15. Nyra
NYRA
Iturn the observation alcove into my office, my sanctuary, and my laboratory.
I dragged a thermal blanket in here, wedged it into the curved stone shelf the ship built for me, and set up K-Seven as a makeshift processing hub, its chassis props against the viewport with all three lenses on a wall panel I pried open two days ago.
The panel burns with Reaper script—text cascading across it, refusing to stay still.
It buzzes. When I push my fingertips on the surface, a low-hertz force travels through my skin, traveling up my arm like a phantom pulse.
It feels like the ship is trying to reach into my nervous system, translating its logic directly into my bones before I can even process the symbols.
Recently, Draevik has been keeping his distance.
I feel the absence like a low-grade fever—a sense that all those hours of him questioning me about my past, watching me heal, and actually seeing me were all in vain.
We’re drifting apart; the radio signal of whatever we were building turned down to static.
He shows up in the Obsidian Sanctum when I gear up to leave, vanishes to the lower decks when I eat, and sleeps in three-hour windows that never overlap with mine.
Virex Prime keeps steering me toward him—doors closing, corridors rerouting—but Draevik is a thousand-year-old warlord, and the ship is his, and when he wants to disappear on his own vessel, he manages.
I decide to stop chasing him. Instead, I’ve been digging deeper into the ship's guts, prying at the corners of its logic.
The panels are a gold mine. Over the past several days, I've been pulling up schematics, cargo manifests, star maps—anything the ship lets me access, which is more than it should, and more every day.
Virex Prime loosens its grip on me in stages—first the corridors, then the environmental readouts, then the cargo manifests.
Each time I push into a new system, I brace for the lockout, and each time the ship just...
lets me in. Technically a prisoner reclassified as an "Integrated Biological Variable," the reality remains far more complex, as the ship holds its own opinion about what that title means.
K-Seven has been recording everything, its tiny data core filling up with fragments of Reaper engineering that would make a Guild tech drool.
Navigation protocols. Reactor harmonics.
The algorithmic structure of the ship's neural lattice, which operates more like a living brain than any computer I've ever cracked.
"Nyra," K-Seven chirps from its perch on the viewport ledge. "Unit is detecting an anomaly in the external communications array."
I look up from the schematic I'm studying—a cross-section of the ship’s defensive grid—Virex Prime herself—layered with energy shields and kinetic absorbers in a pattern like snake scales. "What kind of anomaly?"
"Incoming signal. Low-band. Encrypted. The encryption is crude. It is using a Fringe-standard compression protocol. This is human technology."
My fingers freeze on the panel. Human technology. Out here, in deep space, light-years from the nearest inhabited system, where the only living things are me, a Reaper warlord, and a drone with an attitude problem.
"Put it through," I demand, leaning closer to the console.
"Unit advises caution, as the signal contains—" K-Seven begins to warn, but I wave off the hesitation.
"Put it through, K," I insist firmly, needing to hear what the void has brought us.
The drone complies. The alcove fills with static, a harsh, crackling wash of white noise that makes my teeth ache. Then, underneath the static, voices. Fragmented, distorted, cutting in and out like a bad connection on a scrapyard comm tower.
"—confirm visual on the hull signature. That's Reaper-class, no question?—"
"—Korr wants a full spread before we close. No one approaches until the sweeps are?—"
"—estimated crew complement? If that thing is crewed, we're walking into a?—"
"—been dark for centuries. It's a tomb. The payout alone would cover?—"
"—Korr says the human girl is the key," another voice cuts in, colder than the rest. "If there’s a Reaper still breathing in there, she’s our leverage.
We get her, we get the codes. If she resists, we hand her over to the gene-markets as a 'slightly used' Sovereign-saturated asset.
Either way, Korr wants her alive until the locks are cracked. "
Korr.
The name hits me like a punch to the sternum.
Captain Rhydan Korr. Korr the Cutter. Every salvager in the Fringe knows that name—and every salvager with half a brain stays out of his flight path.
