"Come here, little rabbit," he growls.
He yanks me forward, my body scraping against the sharp edges of the cut obsidian. I kick, my boots striking the plating of his chest, but it is like kicking a mountain. He hauls me out of the shaft and throws me onto the cold deck of the corridor.
I hit the floor hard, the air rushing out of my lungs. I roll, trying to find my feet, but two more boarders are already there. One pins my arms behind my back, his grip like a set of iron manacles. The other stands over me, the barrel of a pulse-rifle level at my chest.
I look up, my hair falling over my face, and see the man with the stitched-together face. Rovik.
Cruel, raised scars stitch his face into a patchwork of violence. One piercing, predatory blue eye stares out, contrasting against the other—a clouded, milky sphere of dead tissue. He wears a specialized engineering suit, heavy with the weight of harvesting tools and gene-market hardware. He stands with his arms crossed, watching me with a clinical, terrifying curiosity.
He steps closer, his heavy boots clicking on the deck. He reaches down and tilts my head back, his fingers digging into my jaw. He pulls the collar aside, revealing the mark. The brand is flaring, a brilliant, defiant amber.
Selra steps forward, her dark, reflective eyes analyzing the mark with detached precision. She traces a finger inches above my skin without touching me, her implants pulsing a steady, calculating blue.
"Anomalous," Selra states flatly, her voice devoid of inflection. "This isn't a mere territorial claim. Look at the energy transfer, Rovik. She is a biological anchor. The invasive code—my ghost script—encountered resistance because the ship's neural lattice is actively filtering its commands through her biological rhythm."
Selra touches her temple, opening a direct channel. "Korr. We didn't just find a hostage. We found the Warlord's leash. She's a glitch in his armor. If we trigger the girl, we scramble his matrix. We control the girl; we control the Reaper."
Rovik chuckles, a dry, rattling sound in his throat.
I spit at his boots. Terror remains, deep and cold, yet a rising, white-hot fury churns beneath the surface. From the girl surviving the Fringe’s dirt emerged the woman who made her choice: the monster on the bridge.
"He’s going to kill you," I rasp with a certainty that surprises even me.
Rovik just chuckles, a dry, rattling sound in his throat. "He’s going to try, sweetheart. And that’s exactly what we want."
He nods to the boarders holding me. "Take her to the breach. Let's see how much of a storm he's willing to walk into for a scavenger."
The boarders haul me upright, their fingers digging into the soft flesh of my underarms. I struggle, twisting my torso to break their momentum, but the man on my left slams a heavy gauntlet into my side. The impact steals my breath, leaving a blooming heat spreading through me. I sag for a second, my boots dragging across the glossy floor, before the fury returns.
I look back over my shoulder toward the maintenance shaft. K-Seven hovers just inside the dark opening, its lenses spinning in a frantic, silent blur. Seeing it there, safe in the shadows and away from these heavy, scarred hands, brings a sharp spark of relief. He remains in the walls, functional and whole, a witness to the violation they are committing.
Rovik ignores the drone entirely. To him, the unit is merely ancient scrap, beneath the notice of a man who harvests empires. He focuses on the corridor ahead, his pace relentless.
They drag me through Sector Six, a part of the ship resembling a graveyard.Virex Prime’s light vanishes here, turning into the flickering, sickly gray of Selra’s ghost code. The walls are weeping—actual condensation from the failing climate seals runs down the surface in long, dark streaks. I feel the ship’s agony through the soles of my boots. It is an almost inaudible groan of structural failure, a giant gasping for air as its lungs fill with lead.
"You are killing it," I grit out, trying to plant my feet as we pass a junction. "The ship is dying. You are going down with it."
The boarder on my right, a thick-necked man with a jagged tattoo of a serpent winding up his throat, chuckles. "We only need it to stay together long enough to strip the meat, girl. After that, it can turn into stardust for all we care."
We reach a wider transit hall, and the scale of the violation hits me.Virex Primereads like a construction site for butchers.They have set up portable lighting rigs that cast harsh, industrial shadows across the ancient statues. Massive power cables, thick as my waist, snake across the floor, siphoning energy from the ship’s secondary veins into the salvage leeches clamped to the hull.
I recognize the harpoons again—the massive tungsten spikes I saw on the drone feed. Up close, they are even more obscene. They have punched through the hull like needles through skin, and the metal around the entry points is twisted and blackened. Beyond the harpoons, I catch a glimpse of something small and familiar through a secondary viewport—theHarrow, still hangs onto to the lower hull, untouched.
"Leave the scrap hauler," I hear Korr's voice bark over the local comms to one of his boarding teams. "Don't wastetime stripping garbage when we're standing inside a Hegemony goldmine. Focus on the primary core."
The thought stings more than the wire on my wrists. My ship, my home, dismissed as utter garbage.
"Look at that," Rovik points, gesturing toward a heavy bulkhead that has been melted into a puddle of slag. "Six thousand years of history, and it yields to a standard thermal charge just like everything else."
He stops, turning to look at me with that milky-white eye. He reaches out and grabs a handful of my hair, forcing my head back until I stare into his patchwork face.
"The Warlord is holding onto a ghost," he sneers, his breath smelling of stale stimulants and cold rations. "And you are the leash the captain is going to use to pull him out of the dark."
He shoves me forward again. We approach the primary breach point, a yawning cavern in the side of the ship where the atmosphere is held back only by a flickering, deep-blue containment field. It emits a low, oppressive hum, fighting to keep the oxygen inside the bay—the only reason we can still breathe and the only thing allowing the boarders to shout orders without helmet seals. Beyond the shimmering blue curtain, I peer out at the void—the endless, cold dark of the stars. And sitting there, like a bloated tick, is Korr’s flagship, theCarrion King.
The ship manifests as a monstrosity of mismatched plates and protruding weapons arrays, bound by the same ruthless intent that drives the men inside it.
A man stands at the perimeter of the breach. He carries a stocky, battle-worn build that speaks of decades spent in the heavy gravity of salvage yards. His pale skin bears severe burn scars that climb along his jaw and neck like reaching fingers. He keeps his head shaved, and his cybernetic left eye emits a faint, predatory blue light. He wears heavy armored salvage gearbristling with visible weapon attachments and power cells. It can only be one person—Korr.