The Problem at Echo Station
Genre: Deep Sea/Psychological Horror
Length: Short Story
The Problem at Echo Station
His earpiece clicked.
"Martin, you read me?" Talbot's voice crinkled over the comm, breaking the hum of the ventilation fans above.
"Go ahead."
"Most systems are down except the oxygen. Good news is I think it's just a matter of resetting some fuses. There must have been a huge power spike down here that blew everything except the emergency generators. The control monitor's on backup, but I can't access much without credentials. Going to be a pain unless we find an access card. You'd think they'd have given us an admin card. What on earth were they doing down here?"
"Must be a 'need to know' kind of thing," Martin replied. "Let's make this quick. Gabby, how's our ride up?"
A click filled the earpiece with a grunt. "Well, we got here in one piece. We'll be fine on the way up as long as we don't go any deeper."
"So a tour of the trench is a no go?" Martin asked.
"Unless you want to be in a crushed can, I'd advise against it," Gabby said. "There are a few things I want to check with the sub to be sure. The station's surprisingly well stocked, they even have my favorite pistachio bars of all things. I'll freshen us up and we'll be good to go. Kind of need power though to take a better look."
"Didn't take you for a foodie, Gabby." Talbot snorted. "But yes, power, I get it. I'm trying over here."
Martin pulled a dry square of ramen noodles from his jacket pocket and snapped off a corner, crunching into it raw. "Why'd I even pack this?" he said to himself, letting out a sigh.
"As usual, I don't care about your opinion, Talbot, I just want you to flip the 'ON' switch," Gabby shot back.
"Alright, alright, calm down you two, just keep us updated," Martin said. He paused, looking down the corridor. "Think they'd have an access card in the barracks?"
"Probably a good place to look," Talbot said. "Then we're going to have to check the Mess Hall somehow. Need to find a way past the lockdown to find out what happened. Given the lack of survivors, I'm guessing it might be ugly."
"Walking into this blind gives me the creeps," Gabby said. "Is it weird that I'd be less anxious in space than a base almost three miles deep into the ocean? I can just feel the weight of the water on us."
"Not at all, at least you have light in space," Martin said, and then scoffed. "I'm looking through some of the data and it's just a mess. There's scribblings and writings in the margins of all these logs. I can't tell if they are even from the same person." He dropped his pencil, took his glasses off, and rubbed his eyes with a long exhale.
Martin shuffled the binders and stood. An ache in his lower back made him stretch. "Better get moving," he muttered.
The base left little to the imagination. Claustrophobia was the interior design; sterile was the decorative choice. From the Medbay, a simple hallway ran pipes and cords along the ceiling. Nothing was hidden.
"Alright, Barracks," Martin mumbled. "Let's see."
The bulkhead door was cracked. Martin moved it easily. Flipping the switch granted limited visibility, but it was enough to see lockers, desks, and bunks. Everything had its place. He rummaged for access cards. Lockers were unlocked, showing typical wear, but lacked personal belongings. They all held the same items: lab coats and toiletries. Clack, clack, clack, one after the other. Except the last one, which was padlocked.
Martin looked for a key or something to jar it open. As he sifted through the desk drawers, a noise crept into the room.
He paused, the hairs rising on his arms. The squeak of the door was constant, as if a gust of wind were blowing it shut. Turning, Martin watched the steel door pivot. It ran out of momentum inches from the frame, leaving a vertical line of pale light from the hallway.
"Talbot, Gabby," Martin whispered, clicking his comms. "Please say one of you is by the barracks."
No answer. Static invaded the channel—a constant weight of white noise, as if someone held the button down. It grew so loud he tore the headpiece off and stepped back from the door to gather his bearings. Soft metal clanks of his boots and the hum of the vent fans were all that remained.
Through the crack, a shadow walked past. Martin froze. Another shadow walked the other way, shifting in the corridor. Then a giggle echoed down the hallway—the sound of a child playing.
Pat, pat, pat.
Bare feet clapped against water on the ground, running laps down the hallway, both near and far from the door. Martin stood dumbfounded. He reached out, his hand trembling as his fingers wrapped around the cold metal of the door latch. He needed to seal the gap.
He shifted his weight, easing the door forward an inch.
The pattering stopped.
The giggling cut off mid-breath, and for a moment the hallway held nothing at all—no footsteps, no fans, not even the hum of the lights. Martin's hand hovered on the latch.
