2. Draevik #2
She has given up on the maintenance grate.
She is moving now, fast and quiet, cutting a line across the chamber from the far bulkhead toward the door she came in through.
The drone drifts at her shoulder, its floodbeam stuttering as Virex Prime continues strangling its interface.
It emits a thin warble I can hear even through the pod, a sound distressingly close to fear translated through a very literal machine.
She reaches the door and tries the panel.
Dead. She tries it a second time. Still dead.
She turns, helmet beams sweeping the chamber, and I watch realization arrive one piece at a time: every door sealed, every panel dark, and every route from the chamber denied.
Her heart rate climbs rapidly, accelerating from one-thirty-two to one-thirty-four beats per minute as her trapped reality sets in.
Virex Prime. Keep every exit sealed, I order through the link, dismissing her frantic perimeter sweep as entirely futile.
Her actions are irrelevant. She remains in this room.
The ship responds with a warm, agreeable flash in our shared channel. Commander. Of course not.
She begins to work the room in a pattern.
Panic never takes hold of her. That is the part that catches me again, because a small biological creature trapped in a sealed chamber under the attention of a Reaper warship belongs in panic, yet she moves with sharp, controlled purpose.
She moves in a measured sweep along the perimeter, helmet beams methodical, one sealed door after another, testing each one with her palm and moving on.
Her pistol is drawn now. Held low, ready.
Her breath is fast but held. Her boots clank softly against the deck plating in a stride that is almost controlled.
She is hunting for a way out with the discipline of a creature that has been trapped before.
The heat under my ribs settles at the observation—cold, bright, and exact, like the endless whir of a targeting system locking onto its chosen mark.
The capture frame resonates along the biomechanical veining in my chest, keying into every step she takes, and the buried layer that answered Mine a few moments ago answers again, deeper, steadier, with the authority of something that stops asking.
I observe her for fewer than ninety seconds. Already, my operational directives are rewriting themselves to secure her.
The trained part of me registers this rapid biological override as a severe anomaly.
The body registers it as the sudden, unquestionable acquisition of a high-value asset.
There is no contest between the two. I am a Reaper, engineered to enforce hierarchy, and my own nervous system locks onto a new critical priority.
The command structure now pivots around a single, fragile point—a scavenger cutting a perimeter sweep across my stasis chamber with a civilian pistol in her hand.
A tactical imperative now dictates her containment, overriding all other options.
Virex Prime. Status of my waking cascade.
Ninety-four percent complete. All systems nominal. Combat matrix primed. Armor lattice ready on your signal.
Deliver it, I instruct as the combat matrix finalizes its recalibration. Virex Prime hesitates for the briefest fraction of a second. Commander. Through the pod? The query is a mere formality, instantly overridden by my unyielding command to arm me in silence. Through the pod.
A pause in the channel, fractional, the smallest hesitation I have felt from my ship in this conversation. Then obedience.
Initiating silent lattice protocol.
The pod's inner casing warms against my back.
The biomechanical plates that line its interior unfold from their housings in perfect silence, folding down and inward, each one a segmented sheet of the same alloy that makes up my outer harness.
They settle against my bare skin the way they were grown to settle, recognizing the signatures under the plating of my ribs, the old sensor nodes along my spine, and the bonded channels in my wrists.
They lock. One segment at a time, in a languid cascade from my shoulders down through my hips and out along my forearms. The half-collar rises at the base of my throat and seals.
The gauntlets settle down. The sidearm nestles against my thigh. The blade lies across my back.
The plates glide past one another without a sound.
My ship is dressing me for war inside a sealed pod, under the skin of my own stasis, silent as a held breath, because I have asked it to let me emerge ready.
The combat matrix completes its recalibration.
Every system reports in. No longer dormant, I consider myself a weapon waking into a chamber that has a small bright target in it, and the target is walking a perimeter sweep with a discipline that pleases me, and my hands are no longer in suspension; they are resting lightly against the inner wall of the pod, fingers curled, tendons warm, and they know exactly what they are going to do when the pod opens.
Virex Prime. Status of the intruder.
She has completed one full perimeter sweep. She is beginning a second. She is now examining the panel through which she initiated your wake sequence.
Her belief about the panel?
Unchanged. She still believes it is a power distribution node. She is attempting a counter-sequence to reverse what she believes she has activated.
A rhythmic neural synchronization pulses through the harness along my chest. It is the resonance my kind produces when mapping a new, stabilizing biometric signature.
The command stack registers her defiance as a fascinating tactical variable, noting the synchronization of our biological rhythms as operationally stabilizing.
She seeks to undo me. She has no idea that the mechanism she attempts to shut down is tracking her every respiration eight meters behind her, processing her survival as its newly assigned primary objective.
She will be unsuccessful.
Correct, Commander. That panel is slaved to your consciousness. Only you can stop what she has started.
Good.
The word surprises me. I never intended to press it into the bond. It left anyway, dictated entirely by the body's raw instincts, and Virex Prime shudders back a long, soft note of acknowledgment that carries the texture of approval somewhere deep in the channel.
The pod is ready to open.
Virex Prime. Silent unseal. No cycling tone. No light spill. Open into the chamber shadow.
Confirmed. The pod obeys.
The glass retracts outside the standard cascade, dissolving along a silent vector I built for insertion operations a century before the last campaign, while the segmented panels of the pod’s outer shell fold into the housing without a single audible click.
The cryo-gel drains soundlessly into its reservoirs.
A thin curl of atmospheric differential slips from the pod into the chamber air and is absorbed by Virex Prime's recyclers before it can reach her.
Silence in tone. Darkness in light. A helmet beam finds her only if she turns and angles it toward me. Her attention stays locked on the panel under her hands. She holds her position.
She bends over the panel that woke me, working the sub-menu with gloved fingers, her helmet beam pointing down at the console.
Her drone drifts at her shoulder, floodbeam fixed on the same panel, its thin, distressed warble still carrying across the chamber.
All of her attention is forward, on what she is undoing, and none of it is behind her—where what she has woken has just stepped out of its pod onto the deck plating of the chamber behind her.
My feet meet the deck in silence. The harness extends its lower plating down over them in a molded sheath of alloy that greets the plating of my chamber with no more sound than a breath held too long.
I take the first step out of the pod.