4. Draevik #2
The heat of the marking process courses through us, a rushing tide of data and instinct that forces my vision to white out for a split second.
The ship lets out a long, resonant groan of satisfaction, the juddering traveling up through my feet and into my marrow.
The anchor is set. The chaotic static in my mind smooths into a pleasant clarity, and for the first time since waking, the void feels less empty.
The heat of the glyph is still cooling on her skin when the stillness breaks.
Nyra does more than recoil. She explodes.
With the column at her back offering no retreat, she lunges forward, her palms slamming into my chest plates with enough force to jar her own shoulders.
She works to shove me into the shadows of the corridor, her boots skidding against the deck as she fights for even an inch of breathing room.
"I said get away from me!" The outburst shatters the stillness, the syllables buckling and fraying under their own kinetic force as they ricochet off the arches in a chaotic, overlapping roar.
Refusing to grant her the distance, I catch her before she can even reset her stance.
My hand hooks around her waist, hauling her back into the unyielding wall of my armor.
Limbs and teeth thrash against my armor in a feral whirlwind.
She elbows the gaps in my rib-plating, her joints clicking against the alloy, and kicks at my shins with the heavy, steel toes of her salvage boots.
It is like a starcat attacking—all spitting rage and useless, beautiful violence.
I wrap my arms around her, pinning her elbows to her sides and lifting her off the floor until her toes dangle uselessly above the deck.
The friction of her tunic against my armor and the frantic, staccato rate of her heart against my back create a sensory overload.
I feel every muscle in her wiry frame bunch and release as she twists, trying to find a leverage point she lacks.
"Let! Me! Go!" she screams, her head whipping back to strike against my shoulder guard. The impact should daze her, yet she only seems to grow more feral. "You don't get to do that! You don't get to touch me, you don't get to tattoo me, and you sure as hell don't get to keep me!"
"You chose this path the moment you breached my hull.
" My words buzz deep inside her. "You woke a sleeping giant and shattered the stasis cycles.
Now, Virex Prime bleeds power, and the void claws at the bulkheads.
This is the consequence of your greed, scavenger.
You are the marker the ship has latched onto.
It is a debt you will pay, because I never asked for this awakening any more than you did. "
"I don't care about your ship!" Her body jerks in a fresh attempt to wrench free. "I have my own life! People are going to look for me. My crew?—"
I tighten my grip just enough to stifle her next thrash and say, "You have no crew. My scanners already digested the logs of your pathetic vessel. You are a ghost drifting in a graveyard, Nyra. Alone. Indebted. Forgotten."
She goes rigid at the mention of her name, her breathing turning into a series of sharp, broken gasps.
The anger remains the dominant force, curdling into a focused, calculating hatred burning through the amber-brown of her eyes.
I can practically hear the gears in her head grinding as she looks for a weakness in my plates.
"Don't say my name," she hisses, the words more dangerous than her screams. "You don't have the right."
I find myself staring at the sharp line of her cheekbones, flushing with the heat of her exertion.
Any other creature would have broken by now.
Any other species would have recognized the absolute futility of fighting a Reaper Commander in the heart of his own warship.
While I expect her to break, she recalibrates instead, her mind clearly spinning through a thousand different ways to kill me.
The defiance acts as fuel, stoking a fixation crawling beneath my skin. I desire to see how far this fire goes. I want to know if I can crush the spirit of a woman who looks at a god and sees only an obstacle.
"You are a creature of many words and very little power," I note. The organic translator nestled low in my throat utilizes the linguistic data the ship parsed when she first touched my stasis console, shaping the words into her own fringe dialect with a mocking edge.
"You think this is funny?" she blurts, her fingers clawing at the gauntlets around her waist. "You think you can just kidnap me and I'll eventually just... what? Accept it? I will break every single light on this boat. I will rip the wires out of the walls until this thing stops breathing."
