyway, so I won’t disturb you, but if it’s too- you know, I can build a new compartment-“

“I don’t mind if you don’t,” Ryley signs again, and Bart nods.
“Alright, then, I’ll set up and you can go get changed. Nobody wants to sleep in their dive suit.” Ryley elects not to tell him that actually, he has been sleeping in his dive suit for the past few months. “The fabricator’s set to my measurements, but you’re not so far off my size that they wouldn’t fit. The washroom’s through there too.” Bart briefly touches his shoulder, the warmth of his palm lingering even after he’s stood up to leave.

He's exhausted and not exactly steady on his feet, but when he wobbles in the direction Bart pointed him, he finds out that there’s actually a proper bathroom and not just an Alterra-style bare concession to sanitation. He hasn’t showered in months – short of his ritual of swimming mostly naked to wash off the sweat the suit tends to trap, dragging said suit inside out to sort of wash it as well, he hasn’t had any way of doing it. Even a quick shower feels like an ungodly luxury, and there’s soap. It smells like vaguely herbal creepvine oil. He scrubs himself until the parts of his skin he can reach have turned from brown to red, even unwinding the bandages from his arm to carefully wash the wound as well.

Stars, it feels good to be clean. Actually clean, not just mostly not dirty. He almost feels like his old self again.

Of course, getting the salt out of his hair won’t fix it, not without proper colourwash and hair gel. And no amount of scrubbing will take off his planetary suntan. But he feels a whole lot more normal dressed in a loose grey t-shirt and shorts than being perpetually in his swim gear. He thinks Bart might have underestimated their difference in measurements – the other man’s a fair bit taller, even if he’s only marginally narrower in build.

Bart’s room is cozily lit, the alloy floors covered with thick-woven rugs and the walls adorned with pictures. There’s a bit of a glow from through the curtained window (from the creepvines, Bart tells him, he cultivates them there). Part of Ryley wants to soak in all the little details, the marks of human life that make this place feel like a home rather than just a place to sleep, but he’s so tired he collapses into the bed Bart’s fabricated for him before he can motivate himself to do so.

The last thing he vaguely parses is a low chuckle before he lets himself be swallowed up by the deep ocean of sleep.

Chapter Text

When Ryley wakes up, it’s still mostly dark, but he can hear tuneless humming and the clattering of dishes from outside.

He disentangles himself from the sheets and stands up, stretching stiff joints until they pop. His arm’s still sore but the wound has closed, leaving only jagged red lines. Modern medicine is pretty fantastic. Still, he’ll have another scar to add to his collection, which has grown significantly since landing on this planet.

When he tentatively peeks around the doorframe to see where Bart’s gone, he blinks in surprise. He’s cooking. Not ‘put fish in the fabricator and wait’ cooking, but actual bona fide cooking, with a stove and everything. Bart looks up from slicing a potato and smiles at him. “Morning! Well, early afternoon, I suppose, but it doesn’t make all that much difference down here. Did you sleep well?”
Ryley ducks his head in vague embarrassment, flushing. “I did, thank you,” he signs. “You’re cooking?”

“Yes, it’s one skill I’ve found quite useful down here.” He wrinkles his nose. “The fabricator is surprisingly bad at synthesising decent Terra-style analogues from what grows here, and it has no concept of flavour balance. Once I ran out of processed nutrient stores, it was either do it by hand or resign myself to a diet of unseasoned fish and raw vegetables. Besides, I prefer using fresh ingredients to synthetic anyway.” He gestures at the stove, where he has mashed potatoes frying in what appears to be creepvine oil. “I’m no chef, but I do alright for myself.”

“I wouldn’t know the difference,” Ryley signs with a sigh. “I don’t know how to cook at all.”
Bart raises an eyebrow. “You never learned? Oh, right, you’re Alterran. I suppose you wouldn’t have.” He’s wearing that serious, almost sad little frown again. “I apologise, I’m slandering your trans-gov awfully. I’m sure they’re perfectly fine, I just instinctively distrust anyone who claims to have no obligation to protect their citizens and essentially subjects those who fall on bad times to debt slavery- oh dear I’m putting my foot in my mouth again.”
Ryley breaks into a bright peal of laughter, the first time he has in what feels like years. “It’s alright,” he signs, “I don’t like them much either.” And that makes Bart laugh too, and they both stand there in the kitchen in a fit of giggles until they’re breathless and leaning on the counters for support. It feels good. Ryley’s missed jokes. He’s missed humour. He’s missed other people, as much as he’s always been a bit leery of them. The need for human connection runs far deeper in his blood than the autistic antipathy to confusing social interactions – and Bart’s easy to talk to like no one else he’s ever met.

By the time they’re coherent again the potatoes are done. Slightly more than done, actually, and Bart has to hurriedly pull the frying pan off the stove before they burn in earnest. “That’s one thing the fabricator never does – burn the food,” he says with a twist of wry humour. “I hope you don’t mind your hash browns well done.”
He has plates and cups too, and cutlery, so they can sit at a table and eat like civilized beings. Ryley occupies his hands with knife and fork so that he doesn’t say anything embarrassing. Hash browns, even slightly burnt, are crunchy and delicious, and sweet marblemelon juice is just as good. He sees what Bart meant about preferring fresh ingredients – something about food that isn’t reconstructed or rehydrated just tastes better. No wonder it’s a luxury in Alterra. Sure, nutrient blocks are healthy and nutritionally complete, but there’s a certain simple pleasure in eating something that actually tastes good.

“Better than fabricator fish?” Bart asks with an undertone of mirth in his voice, and Ryley nods emphatically.
“I would rather eat acid mushrooms,” he signs emphatically, “raw, than bite into another holefish.”
Bart grimaces. “They’re so gelatinous. I just can’t stand it. It’s worse than eyeballs.”

Eventually they get round to more relevant topics, and Ryley asks “How come you have so much…” He waves his hand vaguely. “Non-survival stuff? My PDA scrubbed every blueprint that wasn’t relevant when I crashed.”
Bart frowns. “That seems stupid. You never know what might be useful in any situation.”
“Corporate policy,” Ryley signs witheringly, the tone of his gestures making it very clear exactly what he thinks of corporate policy. “For the first couple months I had to sleep on the floor in my seabase because beds weren’t survival tools. I had to go to the crash site and scan furniture before I could synthesise any of it. And I still don’t have blueprints for anything that isn’t protective gear, survival equipment or seabase modules, aside from what I scrounged from the Aurora.”

The look on Bart’s face is a combination of surprise and downright disgust. It’s somewhat reassuring that he’s not the only one who thinks Alterra policy is spaceflot, especially when it comes to the relative necessity of human comforts. “I am finding it very hard to maintain a shred of respect for your corporation,” he says in a measured voice that hints that he’d like to say a few less politic things as well. He sighs. “When we crashed, we were heading out to establish a new mining venture – I was supposed to lead it. Father ordered the detour here because he thought the planet might have mineral resources. He thought it might be worth considering establishing a colony so we could attract families as well as hardened spacemen.”

Ryley listens with fascination as Bart continues. “At least he had the sense to plan for contingencies. We had loaded slates of blueprints in the Degasi’s databanks. Submarines, dive gear, mineral detectors, that sort of thing. Habitation modules as well. The idea was that if the planet turned out to be worth staking, we’d set up an interim base down here to establish a claim. Leave one of the crew to maintain it so they could claim habitation, then pick them up when the ship returned a couple months later.” He grimaces. “You know how that part went. But that meant that when we crashed, Marguerit could salvage the ship’s data and the blueprints on it – which included the necessities to make a base liveable for long stretches.”

“Can you really just call dibs on a planet?” Ryley asks incredulously.
Bart laughs. “Absolutely! How do you think colonies are usually established? If it’s outside the recognised reach of a trans-gov, it’s fair game. The person who claims stake to the planet does so on behalf of a company or government, and the laws of whatever trans-gov they belong to are the ones that apply.”

“So do you own this planet now?”
Bart tilts his head, brow creasing as though he’s never thought of it before. “The standard is, I believe, a year or more of self-sufficient habitation to claim automatic title. I’ve been living here for ten years. So yes,” he says slowly, “I believe I might.” He levels Ryley with an amused glare. “Which means we’re subject to Mongolian law down here, and under that standard I believe Alterra may have contravened several of your rights.”

“Good luck getting anywhere with that,” Ryley signs wearily. “According to Alterra I owe them just under a billion credits.”
Bart actually rises half-out of his chair at that, spitting out an incredulous “What?”
Ryley explains the situation, pulling out his PDA to show Bart the data file itemising his material use. Bart listens with a steadily angrier expression, his eyebrows sitting like heavy dark clouds over his face. “I am shocked,” he says very evenly when Ryley finishes. “Scratch that. I am extremely shocked that any company could get away with that kind of audacity. To start with, their valuations for some of your collected minerals are ridiculously inflated – now don’t give me that look, my father owned a mining company, I would know – not to even get into the complete bastardry of attempting to charge you for materials you collected in the course of surviving a shipwreck. By all rights, even if the crash counts as an act of God de jure, you should be compensated for the hardship you endured while under contract. The fact that Alterra is still allowed to argue that they have no responsibility to citizens of their space who are not their employees is absurd, and the fact that they apparently have no responsibility to their employees either is laughable.”

Ryley spreads his hands in the universal gesture of ‘so what’. Arguing with Alterra is like yelling at the moon. You can complain all you want, but unless you’re going to sever your contract with the company (and pay fees to boot) to move to some other trans-gov, you don’t have much recourse. Bart tips back in his chair. “I dislike Alterra,” he says meditatively. “Of course, after so long down here I find myself struggling to find much interest in matters of corporate governance and the like, but I believe I dislike Alterra particularly strongly.” He sighs. “Although I suppose it doesn’t matter very much now. They can’t reach you down here. If what you’ve said is true, no one can.”
“Silver linings,” Ryley signs with a bitter twist of his lip. “I suppose it could always be worse.”
“It could.” A slight smile crosses Bart’s face. “We could have crashed on some catastrophically boring planet and had to survive on stankroot and tree roaches.”
Ryley groans. “If I hear,” he signs with cutting gestures, “one more Craig McGill reference, I’m going to commit some sort of crime.”

They talk about inane nothing as they clear away the dishes. Ryley tells Bart about the latest slate of terrible holovids and the current political manoeuvring in the Ariadne Arm, and in return Bart tells him about peeper brains. Apparently peepers have some degree of minor sapience, but oculi, which Bart thinks are closely related, are dumb as rocks. They devolve into a tangent about peepers for a while, although Bart does most of the talking, since Ryley’s no biologist and couldn’t even begin to guess. He does however proffer the thought that peepers have soulful eyes while oculi stare like there’s absolutely nothing going on behind theirs. According to Bart, there actually isn’t, since the eyeball takes up the entire body cavity and the brain is actually located back toward the tail.

“I have peepers here actually,” Bart says like he’s just remembered. “I breed them in containment.” He looks vaguely embarrassed. “I should show you around, shouldn’t I?”
“I’d like that,” Ryley signs. He laughs. “Do you eat them? The peepers, I mean.”
“Nah, I’d feel too bad. I have no compunctions about oculi or boomerangs – it’s hard to hold onto that ingrained disgust when fish are one of your only food sources – but peepers look so terribly sad when you catch them that I don’t think I could stomach it.” Ryley concurs with that assessment, having been somewhat traumatised by his one time eating one. That and the goopy eyeballs.

True to his word, Bart leads him around the base. In one of the partitioned rooms on the same level he has a bioreactor, the empty corners occupied with planted growbeds full of low shrubs and mushrooms. “The pink caps are edible if you cook them, but not raw,” he explains. “The rattles you can’t eat, but they make good bioreactor fuel because they grow so fast.”
Ryley picks one up and shakes it demonstratively. “Good musical instrument,” he comments. “What are they called? Maracas?” Bart laughs at that. He takes the rattle and shows Ryley the best way to crack one open, collecting the little spores inside that make the noise and feeding the shell to the bioreactor. It gives two solar panels’ worth of energy, which makes Ryley raise an eyebrow.

The next compartment connects to a ladder, which leads to more rooms on top of the big one. To the left is a containment unit planted with jellyshrooms and filled with oculi. A small crabsnake peeks out of one of the glowing fungi. “She’s too small to hunt the oculi, so I feed her scraps.” Bart taps on the glass to demonstrate how the snake lunges but doesn’t sink her fangs in.
Ryley peers inside, fascinated. “How come she’s so little?”
“Not sure. I hatched a few in here to study, but I had to release most once they got too big. This one just never outgrew her shroom.” He pats the tank with vague affection. “I named her Marguerit,” he admits, the tips of his ears red with embarrassment. “She’s a little terror. She’ll go after anything that moves, even if it’s more than twice her size.”
Ryley thinks about the logs Marguerit the human had left, how she’d hunted sea monsters and fought a Reaper to the death. “It’s a good name,” he signs, watching Marguerit the crabsnake throw herself at an oculus that ventures too close to her shroom.

In the next room is another containment unit, this one stacked two high and landscaped to resemble the shallows. Inside are peepers, boomerangs, hoopfish – even a few rabbit rays. “It’s my best shot at replicating their natural habitat,” Bart explains. “I’m trying to figure out why they don’t produce the enzyme in captivity. There could be any number of factors involved – diet, interdependent fauna and flora, the water temperature – or maybe they’re intelligent enough to know I’m studying them and they do it to spite me. I’ve tried almost everything but that hypothesis. Even introducing gas pods to see if that had something to do with it.” Ryley grimaces in sympathy, all too familiar with the difficulty of collecting the pods before they burst and poison you. He doesn’t like gasopods much. They’re mostly harmless, but there’s something inordinately creepy about their gas-mask faces and crazy laugh.

“Maybe they only produce it in response to the Kharaa?” he offers.
Bart sighs. “If only. I’ve tried introducing Kharaa-infected fish, and all that gets me is a tank full of diseased peepers. They die off within four days, no immunity, at least not that I can decipher. I’m leaning on the theory that they get the enzyme from somewhere else, but where is the thing I can’t figure out.” They skirt around the tank, Ryley looking in and wondering if the peepers really are that smart. They seem to watch him and Bart passing, but he can’t tell if they’re automatically tracking a potential predator or just curious.

In the last unit is an absolute explosion of plants. Ryley stops dead in his tracks for a moment, inhaling the smell of greenery and drinking in the sight of vine-crowded walls and lantern trees with great canopies brushing the domed roof.  Bart turns his face up to the artificial sun with a brilliant smile. “My pride and joy,” he says, imbuing the words with a hint of self-deprecating humour, but Ryley can see in his expression just how much he loves this place.

Filling the growbeds are every plant Ryley’s seen on the planet and more. Lantern trees that must be years old to have grown so tall, branches weighed down by brightly coloured fruits. Vase-like ming plants, low fern palms, beds of marblemelons and potatoes, orange jaffa cups big enough to sit inside comfortably. The air is warmer and more humid than the rest of the base. Bart must be one hell of a gardener to have cultivated all of these with so much success. On some of the bulbo trees he can see the marks of grafting and staking to keep them growing straight.

“It’s beautiful,” he says softly, the first words he’s spoken aloud in a long time. His voice is a downright embarrassing rasp, barely audible, but Bart turns to him with a beaming smile. “I’m glad you think so.”
“You have a lovely voice,” he adds quietly, with total sincerity, and Ryley blushes furiously and shakes his head.

The last level of the base is attached to a corridor off the peeper room. It’s a tall ladder that leads up to the moonpool where Bart docks his battered Seamoth, with an observatory attached to the other end that looks out over the whole base. From the high vantage point Ryley can see a veritable forest of exterior growbeds, glowing with disparate flora from all over the crater. Gel sacks are lined up in neat rows next to delicate regress shells and rouge cradles. Bloodvines from the deep trenches grow out of place next to native spotted dockleaf and bulb bushes, all of them casting dim light from bioluminescent leaves and seed pods.

“How long did that take you to cultivate?” he asks.
“Years.” Bart smiles wryly. “Most of them are useless, too. You can’t eat them or use them for crafting. But this planet is full of so many beautiful plants that I couldn’t resist bringing as many as I could here.”

“No deep shrooms?”
Bart gives him an embarrassed look. “I have my reasons.”
“Which are?”
“You’ll laugh at me.”
Ryley schools his expression. “I promise I won’t.”
Bart deliberately looks off into the distance instead of at him, red from the tips of his ears to the collar of his shirt. “They look like buttholes.”

Ryley tries, he really tries, but he can’t choke off a wheezing breath that threatens to break into full-blown laughter. “It’s not like I don’t grow them at all!” Bart defends. “They’re useful, I just don’t like the look of them. I keep the growbed under the habitat foundation – they grow better in the dark anyway, so it’s not like I- oh, come on.”
Ryley’s laughing in earnest now, doubled over nearly in half. “Like buttholes!”
“Well they do. Surely you’ve noticed that.”
His sides hurt at this point and he can barely muster the breath to speak or the motor control to sign. “I mean, they kind of do- I just never really-“ and he’s breaking into uncontrollable giggles again.

Bart waits for him to catch his breath with a martyred look. “You are terribly immature,” he mumbles, but there’s a hint of a smile on his face that belies his tone. “How old are you anyway?”
“Twenty-seven,” Ryley says with as straight a face as he can muster, “but I’ve always been about nine at heart. It’s not as though you’re that much older than me anyway.”
“No, I’m not.” Bart shrugs. “Sometimes I forget how old I am. It’s not as though I bother keeping time much. But I am twenty-nine, I suppose.” He cracks a grin. “Which makes me eleven. At heart, that is.”

They laugh together, and for that moment the rest of the world doesn’t matter. Aliens and peepers and lost friends and lonely years don’t matter. There’s only the two of them, and this little oasis, a garden beneath the sea.

Chapter Text

Ryley stays with Bart for another couple of weeks, although it could have been longer, before he feels the tugging again.

It’s easy to lose track of time, living down here. The sun filters down only a little and so the only sign of day and night is whether the lights are on. Bart shows him the nearby caves that hold useful minerals and how to dodge a boneshark more effectively, and makes the attempt to start teaching him to cook. Ryley’s downright awful at it but he tries, and Bart is a patient teacher, so eventually he manages to cook vegetables without burning them and fry boomerang fillets with salt and the vinegar Bart’s created by fermenting lantern fruit juice.

Lantern fruit juice also makes a good alcohol, about as strong as grape wine. It’s surprising how much you can make out of a few ingredients with some knowledge. Ryley sorely lacks it, but is fascinated. Bart explains that his digi-training, although most of it was practical biology, finance and languages, also included some tangents. One of his specific interests was Old Terran history, and from that course of study he learned a lot about the archaic ways of doing things that has come in very useful stranded down here.

Bart is full of surprises, and Ryley could listen to him talk all day – does, sometimes. He’s started to infect Ryley with the lack of urgency that comes from years with nothing to do but the tasks he made for himself. There’s always plenty of time. A whole day sitting in a greenhouse doesn’t feel like a mortal sin anymore, not when time isn’t worth money. It’s a currency that, unmoored from the rest of the universe, they can spend on whatever they want. On just drifting with the planet’s steady spin, taking their time to marvel at its beauty and decipher its mysteries.

He doesn’t want to leave, he’s realising. He’s content down here in a way he hasn’t been all his adult life.

But one morning he wakes up from a nightmare that feels distant and alien. It’s the same dream he remembers having back on the surface the day the Sunbeam left – the cage, the darkness, the voice calling to him. She sings in the back of his head and Her song is filled with urgency, crying out in silent anguish. She urges him, Come, She says, I am waiting.

He surfaces from the ocean of sleep trembling and crying out, sheets damp with sweat. The marks of the Kharaa on his skin have stopped itching and started to burn, small dots swelling into larger blisters that feel hot and painful to touch. Bart’s beside him, he realises dimly, one hand on his forehead. “You’re burning up,” he says worriedly.

Ryley struggles for breath, barely able to form words. “Who is She?” he rasps. “I keep hearing Her. She’s calling-“ He breaks into a wracking cough.
Bart wraps his arms around his shoulders and holds him up until the coughing fit passes. “She’s not real, Ryley,” he says softly. “It’s a vision, nothing more. The illness is messing with your mind.” There’s a troubled look on his face, like there’s something he isn’t saying.

“How do you know?”
“Because I heard voices too, on the island, when I was sickest. A woman’s voice asking me for help.” Bart strokes a hand through his damp hair and then lets go of him, pressing him gently back down into the bed. “Stay here. I’ll be back in a moment.”
When he returns he’s carrying a water bottle and a small sample container filled with glowing fluid. It looks like flakes of gold suspended in water, bright and dazzling. “I collected some of the enzyme to analyse,” he explains, “but also in case I ever needed to use it and couldn’t get to the water.” He dips fingers into the fluorescent liquid and catches Ryley’s wrist, dabbing it onto one of the blooming blisters on his hand.

Nothing happens.

“I don’t-“ Bart swallows. “That should have worked. It always has for me. I collected that less than a month ago, it should still be effective-“ He trails off, looking like someone’s just punched him in the face. Ryley can guess what he’s thinking.
“It doesn’t always work, does it?” he asks quietly.
Bart bows his head, eyes closed in pain. “I’ve tested it on slates of Kharaa-infected creatures. It heals the infection in most of them. But some-“ His voice breaks. “Either the infection’s too deeply rooted or their immune system is damaged in some way, but sometimes it can only buy them time.”

Ryley looks down at his blistered skin. He remembers vaguely bits and pieces of the PDA’s report on the disease. Lethal within weeks. He’s seen enough infected animals to know that once the pustules start appearing they don’t have long left. If he’s lucky, and exposure to the enzyme can at least slow the progression, he might have a month to live at most.
“Then I have to go,” he whispers. He doesn’t need to tell Bart where. They both know the only answers lie down, deep down in the caves below the base, as deep as a Seamoth can go and then some. His only hope of survival is that the aliens know something that might be able to save him. His PRAWN has the requisite modules installed – they’d gone to retrieve it a while ago, it’s safely parked beneath the moonpool.

Bart is silent for a long moment, as though at war with himself. “Then I’m coming with you,” he says determinedly. Ryley opens his mouth to protest, but the look on Bart’s face makes him shut it again. “I’ve left a lot of things unsaid and work undone. If you’re going down, then I won’t let you go alone.” He turns his head away slightly. “I’ve gotten used to having you around,” he admits quietly. “And I don’t want to be alone again. If there’s anything I can do to fix this, I have to try.”
“The PRAWN’s a one-person vehicle.”
The corner of Bart’s lip quirks into a smile. “Didn’t you say you had the blueprints for a Cyclops?”
Catching his drift, Ryley starts to grin too. “I do.”

