14. Draevik
DRAEVIK
The tremor starts to intensify in my left hand.
I hang around the command console in the Sanctum, scrolling through the navigation feeds, when my fingers seize on the jet-black surface.
The muscles lock from knuckle to wrist, a violent contraction that sends a spike of light racing up my forearm.
Flattening my palm against the stone, I press hard until the spasm passes, counting the seconds between tremor and release. Four. The last one lasted two.
They are getting longer.
The tremor is far more violent than the brief spasms I’ve experienced over the last few days.
I begin to unspool. The stasis-decay I fear accelerates rapidly whenever I isolate myself on the bridge.
I seek the cold, agonizing logic of the recalibration pod to purge the weakness, refusing to connect the failing of my neural matrix to her absence.
My survival seems tethered to a human scavenger.
I search the tactical archives for a precedent, but a section of my own memory regarding the marker protocols remains locked, encrypted behind a command crystal blurred in my memories.
The stasis wiped the details, leaving only this blinding, irrational compulsion: her pulse is all that stands between my mind and the void.
Elevated heart rates, erratic neural conductivity, and spikes in the adrenal system that mirror combat readiness without a single enemy on the scope.
My body thinks it is at war. My body is wrong.
The training failed. The emotional repression I have maintained for centuries cracked open on that dais, and what leaked through is rewriting my operational parameters in ways no diagnostic can quantify.
Nyra is asleep on the dais behind me, curled beneath the thermal cover with K-Seven hovering above her shoulder like a loyal sentry.
Her breathing fills the Sanctum—prolonged, deep, hypnotic—and every exhale pulls at something lodged beneath my sternum.
I can feel her putter through the tether.
The temperature of her skin is warm, and her body moves with a slow, rolling contentment, relaxed enough to sleep without tension.
The tremor returns. This time it climbs past my wrist and into my bicep, the veins flaring so brightly they throw shadows across the starcharts. I curl my fist and squeeze until the bones grind.
My Reaper species was engineered for sustained operational clarity under extreme duress.
We held formations in the gravity wells of collapsing stars.
We maintained fire discipline while burning through the atmosphere of hostile worlds.
Emotional contamination was trained out of us before our second decade—our biology was pruned and rewired until every response served the hierarchy.
And the training shattered the moment I let myself take what the bond was offering.
The true transgression lay entirely in my mental surrender—a Reaper Commander choosing to stop overriding, choosing to let the hunger win, and now my body has no way to reinstall the walls I dismantled with my own hands.
The next tremor starts in my chest. It rolls outward from the mark, a deep, muscular convulsion that locks my diaphragm and forces the air out of my lungs in a sharp hiss.
The console beneath my hands flickers. The lights in the Sanctum stutter, violet to red and back again, and the ship groans—a low, sub-vocal rolling that makes the floor shudder.
Nyra stirs. She rolls onto her side, her brow creasing, her lips parting around an indistinguishable murmur.
I move.
I exit the Sanctum doors before the next convulsion hits.
The heavy alloy panels cycle shut behind me with a sound like a jaw clamping, and I brace myself against the corridor wall as the tremor tears through my torso.
My lower ventricle lurches into a speed so fast it blurs—a frantic, hammering double-beat designed for combat acceleration, dumping oxygenated blood into muscles that are preparing for a fight that does not exist.
Commander. The ship's voice carries a clinical urgency now.
Your autonomic regulators are cycling outside trained parameters.
The recent physiological event introduced variables the tactical layout cannot categorize.
Neural conductivity and adrenal output have been escalating for seventy-two hours.
Recommendation: immediate recalibration in the stasis chamber.
"I am aware," I grind out. The corridor wall cracks beneath my fist—a hairline fracture spiderwebbing through the obsidian. The ship heals it instantly, the crack sealing itself with a whisper of light, but the damage registers in my mind like an alarm.
I broke my own ship.
