"Open, you piece of junk!" I scream.
The dial gives, turning with prolonged, agonizing resistance as ancient gears screech back to life. Somewhere deep in the corridor outside this shaft, I hear the echo of metal on metal. The boarding party is moving through the lower decks, clearing the secondary access points.
"They're coming, K! I'm out of time!" I exclaim, giving the dial one final, desperate heave.
A hiss of pressurized gas vents into the shaft, nearly knocking me off the ledge. From beyond the bulkhead, a heavy metallicclunk signals the release of the manual bypass. I did it. I have opened a path for myself to navigate toward the core, but I have also exposed my own position to the local sensors.
"Override successful," K-Seven shouts over the rising roar of the reactor. "The central spine is accessible!"
I scramble toward the exit hatch, my heart racing out of control. Survival has a different shape now. It is the man standing a mountain away from me. I need to get through this artery and find a way to the bridge level before the butchers finish their climb.
I close in on the final panel, my fingers brushing the release lever. Tucked away in the marrow of the ship, I stay close to the core systems to feel the frantic pattering of the vessel's heart. Through the thin metal of the hatch, the sound of heavy boots hitting the deck strikes like a deafening barrage.
I freeze, my hand trembling on the lever. The thumping of their movement travels through the spine, through my bones. They are in the corridor right outside this hatch. They may have reached the central spine, but their focus is entirely on finding an upward ascent.
The shadows of the butchers flicker through the grate as they prepare to ascend, unaware that I watch from the dark, the sole witness to the open manual path. Draevik remains a world away, leaving me trapped within the walls alongside the men who want to tear us both apart. Survival twists like a single, tangled cord, binding us, and I refuse to let them cut it.
CHAPTER 18
DRAEVIK
The first boarder dies before he finishes raising his rifle.
The search ends three levels below the bridge in the junction of Sector Five, where six men wait, their helmet lights cutting white scars across the ancient dark. The closest one sees me at the same instant I spot him. His mouth opens behind his visor. The word he wants to say—probablycontact, probablytarget, probably something profane and small and human—never arrives. My pulse-blade punches through his chest plate, shears through the polymer beneath, and exits between his shoulder blades in a wet spray of sparks and copper. I wrench the blade free and let him drop.
Five left. They scatter like vermin exposed to light.
A correct Commander would hold this position. The junction controls access to the primary spine—three corridors converge here, a natural choke point designed by engineers who understood that architecture is warfare. I could plant myself in this intersection and force every boarder on this ship to come through me, one squad at a time, until the floor is ankle-deep in their dead and the surviving crew's radio Korr to report that the derelict has teeth.
That is the optimal tactic. That is the solution the combat matrix is screaming for, a red imperative blinking across my HUD in urgent script:HOLD POSITION. ESTABLISH KILL ZONE. DEFEND THE CHOKEPOINT.
I ignore it.
Nyra is three decks below me and forty meters to port, moving through a maintenance artery I sealed during lockdown. The mark throbs with every step she takes—a hot, searing tracking signal I cannot mute, cannot ignore, cannot mistake for anything other than what it is. She broke through the Sanctum's perimeter. She pried open an access panel using the brand I burned into her skin as a key, and now she is threading herself along the ship’s veins and conduits like a needle through living tissue, heading toward the central spine, heading toward the boarders, heading toward the danger I put a mountain between her and precisely to prevent.
Abandoning the defensible chokepoint, I break into a run, guided solely by the mark tracking her every movement. This is the part the Reaper archives omitted—this involuntary, continuous awareness of another body occupying my own perceptual field. I feel the constant rise of her breathing layered beneath the thunder of my boots on the deck plating. I feel the slight elevation in her cortisol when a distant detonation shakes the hull around her. I feel the stubborn, grinding determination in her jaw, and it translates through our shared mark into a pressure behind my molars that feels foreign yet still lives in me. She is afraid. She is moving anyway. The bond reports both facts simultaneously, and neither surprises me.
The combat matrix registers the decision as a tactical error. I feel the disapproval as a cold pressure behind my eyes—the trained architecture of my mind pushing back against a body that has already overruled it. Every meter I move from the junction leaves behind a stretch of undefended corridor for theboarding party to exploit. I know this. I have fought wars across a hundred systems, and I know how territory works, and I give it away with both hands because the gold smudge on my internal sensors is drifting toward a part of the ship where armed individuals are cutting through bulkheads.
The second squad finds me at the base of the gravity well.
These are different. Better equipped, better trained. They carry tower-shields that project kinetic dampening fields—zones of thickened space that drag at my limbs like wading through setting concrete. Their movements are coordinated and rehearsed. Somebody briefed them on Reaper physiology. Somebody told them where the armor gaps sit, how the servos lock under lateral stress, and which joints to target with shock-batons to short the neural bridge.
Selra. The name surfaces through the corrupted data still bleeding across my HUD. A tech specialist. She is somewhere outside the hull, feeding my ship poisoned data, and she has also fed these men a manual on how to kill me.
I charge into the dampening field. The world goes thick and slow. My pulse-blade swings, and the arc that should bisect the nearest shield-bearer takes twice as long to complete, the kinetic field dragging at the energy projection like fingers catching in honey. He ducks. The blade carves a gouge across the top of his shield instead of through his throat, and the man behind him jams a shock-baton into the exposed seam at my knee.
The pain is immediate and total. Lightning arcs up through my femur and detonates in my hip joint, locking the servos on my left side in a spasm that nearly drops me. My HUD strobes white. For one sickening instant, the corridor vanishes into a wall of static, and all I can see is the flutter of the mark—Nyra's heartbeat, unchanging and fast, thirty meters below my feet and moving.
Lunging for the baton, my gauntlet closes around the shaft and the man's fist together, crushing them both. He screams. I use his body as a ram, driving him into the shield-bearer behind him, and the dampening field collapses as its projector cracks against the bulkhead. In the space that opens, speed returns with a violent, renewed clarity. The pulse-blade takes the screaming man's head. The shield-bearer dies on the backswing.
Three remain. They fall back into a defensive line, rifles up, barrels tracking me. A proper Commander would pursue. A proper Commander would press the advantage, clear the corridor, and establish fire superiority.
I turn my back on them and drop through the maintenance hatch.
Behind me, I hear them regroup. Boots are shuffling; voices are barking coordinates into helmet comms. Within thirty seconds, they will have reported my position and my direction of travel, and Rovik will know the Warlord abandoned a defensible position to go deeper into the ship. A competent tactician will interpret that correctly. A competent tactician will understand that I am protecting something and will begin searching for it.
The knowledge sits in my throat like swallowed glass. Every kill left unfinished serves as a breadcrumb leading them toward her.