Between their PDAs, they have the requisite plans for the entire sub. Bart has the engine pieces Ryley’s missing. Ryley pins the blueprint and hauls himself out of bed, ignoring the ache in his joints as he joins Bart in searching the seabase lockers. Like any reputable 4546B resident, Bart has stores of titanium and lithium on hand, as well as stalker teeth carefully bundled up in a shelf. What he’s missing is mostly rubies, lead and wiring components. The rest of the raw materials Ryley knows he has in his own lockers.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve gone up to the surface,” Bart comments when he suggests returning to his base. He smiles wryly. “It’s probably time I faced the sun again. I must be sorely Vitamin D deficient.”

They pack quietly. Ryley synthesises a plasteel ingot and packs the leftover metals while Bart harvests vegetables and cooks fish for the journey. He’ll pilot his PRAWN while Bart follows in the Seamoth – it’s faster than swimming, and although it’s an older model than his own it’s still sturdy and reliable. He goes over it with his repair tool and patches anything that looks even vaguely dodgy. Bart joins him in the moonpool at some point during the process and watches in fascination as dents straighten and gouges seal themselves. “I’ve never been much good with machinery,” he comments. “I must say, the repair tool has always seemed to me like magic.” He flourishes a hand. “Abracadabra, and the flaws are all as new!”
Ryley laughs. “It’s just rearranging parts to match the blueprint. It’s no more magic than the fabricator.” He pats the side of the Seamoth, satisfied. “Shipshape and Bristol fashion,” he quotes from some half-remembered book or another. “Ready to go?”

“Yes. I just had to feed Marguerit. The daft thing is over the moon at the moment, since I’ve well and truly oversupplied her.” Bart examines the side of the Seamoth. “I don’t think it even looked this good brand new,” he says dryly.
Ryley grins. “I’m a master of my craft.” He stuffs the repair tool back into his pack and secures the straps of his rebreather. Throwing Bart a salute, he turns and dives into the water.
The Sea Treader is waiting underneath, cockpit sliding open to receive him as he swims closer. “Welcome aboard, captain,” the onboard voice says robotically. Its servos spin and whir as he navigates it carefully up the rock face, freeing space for the Seamoth to drop into the water. He listens to the distant hum of its engines as it spins up and doesn’t hear anything untoward.

Bart pulls it out of the crevice with the deft skill of a long-practiced pilot. They come alongside, face to face through the glass. “Lead on,” Bart signs, gesturing wider than usual to be seen through the blurring effect of the water. Ryley nods. He locks hands and feet into the PRAWN’s controls and hits the jets, swinging it up the cliff and towards the sunlight.

They make their way through forests of bulb bushes, leaping over darkly glowing lava vents and skirting nests of ampeels. Bart pauses as they pass Danby’s lifepod, bringing the Seamoth lower as though to investigate. Ryley catches his eye and shakes his head, grimacing, and so they move on.
Bulb bushes give way to massive branching forests of tree mushrooms. Here Ryley can jump from ‘branch’ to ‘branch’ hundreds of feet above the seafloor, floating suspended in the water where he turns on the thrusters. Hearing a Reaper’s roar, he cuts them and lets himself fall, dropping into the crevices where it can’t reach. Bart knows Reapers too and follows him without hesitation. They sneak under its nose through the fungal forest, carefully navigating the narrow gaps between immense trunks.

Then on they climb up sandy dunes to the grassy plateaus, Ryley ignoring the sand sharks that try to throw themselves at his PRAWN. The armoured suit is impervious to their teeth, but they’re dumb as rocks and still haven’t learned to ignore him. He kicks up silt as he jumps and lands to avoid them.
Finally the ground slopes upwards again, and they’re skimming over flourishing coral reefs and creepvine trenches. Bart’s long-sighted and he spots the smoking vent first, the white habitat compartments peeking up behind the ridge and the bed full of gel sacks that don’t grow here naturally.

“You picked a nice spot,” he signs as he emerges from the Seamoth. “Plenty of space, resources nearby, warm water for a nice hot bath...” His eyes crinkle behind his mask and Ryley can tell he’s ribbing him.
“Pleased you think so,” he signs back. “Come on in, the air’s fine.” With that quip he swims for the bottom of the moonpool and pulls himself inside, pulling off his helmet as he emerges. The Peeper’s still there, faithfully waiting for its captain to return. Bart, who’s followed him, laughs when he sees the colour scheme. “Taking inspiration from nature?”

Ryley goes red. “It’s the bubble cockpit,” he explains. “It looks like a peeper’s eyeball.” Bart can’t argue with that, and he nods as Ryley leads him through a snaking corridor into the base proper.
“Well, it’s not much,” he says, spreading his hands, “but it’s home.”
Bart draws a hand over one of the posters, smiling slightly as he sees the stuffed dragon and ship perched on the shelf by Ryley’s bed. “Where did you get those?”
“Salvaged them from the ship.” He picks up the miniature and shows it to Bart. “That’s what the Aurora looked like – when she was whole, at least. There’s not much left of her now.”

Squeezed by a sudden wave of sadness, he replaces the toy carefully on the shelf and opens the nearest locker. “I know I’ve got some rubies in here. I’ve been hoarding them for months – aha, there we are. There should be lead in that box over there.” He gestures vaguely to another compartment. “I keep it in lab containers because they’re sealed and I don’t want lead powder getting anywhere.”
Bart pulls one out and shows it to him. “Here?”
“Yup. Now all we need is wire and chips. I could have sworn I had some table coral around here-“ He digs into another locker, rummaging through piles of ores and plant samples for the jewelled disks. “Here we go. These, silver, copper, gold.”

The last few components are easy to fabricate. Ryley pulls out some of his stored quartz for the glass. He also pulls out some ion cubes to show Bart, who’s fascinated by the glow of the crystal matrix. “The aliens seem to like green,” he comments. “I wonder if it’s some quirk of their vision, or if they’re just particularly fond of the colour.”
“Maybe we’ll never know.” Ryley holds up the wiring kit in one hand. “Shall we? I have a mobile vehicle bay near here.”

They swim out to the bay, hauling heavy bars of metal along with them. Ryley keeps the less water-friendly components safely in his pack. He has to push the platform out a little into deeper water before they can climb aboard, the narrow plate a tight squeeze for both of them at once.
Bart pauses in stacking ingots onto the vehicle bay’s drone platform, his gaze snapping up to the waters beyond them. He swears a stunned oath in Mongolian, taking an involuntary step backwards. Ryley catches him by the arm before he can fall. “What is it? Is there a-“ When he follows Bart’s gaze, he can see what must have shocked him. Of course. Bart hasn’t surfaced in months. He wouldn’t have seen the ruin of the Aurora.

“Sorry,” he says quietly. “I’ve gotten kind of used to it. I forgot how it must look.”

Bart shakes his head. “Not your fault. You did tell me. I just-“ He breaks off. “It’s one thing to hear and another to see. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ship that big. Or that broken.”
“She’s a skeleton now,” Ryley says quietly. “When I boarded, I felt like I was crawling around inside a corpse. I’ve never been that superstitious, but if hell is real then I think it would look like that.”
“Yeah,” Bart breathes. He shakes his head. “I apologise. Let’s get back to the job at hand.”

They work quietly. It isn’t long before they’ve piled up their collected treasures like an offering to the submarine gods on the platform’s mechanical altar. Ryley activates the constructor drones, tapping through menus and selecting the Cyclops icon. “Don’t tell me I have to move the thing again,” he mutters.
The screen goes black and the drones fly up, laser fabrication modules whirring loudly as they sketch out the sub’s hull in the air. It’s a real beast – Ryley doesn’t think he’s appreciated how big they are until now, seeing a vehicle as big as his entire seabase floating suspended in the air by traction magnets. No wonder it kept telling him to go for deeper water.

“I’d like to see a Reaper try to chew on that,” he says with a laugh as the Cyclops settles into the waves. “Come on. I’ve always wanted to get my hands on a spaceship, and this is the next best thing.”
They dive and swim around it, skirting the massive engines down its sides to the hatch at the very bottom. Ryley trails a hand over the sleek hull appreciatively. It’s a beautiful machine, well-built and designed as much with aesthetics in mind as function. The fact that it isn’t Alterra design probably helps with that.

“Welcome aboard, captain,” it greets him as he climbs through the hatch. Then “Welcome aboard, captain,” again in the same tone of voice, when Bart does the same.
He can’t help but laugh. “Which of us is captain, then?” Bart asks with levity in his tone. “I’m fairly sure you can only have one at once.”
“Shifts?” Ryley offers with a crooked grin. “You can be captain every first day, and I’ll be captain every second. If both of us are sleeping then Marguerit gets the wheel.”
Bart shudders. “Gods preserve us if that little menace had opposable thumbs. We’d never have a moment’s peace.”

The Cyclops has multiple decks. They walk through a narrow, sloped hallway, up through the docking bay and ramp to the engine room. Ryley puts an ear to the massive engines to hear them purr softly, idling but ready to spin up. Built in beside them is an upgrade panel and housing for the Cyclops’ power cells. He pulls a module core out of his pocket and slots it in, grinning as it clicks and the noise of the turbines shifts slightly. “Efficiency module,” he explains at Bart’s questioning look. “I swiped it off the Aurora in case it might be useful later. It cuts power consumption to a third.”

Fore of the engine room is the glass-floored upper section of the vehicle bay. Servo arms sit waiting to catch whatever’s docked. They skirt around the hatch and enter the forward hallway. Behind a bulkhead is the expansive cockpit, control consoles arrayed either side of the pilot’s chair.
Ryley walks forward to the window, looking out into the blue water. “It’ll do,” he says, the beginnings of a grin tugging at his face.

Bart laughs. “Alright then, captain, do you want to do the honours?”

Ryley takes a deep breath, slides into the pilot’s seat, and hits the power. And beneath his feet the ship comes alive. “Engine powering up,” the Cyclops says, lights switching from power-saving dimness to full bright. He can hear the engines rumble as they wake, can see the immense gear-shafts in his mind’s eye where they spin, rotating turbines and propellers.

“Strap in,” he says. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

Chapter Text

It’s two days later by the time they bring the Cyclops down alongside the lights of the base. Most of that time had been spent gathering materials to furnish it and fill its storage, packing anything that might be useful into the steadily increasing ranks of wall lockers. Ryley uses the last of his rubies for the depth upgrade and counts them well spent.

There’s not much space inside for furniture, but Bart lines the upper vehicle bay’s walls with plant pots, ready to grow edible types to keep them fed and watered. Ryley has perfect faith that he’ll be able to convince them to flourish even in those cramped quarters. Unfortunately the Cyclops’ hull can’t tow exterior growbeds, so they have to devote an entire locker to collecting sea plants. Another gets packed with fibre mesh, lubricant and silicone rubber, since it’s far less space-efficient to take the plant cuttings. Ryley denudes an entire cliff face of its table corals and packs them. He also catches some fish and puts them in an aquarium, so they can be dinner later.

The PRAWN is stowed safely in the Cyclops’ vehicle bay. They add in other necessities here and there. Mod station under the decoy launcher. Fabricator and radio on the cockpit walls. A shelf for the dragon and Aurora statue, safely lockable so they won’t become projectiles if the Cyclops hits rough seas.

There’s only enough space in the empty compartment for one double bed. At first they have some vague conversation about sleeping in shifts, but when push comes to shove they end up collapsing into it together, too tired to bother with propriety. It’s not as though Ryley’s never bunked with someone else before – he shared pretty close quarters on the Aurora after all – but it’s different somehow. Maybe it’s long isolation that makes him hyperaware of every point of contact between them.

They fall asleep with a respectable amount of space between their bodies, but by the time they wake up the next morning they’re pressed up against one another. It’s kind of embarrassing, but Ryley finds he doesn’t mind. Sharing body warmth feels as natural as breathing. The human urge for contact, for connection, is more powerful than any conditioning about what’s normal or proper. That and it helps that Bart doesn’t snore or kick in his sleep like his old bunkmate.

When the Cyclops is ready, Ryley’s the one who pilots it down. For all the joke about sharing captaincy, Bart seems to recognise the joy Ryley derives from being at the controls and gladly yields those duties. He sits at the navigator’s desk and switches between monitoring systems and just watching as they drift deeper into dark water. “You’re a natural,” he comments as Ryley swings the unwieldy body of the sub through a narrow trench. “I gave piloting a shot back when I was younger, and the only thing I succeeded at was crashing an awful lot of VR ships. I’m surprised you went into engineering.”

Ryley shrugs. “Wasn’t my choice,” he says, watching the keel camera as he scrapes dangerously close over a ridge. “If you grow up in Alterra space, you get assigned digi-training depending on what the personality profiles say your aptitudes are. The test said I didn’t have the reflexes to be a pilot. I was too timid and didn’t perform under stress.”
“How old were you?”
“Eleven.”
Bart scoffs. “No one’s profile at eleven makes a jot of difference to what they’re like as an adult. When I was eleven my father was convinced I’d never mature enough to be left unsupervised. I’ve been unsupervised for a decade now and I’m doing quite fine for myself.”
“Preaching to the choir,” Ryley says with a snort. “I’d say I perform fairly well under stress, seeing as I’m currently still alive.” He swears as an injudicious pull on the controls dents the hull against a rock he hadn’t noticed. “As much as I love it, this thing handles like a sofa.”

It's a tense few minutes as they navigate carefully down into the canyon. Ryley breathes a sigh of relief as they pull down alongside the lights of the base. “Alright. Here we are.” He powers down the engines and unstraps himself, stretching out stiff shoulders. “What’s left on the to-do list?”
“Clear out the mineral lockers, check on Marguerit, plant cuttings,” Bart lists off. “I’ll go and collect seeds if you do metals? Whoever finishes first can make lunch.”
“Deal.”
They climb into their dive suits and jump free of the sub. Up on the surface it’s safe to swim unmasked and stripped down to shorts, but down here the sudden pressure difference would be highly dangerous if they weren’t suited up. Even further down it’ll be impossible to leave the sub without reinforced gear, not if they want to avoid having lungs crushed by the pressure. The deeper you go the more the sea becomes like space – black, barren, lethal. There’s an animal part of Ryley that gibbers in terror at the idea of venturing down there.

He drowns his long list of fears in the monotonous work of hauling metal out to the Cyclops. He doesn’t pack everything, preferencing the rarer and more useful materials over bog-standard titanium that you can mine anywhere, but it’s still a hard slog. In between trips he sees Bart harvesting acid mushrooms and deep shrooms from the shamefully hidden growbed – he has to stifle a fit of laughter when he sees them packed into a locker. A few fresh lantern fruit, melons and potatoes take up another, stored until the new plants can grow big enough to be harvested. Fortunately the artificial fertilizers that enrich the soil are powerful growth promotants, bringing the faster-growing ones to maturity in days. And 4546B flora are nothing if not fast-growing.

In the end it’s a tie, so they make lunch together, shoulder-to-shoulder in the small kitchen as they roast pink caps and fresh-caught boomerang. The scraps are fed to a delighted Marguerit, who snaps up the bounty as though she hadn’t been in a food coma when they left. “Bottomless pit,” Bart says affectionately. “I’ll miss you.” He sighs. “The containment unit has an automatic feeding module, but I’ll toss in a couple of holefish before we leave. They’re the only fish small enough for her to hunt.”
Marguerit nearly tolerates Ryley now, enough to let him approach her shroom with an offering, but only Bart can pet her without getting snapped at.

She’s still chasing a holefish in circles when they lock up the base and leave the next morning. Ryley’s a little fuzzy from lack of sleep, having been kept awake by uneasy dreams and the growing pain of the Kharaa blisters, but he musters enough focus to navigate the sub carefully down. Bart’s home is perched above a deep valley that leads down into the caves below, firelike corals and strange green pools marking the way. “Brine pools,” Bart says softly as they skim over. “The water inside is extremely salty and dense, so much so that it doesn’t mix with the rest of the ocean. That’s why it collects on the bottom like water in air. It’s just as suffocating to sea creatures as the ocean is to us.”

Ryley watches the keel cameras to pull as low as he can without crashing. Below him he can see the pools merging into bigger puddles, then downright lakes spilling in toxic green falls down the cliff face. Above them swim huge ghostly rays and skeletal, toothy eels, the latter snapping at little bone-white fish. They plunge down a hundred metres, then another hundred, steadily approaching the floor of the Cyclops’ capabilities. Then ahead of them the black throat of the tunnel levels and opens out into a huge cavern. Ryley cries out in alarm, cutting the engines and telling Bart frantically “Turn off the lights!”

Ahead of them, muscular body blinking with bioluminescence, is what Ryley recognises instantly as a ghost leviathan. The greenish tint of the waters it swims in cast its body in a sickly glow. It doesn’t seem to have noticed them, thank god, but he’s all too familiar with the crushing force its hammerlike head can deliver.
“What is that?” Bart asks in a whisper.
“Ghost,” Ryley answers in an equally muted voice. “Leviathan class, aggressive. I’ve only ever seen them out beyond the crater edge. They only feed on tiny plankton but they’re territorial as all hell.” He frowns as the ghost undulates towards them on its patrol, seemingly swimming in aimless circles. “I didn’t get too close to the void ones, but I remember them being a lot bigger than that. This one looks about Cyclops sized.”

“If that’s small, I don’t want to meet the big ones,” Bart murmurs. “A juvenile? The water off the crater edge is kilometres deep. I doubt the larger ones lay their eggs down there. They’re probably hatched in the crater and then migrate out as they grow.”
Ryley grimaces. “Then we have bigger problems. PDA says the babies are carnivores. I don’t think we’d be much more than popcorn to it, but it might think the Cyclops is prey. Why the hell is everything on this planet so big?”
“Number of reasons, probably. Deep-sea gigantism. Lighter gravity. Abundant resources. God hates us.” The last is delivered in the same scientific tone as the others, to the point that it takes Ryley nearly a minute to realise what he said. He has to viciously stifle the laugh that threatens to escape, afraid that any sound will bring the ghost screaming down on them.

“What was the biggest animal on old Terra?” he asks with vague interest.
“Blue whales. Large planktivorous cetaceans, occupied a similar niche to Reefbacks. They were quite intelligent as I recall. The largest were about thirty metres long.”
“You’re kidding,” Ryley whispers. “The biggest thing they had was half a Reaper sized?”
“The largest predator ever to live on Terra was smaller than a crabsnake, and it occupied an outsize mythological position in the human psyche for centuries.” Bart snorts. “I wonder what they would have made of this one?”
“Probably just died on the spot,” Ryley says faintly. “Sometimes I feel like dying on the spot.”

“We’re going to have to get past it,” Bart says.
“We could go home,” Ryley suggests, but his heart isn’t in it. Deep down he knows what they’re going to do. He groans. “Rig the Cyclops for silent running and keep the lights off. I’ll pull us ahead slow and pray it doesn’t notice us until we’re gone.”

The Cyclops’ silent running mode sets the internal lights to an ominous red, which Ryley thinks is totally unnecessary. He winces at the low hum as the engines spin up, watching the ghost through the cockpit window. It’s swimming away from them. He doesn’t dare take his attention from it to check the keel cameras, so he has to coast a little higher in the water than he’d like, pulling up to avoid spikes of rock that threaten to gouge the hull out from under them. “Steady on,” he mutters, patting the console.

They move forward slowly. Ahead, the ghost doubles back on its patrol, approaching them in its aimless circle. It still hasn’t noticed them. Ryley pulls sideways to avoid it as it gets closer, keeping it outside the circle of the sub’s sonar.
The Cyclops can’t strafe like a Seamoth can. He’s pushed it a bit too wide into a turn, dragging the tail back into the ghost’s path. The leviathan screams. Fuck.
“Drop silent running. It’s seen us!” The lights blink back on and Ryley punches the button for flank speed. He can’t run it like this for long – he can already hear the engines wailing in protest.

The sub pitches, lunging forward in the water. Behind it the ghost abandons its patrol and gives chase. It’s pretty fast and it’s already close, so the tail gets bashed heavily before they pull ahead. Ryley breaks into a series of swear words he didn’t even think he was capable of uttering, throwing his whole weight into the controls to counteract the wild pitch. The ghost’s coming up underneath them, mashing the Cyclops up into the roof of the cave.
“Warning! Engine Overheat!” the AI says. Ryley tips the submarine and dives, freeing them from the hammer-and-anvil crush attempt of the ghost. They straighten out in the water, rocking wildly.
“The second we clear the cave, I’ll cut the engines,” he shouts. “Grab the extinguisher. The overheat will set fires.”

Finally they’re out and pulling up into a narrower tunnel. Ryley’s banking that the ghost won’t leave its territory – if they can outrun it and hide, it’ll abandon the chase. If it’s anything like the adults then it won’t go far. He drives the Cyclops into a reckless dive, bringing it as low to the cavern floor as he dares.
The screaming engines fall silent. Behind him Bart abandons his chair and sprints for the engine room. He can hear the crackle of flames die out as the extinguisher hisses, but both are drowned out by the thwarted howling of the ghost. On the sail camera he can see it flipping back and forth in the cave mouth, swinging its wide head around. He isn’t sure how good its eyesight is. They painted the Cyclops dark blue before they came down, attempting to minimise the bright white signal of its plasteel hull, but if the ghost’s four eyeballs give it great vision then they’re totally screwed.

It screeches angrily but doesn’t follow. Either it can’t see them or it doesn’t want to chase, but after a bit of posturing and sabre-rattling it darts off back into the dark water.

“Clear?” Bart asks when he returns, empty extinguisher in hand. They’ll need to fabricate a new one.
“Clear,” Ryley affirms with a sigh. “It’s gone.”

They have to leave the Cyclops to make repairs. Ryley winces when he sees the dents and scars in the hull. “This’ll take a while,” he signs to Bart, grimacing behind the rebreather mask. “You wanna go scan some stuff?” Bart grins and nods, lifting up the scanner in his hand in salute. There’s a proliferation of creatures down here that they’ve never seen before, and Ryley’s willing to bet chasing them down will occupy him for a while.

He drags out the repair tool and sets about straightening buckled plasteel. The sail’s damaged but the bay doors are downright crunched in, bashed by the ghost’s head. Once he’s fixed them up he climbs back into the sub and launches the PRAWN, checking the doors still work. They slide open cleanly.
The PRAWN can dive down into the brine pools where Ryley can’t go unaided. He sinks into one, thumping around in the heavy water and examining the outcrops of minerals. There’s piles and piles of crystal sulfur down here, along with spires of titanium, copper and gold.

“Found something interesting?” Bart signs when he jets his way back up to the river’s shore.
Ryley shrugs. “Nothing alive down there,” he responds, “but bunches of stuff. No more tangling with crashfish for sulfur.” He shows Bart one of the fist-sized yellow chunks.

