A/N - Inspired by the Below Zero drop and the Subnautica fanfic In Charge, which is a fantastic story! I may have borrowed an idea or two, specifically the suit storage and airlocks. I like how their functions were described.

Summary: Rekha had been perfectly content with her life as an exosuit technician aboard the Aurora. A few friends, a few bedmates, a few credits saved up. She had a quiet, fulfilling life where no one knew her secrets. And then her ship exploded.

As far as crash landings on uncharted alien worlds went, this wasn't so bad. Sure, the flotation device on her escape pod hadn't deployed. Yes, the depths to which it had sunk were nerve wracking. And okay, the tiny pod and dark depths were making her feel rather claustrophobic. Other than that, things were fantastic.

Rekha was in great health, aside from a few burns and scrapes that she'd gotten while escaping the Aurora. She had a similarly healthy companion. Environmental controls were functioning at full capacity. Their escape pod's storage had enough food and water for a week plus raw materials for the fabricator to create essential items like reinforced dive suits and high capacity air tanks in case they had to evacuate before help arrived. The radio was sending out their distress call.

Rekha frowned at the lack of incoming transmissions. They'd been down here two days. Someone should have come to check on them by now. Was there an anomaly blocking radio waves? Intentional disruption? Had someone gone to war with Alterra and started with a science ship out in a far arm of the galaxy? Dumb way to start a war. Waste of resources. She frowned out the window into the inky waters. Her reflection frowned back.

"Ugh!" Harrington groaned from her drop seat. She waved her PDA at Rekha. "Dogar, any luck getting your PDA to unlock? I need something other than useless survival tips for entertainment."

Rekha looked at Dr. Alandris Harrington, senior medical officer and holo-novella junkie. "No. Company-issued PDAs won't unlock from survival mode until they reconnect with an Alterra AI." She'd attended enough safety briefings to know that.

"There's got to be a way."

"I'm a prawn technician not a programmer, Harrington."

"Ugh."

Not the complete truth. Rekha had a custom PDA stowed away that had several hacking programs she could use to reset Harrington's. She had a whole slew of skills that she didn't care to be publicly known. Spacecraft piloting, various forms of combat, interrogation, psionics…

She'd learned most of her not-on-file skills long before she'd bought herself a citizenship in Alterra. The last thing in the galaxy that she needed was people asking about her past. It'd take one hell of a dire situation to expose herself in any way.

Alterrans weren't famous for their understanding attitudes.

"Fine. I'm going to try and sleep. Pod, lower lights to ten percent." Harrington laid out on her dive suit, head propped on an arm.

Rekha's chronometer said it was only 2130. Not very late, but what else was there to do when trapped 328 meters below the surface? She looked back out the little window. As her eyes adjusted, the outside world made itself known. Glowing things flickered in the shadows between huge green orbs. She could sense life out there. Simple and alien, but life. And farther out, she could sense human life. Other survivors. There was a third of the ship's original compliment, yet most in the same or better circumstances than Rekha. Someone would come for them soon.

Harrington had them up and doing cardio exercises at 0700. Rekha grumbled even though she'd already been awake. She hadn't slept well. A nightmare about giant sea monsters had snapped her from sleep several hours before. The distinct feeling of unease kept her from going back to sleep. At least the exercise burned an hour.

They ate and drank and Rekha managed to catch an hour nap.

"Hey. Dogar." Harrington prodded her shoulder. "Did you hear that?"

She yawned and squinted. "What?"

There came the distant groaning songs of what they'd already guessed were whales of some sort.

"Not that. Listen."

She did. She listened until Harrington sighed and threw up her hands.

"Thought I heard…" Harrington didn't finish.

Around mid-afternoon, Rekha felt what she thought Harrington might have heard. A massive presence that radiated predatory hunger. Not a minute later, the life pod vibrated with the force of its roar.

"That!" Harrington squeaked, immediately clamped a hand over her mouth. She manually dimmed the pod's light to five percent.

Twitchy with fright, they peered out into the gloom. Light flit among the green orbs. The roar sounded around them again. And again. Louder, closer, making Rekha glad she was already on her knees and pressing close to another human being.

They saw something slide through the darkness. Something big enough to reflect the green orbs' light and stretch the meters and meters between them. Their breaths came in strangled pants as they struggled to both breathe and make absolutely no noise that might attract that… thing.

Eventually the roars faded and stopped. Rekha remained trembling, would have for a while, except Harrington swore up a blue streak. "We have to get out of here!" She growled. "We have to."

