17. Nyra #2
The drone chirps, a sharp, electronic sound of protest, before a new image flickers into existence in the open space.
This one is thermal—blobs of hot, angry orange moving through a sea of deep, cold blue.
I witness the boarding party. They clear the airlock and begin navigating the secondary maintenance shafts.
Sharp obsidian and forgotten tech twist Virex Prime into a labyrinth, a maze built to swallow intruders who nonetheless move with a terrifying purpose.
Then I see him.
Draevik’s silhouette towers on the bridge feed, a massive presence of pure white heat.
He is miles away, separated from me by a mountain of fortified hull and sealed bulkheads.
He stands perfectly still. Too still. He stares into the void through the viewport, his armored hands on the weapons interface.
He knows the boarders are in the corridors—but Selra corrupts his targeting systems, scrambles the internal grid, and strips his control over the ship’s defenses.
He’s a god of war fighting blind in his own house.
“Draevik, hold on,” I pray aloud, even as the thick walls of my cage swallow the sound.
The first breach is real now. I feel it in the way the air pressure in the Sanctum shifts—a subtle, nauseating tug at my eardrums. The ship is gasping. Those harpoons latched on like straws drinking from the ship’s lifeblood.
Fear spikes, hot and piercing. This new, overwhelming dread takes hold, bringing the stomach-turning realization of a universe without him.
Life before Draevik amounted to nothing more than a haunting, a spectral drifting through the void.
A forgotten orphan scrounging for scraps in the dirt who nobody bothered to look at twice.
He is the anchor. He is the terrifying, ancient, surprisingly gentle monster who brought me stew and took care of me while I was injured. I want to hear the gravel in his voice.
I want him to survive. The thought hits me like a kinetic slug.
“K-Seven, I am leaving this box,” I bark, moving toward the shimmering violet console embedded in the dais. "The ship is letting me in because it's desperate. Use my biometric signature to bridge the gap to the core."
"Nyra, the Commander’s orders were absolute. Sector Nine is under total lockdown," the drone moans.
"The Commander knows they're inside, but Selra is shredding his internal sensors! He can't target them if the ship can't see them!" I yell, slamming my palm onto the console.
The onyx surface ripples under my touch. The amethyst radiance flares blindingly bright, and for a second, I feel Virex Prime’s mind. Static, pain, and a deep, ancient hunger collide within its consciousness. It recognizes me, remembering the blood I gave it.
Help, the ship seems to whisper through the mark on my chest.
My priorities have shifted. Survival is about anchoring myself to him.
I have to reach him. I need to be the eyes he lacks in this moment.
I must stay close to these core systems, to the very brain of this beast, and fight Selra for every inch of code until I can break these doors and get to the bridge.
"Bridge the connection, K," I command quietly, my eyes on the heat signatures moving through the maze toward him. "We’re going to give the Warlord his sight back, and then I'm getting to that bridge."
The violet color on the console intensifies, bleeding into the air like an open wound.
Desperation radiates from the ship, sinking through my feet and into my teeth.
Those thermal ghosts of the boarding party are already navigating the heavy maintenance junction between Sector Four and the spine.
They move with a precise, unerring flow that makes my stomach drop—each turn avoiding the active gravity-wells and stasis-field choke points Draevik layered between the bridge and the Sanctum.
"K-Seven, I need a direct link into the environmental control sub-layer," my hands hovering over the liquid stone of the interface. "If Selra is masking their heat, we find them by the pressure they're displacing. We track the air they're breathing."
"Nyra, the ship’s internal security is fighting the Unit! Selra’s ghost code is mimicking the Commander’s authorization," the drone shrieks, its sensors spinning in a frantic blur. "Access denied! Access denied!"
"No more talking, K! Just move!" I yell, pushing away from the console.
The mark flares with a white-hot intensity.
I gasp, my knees buckling as the interface fights back.
I pull my hands away from the console, the connection snapping like a frayed wire.
My head thumps with an unyielding, sharp pain, and for a second, my vision swims with amber and violet light clashing behind my eyelids.
I want the ship to stop coming through me.
I want its ancient, aching circuits gone from my senses. I just need out.
“K-Seven, status of the bridge doors!” I cry, staggering deeper into the room.
"Internal sensors are failing, but the Unit detected a seismic spike in the primary lift-shaft," the drone babbles. "Something heavy just fell. It appears the shaft is blocked."
A quick glance at the fading holographic display shows multiple men and women in the first wave, with more funneling in behind them from the leeches still clamped to the hull.
They reach the primary lift-shaft directly beneath the bridge.
If the lift car drops, it might buy Draevik time, but only briefly—they’ll find another way up.
Fear for myself fades into a distant, muffled echo. The real terror stems from the image of Draevik standing there, a giant in a suit of armor slowly becoming a coffin. He waits for a war in the stars, but death is climbing out of the floorboards.
The weight in my chest is not fear for myself because I want to save the man who looked at a broken scavenger and decided she had some kind of worth.
"I have to get out of here," I gasp, my legs feeling like lead as I regain my footing. "I have to get to the spine. I have to reach him."
"Sector Nine is on Lockdown Level Nine, Nyra! The doors will only open for a Sovereign-key!" K-Seven vocoder blares, hovering inches from my ear.
I charge toward the massive obsidian slabs that seal the Sanctum, but they remain a solid, mocking wall of stone. Draevik’s lockdown is absolute. I slam my fists against the cold surface, a useless, frantic flurry of desperation. He’s being buried alive on the bridge, and I’m buried in the heart.
"The ship knows me," I shout, spinning around to scan the room. "There’s always a back way. Scavengers don't look at doors, K. We look for the cracks."
My eyes lock on an alcove near the base of the primary reactor pillar. It’s a rough seam, one I noticed during my late-night pacing but dismissed as a structural quirk. Now, in the red flicker of the combat alert, it phosphoresces with a faint, invitation-like violet light.
"K-Seven, illumination!" I command.
The drone darts forward, its spotlight cutting through the shadows. The light reveals a series of interlocking stone plates, etched with the same bio-reactive script found throughout the ship. This surpasses a mere storage locker to function as a manual access point.
"Unit identifies this as a primary maintenance artery," K-Seven chirps, sounding skeptical. "It leads directly to the core systems and the central spine. However, the clearance required is?—"
"I have the clearance right here," I growl, clutching at the burning heat on my chest.
Without waiting for a digital handshake, I rip a thin bracket from the base of the nearest pillar—the obsidian is ancient, and the fittings are brittle where the bio-reactive coating has worn thin—and wedge it into the seam, using every ounce of my scavenger leverage to pry.
The stone resists for a heartbeat, then yields with a grinding, metallic groan.
I press my palm against the inner sensor.
For a terrible second, nothing happens. Then the mark tattooed on me flares, an intense, white-hot burn that feels like a key turning in my very bones.
Instead of it just scanning a brand, it's reading the living blood vibrating underneath it, recognizing the Warlord’s own mark pumping through me.
The panel shudders and slides back with a reluctant groan, revealing a narrow, vertical shaft lined with lambent cables and blazing neural conduits.
It’s the nervous system running through Virex Prime.