By the time they climb back into the Cyclops, they have slates of new databank files. Bart’s caught a little bony fish, which at close inspection looks a little like a hoopfish. A lot of things down here seem to have transparent flesh over their bones. The eel-like river prowlers, the spinefish, the ghostrays, the leviathans. Even the amoeboids are see-through aside from their bluish nuclei. It’s like a graveyard of skeletons down here, with the living creatures as dead-looking as the bones that litter the ground.
They’re about 800 metres down now, so they should be approaching the location of the alien facility. And it looks like they are. He can see towering pillars supporting the cave roof above them, casting a bright green glow over a great dragonlike skeleton. Its immense jaws are locked closed like it's gritting its teeth, heavy skull caved in as though from a giant's blow. 

Rising up beyond the pillars is an immense, hostile block of metal, collapsed on its side in the cavern it takes up most of. Cables as wide as a Seamoth hang loose and drooping from anchors in the stone. Ryley instinctively leans away, dropping his pressure on the controls in awe at the sheer size of it. It looks like something out of an old movie – an alien mothership come to destroy the planet, pale green lights flickering ominously in warning. But the glow is dim and the facility is battered and old, like it had been cut from its moorings and left to rust by the aliens long ago. Abandoned amongst the graveyard to rot with the other bones.

“I think we’ve found what we’re looking for,” Bart says slowly. He curses to himself. “I feel stupid. All this time I was sitting right above it, and I never-“
“You couldn’t have. Freediving down here would be suicide.” Ryley swallows. Under the material of his dive suit the Kharaa blisters are burning, lancing down into his nerves and leaving them numb to anything but the pain. Faintly brushing across the edges of his awareness are whispers, too distant to decipher but loud enough that he feels like he could understand if only he listened. “Let’s go,” he bites out, “and get this over with. I feel like I’m going mad down here.”

Bart puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes, worried frown creasing his face. “Will you be alright?” he asks in a low voice.
“I’ll be fine.” Ryley stands up with a shaky breath.

It’s not entirely true. As they jump out into the water, he coughs, pain squeezing his chest like a giant hand. But in the cold, silent ocean, Bart doesn’t hear.

Chapter Text

The dark mouth of the facility is unimpeded by any forcefield. Still, they pack a couple of freshly synthesised purple tablets into the PRAWN’s locker. Ryley gives up the requisite ion cubes without too much angst, telling Bart there’ll probably be more to steal inside the facility.

Inside they take turns, one bringing the Sea Treader through wider hallways while the other investigates smaller openings until their oxygen runs low and they return to the exosuit to recharge it. It’s nearly pitch black inside and completely flooded, furniture tumbled and glass panels shattered. Bart has to be hauled back into the PRAWN sometimes to stop him drowning, too caught up in examining the first true alien architecture he’s encountered. He marvels at ancient bones and preserved rays and a truly immense egg in a case. “Look at the size of that,” he breathes. “Ryley, these are ancient. The aliens must have been gone for centuries to let this kind of disrepair happen.”

Ryley holds him around the waist to stop him diving out again. “Oh no you don’t. Your tanks aren’t recharged yet. Besides, it’s my turn, and I see ion cubes.” They have to awkwardly roll over one another, the cockpit of the PRAWN far too small for two adult men even if neither of them are particularly tall or wide.
“Kleptomaniac,” Bart teases as Ryley dives, making a beeline for the unguarded plinths that hold the glowing crystal.
Ryley makes a face at him through the mask, sticking his tongue out and signing “Finders keepers.” He tosses the cube into the Sea Treader’s inbuilt lockers.

Exploring is much less scary with Bart. It’s still dark and gloomy and unnervingly alien, but he has the other man’s bright laughter and insatiable curiosity to insulate him against the fear.

They wind their way downward into the lower layers, carefully dodging broken glass that could gouge open a dive suit and let the pressure in. Under the specimen room there’s a huge glass tank containing another big skeleton. It’s just under the size of the Cyclops – shorter and bulkier – and has the body construction of a biter or blighter, complete with its tiny cousins’ four eye sockets. Bart trails the length of its body, fascinated. “Definitely a common evolutionary ancestor. I wonder how far back? This type seems to be extinct, or maybe lives in a biome we haven’t gone to yet.” He grimaces. “The Precursors must have left it here to starve when they abandoned the place.”

Ryley raises an eyebrow. “You seem very sure they abandoned it.”
“Well, look around.” Bart spreads his hands and somersaults backwards in the water. “They’re clearly not here. Either they left or they died out, but either way they’re long gone.”
Ryley can’t argue with that assessment, but it leaves something itching uncomfortably at the back of his brain. Considering the sparseness of alien architecture, he doubts this place was their home world – creatures with the technology to build such immense structures and powerful machines would have been space-faring and long since sprawled into every inch of their native system. But if that’s so, why did they come here? And where did they go when they left?

They squeeze back together in the cockpit to compare notes from what they’ve found. Behind a forcefield in the upper room Ryley’s downloaded a slate of research data, while Bart’s scanned nearly every specimen he could get his hands on. It seems clear that the Precursors were trying everything they could to find a cure. Most of the samples look to have been collected for experimentation.

“Small herbivore Gamma – that must be peepers. Death occurs within four days; that seems consistent with what I’ve seen. Large carnivore Theta is probably somewhere down here considering the fossil density. Leviathan embryos, that would be the big egg.” Ryley leans on Bart’s shoulder and watches him scroll as he speaks. “It’s not from a species we’ve seen either. They called it ‘sea dragon’. I’m inclined to believe that given the size of that egg – I’m not sure I’d want to meet the mother that laid it.”

“Unidentified leviathan, caught for study at- oh christ, 1.4 kilometres.” Ryley’s eyes go wide. “They went that deep? I didn’t even think these cave systems went past 900 metres!”
“There must be another system, or else there’s deeper parts of this one,” Bart says, sounding troubled. Ryley’s feeling similar. If the most promising parts of the alien research are secreted away kilometres below, they’ll have to dive deeper if they want to put together the pieces.

Bart squeezes his shoulder in silent reassurance. “We’ll figure it out,” he murmurs. “Come on, there’s more rooms. Maybe we’ll find something else.”

Passing by the megabiter’s tank, they swim into a new specimen room. There’s bits and pieces of biological matter on tables, another data terminal, holy shit is that a warper?
Ryley kicks backward frantically, about to draw his knife, but he realises it’s stationary and dead. He hesitantly approaches.
“Dissection table?” he signs questioningly to Bart. The other man narrows his eyes, then shakes his head, rocking his hand back and forth. As Ryley gets closer he can see what prompted Bart’s denial. The warper has an open chest, but it doesn’t seem to have been cut or broken. At this close remove he can see miniature circuitry wending its way through its empty ribcage. There’s ports and joints open as though to receive pieces – not that were removed, but like they haven’t been added yet.

“It’s a construction line,” he signs with a frown. “This one was being put together. But that means…”
“Warpers aren’t natural,” Bart finishes. He joins Ryley in examining the scattered organs and tissues on the production line, well-preserved by the cold and salty water and whatever the aliens had treated them with. “It makes sense,” he adds, “now I think about it. Their teleportation ability has no match anywhere else in the universe that isn’t artificially created. And they don’t seem to eat what they hunt. If they’re battery powered or something similar, they wouldn’t need to.”

“Programmable hunter-killer,” Ryley reads with a shudder. He gestures vaguely at the constructor assembly. “I suppose the upside is that the population will be limited. There would’ve been a few created back in the day, then when the aliens left none of them could have been repaired or replaced.”
Their data calls them Self-Warping Quarantine Enforcement Units. SWQEUs if you prefer, which Ryley doesn’t (he’s going to stick with ‘warper’, thanks). Now he’s starting to understand their inexplicable behaviour. They hunt the infected. To slow the spread? To prevent some terrible mutation from proliferating?

“It explains why they’re more aggressive to you than me, too,” Bart signs slowly. “My infection is suppressed, but yours is advanced enough for them to notice.” His brows crease. “But why? What would the aliens have gained from trying to eradicate endemic bacteria? If they were already infected-“

“I think we might have an answer,” Ryley interrupts, leaning against the terminal and gripping his PDA with shaky hands. He’d started downloading the data as Bart spoke, and what was on it shocks him to the core. His ears are ringing louder. Bart turns to look at him as he signs, trembling “It isn’t endemic. They brought it here.”

Bart exhales slowly, wide-eyed, and carefully takes his PDA before he drops it. Ryley can see what he’s reading burned into his mind’s eye. Uploaded to core worlds. Confirmed deaths: 14.3 billion. Samples taken to isolated facilities for study.
The Kharaa isn’t natural. It’s alien, brought from distant reaches of the galaxy, from some ravaged world the aliens had tried to settle. And it had wiped their central worlds clean, killing them in the billions, and in their desperation they had brought the curse to this untouched planet and set it free.

So many of the PDA’s theories have incorporated speculation about recent genetic upheavals and extinctions, and now it makes sense. Once the Kharaa was loosed it would have poisoned every part of the planet the peepers’ enzymes couldn’t protect, decimating and killing off species without resistance.

Mid-thought, Ryley starts to feel faint. He breaks into another wracking cough, then another, and then he’s coughing so hard he can’t stop. His skin burns unbearably – he wants to rip off his suit, but that would be dangerous and he’s too weak to do it anyway. Distantly he hears the PDA drop and thud against the floor and Bart call out his name, but the fathoms of water and the terrible ringing drown out all other sound.

There’s an arm around his waist. He’s being held upright, hauled through the water, then he’s in the Sea Treader’s cockpit with Bart pulling off his mask. “Ryley, talk to me,” he pleads. “Please. Tell me you’re alright.”
Ryley gasps for breath, struggling to draw in air against the pain in his chest. “My hands,” he slurs out hoarsely, yanking clumsily at the seals of his gloves. “I can’t-“
Bart peels them off for him. Underneath them his fingers are twitching and his veins are prominent and black. The blisters are visible green pockets on his skin, glowing with an awful toxic light. Ryley closes his eyes, letting his head drop back against Bart’s shoulder so he can’t see. At least the proliferating pustules haven’t marked his face yet. Judging by the pain and numbness they’re most concentrated on his extremities, fading off to smaller spots of fire up his arms and legs. He can hear Bart draw in a shocked breath, can feel his chest move. His ears are working again and they feel hypersensitive now, so tuned that he can hear Bart’s heartbeat as well as feel it against his back.

“We need to get you back to the ship.” Bart says against Ryley’s weak protest. “We’ve covered the place. We know the cure isn’t here.”
“At least check the report,” he mumbles, giving in. Bart’s as stubborn as he is and he’s so, so tired. Everything hurts. Bart sighs in acquiescence, opening the PDA and setting it to decode the facility’s background noise. Beneath him he can feel the Sea Treader move as Bart locks his feet into the control pedals, one hand on the servos and the other wrapped around Ryley’s waist like a seatbelt. He'd laugh but his throat hurts too much.

The ringing’s loud again. He listens to its song as Bart pilots them back to the Cyclops. It’s Her voice, of course, and it’s much easier to make out down here. She soothes him, asks him to come, come down where She can aid him. “I can’t,” he says pleadingly. “I don’t know where you are.”
“Ryley?” Bart asks. “The voices?”
“She’s close,” he mutters feverishly. “I can hear Her.”

As the Cyclops bay doors close, the singing is muted by the heavy metal hull. Bart climbs out and then leans down to haul Ryley free, lifting him with a grunt of effort. Even with Ryley levering what strength he has to help, it’s not easy. He’s wrapped in one of the towels they keep in the bay, flippers detached and dive suit carefully peeled off. He’s only in underwear underneath but he’s too exhausted to have any self-consciousness about his nudity. What does it matter if Bart sees him stripped down? All that’s interesting is the green blisters dotting his limbs and the old scars from old run-ins.

“Don’t worry. The PDA finished compiling before we left,” Bart tells him as he sets him down in their bed. “It’s not much data by these creatures’ standards.”
“What does it say?”
The tablet lies open between them on the entry. He reads along vaguely as Bart talks. “A leviathan attacked. It must have been a true monster to have delivered enough force to breach the facility, but it got in. The damage must have released their Kharaa samples.”
Ryley lies back and stares at the ceiling, thinking. “She was a mother,” he says in a small voice eventually. “They took her baby.”

Bart looks like he’s about to ask Ryley if he’s mad, but then he sees realisation on his face. Of course. The leviathan eggs the Precursors had taken would have had a parent – and the skeleton with its crushed, damaged skull, lying beside the facility, had been an adult in the egg-laying stage.

There’s a strong part of him that rails at the cruelty of the alien scientists. Their callous disregard for the order of this world that had resulted in cataclysm. But dying and desperate, willing to do anything for a cure… in his current state, there’s a stronger part that reluctantly understands. After all, would humans have done any differently? If Alterra had come to this world, they would have wrecked its ecosystems and slaughtered its creatures for far less noble reasons, motivated by profit and utter disregard for beauty. The ugly truth is that the aliens are a lot less alien by nature, and a lot more like people.

Bart strokes a hand through his damp hair. “Sleep, Ryley,” he says softly. “You need rest. We can figure out what to do later.”
Ryley catches his wrist. “Stay?” he asks. He’s not sure what possesses him to make the request. Maybe he’s gotten so used to their closeness that he can’t sleep in an empty bed. Maybe he’s afraid he’ll die alone in his sleep. But somewhere deep down he thinks it’s less logical than that. He just wants to feel alive, feel human, in a way he only does when Bart’s around to remind him of those things. That he’s breathing; that they’re breathing, that they’re still there and still together. Alone he feels like he’s drifting into a dream, slipping further and further from his ties to reality. Already he can feel the song encroaching.

Bart smiles wryly. “Well, I suppose I don’t think I can drive us back up.”
He settles down beside Ryley, wrapping reassuringly steady arms around his shivering shoulders. The feverish hot-cold abates a little when they’re so close, like he can absorb warmth directly and store it against the ravages of the illness gripping him.

Ryley presses his face into his chest and listens to the steady drumbeat of his heart. Lulled by the sounds of their breathing and the low hum of the engines, he drifts off to sleep free of the insistent song.

He dreams still. He dreams of tumbling through dark water, hearing the roars of an immense beast from the deep. He is the cables as they snap and break, he is the building as it lists and tumbles, he is the unhatched egg and the raging mother who dashes herself against metal again and again. He drifts into the brine and rests, long centuries passing as he slowly decays and falls apart into bones and dust. Little creatures come to feed on his remains and he becomes them too, darting and drifting through dark caverns and immense glowing trees.

The ocean rushes through his veins. In his mind’s eye his blood is the salt water, tugged by the tides of immense moons, pulsing in waves through his body. It brings brilliant, ravening life to every cell of his body. He sees himself as though from a distance, asleep in Bart’s arms. His skin looks greyed and pale from the effects of the Kharaa, warm sun-touched brown fading to sickly green undertones, the ocean in his blood washing to the surface.

In the dream he can see the same tides running through Bart and he understands instinctively. The planet is a living thing and they are of it now, and so it is of them. Bart looks up at him, awake and yet unseeing of the ghost that hovers above. He’s pale too, quiet, but in grief and nervousness rather than ill. There’s a fear etched into the lines of his face that Ryley’s never seen awake. “Please be alright,” he says softly with eyes closed. “Please let things be alright. If there’s anyone listening, don’t let me lose him too.”
It’s not quite a prayer, but it’s close. Ryley wishes he could reach out and offer some reassurance. The pain in Bart’s eyes hurts him deep in the distant heart left behind in his body.

Still he drifts, seeing the plants sway softly in the verdant vehicle bay and the fish swim in their aquarium. The peepers turn and watch sometimes. They look at him, directly at him, wherever he is. He senses awareness behind them, an alien mind, and recoils – but it doesn’t come from within but from without. They chirp individual notes that sound like parts of the grand orchestra of Her voice.

He floats among them for a while, comforted by the quiet. Somewhere in the distance he hears Bart’s breathing, slow and even as he finally drifts off. He wonders if Bart is dreaming too.

The ocean washes over again, and he lets his fuzzy awareness go again, deep into the dark safety of true unconsciousness.

Chapter Text

By the time they wake up, Ryley’s feeling slightly better. His hands still hurt but they aren’t useless, and the coughing has subsided thanks in part to a bitter-tasting drink Bart’s thrown together from an old fabricator recipe. He’s in good enough shape to pilot, which is well enough, because Bart’s attempt at pulling them free of the research facility’s cavern has turned the Cyclops around and bashed a few dents in its hull. He sits in the second officer’s chair, shaking his head bemusedly as Ryley guides the sub smoothly over the tangled mess of rock. “I’ll tell you, I have an entirely new appreciation for your skills,” he says with a laugh in his voice, “now that I’m faced with my own utter incompetence.”

Ryley grins, unable to suppress the flush of pride that warms his chest. “It’s just practice. I spent half my leisure credits on simulator time for years. Besides, if you were totally incompetent you would’ve sunk the thing.”
The detour has gotten them a bit lost though, and they have to work their way through winding tunnels to find the mouth of the cave they entered through. They skirt glow-tipped trees bustling with rays and great rapid-like tumbles of the brine river. Exiting the cavern they find themselves drifting through a field of immense bones, ribs like great curved trees reaching up towards the low stone roof.

Bart whistles incredulously. “Gods, look at that thing,” he says in an awed whisper as the Cyclops pulls alongside a skull bigger than it is.
Hearing the distant wail of a patrolling ghost, Ryley backs the sub underneath immense fangs and into the monster’s jaws, hidden safely from the hunting leviathan. It fits with room to spare, making him shiver at the thought of how easily the living creature could’ve eaten them. The Cyclops would’ve been popcorn to it in the same way they’d be popcorn for a ghost.

“This thing can’t be real,” Bart whispers, looking out of the cockpit at teeth bigger than the PRAWN. “The skull alone is as big as the biggest things we’ve seen alive on the planet. The PDA says what we’re seeing is a third of the skeleton – that would make it a kilometre long, Ryley. Nothing could survive at that size.”
“Good thing it’s long gone, then.” Ryley shudders. “Imagine running into that on a dark night.”
“You’d see it coming. It’s half the bloody length of the crater,” Bart says with unusual vehemence. “This is an insult to the laws of physics. What would it even eat?”

“Ghosts, I guess. It’d live in the waters off the crater and crunch on them like rice snacks.” Ryley deliberately doesn’t contemplate the idea that live ones might still be down there, coiling around the base of the volcano like some mythical world serpent. That’s a kind of terrifying that just makes his brain bluescreen and stop trying to think about it.

With the ghost gone, he quickly guns the engines and drives away from the immense bones, too unnerved to stay inside titanic skeletal jaws even if it is a safe hiding place. Drifting past they can see amoeboids and corals growing on the bones. “They’re feeding on it,” explains Bart. “There must still be organic matter left in the bones, although I’m not quite sure how given how long dead it is.”
There’s an odd sort of irony to that. Even the remains of what must have been a super-predator that dominated the oceans can fall low and become food for the lowest and smallest.

They go up again, the sub sliding through a higher cave mouth. This one doesn’t lead out either, but instead forms a blind canyon housing another skeleton. This one, thankfully, is only standard 4546B immense rather than jaw-droppingly physics-breakingly gargantuan. It has a segmented, shelled body with heavy bone plates housing its inner skeleton, its integrated skull staring out with six empty eyes.
Ryley gestures to the alien sensors surrounding it. “Large Carnivore Theta, I’ll bet. This must be the ‘off-site lab’.”

“I’ll go take a look.” As Ryley stands up to follow, Bart sets a hand on his shoulder and pushes him back into his seat. “You stay. You’re sick and it’s dangerous.”
“I feel fine!” Ryley protests, stifling a cough that threatens to make a liar of him. “There’s nothing down here but the bones. Besides, weren’t you saying the water has healing properties?”
“The enzymes have healing properties. But I haven’t seen a single peeper down here yet, and every second creature’s covered in pustules. I’d wager the bacterial concentration is a lot higher and that won’t help.” Bart keeps his hand in place. Ryley doesn’t want to admit that he can’t actually get up unless Bart lets go. He’s still weakened by the illness.

“I can’t get double infected. I already have it. Swimming out there won’t change that. And I’m not letting you go if I can’t.” Ryley glares stubbornly over the back of the seat.
Eventually Bart relents with a sigh. “Fine. But if you start feeling worse-“
“I’ll go back to the sub,” Ryley says obediently. “And I won’t kick anything that looks dangerous. No promises about touching if there are ion cubes in there.”

Bart keeps a close eye on him as they explore the cache. It’s full of more specimens, some of bones and some of plants collected from all over the planet. Ryley picks up a strange egg, turning it over in his hands. “Ever seen one of these?” he asks.
Bart shakes his head. “Can’t say I have.”
Ryley slips the egg into his pack, nestling it in a fold of fibre mesh. They can hatch it in containment later if it’s still viable. He’d like to think it will be; there’s a vague warm pulse inside it that feels alive. A tiny thread of song tugging at his awareness.

He doesn’t have another attack after exposure to the water, which seems to reassure Bart somewhat. The coldness of the environment does make his joints ache, but it’s nothing he can’t handle, especially once he’s bundled up in a towel and resuming his position. He puts the egg in the aquarium to keep it wet. Most of the fish ignore it, but the peepers investigate, chirping in little tones. They harmonise with each other but they don’t sound like Her anymore. He wonders if he imagined that. Then he realises he’s hearing fish sing inside an aquarium he definitely shouldn’t be able to make out sound through, and until now he’s never heard a peeper make a noise in his life.

“Do you hear that?” he asks Bart.
“The voices?”
“No, not that. The peepers. They’re chirping.”
Bart cocks his head and listens with a faraway expression, frowning softly. “No, I can’t hear anything.” Abruptly he pulls the scanner out of his belt and points it at Ryley, admonishing him “Stay still.” Ryley sits obediently, bemused and tempted to sneeze at the slight weird tickle he feels. That’s probably imaginary though, because it’s not like the scanner beam is substantial.

‘Infected’, the scanner reads. Ryley feels his PDA beep with a new data entry. Bart peruses it with a deepening frown. “Unpredictable alterations to biological structure,” he reads quietly. “Have you been hearing anything else strange?”
“Everything’s just…” Ryley trails off. “Louder. I can hear your heartbeat when we’re in the same room. I mean I’ve always heard stuff other people don’t-“
“Electric lights? Engines humming? Things other people tune out?” Bart nods. “I hear them too. I’m pretty sure it’s par for the course for people like us. But this is new, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Ryley echoes.

Bart’s probably seeing the worry on his face, and he sets a comforting hand on Ryley’s shoulder. “It’s not the worst. If your hearing’s becoming more acute, it could be useful, and it’s unlikely to cause significant problems. Just keep an eye on anything that changes.” Despite his flippant tone, there’s a thoughtful look on his face, and the little crease between his brows hasn’t smoothed out.
Ryley captures his hand. “What’re you thinking?”
“Speculation.” Bart shakes his head. “Nothing important. Don’t worry about it.”

