Page 73 of The Captain
“Compensating.”
“Dominion Hall, Sector—you have a squall line building offshore. Nothing ugly for twenty. You’re fine.”
“Copy.” Marcus, light again. “We like fine.”
“Eyes,” Langford murmured. It wasn’t for the net. It was for the walls.
“Blue-Four, contact,” a voice said, not Jacob. Tight. Excited the way you try not to be when you know other people can hear your heart. “Visual on structure. Not natural.”
My stomach tried to turn itself into a fist. I told it no.
“Describe,” Sector said.
“Angular,” the diver said. “Edges wrong. Surface irregular. There’s—” a crackle—“resistance to the light. Stall. Stall?—”
“Blue-Four, say again,” Sector said. The casual went out of it.
“Blue-Three,” Jacob cut in, steady. “We have it. Approaching from starboard. Lines clear.” A beat. “Boarding.”
Boarding. God.
The room contracted. McGuire’s hand found the back of a chair and didn’t know it had. The gray-suited man’s jaw moved once like he wanted to chew on the air.
“Blue team, we’re seeing a spike on—” a tech started, then shut up when Langford lifted two fingers.
“Keep chatter down,” the admiral said. “Let them work.”
The speaker hissed like a kettle.
“Blue-Four on hull,” the not-Jacob voice said. “Finding purchase. Texture is—” static—“like a?—”
“Say again?” Sector.
“Blue-Three on hull,” Jacob said, and I almost put my teeth in my lip hard enough to make it bleed, because the sound of him doing that thing where he takes his breath and sets it down exactly where it belongs is a sound my body wants to crawl inside and live. “Proceeding to?—”
His sentence broke in half. Not static. Cut.
“Blue-Three, repeat last,” Sector said immediately, efficient. No fear. “Blue-Three, radio check.”
Nothing.
“Blue-Four, status,” McGuire said, louder. “Where’s your three?”
“Four here.” Long enough to wonder if the man had a heartbeat. “Three was at—” a roar, not sound so much as absence of it, like someone opened a door and what came in was everything.
The speakers went cold.
Every screen went soft gray for one blink and then flicked back to maps that had already decided to forget.
“Sector?” McGuire. Not calm. Crisp.
“Stand by,” Sector said. Their voice changed shape, went smaller, like they were talking down two nets at once in their head and picking the one they could save. “We lost Blue-Three. Four, I need your mark.”
Silence the way a room makes it when everyone is thinking the same ugly thought.
“Blue-Four?” Langford said, and all the admiral fled out of him until what was left was an old sailor who’d learned how to keep men alive by saying the right thing in the right order. “Talk to me.”
“Blue-Four,” the voice came after a beat that felt like being held underwater by a wave that misjudged you. “I have—” and then nothing again, but worse. A soft pop the way a radio makes it when a battery gives a tiny, polite goodbye.
