17. Nyra
NYRA
Ishould have run when I had the chance. The doors sealed a lifetime ago—or maybe a few minutes or even hours—leaving only the sound of boots clicking against the stone as I pace the dais.
Time fractures when the floorboards hum with the feeling of charging kinetic batteries.
The sound of my pacing echoes back at me like a taunt, rattling around the high, vaulted ceiling.
Draevik thinks he tucked me away. He thinks he put his "Variable" in a vault where the universe can't reach it.
He's wrong. Virex Prime is still talking to me, and it sounds like a dying animal.
The mark burns like a persistent brand. It flares with every cycle of the reactor, sending a surging heat that makes my skin itch beneath the thin fabric of my tunic.
I touch my palm against the nearest pillar.
The ship’s logic feels like a fever. It reaches out, bleeding into my senses, showing me the raw edges of its own panic.
"K-Seven." The name escapes like a leak in a compressed hull—hissing and desperate—before the crushing weight of the void smothers it. "Talk to me. Show me what he’s seeing."
The drone descends from the shadows above, its lenses spinning in a frantic, clicking dance. It hovers just in front of my face, projecting a grainy, amber-tinted holographic grid into the air.
"Unit is maintaining a low-level tether to the secondary bridge sensors," K-Seven chirps.
Its voice is tinny, competing with the deep, structural groans of the ship.
"Commander Draevik has engaged the primary fleet.
Multiple hostile signatures eliminated. However, Unit detects an anomaly in the local data-sphere. "
I step into the light of the hologram. "What kind of anomaly?"
"Invasive code. It is of human origin. High-density. It is spreading through the lateral breach."
I stare at the grid, viewing Virex Prime’s neural lattice—a beautiful, sparkling web of lines. But at the edge, where the hull is scarred and open, the lines turn a sickly, stagnant gray. It looks like rot.
Selra.
Even in the deepest corners of the Fringe, everyone knows the name of Korr’s ghost. She is the technician who once took down an orbital station’s life support systems just to see if the backup generators would kick in.
This digital butcher earned her fame by peeling back a ship's defenses until the crew is left naked in the void. She is rewriting the ship’s brain from the outside.
I watch as a segment of the internal defense grid flickers and vanishes.
The script on the walls of the Sanctum stutters, the glyphs flickering with a high-pitched whine that makes my teeth ache.
"She's overriding the permissions," I mutter, my fingers tracing the gray rot on the hologram. "She’s convincing the ship that the intruders are part of the crew. She’s spoofing the biometric locks."
A massive shudder rolls through the Sanctum. It is a heavy, grinding, metallic impact that makes the air jump in my lungs.
"K-Seven! Direct feed. Now!" I order.
The hologram shifts. The grid vanishes, and a flickering, low-angle view from a maintenance drone near Sector Four replaces it. The image distorts, washed in the frantic red of the combat alert.
Spliced metal and hissing atmosphere form a ragged mouth across the lateral scar. The feed is minutes behind—drone relay lag, K-Seven warns me—but the breach has already happened.
And then, the first harpoon slams home. It’s a massive, tungsten-tipped spike that sinks into the bone of the ship, trailing a thick, firm cable. Two more follow in rapid succession. They look like parasitic teeth sinking into a whale.
My stomach drops. I know those harpoons. I’ve seen them strip the life out of salvage wrecks back in the Fringe.
"They're on us," I breathe.
The screech of metal on metal travels through the floor, through my boots, and straight into my spine. It’s a violation. The place that healed me and gave me a sanctuary is being torn open.
And then I notice the first scavenger clear the airlock.
He wears a heavy, industrial pressure suit and holds a pulse-rifle tight against his shoulder, moving with a lethal, predatory grace.
Behind him, another one. And another. These professional killers form a boarding party, stepping into the heart of Virex Prime with their lights cutting through the ancient dark.
Fear spikes in my chest, but it’s a new kind of terror. It is the realization of what happens if they win.
My eyes dart to the secondary feed—the one showing the bridge.
I catch the back of Draevik's armored head.
He knows they're inside—he must; the ship would have told him—but he's pinned between the fleet still firing from the void and the pack now crawling through the corridors.