Evidently Bart’s not going to share whatever’s on his mind until he’s unpicked it himself, so Ryley lets it go, patting his hand and doing his best to ignore the spike of pain from his blistered palm. He’s taken to wearing his gloves even inside to hide the glowing pustules, unable to look at them without feeling nauseous. Sometimes he’s vaguely tempted to pop one with a knife just to see what would happen.

They start back up, the engines whirring calmly to life. Ryley pulls them around the cavern wall and carefully navigates them out of the canyon. Even with his eyes on all three cameras he can’t avoid scrapes to the hull while he turns, the length of the Cyclops slightly too much compared to the cavern’s width. “Let’s not get lost again,” he says. “I’m just going to hug the wall and follow it. If it’s a self-contained system, that’ll eventually bring us out or to another opening.”
“Maze tactics?” Bart laughs. “Did you ever play the VR hedge runner game as a kid?”
Ryley goes red. “Yes. A lot.”

He keeps to his position, maintaining the wall on his left side. As he pulls around they come back out into the bone field, then drift further around. The water starts to turn turquoise and then blue. “Getting somewhere,” he mutters. “Too deep to be our canyon, though.”
Around them the walls open up, the brine rivers spilling into blue pools. The new cavern is filled with ghostrays quietly grazing on a huge glowing tree whose huge roots crack deep into the salt-suffused rock. Great luminescent blue orbs swell from its gnarled branches. They’re eggs, Ryley realises, immense eggs bigger than a Seamoth around.

“Beautiful,” Bart breathes, staring transfixed at the tableau. Ryley hears the song of the tide within him swell and leap with joy.

They leave the Cyclops to explore. Ryley floats along the blue river, trailing his hands in the heavy brine. It doesn’t eat at his suit the way the rest of the pools do – he wonders if the tree is leaching toxins out of it. The water is quiet and cool in a way that soothes the pain of his blisters. He lets Bart do the scanning while he drifts, eyes closed, listening to the ocean.

The ghostrays hum quietly. Their song is soft and wispy, like a breathless flute player. He can hear the tiny threads that sound like a musical version of a ghost’s cry. There are many of them, but they’re barely audible, just the background music of aliveness. “Are they ghost eggs?” he signs sleepily to Bart when he returns.
He can faintly hear the muffled laughter Bart’s mask should have drowned out. “Yes, they are,” he signs back. “How did you know?”
“They glow like ghosts do. And they sound the same.” He tilts his head to show ‘listening’. “The ocean sounds like music, Bart. It’s beautiful. I wish you could hear it.”

They float together there for a bit, hands linked, letting the currents push them around. Ryley thinks about old Terran sea otters and how they held hands while they slept to keep from drifting away, laughing to himself softly. He could’ve probably fallen asleep, but eventually he gets an oxygen alert, prompting both of them to return to the sub. This time they can dive out without the PRAWN to collect ores from the pools, including silvery red-tinged nickel. Ryley hacks free as much as he can carry and then goes back for more. Nickel is vital for new depth upgrades, and he suspects quietly that they’ll need those. They’ll have to keep going deeper.

In the dark down here, there’s no knowing when it’s night and when it’s day, but the sub’s inbuilt clock tells them it’s sometime after ten pm. The ghost tree seems safe, uninterrupted by predators, so Ryley pulls them in under its spiralling branches. They don’t have a stove in the Cyclops, so they improvise and toast sliced potatoes on a thermoblade. “You know what I miss?” Bart remarks as they eat them, sitting on the floor in the cockpit. “Butter. There’s a lot of herbs and spices I’d like to have, but I really miss butter and milk. I can think of all kinds of things I’d do with them. Potato gratin with milk and cream, butter sauces, ice cream, cake…” He sighs. “It’s a pity you can’t really eat the eggs here. You can sort of make flour from potatoes – it’s not very good – but without eggs and milk you don’t get bread, you don’t get muffins, you can’t have a good fry-up in the morning.”

“We could try,” Ryley says with a giggle. “Crashfish eggs are a dime a dozen. I’d be willing to bet you could collect enough for an omelette.”
Bart makes a face. “Crashfish? Those would taste horrible, I’d wager. Sulfur plant leaves do make a good chili substitute though. If you can get them without getting exploded.”

In the quiet hours before they drift off, in bed together in a way that no longer feels anything but natural, they talk about eggs. Foods they’d like to make with them, the size of the ghost eggs in the tree, speculation about what might be inside the little grey egg from the cache. Ryley thinks it’s a friendly creature. He doesn’t know why, but it just feels as though it will be. Bart wonders if it’s a deep-sea species they haven’t seen or another creature hovering on the edge of extinction. The eggs can sleep for years or even centuries in stasis, according to his research, so the fish that laid it might have died out along with all of the species’ adults.

They speculate for a while longer before they’re too tired to think anymore, and drift off to sleep in a tangle of blankets.

Ryley wakes first. He’s somehow too hot despite how cold it is outside, and for a while he thinks his fever is spiking again. But it isn’t him that’s the source of it; Bart’s burning up, shirt damp with sweat and mumbling incoherently to himself. He’s still asleep, and he’s speaking what Ryley’s fairly sure is Mongolian, which he doesn’t understand a word of.
“Bart. Bart!” He grabs the older man by the shoulders and shakes him. “Bart, wake up!”
Midnight brown eyes open, dazed and distant. “Ryley?” Bart mumbles. He twists his head as though straining to listen for something. “I hear it,” he whispers urgently. “Her. I can’t make out- if only I could-“

Ryley listens too, trying to make out what Bart’s hearing over the hum of the engines. Soft in his ears are the whispers he’s been trying to tune out. The calling. The song.

“We have to get back to the surface,” he says abruptly. Still confused and half-asleep, Bart only protests mildly as Ryley kicks the blankets free and rolls out of bed. “You’re getting worse. We need to get back up where the water can help you.” There’s a grim laugh echoing in his head that won’t quite escape at the bitter irony of it. It wasn’t him in danger from the Kharaa-infested water down here; he’s too far gone. But Bart, whose infection is held dormant by the enzymes, would inevitably get worse without exposure to them.

Unwilling to keep getting lost deeper in these caverns, Ryley picks a direction and drives directly there across the bone field. Somewhere in here must be the pillars they passed by. If he can only localise himself against those, he can get them home.
“The ghost?” Bart asks, sitting in tense silence beside him.
Ryley shakes his head. “I don’t see it. The cave’s pretty big, so there’s a good chance we can clear the area before it loops back around.” In the distance he spots a green light and changes course to follow it, hoping it’ll be the Precursor base.

They’re lucky. The cave rises up above them, tumbled alien wreckage giving way to the long tunnel and then the cavern where they encountered the other ghost. This time Ryley doesn’t bother trying to skirt it, instead keeping them running brazenly into its territory until it notices and then throwing them into flank speed. The whine of the engines is so loud it’s painful, like pins being driven into his brain through his eardrums, but he grits his teeth and endures it until they’re clear.

Finally they’re coming up into shallower, bluer water, the bright stars of glowing barnacles lighting their way up the canyon. Beyond them is the soft bioluminescence of Bart’s garden, golden-glowing creepvines shrouding dull plasteel.

It’s with immense relief that they stumble back inside the habitat. Ryley strips off his dive suit and marches, almost totally naked, into the bedroom to look for the flask of enzyme. “Sit down and use this before I dump the whole thing on your head,” he says in a tone that brooks no argument.
“You’re sicker than I am-” Bart protests.
“Yeah, so you’d better make sure at least one of us stays healthy.” Ryley dips his fingers into the fluorescent liquid and draws a stripe of gold across Bart’s forehead. The glitter absorbs quickly into the skin, leaving only a faint lustre behind. It marks his own fingers too, stinging where it touches the pustules, but he doesn’t wipe it off in the vague hope it might do something to help.

Bart lets him dab the enzyme on scarred patches of skin erupting in new sores, watching as the damaged skin starts to heal over. It reduces the size and redness of the spots, but they don’t disappear completely, and Ryley’s heart sinks.
Bart holds his hands up to look at, his lips quirking into a wry smile. “Some improvement is still improvement,” he says softly. “Either it’ll fade properly or it won’t. Either way, it makes no difference.” He catches Ryley by the wrist and tips some of the glitter onto his blistered hand. “And it’s still possible that there’s some effect we can’t see,” he adds, watching the colour disappear.
Ryley winces. “It makes the patches feel less numb,” he offers. “Not sure I prefer that, but I guess it’s better to feel something other than the burning.”

“Some improvement,” Bart repeats with a sigh. “Come on, let’s check on Marguerit. Then we need to come up with a plan. There’s something else out there we need to find.”

Ryley takes a deep breath, nods, and follows Bart up into the next level.

Chapter Text

Marguerit is in good health, although somewhat grumpy, and is relatively easily pacified by the addition of a fistful of meat scraps.
Bart spends a few minutes playing with her while Ryley sets the mystery egg in the soft sand of the peeper tank. He’s not sure what the fish’s natural habitat would be, but the alternative is leaving it where Marguerit can take a chunk out of it when it hatches, so in with the peepers it goes. He brushes some silt over it and gives it an absent pat, feeling its membranous shell pulse slightly.

“It’ll probably hatch within a few days if it’s going to at all,” Bart remarks. “They seem to develop mostly fully, then just wait for the right conditions to crack shell.”

They go back downstairs to cook, still tired but also longing for a proper meal after days of Cyclops rations. They definitely need to find space to put in a cooking unit. Ryley mentally sketches out blueprints to channel waste heat from the engines, imagining flank speed frying fish while Bart actually fries real fish on the cooktop. The oculus tank has become overcrowded, and since Marguerit can’t keep the population down, they take over that duty for her. Oculus meat has a rich, smoky flavour that pairs well with fried mushrooms and blanched creepvine shoots.

“I’ve gotten spoilt,” he remarks as they eat. Bart raises an eyebrow. “Food-wise,” he clarifies. “When I first landed I was fine eating fabricator fish and raw vegetables for months, but now I’ve gotten used to actual cooking I can’t go back.”
Bart laughs. “You say ‘spoilt’, I say ‘developing an appreciation for the culinary arts’. What is life without good food?”
“Much less flavourful,” Ryley says, raising his fork in salute.

After lunch they clear away the dishes and actually get down to planning. Ryley drags out the data he got from the gun platform, setting the PDA on the table between them. “Alright, we’ve found the disease research facility and one of the caches. I’d wager ‘primary containment’ is the 1.4 km one. I doubt the thermal plant has any useful data regarding Kharaa, but if we can find it then we’ll have a better shot at getting to the bottom of this – literally and figuratively.”

“We’ve got the nickel for new depth upgrades,” Bart remarks. “How deep will that take us?”
“1300 metres.” Ryley frowns. “Which won’t be deep enough. The next set of blueprints needs kyanite, and we’ll need them if we want to get to the megaquarium.”
“Megaquarium?” Bart questions with a snort.
“Yeah, mega aquarium. They kept a leviathan there, so it must have been pretty big.” Ryley nobly ignores Bart’s snickers and switches to the blueprint tab. “We need plasteel, 2 ingots, and 3 rubies. The next set takes another ingot, 6 kyanite crystals and some extra titanium and lithium.”
“Kyanite forms in volcanic areas, yes?”
Ryley nods. “Yeah, so there’s a chance we’ll find some down in the active portions of the crater. Worst case scenario we don’t and we have to find another way.”

Bart sighs. “Let’s not limit ourselves. Worst case is we run into something big and nasty and get eaten. But I take the point. Is there anything else we need?”
Ryley considers, ticking off points on his fingers. “Cyclops and PRAWN depth upgrades, collect extra materials for the next set once we find the kyanite… A sonar module would be nice. I think we have magnetite for that. And then we need to figure out a way to install a stove – I’ll work on that as well.” He sighs.

“I’ll collect some more of this, too,” Bart says, holding up the half-empty flask of enzyme. “It’s most effective fresh, and better if we don’t have to come back up here to stave off symptoms. It seems like the water deeper down will make this illness worse.”
“Well, look on the bright side. If we’re going down into volcanic areas, the water will be so hot we won’t be able to swim in it anyway,” Ryley quips. “I’ll get materials for thermal reactor modules. They might come in useful, if we can find the kyanite.”

That’s one of the chief problems. This entire plan, stem to stern, rests on their finding kyanite. If there’s none deeper in the crater, they won’t be able to take their sub down deep enough to reach the last facility, and Ryley’s increasingly sure that’s where all the answers will be. He’s also, dimly, starting to suspect something about what they might find there.

“Do you think that leviathan might still be alive?” he asks softly.
Bart bites his lip. “I doubt it,” he responds, but there’s a hint of uncertainty in his expression. Some thread of a thought he still hasn’t shared. Ryley might not have Bart’s quick intellect or expansive library of knowledge, but he’s no idiot. He can put the pieces together and arrive at an approximation. Ryley, whose hearing seems to be becoming more acute, hears Her in the same way he hears the song of other creatures. And in his dreams She is caged deep below the earth.

He’s not quite sure he can put words to how the thought makes him feel. If his speculation is accurate and there’s an intelligent mind alive down there, perhaps the leviathan or one of its descendants, it’s patently a powerful telepath. That’s not a gift observed many places in the galaxy. That She can try to reach out and direct them from so far distant means She is very strong, and could be a powerful ally - or a dangerous enemy.
Or he’s losing his mind from Kharaa-induced brain damage, which might well be the more likely possibility.

“Have you heard anything since we came back up?”
From the look in Bart’s eyes, he can tell Ryley’s mental calculus is adding up to a similar number as his. “Not much. Just…” He gestures vaguely. “Louder. I’m not hearing the singing, if that’s what you mean. But it might just be a matter of time.” He winces. “But you get the messages clearer, and your ears are better. Certainly correlation doesn’t equal causation, there’s a number of confounding factors – the Kharaa, enzymatic exposure, time on the planet-“

Ryley holds a hand up to forestall a scientific lecture, grinning slightly. “You can give me the lab report once we’re underway, yeah?” Bart laughs and takes it as the gentle prod it’s meant to be, but privately Ryley thinks he wouldn’t mind that. The songs of 4546B are beautiful, but the wonder in Bart’s voice when he talks about the world is most beautiful of all.

Without further discussion, they get to work gathering supplies. Bart goes off in the Sea Treader to mine for ores while Ryley sits at the table and starts sketching out alterations to the cooktop blueprints. He’s not exactly sure how he’s going to manage it. Most of his engineering training consisted of where to point the repair tool and general theory rather than how to jury rig things. He’s not a natural engineer on that front. But what he does have is a good spatial memory and solid grounding in basic systems thanks to years of working on maintenance. Sure, habitat builders and fabricators can pull existing blueprints together perfectly, but they can’t improvise. And after his long career keeping subpar Alterra construction together, he’s learned very much how to improvise.

On 3-Beta they’d had habitat rooms designed without regard for the environment or the comfort of their inhabitants. Ryley had figured out a way to splice into the light controls to dim them. He’s spent years tinkering with fans and vents to reduce noise, or working out how to patch damaged panels with duct tape, sealants and scavenged copper when head office wouldn’t send the materials to fix non-essential systems. And to Alterra, anything that didn’t actively make them money was ‘non-essential systems’. He learned that one painfully when it came to the lifepods on the Aurora.

At least he knows he’s innocent of that charge. He’d never been the one who maintained their interiors – they weren’t supposed to be entered when the ship was underway, so he’d only ever checked hatches and launch systems. And those hadn’t been the failure points. The failure points had been inadequate design and the utter blindside of the alien gun.

So he improvises. He works out a patch into the engine coolant system that will redirect the boiling fluid to circulate and heat a cooktop, then a safe way to do the patch without making the engines explode. It’s less efficient than standard induction by heating times, but it’ll save energy they can’t afford to waste, and Ryley’s quietly pleased at the elegance of the solution. Ruefully he wonders if he could sell the blueprint to Alterra, but then he dismisses that idea. It’d be far too human-oriented and not a profitable addition.

It takes him about half a day to work it up, aided by the alteration functions in Bart’s PDA. His own won’t let him modify blueprints. Once he’s installed it, he runs up the engines and drives in circles, switching speeds a few times to check that they’ll stand up to stress. Flank speed heats the stove to the point where it boils water far too fast. Ryley notes down with amusement that idling the engines produces a low simmer, and then he closets himself again to work out a way of storing and modulating the heat without running the sub in pointless circles.

He presents his work to Bart, who seems genuinely impressed. “That’s very clever,” he says with genuine sincerity, and Ryley’s not sure why the praise makes his cheeks redden as much as it warms him inside. “Efficient, too. Shall we christen it? I had to go a little far afield for metal salvage, and I caught a few Reginald on the way.”
“Who’s Reginald?” Ryley questions, perplexed, and Bart cackles with laughter as he hauls out a flopping green fish from his ersatz aquarium.

Reginald, it turns out, is a peeper relative, but with much smaller eyes. This is good because less eye means more meat on the fish. They use the fabricator in lieu of gutting them manually, which is doable but messy. Filleted and poached with lantern wine, creepvine shoots and diced marblemelon, it produces a richly smoky and flavourful dish. “Perhaps I should be cultivating these instead of oculi,” Bart comments through a mouthful of fish. “Much more bang for your buck, as it were, and it’s certainly an interesting taste. Maybe I’ll catch a couple on the way back and start my own fish farm.” Ryley’s too busy munching on spicy-flavoured cooked marblemelon to respond with anything other than a thumbs-up.

After dinner they go to bed. By some silent agreement they’ve defabricated the extra single bed and just share Bart’s. They’ve become used to having one another close, sharing warmth on cold nights and kicking blankets and each other when it’s hot. Ryley dozes with his head tucked into Bart’s shoulder and contemplates how this would look from the outside. They cook and eat together, they sleep together, they sit close when they work so that their knees touch. An observer might well have mistaken them for a contracted couple.

Would that be so bad? a tiny part of him wonders. Ryley shoves that thought down with a sudden surge of nervousness, but it won’t go away, quiet but insistent.

Relationships in Alterra are… complicated. The official corporate line is that a relationship is just an exchange of emotional value, no different from a financial one. But that’s one line Ryley’s never really bought. He knows humans are complicated and feelings most complicated of all. No partner jilted for another will consider the ‘value’ of the ‘goods’ they’re providing, they’ll feel upset and betrayed. He’s known enough friends be screwed despite relationship contracts. The really awful ones use the contract to make partners feel trapped.

Ryley’s never had a contract before. Sure, he had a few flirtations in school, but nothing that ever went beyond longing glances and the occasional banter in hallways. And he’s never had a relationship off the books either. Some people did do that – not wanting to be constrained by Alterra contracts, not wanting to make their relationship public, classic bathroom trysts or impulsive kisses in the blind spots of cameras. He’s seen it. But he’s always seen it as an outsider, never from within. He doesn’t know how to recognise those feelings or handle them even if he did have them (which he definitely doesn’t).

And what would Bart think? Maybe this kind of closeness is totally normal where he’s from. After all, Alterra had tried to cultivate people that behaved like robots driven by economic self-interest, but from what Bart’s told him he knows Mongolia is different. Ryley has zero conception of what relationship contracts look like outside Alterra space. Or if they even have them. Would he even consider Ryley in that light, or is Ryley’s treacherous brain just ascribing non-existent meaning to simple friendliness and a desire for company after years spent alone?

Unsettled by the direction his thoughts have taken, Ryley quietly disentangles himself and pads out of the room. Bart stirs and mumbles but doesn’t wake, even when the door hisses shut behind him. The base is quiet, only the hum of the water filter and the soft swish of the air recirculators. Ryley looks around and realises his presence has already settled into the place. There’s two chairs at the table where there had been one. There’s his dive suit hanging neatly by the hatch. There’s his clothes and towels folded in the shelf by the washroom, and scattered on the mod station counter are his sketched blueprints for the Cyclops stove.

He climbs the ladder up. There the peepers watch him with mild disinterest as he passes by their tank to check on Marguerit. They’ve gotten used to him. As has she, since she doesn’t lash out when he approaches her shroom, curled up and dozing peacefully inside rather than lunging at the intruder. The oculi, of course, barely notice his presence.

And at the last, in the greenhouse that’s as much Bart’s place as anywhere here, there’s still traces of him. There’s the new potatoes he helped to plant, the notch in the bulbo tree he carved to collect sap, the jaffa cup still slightly tilted from his attempt to sit in it that had ended in a tumble and Bart in paroxysms of laughter.

There’s something strangely unsettling about it. About how, despite his hard and frightening months alone on this planet, most of the vivid memories have Bart in them somewhere. About how Bart is omnipresent in his thoughts the same way Ryley’s physical presence is all over the base. And about the fact that this habitat feels like their home, and both the ‘their’ and the ‘home’ have a lot of big and scary thoughts attached.

He returns to the central tank, pulling on his mask without bothering with the suit. Here, with the brain coral releasing air bubbles, he can sit underwater almost indefinitely without his oxygen running dry. The cool water is soothing, and the peepers soon lose interest in him and return to their aimless circles.
The egg is sitting in the sand by his knee. Ryley sighs and asks it “How’re you doing?” It doesn’t respond, of course, but it feels like it moves slightly and the song pitches louder. He’s probably imagining it. But who knows, maybe the baby fish inside likes being talked to?
“I mean, it’s not like I really like him like that, you know?” he says. “God, I sound like a teenage girl. I just used ‘like’ three successive times in a sentence.”
The egg listens nonjudgmentally. “Not that it would matter if I did,” Ryley tells it firmly, although it sounds more like he’s trying to convince himself. “I mean, he’s an easy person to like. He’s smart, he’s kind, he’s fun to talk to. Have you seen that little frown he has when he’s thinking hard? He barely has any wrinkles, but there’s a line right there on his forehead from doing that so much. It’s really cute.”

He slumps back against the tank wall with a sigh that sends bubbles erupting from his mask. “I just don’t know,” he says morosely. “I barely even know how I feel. I’ve never even- I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never felt like this about someone. I mean, I’ve barely known him for a month, but it feels like we’ve been friends for years. Like we’re on the same wavelength. We barely even have to talk about things sometimes, he just… gets it.”

He reflects glumly that every word out of his mouth only makes him sound more like a lovesick schoolgirl. But now that word’s in his head, and he can’t unthink the thought. Lovesick. Maybe the ‘sick’ part is more descriptive of the nervousness and confusion he’s feeling, but even saying the word ‘love’ in his head makes it uncomfortably real. He’s now acutely aware that he might be falling in love with Bart, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it from happening.

