They cleared the engine room.
Franklin ordered everyone out—the scientists, the guards, everyone but himself and Hollister. They stood near the door, watching, as Sal approached the bulkhead where Miller had been.
He laid his hands on the steel.
It was warm. Warmer than it should be. And underneath the warmth, that vibration—the hum, the pulse, the heartbeat of something that shouldn't be alive but was.
He closed his eyes.
Miller, he thought. Not words—just the name, the idea of the name, pushed toward the steel like water through a pipe.
Nothing happened.
He tried again, focusing harder, concentrating on the young sailor's face, his terror, his embedded hand.
Miller. It's Sal Lombardi. The plumber. Can you hear me?
The hum changed. Shifted. Deepened.
And then, faintly, like a voice through a wall:
...here...
Sal's eyes flew open. "I heard him. He said 'here.'"
Franklin stepped forward. "What else? Can you ask him something?"
Sal closed his eyes again.
Miller. Where are you?
A pause. Then, clearer this time:
...everywhere... in the steel... in the pipes... can't find the way out...
The others? The other men?
...here too... all of us... scattered... like water... like steam...
Sal's breath caught. "They're all in there. All of them. Spread through the ship like—like—"
"Like pressure in a pipe," Hollister whispered.
Sal nodded. "Like pressure in a pipe."
The next hour was a revelation.
Sal moved through the ship, touching bulkheads, pipes, deck plates, anything made of steel. And everywhere he touched, he found them—fragments of consciousness, pieces of men, scattered across the vessel like a message written in disappearing ink.
He found the cook in the galley, fused with the stove where he'd been standing when the field collapsed. He found an engineer in the engine room, spread through the massive generators like a ghost in a machine. He found a young signalman on the bridge, his awareness wrapped around the very wheel that had spoken Sal's name.
And he found more—dozens more, maybe more than dozens. Men who'd been on the ship during those seventeen minutes, who'd come back wrong, who'd left pieces of themselves behind in the steel.
They were all conscious. All aware. All terrified.
And they all wanted to come home.
By noon, Sal was exhausted.
He sat on the mess deck, surrounded by the ghosts of a hundred meals, drinking coffee that one of the scientists had brought. Franklin and Hollister sat across from him, their faces a mixture of hope and horror.
"There are at least thirty of them," Sal said. "Maybe more. I can't get an exact count—they're too scattered, too mixed up with each other and with the ship. But it's a lot."
"Thirty men," Franklin murmured. "Thirty families. Thirty mothers who don't know yet that their sons are trapped in a ship."
"The Navy's going to have to tell them something," Hollister said. "They can't just—"
"They'll tell them the men died." Franklin's voice was flat. "Heroically. In service to their country. There'll be medals. Letters. Grieving widows. And the ship will be decommissioned, scrapped, melted down, and no one will ever know that their boys were still inside when the torches started cutting."
Sal looked at him. "You can't let that happen."
"I may not have a choice. The Navy doesn't ask my permission."
"The men in there—they're alive. Scared and confused and scattered like water through pipes, but alive. You can't just—"
"We won't." Hollister's voice cut through. "We won't let that happen. There has to be a way to reverse it. To bring them back."
"The reverse pulse," Franklin said slowly. "If we could generate a field with opposite polarity—"
"We don't know if that would work. We don't know if it would kill them. We don't know anything." Hollister ran his hands through his hair. "We're flying blind here."
Sal listened to them argue, their voices rising and falling in the familiar rhythm of scientists debating the unknown. He didn't understand half of what they said—something about frequencies, harmonics, the nature of the unified field. But he understood the problem.
They had thirty men trapped in a ship. They had no idea how to get them out.
And the ship was listening.
Sal felt it in the hum, in the vibration beneath his feet, in the whisper that ran just below the threshold of hearing. The ship was waiting. The men inside were waiting.
And they were running out of time.
ns216.73.216.253da2
and then Add to home screen.