Chapter 9
The symbols made almost no sense. If she looked sideways and squinted a bit.
Harper's fingers flew across the interface. The symbols were alien, sharp angles and flowing curves that meant nothing to her brain, but the data cascading down the screen spoke a universal language.
Logic. Flow. Input and output.
Math didn't change just because the species did.
Behind her, the Command Center was awash with noise, but she blocked it out.
It helped that Kirr stood behind her. He didn't touch her, but his huge frame created a wall between her and it all.
He was a physical shield, blocking out the shouting warriors, and the skepticism of the techs whose glares she could feel burning a hole in the back of her head as they waited for her to fuck up.
But that didn’t matter. In the pocket of space he'd carved out for her, there was only the terminal and the problem.
And the problem was ugly.
"Shit… It's not just a feedback loop." Frowning, she tapped a sequence, highlighting the data trail. "It's hunting."
Kirr's breath warmed the shell of her ear as he leaned over her. "Show me."
"The power surges aren't random failures.
They're requests." His heat at her back made her want to shiver.
She ignored it and pointed out a string of code.
“This keeps repeating in the logs. The system thinks it's starving.
It queries a sector for power, drains it, overloads the conduit, and then moves to the next stable source.
It's eating the grid to feed a phantom demand. "
"A rogue demand process." The lead tech took a step closer, his earlier sneer replaced by a frown of concentration.
"No, it’s worse," she said. Her hands wanted to shake, but she wouldn't let them. "It's got to be a virus. Look at the transfer protocols."
She brought up the docking ring diagnostics. The red blotches were clustering around the airlocks.
"The station is almost dry." Her stomach dropped. "Or it will be soon, and it knows that. So it's replicated—looking for a new battery. Multiple instances are already querying the handshake protocols for every ship docked at the ring."
The tech paled, his skin taking on a sickly ashen hue. "The docked ships run on independent cores. If this can jump the gap..."
"It will infect their systems as well," she finished for him. "It'll drain them just like it drained the station."
An image of Delilah being wheeled out into the corridor flashed in Harper’s mind. Kirr telling Kellat to use his ship.
Shit.
If the virus jumped to the Ra’Tervas, the ship would go dark. The stasis pod keeping Delilah alive would fail. Which meant that evacuation hadn’t been a solution; it had just moved the target.
Her throat closed. She wanted to scream at them to undock the ships, to cut the physical connections and shove them into the void. Save Delilah. Just save Delilah. Who cared about the station?
“We need to undock all ships from the station,” Kirr barked. “Now!”
But the readout showed the truth. The docking clamps were mechanical—physical locks that needed power to retract. No power, no release. By the time they manually blew the bolts, the handshake would be complete, and the virus would be on the ships.
“What kind of supposedly advanced alien technology uses fucking mechanical clamps?” she hissed to herself.
There was no running from this. She had to kill it.
"It won't work. We’re not going to be fast enough to get them all." She jabbed the docking ring cluster on the display. "We have to cut the hunger."
"We've tried," a second tech argued. "We can't pin it. Every call looks clean until it isn't."
"You're hunting the wrong monster." Her finger struck the timestamp hard enough to ripple the hologram. "Don't chase the request—find what isn't dropping with the sector."
She pulled up the sector map. "Track the last three jumps." She flicked highlights onto the map. She tapped Sector 7. "And Sector 4. They're dark, but they're still pinging the central processor. They aren't dead. They're zombie nodes broadcasting the hunger signal."
The lead engineer stared at her screen. "Draanth…" He rechecked the ping timestamps, jaw tight. "If that's real, we've been feeding it."
"If we cut them..." he started.
"No! Cutting triggers the emergency bypass—the system thinks it's a failure and reroutes around it." She slashed a hand through the air. "We have to make the nodes drop themselves. That makes it a voluntary disconnect, not forced."
She glanced up at the holographic display. The red was inches from the docking ring. Minutes. Less. Probably seconds.
"We trick it." She flexed her hands once, then went still. "Spam the bus with full power signals from the maintenance subroutines. Make them look big and juicy, then when it goes for the bait, we drop the infected nodes out of the system, isolating them."
"To force a voluntary disconnect, we have to spoof the nodes into thinking they're shutting down for maintenance." The tech wet his lips. "That requires reactor-level authorization. If the system doesn't buy it, it'll read the spoof as an attack and emergency vent the core."