“What do I do?” he asks the egg in despair. “I wish I could just wipe my mind about that. I mean, what else could I do but ruin everything? I mean, he probably doesn’t even think about me that way, and if I told him I-“ He stops short. “He’d probably hate me,” he concludes miserably. “Actually, no, he’s too kind to hate me for that. He’d be so nice about it, but it would still ruin everything. It’d never be the same.” And that’s the real kicker. Because in the last month he’s spent down here, he’s been happier than he’s ever been. Happy living this simple, hand-to-mouth existence deep below the ocean, because the man he’s living it with makes every day peaceful and joyful. The unselfconscious closeness he’s shared with Bart has been wonderful, but now no matter what he does he won’t be able to keep things the way they are, because the secret he’s holding will make it impossible.

The egg nudges him sympathetically. Ryley reaches down to absently pet its shell. “Sorry for rambling at you,” he mumbles. “You’re a fish. You don’t get it. You don’t need to.” He sighs. “Must be nice.”
He feels another nudge at his hand. Suddenly he realises what’s happening. The movement must be the egg on the verge of hatching.

His own internal agonies set aside for the moment, he hurriedly brushes sand away from the thin membrane. It’s semitransparent now and he can see a bit of the small grey-blue body inside, moving as it pulses.
There’s a shudder, and then another, and then suddenly the shell pops like a grape in a microwave, letting the newly hatched creature tumble free. Ryley’s first thought is that it’s adorable. It has a stocky, rounded little body trailing off into five stubby tentacles, little fins flipping as it tries to right itself. Ryley captures it gently in his hands and turns it right side up, laughing. “Poor thing, you look like a potato!”

The fish chirps delightedly and wraps its tentacles around Ryley’s arm, butting its head into his hand. It has big soulful brown eyes that flicker closed in contentment when he tentatively scratches. Now that it isn’t moving, he has a better view of the rounded-off nubs that might once have been spikes and the white blaze that runs down its head. “Well someone’s cuddly,” he says with a little laugh. “What do you think, Potato?”

The newly christened Potato, who really does look like one with his round little body and slightly purplish colouring, chirps in agreement. And Ryley hears his brand-new little song rise in delight.

Chapter Text

Potato’s hatching provides a welcome distraction from Ryley’s confused feelings over Bart.

It’s concluded that he’s probably unique on the planet. Scanning analysis, which he patiently sits still for in exchange for a snack, reveals evidence of genetic splicing – probably by the Precursors. He’s patently fairly intelligent, since he’s eminently capable of learning tricks, and naturally affectionate by nature. While he’s happy to play and cuddle with Bart, Ryley seems to be his favourite. “It’s natural, probably,” he observes dryly as Potato rockets into Ryley’s arms, abandoning the simple block game Bart had been teaching to him. “You were there when he hatched. He’s probably imprinted on you.”
Ryley grins at him over Potato’s head. “You’re just jealous he likes me better.”

Despite his joke about being passed over, Bart’s happy to observe and let Ryley do the direct handling. He puzzles over Potato’s body plan and concludes he’s probably a distant relative of the crashfish. The rounded body and spikes match, although Potato’s have been blunted by either evolution or alteration into little nubs. The tentacles don’t seem to have an analogue. Neither does the fish’s intelligence, which according to Bart matches old Terran dolphins and octopi. “I wonder if they bred them as pets,” he muses. “If these are cultivated traits, it makes sense that they’d want intelligence and friendliness.”
“He’s warm, too,” Ryley comments, petting Potato’s slightly bumpy hide. “I don’t think he’s a proper fish.”
“Fish can be warm-blooded. It’s less common, but it’s not unheard of.”

Playing with Potato delays their preparations to leave. Eventually they’re packed and ready, new modules synthesised, but Ryley’s reluctant to go. “Won’t he get lonely?” he asks plaintively.
Bart sighs. “Probably,” he admits, “but the alternative is putting him in with Marguerit and she’s rather bad company. We can’t bring him with us. He’s too big for an aquarium and we can’t put containment in the Cyclops.”
“Oh well.” Ryley feeds Potato one last treat and gives him a hug. Potato, sensitive to mood, has probably realised something is up, and he rubs his face against Ryley’s and chirps reassuringly. Despite himself Ryley smiles. “Oh alright, you little monster, I’ll stop moping.” Potato’s simple joy is infectious, and he can’t feel too upset with that goofy smile directed at him. Once they’re underway he'll have to get on with the worrying about his advancing Kharaa symptoms and Bart and all the other stuff.

He's getting sicker. He’s done his best to keep it under wraps, not wanting to worry Bart unnecessarily, but it’s getting harder to hide the wracking coughs and the swelling size of his green blisters. Regular application of the enzyme hasn’t seemed to have much of an effect. Now, every so often, he breaks into a fit of coughing that results in little droplets of blood staining the inside of his mask.

He stifles another as he takes his place at the helm of the sub. Their first time diving down, Bart had noted a crack in the rock at the base of the canyon, and Ryley’s fairly sure it’ll lead down into the deeper regions of the caves. It’s close enough to the cave mouth that they should be able to skirt the ghost. “You know, dodging this guy is a real pain,” he remarks as they wait for it to pass them on its patrol.
“I wonder how long they take to migrate outwards.” Bart peers out of the front window. “This one’s around two thirds the size of an adult, right? I’m not sure how much longer he can maintain himself feeding on ghostrays. This area’s already pretty bare.”
“Well, if he wants to leave, I certainly wouldn’t object.” Ryley pushes the sub forward hurriedly as the ghost disappears out of sight. The crack is larger close up, fortunately, but he still has to take a minute to line up before descending so he doesn’t bash against a wall.

As they sink deeper, orange light blazes up from below them and slowly swallows them until the water around them glows a dull red. Grey rocks give way to black magmatic ones, lava flows spilling down the surfaces in waterfalls of searing flame. “How do they do that underwater?” he asks in an awed undertone.
“They’re so hot the water can’t carry the heat away fast enough,” Bart says quietly. “Christ. With this much lava, I have my doubts about the crater’s activity. It might be overdue for an eruption.”
“Well there’s a cheery thought.” Ryley swallows, trying not to think about what that would look like. Instead he contemplates whether bringing a potato outside would boil it, and decides it probably would. Maybe he shouldn’t have bothered with the stove. Then again, it’s not quite boiling, since evidently fish can live in it. Gliding past the Cyclops is an immense dull-scarlet ray that seems to be a subterranean relative of the ghostrays up above. Red boomerangs dart around them as they move, incandescent yellow tips signalling their positions in the dark water. One is followed by an eyeye with a distinct orangish colouring.

The tunnel bottoms out at just below 1200 metres, opening into a slightly wider cave system with lava spilling down the bottom like a burning version of the brine rivers. Ryley positions himself high in the water, unwilling to bring the Cyclops too close to the molten rock. He’s pretty sure it’d turn even the reinforced plasteel hull to slag.
“Ryley!” Bart whispers harshly.
He follows his pointing finger to a tumbled collection of bones on the seafloor. “Yeah, big skeleton, so wh- is that a Reaper?”
Now that he’s looking at it, he can see the distinct clawed mandibles of the eel-like predator, the four empty eye sockets staring up reproachfully. It’s a full-grown adult. Ryley’s never seen one deeper than a few hundred metres, so he’s got no bloody clue what the remains of one are doing down here.

“The mandibles are jointed. Fascinating,” Bart mumbles. He frowns, brow creasing deeper than Ryley’s ever seen it. “These things don’t live down here.”
“Well no sh-“
Bart holds up a hand to forestall him. “No, I don’t mean natural populations. I mean they couldn’t live down here. The water’s what? Seventy, eighty degrees? Reapers are adapted to cold water, they don’t have heat regulation systems. If one came down it would be boiled alive. And they may not be all that intelligent, but they’re intelligent enough not to commit suicide via natural slow cooker.”
“So…”
“So something forced it down. Either an accident, or something bigger was looking for dinner.”

Ryley shudders violently. He definitely doesn’t want to tangle with something big enough to make a snack of a Reaper. But the bones don’t look so old that whatever took them might not still be waiting for something else to make up dessert, and he’d prefer that them and the Cyclops not be it.

As they push on further, he starts to hear a distant grating roar. Through the hull he normally can’t hear the songs of the smaller creatures, but he can sure as hell hear Reapers and ghosts, and this echoing scream sounds like it comes from a bigger throat than either. “Bart?” he says nervously.
“I hear it,” is the quiet response. “Our culprit?”
“I hope not.” Ryley grits his teeth. “Let’s stop. Switch the hull to red so it’ll be harder to see. If we go out in the Sea Treader we might be able to scout the area without being noticed.” He’s not exactly enthusiastic about tangling with some subterranean monster in the comparatively tiny exosuit, but he’s also aware that the PRAWN’s hull is ridiculously tough and its small size might make it beneath notice.

Bart concurs reluctantly. “Alright. But I’ll go.”
Ryley’s about to protest when Bart stops him. “Ryley, I know how you feel about that. And you are a better pilot than I am. But that’s exactly why you need to stay here. If we need to make a quick getaway, we can’t afford to wait for you to clear the PRAWN before moving. This way, if something goes wrong, I can jump into the vehicle bay and you can get us out of here quickly.”

Ryley grimaces, but he sees the logic. “Fine. But note my general displeasure.”
“Noted.” Bart smiles. “Nice to know you worry about me.”
“Of course I do,” Ryley says softly as Bart climbs into the PRAWN, stomach doing a nervous flip.

Fortunately, the PRAWN has an inbuilt intercom system, since it’s designed for spacewalking outside habitats and larger vessels. Ryley can watch nervously as Bart jumps from rock to rock, tipping the cameras up to show Ryley what he’s seeing. “Heavy volcanic formations,” he comments. “There’s a big trench under my feet. I’m not going to jump down it. I think it’s deeper than the PRAWN’s crush depth.” Another echoing roar assaults Ryley’s ears through intercom and directly alike. “Whoof, that’s loud. I think I might hide now.”
“Yes, please do,” Ryley says faintly. “I’m not sure how I’ll explain to Marguerit if I get you killed.”
Bart tucks the body of the PRAWN inside a rock formation, peering out above heavy spires.
“Good vantage point. Let’s see if we can’t get a look at our friend here.”

Almost in unison, they inhale as the huge body of the creature comes into view. It’s immense. Bigger than anything they’ve seen alive so far. Ryley estimates it’s a little longer than a ghost, but the breadth of its body makes it twice or more by mass. It has a heavy reptilian head with rows of glowing orange eyes, huge paddle-like limbs attached to its stocky body, and seven clubbed tentacles trailing away from its body. When it opens its mouth and roars again, they see rows and rows of teeth.

“Sea dragon.” Ryley recognises it instinctively by the shape of the head and upper torso. And now he sees far better why the Precursors called it that, as it spits a massive fireball that slams uncomfortably close to Bart’s hiding place.
“No way are we getting past that,” he says in an undertone. “The Cyclops is too unwieldy. Look how fast it moves.”
He hears Bart sigh assent. “Efficient propulsion. Damn whatever god designed these things. I’d like to hope it’s not predatory, but I don’t think anything else down here will be Reaper-eater sized.”
“You think it’s hungry?”
“Not sure. It’s a giant. If it had a fast metabolism, it wouldn’t be able to sustain itself down here. I’d guess that it feeds infrequently, maybe once a year, and stores the energy until it needs to hunt again. And it’ll have a low population, thankfully. No species that immense could maintain more than a few in a single territory.” Bart tilts the camera around past the dragon’s body, directing it into the hazy distance. “Do you see that mountain?”
“Looks more like a castle.” Ryley chews on his lip. “You think there’s cover there?”
“More than that. Didn’t the PDA say the thermal plant was inside a large rock formation? That looks like it fits the bill.” As he talks, Bart carefully picks his way back towards the Cyclops. The camera’s still swivelled on its mount, directed vaguely upward of the PRAWN’s cockpit.

“Bart.”
“Hang on a second, I think I see a kyanite crystal. Let me just-“
“Bart!” The terror in Ryley’s voice must have finally alerted him, because Ryley hears him cry out in alarm. Sweeping over him is the massive body of the sea dragon, heavy flippers propelling it through the water with alarming speed. The camera captures a confused flash of green and orange and purple before the PRAWN is battered sideways, tumbling in the wake of the creature’s passage and slamming into a large rock. It’s tough enough to tank the impact but it’s still jarring. A thin black line splits the view screen as the camera lens cracks.

Bart groans. “Intact. We’re fine. It didn’t even notice us!” He stops short. “Oh, gods, Ryley. Ryley, it’s after you!”
Glued to the cameras, Ryley hasn’t even noticed the dragon’s trajectory, but Bart’s cry makes him realise it’s coming at the Cyclops fast. It must have seen the sub, or heard it, or something. “Get out of there!” he hears Bart shout.
“I’m not leaving you behind!” he protests.
“I’ll be fine! You were right, the PRAWN’s too small for it to care about. Just get away before it turns you into scrap metal!”
Even that short delay has brought the dragon closer, its roar so loud Ryley can hardly stand it. He spins the engines up to flank speed and throws the sub into reverse. It’s not a fast vehicle nor a manoeuvrable one, and he’s pushing it to its limits trying to outrun the sea dragon. Twenty seconds until overheat, although the boiling water around him might cut that time, but better a burning engine room than a burning pile of wreckage.

He can’t afford to look back, but the deafening roar tells him it’s closing. If only the tunnels were narrow enough to hide in! The cave mouth that leads upwards is easily dragon-sized, and Ryley has little doubt it’s been used as a hunting thoroughfare before. “Come on,” he hisses, gripping the yoke until his knuckles go white. “Come on, don’t fail me now.”
“Engine Overheat,” the AI announces, right as something slams into the Cyclops from behind.
The blow sends it tumbling, pitching wildly in the water. The dragon’s come alongside – he can see its head now – and is battering the sub with those huge paddle-like flippers. Every blow smashes the Cyclops heavily.
“I’m not making it,” he says with cold certainty. The intercom arrays have been damaged, so any response Bart might have sent is turned into an incoherent warble. But he knows he’s right. The Cyclops is too heavily damaged to escape, even if he could get it clear of the attacking dragon, and he can hear flames burning in the engine room.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if he died here? They’re one hard sprint from their destination. So close. And after all this time worrying about whether he’ll survive the Kharaa, agonising over the possibilities, he’s just going to be crushed to death by a creature so huge it won’t even bother eating him?
Ryley draws in a harsh breath and prepares for a last-ditch effort.
“If you can hear me, I’m sorry,” he says into the intercom, then yanks the engine lever and hears them go cold.

Below, in the PRAWN, Bart barely makes out the last message before the link squeals with static and dies. “Connection lost,” the PRAWN’s AI tells him. “Vehicle transponder damaged. External transmission unpowered.”
“No,” he breathes, the word torn out from deep inside his chest. He speaks nineteen languages plus Standard, but not a single one of them has a word in it to describe the pain that wells up into the empty space left by Ryley’s voice. If the transponder has lost power, either Ryley’s cut the engines or they’ve been destroyed so badly there’s nothing to transmit, and Ryley wouldn’t have cut the engines unless he was resigning himself to death.

Bart throws his weight into the PRAWN’s controls, feeling it lurch and stumble forward. The Cyclops is clear of sight now – Ryley had brought it up hundreds of metres to flee the dragon. He can’t see anything of what might be left of it, but he’s not going to leave until he finds his partner. Alive. He has to be alive. Bart doesn’t even know what he’ll do if he isn’t.
Ten years alone, and after just a month he already can’t imagine his life without Ryley. He can’t imagine a table with one chair, or a bed to sleep in alone, or a game with Potato where the cuddlefish would pay attention because Ryley wasn’t there to distract him. If he could hear the songs the way Ryley can, his own would be a keening wail, he determines. A mournful cry like a ghost’s, screaming in anger and loneliness.

After losing Marguerit and Father, he’d just felt… empty. Then he’d been sure it wouldn’t be long until he joined them, and he’d retreated into a feverish haze, sleeping for days at a time and waking only when pain and thirst overwhelmed him. Only at his weakest had he heard Her calling him, and he’d stumbled blindly into the water, thinking the voice was Marguerit asking him to join her. Now he can’t hear anything but the dragon’s roars and the ringing in his own ears.

It's the burning agony of leaving so much unsaid. He wishes he’d told Marguerit how much he admired her. That he’d heard his father say that he was proud of him. That he’d apologised for his mistakes and reconciled old arguments and told the missing people how much he loved them.
If he loses Ryley now he’ll never get to say any of those things. All the things he’d kept to himself, afraid they’d be misinterpreted, afraid he’d be misinterpreting himself. He wishes now that he could have just said them anyway. What does it matter that he knows little of love, lost a decade on this planet since his teens? What construct distinguishes platonic from romantic? What does it matter, when he’s known he loved Ryley since he saw him fall, laughing, out of the jaffa cup he’d been sitting in? That instant, when they’d locked eyes and he’d seen the brilliance of Ryley’s smile, had done him in. And he still doesn’t know what to do with the surge of warmth he’d felt, but he wishes he’d decided before it was too late.

The PRAWN crests a ridge, stumbling over the rocks Bart doesn’t have the focus to avoid. Above them the Cyclops lists in the water, battered and scarred and with the cockpit shattered open by a blow from the dragon’s heavy flippers. Locked in a vicious battle with its perceived adversary, the dragon doesn’t even notice the metallic mote below.
Or the smaller scrap of black and orange pushed around by the current of its movement.

At first Bart doesn’t see either, the colouring of Ryley’s dive suit blending with the magmatic background. The oxygen tanks that might have made him more visible aren’t attached to their housing. But the strip of white on the seals of his rebreather makes a bright signal, and Bart almost doesn’t even get his own on before he jumps free of the PRAWN.
The water is painfully hot. His reinforced suit protects him from burns, but it feels like he’s just dived into a sauna, sweat dripping down his skin and making him feel damp enough that he worries there’s a leak. The currents are rough and kick him back and around as the dragon sweeps tentacles uncomfortably close.

He blindly reaches out and catches Ryley around the waist, dragging him as quickly as he can back to the safety of the PRAWN. On land he couldn’t have hauled the other man’s dead weight, but one of the advantages of the water pressure down here is that they’re negatively buoyant, and Bart takes advantage of that to sink them down so he can haul Ryley into the cockpit. “Please be alive, please be alive,” he chants under his breath as he pulls Ryley’s mask off. He doesn’t know when he left the Cyclops, but it’s been over four minutes since the engines cut and Ryley can probably only hold his breath for two if he’s exerting himself. There’s blood running down the back of his head that suggests he hit something in the process, and his skewed mask has left a strip of uninsulated skin around his neck that’s marked red with burns.

For a long, agonising minute, Ryley doesn’t move at all.
Then he draws in a deep, gasping breath, and Bart could have wept from relief. “Did we make it?” he asks in a low rasp, eyes half-closed.
Bart hasn’t ever counted himself an impulsive person. He’s always been the type to consider every decision before he makes it, weighing probabilities and risks and rewards ad nauseam until he gets completely lost in analysis paralysis. He doesn’t think he’s done something without thinking first since he was a child. But now, light-headed with relief and residual terror, none of that stops him from pulling Ryley into a desperate kiss.

You idiot, you’ve just ruined everything, says a voice in the back of his head. But Bart ignores it, because Ryley’s wrapping arms around his shoulders and kissing him back.

Chapter Text

Ryley’s head is still spinning as the Sea Treader makes its way out of the area.

Bart had kissed him. Bart had kissed him.
They’d barely separated when the dragon had roared again above them. “We need to get out of here,” Bart had said. Still dazed from the blow to the head (he’d been caught by one of the dragon’s flailing tentacles as he swam free of the Cyclops) and delighted confusion, Ryley hadn’t said anything, but he was well aware Bart was right.

The PRAWN, not designed to accommodate two adults, is a tight fit to manoeuvre properly in. Bart’s still in the pilot’s seat. Ryley’s not sure he could drive it in a straight line he tried. “The castle?” he asks.
“Thought there might be caves inside. I’m willing to bet the dragon won’t be able to follow us in there – if it’s inclined to pick a fight.”
It doesn’t seem to be. Ryley can hear its echoing roar receding into the distance behind them, along with the sound of shrieking metal as it mauls the Cyclops. “Dunno if it’s fixable,” he mumbles. “I cut the engines so they wouldn’t explode. If it gets damaged bad enough it can’t be repaired.”
Bart shrugs philosophically. “The sub can be replaced,” he says softly, “even if it’s a pain. But you can’t be. All that matters is that you’re alright.” He frees a hand from the controls to touch Ryley’s forehead. It’s damp. He’s not sure if it’s water, blood or both. “Are you alright?”

He can hear the note of uncertainty in Bart’s song, half worry and half nervousness. Light-headed, Ryley wonders if Bart’s been just as agonised over this as he has, both of them in their own silly bubbles of worry that they could’ve popped if only they’d talked to one another. “Never been better,” he says, and he’s not even lying.
“Even with the concussion?”
Ryley scoffs. “Oh, baby, you don’t even know concussion. I got conked out cold by a flying panel when I made planetfall and I was out for hours. Compared to that, this is peanuts. I just got sideswiped a little.” He might be exaggerating a bit. His head does hurt and he’s a bit dizzy, but he’s relatively intact. The blood in his hair is more from the gash he’d caught jumping free of the damaged hatch.

Ahead of them looms red and orange and black, the castle looming ominously with towers of rock better than any gothic architecture. Struck by an unhinged thought, Ryley giggles. “It’s like a fairytale,” he whispers. “Here’s the castle, guarded by a terrible dragon that keeps us from the treasure.”
“So who’s the knight?” Bart asks absently as he pulls the PRAWN up a cliff face.
Ryley considers for a moment, then concludes “You can be. You’re the knight in shining plasteel, and I’ll be the damsel in distress. But next time it’s my turn to swashbuckle.” He drops the silly analogy as he sees a spark of green, pointing out the left of the cockpit. “Hey, see that? It looks like you’re right about alien presence.”

The ’drawbridge’ of their castle is a gate built out of that gunmetal grey alloy, leading into a natural corridor of rock that reaches inside the formation. There are fish and some of the lava lizards inside, but the narrower tunnels seem to evade their large bodies. They snap at magmarangs and red eyeyes, roasting them with spat magma. Ryley cocks his head. “The facility proper must be deeper inside. I reckon one of these tunnels must lead down.”
“Down we go, then,” Bart concurs, carefully avoiding a small but angry lizard trying to gnaw at his grabber arm. He pauses to pick up a piece of kyanite. “Convenient. If we make it out of here, we shouldn’t have much trouble synthesising those upgrades.”
“If we have a vehicle to put them in,” Ryley mutters, feeling another surge of regret over the Cyclops. He hopes the dragon will have lost interest by now and they can at least salvage it, even if it’s not repairable.

