Chapter Text
Ryland Grace awoke to a splitting headache and the sharp, acrid smell of smoke filling his lungs.
For a moment, he just sat there, blinking. Once. Twice. Then several more times as the world swayed nauseatingly around him.
Okay. Not dead. That was good news.
The bad news was that his head felt like someone had replaced his brain with a sack of angry hammers. It took a while for his vision to slowly steady.
That was when he noticed the fire.
Well.
‘Not dead’ might have been a temporary condition.
Nearly everything in sight seemed to be burning. Orange and yellow flames crawled across the walls of the small chamber, greedily consuming panels and wiring. Smoke curled through the air, gathering near the ceiling and turning the room into a hazy blur. Heat pressed against his skin.
Where was he? Why was everything on fire? More importantly, why was he in the thing that was on fire?
Questions for later. Much later. Preferably after the not-burning part.
Adrenaline slammed into him.
Grace jerked against the restraints holding him to the seat. They didn't budge. His gaze darted around the chamber until he spotted a control panel built into the armrest.
He smacked it.
Nothing happened.
"Excellent."
Then, after several agonizing seconds, machinery whirred to life. The restraints began retracting. Slowly. Very slowly. Apparently whoever designed this system had never considered the possibility of wanting to leave a burning room quickly.
"Come on," he muttered through clenched teeth.
At last, the harness lifted away. He lunged out of the seat.
Immediately, his legs attempted to resign from active service. The room tilted. His vision blurred. He caught himself against a nearby console and fought back a wave of nausea.
That was when he spotted the fire extinguisher lying on the floor. Relief surged through him. A fire extinguisher. Perfect.
Grace snatched it up.
He had no idea where he was. He had no idea why he was there. For that matter, he couldn't remember how to properly use a fire extinguisher either. But he was reasonably confident the extinguisher went toward the fire and not the other way around.
Good enough.
He yanked the handle and squeezed. A blast of white suppressant erupted from the nozzle. The flames hissed angrily as the cloud engulfed them.
"Ha!" Grace shouted.
Take that, fire.
The extinguisher bucked in his grip as he swept it back and forth. Smoke stung his throat, forcing him into a coughing fit, but he kept spraying. Slowly, the flames retreated. Then shrank. Then vanished altogether.
Grace lowered the extinguisher.
The room fell silent.
He stood there for a moment, staring at the blackened walls.
"Okay," he said to nobody. "Now what?"
Looking around didn’t provide him with much information. The room was tiny. Tiny enough that turning around required actual planning. Grace stretched out an arm and discovered he could almost touch opposite walls without moving his feet.
Not fun.
The room contained exactly one other seat, identical to the one he'd just escaped from. Beyond that, there was a collection of machinery. Most of it was completely unfamiliar. One box-shaped device looked vaguely like a radio that had lost a fight. Another had so many blinking lights that it seemed determined to convince him it was important. A large screen occupied nearly a quarter of the wall. Walls? It was kind of confusing when the room was spherical. There was also what appeared to be a storage compartment.
More importantly, there was a ladder.
Grace followed it upward with his eyes.
It led to a hatch in the ceiling. A hatch with a window through which he could see sky. Actual sky. Blue sky.
Now that was useful information.
There was also a hatch in the floor. Grace gave it a brief glance. Maybe it was important. Maybe it led somewhere interesting. Maybe it contained all the answers to life's mysteries. Didn't matter. The ceiling hatch had sky. The floor hatch did not.
Decision made.
He scrambled up the ladder with all the coordination of a newborn deer. At the top, he shoved the hatch open.
Air hissed past him immediately. Fresh air rushed inside while the smoke wasted no time fleeing in the opposite direction. He followed its example. Bracing his hands against the rim, he hauled himself through the opening and climbed onto the roof.
Then he froze.
Water.
Water everywhere.
An endless expanse of blue stretched to every horizon. No land. No buildings. No people. Just the ocean. Or rather an ocean. Grace wasn’t exactly in a position to identify which one.
He turned slowly in a full circle.
Not too far away from where he stood, perched on top of what could only be described as an escape pod of some kind, was a ship. A spaceship currently half submerged in water. The other half appeared to still be on fire.
“Cool,” Grace said flatly.
It wasn’t so much a reaction as it was a placeholder for whatever more complex emotion was supposed to go there. His brain, apparently, was still loading that file.
The only reasonable conclusion was that he had been on that ship. Which meant he had crashed it. Which meant he had, at some point prior to waking up, been inside a vessel capable of space travel and then successfully transformed it into a partially submerged bonfire in the middle of an ocean.
He filed that under important but later.
Because the more immediate issue was simpler:
He was currently floating in a tiny metal pod in the middle of a vast body of water. A pod that had recently been on fire.
