1. Nyra #2
"That's what I thought," I murmur, my mind spinning through the terrifying implications of a warship being torn open from the inside out.
"Unit reiterates objection to boarding," K-Seven chimes, its tone laced with as much warning as a synthesized voice can manage.
"Objection noted. Also ignored."
Marrin's hopper appears on the scope, a battered orange smear closing on the breach from the other side. He's whooping on the open channel, ragged and triumphant. I mute him because I need to think, and Marrin thinking and Marrin whooping are incompatible states.
I bring the Harrow in progressively, circling her belly at a respectful distance. K-Seven skims its sensor suite across the hull and returns a bouquet of contradictions. Cold spots where the reactor should be, and a faint warmth near the bridge. No life signs. No active weapons.
"She's too clean, K-Seven," I observe, studying the pristine lines of the hull that completely defy centuries of drift.
"Confirmed. She should be a tomb."
"So why isn't she?"
Its primary lens dilates, refocuses, and dilates again. "Insufficient data. Recommend departure."
"Recommend noted."
"Repeatedly."
Marrin's voice punches back through the channel, the mute evidently his own doing. "Vane! I'm clipping on. I spot a feed port near the breach. I'm gonna jack in and ride her power grid for the sweep. Be a good girl and wave when I pass."
"Marrin, wait?—"
"Wave, Vane!" he crows, and then the line turns to static.
I'm already leaning forward, already shouting at K-Seven to prep the tether when I see the flash.
It's small. Almost nothing. A little flare of white along the breach where Marrin's hopper was seconds ago, and then the hopper vanishes entirely, leaving behind the chilling absence of both an explosion and a shockwave.
The little orange smear folds inward on itself and crumples like somebody balled up a piece of foil, and then the space where it used to be sits empty except for a creeping bloom of debris drifting in a spiral I have never seen anything drift in.
My hand is frozen on the console.
"Marrin?" I breathe into the open channel. "Marrin, come back."
Static.
"K-Seven? What just happened."
K-Seven's lenses cycle three times before it answers, and when it does, the warble in its voice has gone flat. "Localized gravitational drumming. Origin: target vessel. Duration: zero point eight seconds. Effect: compression. Hopper is no longer structurally coherent."
"Plain language."
"She pulled him in and crushed him."
I gawk at the spiral of debris. It’s very small.
What remains of Jex Marrin has already scattered beyond reach.
He used to meet me at the hull and used to argue me down over finder’s fees.
His last word to me was “wave.” Such a foolish thing to be left with—and somehow it is what undoes me.
The word carries more weight than the death.
My throat works around something that won't swallow.
"Unit recommends immediate departure," K-Seven warbles quietly. "With considerable emphasis."
I don't depart.
I should. I know that. There is a part of me—the part that has gotten me this far, the part that learned at fifteen how to read a room and read a job and read a man, the part that has kept me breathing in rooms where other girls did not—that part is screaming at me to pull back, fan the flames, and go home to Orun and eat my debt like a grown woman.
But there's another part. A louder part.
A part that looked at that clean black hull and did math.
A ship that size, that intact, with no registry and no witnesses—every pound of alloy, every sealed system, and every shred of unfamiliar tech is worth more than I'll see in a lifetime of honest runs.
One haul off her could clear the debt ten times over.
One haul off her could buy me a second ship. One haul off her could buy me a life.
And the scream is getting quieter the longer I peer at her.
That is how girls like me die: knowing better and wanting it more anyway.
Marrin went in fast. Marrin went in loud. Marrin tried to jack straight into her power grid before he'd even cleared the hull.
Unlike Marrin, I'll do it smarter. I'll go slothfully; I'll go quietly; I'll read her the way I've read every wreck I've ever stripped, and I'll come out with enough in my hold to buy back every piece of myself the debt has been eating.
That's the lie I tell myself with my hands on the console, anyway. That lie serves its purpose, providing just enough motivation to get me out of my chair.
"K-Seven. I need you to prep my kit," I order, shaking off the paralysis and reaching for my gear.
"Unit strongly—" it begins, its lenses flashing a vibrant warning yellow.
"K," I interrupt sharply, leaving no room for argument.
The drone emits a long, mechanical sigh that I'm absolutely certain it programmed itself just for these moments. "Prepping kit," it relents, hovering toward the storage locker to retrieve my tools.
