The Signal Between Them (Ocean's Song, Chapter 9)
As Parker presses the Aegis crew to keep searching for Rachel, PelagiaCorp seizes on rumors of a mysterious new signal—just as Miguel appears with news Parker can’t ignore.
The Aegis rocked on the gray Atlantic swells, her hull groaning like a tired animal. Salt crust clung to every surface; the tang of diesel threaded the air. Parker Carbis stood at the bridge console, hands braced on the edge, eyes locked on the sonar sweep. The screen pulsed green, mocking him with silence. No debris signature. No beacon. No body.
The console’s edge dug into his palms, and the second-skin bandages pulled tight across raw nerves. He barely felt it through the chemical haze.
The “second skin” wasn’t bandage so much as scaffold—an adaptive bio-membrane spun from silicate fibers at the nanometer scale. Each strand was laced with antimicrobial peptides, preventing infection faster than any antibiotic, and beneath the lattice a slurry of engineered keratinocytes slowly fused with his own, accelerating regrowth. The surface was tougher than epidermis, flexible like cartilage, and capable of absorbing blunt force without tearing.
More uncanny was its intelligence. Micro-sensors along the weave mapped his nerve activity in real time; whenever the system detected a pain spike, the membrane released a vapor-thin mist of synthophalin, a synthetic neuro-modulator designed to quiet the brain’s panic response while leaving cognition sharp. It didn’t dull him, not like the pills he still pocketed in secret, but it made every breath tolerable.
There was a darker genius to it too: the film pulsed faintly with Parker’s own heartbeat. If circulation faltered, it could constrict like a tourniquet. If tissue necrosis threatened, it dissolved the dying cells and recycled their nutrients into the regrowth matrix. It was medicine and armor both—a hybrid skin tougher and smarter than the body it clung to.
And he hated it. Hated the reminder every time he moved, every time it hissed out another microdose, that he had been rebuilt—while Rachel had been left behind.
The med team said he was lucky—the burns hadn’t gone deep, the synthetic membranes knitting faster than natural tissue ever could. But luck was relative. Every movement was a reminder, a tug on half-healed flesh that told him he should be in a bed, not on his feet. And still, it was easier to stand here, hurting, than to sit still long enough for memory to catch up.
He clenched his jaw until it ached. Somewhere down there—buried beneath a hundred thousand tons of collapsed vent stone—Rachel was tangled in the dark. The last words he had from her were broken, gasping through the comms, and he hadn’t been able to save her. He wouldn’t let her just vanish.
Parker’s knuckles whitened against the console. “Run the scan again.”
A junior tech shifted uneasily at the sonar station, eyes darting to Captain Morrison. The ex-naval officer gave the slightest shake of his head, and the tech looked back down, lips pressed thin.
“Dr. Carbis,” Morrison said, his voice even but firm. “We’ve been at this grid for twelve hours. The plume’s still scattering returns. If she’s down there…” He let the words trail off into the hum of the ship.
“Run the sweep again,” he snapped. His voice came out raw, sandpaper over glass.
The tech, Lena, flinched, then bent back to her station.
Parker felt the weight of their eyes on his back—the unspoken truth none of them dared say aloud. They thought Rachel was gone. They thought this was pointless. They were already calculating how soon PelagiaCorp would order them to pack up and leave.
A murmur rose at the rear of the bridge. Two deckhands, shifting uneasily, carried in a coil of black umbilical line. It dripped seawater on the metal decking, leaving a thin trail.
“Found this snagged on the starboard crane when we came about,” one said, his voice subdued.
The coil slithered loose with a sick sound, spilling across the floor. Parker froze. He knew that line—the reinforced supply tether Rachel had worn. He bent, hands trembling, and picked up the severed end.
He wanted to be surprised, but he remembered seeing it before, in the depths, right before he passed out. He had hoped it was part of the hallucination that made him think he saw a rescue team.