Yes. Whatever it was, it'd be back. They were in its hunting grounds, and it would find them eventually. Even if it couldn't break their pod's plasteel skin, it was big enough to cause a lot of trouble. Roll the squishy humans around inside until someone's skull popped like a ripe melon. Destroy their radio. Push them to a depth that their pod couldn't handle. Keep them trapped inside the pod until they died of dehydration.

"As soon as I can feel my legs again. Then we'll go." Rekha whispered.

Harrington eyed her. "Yea. We probably shouldn't wait for it to come back."

The radio beeped with an incoming message that made them both jump and stare at the window. There wasn't an answering roar, not even ten minutes later. Rekha looked to Harrington, who glanced at the radio, then back at the window. She shook her head. Nope. They wouldn't be playing that message. Probably just another survivor distress signal finally making its way to them.

Alterra comms were the worst. It was a running joke among prawn technicians that if an exo-head sneezed inside their suit, their comms would go down. Instead of live comms to try and organize the survivors, they had to deal with limited distress messages and delayed incoming messages. One would think a corporation that had originally been a weapons manufacturer and distributor would have decent communication systems.

Rekha and Harrington pulled off their Alterra uniforms and squeezed their naked butts into the head to toe dive suits. Feet were stuffed into flippers, tanks hauled onto backs, heads crammed into masks. Harrington checked seals and gauges. Rekha tested the flexibility of her suit. Not bad. She wouldn't want to fight in it, but hopefully it worked like Alterra prawns instead of comms. It was supposed to protect from extremes in temperature and pressure, to reduce or completely negate the effects of decompression. Or maybe the tanks and mask did the decompression thing. Whichever. They should be fine making a quick ascent from the black depths.

She stuffed her clothes and share of the supplies into the dimensional pocket that her suit used as a storage system. The mass and weight wouldn't affect her. Same quantum mechanics as used on the prawn storage units, though decidedly smaller. Prawn suits did a lot of heavy mining. Their storage units could have much deeper d-pockets.

"Ready," was whispered. The sound couldn't have gone far past the mask over her face, but Harrington nodded. She finished manually typing the message that she wanted the radio to transmit and gave a thumbs up.

Harrington opened the overhead hatch. A stasis field kept the water from pouring in and pinning them to the pod's floor. Maybe that's how the dive suit functioned. With a stasis field? It had a tiny power supply, derived from kinetic energy and her own bio-electric field. Rekha shook off thoughts of physics and climbed the ladder. Despite the suit, she felt like she was climbing into cold honey.

Out of the lit safety of the pod, she felt the weight of the ocean pushing her down, crushing her with its merciless grip. Her eyes struggled to make out anything in the deep blackness. Only the strange floating bulbs and flitting creatures. Her breath stuttered.

Harrington grabbed Rekha's mask, made her look at Harrington's softly lit face. It grounded her. The claustrophobia receded, and Rekha's lungs found a normal rhythm. Her pulse slowed. Harrington nodded. She maneuvered them until their flippered feet were against the top of the pod. She held up a hand, three fingers, then two, then one. Together, they launched upwards. As Harrington had instructed earlier, Rekha paddled with her feet and slowly reached overhead to curl her arms down.

The depth gauge on her HUD changed achingly slow. How long had they been swimming? She wished they'd had enough materials to build a seaglide or two. She was exhausted and they still had a hundred meters to go! It was pitch black now. No luminescent bulbs or fishes to break up the monotony of oppressive nothingness. Without her gauges, she'd have no idea if she was swimming up or sideways or absolutely nowhere.

And it was starting to get cold. She hadn't noticed at first due to hot adrenaline and the suit's insulation. She was far from freezing, yet it made her wish for a sweater and fuzzy slippers. Maybe a cup of hot c-

ROAR!

Both women stopped dead. The roaring continued in terrifying spurts. Rekha felt a massive presence directly beneath them. Morbid curiosity had her touching its mind. It'd just found something new, something that gave off light and heat and might be food, so it was attacking.

Far below, she saw a flicker of light. Several breaths later, a flurry of bubbles raced upwards. Their life pod. The creature had torn a hole in plasteel! Harrington was already several meters in the lead before Rekha thought to frantically swim upwards. Angry roars spurred her on. A faint glow of light from above teased her.

The sun? Her chronometer said it was too early. Must be a moon. Wonder if…

ROAR!

She barely registered the presence speeding toward her when enormous claws grabbed her. Bubbles screamed from her as the claws dug into the suit.

"Let me go!" she screamed, both into her mask and into the monster's skull.

