Chapter 28
G reta floated in the center of the makeshift bridge, pink scales glowing under the newly awakened amber lights.
The bridge was smaller than she'd expected for a ship this size — designed for a crew of maybe four, the consoles arranged in a tight semicircle around a central command position that she'd claimed by default because she was the one who understood what the readouts meant.
Her hands moved across the cracked console with practiced confidence, rerouting the last stubborn power feed through a secondary pathway she'd identified twenty minutes ago and been working toward ever since.
"Thrusters are online," she said, voice tight with excitement. "Altitude control is shaky, but we've got lift. Klari — I need you at the primary yoke. This thing was built for hands like yours, not mine."
Klari slid into the oversized pilot seat beside her. His massive frame filled it perfectly, like the seat had been waiting for exactly his dimensions, clawed hands closing around the dual grips with the easy confidence of someone who had handled vessels before.
Fresh blood still seeped from the gashes across his chest, dark against his indigo scales, but his golden eyes were steady on the instruments.
"Tell me what to do," he said.
She flashed him a fierce grin. "Push power to thirty percent on my mark.
Then ease the yoke forward — slowly, like you're coaxing it, not commanding it.
We're not flying to the stars today — just breaking atmosphere and clearing the platform.
The hull has stress fractures in the port side I don't love, but the shields should protect us from the worst of what space will throw at us.
No banking until I tell you we can bank. Ready?"
His hands tightened on the yoke. "Ready."
"Mark."
Klari fed power to the engines.
The wreck shuddered violently, a full-body tremor that ran from the nose to the aft section and back again.
Metal groaned deep in the structure as years — decades?
— of compacted sediment and coral cracked away from the hull in chunks, the seabed releasing its claim on the ship with obvious reluctance.
Greta grabbed the edge of the console to steady herself, tail flicking with nervous energy, eyes moving between three different readouts simultaneously.
Then, slowly at first — haltingly, like something waking from a very long sleep — the ancient ship began to rise.
Bubbles erupted around them in a roaring white storm that completely whited out the viewports. The ship shook as it tore free from the seabed, trailing sand and coral and tons of accumulated marine growth.
Greta pressed her free hand flat to the console, reading the vibrations through her palm the way she'd learned to read prototypes — feeling for the difference between normal stress and the kind that preceded catastrophic failure.
"Come on, you beautiful bastard," she muttered. "Don't quit on me now."
The ship accelerated.
Faster.
The water column parted around them like a curtain being ripped open. They shot upward in a cascade of white water and churning sediment, the pressure dropping rapidly against the hull, the viewports clearing as the worst of the debris cloud fell away below them.
Greta pressed her palm to the viewport, eyes wide, watching the dark depths give way to lighter blues, then turquoise, then brilliant sunlight fracturing through the surface above them like broken glass.
They broke the surface in a spectacular explosion of spray, the ship punching through into open air with a sound like the ocean exhaling.
A torrent of water roared out of the open breaches and shattered viewports, cascading from the bridge in a thundering waterfall. The flooded cabin emptied in seconds — gallons upon gallons rushing out through every crack and tear, leaving the deck slick and gleaming but no longer submerged.
The last sheets of seawater poured off the consoles and tilted pilot seat, dripping from the ceiling in steady streams before finally falling silent.
Only a few shallow puddles remained, trembling with the ship’s vibration.
The ship climbed.
Actually climbed .
Greta's breath caught in her throat as the artificial world spread out beneath them, shrinking with every second.
The atolls shrank into glittering specks.
The kelp forests became emerald threads against the turquoise.
The glittering water stretched in every direction, and far above, the artificial sun burned steady and false in the engineered sky, close enough now that she could see it wasn't a star at all — a constructed light source, a machine pretending to be something ancient.
She could see the shape of the platform now — a vast rectangle lattice, edges sharp and impossibly precise, the kind of geometry that only existed when something had been designed rather than grown.
Boundaries marked by faint energy fields that shimmered at the edges where the contained water met open space. And beyond it?—
Greta’s breath hitched in her throat.
More platforms.
Hundreds. Thousands.
An endless grid of identical arenas stretching across the 3D horizon like tiles on an infinite game board, each one its own contained world, each one the same turquoise and gold from up here.
Each one with its own prize. Trapped. Confined.
"My God…" she whispered, voice cracking on the words. "Klari, look. There are so many. I had no idea. The scale — it's a whole system. They're running thousands of these games at once. Thousands of females, thousands of males…"
She couldn't stop talking, the words tumbling out as her engineer brain tried to process the horror and the wonder simultaneously, the way it always processed things that were too large to hold whole — by breaking them into components, by finding the logic of the system underneath .
"They must recycle the biomass between cycles.
Look at the kelp patterns — they're too regular.
Engineered. And the currents — I bet they're artificial too, generated to keep the contestants contained within platform boundaries.
The platforms are probably modular — drop a new set of players in, run the game, extract the winners, reset the board.
It's efficient. Horrifying, but genuinely efficient.
How many females have they run through this?
How many have been through what I went through in that first sequence and never found anyone like?—"
She stopped herself.
Klari wasn't looking at the view.
He was watching her. Had been watching her, she suspected, for most of the ascent.
His golden eyes stayed fixed on her face, soft with something deep and unguarded as she narrated the horror unfolding beneath them. One corner of his mouth twitched — not quite a smile, but the thing that lived next to smiles in his expressions.
"You're magnificent when you do that," he said quietly.
She blinked, warmth rising under her scales despite everything. "Do what?"
"Turn terror into understanding. You see the machine and immediately you want to know how it works so you can break it.
Or improve it." He reached over and brushed his knuckles gently along her jaw, the touch brief and certain.
"I could listen to you talk about alien engineering for the rest of my life. "
Greta's heart stuttered in a way she was going to examine later, privately, when she had the bandwidth for it. She opened her mouth to reply — something deflecting, something wry, the kind of response she kept ready for moments like this? —
A warning chime sounded from the console. Sharp and insistent.
Klari went completely still beside her, the warmth in his expression replaced by something flat and alert in the space of a single breath.
"Cargo bay door," he said. "It's open. Internal sensor just tripped."
She was already turning toward the console when the aft hatch hissed open behind them.
And the last rival stepped onto the bridge.