Commander, the ship queries, a subsonic hum of data shifting through the deck. The marker is resistant. However, the biological bridge is stable, and the connection is hard-coded into the primary drive. She is essential. You must preserve the connection.
I am aware; I think back, my focus narrowing strictly on the tactical variable in my arms.
I squeeze her tighter, feeling the way her ribs expand and contract against my armor.
Her structural frailty contrasts sharply with her aggressive output.
She defies optimal survival logic. Observing such defiance reveals a fascinating tactical variable that must undergo rigorous security and analysis.
"Try it," I state flatly, stripping any emotion from the command. "The outcome will remain unchanged."
Virex Prime lets out a long, resonant wavering through the deck plates, a sound Nyra likely perceives as a mechanical groan. The harmonic shift in the ship's consciousness tells me everything I need to know. The vessel has recognized its heart.
I speak to the ship in my native tongue, the syllables thick and guttural, grinding like heavy stones. I command it to reclaim the perimeter and divert all auxiliary power to the Sector Four Holding Wing to secure the tactical ward.
"What was that?" Nyra demands sharp and brittle as she stops thrashing for a split second to stare at me, her eyes darting to my jaw. "What are you saying to it? If you're planning on venting me out an airlock, just do it and get it over with!"
Ignoring her outburst to focus on the internal directives I currently weave; I speak again in the language of the Reapers, ordering the ship to prepare the sterilization protocols for the holding wing.
The creature is contaminated with Fringe-world grime and carbon scoring.
I tell the ship to prepare the reclamation cycle and adjust the water-vapor settings for her fragile biology.
Acknowledged, Commander, the ship rumbles, the judders so deep they likely rattle the bones in her chest. The Holding Wing is being pressurized. Tactical containment is active. Shall I process the items she carries?
I answer in my guttural, native speech, commanding the vessel to collect every piece of her prep kit from the core chamber floor.
The pulse pistol she dropped at the column.
The cutter on her belt. The primitive vibro-blade, the pry tool she has already broken, and the spare oxygen cells clipped to her hip. Recycle them.
"Hey! Answer me!" Nyra screams, her palms slamming into my chest again as she hears the heavy, undulating sequence of the ship shifting its power.
The dim, amber emergency lights overhead flare into high-intensity beams, flooding the corridor with a blinding, clinical white light.
"What is going on with the lights? And don't you touch K-Seven!
If you hurt my drone, I swear to every star in the sky, I will find a way to melt your circuits! "
Looking down, I watch the sweat make her skin glisten under the new, harsh glare; her dark hair forms a wild halo, and her eyes are wide with a frantic need for information she cannot parse.
Delicious chaos radiates from her confusion.
She attempts to grasp the rules of this new reality. The only law here is me.
"The ship and I are discussing your new accommodations," I growl, letting the translator resting beneath my throat shape my voice into the clean, flat cadence of her own tongue.
"Accommodations? You mean a cell!" Renewed energy fuels her fresh attempt to kick my shins. "I refuse to stay here. I have a ship out there that needs me. I have?—"
"You have nothing but the debt of waking me," I interrupt, my patience thinning as the biological bond continues to throb in my mind.
A constant, quaking reminder that she belongs here, in the marrow of this vessel.
"You will not leave, Nyra. Not until I have determined the full extent of what your presence has done to my systems."
Shifting my hold, I hook one arm beneath her knees and the other behind her back to hoist her fully into the air. The movement is swift, catching her off guard. She lets out a startled gasp that quickly turns into a high-pitched bellow of outrage.
"Put me down! You giant, rusted bucket of bolts! Put me down!"
I turn away from the column and begin the march out of the core chamber. My stride is long and relentless, eating up the distance of the hallway. Behind me, the massive blast doors of the chamber begin to slide shut, the heavy metal grinding together with a finality that makes Nyra flinch.
"My suit! My helmet!" she shouts, her head whipping around to look at the retreating doors, then back at the drone still hovering in its stasis field. "You left them there! And K-Seven! You can't just leave it!"