"Thank you," it chirps cheerfully, completely missing the sarcasm.
The crossing is unrushed.I tether short, and I use cold-burn thrusters, a series of small puffs that move me hand-over-hand across the gap without lighting up a single heat signature. My helmet beams catch the lip of the breach as I approach; the edges of the torn alloy curl outward like a flower forced open from within. A faint, shimmering blue containment field stretches across the gap, holding back the void while letting my solid mass slip through with a static prickle. I pass through without touching the sides.
Inside, the warship is darker than dark.
My helmet beams cut twin cones through the black, and the black drinks them right back down. I drift through a corridor that must have been beautiful once, the walls lined with some kind of dark alloy that ripples under my light like water. Strange. I've boarded maybe a hundred wrecks in my life, and I have never seen metal that looks back at you.
Every surface is seamless and unmarred. Preserved so immaculately, she appears to have been powered down only yesterday, masking the centuries that have actually passed. She's too intact. She's way too intact to be safe, and that is the part that is going to kill me—I can feel it already.
"All right, sweetheart," I murmur to the ship, because I like to talk to wrecks, and the silence is already trying to crawl down my throat. "Let's not be weird about this. I take some pretty pieces, you let me leave, and everybody goes home breathing."
I clip my boots to the deck plating and start walking.
K-Seven whirs knee-height behind me, floodbeam panning gradually across the walls, and scanner array feeding readings to my wrist display in a fixed green ticker.
And that is when it starts to glitch.
"Nyra." Its voice catches on the second syllable, coming out as two copies of itself laid on top of each other. "Biological read — biological — biological read anomal?—"
"K-Seven?"
"Interface — interface not — compat—" The readout on my wrist hammers once and twice, and then the screen is crawling.
The signal shifts beyond static classification. The readout moves—green tendrils flickering across the display in unfamiliar patterns. Organic patterns. Living patterns. The feed registers biological material throughout the ship, present everywhere. The walls. The floor. The ceiling above my head.
My throat goes tight. "K-Seven. Talk to me."
Its primary lens fogs and clears, fogs and clears. "Unit is — encountering — an incompatible architecture. Readings are not translating. Readings are — readings are being rewritten as Unit reads them."
"By what?"
"By her."
The walls of the corridor are alive now, a deeply pitched shudder I feel more than hear. The chain of amber maintenance lights along the ceiling flickers to life one by one, following the length of the corridor ahead of me. Lighting my way. Inviting me deeper.
Behind me, something clicks.
I spin fast, pistol half-drawn, helmet beam swinging. The corridor I came through is sealing. A heavy pressure door slides down from the frame with laggard, patient finality, the soft exhale of servos breathing through the silence, servos that should not, absolutely should not, have power.
"No." I scramble back toward it, but the door is already two-thirds down. "No, no, no, no?—"
I jam my pry bar into the gap. The door keeps coming. The bar bends, then snaps, and I yank my hand back a half-second before the door kisses the deck with a low, final thunk.
Silence.
My breath saws loud inside my helmet. I press my palm flat to the sealed metal, and I can feel the faintest fluctuation running through it. A pulse. Something under the skin of this ship notices me, and it is deciding what to do about it.
"K-Seven. Tell me you have a reading on the other side of that."
Its lenses cycle, cycles again. "Negative. Sensor penetration blocked. Unit is experiencing partial interface interference."
"What does that mean?"
"It means she is listening to the Unit too."
I take a step back. My voice sounds wrong in my own ears, too thin, too high. "Okay, Nyx. Think. Think, think, think."
I spin, scanning the chamber. There has to be another exit. A chain of lights blinks to life along the main corridor, attempting to guide me toward what looks like safe cargo holds. Distrusting anything this ship offers freely, I ignore the illuminated path. Instead, I find a completely unlit maintenance hatch in the far bulkhead and jog into its darkness, my boots clanking on the deck plating.