Then the feet came back, fast, closing the distance in a sprint. Before he could brace, something struck the door in a wet splatter that he felt through the metal against his palm—small, wet, and close, like a body hitting it at full speed and stopping dead an inch from his face.
Martin didn't move. Didn't breathe. Whatever was on the other side of that door wasn't running anymore. It was standing there, waiting the same way he was.
He leaned in, his ear pressed to the seam.
A wet, shifting sound pressed against the metal opposite his face. Then came a whisper through the crack—a child's voice, thick and bubbling, like it was speaking through a mouthful of water it couldn't quite swallow.
"I've... made a mess. Shhh—shhh—sorry."
A pause, wet and small.
"They're all sh-sleeping now. No one wants-sh to play with me."
A thin trickle of water seeped under the door and touched the toe of Martin's boot.
He didn't answer. He stayed pressed to the door, listening, not trusting himself to move.
The whisper thinned into something smaller, almost a hum, the words dissolving back into the wet sound of breathing through water.
The door began to shake, and a low rumble rolled across the station. Before Martin could react, the door burst open and sent him reeling. A wall of freezing seawater surged through the opening. The force hit him square in the chest, ripping the air from his lungs and flinging him backward.
Hitting the floor hard, the phantom tide swallowed him. Salt water filled his mouth, and he gagged, spitting it out, coughing. He squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for the weight of the ocean to cave his skull in.
One second. Two seconds.
The pressure never came.
Martin opened his eyes with a gasp. The room was bone-dry. The fluorescent lights hummed above with their sterile flicker, undisturbed. He sat on the floor, his clothes dry, though his skin felt impossibly cold. He spat at the floor, but there was nothing. The brine was gone.
"Come—come on, Martin," he muttered, the words catching on their way out. "You're an M.D. What the hell was that? Hypoxia?"
He pressed his palms against his eyes until he saw bursts of light, forcing his brain to reset, then crawled forward, scooped up his headset, and slipped it over his ear. His hand shook as he hit the toggle.
"Talbot? Gabby? Report. Are you two alright? Did you feel a pressure spike? Gabby, is the sub secure?"
The line clicked open.
"Easy there, Doc," Talbot said, sounding unbothered. "Everything's green. Monitor's still just asking for credentials. You OK? Find anything weird in the barracks?"
"I'm fine," Gabby chimed in, her breathing steady. "Just trying to balance this ballast. What's going on, Martin? You sound like you just ran a marathon."
Martin swallowed hard, looking at the dry, undisturbed barracks. "Nothing. Just the air. It's heavy. I heard some metal moaning and got the shakes."
"Well, even though we're researching an accident, I can promise you it's from the inside. The outside is an engineering marvel," Talbot said. "Just find an access card for us so we can get out of here."
"Working on it," Martin whispered.
He forced his legs to find purchase on the smooth metal deck. Grunting against the same stubborn ache in his lower back, he reached upward, his fingers wrapping around the brass padlock of the final locker to haul his weight up.
He pulled.
With a sharp snick, the padlock was free. Martin stared at it.
Had it been unlatched this entire time?
He placed the lock back on the handle and yanked the locker open.
Inside, there were stacks of access cards. Confused, he grabbed the top one, which bore the Olokun Company logo along with a name: Dr. Aris Vang.
Martin stared at the photo as his other hand shut the locker and set the lock back in place. She wasn't on the manifest. There were only supposed to be eight.
He thumbed his comms button. "Talbot? Gabby?"
"What's up, doc?" Talbot said, trying to stifle a chuckle.
"I found a keycard," Martin said, his eyes tracing the plastic. "Dr. Aris Vang. Does that name mean anything? Was there a ninth crew member down here?"
"Beats me," Gabby said. "Sounds sketchy. At the same time, this place doesn't exist, so probably not out of the question there's an unknown crew member down here."
Martin sat for a moment with the card in his palm before slipping it into his chest pocket. His hands had stopped shaking, at least. Outside the barracks, the hallway waited the way it always did—quiet, white, indifferent to whatever had or hadn't just happened to him. He stepped into it, let the door swing shut behind him without looking back, and kept his eyes forward as he made his way toward the heart of the facility, listening to nothing but his own boots and the low hum of the air recyclers.
