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It starts slow, small. His commander in charge of the lower half of the city goes missing. He’s not the first. Him they find, though, more than just fragments of plastoid. It’s his emergency beacon that leads them to him, faulty, water getting into the innards of it and shorting it out. It transmits for just under a second before it succumbs, but it’s enough to track it back. He turns up bloating, billowing, gases blown out through the parts of his armour that aren’t sealed. They fish the remains out of the big reservoir, not even enough to set off the water quality alarms.
Fox loses a few to violence and accidents.
The next is months later. His armour is in his locker one morning, but he isn’t in his bunk. He never turns up. Fox questions those that should have heard him get up in the night, and those he was close to.
He got quiet, you know? One says. Got jumpy. We just thought he’d had something happen and didn’t want to talk about it yet.
The trooper who bunked opposite him, on a different schedule, said he’d started muttering in his sleep, but he’d never been able to make out the words.
One of the old commander’s, he’d never reported directly to Fox. He has nothing in his records that stands out, no deaths or incidents, wasn’t close to his CO. Fox marks him down as AWOL and puts it out of his mind. He won’t have the first suicide in the GAR on his watch until there’s evidence.
Fox loses a few to violence and accidents. A couple to stupidity that isn’t theirs.
Another from the same pool of troopers goes missing. He leaves a scrawled message behind, but no one can read it. It looks like it should be words, but they don’t mean anything. He takes his armour with him, and his boots get found in the reservoir filter. They can’t find the rest. They can’t find who to ask for permission to dredge it. Fox has some engineers take a look, and they say they couldn’t, even if they could get together the equipment. It’s too old and too big, corrosion half of what’s holding it together from the inside. One wrong move and it’ll flood everything underneath. The automated systems are still reading green.
Fox loses more than a few. Some to violence, some to accidents, some to overwork. Some to stupidity that isn’t theirs.
Fox gets two new commanders to replace the one, and they reshuffle the Guard between them. It’s a miserable place, the lower levels. Giving troopers a bit more variety drops the numbers that go missing or turn up dead for a while. He still loses some to things that aren’t their fault.
Hound comes to him with the next. One of his massiff handlers, the animal well kept and distraught, howling at the mouth of one of the tunnels down. Hound has to drag her away with his heavy training gear on over his armour, no bribe or evidence that there’s no one down there will work. Her handler never shows up, and the tunnel opens into a busy area that gets patrolled by the Guard more than once a day. They can’t track a single trooper through that, especially not when his bunk has been scrubbed to beyond factory clean and the only animal that could track him without help is too upset to do it. Fox already has alerts set for anything turning up that could have been a clone, but he doesn’t expect to ever know what happened to this one. Hound reports him MIA, and Fox lets him have it.
Fox loses them in a steady stream, stupidity not theirs and violence and accidents and spite and overwork and death and going missing-
He gets a medal for his exemplary service. The automated system still shows green.
He loses more, and some of them show up in the upper levels and some of them show up in shards of broken plastoid and some of them never show up at all and more and more of them show up bloated and mottled. He still can’t find who is in charge of the reservoir, but putting a watch on it does nothing. Some of them go missing, some of them get killed. The lower levels speak love to the Guard when they take down relief packages, but they hate them. It’s a dangerous place to be stationed, and the math doesn’t work out for him to keep anyone there.
He takes to walking there when he can, just to keep an eye out.
It’s the early hours more than a month in when a trooper walks straight past him, so casual that he returns their nod without thinking about it.
They don’t stop when he calls after them, just waves over their shoulder, and when he catches up, grabs their shoulder, they twist like their bones aren’t real and bolt with a watery it’s okay, Commander. Not upset, not in crisis, but- off.
He investigates, because what else is there to do? He never finds more evidence of the trooper than a few drops of water that could have been caused by anything, but he figures out who the trooper was. He talks to anyone that could have passed a comment by them.
He starts putting it together. He learns what makes these different to the others. He’s not always right, but that saves some he would have otherwise missed. He doesn’t save them all, and- what was that?
He works out an order of events.
Nobody would believe Fox if he said that the biggest, oldest of the water reservoirs wants to eat his men.
Fox isn't sure he believes it, not really, but sometimes he just catches the whispers at the edge of his hearing. It would be easy enough to dismiss them - Coruscant is never quiet and the architecture in some areas makes sound travel strangely, a rogue comms signal being picked up by his or another person's comm, not enough sleep.
But he hears the same things that the others say they do, just before they disappear. What he hears is what they leave scrawled across walls and bunks and armour and abandoned belongings, if they leave anything at all. If they can read what they left behind. He usually can, these days.
He isn't some of his brothers, too credulous by half. He's a mean old bastard and he believes what he sees and not much else. He will, in a pinch, believe those he knows share his views.
That's why, when Stone starts drinking less, starts sleeping less to the point where he looks haggard, somehow looks worse after he's slept six hours of his off time at his desk, Fox intervenes. Stone is less of a bastard, but he's got as good a grip as Fox has ever had. He gets nightmares like they all do, but he doesn't let that affect his performance. If he's developed a substance habit that's stopping him from sleeping or taking sleeping pills, that's something Fox needs to be dealt with before it gets any worse.
He scares the shit out of Stone by sitting down on the desk next to him and nearly takes a good hit for it, but Stone redirects at the last moment and probably jars his elbow pretty bad for it. Fox hadn't realised he'd been asleep, or spaced out so hard - they all sit with their buckets on, sometimes, for work that needs comms or to monitor a team's HUDs or the other thousand things their buckets can do. With a lot of the controls also internal, Fox probably looks the same for a good number of hours a day.