The interior of the formation is honeycombed with pits and tunnels, lava erupting from cracks in the rock. They avoid those carefully, stepping over green-shelled eggs and collecting sulfur and magnetite that just crystallise out of the walls. A couple of corridors turn in on themselves and lead to dead ends.
“Now if this were a real castle, it would be impregnable,” Bart comments. “You could hold it with ten men against an army. The sea dragon would be all the catapults you needed, and you could eat fish and lizard eggs when your supplies ran out.”
“Another old Terra reference?”
There’s a hint of mischief in Bart’s voice. “I studied ancient warfare. And as I recall, my ancestors were rather good at breaking castles. Sometimes they catapulted plague-ridden corpses over the walls. Other times they just rode straight through. The Chinese Emperor had the world’s greatest wall built - wasted an awful lot of lives on it too – just to keep them out, and it failed roundly.”

As he talks, they emerge out onto a ledge. Beneath them is a dizzying dropoff, ready to pitch them right into immense lakes of lava. And rising up above it is a huge block of metal anchored to the cavern walls by heavy cables, pillars dropping down into the fiery ocean to feed on its violent energy. “And there’s your keep,” Ryley says. “Well, Genghis Khan, how do you feel about that one?”
Bart grimaces. “Not great.”

They switch seats eventually. Bart’s not happy about it, but even he has to admit that Ryley’s more experienced handling the PRAWN, and he’ll need every iota of that to make the entrance. It’s positioned high up in dead water, the only path upward being jumping from cable to cable over the sea of flames. The cables themselves are heavily reinforced and large enough to stand on, but they’ll be a small target to land.
“Hold on,” Ryley advises as he hits the jump jets and manoeuvres them out into the danger zone.
He reaches the first cable easily, putting them down on its heavy-jointed base. It’s not easy to pilot when he has to peer over Bart’s shoulder. They’re not all that far apart in height, but even those few inches make a difference when they’re squeezed into a cramped one-person cockpit.

His vision wavers a bit as he’s aiming for the second, and he just misses it, falling into empty water about a metre forward. “Fuck!” he swears, slamming his hand down on the thrusters and forcing the PRAWN to jet upwards. There’s only so much juice in them, but he’s been pulsing them to save energy, so he just barely makes it to the safety of the third platform.
He feels Bart breathe a sigh of relief. “Cut that one a little close. Can you make the opening?”
“I’ll have to,” he responds grimly. After a few seconds to let the jets recharge, he nudges the PRAWN upward again, deliberately overshooting the height of the gate. When he starts to sink, he can push forward and catch himself on the lip of the opening, bringing the PRAWN safely through into the ventilated interior.

Free of the confines of the cockpit, Bart gives him a courtly bow, the tiniest smile tugging at his lips. “Your skill amazes me, sir knight. Now come on, I want to take a look at that head wound.”
Ryley steps out as well and sits on the floor, exhaling heavily. “I have a medkit in my pack,” he says, unslinging the waterproof carisak from his shoulder. He’d snatched it up at the last minute during his escape and he’s grateful for it. Not just the medkit. Inside are also a couple of purple and orange tablets, synthesised just for this purpose, and day rations.

“Your mask wasn’t sealed properly,” Bart comments, brushing gentle fingers over the ring of burns around his neck. Ryley winces. It feels like someone has detached his head and stuck it back on slightly askew.
“Still airtight, thankfully,” he says, holding his head still as Bart wraps a length of bandage around the injury. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t.” Man, he’s thankful for bandage gunk. It mutes the pain so he only feels like he’s wearing a choker necklace made of hot coals. If he ever wants to dress up as Frankenstein, he’ll certainly have the scars to match the costume. Seized by a sudden wave of dizziness, he leans forward against Bart, trying and failing to stifle a wracking cough.

“It’s not just the heat. You’re feverish again.” Bart’s hand is cold against his forehead despite the boiling heat he’s just swum through.
Ryley takes a shuddering breath. “It’s getting worse,” he mumbles. “I’m not sure how much time I have.” Reluctantly, he pulls off a glove and finally shows Bart the size of the blisters on his hands. They’ve swelled to toxic-glowing pockets the size of rattle spores.
“You didn’t-“
“I didn’t want you to worry,” he says with a wry twist of his lip. “But I don’t think I can stop you from doing that.”
Now it’s Bart’s turn to exhale, pulling Ryley closer into his arms. “I thought you were dead,” he whispers. “And I realised there were a hundred things I wished I’d told you. That it’s been so little time and I already can’t imagine-“
A world without you. He doesn’t need to say it. Ryley knows. He knows, because it’s the same thought he’s been having, the same words that crossed his mind when Bart had that attack in the Lost River.

“Was this one of them?” he asks tentatively, pressing a hand to his mouth where he can still feel the ghost of their kiss.
He can’t see Bart’s face, because he’s hidden it in Ryley’s shoulder. “Maybe,” comes the soft response. “I wasn’t really thinking. I don’t know much about all of this.”
“Neither do I.” He can hear his own song change key, quietly, the tentative beginnings of a two-part harmony. “But-“ He swallows. “I’d like to find out. If you wanted that.”
Bart’s song pitches up to meet his, and he leans back, a small smile creasing his face. “I would like that very much.”

That understanding will have to wait, though, because they can’t stay here indefinitely. The PRAWN will be safe parked inside, but eventually they’ll run out of rations and starve, even if they try to hunt magmarang and cook them with a thermoblade. They need to clear the area and then figure out a plan to get back to the surface.
Step one is to explore the plant. The corridor they’ve landed in leads down into a larger room, a big deposit of ion crystals on a pillar in its centre. For once Ryley ignores it, unable to break them off without bringing the PRAWN down to drill. The aliens must have been quite large, because the arches and doorways are all easily able to accommodate its four-metre height with room to spare.

A passageway leads down into the core of the facility. Beside a data terminal is a force gate that requires a purple tablet, which Ryley presents while Bart downloads the data. “This is immense,” he says in an undertone as they enter the generator room. “No wonder they can run enough energy to power the gun. They must be generating gigawatts here.” He jumps as one of the little maintenance robots runs up behind him and zaps his leg. “Ow! Hey! We’re not trying to damage anything, you piece of shit!”
“Those are fascinating,” Bart comments. “Powered by ion cubes?”
“They must be.” Ryley rubs his zapped thigh, giving the bot a sour look. As an engineer he appreciates the elegant simplicity of the design, but why do they have to look like mechanical cave crawlers?

On data terminals located dangerously close to energetic arcs, they find useful ion data and information about the plant’s power draw. “They’re not even using all of it,” Ryley says admiringly. “These guys were fantastic with technology. 20% of the energy off here is just going to reserve. About a third runs the gun, and the rest is split between the Warpers, sanctuaries, the megaquarium and the arch network.” He frowns. “So the arches do have a function. Power distribution, maybe? The facilities sure as hell aren’t connected by cables, so they must have some wireless system.”
“Maybe we should be thinking about damaging it,” Bart says dryly. “We’d get rid of the Warpers and the gun in one stroke. But then again, I doubt we have the means to do so.”

As they walk back up the ramp, he adds “At least that means the primary containment isn’t far from here. If we can synthesise the depth module, we could make one final sprint and get down there.”
For the size of the facility, there aren’t many rooms. The next one is another of the huge arches. Ryley paces around it, examining corners to try to decipher what it does. “I can’t find any-“ He has to take a break to cough. “Can’t find any opening. It’s as sealed up as the ones on the surface.”
“This panel opens.” There’s a loud whir. “Do you think it wants a tablet?” The panel in question is more of a split cube, humming urgently at Bart as he tries to offer it one of the purple ones. It doesn’t accept that, but it doesn’t seem to want an orange one either.
“Try an ion cube,” Ryley suggests, tossing Bart one of the green crystals. He tentatively presents it, hurriedly snatching his hands away as the magnetic field hauls it in and nearly snaps the housing closed on his finger. “OSHA violation,” Ryley mutters. “But hey, it worked.”

The cube sinks back into the pillar it sprang from, lights flashing on the arch. “Now that it’s too late to do anything, is it a bad time to ask if this might be some kind of weapon?” Bart asks drolly.
“Yes,” responds Ryley with emphasis, watching green glow flare and coalesce inside the mouth of the arch. It flickers a bit, like a thicker version of the force gates, rippling like liquid crystal. Nothing explodes. He breathes a quiet sigh of relief.
“Fascinating.” Bart takes a step closer. “It reminds me almost of the water disturbance Warpers leave behind.” He frowns a little. “Didn’t the PDA say these might be some form of transportation? Maybe it’s a miniature phase gate. I couldn’t guess where it goes, but it’s quite the technical achievement to build one so compact.”
“There’s only one way to find that out.” Before Bart can stop him, Ryley reaches out and presses his hand into the glow. It feels almost solid, his palm sinking into it like he’s pressing on treacle. Then the force of it yanks him forward and all he can see is green.

Bright sparks swarm his vision, a tunnelling effect that makes it look like he’s tumbling face first down an immense cybernetic waterslide. He tries to reach out to stop his motion but he can’t feel his hands. The nerves only return phantom signals, a strange impression of weightless nothingness. It doesn’t hurt, but it frightens him, and he screams soundlessly and flails imaginary limbs in a vain attempt to free himself. The pitching rolling motion makes him feel seasick even though he doesn’t have a stomach either.

Then, as soon as it started, it stops, and he stumbles forward onto cool metal. He’s dry-heaving and nearly face down on the ground but he’s alive, and his limbs are all still attached to his body.
When his inner ears stabilise and stop telling him he’s falling, he flops over onto his back and pants like a drowned fish. “Achievement my ass,” he mumbles. “I’ve phase travelled before and I’ve never once-“ His sentence is cut off with another wave of nausea.

The ceiling above him is the same gunmetal colour as the base he just left, but he can tell he’s in a different room. It’s larger, and he can faintly smell salt. Gingerly, he climbs to his feet, leaning on a wall for balance as he walks up yet another goddamn ramp.
Hey, hang on, this place is familiar. He squints and shakes his head. Up in front of him is one of those lime green cases he saw in the lower side of the gun emplacement, sitting at the base of a dizzying string of catwalks leading upwards. He’s on the enforcement platform. But the enforcement platform is over a kilometre above where he’d just been, above sea level. No wonder he feels so sick.

“It’s a portal,” he says to himself. “It’s a portal!” A wave of excitement rushes over him. Where he’s positioned now he’s on the surface, a few hours’ swim from home, and he didn’t have to tangle with anything nasty to get here. Now they have a real, solid chance to build the depth modules, and with enough ingenuity they’ll be able to dive down to the last facility without having to encounter sea dragons or ghosts again.
He’s excited enough that, forgetting his nausea, he throws himself back into the portal to go tell Bart. Which is a mistake, because his brain hasn’t fully recovered from the disorienting experience and it doesn’t appreciate being subjected to the same thing twice. By the time he pitches out on the other end he nearly throws up and definitely falls over, barely escaping another concussion when Bart catches him half a metre from the ground. “Ryley!”

“I’m alright,” he rasps. “Just give me a second for the room to stop spinning.” Balance seems determined to elude him, and he only just stops himself from being sick. “It’s a portal,” he repeats when his voice returns to normal. “Leads up to the mountain island.”

And lord hope his inner ears can handle another trip, because he can easily guess where they’re going next.

Chapter Text

It turns out Bart can tolerate the phase jumps better than Ryley, so he goes to the island while Ryley salvages the Cyclops.

They haven’t entered the last room yet, the one with the blue tablet. It’s fairly certain it’ll be one of the keys to the last facility, so it’s safe to leave where it is while they prepare for the descent. Ryley passes it on the way out, a rueful smile tugging at his lips. “Why couldn’t you just pick one key?” he asks the long-gone aliens. “Why three different ones? I’ll bet we have to synthesise more of the blues, or else they’re only useful for one lab cache and totally pointless otherwise.”

That speculation he leaves aside as he carefully navigates the obstacle course that leads out of the formation. It’s easier unimpeded, but inopportune fits of coughing seem to strike at the worst moments, forcing him to double over the controls and temporarily lose manoeuvrability while he wheezes for breath. His lungs are getting weaker, making it harder to draw air in. At the peak he could hold his breath for nearly four minutes underwater; now his lung capacity is heavily reduced, rendering it difficult to exert himself even on land. Their plan has to work. If it doesn’t, he knows he’ll be dead within a week.

Bart didn’t want him to go. Would have liked to do the dangerous part himself and send Ryley to the relative safety of the island. But even coughing his lungs up Ryley’s still a better pilot, and he’ll be nonfunctional if he has to do many more phase jumps. The alien gates are not designed for comfort, not the way human phasegates are built with smooth transitions in mind. It irks him doubly because he’s never gotten portal-sick the way some of his Aurora crewmates did – he didn’t even notice when they passed through light-years in the blink of an eye, but he’s rendered dizzy and incapable by a jump of just over a kilometre.

Either way, it’s evident that there’s little danger in his current mission. The sea dragon doesn’t even see the PRAWN. Given its size, the exosuit is too small to be worth hunting as a meal, which renders it almost totally beneath notice. Ryley shudders as he sees its massive shadow sweeping overhead, blind to the tiny shape picking its way over tumbled rocks below. Its roar is ear-shatteringly loud even at a distance, sharp enough to be painful, and he wishes he could fabricate ear plugs. “Shut it,” he mumbles as it howls again. “Seriously. You’re a terrible neighbour.”

The corpse of the Cyclops is a sorry sight. Ryley draws in a breath as he sees it, listing painfully in the water and nearly crushed halfway through. Great rents from claws as big as a human body mark its sides, and the cockpit window is a shattered memory. The gap is actually big enough to bring the PRAWN inside.
“You were a good ship,” he says quietly, patting the twisted wreckage of the console. Inanimate object or not, it deserves to know it was loved.
He swims in through the hole of the front deck, yanking bulkhead doors open against the pressure of the water. The fabricator he deconstructs and collects the materials for, but the radio he leaves in place. Likewise with the plant pots full of drowned trees and marblemelons. One melon he picks up, curious whether there’ll be anything edible left of it, but it’s disgustingly squishy in his hands and he decides he doesn’t want it after all. He does, however, harvest a few seeds in the hope they’ll be viable to plant.

Beneath, the lockers filled with materials will have to be mostly left. He pulls out what he knows he can’t easily mine either here or on the island – rubies, nickel, table corals, prefabricated lubricants and silicone. Those go in his pack, as do the rolled-up posters whose plastic coverings make them waterproof.

On the way out, he carefully collects the ship miniature and the dragon toy from their little shelf, whose locking mechanism has kept them safely dry. It reminds him uncomfortably of salvaging the Aurora. He has to deliberately remind himself that this ship holds no ghosts, that the empty bed was his and Bart’s and not that of a lost crewmate, that the toys and posters are here because he put them there and not left by long-dead hands.

The fish in the aquarium are surface species and wouldn’t survive in the hot water down here. Two have already died; Ryley dispatches the others to save them the suffering. The boomerangs he collects to eat later, because if there’s one thing he’s learned on this planet, it’s that those who waste will quickly become those who want.

He carefully jumps the trench on the way back, peering down into the dark water below. It looks like it might be a pathway down to the deeps. He can’t find out now, not with the PRAWN already pushing the limits of its hull integrity, but he marks it for later and skirts over it to the safety of the castle.

“You took your time,” Bart says acerbically when he climbs out of the PRAWN.
Ryley’s drawing breath to reply when he realises Bart’s song is strung high and tight with worry. His snappish behaviour is probably more anxiety than real anger. “I had to,” he responds. “Didn’t want to fall into any holes. Speaking of holes, I think your trench might lead us down to the lower chamber.”
That draws Bart’s interest. “Really? I thought the entry said it was south-south-east.”
Ryley shrugs. “There’s probably more than one entrance. God knows there are like 5 into the Lost River. But even if it isn’t, it’s probably a good idea to try it before we try for a different cave system.”

“True that.” Bart sighs. “I’ve built a couple of base compartments on the island, but I’m missing pieces for a mod station and fabricator. Did you get the parts from the Cyclops?”
In answer, Ryley tips out his pack onto the polished grey floor. “Here we go. Gold, table corals, diamonds, lead. I didn’t bother with titanium – I assumed you could get some on the island?”
“You can get titanium anywhere,” Bart says with a snort. “Alright. What’s the plan?”
Ryley sets the toy dragon on the ground. “Well, we have to dodge this guy. It seems like he’s not interested in the PRAWN, so I reckon our best bet is to just take it down. The Cyclops is past repairing. It’s totally sunk. Building a new one and bringing it down would take too long and be too risky.” Bart murmurs assent as he continues. “So we make a last-ditch sprint, try not to fall into any lava pools. I took a look down the trench and it seems like it’s just an ocean down there. We fabricate another couple purples and at least one more blue tablet, just in case we need them, put a thermal reactor in the PRAWN and pack it with enough materials to build a small interim base with a fabricator. Then we run like hell and pray we make it.”

“Simple.” The ghost of a smile tugs at Bart’s lips. “What’s the catch?”
Ryley groans. “I don’t know yet. There’s probably something even bigger and angrier down there. Warpers – I bet there’ll be warpers. They guard all the alien facilities. Also I want you to pilot.”
Bart frowns. “Me? But you’re-“
“Breaking into an uncontrollable coughing fit every twenty seconds,” Ryley admits. “I could afford to stop up there, but if we need to play floor is lava across rock islands, I might end up sinking us because I can’t keep track of where we are.” He grins. “Plus, you’re taller. You’ll have a better view.”
“I’m average at best!” Bart scoffs.
“Yeah, and I’m short, so checkmate.” Ryley has to viciously stifle another cough that threatens to make his point for him. It doesn’t work, and he nearly chokes trying to get his breath back, hand over his mouth as he shakes.

“I see what you mean,” Bart says softly, one hand on his back to steady him. He catches Ryley’s gloved wrist. There’s blood on the hand he’s been coughing into. “Ryley-“
“There’s no point.” Ryley closes his eyes. “The only thing we can do is go. Else I’m just waiting around to die.” He’s never said the d-word before. It hangs in the air between them like a guillotine, threatening to snap down. “It could be worse,” he adds in a low voice. “I’m still upright. I’m still thinking. I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck, but I can cope.” He’s not exaggerating the latter either – his joints are on fire and his hands shake as he tries to put the materials back into his carisak. He’s not even sure if he could get his gloves off now without popping one of the horrible blisters.

He's also not so blinded by his own misery that he hasn’t noticed green spots starting to bloom on Bart’s uncovered hands. They’re not as severe as his own, but they’re a blindingly obvious sign that Bart’s illness isn’t under control anymore. Even if it’s too late for Ryley, they still have to go, because there’s still time to forestall it before Bart gets as sick as he is. “You’re hearing them now, aren’t you?” he asks.
Bart winces and taps his head. “Not clearly. But when I was in the water up there I could hear the peepers chirping – vaguely, but I could hear them.”
Ryley exhales. “I thought so. Can you hear mine?”
“Yours?” That little frown is on his face again. “Your heartbeat? I can hear that, just. Your lungs sound awful by the way.”
“Not my heart,” Ryley says with a snort. “My song.”
Bart tilts his head, listening, a faraway expression on his face. “I didn’t think we had them. We’re not part of the planet.” He shakes his head. “No, I can’t hear it. Can you- can you hear mine?”
“Yeah.” Ryley puts a hand on his chest, feeling the steady drumbeat of his heart underpin the notes of his song. “I don’t know if I can describe it in words. You’re kinda lower pitched, baritone almost?” He smiles. “When you’re happy it gets louder and sort of runs up, like an arpeggio.”

“Fascinating.” Bart covers Ryley’s hands with his own. “I wish I could hear yours.”
“I hope you don’t have to,” Ryley says under his breath. He’s sure now that the changes are due to the advancing effects of the Kharaa, and no amount of music is worth the pain it causes.

That night they go through the portal and sleep in the newly fabricated bed on the island. Ryley watches the waves lap against a partially submerged window, reflecting reddish and white moonlight in fractal patterns. 4546B has a beautiful sky. He hopes he’ll get to see it again. Once they go down, that’s the point of no return; if the last facility is a dead end then he knows he’ll likely never make it back to the surface. Eventually he falls into a feverish doze, unsettled by the distorted voices he can’t quite hear and the pain blazing up through his skin.

Bart shakes him awake hours later. The sun’s already halfway up in the sky. “You were tossing and turning all night,” he says unrepentantly when Ryley gives him a reproachful look. “By the time you were finally calm it was nearly morning. I thought you might as well get a few hours of rest before we left.” Before Ryley can protest any further he gets a glass of marblemelon juice shoved in his face and has to drink it or else let it spill everywhere.

With the benefit of rest and some degree of preparation, the phase jump back down doesn’t floor him, but it’s still thoroughly uncomfortable. He catches himself on the wall for balance, and Bart winces in sympathy. “I’ll go back and synthesise another blue tablet when we’ve got the blueprint. Will you get the PRAWN ready?”
“Gladly,” Ryley says with a groan. “Come on, let’s see what colour we need to go unlock it. You know, this is a pretty terrible security system if the room you keep the high-security key in is opened by a low-security lock. It’s like keeping the keys to the royal treasury in a janitor’s closet.”
Bart starts laughing, and in the process thereof nearly loses a finger to the snappy tendencies of the control panel. “Ow, bloody hell!” He shakes his hand with a rueful grin. “You aren’t wrong. Maybe that panel is the security system. Anyone below a certain rank gets their fingers severed.” He frowns. “Do aliens have fingers?”

“Probably.” Ryley scans the tablet quickly and then picks it up, hearing a slight click as the magnetic field holding it disengages. “I mean opposable thumbs give manual dexte-“
Suddenly his sentence cuts short as a voice slams its way into his head with the force of a hammer blow. Until now he’s heard whispers and distant songs – now it’s like the language centre of his brain is being grabbed and twisted, a mental shout that drives right through any barrier his skull might have offered.
“COME HERE, TO ME.”
Stunned by the force of it, Ryley drops the tablet with a loud clatter, only staying on his feet because he's fallen against Bart rather than the floor. Distantly he recognises Bart’s also holding his head, his groan of pain a whisper in comparison to the awesome volume of Her voice. She must be close by for them to hear Her so clearly. He wonders if She’s been shouting like this to reach them through the kilometres of rock that have separated Her from their position.