He rounded the corner into the central control station—a wide, circular hub of dark server racks and curved monitors. In the center sat the primary console, its screen pulsing with an amber prompt: CRITICAL LOCKDOWN: INSERT CREDENTIALS.
The room was empty.
Martin walked straight to the terminal, pulling the lanyard from his pocket. "Talbot, I'm at the main console," he said, tapping his earpiece. "Got the card."
A click echoed. "Perfect timing, Doc," Talbot responded, backed by the metallic rattle of a socket wrench. "I'm behind the server bank, in the crawlspace. Some cabling got knocked loose in the lockdown—trying to get it back together. Give me two seconds."
"...damn bolt is stripped..." Martin could hear the muffled curse through his earpiece.
"Take your time," Martin said, leaning an elbow on the console.
"Really need to lose a few when we get back, this is ridiculous." Talbot grunted, followed by an unintentional bang. "Alright. That should do it. I've bypassed the local lock. Slide that card into the terminal."
The terminal accepted Vang's key with a crisp chime, and vibrations began rattling through the deck plates.
The amber lighting was replaced by brilliant, sterile white. Fans roared in the server racks. Text raced down the monitor as systems came back online—directories, timestamps, a wall of restored files. Martin's eyes snagged on a couple as they rolled past:
ECHO STATION SYS v2.14
THE OLOKUN COMPANY — ALL MATERIAL CONFIDENTIAL
INITIALIZING.................................OK
MEMORY CHECK.........................OK
POWER GRID...............................ONLINE
LIFE SUPPORT.............................ONLINE
O2 SCRUBBERS..........................ONLINE
COMMS RELAY.............................OFFLINE
HULL INTEGRITY.........................STABLE
FIRE SUPPRESSION...................ONLINE
=>MESS HALL ACTIVATION ON........07/13/2028 @ 13:41:28
OPERATIONAL FEEDBACK........STANDBY
WELCOME BACK, ARIS VANG.
He frowned, reaching for the keyboard to scroll back to it, but before his finger found the key, the screen flickered and reorganized itself, resolving into a palm tree beach desktop background and a scatter of icons. Something else caught his attention.
The forward wall was a massive viewport of reinforced acrylic. As the power grid stabilized, floodlights erupted outside the hull, cutting through the black at twenty thousand feet. Martin rose from the office chair he found himself in, awestruck. The lights illuminated a vast white desert of abyssal silt stretching toward the drop-off of a deep-water trench.
Martin pressed his hands against the acrylic as his breath fogged the glass. Nothing stirred, and it seemed as if he was on another planet.
Except for one thing.
About forty feet out, hovering at the edge of the light, a single small fish held perfectly still, like a needle floating in oil. It drifted closer. Martin could almost see through it, down to the tiny organs. It stared directly at him, and Martin squinted to try and get a better look. The fish broke from its trance and darted forward, gathering enough speed to become a blur, and collided squarely with the glass at Martin's face level. He pulled back in reflex and confusion.
The fish floated listlessly into the dark, dead from the impact. A small imprint of pale scales remained on the acrylic. Is this something they were studying down here?
THUD. THUD.
More fish came into view and drove themselves into the station. The darkness beyond the lights began to move—dozens of pale, blind ribbonfish and fangtooths racing toward the station, hitting the glass in a frantic barrage. Plumes of blood erupted into the water, and the shock sent the rest of the deep-sea life into a frenzy. Out of the trench, massive shapes ascended—eels, ancient sharks, things Martin had no name for—throwing themselves against the glass, jaws snapping. Loose eyes drifted free of ruptured sockets in the churn, and somehow every one of them still seemed to find him.
The viewport became a wall of white bellies and gills. The acrylic groaned. Spiderweb cracks bloomed across the center—right where the scale imprint had been.
The glass was giving way.
Martin stumbled backward, lost his footing, and fell hard onto the deck. He let out a ragged yell, staring up at the cracking, bleeding window. The sound of rushing water was surely to follow, his body vaporized in the next instant by the rapid loss of pressure.
The sound of rushing water never came.
Slowly, he dragged his eyes back up.
The window was clear. The floodlights lit the same empty white desert. No sharks. No eels. No blood. The acrylic was smooth and intact.
Except for that one thing.
Right at eye level, marring the clean glass, was a small smudge—a faint, grease-slick circle, patterned with the imprint of fish scales.
