The silence that followed the engine cut was heavier than the eighty metres of water they had just left behind. It was a thick, unnatural quiet that seemed to swallow the clicking of the cooling metal and the heavy breathing of the men on the casing. Fallon stepped off the casing and onto the dock, her boots hitting the concrete with a flat, dusty thud. The ground felt wrong too still, too solid after fourteen days of the Vanguard's rhythmic swaying. She looked at the nearest warehouse, a massive steel structure with its corrugated doors buckled inward, as if a giant hand had tried to squeeze the air out of it. Chris Holt stepped down beside her, his hand resting on the grip of his sidearm. He stayed close, his presence a familiar anchor against the alien landscape of the ruins.
"Section one, on me!" Becker's voice cracked the stillness. The Master-at-Arms and his team fanned out, their SA80s held at the high-ready as they moved toward the shadows.
"Perimeter set! Port and starboard clear!"
"We need to move, Elira," Chris said, his voice a low rasp.
He looked toward the cold stores, then back at the jagged silhouette of the shattered command building.
"If there's any potable water or medical supplies left in there, we need them before the light fails completely."
"Take the technical team," Fallon replied, nodding toward the main victualling yard.
"I want every crate of dry goods and every canister of medicine we can haul. If it's sealed, it's ours."
The two of them moved together toward the entrance of the warehouse, their footsteps echoing off the hollow shells of the dockyard. Every few meters, they passed signs of a frantic, failed evacuation: abandoned trucks with their doors flung wide, scattered gas masks, and boots left behind in the mud.
"What about the local garrison?" Chris asked, scanning the dark windows above.
"There should be a duty officer, something."
"There's nothing, Chris." Fallon's gaze drifted back to the burning sky.
The sickly yellow light cast long, distorted shadows that made Portsmouth look like a fever dream. They reached the heavy steel doors of the main store. Chris put his shoulder to the metal, the rusted hinges screaming in the silence. Inside, row upon row of high-density crates sat untouched. It was enough food to keep the Vanguard running for months if they could get it back to the boat.
"Start the chain!" Holt ordered the waiting ratings.
"I want those crates moving. Now!"
As the crew began to haul the supplies, a low, tectonic groan vibrated through the concrete under their feet. It wasn't an earthquake; it was the sound of the city itself settling into its new, broken shape. Chris paused, looking back at the Vanguard. The submarine sat against the pier, a black, jagged splinter of the old world.
"Elira," he whispered, his voice stripped of its military edge.
"If we go back down... are we ever coming back up?"
Fallon didn't answer. She just watched the bruised clouds churn overhead, wondering if the fire in the sky would ever go out. The comms building loomed over the jetty like a tombstone, its glass frontage shattered into a million diamond-edged shards that crunched under their boots.
"Hunter!" Fallon's voice cut through the heavy, stagnant air of the dockyard.
"Ma'am!" the rating called back, pausing as he shouldered a crate of emergency rations.
"Keep the chain going. Me and the XO are stepping inside the comms building."
"Understood, Ma'am!"
***
Crossing the forecourt felt like walking through a museum of the exact moment the world stopped. The silence was absolute, broken only by the rhythmic, lonely bang-bang-bang of a car door caught in the stale wind.
Fallon and Chris picked their way through an eerie graveyard of vehicles pristine Land Rovers and transport trucks abandoned mid-turn. Near the perimeter, a fuel pump had been dropped, the nozzle hissing faintly as it leaked a dark, iridescent stain onto the concrete. It was clear the people here hadn't been evacuated; they had simply vanished into the shadows of the event.
"It's too quiet, Elira," Chris whispered, his hand tightening on his sidearm.
"It's like the air itself is waiting for something to happen."
The closer they got to the Comms Building, the more uninviting it became. It loomed over them, a brutalist block of concrete that looked like something out of a horror film. The front doors, massive slabs of reinforced glass and steel, sat at a weird, broken angle, hanging off their hinges as if something or a massive pressure wave had tried to suck them out from the inside.
Aside from the doors, there wasn't a scratch on the masonry. No soot, no rubble. Just that unnatural, pristine abandonment.
"Doors are breached," Fallon noted, her voice low. She stepped over a shattered piece of the frame, her boots crunching on the glass.
"Stay sharp. Whatever did this to the doors could still be here, God knows what it did to the people inside."
They paused at the threshold, staring into the dark maw of the lobby. The sickly yellow light from the burning sky didn't reach more than a few feet into the interior, leaving the rest of the hallway swallowed in a thick, velvety black.
"Ladies first, Ma'am," Chris said, though he stepped up to flank her, his tactical light cutting a sharp, white beam through the gloom.
"How gentlemanly of you Chris, just a shame its into horror scene" Fallon remarked, offering a faint smile.