The cut wasn’t clean. It was ragged, frayed fibers half-shredded as though rocks had torn them apart. He turned it in his hands, the salt burning his split knuckles where the second skin had worn away. His chest seized, breath hitching. This was all that was left.
His vision blurred. Automatically, his hand went to his pocket, thumb brushing the small orange vial. He shook out a pill with clumsy fingers, dry-swallowed it before anyone noticed.
The second-skin bandages dulled the burns, but they couldn’t touch this kind of pain—the hollow that opened every time he thought of her. The pills weren’t for his body. They were for the moments like this, when grief hit so sharp it flayed him raw.
A fresh wave of guilt crashed through him. He should have been the one down there. He should never have let her dive. He was the dreamer, the one chasing ghosts, and she had gone into the plume for him.
Before Parker could snap back, the comm crackled to life. “Aegis, this is PelagiaCorp oversight. Status on ROV recovery?”
For a moment, Parker thought it would be Dr. Wright, his old MIT colleague, but the voice that cut through the static was colder, sharper. Shelby Merrick.
The screen above the console flared to life, resolving into Shelby Merrik’s sharp-featured face. PelagiaCorp’s liaison always looked immaculate: hair slicked back, blazer uncreased, lips painted in some shade designed to project confidence. Behind her gleamed the steel-and-glass interior of corporate HQ—clean, polished, untouched by brine or blood.
“Dr. Carbis.” Shelby’s voice was clipped, efficient. “Update me.”
Parker swallowed hard, the coil of severed umbilical still in his fist. He forced himself upright. “No ROV. No recovery. We’re still scanning.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Still scanning? After twenty-four hours?” She leaned closer to the camera, her tone sharp enough to cut steel. “Do you have any idea what that unit cost? The data we lost when the vent collapsed? Over thirty hours down there, Carbis. You’re not going to recover her. But the black box telemetry, the mineral samples, the sensor arrays—those might still be salvageable.”
Parker’s grief snapped like dry tinder. “We lost more than a machine.” His voice rose, harsh. “Rachel was down there.”
For a beat, Shelby didn’t answer. Then her expression softened—not with sympathy, but with the calculated approximation of it. “Yes. A tragedy. She was talented.” She let the words hang, then added: “But the work doesn’t stop. PelagiaCorp has shareholders to answer to. You know this.”
Parker’s stomach turned. “All you care about is your tech.”
“All I care about,” she said smoothly, “is results. And results require equipment. And people.” Her eyes flicked toward him, sharp as scalpels. “You, Dr. Carbis, still have a position—if you can deliver.”
He clenched his fists. “What do you want from me?”
Shelby’s smile was small, predatory. “Your feed showed interference before the collapse. ORI’s recovery drones picked up the same harmonics. Repeating signal, high-precision intervals. Not geological. Very interesting.”
Parker froze. She knew. He hadn’t shared the details, but PelagiaCorp’s intelligence networks were everywhere.
“We’d like access to ORI’s drone modifications,” Shelby continued. “Their capture algorithms, the way they filter through acoustic turbulence. Your… new friend Miguel seems to have insight. I believe you’ve met?”
The name hit him like a blow. “Miguel.”
Shelby leaned back in her chair, her avatar softening, tone pitched low as if she were speaking only to him. “Dr. Costa. I’ve reviewed his data. Adaptive mapping routines, sensor fidelity beyond anything our in-house teams have achieved. ORI doesn’t see it—they’ve got him running field grunt duty. But Parker… if anyone can find what’s left down there—your ROV, your data, maybe even…” She let the word hang. “…Rachel—it’s him.”
The name hit like a weight dropped onto his chest. He swallowed, the taste of salt and metal thick on his tongue.
Shelby’s expression flickered with something like sympathy. “I know it feels unbearable to hear this. Too soon. But listen to me: your project deserves to continue. Rachel’s work deserves to continue. Don’t let it die because you couldn’t bring yourself to lean on the right ally. She wouldn’t have wanted that.”
The screen blinked dark.