Martin stepped closer and pressed his finger against it. The acrylic was thick and cold, vibrating faintly with the hum of the revived grid.
"Doc? Doc, you read me? Why were you yelling?" Talbot's voice burst through his earpiece. "What's going on out there?"
Martin pulled his finger back, leaving a clean print beside the scales. "I'm here," he said, his voice flat. "I'm—I'm alright, I just lost my footing. The terminal's unlocked."
"Thank god," Talbot let out a breath. "Man, your scream echoed through the vents. You sure you're good?"
Martin looked at the oily smudge. "Yeah. Must've been—" He trailed off, turning toward the console at the sound of a few faint beeps.
The desktop sat undisturbed until he sat down. It flipped and switched into a DOS black screen. Amber lights turned back on, as if there'd been another power failure.
Behind the wall, the clink of Talbot's wrench stopped. "Whoa, Doc, what just happened? The power loop on my end just went cold. Did you hit the master switch? Swear it wasn't me."
Martin didn't answer. His eyes were glued to the dark monitor.
A single name typed itself across the glass in a toxic green.
MARTIN.
The cursor dropped a line and began to repeat it, over and over, the name filling the screen.
MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN MARTIN
With an unsteady hand, Martin's fingers found the keyboard.
HOW DO YOU KNOW ME? He hit enter.
The scrolling froze. The screen reset, save for a pulsing green underscore.
Then the cursor fired again, slow and deliberate.
EVERYONE DOWN HERE KNOWS YOU, MARTIN.
A line drop.
BECAUSE YOU MADE A MESS.
Another line drop.
YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN.
Martin stared, an unreadable mix of confusion and dread locking his jaw.
Gabby's voice buzzed in his earpiece. "Martin? I'm seeing a power draw and a lot of flickering lights over here. What are you doing in there?"
YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN. YOU MADE A MESS, MARTIN.
He couldn't bring himself to speak while the screen just repeated over and over.
Then the cursor cut out, and the screen flipped into security camera footage. It seemed to be mounted high in a corner, looking down at the crew.
There was a long table inside a metal room. People sat together, talking and passing rations. A fire alarm blared briefly in the background—a short, unremarkable beeeep-beeeep—then cut out.
Someone groaned. "Oh, come on. How hard is it to just watch a pot of noodles?"
Laughter rippled down the table.
"At least it was just the detector," Vang said, not looking up from a tablet in her hands. "Let it cool off and take a look at this." She turned the tablet toward the table. "New readings from the trench. See? It's clearly a pattern."
A man across from her squinted at the screen, humor still lingering in his voice. "Whale calls bouncing off the seafloor isn't an Old God from the deep, Aris."
"I didn't say Old God," Vang said, an edge creeping under the joke now. "A pattern. It's rhythmic and has structure. It's getting louder by a few fractions of a decibel every night."
Someone else at the table waved a hand. "You've been staring at spectrograms too long. Maybe you need to go get checked out for hypoxia."
The table laughed again, easier this time, the sound rolling on under the hum of the vents until—
The video cut.
The screen snapped to black. Martin stood frozen in the amber light, his heart hammering, waiting for the black screen to show some kind of life.
Numbly, he tapped the glass.
The screen lit up with a figure's face directly in front of the camera, coughing and screaming.
"LET US OUT!"
The force of it hit him like a train. He flew backward, his heels catching the deck plating, his body slamming to the floor.
The angle shifted to the wider room, and they were all coughing and gagging, smoke everywhere, making the people barely visible. Fire suppression systems were filling the room, driving out every breath of oxygen. One staggered past the frame, coughing into the sleeve of a lab coat. A clear plastic badge on the breast pocket read: VANG.
The video cut to black again, and the cursor returned.
Martin lay on the floor, his ears ringing, his chest heaving. Slowly he dragged himself up.
"There, that should do it," Talbot's voice came through his earpiece.
The lights slammed back to sterile white. The fans wound back up to their normal, quiet rhythm—an insult to his fractured brain.
Martin let out the longest breath of his life. It didn't last.
A flashing alert replaced the menu. The lights dropped into crimson as an alarm began to blare.
"Whoa! What did you do down there, Doc?" Talbot's voice shrieked, backed by the clatter of tools sliding across the floor. "The whole power loop just went critical!"
A panicked transmission cut over his line.
