Her breath breaks once inside the helmet.
And the chapter of her life that ended when she engaged the wake panel is done, and the one that began the moment my body answered her is about to start, and my hand is lifting, and the capture frame has her, and the stack at the top of my mind has only one word on it, and the word is what every cell of me has been pressing toward since the first layer of cold began to thin.
Mine.
CHAPTER 3
NYRA
My pistol is already half-drawn as the massive door slides open. The ship funnels me here, stripping away every other option until only this threshold remained.
I stand in the seam of it with my weapon leveled and my breath fogging the inside of my faceplate. What waits ahead is no ordinary room. A vast one. The floodbeams of my helmet array struggle to reach the far walls, and that alone tells me more than I want to know, because every salvage run teaches the shape of a space before the edges appear, and this space refuses recognition. It rises too tall and runs too deep. The sound of my boots on plating falls into it and dissolves, giving no return, revealing a chamber built to contain something very, very large.
"K-Seven," I gasp, the word cracking on the second syllable. "Tell me this is a utility bay."
"Unit cannot confirm," it warbles back. Its voice thins, strained at the edges. The ship continues chewing on its interface. "Architecture unfamiliar. Interior volume exceeds standard utility design parameters by three orders of magnitude."
"Plain language," I demand, frustrated by the drone's technical jargon while my eyes struggle to adjust to the sheer immensity of the dark space.
"The room exceeds expected scale," K-Seven reports with a flat, mechanical resignation that offers zero comfort.
"Great," I mutter, the sarcastic edge in my voice failing to cover the knot of dread settling in my gut. "Love that."
I step inside, and the floor accepts my weight with a soft silver bloom that follows each bootfall. Light spreads in widening circles, pale silver chasing across the deck in concentric rings until the outer edges meet resistance and fade, like illumination striking water too dense to carry it. Walls resolve from the dark in fragments. Curved. Ribbed. Organic, forged from the same obsidian alloy as the corridor outside, though polished here, almost glossy, almost wet. Support columns rise in sweeping arcs and vanish into a ceiling I barely manage to track. The chamber evokes the interior of a rib cage.
I really, really wish it felt otherwise. "K-Seven. Stay close," I hiss under my breath.
"Unit remains seven centimeters from your shoulder," it informs me. "Closer proximity requires physical overlap with your suit."
"Then merge with my suit," I grumble.
"Unit is evaluating feasibility."
A short, broken sound escapes me inside the helmet, half-laugh, half-reflex. I swallow the rest before it can become anything else. Focus. Focus, Nyx. Every door behind me seals with finality. The ship plays games with structure and expectation. It presents itself as a nightmare with architecture. I need exit access, or system collapse, or both, and I need it fast.
A dais rises from the chamber’s expanse, caught in the stark glare of my helmet beams.
I move toward it in measured steps, pistol angled low, sweeping left and right with every third pace. The shape on the dais resolves gradually. Tall. Vertical. Roughly the size of a small shuttle, standing upright in a cradle of black alloy, fronted by a long panel of dark glass that swallows my helmet beams without reflection. A pod. A containment pod, perhaps. Cargo suspension unit, perhaps. Old-pattern Coalition cryo architecture, perhaps, though the geometry resists recognition, and my hindbrain begins to generate warnings I choose to ignore.
A different part of me makes the decision before thought completes it. The dark glass at the front of that cradle demands distance. So I give it distance. I move wide. I trace a slow arc around the perimeter of the dais at roughly eight meters, helmet beams sweeping, pistol low, maintaining the same careful radius I would give a live reactor core.
On the far side of the arc, my beams find something else.
A secondary console. Freestanding, set into a low pedestal on the chamber floor, roughly eight meters from the pod. Lit. Actively lit. A pale amber pulse cycles across its surface in a steady pattern that refuses to match the ambient lighting of the chamber. My attention locks onto it with the focus of a starving organism drawn to heat. Power. A power console. Active feed. Distribution node behavior. If access opens, control over chamber systems follows.
"K-Seven," I breathe. "Identify this."
A pause. Its lenses click and re-click. "Unit's parsing remains partial. The structure resembles a distribution node. Power routing is present across multiple chamber systems, including pod. Interface degradation present. Confidence limited."
"Is it a power node?" I ask, my eyes locking on the steady pulse cycling across its surface, desperate for any sign of a controllable interface pointing toward freedom.
"Provisional confirmation," K-Seven responds, its lenses clicking as it struggles to parse the alien architecture.
"That becomes my exit then," I mutter, already stepping purposefully toward the pedestal to try and force a response from the system.
"Unit registers objection," the drone warbles, drifting anxiously nearby, to which I quickly snap back, "Maintain your objection during operation," refusing to let the machine's hesitation slow the only viable plan I have left.
It shouldn’t make sense that I recognize the port configurations on a thousand-year-old warship. The mechanics are ancient; the processing power lightyears ahead of what I'm used to. But then again, every piece of modern technology in the Fringe—every comm-link, every engine manifold, every data port—was reverse-engineered from dead dreadnoughts just like this one. We haven't been innovating for the last millennium; we've just been living off their scraps. I place my glove on the console.