Parker stood rigid, shaking. Around him the crew kept their eyes on their instruments, pretending they hadn’t heard. His ears rang with fury, with loss.
Rachel wouldn’t have wanted the work to die with her. Shelby was right in the coldest possible way. But all Parker could think of was Rachel’s laugh, the way she rolled her eyes when he chased Atlantis through half-baked sonar echoes. She had kept him grounded, even when she didn’t believe. And now Shelby wanted to replace her with some stranger from ORI?
No.
He turned back to the console. “Run the sweep again.”
The crew obeyed, silent.
By dusk, the Aegis limped into Los Atlantes harbor to resupply. The town pressed against the coast the way dead coral clings to its reef, bleached but not yet broken away. Salt crept over its walls in white veins; tidewater lapped at drowned avenues where fish darted between sagging doorways. Sodium lamps flickered in the fog, their glow washed thin by salt spray.
Parker disembarked with the others, fingers brushing the jagged wire coiled in his jacket pocket. A splinter of the umbilical, no thicker than a pencil lead—hardly enough to bind anything. The rest lay abandoned in the hold, but this fragment had clung to him the way he clung to her, hope dwindling to a thread.
Gulls shrieked overhead, mocking him as his stomach churned to the smell of salt and diesel. He had no destination in mind—just the stubborn need to keep moving, to keep the nightmares on the other side of sleep from haunting him.
“Hey, Parker! Dr. Atlantis…” the voice stopped him.
Miguel waved from the far end of the dock, arm cutting through the fog. “Parker!” His voice carried over the slap of water against pylons. He shoved his free hand into the pocket of a windbreaker, the other still raised as if he didn’t trust Parker not to keep walking.
Up close, he looked wrung out—eyes shadowed, hair damp from sea spray, the kind of weariness that went deeper than fatigue. Street clothes hung loose on his frame, ordinary enough to pass in the crowd, but his urgency set him apart.
Parker’s chest tightened. Miguel. The man ORI had sent. The man Shelby already had her eye on.
“What do you want?” Parker’s voice was flat.
Miguel hesitated, glancing around at the bustle of dockhands and ORI volunteers unloading crates. “Weren’t you asking about another diver earlier?” Miguel’s voice dropped as Parker drew near. “A woman?”
Parker froze, the air leaving his chest in a rush. Then his jaw tightened, words spilling like broken glass. “Not just any woman. My wife. Rachel.”
Something flickered in Miguel’s eyes—pity, maybe, or nerves—but he didn’t back down. Instead, he shook his head sharply. “Not here. Walk with me.”
The words lodged in Parker’s chest. He should turn away. He should tell Miguel to take his secrets back to ORI. But Shelby’s voice echoed in his skull—Miguel could replace Rachel. Shelby wanted him recruited. And Miguel himself… there was something in his tone, something urgent.
Parker found himself moving, following Miguel down the dock and into the narrow streets.
The town pressed close, its buildings sagging under the weight of salt and time. Windows glowed with dim light, fishermen huddled in doorways with bowls of stew, gulls diving for scraps in flooded alleys while children darted through ankle-deep water to chase after tin boats, their laughter swallowed by the moan of trawlers out in the bay.
They walked in silence until the harbor noise faded. Then Miguel spoke, voice low, almost reluctant.
“I pulled someone from the water today,” he said. “Barely conscious. She was drowning.”
Parker stopped cold. His pulse thundered in his ears. “What?”
Miguel didn’t meet his eyes. “She asked for you. By name.”
The world narrowed to a point. Parker’s breath hitched, a jagged gasp. Rachel. It had to be Rachel.
The fragment of wire he was twisting in his pocket suddenly snapped. Logic warred with hope, tearing him in two.
“You’re lying,” Parker whispered.
Miguel finally looked at him, and the weight in his gaze was undeniable. “I’m not. Come with me. You’ll see.”
Parker’s knees felt weak. His grief, his guilt, Shelby’s threats—all of it swirled together into a single, desperate thread of possibility.
He followed Miguel into the night.
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