On the bright side, it was no longer on fire.
On the less bright side, that felt like a very low bar for ‘things going well.’
Maybe, argued the more hopeful part of his brain, this was fine. People didn’t just ignore spaceships that crash-landed into oceans. That seemed like the kind of thing societies had collectively agreed was worth paying attention to. Maybe help was already on the way. That would be ideal.
Then another thought, slightly less optimistic, pushed its way in.
He should probably do something about alerting said help to his whereabouts. Assuming they didn’t already know. Assuming there even was help. Assuming a lot of things, really.
He climbed back down the ladder. Once back inside the pod, he decided the best course of action was to check the storage compartment. If something in here was going to help him survive being inexplicably stranded in the middle of an ocean, it was probably hiding in a box.
He flipped it open.
Inside: water bottles. Food. Two flares. A first aid kit.
Perfect. Not a full survival kit, but definitely in the category of things that keep you alive, which was reassuring in a very basic way.
Then he noticed the tablet. It was blue. Rectangular. Kind of weird.
He picked it up and pressed the power button.
Nothing.
Of course.
He pressed it again, slightly harder, as though determination might be a valid troubleshooting method. A moment later, a line of text appeared at the top of the screen.
Booting in emergency mode.
“Yeah,” Grace muttered. “I would classify this as that.”
The loading bar crawled forward. Eventually, it hit one hundred percent and a robotic voice came through the speaker.
“You have suffered minor head trauma.”
“What the heck?”
When exactly did this thing scan him? He didn’t remember consenting to medical evaluation by a mysterious tablet.
The voice continued, completely unbothered.
“This is considered an optimal outcome.”
Nothing about this could be considered optimal. But sure. Whatever the robot said.
“This PDA has now rebooted in emergency mode with one directive: to keep you alive on this alien world. Please refer to the databank for detailed survival advice. Good luck."
Grace stared at the device in his hands.
He completely ignored the menus beginning to populate the screen. He ignored the scrolling text. He ignored the little interface icons that were probably very helpful and very important and absolutely none of his business right now.
“What?” he said.
Pause.
Then, with increasing urgency:
“What do you mean ‘alien world’?!”
No.
No, no, no. That was not a phrase he was going to allow into this situation.
This was Earth.
It had to be Earth.
He had crash-landed back on Earth, in the middle of the ocean, and help was currently on the way in the form of very friendly humans who would arrive shortly and explain, in calm reassuring tones, what the fudge had happened. Simple. Logical. Non-alien.
He nodded slightly to himself, as though agreement might stabilize reality.
No alien worlds. Definitely no alien worlds.
He swallowed thickly. His breathing tightened. He might have started hyperventilating a little bit. Just a controlled amount.
He placed the tablet—PDA—whatever it was—back in the storage compartment.
A petty part of him hoped it somehow knew he was displeased with it. You did not tell someone they had minor head trauma and then immediately follow that up with ‘Hey, by the way, this is an alien world!’ That was terrible bedside manner.
There was no way it was right. Right?
Maybe the thing had been designed for use on alien planets. Maybe that was its default setting. Maybe it saw literally any environment and went, Congratulations! You are now on an alien planet.
That seemed like a design flaw, but at least it was a comforting one.
Never mind the fact that it had somehow scanned him and correctly identified his head injury. Grace chose not to dwell on that. Instead, he focused on the possibility that the PDA itself was malfunctioning. After all, if he could have head trauma, why couldn't it have... chip trauma? Circuit trauma? Whatever the computer equivalent of that was.
The point was, it could be wrong. Hopefully very wrong.
Grace stood in the middle of the pod for a long while, turning the possibilities over in his head.
Surely, if this wasn't Earth, he'd know. Wouldn't he? Different planet meant different gravity. That seemed like the sort of thing a person would notice.
Then again, it could be only slightly different. And he wasn't exactly operating under ideal testing conditions. Between the fire, the ocean, and the minor head trauma, which apparently counted as an optimal outcome, he wasn't sure he trusted his own observations all that much.
Grace sighed.
He wished there was more around him to help make sense of any of this. Unfortunately, all he had was the pod, an endless amount of water, and a spaceship. His spaceship. Probably.
The spaceship seemed like the most promising lead. How wise would it be to go take a look at it?
Not very, his brain answered immediately.
He'd have to swim all the way there. He had no idea whether there was a safe way inside. For that matter, he had no idea whether approaching a half-submerged, partially burning spacecraft was a good idea in general. It sounded like the kind of thing safety manuals specifically advised against.
On the other hand, what choice did he have?
If there was an explanation for any of this it was probably aboard that ship.
Grace sighed again. Then he climbed back up onto the roof of the pod and looked out toward the crash site.