The stasis chamber sits three levels below the Sanctum, deep in Virex Prime’s belly, where the hull is thickest and the reactor's drone pounds with a heavy pressure against the eardrums. I descend through the maintenance shafts rather than the main corridors.
I move too fast, my strides eating up the distance with a kinetic aggression that makes the bio-mat flooring ripple beneath my boots.
I need to be away from her. I need distance to think, to breathe, and to wrestle my own nervous system back under the authority of my trained mind.
The chamber is cold. The stasis pod sits at its center, the gel still clouded from my last emergence—centuries ago, when a scavenger girl put her hands on a panel she should never have touched and dragged me back into the living world.
I clutch the pod with both hands and initiate the recalibration manually.
"Virex. Run the autonomic reset. Full spectrum. Suppress the secondary cardiac override and flush the adrenal architecture."
Acknowledged. Initiating recalibration sequence. Duration: approximately four hours. Commander, the recalibration may cause temporary disruption in the marker signal.
"She is asleep."
She was asleep when you left. Current data indicates she has shifted position twice in the last ninety seconds. Her heart rate is climbing.
I close my eyes. Even from three levels below her, the bond sparks—a taut wire moving up and down with the timing of her waking pulse.
She can feel my absence. The thought sends a surge of something through my chest that the recalibration is supposed to eliminate, and the irony is sharp enough to cut.
"Begin the flush."
The process is brutal. The ship floods my neural pathways with a synthetic dampener—cold, precise, scrubbing the accumulated overstimulation from every synapse like acid through corroded wiring.
My muscles seize. My vision whites out. The pod's interior casing radiates a sub-zero chill that bites through the skin of my forearms where I grip the edge, and every nerve ending in my body fires at once—a blinding cacophony of sensation that collapses into a ringing, empty silence.
I sense the bond dimming. The warm thread that connects me to the sleeping figure three levels above goes thin, then thinner, until it is barely a whisper at the far edge of my awareness.
The absence feels like a fist closing around something vital in my chest. My body fights the dampener—every instinct screaming to reject the flush and chase the signal back to its source.
I override the instinct. I have been overriding instincts since before her species crawled out of its oceans.
When it passes, I stand in the cold chamber, breathing evenly, my hands firm on the pod. The tremors are gone. My secondary heart returns to its baseline rate. The adrenal architecture is quiet.
I feel hollow.
The recalibration has done its job. My operational clarity is restored, my autonomic responses are back within acceptable parameters, and after days of glitching, the combat formation is finally cycling smoothly.
I should feel relieved. However, the autonomic reset merely suppresses the noise, leaving the root issue entirely unresolved.
Keeping her close is no longer just a tactical advantage; it is a territorial imperative, a predatory instinct that overrides every logical center I possess.
I return to the Sanctum as the artificial dawn cycle begins.
Nyra is awake, sitting cross-legged on the dais with her flight suit zipped to her collarbones and K-Seven balancing on her knee.
She is pulling apart one of the drone's secondary sensor arrays with a delicacy that reminds me of a surgeon—or a thief.
"You disappeared," she murmurs, her eyes tracking me as I move toward the command console.
"Maintenance," I offer. The word is clipped. Controlled. I keep the console between us.
She watches me for a long stretch, her head tilting slightly, and I catch the calculation behind her stillness. She knows something changed. The distance I have put up registers on her like a shift in the wind—instinctive, immediate, beyond language.
"So." She sets K-Seven's panel down on the dais and crosses her arms. "You gonna tell me why you smell like stasis gel and guilt, or should I just guess?"
"I am reviewing the navigation arrays."
"Cool. You can review the navigation arrays from right there." She taps the dais beside her. "You've been reviewing the navigation arrays from three decks away for two days straight, Draevik. You're acting weird. Weirder than usual, and your usual is already pretty weird."
I keep my focus on the star charts. The projections blur.
Three full breaths pass. Then she slides off the dais, barefoot, and pads across the Sanctum toward the reclamation alcove. She leaves the room with a quiet that unsettles me more than any of her outbursts ever have.
I enforce the distance.