“Stone,” he says, a warning and a greeting. It means a talk that is not, strictly, work related. As much as anything can not be work related.
“Commander,” Stone says, which means he would really rather receive some demerits or be whipped in the middle of the barracks than be a part of the conversation Fox is going to have with him.
“Is it deathsticks?”
“What?” It takes him a second. “No, and I'm not on spice either.”
Fox waits. Half the Guard is on spice if given the opportunity. He was on spice yesterday for a delightful moment. Deathsticks are more dangerous for them because of the addiction and how quickly it hits. If they were high-flying business people, they might be able to afford the habit. As it is, they invite corruption too easily for Fox's tastes.
“I'm not on spice now,” Stone amends. He's very good at sounding like he is tolerating you purely because he's a good person and not because you have any redeeming qualities, is Stone. “What's this about?”
Fox could play dumb, could try some of the more subtle interrogation techniques he usually doesn't bother with, could let Stone get there on his own. He won't, though, because if all clones are one thing it is stubborn. Stone has already decided to hide his issue instead of sharing with the batch. “You're hearing things,” he says instead.
“I'm hearing you right now.”
“You're going to be hearing me until you spit it out.”
“Every day,” Stone says, “every day I dream of having Cody as my marshal commander,” Stone lies. “Then all I'd have to worry about is him breaking his ankles on a new type of clanker, and not whatever breakdown you're having here.”
Before the war actually started, Fox would probably have let himself be drawn into a fight at this point. He would have wrestled with Stone and left the point for another day. That person is no longer Fox. He puts a hand on Stone’s nearer vambrace, and locks his fingers around it as he says, “You’ve been hearing the water.”
Stone stares at Fox's hand for a long moment before he looks up. The angle of his helmet is off normal by single digit degrees. For a moment, Fox actually thinks he's going to keep denying it at the cost of lying right to Fox's face.
“Yeah,” he says instead, hoarse. “Yeah, I have. I can't shut it out.”
This is where, once or twice, Fox has made a mistake. He does not let go of Stone’s vambrace, a piece of armour that he can easily get out of with the rest of his gear in place. Stone has command-issue vambraces, same as Fox, and with the extra electrics stuffed in there they don't open as far as the usual variety. It takes less than half a second longer to get them on or off. That's not enough. Fox makes sure he's holding it closed.
The water gets louder once it's acknowledged. It gets harder to pretend it isn't happening.
“Take off your helmet, Stone.”
“No,” he says, a thread of desperation Fox hasn't heard from him since they were kids.
“Why?” He asks, devoid of humour, “bad haircut?”
“It's just a faulty comm,” Stone says, “that's all it is. Sliced, or broken. Picking up signals from speeders, illegal radio, something.”
“Avant garde theatre,” Fox says. “Take it off. My wrist comm is live. I get those signals all the time. No one thought to check all the frequency bands before they sent us out.”
Stone wrests his helmet off one-handed and puts it on the desk heavily enough that he might have just dropped it.
He looks awful, and Fox is a fine purveyor of awful. Raw eyes, edges of his lids pink enough to have been flayed. Bloodshot and dragging as he meets Fox's eyes. He knows how bad it looks. His skin is sallow, cheeks sunken. Hair and beard growing out when Fox knows he hates it.
It's a good thing he hasn't been on escort duty recently. He probably wouldn't be here if he was. Getting away from Coruscant could do him good, but getting shot because he's barely seeing what's in front of him won't benefit his health either.
“It says it's me or some of the others,” Stone says, gripping Fox's hand hard enough for the plastoid handguard to creak. His eyes look endless, and Fox doesn't look directly into them. He doesn't want to see himself drowning in there. “It knows me. It wants me. The stars want me, Fox, they need us to seed them and if I don't it'll take more than one.”
“It won't stop with one either,” Fox says. There's a yawning void opening in his stomach, jaws stretching wider and wider until his whole chest is between thick fangs. He can feel the shadow it casts on his face, its breath on his cheeks. It takes all the air in the room. “It's never stopped with one before.” It's never stopped with one trooper, or one squad. Fox does not doubt it won't stop with the whole Guard. The whole GAR, and after that he doesn't care what it does. Let it devour Coruscant and the whole galaxy, once they've lived their lives out. It won't have to wait long.
What's the harm in sacrificing one for the many? That's what they're for. Stone can save a squad for another few days, and the trooper after him, and after him, until they run out of breath that isn't sodden.
“It might,” Stone says, and his face looks like something else is animating it from afar. Manic, but not his mania. “It wants me, I might be enough.”
None of them will ever be enough. Not for the water, not for the war.
“Stone,” he says, voice like a whip-crack, “it lies.”
It says it wants Fox, too.
“You think every drowned man didn't think the same thing?”
That he can save the Guard.
“You think it means something?”
That it is a sweet cold peace under the surface where he can be with his brothers, where he doesn't have to drag them through war and erode them himself so something else doesn't.
“You hear it too,” Stone says, quiet horror and realisation and recognition.
Fox can feel the many-toothed waves closing over his head. The water coming up out of his lungs into his throat and the back of his mouth, into his nose and pushing up painlessly into his ears, his eyes, his brain.
He doesn't release Stone's vambrace as he stands. He smiles, water dripping from his teeth, as he lets go. “It's nothing, Stone. Just bad signals.” He steps backwards, towards the door. “Ask the medics for something to knock you out. You look awful. It'll feel better once you sleep.”