"Operational productivity."
You also rerouted the ventilation in the galley to eliminate a particulate count that was within acceptable parameters but caused her to sneeze once.
"The particulate was a contaminant."
The particulate was cinnamon.
I close the environmental controls and stand. The star charts are vivid behind me, a galaxy of dying suns and forgotten empires, and I argue with my warship about seasoning particles.
Hours later,I continue to study her.
From the bridge, from the security feeds, from the neural link that lets me taste the edges of her emotional state through our connection—I study her the way I once studied enemy formations. Methodically. Obsessively. And with a growing awareness that the data is changing me faster than I can process it.
She laughs differently when she is alone with K-Seven. It is looser, less guarded—a sound that comes from her belly rather than her throat. She bites the inside of her cheek when she is thinking hard, her eyes going distant and unfocused, and her fingers drum against whatever surface is closest in a rapid, syncopated sequence that matches no pattern I can identify. When she is frustrated, she talks to herself in a low, muttering stream that includes creative profanity I have begun cataloging for future reference.
Her grief is quieter. I catch it on the security feed late that evening—she sits in the observation alcove, her knees to her chest, staring out at the nebula with her chin resting on her knees and her eyes carrying something old and heavy and far away.
My hand extends toward the holographic projection of her before I register the movement. Fingers spread, hovering over the ghost of her shoulder, as if I could reach through the feed and press my palm against the curve of her back. I gaze down at my own hand—the hand of a warlord, the hand that has crushed ship hulls and broken command chains—suspended in the air above a hologram of a sleeping scavenger like an offering she did not ask for.
I retract it. Fast. Clinical.
Virex Primelogs the gesture. I feel the data point enter the ship's behavioral archive with the quiet precision of a closing drawer.
I delete the log. The ship pauses. Then obeys.
Her vital signs are stable, her breathing even, but the bond carries a cold, heavy undertone that settles into my own chest like a stone dropped into still water. She is homesick. She is mourning a life built out of scraps and stubbornness and the familiar weight of debts she understood. I am offering her a galaxy, and she misses the scrapyards.
The realization lands with an unsettling depth. I delete the thought. The phrase is on the blacklist of emotional responses my training should have purged decades ago.
On the fourth evening,I make the mistake of entering the Sanctum while she is still awake. I need the tactical console, and I calculate that she will be in the galley. Instead, she is cross-legged on the dais, disassembling K-Seven's tertiary guidance array with a pair of improvised tools she fashioned from the ship's own hull plating.
“You’re back,” she observes, fingers still working while her focus remains locked on the drone’s innards.
"I require the console."
"It's your console. I'm not sitting on it."
I move to the console. She keeps working. The quiet settles differently now, a change from what existed before the recalibration. That silence was warm, charged, loaded with potential energy. This one is careful. Clinical. She is giving me exactly the space I demanded, and the sheer precision of it cuts down to the bone.
"You built tools." I nod toward the thin strips of stone she has sharpened into something resembling a Phillips-head screwdriver.
“You won’t give me my prep kit back,” she says, shrugging as she keeps her focus on the drone’s innards. "So I improvised.Your hull plating has a crystalline shear point at forty-five degrees. Makes a decent edge if you know where to snap it."
I stare at the improvised tools. She has identified a structural property of Reaper-grade hull alloy that my own engineering corps needed six months and a laboratory to catalog. She found it by feel, by instinct, by being hungry enough to look.
“Those are impressive,” I breathe, the admission escaping unfiltered.
Her fingers pause. She glances up, and the guard drops—for half a second, there is nothing behind her eyes except genuine surprise. Then the guard slides back into place, and she turns back to the drone.
"Commander gives a compliment. Somebody mark the calendar."
K-Seven's primary lens flickers. "Unit is noting the date and time for the historical record. This is an unprecedented event."
When she thinks about me—and the shift in her signature is unmistakable, a sudden warmth blooming beneath the regular baseline of her emotional state—she touches the mark on her sternum. She does it unconsciously, her fingers pressing flat against the bone as if checking that something is still there.
I catch myself mirroring the gesture. My own hand pressed to my own chest, over the glyph that moves in time with her heartbeat.
I sitin the stasis chamber on the fifth evening, my back against the cold wall of the pod, reviewing a tactical archive from the Veln campaign that I have read eleven thousand times. The words blur. The strategies dissolve. My mind keeps returning to her voice in the Sanctum—you're acting weird—and the lack of accusation in it. She delivered the observation flatly. Neutral. As if she were simply recording the weather.