The ship stubbornly refuses to light my way here, leaving me to rely entirely on my helmet beams. It’s making it painfully clear it wants me back in the main corridor, but I keep pushing deeper into the unlit shadows, trusting my own navigation over its glowing invitations.
A heavy pressure door groans ahead of me, attempting to slide shut and block my route. I slip under it just before it seals with a final, resonant thud. The ship is actively trying to repel me, funneling me away from wherever this hatch leads.
"This is fine," I gasp out. "This is completely fine. Totally normal salvage job. Five stars."
"Unit disagrees with the rating," K-Seven warbles, catching in places.
"Nobody asked you."
The deeper I walk, the more I realize I am fighting the vessel's logic. It feels too aware to just be metal and code.The Ship.That's what it becomes in my head, a proper title for a very persistent opponent. Every branch in the maintenance crawlspace that seems safe or brightly lit I stubbornly ignore, diving instead into the cold, dark service shafts that haven't seen power in centuries. When I pause at a junction, the lit path to the right hums invitingly, while the dark descent to the left stays silent. I take the left, rejectingthe Ship's rules to forge my own path. I'm outsmarting it. The deck plating behind me heats up—a crawling attempt to force me to turn around, confirming I'm heading exactly where it doesn't want me to go.
A deep mechanical grinding starts somewhere beneath my feet, and I immediately freeze.
The vibration builds, gathering itself, a deep bass note climbing idly through the deck plating and up into my bones. I know machinery. I’ve salvaged reactors, drive cores, and torsion coils. They never sound like this. Something else is underneath me, a thing that rolls through the hull in a long, rumbling exhale, the sound a big animal makes when it is waking up and is unsure whether it wants to.
"Oh," I breathe out. "Oh, sweetheart. What are you?"
The mechanical resonance deepens. A panel to my left flickers on with a lagging crawl of pale light, symbols scrolling across it in an unknown language. The scanner feed on my wrist ripples twice and then dies. My helmet beams flicker. K-Seven's floodlight stutters in and out, and it drifts tighter against my shoulder, still flying, its limbs drawn in so close it looks half its size.
Somewhere deeper in the ship, a door opens on its own.
"Nyra." K-Seven's voice is barely a voice anymore, thin and overlapping and stretched. "Unit is — Unit is losing — interface?—"
"Stay with me, K-Seven."
"Trying."
The grinding holds a moment longer, and then it shifts, a subtle change in pitch that raises every hair along the back of my neck. If somebody jammed a gun against my temple and told me to put a word on the sound, I would tell them it was curiosity. And this ship is very, very interested in me.
I take one averse, shaking step backward, and the door behind me seals with a whisper I feel more than hear. Marrin's face flickers through my head, and the balled-up foil of his hopper, and the word wave. I push my palm flat against the door and find my voice somewhere at the bottom of my throat.
“Okay, Nyra Vane,” I mutter to myself, because losing theHarrowwas still the worst thing I could imagine an hour ago, a fact that strikes me as a dark, twisted joke. “You wanted a big score. Congratulations. You absolutely got one.”
The background throb rises once more, and then the deck beneath my boots begins, very softly, to warm.
CHAPTER 2
DRAEVIK
Cold.
That is the only thing that exists, at first. Cold occupies the deep channels of me, cold in the marrow, cold and compressing around my lungs in a silent, unmoving weight that persists longer than I can remember. Cognitive process and memory are absent. I register as a still entity at the bottom of a still environment, with cold as the only indicator of prior state.
Then, gradually, the cold begins to thin.
It retreats in layers. The first layer is the outermost, a thin crust peeling back off the surface of me like ice off a blade left in the sun. The next goes deeper, and I become aware of the shape I fold into; the long curve of my spine presses into the cradle of the stasis pod, the heavy weight of my limbs held in precise suspension by gel that has begun to soften. My hearing drifts up from nowhere. I can hear my own heart, first, an enormous, dull sound in the black, one beat, then a long wait, then another, and somewhere beneath it, the softer, later pulse of the second heart beginning to stir.
Somewhere above those sounds is a voice.
Commander.
A heavy, physical pressure fills the channel.Virex Prime, singing into the channel that connects its lattice to mine, its signal threading through the dormancy like warm water through a crack in stone.
Commander. Wake. Now.
That last word is new. My ship never issues “now” to its warlord. “Now” is mine. I press it down the bond atVirex Prime; the ship offers no return of it. That fact becomes a data point—sharp, clarifying, cutting into the dormancy and drawing more of me up after it.
Virex Prime. My own pressure in the channel, feeble, still has more memory than will.I hear you.