"Martin! Talbot! I need help in the Moon Bay!" Gabby's voice, distorted under a second alarm. "The station just triggered an automated launch! The clamps are cycling and I can't override the hatch from here!"
"Gabby, sit tight," Martin said, slapping his palm on the console desk. He grabbed the keycard out of the reader. "Talbot, get out of the vent and stay at the console!"
He turned and bolted from the hub, taking the western corridor, then north, toward the upper deck. Red LEDs pulsed against the walls in rapid flashes. His boots hit the deck hard, his breath short, as he sprinted past the empty frames of the barracks.
He rounded the final corner and slammed his palms against the door of the Moon Bay observation suite.
The room was a sealed pocket behind thick glass, looking into a hangar. In the center sat the pool—a dark cut of open ocean water. Suspended over it by heavy clamps and straps was their sub.
Martin's eyes locked onto the local control panel. A timer counted down in red: 00:14... 00:13...
"Martin, do you read me?!" Gabby's voice screamed into his headset, the sound of her scrambling against her own board bleeding through the line. "I'm trying to dump the ballast to hold it down and it's not responding! It's going to drop!"
"I'm at the keys, Gabby! Hold on!"
Martin threw himself at the terminal, fingers mashing the keys.
00:04... 00:03...
He palmed the execution button.
The numbers froze at 00:02. A groan resonated through the mounts below as the sequence reset. The alarms died, leaving only the low hum of the fans again.
Martin leaned against the console, letting out a ragged breath. "Gabby. I got it. It's holding."
There was no answer.
Martin frowned, stepping closer to the viewport window. In the room, the dark pool began to churn. A low, rhythmic sloshing echoed through the frame.
Then the water erupted.
A dark tentacle sprang out, slamming against the sub's hull with a thud that vibrated through the glass. More arms breached the surface, wrapping around the hull.
The lights in the Moon Bay began to flash and stutter, plunging the room into a strobing dark.
Through his headset, Gabby began to scream—a raw, piercing sound cut under by the shriek of metal tearing from metal. The tentacles ripped the sub off its mounts and dragged it down into the water.
The room went black.
Martin stood paralyzed, the echo of the splash ringing in his ears.
Bam.
The lights snapped back on.
Right on the other side of the glass, inches from his face, Gabby was floating. Her face was a bloated husk, her eyes wide and colorless. She slammed her palms against the window, choking on brine as she screamed, "MARTIN! LET ME OUT! PLEASE HELP ME." Black water sprayed against the glass from her mouth as she pounded a hand against the pane one last time.
The power cut instantly. The room went black again.
Two seconds passed.
The lights flickered back on.
The glass was clear. Gabby was gone. The only thing left on the acrylic was some droplets of water.
Martin staggered backward, his breath catching, then forced himself back to the window to look at the pool. Ripples lapped against the concrete. But the clamps were intact. No torn metal. No shattered steel. Everything in place.
The sub was gone.
His hands shook as he pressed his headset toggle. "Gabby? Gabby, answer me!"
Static. Then her feed cut in, faint and buried under white noise. "...tin... it's... dark... falling... Mar..." Her voice drifted further away until it dissolved into a flat hiss.
"Martin! Do you read me?!" Talbot's voice, heavy with panic. "Power grid just went haywire and I lost Gabby's audio. What's happening?"
Martin collapsed against the console, his voice cracking. "We lost her, Talbot. We—we lost Gabby. Something dragged the sub down. It's gone."
A long, stunned silence. "What do you mean something dragged it down?" Talbot asked, his voice tightening. "Doc, breathe. Leave the Moon Bay. Come back to Control. We need to regroup." The comms stayed silent as Martin placed his hands over his face.
"Martin, do you hear me?"
As Martin tried to regain his footing, he stumbled toward the pool and stared at the dark water below, then at his own reflection in the glass above it—pale, hollowed out, a man he barely recognized.
The reflection didn't move when he did.
He blinked. It caught up a half-second late, his mirrored hand still rising to his headset after his real one had already dropped away from it. He stared at himself, waiting for the image to settle, to match him again. Instead of regaining the reflection, something emerged from the water.
It was himself, except it was wrong.
The other Martin's head rose just above the surface, his mouth never reaching the air of the station. It just stared at him. Stern and emotionless. Just as fast as it appeared, the figure descended into the black abyss. A couple of air bubbles were the only proof his reflection had become flesh.
