Night on the Aegir tastes like diesel and coffee. A hush had fallen across the drill floor, punctured only by the metronomic hiss of the mud pumps and Keisha’s low sax from the comms pod — a jazz standard she’d play before any tough run, as if rhythm could steady the bones. The stars were swallowed behind a low scud when the first little thing happened: the helipad light that always winked toward shore blinked, stuttered, and then burned steady as if nothing were wrong.

Theo noticed it first. He was at the comms console, flattening a manifest and pretending not to watch the long-distance feed. “We just lost satellite,” he said, voice flat. He tapped the screen; the icon went grey, then blank. “No AIS. No SATCOM. Shore’s not answering. Marco, you seeing this?”

Marco was in his office, the dingy light pooling over the dented pocket watch in his palm. He didn’t like watches that refused to tell the same time twice. “Everyone check secondary,” he said. He kept his voice small because smallness sounded like control.

Chen ran across, toolbox in hand, the soles of his boots whispering on metal. “Generators fine. Power distribution’s nominal. It’s comms. Antenna readouts — nothing. It’s like the sky’s gone mute.”

They cycled through protocols. Theo switched to HF. No long wave. The satellite phone’s little LED refused to glow. The VHF squawked nothing but the platform’s own breathing. On the deck, Roy craned a neck and saw only the rim of the ocean, an actual horizon erased by a white so thick it looked physical — like someone had wrapped the world in cotton.

Anya was in ROV bay, headphones on, watching the feed she trusted more than people. Her screen showed the ROV’s lamps cutting through black water. “Subsea cameras are fine,” she said. “Umbilicals holding. No big current. Nothing physically wrong down there.” She tapped the sonar. Pings came back steady and clean. “Whatever this is up top isn’t coming from the ocean.”

The mist crept in without fanfare. It pooled along the catwalks, licked the stairwells, and condensed into beads on the steel. Juno ran a gloved hand across the handrail and blinked. “Feels like breath,” she said. It dampened hair. It muffled sound. Voices became a room beyond another room — reachable, but not clear.

Sam got the first unusual call: a crewman at the edge of the helideck coughing. “It’s thick,” the man said. “Like walking through steam.” Sam’s medic training made her catalog symptoms before panic. “Keep masks on, restrict movement, watch for irritation. If it gets worse, to medbay.” She clipped a spare respirator to her belt and moved through the mist like a lighthouse keeper checking lamps.

On the drill floor, the sensors went quiet the way a heartbeat does in an empty house. The digital feed that fed Priya’s display flattened into a line. “Telemetry’s dropping packets,” she said, fingers dancing over the console. “I can see local sensors. The downhole pressure is stable. But remote telemetry — gone. It’s like the rig’s own voice is muffled.” Malik, who loved his mud chemistry like someone loves a child, peered into the mixing pit. “No contamination. No slug. The mud’s fine. If anything, the rig should be talking louder, not softer.”

Keisha’s jaw tightened. The drill string was halfway through the formation — a careful, balanced dance. “We keep going,” she said. “We have operational windows. We hit this layer now, we finish and can ship out before the weather—”

“Stop the run,” Marco cut in. The word dropped like an anvil. People stopped moving, like animation paused and resumed on his command. “No transmissions, no tugs, no evac. We’re a hundred kilometers offshore. I don’t want schedule over life.”

Keisha looked at him — at the man who carried a dented watch and the ghosts of older decisions. “You’re basing this on signals we’re still not sure why we lost.”

“I’m basing it on the fact we can still hear ourselves and nothing else,” Marco said. “We secure the well. We lock down non-essentials. Everyone to shelter in place. Theo, get me any local radio patch you can jury-rig."