They stepped inside, the temperature dropping instantly. The smell of copper and ozone was stronger here, mingling with the scent of old paper and the lingering chill of the deep-level air conditioning that had long since failed. Behind them, the sounds of the crew's supply chain on the jetty faded, leaving them alone with the heartbeat of a dead building.The lobby was a frozen explosion of bureaucracy. Sheets of paper memos, logs, and duty rosters blanketed the floor like a layer of dry, grey snow, rustling as Fallon and Chris moved through the gloom. The desks were upright, the chairs pushed back as if the occupants had just stood up for a coffee break and never returned. Not a soul, not a sound, just the oppressive weight of the empty space.
"This way," Chris said, his voice barely a breath. He tapped his knuckles gently against a brass plaque on the wall.
COMMS SUITE L2
The central desk was a graveyard of analog relics, but one object sat squarely in the center of the dust, untouched by the surrounding frantic mess. It was a vintage Morse code key, a heavy brass instrument bolted to a thick, rectangular base of polished black mahogany.
The metal was dull, the once-brilliant brass tarnished to a deep, smoky gold by the static-heavy air. Its straight key lever a long, balanced arm of steel was suspended between two adjustable trunnion screws, ending in a finger-worn knob made of cold, hard ebonite. A pair of silver-plated contacts sat poised a mere millimeter apart, waiting for a circuit that no longer existed. Beside it, the fine-tuning tension spring looked as though it had been adjusted a thousand times by someone who lived for the rhythm of the click.
"An old pump key," Chris whispered, his torch beam lingering on the heavy coil of copper wiring that trailed from the back of the base and vanished into the floorboards.
"Manual backup. The last line of defense for when the digital world goes dark."
Fallon reached out, her gloved fingertip hovering just above the black knob. There was something desperately lonely about it-the ultimate low-tech tool designed to scream across the airwaves using nothing but a pulse and a hand.
"It hasn't been used," she noted, pointing to the thick, undisturbed layer of gray sediment gathered in the bridge of the brass arm.
"They didn't even get the chance to tap out a distress signal before the power was cut for good."
Chris leaned over the desk, his light catching a small, hand-scrawled note tucked partially under the mahogany base. The ink had bled into the yellowing paper, but the handwriting was sharp, jagged, and recent.
"Elira," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "Look at the logbook next to it."
Beside the key sat a thick, leather-bound volume, splayed open to the final page. The last entry wasn't a series of dots and dashes, but a single line of text written so hard the pen had torn through the paperThe rattle of the heavy brass key against its mahogany base was suddenly drowned out by the sharp, rhythmic crackle of gunfire. It tore through the heavy silence of the dockyards the unmistakable, staccato bark of SA80s firing in controlled bursts.
"That's Becker's team!" Chris yelled, his torch beam whipping toward the window as he instinctively dropped into a crouch.
Fallon didn't hesitate. She snatched the leather-bound volume from the desk, shoving it under her arm as she drew her sidearm. The sound of the shots was echoing off the brutalist concrete of the naval base, making it impossible to tell exactly where the engagement was happening.
"Hunter, report!" Fallon barked into her comms, her voice straining against the sudden wall of white noise and static.
"Becker, what have you got?"
The radio hissed, a frantic, distorted voice cutting through the interference.
"...Ma'am! ...perimeter breach! They're... not... stop...shoot.....bas....ma'am" The transmission dissolved into a high-pitched squeal that made Fallon wince.
"The chain is broken" Chris said, his face pale in the dying light of his torch.
"They're being pushed back to the boat."
Another volley of gunfire erupted, followed by a dull, booming explosion that rattled the glass in the Comms Suite frames. It wasn't a grenade it sounded heavier, like a fuel tank or a pressurized line had gone up.
"We're leaving, now!" Fallon ordered.
She didn't look back at the dead servers or the silent Morse key but grabbed the leather bound log book. They bolted for the stairwell, their boots thundering down the winding concrete steps. The air in the building was no longer still; it was beginning to vibrate with the mechanical clack-hiss they had heard earlier, now amplified by the enclosed space. As they burst through the broken front doors and back into the sickly yellow light of the forecourt, the scene was one of absolute carnage. Black smoke was billowing from the victualling yard, and the crew was no longer hauling crates they were in a fighting retreat.
"Elira, look!" Chris pointed toward the main gate.
Through the oily black fog, shapes were moving. They weren't soldiers, and they weren't the processed evacuees mentioned in the log. They were tall, segmented silhouettes that moved with a terrifying, insectoid fluidity, their metallic limbs reflecting the fire in the sky.
"To the Vanguard!" Fallon screamed, her voice a whip-crack over the chaos.
"Covering fire! Get to the casing!"