Martin grabbed his head and shook it violently. "WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?!" The scream tore out of him in complete surrender to his own madness. He swept a handful of materials off the desk nearby and hurled them against the wall, where they landed in a pile of debris among the rest of the office clutter.
As the last manila folder landed, Martin went back to the pool.
The water sat glassy and still while his madness lingered a little too long.
"Rapid pressure shifts.” He chuckled, short and wrong. “Drowning would be the last problem, wouldn’t it?”
He took a step closer to the edge, his boots silent on the wet deck.
"Every soft thing you're made of gets pushed into something else. That's it, that's the whole science of it — and there's no scream, there's no time for it, there's just—" He stopped, swallowing hard, his eyes fixed on his own faint reflection in the black water. "It's just quiet.”
He crouched at the edge, his fingers grazing the surface. It didn't even ripple.
"It would be so quiet," he whispered, and for a moment his voice wasn't afraid of that idea. "Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be—"
"Martin."
The voice cracked through his earpiece like a slap, and he flinched backward from the water as if it had reached for him first.
"Martin, are you there? Talk to me." Talbot's voice was tight with fear, but stern. "Get back to Control. There's nothing good over there for you now."
Martin blinked, and the glassy water was only water again.
Before he could answer Talbot, a click echoed in his earpiece—quieter than the others. The ambient sound of Talbot's breathing cut out, replaced by a private channel.
The voice wheezed, then coughed. It came in short pulls of breath, like someone speaking through a throat that hadn't fully cleared. "Really? That's how this was all going to end?"
Martin's mind scrambled backward through the static, trying to place the cadence. The grainy footage from the cafeteria flashed behind his eyes. The woman with the tablet. The name on the floating badge.
Aris Vang.
"Vang," Martin whispered, his voice trembling. "You're still alive down here?"
"You know—" a pause and a short catch of breath, "—where you need to go, Martin." Her voice carried a faint hiss on every consonant, like air escaping something not quite sealed.
Martin looked around as he considered what the voice said. "What's going to be in there?"
The comms clicked with a long pause. "A mess, Martin. Why else are you down here?"
He thought to himself for a moment, then walked through the threshold out of the Moon Bay and into the hall. He did not turn toward Control.
"How are you doing this?" Martin asked, his boots making a dull, hollow thud on the deck. "I saw the footage, Vang. How are you alive?"
"Alive is a—" another catch, longer this time, like she was gathering enough air to finish "—flexible word, at twenty thousand feet, Doctor." Her voice sounded close, as if she were a few steps behind him in the dark. "You worry too much about the how. You should worry about the what."
The lights near the Mess Hall were failing, throwing long shadows across the walls. The air grew colder, smelling of rust and standing water.
"You locked them in, including yourself," Martin said, hardening. "The logs showed the isolation doors were manually overridden. Did you gas the Mess Hall and kill the crew because of whatever's down in that trench? Why did you do it?"
Her breath rattled faintly into either a scoff or a chuckle.
"So you start talking to a dead person and that's what you ask?" She sighed into a short cough. "Go to the Mess Hall. You need to know wha—"
A burst of static cut her off.
"Martin!" Talbot's voice broke through, yelling now. "Where are you?! Just tell me where you are. I'll come, just stay put. Don't move."
Martin didn't answer. He didn't stop walking, either—something had a hold of him now, a steady pressure at the center of his chest, pulling him forward and down all at once. The corridor thinned at the edges of his vision. The overhead lights started faltering down the hallway, one by one, not going dark so much as going absent.
Then the floor wasn't there.
He was falling, and he wasn't. No wind, no impact—only that same steady pressure, drawing him down through the station and past it, through decks and pipe runs that thinned to outline and then to nothing, until there was no station left around him. Just endless water.
Just the trench.
His body drifted over the gaping mouth of it, the limitless dark of the abyss stretching below. He shouldn't have been able to see anything down there at all, and yet the shape of it kept unfolding beneath him anyway, level after level, as if the dark had its own way of being seen. He stared in awe, his eyes stinging, the black of it filling his vision until there was nothing else to look at. This had been here the whole time, mere feet below the station. It was ageless. It had been here long before him, and it would go on long after he was gone.
