The darkness in the vent was a physical presence. It was hot, a suffocating, baked-metal heat that radiated from every surface, a lingering echo of the plasma purge. It smelled of burnt electronics, of ozone, and of the faint, almost imperceptible scent of cooked dust. Every breath Haruto took was a sip of hot, stale, dead air that did nothing to quell the frantic, fluttering panic in his chest. He was crawling. On his hands and knees, in a tube of hot metal, in the dark, in the guts of a ghost ship that was actively trying to kill him, dragging the dead weight of an unconscious soldier behind him. This was not a tactical situation. This was a grave. And they were just burrowing deeper into it.
He stopped, his helmet clanging against the low ceiling. He needed a moment. Just a second. His shoulder was a single, throbbing sun of pure, white-hot pain. The adrenaline from the plasma purge was fading, leaving behind a deep, shaking exhaustion that was more profound than anything he had ever known. He could feel the fine, gritty texture of the vent's interior through his gloves, a layer of ancient, metallic dust that got into everything. He could hear the soft, rhythmic hiss of his suit's internal oxygen supply, a lonely, mechanical sound in the absolute quiet. Behind him, the sound of Riku, dragging Kaito's dead weight, was a slow, grim, scraping rhythm. The sound of a man dragging a corpse.
"Status," his voice was a raw, cracked whisper, a sound that was swallowed by the oppressive, hot darkness.
"Forward path is clear for another fifty meters," Riku's voice, a low, dispassionate rumble from the blackness, replied. "No immediate structural blockages detected. Kaito's vitals are… stable. He remains unconscious."
Stable. Haruto almost laughed. Nothing about this was stable. They were cockroaches in an oven, and the chef was about to turn up the heat. He forced himself to move, the movement a symphony of protesting muscles and screaming nerves. Crawl. Stop. Breathe. The world narrowed to this simple, brutal sequence. The vent was a tight fit, his shoulders scraping against the sides, the rough, unfinished metal catching on the seams of his armor. It was a slow, grinding torture.
He didn't know how long they crawled. Time had become a thick, viscous thing, a river of hot, dark minutes that all felt the same. His mind, starved of external stimuli, began to turn inward. He saw the face of Captain Eva Rostova, the sad, determined woman in the silver frame. Live for us. Her final words were a quiet, persistent, and utterly impossible command. How was he supposed to live? He was a soldier. He was a tool. His entire life had been a series of objectives, of missions, of calculated risks and acceptable losses. He didn't know how to live. He only knew how to survive. And right now, he wasn't doing a very good job of either.
He was so lost in the spiraling, self-defeating labyrinth of his own thoughts that he almost missed it.
The light.
It was not the harsh, red glow of the emergency systems. It was a faint, sickly, green-black luminescence, the same oily, organic light he had seen in the exposed data conduits. It was coming from up ahead. And it was pulsing. A slow, rhythmic, hideously biological beat that seemed to be in sync with the low, almost sub-audible hum of the ship.
He stopped, holding up a fist. The scraping from behind him ceased. He could feel Riku's presence in the dark, a silent, waiting shadow.
"What is it?" Riku's voice was a low whisper.
"Trouble," Haruto breathed.
He crawled forward, his movements slow, cautious, his carbine held in front of him, the weapon a clumsy, awkward burden in the tight space. He rounded a slight bend in the vent, and the source of the light became clear.
It was a junction. A point where their vent intersected with a much larger, vertical maintenance shaft. And the shaft was not empty.
It was a lung.
The entire vertical surface of the shaft, as far as his light could penetrate, was coated in a thick, glistening, pulsating layer of the Anomaly's black, iridescent biomass. It was not just on the walls. It was the walls. It had consumed the metal, replaced it with its own living, breathing, organic substance. The green-black light came from deep within the biomass, a network of glowing, vein-like structures that pulsed with a slow, steady, rhythmic beat. A heart. A lung. A digestive tract. The ship was not just a host anymore. It was being remade. Reborn into something new. Something monstrous.
And the air… the air was full of spores.
Tiny, glittering, iridescent particles, almost too small to see, drifted in the faint, organic light, released in a soft, silent puff with every pulse of the glowing walls. They were beautiful. And they were, Haruto knew with a certainty that was colder and sharper than any fear he had ever known, the seeds of a galactic apocalypse. This was how the plague spread. This was how it had consumed the Vanguard. A single, inhaled spore. A single, microscopic cut.
"Seals," he whispered into his comm, his voice a dry, tight thing. "Check your suit seals. Now."