The forecourt had become a kill zone. The "clack-hiss" was no longer a distant sound-it was a nightmare made of segmented metal and oily shadow, tearing through the mist with impossible speed.
"FALL BACK! TO THE CASING!" Fallon's scream was nearly lost in the roar of a sudden, earth-shaking blast.
One of the senior ratings, a grizzled veteran they called Pops, had dropped to a knee, bracing an old-school anti-tank launcher against his shoulder. The backblast scorched the concrete as the rocket streaked toward the gate. It hit one of the spindly, metallic shapes, blooming into a fireball that lit up the graveyard of cars. The creature didn't just explode; it shattered into a spray of viscous, inky fluid that sizzled where it touched the ground.
"GET IN!" Chris shoved a panicked technician toward the open hatch of the Vanguard.
The retreat was a bloody, desperate scramble. Becker's security detail was providing frantic covering fire, but the SA80 rounds seemed to pass through the darker parts of the fog like they were hitting water.
"Agnew's down!" someone shrieked.
Fallon looked back just in time to see a young sailor snatched from the supply chain. A shimmering, obsidian limb, sharp as a surgical blade, had pierced his chest, lifting him off the deck as if he weighed nothing. He didn't even have time to scream before he was pulled back into the black haze.
"CAST OFF! CAST OFF NOW!" Fallon roared, leaping onto the black steel of the hull spinning to give covering fire.
The last of the shore party scrambled through the hatch, their boots slipping on the blood and oily residue coating the casing. The massive nylon mooring lines were hacked away with emergency axes, the heavy ropes snapping back like whips. As the Vanguard's nuclear engines coughed into a frantic, gutteral roar, the water around the pier began to churn. Out of the oily black depths of the harbor, more of them emerged-limbs like living shadows, dripping with a thick, midnight-colored fluid that didn't mix with the seawater. They began to crawl up the side of the hull, their metallic claws screeching against the submarine's acoustic tiles.
"CRACK THE VENTS! WE'RE TAKING HER DOWN!" Fallon dived into the hatch, Chris right on her heels.
"But the hatch team is still-"
"CLOSE IT!" Fallon shouted slamming the upper lid herself, the heavy steel wheel spinning into a lock just as a wet, heavy thud hit the outside of the metal.
Inside the boat, the silence was instant and terrifying, broken only by the frantic panting of sixty terrified men. The Vanguard groaned as she began her emergency dive, the hull vibrating as the creatures outside clung to the steel, riding the submarine back down into the dark.
They were no longer just a crew; they were trapped in a steel coffin with something knocking on the walls.
*****
Fallon sat on the bench outside her office, her hands resting flat against the cool, worn leather. It was a familiar seat; she remembered all the times she herself had sat there as a junior officer, hands clasped, waiting to see her commander like a student waiting for the principal. Her fingers found the spot on the edge where she had nervously picked at the material years ago the yellow sponge underneath still showed through the tear, a small, ugly reminder of a world that no longer existed. The silence of the Vanguard was different now. It wasn't the disciplined hush of a stealth mission; it was the hollow, heavy silence of a tomb. The rhythmic, metallic ring of boots echoed down the corridor, growing louder until Chris appeared in the red-tinted gloom. He looked older than he had an hour ago, his uniform stained with the grey dust of Portsmouth and the dark, oily spray from the pier.
"How many?" Fallon asked, her voice flat, devoid of the energy she'd used to command the bridge.
Chris stopped in front of her, his shoulders slumped. He didn't look at her, choosing instead to stare at the flickering light of a bulkhead lamp.
"Eighteen," he replied.
The number hung in the air between them. Eighteen seats empty in the mess deck. Eighteen lockers that would have to be cleared.
"We lost six in the initial breach at the gates," Chris continued, his voice tight.
"Four more when the... whatever those things were... reached the casing. The rest didn't make it to the hatch before we had to seal."
He finally looked down at her, his eyes hollow.
"Agnew. Pops. Young Miller. All gone, Elira. We didn't even get their bodies back. We just left them in that yellow light." Holt voice was bitter.
Fallon squeezed the yellow sponge of the bench, her knuckles turning white. The leather felt colder now.
"We did what we had to do, Chris, this is the weight of command. Its something they dont train you for" she whispered, though the words felt like ash in her mouth.
"Hard choices have to be made, if I hadn't sealed we would all be dead, I want you to think about that, 18 lost insted of 70"
"I know," Chris said, leaning his head back against the cold steel of the bulkhead.
"But sadly, that doesn't make the choice any easier" Fallon said, still.picking at the yellowy sponge
"What was the gain?"
"Twelve crates. Six fresh water casks." Holt answered still reeling from what Fallon sai.
"So, enough for a month?" Fallon felt deflated, was it worth 18 lives for a month of food and water?
"Yes, Commander."