1. Nyra #3
"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.
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, rejecting the 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 the Harrow was 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.