Hayes hit the end of the bridge run at full sprint.
The exit was ahead of him: a split hatch, one leaf frozen open, the other gummed with black growth. Red light licked the frame. A plate beside it still held faded letters. CAPTAIN. Medical was supposed to be the other way. This was a door. A door was enough.
Just there. One more stride.
He reached for the open leaf.
And then—
Smith's line was moving the other way, up toward the crown.
One on point. Smith. Four. Two. Three at the tail. Five where Smith had put him, close enough to watch, not close enough to look like watching.
The mid-spine hummed with bad air. Filters in the thin suits ticked. Sweat ran under collars and into eyes. Nobody wiped it. Wiping meant a hand off a weapon.
A noise cut the corridor that was not their boots.
Not the slipping Hayes had. This was a hard wet rip, like heavy cloth and something under the cloth giving at the same time.
Three was at the back.
Then Three was not.
There was no turning that caught the take. Only the space. A boot still finishing a step that had no owner. The HUD in Smith's glass flickered.
GREEN-3 went from a live stack to a dead one. No body. No spray. A short scream tried to happen and got cut in half — high, then nothing, like a hand had closed on the sound in the dark above them.
What they got instead was smell and feel.
Warm air pushed down the line, thick and wrong, a second of meat and old water. Something fine and dry hit the backs of their masks: dust that had been a person a breath ago. Four's sleeve came back speckled with it. It clung. It had no wet in it.
A rifle hit the deck a half-second later. It bounced once. The sound was huge in the quiet.
Smith did not look up long.
"Tighten. No gaps. Lights down. You do not turn unless I turn. Move."
They closed until their shoulders almost touched. Sweat sheeted now. One's breathing went ragged in the comm and then he crushed it quiet. Four kept glancing at the empty slot where Three's number had been. Five did not glance at all. That was worse.
They sped up. The crown was closer. Hayes was closer. The corridor felt narrower for it.
Two was inside the cluster when it happened. Not the tail. That was the part that broke them.
One second Two's boot was in the rhythm — left, right, left — a presence at Smith's four o'clock, cloth whispering, rifle sling ticking the suit.
The next second the rhythm had a hole in it.
No rip this time. A suck. Air tugged past their ears toward the wall, a cold pull on the sweat at their temples. Two's comm opened on a breath that never became a word. The glass fogged from the inside and stayed fogged. Then the tag died.
GREEN-2 — NO SIGNAL
They heard the suit seals part. A tiny series of clicks, the sound of a body being taken through a space that was not a door. Fabric dragged. Something wet kissed the bulkhead and came off again. A smear at shoulder height, black and thin, already going matte.
Two's lamp hit the floor and rolled. The beam turned, turned, and showed them nothing but plating and their own shaking legs.
No scream. That was the difference. Three had gotten half a voice. Two had gotten the air pulled out first.
The line stopped whether Smith wanted it or not.
Sweat dripped off chins onto the insides of masks. It sounded like rain in a tin. Four made a noise that was not language. One swept his muzzle at the ceiling, the walls, the way they had come, and found only red strips and growth.
Smith's voice came out flat so it would hold.
"Close the hole. Four, you are tail. Five, you stay in my shadow. We do not search. We do not call their names. We get to the bridge."
They started walking again.
Every gap in the footfalls felt like a mouth.
Hayes was in the captain's quarters.
He did not remember deciding that. The hatch was shut behind him. His back was on it. The shotgun was up. The second slug was still in the tube.
The room had been a person's. A bunk folded into the wall. A desk bolted to the deck. A viewport drowned in growth, stars scratched down to nothing. Personal kit still on the desk: a band, a cup, a framed still of people who were not on this ship anymore. The chair was pushed back as if the captain had stood up and never sat down again.
No raisin in the bunk. No body at the desk.
The scrape did not come through the hatch.
For the first time since the bridge, the slipping had nothing to say.
Hayes listened anyway.
The quarters listened back.