Tex pressed on toward the deeper halls of D3, each step echoing through the drowned skeleton of the Ark. Then he saw it.

  “Armorer’s Quarters.”

  His old door.

  The place he used to call home.

  He hesitated—then pushed it open.

  The stale hiss of air rushed past him like a ghost. Inside, nothing had changed.

  Unmade bed. Scent of solder and ozone. Tools half-buried under a blanket of dust. The kind of dust that only settles when the world forgets you.

  Projects still sat where he’d left them—half-built, half-dreamed. A frame for experimental booster engines crouched in the corner like a rusted beast waiting to be born.

  He moved gently, reverently, through the room.

  Then reached into his private log archives—deep storage. The audio files he and his old crew had cut during late nights and long stretches of boredom. He hadn’t touched them since the war went sideways. Maybe, just maybe, they still had some use.

  He tapped one of the logs. Static. Then a voice. Laughter.

  His.

  Not just his.

  Bandstand. Helga. Rattler. The ghosts spoke in stereo, half-buried in memory.

  Tex sat down on the edge of the workbench, the metal groaning beneath him.

  If he could retrofit those booster engines, waterproof the old housing, and maybe sync it with his sonar rig… he could move through the water without crawling like a bottom feeder. Maybe even fight.

  He sighed through his vents, setting the log to loop in the background while he got to work.

  If he was going to swim with monsters—he’d need to remember what it meant to build.

  And more importantly…

  What it meant to belong.

  It felt like a lifetime ago he was in here last.

  He scrolled until he hit on an old Rustcore track titled Kicking Brass.

  The moment it queued, the room filled with the layered hum of reactor cores, servo whines, and the rhythmic clack of musically tuned reloads. It was mechanical, chaotic, but unmistakably theirs.

  Then came Bandstand—his voice distorted, glitched, but clear enough to feel.

  “LET’S KICK SOME BRASS!”

  Tex didn’t hesitate.

  He busted it down, moving in time with the beat, hips swinging, boots slamming the metal floor in hard, percussive bursts. It wasn’t tactical. It wasn’t smart. Part of his processor was still pinging proximity warnings.

  But for a moment, he didn’t care.

  For a moment, he danced like they used to—like they did before Bandstand went down. Before everything went sideways.

  The music echoed down the empty corridors like war prayers. Five minutes of pure catharsis, punctuated by the crash of brass casings hitting steel like applause.

  And somewhere, in the ghost-slick shadows of memory, he heard the cheers of his old squad. He even thought he could hear Bandstand say "You still got it, little man."

  Tex smiled. Gave a nod to no one in particular.

  “Right... back to it.” He muttered as he brought himself back to the present.

  The task at hand wasn't simple, but it was important. He took his time, getting the engines waterproofed, swapping out the propulsion system for a screw powered by Sterling engines, using the heat loop from his reactor and cooling loop to provide a significant temperature differential to power it.

  After a delicate task of clamping off his fuel lines, and swapping out the engine housings, he was ready. The screws already spinning as the Sterling engines began to spin up.

  His core already ran hot. No space for real cooling — just vents and stubbornness.

  But that was perfect.

  The Sterling powered screws spun up. Smooth. Hungry.

  He was ready to swim with monsters.

  He knew these engines weren’t built for torque or speed — and that was fine. He didn’t need a lot. Just enough to move.

  Back in the hall, he followed the slope downward, step by echoing step, until he reached the D3 stairwell.

  Below him, the water yawned like a pit — black as night, slick with a bright rainbow sheen of oil and grease. Tex let out a low grumble.

  “Gonna need a wash after this dip,” he muttered, stepping into the filth.

  The chill crept up past his knees. Then his hips. He moved deeper, each motion kicking up swirls of chemical film and silt. Soon, he was deep enough to float — and the modified engines kicked in.

  Slow. Sluggish. But steady.

  About a walking pace, give or take. But in this drowned tomb, that was enough.

  He couldn’t see a damn thing.

  Tex checked his readout — then triggered the sharp pong from the Lungfish unit clamped to his belly rail. The sonar fired off into the void, and a breath later, a wireframe image bloomed across his HUD: walls, floor, obstacles, highlighted against the dark.

  Half-formed, hazy, but better than blindness.

  He waited.

  Not out of fear — but out of recognition.

  A second ping echoed through the deep. Not from his system.

  Something else was here.

  Also using sonar.

  Also mapping the dark.

  Tex’s processors froze for a nanosecond, cross-referencing signature timings.

  Only one guy he knew ran sonar like that.

  Kreigwal.

  But that didn’t make sense.

  Kreigwal was Black Sun navy. A submarine morph, scout class — old German tech base, if he remembered right. Last he heard, the bastard was in the Atlantic, running interdiction ops and cracking open naval logistics morphs like oysters.

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  This was nowhere near his AO.

