The darkness was absolute. The cold was worse.
Inside the Nautilus 21, everything was frozen in a suffocating stillness. With all power cut to maintain their thermodynamic shroud, frost began to coat the interior metal walls like a slow-growing fungus. Each breath Ethan and Mei exhaled drifted away as a pale, ghostly mist in the dark.
“Ethan…”
Mei’s voice was a brittle thread, trembling with a chill that went deeper than the skin. “You still alive?”
She was curled into a tight ball against the bulkhead, hugging her knees to trap what little warmth her body had left. More than an hour had passed since the air scrubbers were silenced. Carbon dioxide levels were creeping toward the red line.
Every breath felt heavier, like inhaling silt. Ethan’s temples throbbed with a rhythmic, piercing pain—the first warning sign of CO? poisoning.
“…Still alive,” Ethan whispered. His eyes were unfocused, staring into the void. “Breathe slowly. We need to conserve every liter.”
But the darkness was no longer empty. Hallucinations began to flicker in the corners of his vision—spectral blue lights from a NASA control room that shouldn’t be there. He heard a voice—Sarah’s.
“Doctor… it’s zero point eight two percent. Can’t you see it?”
Ethan squeezed his eyes shut, but the memory clawed its way back anyway.
July 12, 2026.
Back then, Ethan Cole had been a man of lethal arrogance. He had believed the Aegis System was an invincible shield, a masterpiece of engineering that would protect humanity forever. He had listened more closely to the thunderous applause of generals than to the quiet, persistent warnings in his colleagues’ reports. He had convinced himself that 0.82 percent was nothing more than statistical noise.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Click.
One light, plastic button. That was all it took to knock tens of thousands of satellites out of their precision orbits—a domino collapse that spiraled into the Silver Cage.
“It’s my fault…” The words slipped from his lips like a long-delayed confession.
“What?” Mei lifted her head, her eyes catching a stray glint of silver light from an overhead crack.
“If I hadn’t pressed that button—if I’d just been more careful—your home… your brother… they’d still be there.” His voice cracked, raw with a decade of silence. “I stole the night sky in the name of saving the world. I was the warden, Mei. The one who locked the cage.”
In the darkness, Mei’s eyes flashed with a cold, predatory light. She said nothing at first. Hatred burned in her chest, but the thinning air and the biting cold were more immediate enemies.
“Yeah,” she said finally, her voice like jagged glass. “You deserve to die.”
She reached out through the dark and grabbed his sleeve, her fingers tight and trembling.
“But not here. If you’re going to die, Ethan Cole, you do it up there—after you open the sky again. You do it in front of the whole world. Until then, your life doesn’t belong to you.”
Then—CLANG!
A sharp, metallic impact rang through the hull, vibrating through their very bones. Not sonar. Pressure.
“Ethan, that didn’t sound right!”
He snapped back into focus, his engineer's mind overriding the CO? fog. His eyes darted to the manual pressure gauge. The needle was climbing—fast.
“They can’t find us, so they’re dredging the seabed,” Ethan said, his voice urgent. “They’re triggering controlled collapses of the canyon walls. They’re trying to entomb us alive.”
RUMMMMBLE—
The ocean floor shook. Hundreds of tons of rock and sediment began to slide toward the Nautilus. Hiding was no longer an option.
“Restore power!” Ethan shouted, scrambling toward the controls. “Engines on—full ahead toward the thermal vent field!”
The Nautilus coughed like a dying beast, its internal systems screaming as power surged back into the lines. In the pitch-black depths, the ghost submarine’s propellers spun violently, biting into the freezing water.
The hunt had resumed. And somewhere above, Marcus was watching.