Martin didn't feel fear, though, floating over the crevasse. He felt something worse. If a deep-sea monster had reached up and dragged him down, at least he would have felt like something knew he existed—like something had considered him, even as food, even for a moment. To matter, in some small way. But there was no monster down there to fear. Only something vast enough not to notice him at all, and that, somehow, was its own kind of monster.
It didn't reach for him. It didn't need to. Martin understood. It hadn't noticed him at all—from wherever it was, he felt like a small, warm, breathing accident, suspended for one instant in a place that had no reason to know of his existence.
That was the part that broke something loose in his chest. Not fear of being eaten. Fear of being nothing.
He tried to scream and made no sound. The pressure kept drawing him down, and somewhere very far above him, a voice found its way through the black.
"Martin."
It came from everywhere and nowhere.
"Come back to the room, Martin. You need to see what's inside it."
The pressure reversed, hauling him back the other way, fast, the trench and the dark and the ripple of silt wrenched away from him all at once.
Martin came back to himself on his knees in the corridor, both palms flat against the cold deck, his chest heaving in short, useless pulls of air. His arms shook too hard to hold his own weight. For a long moment he stayed there, folded over the floor, waiting for his body to remember it belonged to him.
Slowly, he pushed himself upright. Ahead of him, unchanged, sat the door to the Mess Hall.
He put the card into the access slot, and the door turned from the crimson red of lockdown to a sudden green.
The door swung outward on its own weight, and the smell hit him before anything else—not rot, not blood, just a slight acidic sting in the nostrils.
The Mess Hall was dark except for the glow of a single overhead panel, flickering weakly over the long steel table. Trays were still out. Someone's fork sat balanced across a cup, like the meal had just been paused.
Some of them were still in their chairs—heads down, hands loose in their laps, a few slumped sideways against each other, the way people sit when they've heard the same alarm too many times. But two chairs were pushed back and empty. A woman lay collapsed near the door, one hand still flat against the release panel—the lack of a keycard had made her attempts futile. Another body lay inside the vent housing itself, as if he'd climbed in to rip out wires and kill the fire suppression by hand.
At the end of the counter, a thin black streak ran up the wall above a stovetop, and a pot sat cold on the burner, its bottom scorched through, a dried brick of noodles fused to the metal beneath a crust of boiled-over water.
Martin walked the length of the table, past faces slumped over and turned away, past a woman slumped forward with a half-eaten pale green nutrition bar still in her open hand.
Pistachios.
"Where's Vang," he murmured, scanning the slumped shapes around the table. His eyes settled instead on the suppression nozzle above the table, black and spent.
He reached up and touched it. Cold.
"There wasn't even a fire," he said softly, to no one, to all of them.
His earpiece clicked.
"Doc." Talbot's voice, careful now. "You in there?"
"I'm here," Martin said. "They're all here, Talbot. Everyone. I found them."
A pause, longer than it should have been. Then, quieter than before: "Everyone who, Martin?"
Martin opened his mouth and found he didn't have an answer ready. He pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes, quick, almost absent. His hand came away wet. He wiped it on his pant leg and didn't look again.
"I don't—" His voice shook. "I don't know, Talbot."
"That's alright, bud," Talbot said. "Come on back to Control. We'll figure it out together."
"I—I will, in a minute," Martin said. "Need to do something first."
He stepped over the slumped body, and as he left the room, he felt compelled to close the door behind him. That compartment, that mess, could stay where it was for now.
Martin walked back to the Moon Bay, to the inky black pool lying motionless. He took the keycard from his pocket and looked at Dr. Vang's picture.
"I—I'm—" Martin stuttered, and held back. He dropped the card into the water. Watching Vang's picture fade quickly into the dark, he wiped his face dry.
As the card fell to the bottom of the abyssal silt, it found its new home amongst several other key cards, and several other pictures of Dr. Aris Vang.
Somewhere in the walls, the hum of the grid shifted, dropping half a register, like a held breath finally let go. The lights along the corridor dimmed a shade duller, settling back toward standby.
Martin didn't notice. He never did.
He walked past the Barracks, toward the Medbay, and found his binders exactly where he'd left them, open on the counter. He flipped back a page, running a finger down the manifest, his own handwriting crowding the margins. He brushed away a few noodle crumbs and reexamined who was on the ship's logs.
His earpiece clicked.
"Martin, you read me?" Talbot's voice crinkled over the earpiece.
"Go ahead."