It wasn't that far away.
Okay, it was kind of far away.
Far enough that swimming there wouldn't be fun, but not so far that it seemed impossible. He could make it. It would be fine. He was a decent swimmer. At least, he was fairly certain he was a decent swimmer. He wasn't entirely sure how he knew that.
The fact that he couldn't remember what was going on but somehow retained a confidence rating for his swimming ability felt a little strange. Whatever. The point was that he could swim.
Grace peered over the side of the pod at the water below.
Maybe he'd get lucky. Maybe this was some unusually shallow stretch of ocean and he'd be able to see the bottom. There had to be something down there. Coral reefs. Fish. Seaweed. Ocean stuff. Something. Anything.
Because if he saw a fish, he'd know. A normal fish would be reassuring. An alien fish would be... less reassuring.
Though now that he thought about it, he wasn't actually sure what an alien fish would look like. Maybe it would have six eyes. Or tentacles. Or both. Then again, plenty of Earth fish already looked like they were from another planet.
Grace frowned. That line of reasoning was significantly less helpful than he'd hoped.
He sat there, staring over the edge at the water below.
The water stared back.
Well, technically it didn't. That would have been much worse.
The waves just continued to lap against the pod, gently rocking it back and forth. The motion wasn't unpleasant, but it wasn't exactly comforting either.
The ship wasn't going to investigate itself. If he wanted answers, he'd have to get in. He knew that. The problem was that knowing something and doing something were, at the moment, proving to be two very different things. Every time he tried to make himself jump, his body stubbornly refused to cooperate.
Who knew what was in there? This was an ocean.
Even if it was an entirely ordinary Earth ocean, that still meant sharks. And eels. And all sorts of other creatures that had somehow convinced evolution to let them live in a place where humans couldn't breathe.
There was something unsettling about the endless blue beneath him. It hid everything. The surface looked calm enough, but there was no telling what lurked below.
He took a deep breath. This was ridiculous. He just needed to jump. Rip the band-aid off.
He was just about ready to dive in when another thought occurred to him. Maybe swimming fully clothed wasn't the smartest idea.
He looked down at himself. The shoes definitely had to go. Those would do nothing but drag him down. He sat back down and pulled them off, setting them aside on the pod's roof.
For a moment, he considered removing more. Then he looked out at the ocean. The endless, empty, unsettling ocean. Yeah, no. This didn't feel remotely like a pleasant day at the beach. For reasons he couldn't quite explain, keeping the rest of his clothes on felt important. So the shoes would have to be enough.
He was stalling.
Obviously.
Still, no shoes was a good idea in his humble opinion. Future him would appreciate it.
But enough was enough.
Grace tightened his grip on the handles along the pod’s edge and lowered himself into the water slowly. Because jumping in was for people with confidence, and he currently had none of that in stock.
He braced himself for the shock of cold ocean water.
Instead, it felt... warm.
Not bathwater warm. But definitely warmer than it had any right to be.
Grace paused with the water around his waist.
"Huh."
That wasn't what oceans were supposed to do. At least, he was fairly certain it wasn't. Especially not in the middle of nowhere.
The warmth wrapped around him as he lowered himself further. It wasn't unpleasant. If anything, it was oddly comfortable. Which somehow made it more concerning because comfortable was not the word he'd expected to associate with an unexplored ocean on a possibly alien planet.
Maybe there was an explanation. Maybe he was near the equator. Maybe there were underwater volcanic vents nearby. Maybe global warming had decided to stop being subtle and double its efforts.
Okay. Enough of that.
This was fine. It was manageable. He was in the water now. So far so good.
He took a deep breath and submerged himself fully. The water closed over his head with a dull, muffled hush, and suddenly the world lost most of its sound.
Keeping his eyes open was harder than it had any right to be. Still, he forced them to stay that way. He could sort of see. Everything was blurred and wavering, but it was enough to make out shapes. Which, to be fair, was how life sometimes looked when he forgot his glasses.
Hey.
Where were his glasses?
Had they fallen off in the pod? Knocked loose during the whole “wake up in a burning spacecraft” situation? Drifted somewhere inconvenient like literally everything else in his life right now?
It seemed plausible. He had definitely been wearing glasses at some point. Whatever. He didn’t need them now anyway.
He squinted into the water again. It was, in fact, shallow.
Relief flickered through him. That was something. He had gotten lucky on the front.
And there was… stuff.
A lot of stuff. Things he couldn’t quite classify yet, all drifting and shifting in the blue-green light. It would have been pretty, honestly. If it didn’t come with the very persistent implication that none of this was Earth.
