Chapter 74 - The Living Tomb
The airlock of Habitat Module 11 cycled with a deep, hydraulic groan. When the pressure equalized, Cassidy stepped inside, pulling off her rebreather mask.
The interior was stark, clinical, and frozen in time. The walls were lined with computer banks that flickered with phosphor-green CRT monitors from the late 1980s, augmented by jury-rigged modern processors wired directly into the Ridge Road telemetry network. Everywhere were handwritten logs, charts of tectonic movements, and hundreds of empty ration canisters stacked with obsessive military precision.
In the center of the main bay sat a modified pressurized medical capsule. A clear acrylic canopy covered the chamber, inside of which lay a figure so gaunt he seemed almost translucent.
Richard Vance looked like an ancient specter carved from granite. His hair was long and snow-white, his skin drawn tight over sharp cheekbones, his hands scarred from years of manual labor on deep-shaft machinery. Electrodes were taped to his temples, and an oxygen cannula rested beneath his nose, connected to a steady, rhythmic mechanical respirator that wheezed with every breath: *hiss-click, hiss-click.*
`OXYGEN EXPIRATION COUNTDOWN: 44 HOURS, 19 MINUTES.`
Cassidy stepped forward, her boots clicking softly on the deck plating. Her hand trembled as she rested her palm against the acrylic hood. "Dad?" she whispered, the word feeling foreign, heavy, and profound on her tongue.
The eyelids of the old man fluttered. With an agonizing slowness, his eyes opened—a piercing, vivid steel-blue that mirrored Cassidy’s own. He turned his head toward her, his breath hitching in his chest.
A thin, cracked smile formed beneath the oxygen tube. He reached out with trembling fingers, pressing his hand against the glass directly opposite hers.
"Cassie..." The sound was transmitted through a small exterior speaker on the pod's control deck, weak but unmistakably the voice from the radio transmission. "You made it down the shaft. I heard the cable snap on the seismic sensors. I thought... I thought Donald had killed you."
"Donald couldn't kill me if he had an army," Cassidy said, tears finally breaking through her steely resolve, tracking lines through the grime and sweat on her face. "Why are you down here, Dad? Why did you let them tell me you were dead?"
Richard closed his eyes for a moment, gathering what little strength remained in his withered lungs. "I didn't let them, Cassie. Eleanor... Eleanor found the contracts. She found out what Trench Eleven was sitting on. In 1991, during the decommissioning of the Cold War listening posts, I discovered a hyper-dense deposit of rare-earth silicates along the fault line beneath our land. Worth hundreds of millions. But harvesting it meant destabilizing the entire valley."
He struggled to sit up, and Cassidy quickly engaged the mechanical hoist on the medical bed to elevate his torso.
"I refused to file the mining claims," Richard continued, his voice tightening with decades of accumulated fury. "I wanted to seal the shaft permanently. But your mother... she had already made side agreements with Cross-Continental Resources. She and her brother, and later Donald... they wanted the payout. On the night I was going to detonate the subterranean seal, Eleanor poisoned my coffee. A paralytic. When I woke up, I was down here. The hoist controls were locked from above. The surface was sealed."
Cassidy felt a horrifying wave of nausea sweep over her. "Thirty years... she kept you down here for thirty years?"
"Not alone," Richard said, pointing a trembling finger toward the primary console. "She didn't know how to run the balance valves. If the pressure isn't vented every thirty days, the rift expands and destroys the town above. She couldn't kill me without killing herself. So she forced a stalemate. She demanded I sign over the mineral rights. I refused. Every month, I kept the valves stable, and in exchange, she was supposed to keep the life support running."
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Richard turned his gaze toward Cassidy, his eyes burning with immense sorrow. "Then, twelve years ago, Eleanor stopped communicating. The money stopped coming. The air scrubbers began to fail. And then... suddenly, the ledger reactivated. Exactly $1,845 appeared in the operating account on the first of every month. I checked the telemetry headers. The signature wasn't Eleanor’s. It was yours."
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