I watch his armored hands move across the holographic interface, trying to fight a war on two fronts with a ship that's losing its mind.
"Draevik," I moan, my hand clenching into a fist. "You can't do this alone."
The gray rot on the sensor grid accelerates.
Selra is winning. She exposes the boarders only partially—the ship screams their presence the moment they breach—but she degrades everything else.
Turret targeting, bulkhead sequencing, internal gravity control.
She's stripping the ship's ability to fight back from the inside, turning every automated defense into a coin flip.
I'm standing in a cage, watching the man who saved my life get buried under a war he can't fight alone.
"Unit advises against emotional escalation," K-Seven states flatly, its lenses zooming in on the boarding party. "Commander Draevik’s combat prowess is?—"
"Shut up, K! Look at them!" I scream.
One of the men in the lead stops. He raises a hand, and the group halts.
He reaches up to his helmet, toggling a switch.
His visor clears, revealing a face seemingly stitched together from spare parts.
A thick, jagged scar runs from his temple down to his jaw, while a milky, clouded white film covers one eye.
He looks at the walls with a hunger that makes my skin crawl.
"That's not Korr," I say out loud. "That must be his second. Look at the tools on his belt—harvesting gear. Gene-market hardware. He's the one they send in to strip the cargo while Korr watches from the ship."
Behind him steps a woman who commands the air around her just by entering it.
Slim and sharp-featured, she moves with an eerie, calculated grace.
Her pale lavender skin reveals a non-human hybrid lineage, while her silver hair follows a brutally short, sharp cut.
But it’s the neural interface implants tracking along her temples that catch my eye, burnishing with a soft, invasive blue light. This must be Selra.
She approaches the sealed door and bypasses the breaching charge. She presses her bare lavender hand flat against the glossy wall, her dark, reflective eyes sliding shut. The implants at her temples flare. The script on the door in front of her flickers once, then twice.
"Rovik, there's a secondary pulse." Her voice comes through the feed, smooth, analytical, and terrifyingly calm.
"The Warlord is awake, yes. But the ship...
just as we thought, the ship is protecting a second biological rhythm.
It's masking someone." She opens her dark eyes, looking at Rovik.
"Find the second pulse. The ship is tethered to it. "
Rovik smiles, an ugly movement of his lips. The script on the door turns a dull, lifeless gray under Selra's touch.
The footage cuts off into a swarm of static.
I look around the Sanctum, desperation in my throat. I want to stop them. Then clarity hits: I want him alive. I want the ship to stay alive with him. I refuse to hide while the only being who ever treated me like I mattered faces death.
"K-Seven, find me a back door," I command. "The ship is letting me in. It’s loosening the grip. Find me a way to reach the core systems without Draevik’s key."
"Accessing restricted neural nodes," the drone chirps.
The walls of the Sanctum begin to shimmer.
A frantic, blaring purple radiance—a color I have never seen the ship produce before—replaces the dying amber.
The ship is screaming for help, and I'm the only one listening.
If we're going to survive this, I have to shed the role of shielded captive and become the Warlord's savior.
This is where the fear stops being about my own skin and starts being about his.
I watch the empty air where the footage of Rovik just flickered out, my heartbeat hammering like a nonstop warning.
Draevik embodies a god of war and a relic of a legion that turned stars to ash, though even gods shed blood if they suffer from blindness.
Selra is carving out the ship’s eyes while Rovik and his pack of butchers crawl through its veins.
The blaring indigo glow hammering from the walls mimics a heartbeat—erratic, terrified, and loud.
"K-Seven, I need a visual! Get me back into Sector Four!" I unleash the command, and the Sanctum catches it, amplifying the raw, jagged notes into booming thunder that prowls through the shadows of the arches.
"Internal sensors in Sector Four are offline, Nyra," K-Seven babbles, its little metal body whirring with the ship’s distress. "The invasive code has localized the blackout. Selra has effectively lobotomized the secondary surveillance nodes."
"Then find a primary one! Use the life-support sensors. They can't turn those off without killing the boarding party," I argue.