“Did you-“
“I certainly heard that,” Bart says faintly. “I think I could have heard that from orbit.” He bends down to, very hesitantly, pick up the tablet, but it doesn’t seem to trigger another call. “And I don’t think I can deny it either,” he adds with a shaky breath. “It goes against all conventional logic, but what kind of scientist would I be if I ignored empirical evidence? That appears to be very strong, if anecdotal, evidence that an external intelligence is communicating with us.”
Ryley hides his face in his hands. “The longer I stay on this planet, the more I feel like we’re stuck in one of those old sci-fi vids. What next, kidnapped in a flying saucer?”
“Well, I sincerely hope not.” Bart takes a deep breath. “I suspect,” he says slowly, “we may receive more cues when we get closer. I sincerely hope She can modulate Her voice, because if that happens while we’re moving I will definitively sink the PRAWN into a lava pool.”

After a brief moment to regain their senses, they reluctantly separate to make the final preparations. Ryley slots new modules into the Sea Treader, equipping a couple of extra locker slots alongside the new thermal reactor and depth module. It’s a good thing the alien bases are pressurised, because otherwise unloading the module would have required bringing the PRAWN up to unmodified crush depth, which is a massive pain. He slaps the side of the hull. “Not all Alterra design sucks,” he tells it. “You’re pretty good. If I ever get home I’ll tell them that.”
The PRAWN’s AI doesn’t respond of course. It’s not actually very intelligent. But you know what, he’s one of the only two humans alive down here, and Bart’s not going to judge him for personifying a vehicle. He talks to trees, and Ryley means no disrespect by that observation – evidently it works fairly well given the results.

He's straightening out a few cracks and dents when Bart returns. “I had to use the last of the kyanite,” he says with a sigh. “The aliens weren’t shy about using expensive materials for their keys.”
Ryley shrugs. “There’s plenty more down here.” He stifles another ragged cough. “Come on. Let’s get going.”

They pitch the PRAWN out into the dark water beyond the gate. Bart fumbles the jump at first, sending Ryley’s heart into overdrive, but he catches it on the next push and lands on a nearby rock. “Off to a great start,” he says dryly.
They navigate the castle passageways in tense silence, interrupted only by Ryley’s coughing fits. He doesn’t doubt now that having Bart drive was the better idea. Already he’s interrupted one dicey manoeuvre with a violent spasm, coughing until he stains the inside of his mask red and he’s half afraid the noise of it will attract predatory attention.

At last they reach the trench. Poised above it, they can see a seething ocean of lava boiling up to the surface, spilling down from rivers above into a fiery confluence.

“Here goes nothing,” Bart says quietly, and pushes the PRAWN forward into the inferno.

Chapter Text

What they’re sinking into looks, to Ryley’s watering eyes, exactly like hell.

Boiling up around them are pillars of fire, the bubbling sea of lava washing up against a magmatic shore. Bart carefully manoeuvres the PRAWN to land on an island, barely avoiding a flare of heat that sends confused upward currents roiling off the surface of the lava and makes the water bubble with rising steam. Even inside the reinforced metal shell they can feel it. It’s hot and humid inside to an uncomfortable degree, to the point Ryley almost wishes they hadn’t added the thermal module. The extra power is nice though. Proximity to the vicious heat of the planet’s core means their power cells are charging into overdrive.

“I don’t even know how to navigate this,” Bart says despairingly. “Look ahead. We might as well be sitting on top of the mantle given the volume of magma.”
Ryley forces down a wave of heat-induced nausea and leans forward. “There are more islands. You’ll have to jump between them. For now, pulse the jets and keep your vertical elevation until you hit the shore.” He folds his hand over Bart’s on the throttle and guides him on when to drop the power, trying not to press too hard against the burning hot glass. “God, we need an air conditioner in here.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Bart says with a groan as they stumble out onto solid ground. A little remove from the lava lake reduces the heat a little, but not enough to make it tolerable, let alone comfortable. Saunas are supposed to be good for you, right? Ryley vaguely recalls someone telling him some nonsense about heat shock therapy. He certainly doesn’t feel like any of this is therapeutic, and judging by Bart’s laboured breathing he probably doesn’t disagree.

There’s a tumbling ‘crash’ sound, followed by the mechanical screech of a warper. It pitches and warbles up above a truly upsetting low-pitched groan that makes Ryley want to scream. “What the hell is that?” he asks through gritted teeth.
“Sonic deterrence,” Bart suggests in an equally strained voice. “There were similar pillars above the disease research facility. God, that hurts my head.”
The PRAWN stomps out onto a plateau that overlooks the lake. A vague directional sense tells him Bart’s probably right about where the noise is coming from. Immediately after, he has to throw them forward into a tumble to the lower shore to avoid an unusually aggressive warper. It follows them in blinks, screeching in its painful register, but won’t approach as close to the lava as they can. They must be close. The warpers are more active when they’re guarding a site, and this must be the most important site of all.

“Ryley?” He hears the question dimly as he pitches forward against the glass, too exhausted and breathless even to cough properly. He can hear his own lungs so clearly, the awful death rattle as he tries to breathe in – he’s drowning slowly from within, never mind the water outside the hatch.
Clear as a clarion call, he hears Her. “I am what you seek,” She says earnestly. “Want to… help you.” Her voice isn’t so deafening now. It drowns out the buzzing for a second, soothing the pain in his head.
“Ryley!” Bart hauls him back to reality with hands on his head. “Ryley, stay with me, please. I hear it too, I know where we’re going, just stay with me. We’re almost there.”
“Okay,” he mumbles, pushing himself back to a vaguely upright position. “The islands?”
“You’re going to have to guide me,” Bart tells him. Floating in some distant headspace, Ryley can somehow tell he’s lying. It’s a pretext to keep him talking, keep him aware the only way Bart knows how. But he’s too tired to argue. In lieu of talking, he points at the nearest island left of centre, resting his hand on the throttle to check the burst technique on the jets.

They land under another sonic deterrent, its screech agonising up close. Above it there’s the deafening roar of a sea dragon, its flipping tentacles visible in the distance. “Of course there’s more of them,” Bart says despairingly. He doesn’t wait for Ryley’s direction to jump for the nearest rock in an attempt to get clear of the sonic whine, but the noise diminishes only slightly.
The next jump is a dangerously long one. The closer island is barely above the surface of the lava, half-congealed rock with dangerous fiery cracks blazing up through it. “Jump it,” Ryley directs in a hoarse voice. “You can-“ Another fit of coughing. “You can make the shore.”

Bart doesn’t question his judgement, even though he probably doesn’t sound all that convincing, throwing the PRAWN forward on blind faith that Ryley’s right. He hopes he is and that his eyes aren’t just crossed. But his depth perception holds and they make it, landing in a cloud of dust on the far shore.

Rising up above them is a huge facility, easily double the size of any they’ve encountered before now. It’s a gunmetal-grey cathedral built deep in the belly of the volcano, surrounded by a moat more dangerous than any castle. The PRAWN pitches into motion again as they get going towards the entry arch. There’s a sort of airlock system there, a larger field holding the water at bay with the smaller forcefield layered safely inside. As they pass the boundary the temperature drops drastically, blessedly cool air flooding the cockpit as it hisses open. Ryley groans in relief. “God, I could kiss an alien right now,” he mumbles half-coherently. “S’ much nicer.”

“Let’s not start any interspecies love affairs just yet,” Bart says dryly, sliding an arm under his shoulders to lift him out of the Sea Treader. It’s just barely doable with Ryley helping, thanks to the PRAWN’s automatic ‘sit down and wait’ feature. “We still have to get in. Pass me the tablet?”
The tablet is duly presented to the control panel. It hums in yet another of those painful pitched noises that seem typical of alien technology as it snaps it up. His head hurts. Every noise sounds seven times too loud, the echoing of feet on the alloy of the ground as harsh as gunshots. He’s struggling not to just curl up into a ball and rock himself back and forth with hands over his ears.

“We’re in,” Bart says quietly, even his whisper sounding loud as shouting. “Come on. Just a little further.” He slings Ryley’s arm over his shoulders, half-supporting and half-carrying him as they struggle up another ramp. Bart’s taller, so he has to bend down a little so Ryley isn’t on his tiptoes or outright off his feet. He’d laugh but his chest hurts too much.
As soon as they step foot past the first of a line of obelisks, lights click to life. More blink on with vague mechanical clunks and whirs, like some sort of demented alien red carpet leading them up a huge vaulted hall into an even huger room. Alien robots skitter over immense pillars bearing huge deposits of ion crystal, little hissing noises as they weld tiny cracks and run extendable pseudopods over hairline fractures. “Fabricator,” Bart says. “A nearly infinite source of energy.” In true Bart fashion, he completely ignores the machinery of an innovation that dwarfs humanity’s spacefaring achievements and drags Ryley to the closest of a few large display cases, setting him down against the support of its base. “There has to be something useful here. They can’t have had no idea how to treat this.”

Hanging above his head is a sword. It looks like human manufacture. Ryley tries to reach through the case to grab it, but can’t, so he settles for using the scanner to analyse it. “It is human,” he says in surprise. “13^th century? That’s almost a millennium ago.”
Bart abandons his frantic search for a second to look, seduced by the allure of ancient Terran history right here beside them. “So they observed us.” He grimaces. “For some reason that doesn’t make me feel very good. Whether they took this right from Genghis Khan or from a museum centuries later, they were on Terra, and they must have interfered.”
Still dizzy, Ryley breaks into a stuttering laugh. “Hah! That’s your great-granddad’s sword?”
“You jest, but statistically speaking nearly half of the Mongolian States is directly descended from the man. Chances are it is.” Bart sighs. “Apparently he got around.”

None of the other cases hold anything useful. Disparate pieces of broken and discarded technology, meaningless statuary, strange objects with no clear raison d'etre. Bart disappears behind one of the doors for a while, leaving Ryley to attempt to marshal his strength. He’s damned if he’s just going to pass out on the floor rather than stealing every ion cube in this facility and touching every piece of sterile alien tech with his grubby little human hands. It’s kind of his thing at this point.

“Nothing useful,” Bart reports when he returns, “just more inactive arches and a room full of egg samples. I’d like to study them but that can wait.” He frowns when he sees Ryley (barely) on his feet, leaning against the display case. “What are you doing?”
“Exploring.” Ryley flourishes the scanner, although flourish is a strong word for the clumsy flick of his wrist. “Are we checking the other side?”
Bart looks at him and assesses his level of stubbornness, eventually dipping his head in reluctant assent. “Alright. Let’s have a look. Considering our hosts’ obsession with symmetry, I’ll wager that the corner rooms are arches.” He checks around the doors. “And had I made that bet, I’d have won. The middle one seems more interesting.” He holds Ryley’s arm firmly, steadying him as they make their way inside. In turn, Ryley compares their levels of stubbornness and decides to let it slide; besides, he'll probably fall if Bart lets go, and he’s not so proud that he’d faceplant just to prove his fitness.

Inside is a network of large pipes pumping huge volumes of water through. The soft chirping of peepers fills the room, muted by the glass as they spiral up and down tubes like a fish-sized waterslide. They’re the only fish inside. “Fascinating,” Bart breathes. “This must be the base of the vents we see on the surface. But why are the peepers-“
“They’re messengers,” Ryley says. He holds his hand out and touches a pipe, hearing the peeper inside chirp as it rides the flow of the water past him. “This must be where they get the enzyme from.” He’s suddenly seized by a sourceless compulsion to jump inside one of those pipes and go down. He could probably fit. They’re wide enough for a human. He’s so close, he needs to just get down to the last part-

Bart shakes him gently again. “You’re drifting. Is She talking to you?”
Ryley furrows his brow. “No. I can’t hear Her. I don’t think?” He can’t quite tell if the compulsion is natural intrusive thoughts or Her influence subtly urging him to draw as close to Her as he can. He’s suddenly seized by a knowledge as intense as the fear that comes with it. He knows She’s beyond the last forcefield. And he’s terrified. Because he feels like he’s losing his mind, and he’s not in control of himself when Her voice calls to him. He’s as lost and hypnotised as when he was caught by the mesmer, and the memory of that nightmarish call haunts him. It had seemed so logical and reasonable at the time – he’d trusted the voices he heard. It had been so safe, so friendly, up until jaws closed on his arm.

What if She is the same? Some immense predator, drawing Her prey in with the force of her mind, summoning the peepers in to feed Her immense hunger? A leviathanic mesmer ready to tear them apart, confined in the deeps by the aliens as much from fear as desperation. Perhaps they had jailed Her here because they had to protect themselves.
“The last room,” he forces out. “Above the entryway. What’s in there?”
Bart gives him a strange look. “I don’t know. Do you want to check? I think we know it’ll be a dead end.”
“Let’s just make sure, yeah?” He’s avoiding. Deliberately. Bart can probably tell, but he doesn’t push the issue.

They mount the ramp with some difficulty. The burst of determination Ryley’s been relying on for fuel is starting to peter out, and he knows his time is coming fast. Bart basically has to drag him, but he determinedly stays upright, refusing to admit defeat.
The room is layered with more glass cases. “Dissection,” Bart says immediately. “It smells of formaldehyde.” He points at a preserved egg specimen in one, the shell cracked open and almost peeled. It’s immense, easily a metre tall and ovoid in shape. “This must be part of their egg research.”
Mounting the next set of steps, they see something truly upsetting. Ryley can’t suppress a choked-off cry of distress at the sight of it. The egg’s former occupant lies on the table, its row of eyes still partially open and rolled back in its skull. The creature looks a little bit like a sea dragon with its tentacular body and heavy reptilian head, but it has more of a turtle-like shape and its jaws are a blunted beak rather than rows of fangs.

It's as big as a man by length, but it’s a baby. Tiny and forlorn on the table, its paddle-like limbs half-formed and limp by the sides of its body, it’s not hard to tell what must have happened. It wasn’t ready to hatch, but it was forced, the shell cracked, and in the process the hatchling died alone on a dissection table.
As frightened as he is of the sea dragons, he’s already seen that they possess familial instincts enough to crush themselves to death trying to free their unhatched offspring. The mother that started this outbreak did so because she was trying to save her baby. They might not be sapient, but they’re intelligent enough for parental defensiveness and what one could poetically call love. This creature is clearly similar – not enough to be a juvenile of the species, but enough that they must be closely related. There’s a part of Ryley that weeps to know that it probably felt only fear in its desperately short life, and that somewhere outside there must have been a mother who wailed in pain at the loss of her child.

Bart swallows. Ryley can hear the song in his chest muted and modulating into a minor key of sadness. “Their project was doomed,” he says quietly. “They must have been desperate enough to waste their last chance in the hope they could keep it alive. I’ve read the data banks – this one must be a juvenile Sea Emperor. They thought it was the only thing that could save them.”
“And they still killed it,” Ryley spits out bitterly.
“If gods exist,” Bart murmurs, “I imagine they considered the failure a sufficient punishment for the cruelty of the Precursors’ actions.” He presses a hand against the impenetrable case. “I wish we could close its eyes. It seems… wrong, somehow, to leave it like this.”

There’s a distant sense of grief occupying his chest that doesn’t feel like his own. He still can’t hear Her voice, but it feels as though he can feel Her directly. “Was it your baby?” he asks aloud, but there’s no answer.

“We should go down.” Bart catches his elbow as Ryley sags against him, the last flare of strength flooding out of him. “Ryley?”
“Just a little further, right?” he asks. Bart answers, he can hear his voice, but it doesn’t seem to register logically above the subsonic murmur that pervades the metal of this place. There’s some uncomfortable resonance in the alien construction that mutes the songs he should be able to hear. His own is weak and thready, slowly failing, while Bart’s is still loud thanks to proximity. But under all that he can finally hear Hers, rising and falling in soft waves like the ocean.

The forcefield clicks open in front of them. At some point Bart’s picked him up and is talking to him urgently, but it still won’t click in his brain. He coughs, then keeps coughing, his damaged lungs struggling to draw in enough oxygen when the muscles of his diaphragm don’t seem to want to cooperate.

They’re above an immense pool. There’s no ramp down, only stairs with steps far too high to navigate without jumping. Bart’s setting him down now, but Ryley won’t let go, unwilling to be left behind. “You can’t swim if you can’t breathe, Ryley,” he says desperately.
He can’t quite manage words right now, so he switches to sign, shaking hands sketching out “Mask. Put it on me. I have to go.” The call is so intense now he might just pitch himself over the side into the water, and Bart finally seems to realise that, swearing quietly to himself in utterly uncharacteristic tones as he struggles to drag Ryley’s rebreather mask over his face.

“We’re going to jump,” he says, hauling Ryley to his feet. “Hold your breath. Worst case we just hit the water hard.” Then they’re weightless for a second as Bart pitches them over the ankle-height railing, falling blind through the air, and just as suddenly hitting the water with the force of a ten-metre drop. It probably would have winded him if he had any breath to lose, but he doesn’t.

In the water he’s immersed in the song. It’s overwhelming, all he can hear. He can’t remember now why he was afraid to come here. Her song is nothing but calm, welcoming, and so he isn’t surprised or afraid when he hears a rattling call or sees an immense paddle-like flipper lean itself on the gantry below them. The head that raises itself up is big enough to bite a Cyclops through but Her eyes are the glowing blue of the ocean, depthless and filled with wisdom and wonder.

“Hello,” She says, and he hears his own tiny song pitch up in response, trying its best to harmonise with the grand orchestra of Her. Hello! it tries to say, but he’s not sure if the message is received before he passes out.

Chapter Text

They hit the water with bruising force, the impact stinging even through the reinforced material of his dive suit. Bart barely keeps his grip on Ryley, who’s gone completely limp, his hold on Bart’s arm slackening. He’s still conscious – his eyes are still open, sluggishly focusing on his surroundings – but even through the water Bart can hear the awful rattle of his lungs as he breathes. He’s drowning even with the mask on.

Hang in there, he prays silently, focusing his heightened hearing on the quiet but present sound of Ryley’s pulse.

He can tell vaguely that the water pressing around them isn’t as heavily pressurised or hot as the water outside, so this is a tank rather than a moonpool. Drifting up around, bouncing off its walls, is another song that tugs at the edges of his awareness. It’s loud enough that he thinks he could have heard it even without the effects of the Kharaa. He can barely imagine how loud it must sound to Ryley, but despite that Ryley isn’t covering his ears, so it must not be hurting him.

Below them is a platform slung underneath the mouth of the tank. It’s held up by solid cables and looks immovable, so he jumps in shock when it rocks like a swing pushed by a child, a loud rattling call echoing through the water. Slamming down onto the metal floor is a forelimb as big as the entire body of a Reaper. It knocks them back in the water, a current washing through the confined space from the movement of the titanic head that rises to peer at them. Four glowing blue eyes pierce his soul, terrifying in their immensity, and somewhere in the back of his head an illogical part of him is laughing in hysterical terror and awe.

“Hello,” says a sonorous voice in his head. He knows instinctively that this is Her – the touch of Her mind is unmistakeable. But how majestic She is! As She leans away, sweeping tentacles the length of an adult ghost through the water, he estimates She must be at least two hundred metres long, twice the size of a sea dragon and many times its mass. Even with the massive size of Her prison, the full length of Her body barely fits inside it at full extension.

“Are you here to play?” She asks. Strangely graceful for a being of Her size, she turns over in the water and fixes them with her depthless eyes. “Others came here once. They built these walls. They played…alone.” There’s a wealth of unspoken knowledge in her words, her blanketing song a symphonic illustration of the entire story. He sees in his mind’s eye the bare walls of a metal prison, empty rather than flourishing as it is now. Blinking in and out behind glass walls are tiny beings – tiny compared to Her, but he imagines they would seem quite large if he were the one perceiving them. Hears nothing but tuneless buzzing from them instead of song, their minds a dead spot of white noise in the ocean’s spanning orchestra. Reaches out to appeal to them, plead with them to listen, but is not heard.

“They bored me,” She says. “Now they’re gone. And instead, we have you.” And now he sees himself through Her eyes, a miniscule mote floating before Her. He sees his own awed eyes in miniature, the tiny song that until now he hasn’t been able to hear. Beside him Ryley floats, unconscious, the music running through his blood trying valiantly to harmonise with the greater whole. He feels his own mind like a tiny point of light, and it’s a strange ouroboros of perception to be both the observer and the observed.

“We are curious whether you will swim with the current or fight against it as they did.”

Suddenly the spell breaks, and he’s only present in his own body, seeing again through his own eyes and ears. Now that he’s attuned to it he can hear the song still. Hers, the notes of the creatures that proliferate through the aquarium, his own and Ryley’s failing one. He’s dying. Bart can feel the feverish heat of his body even through the insulation of both dive suit and water, see the blue tinge to his lips that signals hypoxia.
She swings Her immense body around and approaches the platform again, resting Her great head barely metres from where they are. He wonders if She has to keep moving to breathe. The water in the aquarium must be starved of air quickly if She stays in one place. The scientific part of his brain is estimating Her species’ natural habitat – deep water, most likely, large open spaces like the dunes or the crater edge. Her jaws are large but don’t have the tearing equipment of a predator, which suggests She feeds on much smaller organisms, perhaps the plankton that proliferates throughout the aquarium. A creature of Her immense size would range many kilometres in a day with ease. This cage, huge as it is compared to a miniscule creature like him, must feel like a coffin.

“The sickness takes him,” She observes with quiet sadness. “It is a pity. His time is too short for action to affect it appreciably.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
A huge blue eye rolls to focus on him. “Can you deny the passing of nature? It is not within my power to forestall death. All things must fall in their time.”
“But it isn’t his yet,” Bart cries. He doesn’t even know if his voice carries underwater, but he knows She can hear his song, and every note of it wails in grief and desperation.
She watches him for a silent moment. “You love him.” It’s not a question, but a simple statement of fact. “The others did not know love in the way that I do. I listened to them although they could not do the same. They were part of a whole as are we, but an implacable one, without knowing pity nor kindness. It was not in their nature to grieve.” Her voice bears no anger nor bitterness, but only an inestimable sadness that thinking beings could live in such a way, deprived of the illogical beauty of feeling.

She reaches out with the smallest of Her long tentacles. It still dwarfs Ryley as the blue fringes of it wrap gently around him, cradling him like a glass statue. “I will do what I can,” She says. “Know this. The sickness that ails you is not of this place. It is only coincidence that I am able to slow its spread. The others sought a cure, but I was not young even when they first came, and so I could only forestall the inevitable.”
He follows Her down, carried along in Her slipstream, and finally he sees what has kept Her here. The thing She has guarded for long centuries against the hope that they might someday be free. She sits over an alien device that houses five sleeping eggs, their thick shells tapped with surgical precision by artificial tubes.

“They knew that my young would have the strength that I did not. But no creature can force a little one from its egg before the time is right. They tried and failed once before.” Her voice is the pitiless crashing of waves against a battered shore, the implacable rage of a mother taken from her child. “These must yet hatch, to play outside this place. The others built a passage to reach the world outside. I asked them for this freedom, but they could not hear me.” She leans forward and the current of Her breath blows away sand from a pile of metallic scrap. Bart recognises it as another arch, buried by centuries of neglect.