He resurfaced with a sharp inhale, water streaming off his face, and grabbed the nearest handle on the pod. His grip tightened instinctively as he leaned into it, catching his breath in uneven bursts.
So the PDA wasn’t malfunctioning.
He was on an alien planet.
He wasn’t entirely sure how he was supposed to feel about that.
Well, he did know how he felt. He just also knew that panicking while already halfway committed to swimming toward a crashed spaceship was, strategically speaking, suboptimal.
He could process the existential horror later. Or at least while moving.
So, without further overthinking, he turned toward the wreck in the distance and started swimming.
Grace quickly confirmed that swimming was exhausting.
His arms cut through the water in a steady rhythm that he was pretty sure used to be efficient at some point. Right now it mostly felt like he was arguing with the ocean and losing.
There was no way that ship had been that far away originally. It had to be moving away from him. Or he was moving in the wrong direction. Or the planet was actively rearranging itself to inconvenience him. He couldn’t rule anything out at this point.
He’d already been swimming for sooooo long.
That was a scientific measurement now. Time was no longer minutes or seconds. It was sooooo long.
And yet he was nowhere near it. Not even close. It still sat further into the distance than he liked. Still on fire in places too, which felt like overkill at this stage.
Grace slowed for a moment.
He wished there was any way to get out of the water for a minute.
No, scratch that. For sooooo long would be preferable.
Continuous swimming was not a sustainable lifestyle choice. His chest tightened with each breath, the water pressing against him in a way that felt like it hated him personally.
He needed a break.
Unfortunately, the only break he could currently afford was one that still involved water. Still, he stopped trying to make forward progress and focused on simply staying in place. He kept his breathing steady as best he could, forcing his arms into a slower rhythm.
He hadn’t dared to look underwater again.
He was pretty sure whatever was happening down there remained committed to happening whether he watched it or not, and ignorance, while not especially scientific, was at least emotionally stabilizing.
Above the surface was fine. Above the surface did not contain whatever ‘alien world’ implied in detail.
He tried to relax a little. Or at least convince himself that this so-called break was doing anything for him.
That was when he noticed something moving in the water.
At first, it was just a change in darkness, an area where the blue shifted slightly. Then it moved. Slowly. Deliberately. A huge shadow circling further ahead.
Grace stopped treading for half a second, which was immediately followed by his body reminding him that stopping treading in open water was not actually a pause so much as a bad decision with consequences.
He resumed immediately.
The shadow continued its path, massive and indistinct, cutting through the water like something far too large to care about anyone besides itself.
Grace swallowed hard. Whatever ‘alien world’ meant in practice, he was starting to suspect it included things that did not belong in the category of comforting marine wildlife.
Some absolutely deranged part of his brain, one that apparently lacked any self-preservation skills, decided going underwater for a better look was a reasonable course of action.
Here, where it was no longer shallow at all, it was practically impossible to see anything. The water swallowed detail, turned distance into guesswork, and made everything feel like it was happening just out of focus.
Fortunately, what he was trying to see didn’t really care about subtlety.
It was big.
Even through the murk, it was impossible to miss the general shape of it. An enormous, elongated body, moving with slow, confident purpose through the water.
It was eel-like. But eel-like in the same way a skyscraper was building-like. There were spikes. Lots of them. Jagged protrusions along its tail, and more near the front around what he assumed was its head.
He tried to estimate size and failed immediately. It was too large for useful comparison. He might have been the size of one of its teeth.
That thought arrived fully formed and uninvited.
Whatever it was, it made his nightmares want to file an official complaint for being bested at their only job.
Grace didn't waste any more time underwater. The instant his brain finished identifying the creature as enormous nightmare fuel, every other thought was abruptly replaced by a single, urgent directive:
Leave.
Before he'd fully processed what he'd seen, Grace immediately turned and started swimming back toward the pod faster than he previously thought possible. The human body was capable of accessing impressive reserves of energy when sufficiently motivated by the possibility of being eaten by something the size of a small apartment building.
His arms burned. His lungs burned. He did not care.
The pod grew larger with every stroke. For the first time since entering the water, it looked less like a cramped metal survival capsule and more like the safest place in the known universe. Or at least the safest place within swimming distance.
When he was close enough he grabbed one of the handles and practically hauled himself aboard. Only once he was safely on top did he allow himself to stop.
Breathing heavily, he stared out across the water.
The spaceship remained exactly where it had been.
Far away. Far too far away.
Grace looked from the wreck to the ocean between them. Then back again.
Yeah, no. Absolutely not. Whatever answers the ship contained, they were not worth becoming a snack for the giant sea monster.
The spaceship wasn't close enough. If he was going to get there, he'd need another plan. One that involved significantly less exposure to the water and significantly fewer opportunities to discover what else lived underneath it.