“To clear the channel. Or to communicate.” Owen put three frequencies on the screen — the array, the creatures’ signature, and the badge broadcast. The badge signal sat between the other two. “They’re not hunting. They’re troubleshooting. Every badge is a piece of interference between them and the closest signal they might have to home. It doesn’t explain the spine thing—”
“I might know that one,” Maddie said as she ran her scanner over the last of the crew. “If they’re looking—or whatever their version of looking is—for signals, the human brain is just electrical signals sent through the spine and around the body. What if the badges get their attention, but the brain’s natural activity makes them want to attempt to communicate?”
The silence that followed had a different weight than the silence before it.
“Who in here right now is wearing a comm badge?” Elliot called as his finger went to his badge, the small device no bigger than a thumbnail. Maddie had hers. Two of the unnamed crew members. “Badges off. Break them if you have to.”
“Holy shit, Tyler,” Maddie breathed as she stepped up to the console, looking like she was about to kiss him. “Did you actually figure something out?”
Tyler grinned. “I guess I did, didn’t I?”
Honestly, if Asher wouldn’t murder him, I’d kiss this idiot on the mouth, too.It was just another reminder: save as many NPCs as possible. They weren’t in this game for no reason. They had a purpose.
“What do we use instead?” Elliot asked.
Jasper was already pulling open a storage locker beneath his console. “Analog, baby. It’s a different electromagnetic broadcast — just radio waves, low power, point to point.” He pulled out a rack of handheld radios, battered and military-surplus-looking, the kind of equipment that didn’t belong even on a ship this beat-up. “These have been sitting in here since the Daedalus was commissioned. No network integration. No signal profile. To those things, they’re just plastic and metal.”
He handed them out. The radios were heavy in a way that modern equipment wasn’t — the weight of physical components rather than digital miniaturization. Levi took one, turned the dial, and heard the static hiss.Walkie-talkies. We’re fighting alien creatures with walkie-talkies.
Levi turned to the ship layout and started tracing paths with his finger. “If we seal the right corridors at the right time, we control which paths stay open. They’re already funneling themselves. We just have to narrow the funnel until there’s only one way through.”
“And the one way through leads where?” Jasper asked, though his face said he already knew.
“Cargo Bay Two.” Levi tapped it on the schematic. “It’s on the heading. Large enough for all of them. Does it have its own purge system?”
“It does.”
“We herd them in and cook them,” Tyler said, grabbing Levi’s shoulder too hard and shaking him. Asher batted his hand away, but Tyler looked too excited to care.
“The junction seals have to hold through the purge, meaning we need people to perform a manual override,” Owen said, looking at Jasper. “If the cascade drops the doors for six seconds—”
“The funnel breaks and they scatter.” Jasper was already pulling up power routing. “I can isolate the junction doors on a separate feed, but someone still needs to physically override the doors during the purge so they’ll hold.”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes from here.” Jasper grinned. “Engineering, to the rescue, as usual.”
Owen ran the power math. “Concentrating all available purge capacity into one section — the temperature exceeds biological tolerance by a factor of four. But the draw takes everything else offline for ninety seconds in that area. Gravity, lighting, life support at fifty percent.”
“But the funnel holds during the purge?” Elliot asked.
“The funnel holds,” Jasper confirmed. “We need three volunteers to stay at each junction through the purge.”
“That’s either brilliant or insane,” Elliot breathed as he sighed. “Okay, let’s figure this out, every step of the way. We’re not losing anyone else.”
Levi felt a glimmer of hope as Elliot, Jasper, and Owen began to work out the plan. He was tired. He knew the hope was dangerous, but he let himself keep it anyway. Maybe he was finally getting better at this game, and he would find a way to the end faster. But even as he stepped back to let his friends work out a plan and pressed against Asher’s side, just to feel something he knew was solid, fear crept into the back of his mind.
There’s no way it is going to be this easy.
11
A Dish Best Served Cold
Jasperclappedhimonthe shoulder on his way out of Engineering. “See you on the other side, man.” The grin that lived on his face was there, but the skin around his eyes was tight, and the terminal in his other hand shook slightly before he adjusted his grip and the shaking stopped. Tyler paused at the far door, gave Levi a single nod, then opened the door and was gone.
Elliot was at the Engineering console with his palms flat on the purge controls. He caught Levi’s eye across the room and held it, before his eyes drifted to Levi’s cheek and throat.Shit. In the chaos since the containment breach, Levi hadn’t seen what he looked like…and now the new acting captain of the ship and eternally irritating romance option was looking at him like he needed to be rescued from Asher more than he needed to help get rid of aliens that said hello via extreme chiropractic adjustments.
“Be careful,” Elliot said. To Levi. Not to the room.