It’s a master arch. There’s no telling where it goes to, but he feeds it an ion cube and watches it blaze to stuttering life. The aliens must have built it here to bring in the other creatures She depends on, or to enter and leave the aquarium themselves.
Her forelimb leans against it as She observes. “With this passage my young can leave this place.”
“What about you?” he asks, but even as the words leave his mouth he knows it’s a stupid question. She is far too big to fit through the passage. The arches can only just accommodate the PRAWN – Her immensity dwarfs it like a toy. Her imprisonment is permanent.

Her face isn’t built to smile, but he senses amusement and sympathy in Her song. “I may not,” She says simply. “It is enough for me that they will go, to live as they were meant to. I have lived too long already for one life. It will be a relief when I can rest at last.” And he sees instinctively that She is old, even for Her standard of age, that She was old even when She was brought here and now has waited for easily the span of Her natural life beyond that time. When She was hatched, humanity was still building ancient stone empires in the dust – a spiral of images run through his mind from old lessons, Roman legionnaires and ancient Chinese emperors and yellow-tunicked Celts. She dates back before Caesar and Jesus Christ and Qin Shi Huangdi, and She has been imprisoned since Genghis Khan ran amok through Eurasia and ancient explorers walked the Silk Road. And again he’s humbled by the immensity of Her perception, feeling very small compared to the scale of time and distance that is natural to Her kind.

She dips Her head to nudge against one of the eggs. “They will go,” She says decisively. “But first they must feel the time is right and break free of their shells. This is the secret they could not force from me; to you I will give it freely.”
The knowledge comes to him with inevitable certainty. He sees plants that grow many kilometres distant from here, sees them as they were when She was young, flourishing throughout the water. The tiny things fed on them and She fed on those things in turn, taking in the things they produced. Beneath, in the cool waters of the dunes, lay long-ago eggs waiting to hatch, and She remembers through him how mothers told their little ones when it was safe to emerge. Chemical signals, although She doesn’t think of them in terms of molecule and protein, derived from fragments of amino acids and organic material from the plants they relied on for life. But those plants don’t grow here. The others knew only what She needed to survive, but did not think that Her young might need other things – the thought even the stupidest of ecologists should have come to, that the habitat of the juvenile is not the same as that of the adult.

He sees in Her memories the egg that She guarded when she was taken, and the other eggs that were brought to Her later, taken from safe nests of sand when their genetic mothers died from the disease the aliens had unwittingly unleashed. Not all of Her eggs are Hers by blood, but She has loved them and so they are Hers anyway, dreaming in their shells with Her song to lull them. They won’t hatch until the environment is right for them to do so. Bart will have to make sure it is, and he knows the plants he needs to find to do it, save for the last that She tells him grows deep in the trenches of Her prison.

She uncoils Her tentacle and deposits Ryley carefully amongst Her eggs. “He will be safe here until you return. But you will have to take off the covering so the water can touch him.”
“He can’t breathe underwater,” Bart says ruefully as he removes Ryley’s gloves, carefully drawing them off hands swollen with terrible green blisters. The seal of his mask can’t be cracked without drowning him, but Bart can deactivate the hermetic seal on his dive suit so it offers no more protection than an ordinary wetsuit would. The water here isn’t deep or hot enough to be dangerous, and he can only pray that proximity to such concentrations of the enzyme directly at the source will ease his symptoms until Bart can return. Gold motes settle on the undamaged patches of his skin, sinking in as though disappearing, and dimly he can hear Ryley’s laboured breathing ease a little bit.

“I’ll be back,” he says softly. “Don’t you dare die on me.”

With his newfound knowledge, he knows that the four warp gates will take him to the things he needs. He brings the PRAWN in to harvest ion cubes from the huge fabricator, feeding them to stoke the massive energy needs of the gates. Each arch leads to a new cave hidden within rock formations and deep trenches, pressurised and protected with forcefields. It seems as though the aliens wanted easy access to any biome. One comes out under the roots of huge tree mushrooms, another in the bulb zone not far from his base. He doesn’t dare waste the time to go there and check on Marguerit and Potato. They’re safe where they are and Ryley is running out of time.

Fungal samples. Bulb bush. He comes out in the ghost forest and has to swim dangerously far from the field to find ghost weed, sprinting through narrow tunnels that drill through the rock. The entrance is hidden behind a brine waterfall and he nearly gets lost in his urgency to find it again.

At last he collects some eye stalk seeds, packing them into the flask he’s using as a receptacle. He ruefully reflects that this would all have been a lot easier from home, where almost everything he needs grows in his garden. All those plants cultivated only for beauty and interest would have become quite useful. Then he thinks about jaffa cups tilted from Ryley’s fall and imagines the mushroom growing straight again, wiping away the memory of the laughing young man that had tumbled out of it, and his heart rate spikes again as much with pain as urgency.

When he finally dives back into the aquarium, he’s surprised to see a compartment in distinctive Alterra white sitting nearby the incubator device. Ryley sits against one of the pillars, humming softly to the nearby egg. “You’re awake!”
Ryley smiles faintly. “Sleep is therapeutic,” he signs, his gestures rendered vague by the weakness in his arms. “I thought you’d need to use the fabricator, so I built a module.” Beside him he pats the fan of a blue membrain-like plant. “And I found a sea crown too. She said that was one of the ones we needed.”
Bart’s alternately impressed by his resourcefulness and flummoxed at the idea that he’s been moving around in his state. “You went diving for it on your own?”
A slow head shake. “She showed me where. I just followed Her.”

She is settling above them now, leaning Her head down to observe. “I am not given the dexterity to pick small plants without crushing them,” She says with a hint of humour in Her voice. “They grow in little cracks where I cannot reach.” She nudges the compartment with one huge flipper. “I am told that these things can make other things within them. It is fascinating. I am pleased to have seen it. There are many things outside this world that I can know only through the memories of others, but now I may see some of them for myself.”
“Do you see everything that happens on this planet?” Ryley asks. It sounds as though they’ve been carrying on quite the conversation.
She inclines Her head. “Not all, but many. I have many little eyes that I may see through. They have long enough memories to bring me stories from outside. But all things that are here are part of the whole, and I am part of it too, so I know what all things know and see what all things see. Now that you have become another part I can know the outside through your songs as well.”

Somehow it’s not surprising that her viewpoint is so deeply philosophical. She is very old, after all, so it makes sense that She sees the world on a grander scale than they do. And with such an intimate sense of Her place in the web of life, She has no need to dominate the rest of it or bend it to Her will as humans tend to do. Mastery of nature seems like a folly on the timeline of Her life – had She observed old Terra, She would have seen as many empires fall as rise, and many things reach oblivion. Striving for immortality and greatness would look foolish from such a distance. Why destroy the very world you are one with? What could one gain from reaching the stars, if one turned them into strip malls once one got there?

Bart realises he’s been thinking for a while when his oxygen starts to blink low. “We’d better get this fabricated,” he says. “It’d be a pity to make the babies wait any longer. They have been for a thousand years, after all.”
She nods, the currents of Her movement washing against them. “Yes. The time for patience is over, I think. Now is the time for action.”

As they enter the compartment, he hears Her begin to sing, telling Her children how wonderful the world will be once they are ready to see it. And he could have sworn he hears them singing back.

Chapter Text

The flask of hatching enzymes feels inimitably fragile in his hands.

Ryley cradles it carefully as Bart fiddles with the settings on the incubator, afraid his trembling hands will spill and drop it. It’s the culmination of centuries of long waiting and days of searching. They’ve come so far to get here. If he breaks the flask now it would be a terrible waste.

Finally the device beeps. “Blasted alien symbology,” Bart mutters, his voice muffled by the mask and his song strung high-pitched with nervous tension. “They couldn’t have gone with nice decipherable pictograms, no. Complex runic alphabet it is. Reminds me of Kanji. That’s one of the reasons I gave up on trying to learn Chinese the analog way – there were so many symbols I couldn’t possibly keep track.”
He takes the flask carefully from Ryley’s hands and places it in the receptacle.

There’s a musical clink as the thin glass is shattered, releasing the enzyme into a diffusion chamber. In nature the mother would have produced it within her body and breathed it into the water, but this alien workaround will deliver the chemicals directly to the eggs without the complex process of water mixing that would attenuate their tiny sample beyond usefulness.

And now they wait. Ryley leans against Bart and silently prays. To what higher power he’s not sure, but he casts the intention out to whatever might be listening. Let the babies be alright. Please, let all these years not have done them any harm, let them be healthy and strong, let them be free-
He realises dimly that his song isn’t the only one shifting key. Hers swells and crests in an uproar like a wave, saying ‘now’, saying ‘welcome!’ It’s a crescendo that puts shame to any human composer, that would have made Ravel weep and inspired Bach to write a thousand symphonies. And he sees the eggs begin to move.

First tiny stirrings, then they begin to rock vigorously, nearly rattling off their incubator perches. The segmented shells peel apart like a flower opening, and rising up to meet Her joyous song are new smaller ones that cry ‘hello!’
The babies are tiny compared to their mother. Ryley estimates they’re only about as big as he is, tentacles and all, and about a quarter head in proportions. They tumble through the water, unsure of the nature and use of their flippers, chirping and rattling in smaller echoes of Her natural sound. He hears a trilled arpeggio from beside him and turns to meet the huge blue eyes of another baby. She chirps the same noise again, and he realises she’s imitating the song he’d been singing – running up the lullaby he’d hummed to her when she was in the egg.

He whistles the same sound, replacing the notes she’d elided, and she chirrups happily and butts her large head against him. Weakened by his illness, even the comparatively small force knocks him back in the water. “Hey,” he says in wonder, reaching out to pet her scaly brow.
Beside him, he sees Bart righting another tumbled infant, disentangling him from the wiring he’d snagged a tentacle on. “Go on,” he urges. “Your mother’s right there.”

She lowers Her head and rattles a lower version of the babies’ calls, deep-throated and sonorous in comparison. Both infants croon happily and paddle themselves clumsily in Her direction, pressing themselves against their mother with little hums and whistles.
“That’s something no one else alive has ever seen,” Bart says softly. “And may never see again. It could be decades or centuries before the little ones mature.”
“It’s really something, isn’t it.” Ryley leans against him and lets his eyes slip closed, listening to the joyful songs of the newly hatched Emperors. They resound bright with laughter and gaiety, singing new life into the ocean with every note. It’s not the rich and complex tapestry of their mother’s, but a blank canvas burgeoning with possibilities. Ryley hopes they get to find out every single one.

“Go with my blessing, my children,” She breathes, dipping Her head, and the babies turn and begin to swim instead for the arch. The water they’ll emerge into is the warmer shallows that will be safe for them until they grow bigger and stronger, able to range ever further across the planet. An ocean decimated, but not devastated; an ocean waiting for them to bring it hope.

A tentacle wraps around his wrist. Ryley looks up to see the searching eyes of the little one he sang to. She nudges him gently and makes a hiccupping noise, blowing in the water to push a small glowing ball towards him. Seemingly satisfied with her work, she disentangles herself and swims to join her siblings.
“What is this?” Bart asks.
She inclines Her head, Her dimming voice sounding all of a sudden very tired. “A gift only she could give. I suspect she will return to seek you out again. That is good. Without me there, they will need other thinking minds to learn from.”
Ryley reaches out to touch the ball, recoiling as it instead envelops his hand. He shakes at it, attempting to brush it off, but instead it sticks to his other hand and coats his skin in gel-like golden fluid. Then it dissolves into the water, leaving a faint sheen on his fingers. “Enzyme 42,” he signs with iridescent hands, smiling. “They’ll bring it everywhere. The whole ocean will be cured again.”

“And so will you.” Bart catches his hand. “Look.” Underneath the glistening coating, the blisters on his fingers are beginning to shrink, discoloured skin returning to its natural warm brown. The concentrated enzyme is potent. Only seconds after exposure, there are barely any marks left on Bart where the illness had scarred his skin.
“New life comes from all quarters,” She says with a smile in Her voice. “You will be granted many more years. My children swim for the shallows, to grow and learn – for this I thank you. My waiting is over.” She raises Her great head to look up towards the sky denied Her for centuries. “What will it be like, I wonder, to go to sleep and never wake up? Perhaps when next we meet I will be an ocean current carrying seeds to a new land, or a creature so small it sees the gaps between grains of sand.” Her eyes flicker closed. “Farewell, friends.”

With a sigh, She folds down in the water, Her body resting on the seafloor. And it’s suddenly, deafeningly silent. The ringing echoes of Her voice are gone; the orchestra of Her song standing up to take their bows, putting their instruments aside. Ryley feels tears roll silently down his face under the mask, the salt of his grief merging with the salt of the ocean. She’s gone.

It’s a bittersweet ending.

“I wish we could have found a way-“ he signs to Bart.
“So do I.” Bart sighs. “But we’re only human. There’s only so much we can do, and we did our very best. She saw her babies free at last, and now She can rest. I think She’s earned it.”
“Well and truly,” Ryley says softly as he reseals his dive suit.

It seems like they’re not the only ones feeling unmoored without Her presence. The peepers swim in aimless circles without anyone to direct them, and bonesharks and stalkers swish about in agitation. Ryley suspects they’ll leave too before long. The facility will be emptied, leaving a mausoleum of green-and-grey steel; a tomb for the Emperor and a monument to the fallacies of arrogance. It’s a keen sort of pain to think that She would have lived out Her natural life free if only the Precursors had listened to Her. If they had allowed nature to guide them instead of seeking to dominate it. But now they’re gone, and the only intelligent creatures left on this planet are him, Bart, and the babies who will become its new custodians. He vows silently that they will never be caged as their mother was. He’ll fight to the death to prevent it.

“Do you want to take anything?” he asks.
Bart shakes his head. “A few days ago I would have killed to get my hands on that ancient sword,” he confesses, “but it feels rather pointless now. I think we should let this place lie as it is, undisturbed.” Unspoken is the ‘and never come back’. Ryley agrees. He has no desire to return to the hellish netherworld of the lava zone, kyanite or no, and it would feel a little like sacrilege to disturb Her resting place.

He does take one thing, though, before they go. A single sea crown seed for Bart to plant later, to cultivate a new glowing bed for his garden, bursting with life in Her memory.

“Ready?”
“More than.”
And, hands linked, they step through the glowing phase gate.

It spits them out below the bulk of the gun platform, in deep water off the shores of the mountain island. The water glitters with enzymatic residue, and he can hear the chirping calls of the babies not far away – hopefully closer in to shore, in the shallow beach where they’ll be safer from the Warpers and other nasties that patrol the cliffs. The sun glows dimly above. He’s got no clue how long they were down there, but he suspects it’s been some days since they left their jury-rigged base.

There’s a stiff breeze blowing as they break the water’s surface. Ryley cracks his helmet and takes a deep lungful, appreciating his ability to inhale fully without the pain in his chest. The feverish aches have been with him for so long that it kind of feels weird to be without them, like he’s just taken off a heavy backpack and now he feels light as air. He does a somersault in the water just for the hell of it, laughing. “We made it!”

There’s an answering smile brightening Bart’s face. “We did indeed.” His voice may be restrained, but his song echoes like a joyous shout, unimpeded by propriety. It’s beautiful. Ryley doesn’t even bother quashing the impulse to kiss him, and it’s not easy to tread water and do that at the same time, but they manage. In the glow of the dawn, anything seems possible. The ocean spreads out below them with its endless store of treasures to discover and mysteries to unfold.

Eventually they pull out on the beach. Ryley lies on the sun-warmed rock, shading his eyes with one hand as he looks up at the sky. It doesn’t seem so long ago that he would have given every limb he has just to get free of the planet. He grasped for the stars with the desperation of a drowning man, praying for a lifeline to pull him back to the world he knew and understood.
Now that he’s cured, he knows he would be able to disable the gun. There’d be no impediment to him building that escape rocket. Ion power cells would provide more than enough energy to power it back to Alterra space, and he could sell them the blueprints to pay off his debt and land a cushy position with the company.

But even though he’s cured, he still hears the songs. His own would sound wrong unmoored from the planet’s chorus, alone in the void. It’s crept into his blood and drawn him in, made him a part of it. A part of the whole as much as the smallest holefish or the largest sea dragon. Cutting himself adrift from it would feel like dying. This planet, with all its horrors and wonders, is now his home.
And that’s not the only thing, either.
Maybe he should be thinking about plasteel quantities and engine wiring and how to afford all the counselling he’d be required to go through once he got home. He should be agonising over the friends he’ll never see and the crate full of belongings that still sits in storage on Alpha 25 Station. But all that’s really in his head is how nice it is to just lie here with Bart. How he wants to go home together to their pet fish, and cook dinner with him, and fall asleep together, and kiss him amongst the flourishing leaves of the greenhouse.

As if reading his mind, Bart’s hand finds his and squeezes. “You could leave, you know,” he says softly. “You’ve only been missing for three months. I know you have those blueprints.”
“Would you come with me?” It’s a stupid question. He already knows the answer before Bart opens his mouth.
“No,” is the quiet reply. “I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I’ve been living here a decade – I don’t have anything to go back to. After seven years without contact I would have been declared legally dead, assets dispersed, stocks divested. Without Father or I, our combined stake would have gone to one of my cousins, who probably would’ve sold it off to some foreign investor – if the value hadn’t tanked in the meantime.” He sighs. “Not that finances are my primary concern. My home is here now.”
Ryley squeezes his hand back. “Then I’m not leaving either. My home’s wherever you are.”

They sit there together as the sun rises over them, setting the water sparkling, and the wind blows the chirping laughter of the baby Emperors past them. “You know, I’ve been thinking too,” Bart says, leaning his head against Ryley’s shoulder. “There are some beautiful spots in the shallows. I thought perhaps we could build a place up there in the sun. Find somewhere with a nice view. I’m tired of hiding in the dark.”

“That sounds perfect.”

Ryley closes his eyes and lets the sun and the ocean’s song lull him into dreams of a home in the reefs, of flourishing greenhouses and a place just for them.

Chapter Text

It’s a bright spring morning.

4546B doesn’t have all that much seasonal variation, but Ryley definitely notices the slight axial tilt as the weather warms. The past few months have been chilly enough to make swimming without a suit uncomfortable. He’s glad of the more comfortable temperatures, although he might have to fabricate some new clothes. His winter skirts are getting a little hot.

“Nice weather today,” Bart comments, depositing the watering can he’s been using on the table beside him. “No wonder the melons are growing so well.”
Ryley laughs. “It’s a lovely day. I might take the cuddlefish out to the island and look for shale. Melon’s got a knack for sniffing it out.” The fish so referred to makes a leap out of the water, splashing and chirping at the sound of her name. They’d found her egg in a cache in the bulb zone when they were packing up to move out. Despite being a month or so younger, she’s still larger than Potato, with a warmer dappled colouring.

“Without me?” Bart gives him a mock-hurt look. “Bad enough that they both like you better-“
“Because you were too busy studying when Melon hatched-“
“Well how was I supposed to know, you hear the songs better than I do and I can’t judge-“
It’s an old argument that they’ve dragged out many times before, but there’s no real bite in it. They don’t fight often. After all this time living together he would’ve thought they would have grated on each other more, but they haven’t found any terrible faults with one another yet. It helps that they have a whole planet to range if they ever get cabin fever.

“It’s not a bad idea, though,” Bart remarks as they sit on the foundation edge, trailing hands and feet in the water for Melon and Potato to nudge at. “Check the other growbed. Skirmish likes to play there too, and I’d like to get a look at that cut on her side. Warper slashes are nasty.” The little Emperor has developed quite the defensive streak, which infrequently brings her into conflict with Warpers – or, on one memorable occasion, a Reaper. She’s already a match for one by size, only a few months after her hatching. Not that she should have been brawling with the eel-like predator. Reapers are too aggressive to be pacified by the soothing effect of the telepathic powers the babies are only just beginning to figure out, and not intelligent enough to listen to reason. Bart had thoroughly dressed her down after that escapade, which was always an interesting sight: a five-foot-ten human scolding an alien sea monster the size of a submarine.

“Well, if you put it that way…” Ryley unlaces the wrap of his skirt, leaving it pooled on the balcony as he dives into the water. “Race you to the shore. Last one there is a shuttlebug!”
“Ryley!” comes the half-amused, half-outraged shout from behind him.
Ryley grabs the seaglide parked nearby and kicks it into gear, feeling Melon tangle her tentacles around his right leg to catch a ride. “Are you coming or not?” He doesn’t wait for a response, ducking his head under the water in the sure knowledge that Bart will meet him there. But not before Ryley makes the shore and wins their contest – not with the off-market alterations he’s been making to the seaglide.

Laughing and splashing, the two young men race away. Behind them, in gleaming white and blue, rises the home they’ve built for themselves. It sits nestled in a cove in the shallows where peepers chase in circles and boomerangs hurtle through the waves, surrounded by flourishing beds of plants of every description. It’s no luxury mansion nor rustic cottage, but it’s theirs.

Deep below, in fathoms of dark water where few living things venture, a peeper slips into a vent.

It tumbles down in the flow, spiralling through kilometres of rock, down into the glowing heart of the volcano. Down where the roars of sea dragons echo and the shifting of the planet thrusts great spires of stone into the light, there lies a place built of dark metal from another world. A monument to arrogance, a memorial to a great civilisation brought low by the smallest of living things. It is the mausoleum of a forgotten age: the tomb of the Empress.

Beneath the titanic workings of the Precursors, the peeper swims free of the piping network into a great chamber. It is empty of predators and scavengers now. They have left and returned to the upper world, but the peepers still journey downward. There’s no voice to call them here anymore, but the ancestral memories of a thousand years keep them pulled to this place, to execute a routine made meaningless by the ending of an era.

Its mouthful of seeds it deposits in the sand, the way it’s done all its short life. There’s nothing for it to bring back; instead it feeds on the corals that attach themselves to the walls of the prison. It is a tiny mote. So tiny that it never truly knew She existed, and so it doesn’t know She’s gone either.

Rising up behind it, unseen by its single eye, is the great hulk of a body. With no scavengers to pick it apart, its thick hide remains mostly intact, the great white spears of its bones showing in places. In their place, spiralling up through cracks in great scales, winding their way around the tips of antennae and proliferating in the great jaw, are the flowers of the sea. She returns to Her planet in the mouths of the fish who feed on them, in the spores and seeds that drift up through miles of piping to the surface. Her body will one day be gone, leaving only Her immense skeleton. But as long as She lies here, new life will still bloom in the crevices of the facilities that nearly stamped it out.

The peeper is gone now. But in the sand, the seeds are beginning to sprout.

What is a wave without the ocean? A beginning without an end?
They are different, but they go together.
Now you stand amongst the waves, and I fall amongst the sand. We are different.
But we go, together.