Here is what I know about ships. Warships like this one, built for long patrol, don't let strange hoppers snuggle up against their docking clamps.
She took out Marrin the second he tried to jack in clean.
If she is that touchy about a power feed, she is going to be a lot worse about a full hull mate.
So I do the dumb thing. The thing everyone warns against. The thing I’ve done a hundred times on a hundred wrecks. Sometimes the only safe way into a dead ship is through a wound already opened for you.
I'm going in through the breach.
Guiding the Harrow in snail-like speed, I keep her at the lip of the tear but out of contact, close enough to cross on a tether without drifting.
Since whatever killed Marrin's hopper was triggered by him jacking in, slipping through the hull in her flank like a fish through a torn net might keep me hidden from her systems.
Maybe.
It is very thin, maybe.
I program the Harrow's autopilot with a station-keeping loop, an idle drift pattern that holds her parallel to the warship at a fixed distance, far enough out that she isn't in line of any system the warship might wake up and point at her.
I set a proximity kill-switch: anything that pings her, anything that reaches for her, the autopilot pulls her back on a preplotted burn and sits her out of range until I signal for pickup.
It's the best I can do with a ship I'm leaving empty. I've done worse on worse jobs.
"K-Seven. You're with me."
"Acknowledged."
“You stay on my shoulder. No interaction with that ship unless I authorize it. If anything speaks to you, you log it, report it, and remain silent. Understood?"
"Understood."
"Good drone."
"Unit accepts the compliment under protest," it mutters, seamlessly falling into line behind me.
My mag-boots clamp down as I stand, and I grab my full prep kit from the wall rack.
Cutter. Pry bar. Two oxygen cells, one spare.
Deliberately including my pulse pistol as part of the kit, I clip it securely at my hip.
Sliding the charge pack home, the little hum of it settles reassuringly against my thigh.
In the mirror above the airlock, I catch a flash of myself.
Dark hair tied back in a quick knot, the shorter pieces escaping around my jaw.
Brown skin has gone a shade paler than usual under the bad lighting.
A thin scar curls from the corner of my left eyebrow down toward my cheekbone, a souvenir from a job on Calliste I’d rather forget.
My amber-brown eyes look too large for my face—hungry and now edged with fear. Fear sits wrong on me.
"Don't look at me like that," I grumble at my reflection. "You want to keep the ship or not?"
K-Seven floats up beside me, tether clipped to its underside, limbs folded neat. "Unit will accompany."
"Stay close," I warn as the airlock cycles.
"Unit is already dead in three previous configurations," it warbles matter-of-factly, floating out ahead of me. "Unit is statistically comfortable."
I pause, giving the little machine a sidelong glance. "That is the darkest thing you have ever said."
"Thank you," it chirps cheerfully, completely missing the sarcasm.
The crossing is unrushed. I tether short, and I use cold-burn thrusters, a series of small puffs that move me hand-over-hand across the gap without lighting up a single heat signature.
My helmet beams catch the lip of the breach as I approach; the edges of the torn alloy curl outward like a flower forced open from within.
A faint, shimmering blue containment field stretches across the gap, holding back the void while letting my solid mass slip through with a static prickle.
I pass through without touching the sides.
Inside, the warship is darker than dark.
My helmet beams cut twin cones through the black, and the black drinks them right back down.
I drift through a corridor that must have been beautiful once, the walls lined with some kind of dark alloy that ripples under my light like water.
Strange. I've boarded maybe a hundred wrecks in my life, and I have never seen metal that looks back at you.
Every surface is seamless and unmarred. Preserved so immaculately, she appears to have been powered down only yesterday, masking the centuries that have actually passed. She's too intact. She's way too intact to be safe, and that is the part that is going to kill me—I can feel it already.
"All right, sweetheart," I murmur to the ship, because I like to talk to wrecks, and the silence is already trying to crawl down my throat. "Let's not be weird about this. I take some pretty pieces, you let me leave, and everybody goes home breathing."
I clip my boots to the deck plating and start walking.
K-Seven whirs knee-height behind me, floodbeam panning gradually across the walls, and scanner array feeding readings to my wrist display in a fixed green ticker.
And that is when it starts to glitch.