Chapter 2 : Radio Silence
"—eighty percent mortality rate, confirmed across six continents."
Captain Chandler's voice cut through the wardroom like shrapnel.
Corbin stood near the back, shoulder pressed against the bulkhead, watching faces crumble. He'd arrived mid-briefing, slipping in behind Master Chief Jeter while Chandler explained the end of the world in precise military terminology.
The Red Flu. The death toll. The governments falling like dominoes.
Every word matched what Corbin remembered from the pilot episode. Chandler's tone. His bearing. The way he stood at the head of the table like a man holding together through sheer force of will while his crew discovered their families were probably dead.
"Don't react. Don't stand out. Match their faces."
Corbin forced his expression into something approaching shock. Around him, officers and senior enlisted processed the briefing at different speeds. XO Slattery's jaw locked tight. Lieutenant Granderson gripped the table edge hard enough to whiten her knuckles. Someone near the door made a sound like the beginning of a sob, quickly swallowed.
"Dr. Scott will explain the scientific details."
Chandler stepped back, and the woman who'd haunted Corbin's memories for three months of dying took his place.
Rachel Scott.
British. Brilliant. The architect of humanity's salvation and the subject of its cruelest irony.
In the show, she'd created the cure. Distributed it across what remained of civilization. Saved the species. And then, in the final moments of the season, an assassin's bullet had ended her before she could see the fruits of her work.
Standing in the wardroom now, she looked impossibly alive. Brown hair pulled back in a functional ponytail. Lab coat over civilian clothes. Eyes carrying the weight of knowledge that had kept her silent for four months while the crew talked about home.
She caught him staring.
Corbin looked away too quickly, pulse jumping. Amateur mistake. A man who'd just learned his family was dead didn't study strangers with that kind of intensity.
"The virus is prehistoric in origin," Rachel continued, her accent cutting crisp and clear through the wardroom's grief. "Released from Arctic permafrost due to climate-driven ice melt. My team and I were sent to this region to locate the primordial strain — the original form of the pathogen before it mutated into its current lethal configuration."
Her explanation flowed the way he remembered. The Arctic terns as carriers. The mutation rate. The impossibility of conventional vaccine development.
What he hadn't remembered was how tired she looked. Dark circles under her eyes. A slight tremor in her hands that she controlled through obvious effort. She'd been carrying this secret for four months, watching sailors joke about going home while she worked to save a species that didn't know it was dying.
"That's going to be my secret too."
The weight of the thought pressed down like physical mass.
"Our new mission," Chandler said, stepping forward again, "is to support Dr. Scott's research while evading hostile forces. The Russians have been tracking us — possibly for the cure research, possibly for other reasons. Either way, we cannot engage unless absolutely necessary. The work is more important than our comfort or our anger."
Questions followed. Practical ones about provisions and fuel. Emotional ones about communication attempts. Angry ones about why they hadn't been told sooner.
Corbin stayed silent.
Every answer he could give would raise more questions. He knew Russian force dispositions. He knew which supply caches remained accessible. He knew exactly how long the Nathan James could operate without resupply.
But an intelligence analyst shouldn't know those things through foreknowledge. An intelligence analyst should know them through intercepted communications and pattern analysis. The information existed — he just couldn't explain how he'd already processed it.
"Patience. Build credibility first."
XO Slattery's voice cut through the murmur: "Duty rotations will adjust to wartime footing. Calloway, you're on intelligence analysis, same as before. Report anything unusual from the intercept feeds."
"Aye, sir."
The meeting dispersed in clusters of three and four, sailors finding their people, sharing grief that couldn't be expressed in regulation language.
Corbin moved toward the coffee station in the corner. His hand trembled when he reached for the cup.
"You okay there?"
Petty Officer Miller stood beside him. Miller, who would die in season two. Miller, whose face Corbin now connected to a voice and a person instead of a statistic.
"Still processing." The lie came easier than expected. "It's a lot to take in."
"Tell me about it." Miller's voice cracked slightly. "I've got a kid in Baltimore. Three years old. Her mom's probably..." He trailed off, staring at nothing.
Corbin's throat tightened.
"Baltimore survives. His daughter probably makes it."
He couldn't say that. Couldn't offer hope that came from watching fictional characters become corpses across five seasons.
"Focus on what we can control," he said instead. "The mission. The ship. Each other."
Miller nodded slowly. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right." He straightened his shoulders, pulling himself together by visible effort. "Thanks, Calloway."
The man walked away.
Corbin watched him go, coffee cup cooling in his grip, mind running calculations that had nothing to do with sonar returns or patrol patterns.
Miller's daughter. Chen's sister. Granderson's family in Baltimore.
He carried their futures in his head like a cargo manifest for ghosts who weren't dead yet.
---
Evening came in gray twilight through the wardroom porthole.
Slattery was finishing the watch assignments when Corbin raised his hand.
"I'll take the 0200 to 0600 bridge rotation."
Eyes turned. The night watch was purgatory duty, especially now. Skeleton crew. Empty corridors. Hours alone with the knowledge that everything you loved might already be ash.
Nobody volunteered for that.
"You sure, Calloway?" Slattery's expression carried the faint approval of a man who recognized someone taking one for the team.
"Positive, sir. I work better when it's quiet."
Slattery made a note on his tablet. "You've got it."
The helm called to him like a whisper at the edge of hearing.
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