  Tex stared into the dark, hydraulic whine low in his chest.

  “You ain’t supposed to be here…” he whispered.

  He checked the sonar profile again. Still just a ping. No shape yet. No contact. But the rhythm felt familiar — too deliberate, too precise to be wildlife or stray machinery.

  He sighed. Bubbled some coolant.

  Might as well give it a shot.

  He and Kreigwal had history — 2010, back when things still had borders and orders. He was under his command, doing weapons reclamation and retrofitting. Tex was on the forge crews, patching up munitions from busted morphs and bolting warheads back onto rearmed interceptors. Kreigwal was the brains of the operations, leading his own wolfpack.

  Precise.

  Quiet.

  Dangerous as hell.

  Tex, as one of the Sun’s mobile armorers, got shuffled into every hot zone with a scrap pile and a pulse. And back then, Kreigwal was one of the few who didn’t treat him like a disposable asset.

  Hell — he even laughed at Tex’s jokes.

  And that counted for something.

  Tex cued up his 18th preset — an ancient frequency buried deep in his comms archive.

  Took a second to spool up.

  Old codecs. Pre-humanity formatting.

  He ran a calibration sweep, synced his encryption key, then keyed the mic with a grin.

  “Hey, I didn’t know they had a dinosaur exhibit on the Ark!”

  The silence that followed wasn’t empty.

  It shifted.

  Like the water around him was listening.

  Then came the reply — familiar and wrong.

  Not raw, not garbled — just… aged.

  A voice he knew, but warped like it was playing through a cracked museum speaker.

  “Ah… ze funny one.”

  A pause. Static laced with sonar chimes.

  “Vat can I do for you, Herr Tex?”

  There it was — that heavy, calculated Germanic precision. The kind of voice that never lost composure, not even under nuclear fire.

  But it didn’t feel right.

  Too calm.

  Too cold.

  Like it wasn’t coming from Kreigwal at all…

  ...but something wearing his voice.

  Tex’s grin faded, just a little.

  “So… how long you been down here, old man?” Tex asked, trying to keep it light. “You’re sounding a little worse for wear.”

  There was a pause.

  Not lag.

  Not signal delay.

  Processing.

  Like Kriegwal was piecing the answer together from fragmented logs and broken pride.

  Then — calm, low, and colder than before:

  “I am a Kommandant vithout a fleet, Herr Tex.”

  A beat.

  “They are all sunk.”

  The words dropped like ballast into the dark.

  “And zis…” he muttered, bitterness bleeding in like rust through a hull,

  “…zis is my job now. To fix… zis mess.”

  His voice darkened — not angry, but drained. Like a man who had been underwater too long, held together more by protocol than purpose.

  “So you’ve gone from commander to grease monkey?” Tex asked, sonar mapping the corridor ahead.

  “They really did you that dirty, huh?”

  Another pause — shorter this time. More human.

  “I’ve been down here for three months, Herr Tex,” Kriegwal replied, almost reverently.

  “If I can save the Ark… maybe zey vill give me command again.”

  Hope.

  Real hope.

  Worn thin like a boot sole, but still there.

  Tex finally rounded the corner. His HUD lit up with the figure — small, hunched over a coolant pipe.

  Kriegwal.

  A U-Boat scout morph, about Tex’s size. Compact. Elegant in his own sharp-edged, riveted way. Once designed for silent strikes and long-range tracking. Now... a janitor in a death maze.

  Kriegwal didn’t look up. His welding torch hissed in steady bursts, each bead of molten metal laid with glacial patience.

  Tex couldn’t help himself.

  “You do know the radiation down here’s off the charts, right?”

  Kriegwal paused his weld, just for a moment. A servo clicked. Then he resumed — like the thought didn’t matter.

  Tex settled beside him, watching the work.

  If I was his squad lead, Tex thought, I’d be tapping my landing toes so hard they’d spark.

  But he didn’t.

  He just watched.

  Tex reached out, laying a hand softly on Kriegwal’s shoulder. Not like a soldier. Not like a tech.

  Like a friend.

  “Would you like some help, Kommandant?”

  He asked it carefully.

  Gingerly.

  Because with Kriegwal, tone meant everything. One wrong note could turn camaraderie into command friction.

  The U-boat paused mid-weld. The arc flickered out. Silence hummed between them, heavy with static and reactor pulse.

  “Your data line isn’t active,” Kriegwal replied, clipped and formal. “Couldn’t zend you ze verk order if I vanted to.”

  Tex sighed through his vents. Heavy.

  Resigned.

  “Tell Dollface not to hack me, and I’ll open it long enough to get the orders,” he said, tone even.

  “I’m not here to dig or sabotage, Sir. I just want to help you.”

  A long beat.

  Then another.

  No movement. No sound beyond the slow drip of condensation and the distant groan of pressure-shifted metal.

  Kriegwal still didn’t look at him.

