15. Nyra #2
Tearing the blanket off the shelf, I break into a full sprint, letting the corridors blur past me.
My boots hammering the bio-mat flooring, the ship's bioluminescence flaring to life ahead of me in a frantic cascade of violet and amber. Virex Prime can feel my panic—the mark is throbbing, a hot, insistent rumble that matches the ship’s own reactor throb.
Every door I approach cycles open before I reach it, the ship clearing my path with an urgency I've never seen from it.
"Draevik!" The syllables sprint down the passage, shattering into a thousand tiny, metallic shards that rattle against the ceiling and then vanish into the dark. "Draevik, where are you?"
K-Seven zooms ahead of me, its thrusters whining at maximum output. "Commander's heat signature is located on the bridge. Deck Two, Sector Three."
The bridge. I have never been to the bridge. He's never let me. I don't care.
I take the maintenance shaft K-Seven highlights—a vertical climb that feels like a breeze compared to the rusted-out chutes of the Harrow.
My Weave-reinforced grip holds firm against the rungs, and my lungs burn with a strength that still surprises me.
Two decks up, a hard left through a corridor lined with dormant weapons racks, and then a massive fortified door—three times my height, engraved with Reaper glyphs that beam red as I approach.
The door hesitates. I can feel it—a movement through the stone, a moment of mechanical indecision, the ship weighing its Commander's privacy against the heat radiating from the mark.
The door opens.
The bridge on Virex Prime stretches wide and immensely.
The ceiling vaults upward into a cathedral of black stone, ribbed with bioluminescent veins that branch and fork overhead like a canopy of twinkling trees.
The forward viewport stretches the full width of the room—a wall of stars so vast it makes me dizzy.
Tactical consoles line the perimeter in a sweeping horseshoe, their surfaces alive with text and holographic projections of star systems I've never seen on any Guild chart.
The air is colder here, drier, carrying the mineral tang of recycled atmosphere and the deep, resonant roar of a reactor operating at full capacity.
Draevik stands at the central command platform, his back to me, his hands braced on a console the size of a dining table.
"You should be in the Obsidian Sanctum." He responds in a low, unyielding rumble while he keeps his focus on the console.
"Draevik, shut up and listen to me."
He finally turns, his frame casting a long shadow across the deck. "You are trespassing on my bridge, Nyra. Leave. Now."
"There's a fleet coming!" I cut him off, breathless, bracing my hands on my knees.
"Scavenger fleet. Four to eight ships. Led by a man named Korr—Rhydan Korr, Korr the Cutter.
He's the worst of the worst, Draevik. Salvaging ships, to him, is butchery.
He sells crews for parts. And he knows you're here.
He knows I'm here. He has your hull signature and my biometric ping, and he has a tech specialist who claims she can crack Virex Prime's neural lattice. "
The temperature in the room drops. I can feel it—a physical shift, the air thinning, the bioluminescent veins in the walls flickering from their persistent blue-violet to a deep, gleaming red. Virex Prime is listening and becoming enraged.
But Draevik's face is what stops me cold.
The man I've been living with—the one who fed me stew, who questioned me relentlessly about my life in the guilds, and who meticulously watched over my healing—disappears.
It happens in the span of a single breath.
His eyes go cold, the warmth in them draining out like heat from a breached hull.
His mouth firms into a line so rigid it looks carved from the same obsidian as his ship.
The muscles in his neck cord, the veins flaring bright beneath his skin, and his hands curl into fists at his sides with a progressive, deliberate pressure that makes the knuckles crack.
I'm looking at a warlord.
"Virex Prime." The command hits the air with a sub-zero finality, the syllables dense and lightless. Every warmth I’ve coaxed from him has been flash-frozen, replaced by a deep, tectonic friction that ignores my presence entirely.
It sounds like the voice from that first day, when he pinned me against the column and stared through my faceplate like I was something to be cataloged and consumed.
"Why was I not notified of this intercept? Confirm external contacts."
Commander, the recent autonomic recalibration prioritized internal stability.
Systems are still mending from the structural breach and the unauthorized exit attempt by the Integrated Biological Variable.
Long-range sensors were on a secondary power-cycle.
Four distinct vessel signatures at extreme range.
Trajectory is a direct intercept. Estimated arrival: fourteen hours, twenty-six minutes.
"Weapons status."
Primary armament arrays are at sixty-two percent capacity.
Secondary kinetic batteries are operational.
Defensive shielding is at full integrity.
Commander, the signal the bonded individual intercepted contains references to a neural lattice infiltration specialist. Recommend immediate hardening of all external access points.
"Harden them. Lock out every access port on the hull. The breach in the lateral flank—how far has the regeneration progressed?"
Seventy-one percent structural closure. The biomass has been regrowing the hull plating since the marker integration, but a full seal requires another forty hours at the current growth rate.
"We don't have forty hours. Reinforce the breach perimeter with layered stasis fields and route the secondary kinetic batteries to cover the gap.
Nothing gets through that wound. If anything larger than a microbe approaches my ship, I want the point defense grid to vaporize it before it crosses the outer perimeter. "