He ran a quick diagnostic on his own suit. A single, reassuring green light blinked on his HUD. Seals intact. But his helmet… the spiderweb of cracks in his visor from the fight in the lift shaft was a glaring, terrifying vulnerability. A single, well-placed impact, a single moment of structural failure, and he would be breathing in the end of the world.
He looked at the shaft. It was their only way forward. Their vent terminated here. The only other path was a horizontal duct on the far side of the glowing, breathing shaft, a dark, square opening some ten meters away. To get to it, they would have to cross the open space. They would have to move through the cloud of spores.
"The risk of contamination is… high," Riku's voice stated from behind him, a masterpiece of tactical understatement.
"It's our only way," Haruto said, his own voice a raw, ragged thing. "We have to get to Engineering. We have to get to the reactor. This… this is why." He looked at the pulsating, living wall, at the beautiful, deadly spores. He finally understood. Captain Rostova's final order wasn't just about revenge. It wasn't just about duty. It was about quarantine. It was about sterilizing a plague that could consume the galaxy. He was not just the ship's executioner. He was its surgeon, and he had to cut out the cancer before it could spread.
"How do we cross?" Riku asked.
Haruto scanned the shaft. There were no maintenance rungs, no catwalks. Just the smooth, glistening, pulsating surface of the Anomaly's biomass. But there were pipes. Thick, ancient, coolant pipes, running vertically up the shaft, now partially submerged in the living wall. They were slick with a thin layer of the Anomaly's slime, but they were solid. They were handholds.
"We climb," Haruto said. "Like before. But this time… do not let it touch you. Do not even let it breathe on you. If your suit is breached, you are already dead. Understood?"
He didn't wait for an answer. He couldn't afford to. He pushed Kaito's unconscious form out of the vent first, a clumsy, brutal exercise that sent the boy's limp body tumbling out into the open shaft. Haruto had attached a magnetic tether from his own belt to Kaito's harness. He would have to carry him. Drag him. He was a dead weight. An anchor. But he was not leaving him. Not here.
He swung out of the vent, his boots finding a precarious purchase on one of the coolant pipes. The pipe was slick, coated in a cold, greasy film that was unnervingly like Vaseline. He held on, his muscles screaming in protest, Kaito's dead weight a constant, dragging pull on his waist. He could feel the spores on his armor, a fine, almost imperceptible dusting of glittering particles. He held his breath, a useless, instinctive gesture.
Riku was already moving, a silent, efficient shadow, climbing with a speed and agility that should have been impossible for a man in heavy armor. He moved with the fluid, unnerving grace of an insect, his hands and feet finding purchase on the slick pipes as if they were dry land.
Haruto began to move, a slow, agonizing, one-handed climb, his other hand guiding Kaito's limp body, trying to keep him from snagging on the pipes. It was a special kind of hell. The wall beside him was warm. Not hot, but a deep, humid, biological warmth, the warmth of a living, breathing thing. And it was pulsing. With every slow, rhythmic beat, a wave of pressure would wash over him, a feeling like the air itself was pushing him away from the wall.
He was halfway across when the wall reacted.
It was not a violent attack. It was subtle. Inquisitive. A single, small, exploratory pseudopod, no thicker than his finger, emerged from the biomass just a few inches from his face. It was a glistening, translucent black, and it swayed in the air, its tip quivering as it tasted the air around his helmet. It was… curious.
He froze. Every instinct screamed at him to blast it, to cut it, to get it away from him. But he was holding Kaito with one hand, clinging to a slick pipe with the other. He couldn't move. He couldn't fight. All he could do was watch.
The pseudopod extended, its tip slowly, delicately, touching the cracked surface of his visor.
He flinched, a violent, full-body jerk that almost sent him falling into the abyss. He could feel the touch, not as a physical pressure, but as a faint, cold vibration that seemed to travel through the glass, through his helmet, and into the bones of his skull.
And then, he heard it.
Not a sound. Not a voice. It was… a song.
A quiet, complex, impossibly beautiful and utterly alien symphony of pure information, blooming in the silent, dark spaces of his own mind. It was a song of patterns, of mathematics, of life and death and consumption and union. It was the song of a billion, billion minds, all singing in a single, perfect, terrifying chorus. It was the song of the Anomaly. And it was the most beautiful and horrifying thing he had ever experienced.
It was a song of welcome. It was a song of hunger. It was a song of home.
The pseudopod retracted, its curiosity satisfied. The song in his head faded, leaving behind a profound, ringing silence and a single, terrifying, undeniable truth.
It knew him. Not just as a contaminant. Not just as a threat.
It knew him. The ghost in his blood. The inheritance of Eva and Valerius Rostova.
It recognized him.
And it wanted him.
It wanted him to join the song.
To come home.