Darkness.
Not the familiar, reassuring dark of a night sky, but a thick, absolute blackness that pressed in from all sides. A physical weight on the eyes. It was a tomb-dark, devoid of light, of hope. The only sound was the ragged, wet rasp of Kaito's breathing, a frantic, panicked rhythm that was far too loud in the cramped confines of the service duct. Haruto could feel the vibrations of it through the thin metal floor. Beside him, Riku's breathing was a slow, steady, almost silent metronome, an infuriatingly calm counterpoint to Kaito's terror.
Haruto's own breath was a controlled, measured thing. He forced it in, he forced it out. The air was stale, a thousand years of dead stillness, thick with the metallic tang of old wiring and the unsettlingly sweet scent of decay. He was wedged between a bundle of thick, cold conduits on his left and the rough, vibrating wall of the duct on his right. The space was so tight he could feel the individual rivets of the wall pressing into his shoulder plate. Dust, thick and fine as silt, coated everything, a soft, gray snow of ages. A loose particle got past his helmet's filtration unit, and the urge to cough was a violent, physical thing he had to swallow down. Any loud noise felt like a sacrilege. Like waking the dead.
"I can't— I can't breathe," Kaito gasped from somewhere ahead in the blackness. His voice was a high, thin wire of panic. "It's… the walls. They're closing in. We're going to die in here."
"Negative," Haruto's voice was a low, flat rasp, devoid of sympathy. He brought up his wrist-slate. The screen cast a sickly green glow, a tiny island of light in the infinite dark, illuminating the tight, metal-walled tube they were in. The light caught the wild, terrified look in Kaito's eyes. "The duct's structural integrity is sound. You are experiencing a standard psychological reaction to confined-space operations. Control it."
"Control it?" Kaito's voice cracked, bordering on a sob. "Did you see them? Out there? The… the bodies. Just sitting there. And that—that voice. It tried to melt us. We're trapped in here with a crazy goddamn ghost that wants to kill us!"
"The Warden is not a ghost," Haruto said, his fingers moving deftly over the screen of his slate, the light reflecting in his focused, narrowed eyes. "It is a damaged, corrupted shipboard AI. It is following its last valid command: containment. It perceives us as a biological threat. It is a machine executing a program. Nothing more." He was talking to Kaito, but he was also talking to himself, forcing the cold, hard logic of the situation to suppress the primal, unnerving wrongness of it all. The ship didn't feel like a machine. It felt like a haunted house. A very, very large haunted house with a very effective ghost.
He was trying to access the ship's internal schematics, to find a map of these service ducts. But every query he sent was met with a cascade of red error messages. ACCESS DENIED. WARDEN PROTOCOL 734. SYSTEM LOCKOUT. The AI was actively fighting him, walling off sections of its own memory, a digital fortress pulling up its drawbridges.
"The AI is blocking me," he finally said, the admission a bitter taste in his mouth. "We have no map. We're moving blind."
A low, guttural sound came from Kaito. It might have been a whimper.
"Then we stay here," Kaito said, his voice pleading. "We just… we wait. Himari will send help. She has to."
"Help is not coming," Riku's voice was a dead, flat thing from the darkness behind Haruto. "The comms are dead. The entrance is sealed. No one is coming."
The brutal, simple truth of it seemed to finally break through Kaito's panic, leaving a stark, hollow silence in its wake. They were alone. Utterly, completely alone in the belly of a dead, hostile ship.
Haruto broke the silence. "We move forward. The ducts have to lead somewhere. We find another exit, we get our bearings, and we find the bridge. That's the mission." He didn't wait for an answer. He began to crawl, his armor scraping against the metal with a sound that was like nails on a chalkboard. The movement was awkward, painful. He had to move on his elbows and knees, his carbine digging into his back, his helmet scraping against the low ceiling. Every few meters, a spray of fine, gray dust would fall from the ceiling, shaken loose by their movement.
The crawl was a special kind of hell. A slow, grinding torture of scraped knuckles and bruised knees. The quiet stretched, broken only by the rhythmic scrape-shuffle of their own movements and their ragged breathing. Time seemed to lose all meaning. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. Haruto's world narrowed to the few feet of metal tube illuminated by his slate and the burning ache in his shoulders. He passed a junction, two dark, yawning holes branching off to the left and right. He hesitated for a fraction of a second. There was no way to know which path was correct. He chose the one that continued to slope downwards, following the slight, almost imperceptible angle of the ship's wrecked hull. Logic. It was the only thing he had left.