It shuddered and loosened its grip. Panic thrust her up, toward Harrington's retreating form and the wavering disc of light.

The monster howled beneath her.

She kicked desperately, knowing she wouldn't make it to the surface, let alone to some bastion of safety. Claws piercing her suit, then her skin, digging blindingly deep, made her shriek. Pain and terror seared along her nerves. She flailed wildly, bubbles everywhere, pain everywhere, wa-

A mind-numbing roar shut out the pain. She blinked into a double set of eyes illuminated a horrifying blue by her face mask, at the rows of hungry teeth beneath. The claws in her sides pulled her toward the open mouth.

No!

Absolutely, fucking NO! Her entire core boiled into a single thought, "LET ME GO!" She threw it at the monster in a psychic scream.

It flinched, and the claws retreated. For a few seconds they stared at each other. Fury joined her maelstrom of emotions as the monster glared at her. How dare this thing try to eat her! How dare it try to end her life! It needed to hurt, like it had hurt her!

Another psionic blast lashed out, this one a combination of psychic and telekinetic force. It rippled through the water and crashed into the monster's head like plasteel into stone. What was probably blood escaped the creature's mouth. Over her pounding heart, she heard the monster whine. It blinked at her once more before coiling around and sluggishly swimming away.

Panting, she stared after it for long moments, ready to hurl another psionic attack. It didn't circle back. It didn't send out a predatory flare of thought.

Rekha decided that the creature was in full retreat and allowed herself to paddle to the surface. She gaped at what waited for her. Brilliantly red and orange, a gigantic moon dominated the night sky. Delicate clouds wafted across its face. Below them was a glowing monolith, shaped a little like a beetle. No. It was shaped like a…

A ship. The Aurora. It had to be. Her heart plummeted from its adrenaline high. Shit. The ship wasn't making a limping orbit around the planet like she'd hoped. It was nose-first in what must be a reef or shallows of a continent. Who knew when Alterra would bother sending another ship to investigate? Those assholes w-

Small and quick, a shadow darted across her vision. It veered to her right. Some sort of bird, and it disappeared into a bigger shadow. Rising from the waters, blacking out the field of stars, covered in luminescent plants, was land.

"Yes!" she cheered, slipped below the surface.

She kicked back up and splashed toward safety. It took a while to close the distance, then even longer to find a beach instead of sheer cliffs several meters high. Harrington was there, mask already pulled off, face a moonlit mix of exhaustion and terror. "Dogar? You're alive."

Rekha was too busy crawling up the sandy slope to respond. Pain made itself known. Pain around her torso and a splitting headache. She flopped to her butt and panted.

"You're bleeding." Harrington announced.

Was she? It hurt enough that she should be.

Instruments were already being pulled from a med kit. Harrington knelt and shone her PDA's light over the injuries. Oh yea. There was blood. A lot of it. "Any trouble breathing?"

Was her lung punctured? That had happened once. A prawn suit had collapsed on her, broken several of her ribs, one of which had gone right into her left lung. Now that had been painful. "No."

"Good." Harrington nodded. "Let's get this gear off so I can patch you up." Mask and tanks were tugged off, the suit unzipped to expose Rekha's bare torso to the world. Harrington poked and prodded, made Rekha cry and whimper. "You're lucky. These aren't too deep."

Lucky. Rekha eyed the smoldering hulk of the Aurora in the distance. Sure. Lucky to be alive. Stinging dermal spray was applied, stopping the bleeding, sealing the wounds, and starting the process of repair. Bandages covered most of her torso by the time Harrington finished.

"Warning!" One of their PDAs chirped.

Adrenaline spiked and Rekha scurried backward from the water. What? What was-

"Endorphin levels low. Consider taking a seat and meditating. It may help to remember that problems exist only where you choose to see them."

Heartbeats pounded in her ears.

"When we get back, I'm going to write several letters to upper management about this survival mode." Harrington grumbled.

Rekha slumped and winced at the pain of movement.

"No painkillers in the med kit. Guess they don't trust us to self-medicate. You should zip back into your suit. It might be warm and humid here, but with the exertion and blood loss, your body could use the support. You should also get something in your stomach." Harrington advised. She pulled out a nutrient bar from storage and broke it in half. "I'm going to start rationing." She glanced at their former ship. "Rescue might take a while."

All good ideas. Painful though. Rekha wheezed as she struggled into the sleeves of her suit, then exchanged flippers for ship shoes, every motion feeling like fiery knives arcing through her chest. Storage mercifully wasn't damaged. Food and water made it into her stomach. Her eyelids fluttered. She leaned against a rock and yawned.