  But the weld torch tilted slightly away — an unspoken signal.

  Tex let out the breath he didn’t realize he was holding.

  Because Helga? Helga was a predator in officer’s paint.

  But Kriegwal?

  Tex had never served under a better commander.

  Tex opened his data link — just a hair, just enough.

  He watched the connection like a hawk, his internal systems screaming warnings as packets came through. No intrusion, no piggyback signals. Just the file. Just the job.

  The moment the transfer finished, he slammed the port closed again, like slamming a vault on a bad memory.

  He scanned the work order.

  Straightforward. Ugly. Just how he liked it.

  Some welds had already been done — barely. Most of the piping was held together by little more than rust and a prayer. A few pressure points were threaded together with corroded bolts that looked ready to sheer under a cough.

  Tex let out a long, tired sigh.

  “Right… first order of business is plating,” he muttered. “Gotta get some external panels bent and welded to cover the holes. That’s the patch job.”

  He tapped the pipe with a knuckle. It rang with a sickly metallic twang.

  “Then… we pump the water outta D3, filter and distill it, then cycle it back through the system, maybe get the coolant loop back online. Then, maybe we can get Reactor 5 back in action.”

  He didn’t say the odds were low. He didn’t need to.

  But he started anyway.

  The next several hours passed in near-total silence.

  Just the hiss of welding torches.

  The stutter of impact drills.

  All of it muffled by dark, oil-thick water, like the Ark itself didn’t want to disturb them.

  No banter. No jokes. Just the sacred quiet of two old machines doing what they were built to do.

  Then Tex’s personal channel flickered. A ping. A voice.

  “What are you doing, Tex?” came Helga’s sharp, acidic drawl. “Trying to kill us all?”

  Tex didn’t even look up.

  He didn’t flinch.

  He just kept working.

  “Yes,” he said quietly, pressing a rusted panel flush against the breach.

  “But I’m doing a favor for someone who earned it.”

  Then he lit the torch and sealed the edge.

  And the silence returned.

  It broke again about twenty minutes later.

  Not the pipe — the silence.

  Kriegwal turned slowly, the faint glow of his optics catching Tex’s through the dark.\

  “So… you are after Helga, ja?”

  His tone was careful. Almost neutral.

  “I have heard… zat she was not a good Kommandant.”

  Tex didn’t stop working — but his hand paused on the weld seam, just long enough to register.

  “Yeah,” he said flatly. “Got a laundry list of complaints.”

  He sparked the torch again.

  “But by the time I’m done...

  ...that won’t be a problem.”

  Kriegwal let out something that might’ve once been a chuckle.

  A low, mechanical wheeze through his chest plating.

  “Gut.”

  “Perhaps when zis is all over… I could have a new office,” he mused, glancing at Tex.

  “Maybe vun vith a window.”

  Tex laughed. Couldn’t help it. It caught him off guard — honest and corrosive like a busted coolant valve.

  Kriegwal joined him.

  Just for a moment, the pressure didn’t feel quite so crushing.

  Then Kriegwal’s voice dropped again, serious — but not hostile.

  “Every protocol in me is telling me to kill you…”

  A pause.

  “But I believe... ve can work together. To better both our positions.”

  He nodded toward the pipe, then the Ark beyond it.

  “Any assignment is better zan zis.”

  “Amen, brother,” Tex said with a crooked smile.

  “So… you’ve been at this for three months now?”

  Kriegwal didn’t look up.

  “Tactical delays,” he replied, voice dry.

  “Make them hurt for zis disgrace.”

  Tex raised a brow, the grin twitching wider.“Ah… making it personal?”

  A pause.

  Then Kriegwal turned, one optic glinting like a knife's edge.

  “Very.”

  “I knew I liked you for some reason,” Tex said with a grin, giving Kriegwal a solid pat on the shoulder before turning back to the task at hand.

  The banter continued — dry, grim, necessary — right up until the last weld.

  By then, Tex’s radiation alarms were screaming.

  His HUD glitched like a fever dream. Icons warped. System readouts flickered. A warning tone buzzed behind his optics like a migraine.

  “Alright, big guy,” he muttered, sealing the final seam with a hiss of molten metal,

  “let’s get outta these rads. My systems are starting to go haywire.”

  He stood, plates groaning with strain, then glanced at the work they’d done — not perfect, but functional. A dent in the dark.

  “Once this is all done…” he said quietly, “maybe we can finish this.”

  He turned toward the stairwell, one last look over his shoulder.

  “But the jury’s still out on whether I’m putting this station back together…

  …or putting it in the ground.”

  A pause. Just enough for the air to grow heavy.

  “So… be ready to leave. Just in case.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply. Just started climbing, one slow step at a time, coolant bleeding from his vents.

  Behind him, Kriegwal called out — voice low, resolute, and just a little wistful.

  “Ja... Good luck, Herr Tex.”

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