After what felt like an eternity, he saw it. A faint, rectangular outline of light up ahead. A grate.
He moved faster, ignoring the protests of his tired muscles. He reached the grate and peered through the narrow slats. He was looking down into another corridor. This one was different. Wider. The walls were paneled with a dark, polished wood-like material, the emergency lights casting a softer, more subdued red glow. Officer's country.
He scanned the corridor. It was empty. But something was wrong. The deck plates were scored with deep, black gouges, as if something heavy had been dragged across them. And the wall… the wall on the far side was peppered with small, circular holes, the tell-tale impact marks of blaster fire. A firefight had happened here. A vicious one. But like the mess hall, there were no bodies. Just the evidence of the violence.
"What do you see?" Kaito's voice was a nervous whisper behind him.
"A fight," Haruto murmured, his eyes tracing the pattern of the blast marks. They weren't from standard Imperial sidearms. The energy signature was wrong, the impact pattern too chaotic. This was something else. "And something else."
His light caught it then. A strange, dark, almost iridescent residue splattered across the wall, partially covering the blaster marks. It looked like oil, but it had a strange, organic texture, like dried, flaking resin. He zoomed in with his helmet's optical sensor. He could see strange, almost crystalline structures within the dark substance. It was not a chemical. It was not a lubricant.
Before he could process the warning, the ship groaned.
It wasn't the sound of settling metal. It was a deep, resonant, structural groan, a sound of immense stress. A low, powerful hum vibrated through the grate, and the emergency lights in the corridor below flickered violently. Then, with a sound like a giant's sigh, the artificial gravity in the corridor failed.
They watched through the grate as loose debris—a discarded data slate, a stray piece of paneling, a cloud of dust—lifted from the floor and began to drift in the sudden, silent zero-gravity. The effect was beautiful and terrifying. A slow-motion ballet of wreckage in the dim red light.
The gravity returned a second later with a brutal, solid thump. Everything slammed back down onto the deck plates with a cacophony of crashes and clangs. The ship groaned again. The hum faded. The lights steadied.
Kaito let out a choked cry. "What was that? What the hell was that?"
"Warden," Haruto breathed, his mind racing. The AI wasn't just sealing doors and venting gas. It was actively manipulating the ship's core systems. Gravity control. Life support. It was using the ship itself as a weapon. "It knows we're in the ducts. It can't get to us directly, so it's trying to crush us. It's cycling the gravity, trying to cause a structural collapse."
The crawlspace, which had been a claustrophobic prison, now felt like a death trap. A coffin that was actively trying to crush them.
"We have to get out of here," Kaito said, his voice high and strained. "Now!"
"The grate's our only way," Haruto said. He examined the locking mechanism. Standard mag-clamps. He could override them with his slate. He was about to begin the bypass sequence when he saw something else through the grate, in the corridor below.
In the aftermath of the gravity fluctuation, a section of the wall paneling had been shaken loose. It hung ajar, revealing the dark space behind it. And from that dark space, something was leaking. A thick, black, tar-like substance, the same iridescent material he had seen splattered on the wall, was slowly, viscously oozing from the breach, pooling on the floor. It wasn't dripping. It was… flowing. Spreading. Like an oil slick with a mind of its own. As he watched, a thin tendril of the black substance rose from the pool, twitching in the air for a moment before retracting back into the mass.
The doctor's log entry flashed in his mind. I don't know what that thing in engineering was, but it has killed us all. The unclassified organic compounds. The anomaly.
It wasn't a ghost. It wasn't a monster. It was a contamination. And it was still here. Still alive.
He looked at the grate. At the only exit. It led directly into a corridor where a biological nightmare was actively leaking from the walls. He looked back down the dark, cramped service duct, back towards the silent, watching AI and its gravity games.
They were trapped. Trapped between a hostile, ancient machine that wanted to sterilize them, and an alien, unknown thing that had consumed the ship's original crew. The quiet of the ship was no longer the quiet of a tomb. It was the quiet of a predator, holding its breath, waiting for its prey to make a move. And they were the prey.
He looked at Kaito, then at Riku, their faces pale and ghostly in the dim light of his slate. The fear in the crawlspace was a living thing now, thick and cloying, and it had the faint, sweet smell of decay.