He looked at Kirr. They all did.
She met his gaze levelly. This was it. She was asking him to bet the station, his career, everyone on board—on her. A human woman who used to fix servers for a living.
“You should get someone to check…” she said hesitantly. After all, what did she know about alien technology? She was just Harper, the girl who couldn't even keep her cousin safe in a flyer.
Kirr didn't flinch. He leaned down, his face inches from hers. The room vanished. "I trust you, kelarris."
Her breath caught. He wasn't just letting her try. He believed she would succeed.
Then he straightened, his gaze cutting across the engineers. "Do it. Now. Override the safeties. Give her the command bus."
The engineer scrambled to obey. "Safeties disengaged. Command bus is open."
Her hands hovered over the keys. "Ready?"
Kirr didn't look away from the schematic. "Do it."
Her fingers flew. She initiated the broadcast, sending a massive wave of 'power full' signals into the starving network.
The red blotches on the map pulsed angrily.
"It's fighting back," she called out. "It's trying to reroute through the environmental controls. Sector 9 is spiking."
"Isolate Sector 9!" Kirr bellowed to the room at large.
From the main floor, a voice cut through the alarms. "Sector 9 isn't responding—forcing hard isolation now!"
"Shit. It's jumping to the hydrostatic reserves," she hissed, tracking the data trail as it slithered through the system. "It's trying to find a back door to the docking ring."
"Cut hydrostatics," Kirr ordered.
"Pressure will fall just below safety margins in the habitation sectors," someone reported.
“That’s still within tolerances even for human physiology,” Someone else replied. She looked up for the speaker, relieved to see the teal sash he wore and the scars across his skin. A healer. He would know what humans vs Latharians could take.
"Reroute air scrubbers to manual," Kirr’s voice was firm.
"Hydrostatics cut."
They fell into a rhythm. She watched the data, spotting the virus's desperate lunges for power, and called out the targets. Kirr became her voice, amplifying her analysis into absolute commands. There was no hesitation, no second-guessing. She pointed, and he fired.
"It's cornered," she said, sweat beading on her forehead. The red signals were bunching up in the primary distribution hub. "It's stopped trying to spread. It's going for the dummy nodes. In three… two… one.."
"Kill it. Pull the nodes," Kirr's hand braced the chair back behind her, steadying without touching.
"Pulling now."
She hit the execute key.
The Command Center went dark.
For a heartbeat, there was total silence. No hum of drives. No whir of fans. Just the void of a dead power grid.
She stopped breathing. Oh shit. Had she killed it? Or had she just killed them all?
A low thrum started in the floorboards. A vibration that worked its way up through the soles of her shoes. Consoles flickered to life one by one. Then the overhead lights blinked on, steady and bright.
She swiveled her head to the main display.
The angry red blotches were gone. The station schematic was a calm, cool blue.
The air rushed out of her lungs in a ragged gasp, and her hands dropped to her lap. She clamped them together to stop them shaking.
"Report." Kirr's tone was calm, as if he hadn't just authorized a station-wide shutdown on a prayer.
"Core online," the lead engineer said, his voice hushed with awe.
"Power distribution is nominal. The viral cascade is gone.
Systems are resetting to standard parameters.
" He turned to her, shaking his head slowly.
"We wouldn't have found the echo if not for your female, my lord.
We were chasing the spikes, not the cause of them. "
"You saved the station," Kirr said to her, his hand on her shoulder lightly. “And the lives of everyone on board.”
She sat back in the oversized chair, trembling as the adrenaline crashed out of her system. She was lightheaded and drained but sharply alive. They were all alive.
Delilah was safe.
So why did she feel like she was about to burst into tears?
His female had saved the station.
Pride, hot and fierce, expanded in Kirr's chest until it felt like his ribs might crack. He looked down at Harper, slumped in the oversized engineer's chair, her hands trembling in her lap. She'd just saved them all. His female.
"System integrity at ninety-eight percent," the lead tech announced, the words echoing in the quiet room. He turned from his console, his gray face still pale but his expression transformed. The disdain from ten minutes ago was gone. It was hard to sneer at someone who just saved your life.
He wasn't the only one.