14. Draevik #2
Over the following days, I restructure my schedule around her absence.
I run the reactor diagnostics during her sleep cycles and conduct hull inspections while she explores the corridors.
When she is in the Sanctum, I go to the bridge.
When she moves to the galley, I retreat to the stasis chamber and review tactical archives from campaigns that ended before her species learned to make fire.
I sleep at odd intervals—two hours here, three hours there—timing the cycles so that our waking periods overlap as little as possible.
Yet, performing this maneuver leaves her effectively isolated.
Seeking a compromise that eases my own restless surveillance, I quietly rewrite the security protocols restricting her small machine.
I grant K-Seven even further, yet still limited, access to the secondary internal networks.
If I am to keep my distance to preserve my failing architecture, she must have a responsive tool to occupy her mind, a companion to keep her grounded while I stay away.
In theory, it sounds like a sound strategy. It lasts until the first accidental collision.
I round the corner into the primary spine corridor, heading for the bridge, when she appears from the opposite direction, carrying a bowl of stew and arguing with K-Seven about thermostat calibration.
We nearly collide. My hand shoots out—instinct, pure and ugly—and catches her elbow before she stumbles.
The stew sloshes. Her skin is warm under my fingers.
"Whoa." She steadies herself, looking up at me with those amber-brown eyes. "You're like a wall with legs, Draevik. Make some noise when you walk."
"You are carrying an open vessel of liquid through a corridor with a twelve-degree curve," I point out abruptly, releasing her elbow faster than necessary. "The spill would have contaminated the bio-mat substrate."
"Right. You grabbed me to protect the floor."
I keep walking. Behind me, I hear her mutter something to K-Seven that includes the words emotionally constipated and giant alien toddler. The drone whirrs in what sounds suspiciously like agreement.
The encounters multiply. I adjust my schedule; she adjusts hers.
I shift my sleep cycle by two hours; she wakes early.
I route my hull inspections through Sector Nine; she discovers Sector Nine's observation deck and starts eating her meals there.
Virex Prime appears to be a warship the length of a small moon, and somehow we keep ending up in the same corridor.
"Your ship is herding us," she accuses one evening, catching me in the galley as I reach for a hydration canister. She is sitting on the counter, her legs dangling, her boots knocking against the base panel in a lazy tempo.
"The ship does not herd." My tone brooks no argument.
"The ship absolutely herds. It closed three doors behind me and left only one open, and it led straight here." She points with her spoon, aiming in my direction. "To you."
Commander, Virex Prime interjects directly into my consciousness. The bonded individual is correct. I have been optimizing foot traffic patterns to increase overlap probability. This is standard process protocol for bonded pairs.
I ignore them both. The ship disapproves of all of it.
Commander, Virex Prime interjects on the third morning of my new routine.
Your current sleep pattern is degrading cognitive function by eleven percent.
The bonded individual has inquired about your location four times in the last cycle.
She asked the drone to scan for your heat signature.
The drone complied. I did not intervene because I was curious what would happen.
"You are a warship, not a matchmaker."
I am a vessel operating with a bonded pair whose primary signatures are diverging instead of synchronizing. This is operationally suboptimal.
I ignore the ship and pull up the atmospheric density readouts for the lower decks.
But the data blurs in front of my eyes because I track her already—a gold smudge on the security grid, moving through the corridor outside the galley with that specific, loose-limbed stride that tells me she is comfortable.
She has stopped checking behind her when she walks.
She has stopped flinching when the doors cycle.
Somewhere in the last cycle, Nyra began to move through Virex Prime like she belongs in it.
I zoom into the feed. She is running her hand along the wall, her fingers trailing over the bioluminescent veins, and the ship is lighting up beneath her touch—a ripple of blue-violet racing ahead of her palm as if the hull were eager to be touched.
She pauses at the observation alcove the ship built for her—the one with the viewport and the warm stone shelf—and I watch her settle into it with her bowl of stew and K-Seven bobbing overhead.
She looks settled. She looks at ease. She has stopped running and started inhabiting.
I catch myself adjusting the temperature in the alcove from the bridge—raising it two degrees because I notice her rubbing her arms in the last feed—and I stop.
My hand hovers over the environmental controls, frozen, because I realize I have been doing this for days.
Every corridor she walks, I have already adjusted the atmosphere.
Every section she enters, I have already verified its structural integrity.
Every meal the dispenser produces, I have already cross-referenced against the Weave's metabolic data to ensure her nutrient levels hold.
I guard her from three levels away. The distance comes off as a performance. The care is compulsive.
Commander, the ship ventures almost gently. You adjusted the gravity in Corridor Twelve by point-three percent yesterday. The bonded individual's gait analysis indicated mild fatigue in her left knee. You corrected for it before she reached the next junction.
"Operational productivity."
You also rerouted the ventilation in the galley to eliminate a particulate count that was within acceptable parameters but caused her to sneeze once.
"The particulate was a contaminant."
The particulate was cinnamon.
I close the environmental controls and stand. The star charts are vivid behind me, a galaxy of dying suns and forgotten empires, and I argue with my warship about seasoning particles.
Hours later, I continue to study her.
From the bridge, from the security feeds, from the neural link that lets me taste the edges of her emotional state through our connection—I study her the way I once studied enemy formations.
Methodically. Obsessively. And with a growing awareness that the data is changing me faster than I can process it.
She laughs differently when she is alone with K-Seven.
It is looser, less guarded—a sound that comes from her belly rather than her throat.
She bites the inside of her cheek when she is thinking hard, her eyes going distant and unfocused, and her fingers drum against whatever surface is closest in a rapid, syncopated sequence that matches no pattern I can identify.
When she is frustrated, she talks to herself in a low, muttering stream that includes creative profanity I have begun cataloging for future reference.
Her grief is quieter. I catch it on the security feed late that evening—she sits in the observation alcove, her knees to her chest, staring out at the nebula with her chin resting on her knees and her eyes carrying something old and heavy and far away.
My hand extends toward the holographic projection of her before I register the movement.
Fingers spread, hovering over the ghost of her shoulder, as if I could reach through the feed and press my palm against the curve of her back.
I gaze down at my own hand—the hand of a warlord, the hand that has crushed ship hulls and broken command chains—suspended in the air above a hologram of a sleeping scavenger like an offering she did not ask for.
I retract it. Fast. Clinical.
Virex Prime logs the gesture. I feel the data point enter the ship's behavioral archive with the quiet precision of a closing drawer.
I delete the log. The ship pauses. Then obeys.
Her vital signs are stable, her breathing even, but the bond carries a cold, heavy undertone that settles into my own chest like a stone dropped into still water.
She is homesick. She is mourning a life built out of scraps and stubbornness and the familiar weight of debts she understood.
I am offering her a galaxy, and she misses the scrapyards.
The realization lands with an unsettling depth. I delete the thought. The phrase is on the blacklist of emotional responses my training should have purged decades ago.
On the fourth evening, I make the mistake of entering the Sanctum while she is still awake.
I need the tactical console, and I calculate that she will be in the galley.
Instead, she is cross-legged on the dais, disassembling K-Seven's tertiary guidance array with a pair of improvised tools she fashioned from the ship's own hull plating.
“You’re back,” she observes, fingers still working while her focus remains locked on the drone’s innards.
"I require the console."
"It's your console. I'm not sitting on it."