I've never met him, but I've heard the stories and seen the wanted posters.
Stocky, battle-scarred, with a shaved head and one cybernetic eye that glints blue in the dark.
He built his fleet by boarding vulnerable scavengers, stripping their ships, and selling the crews for parts—literal, biological parts—to the gene markets on the outer rim.
He runs a dozen ships, maybe more, scattered across the rim, running jobs and raids simultaneously.
The four to eight heading our way are just the ones he could pull together fast—crewed by the kind of people who think airlock executions are a team-building exercise.
And he is heading straight for us. "K-Seven, how many ships?" The drone's lenses cycle rapidly, processing the signal data.
"Unit is parsing multiple transmission sources. Minimum four vessels. Maximum eight. Signal degradation prevents an exact count. Estimated arrival based on signal strength: twelve to eighteen hours."
My heart hammers. Four to eight ships. A full scavenger fleet, armed, organized, and hunting a Reaper vessel that Korr already knows is intact.
Virex Prime drifted untouched in the deep dark for centuries, its energy signature completely masked.
I only found it on a rogue, one-in-a-million thermal blip.
But the second I forced the airlock and breached the hull, the ship's dormant defense protocols must have triggered a system-wide energy spike.
It wasn't a distress beacon—it was a flare. A thousand-year-old lighthouse illuminating the dark, and Korr’s scanners would have caught the massive pulse the moment it lit up the sector grid.
Pulling up the external sensor array through the panel—the deepest system I've touched yet—the interface violently resists, flashing a crimson warning.
But then the mark on my chest flares, a deep, burning ache that echoes in the console beneath my hands.
Instead of the ship deciding, it's verifying the bond tethering me to its Commander.
The red script shudders, yielding to the biological rhythm in my veins.
The text translates itself, rearranging into a grid of concentric circles radiating outward from our position.
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.
There, along the perimeter of the grid, a cluster of heat signatures.
Faint, distant, but moving. Moving toward us with the persistent, deliberate speed of predators who know their prey is already caught.
"Play the rest of it," I demand softly.
K-Seven scrolls through the captured signal and pulls up more fragments and more distorted voices.
"—Selra says she can crack the hull locks if we get close enough. She's worked Reaper-adjacent tech before, says the neural lattice has a back door if you?—"
Another voice cuts in, "—what about the human signal? The biometric ping the ship keeps broadcasting?—"
"—Korr says she's leverage. If there's a Reaper still breathing in there, the human is either bait or a hostage, and either way, she's?—"
The transmission cuts to static.
Pressing my hand flat against the wall, I sit in the alcove and feel Virex Prime drum beneath my palm.
My brain runs calculations faster than K-Seven's processor, drawing on my intimate knowledge of how scavenger fleets operate.
I used to be one—a solo operator, at the bottom of the food chain—but I understand the math.
Nobody comes this far out into dead space for a maybe.
Korr has hard data. He has the ship's hull signature.
He has my biometric ping—the one Virex Prime broadcasts as part of its atmospheric regulation, marking me as an organic presence on board.
And he has Selra, who claims she can break into a Reaper warship.
"K-Seven. Can you trace the signal origin? How long have they been tracking us?"
The drone’s chassis rotates, its lenses cycling through color spectrums beyond my perception.
"Signal trajectory analysis suggests the fleet has been following an emissions trail for approximately seventy-two hours.
Virex Prime's reactor produces a thermal signature detectable at extreme ranges.
Commander Draevik's recent recalibration of the autonomic systems generated a power surge that may have amplified the signature temporarily. "
Seventy-two hours. Three days. The exact window Draevik has been running from me, sleeping in the stasis chamber, flushing his systems. His recalibration sent up a flare, and Korr caught it.
I want to laugh. I want to scream. The one time Draevik tries to get his head on straight, he accidentally broadcasts our position to the most dangerous salvage crew in the Fringe.
The infinite bounty. The data I found in the ship's manifest, the one that named Draevik as the sole surviving officer of the First Sovereign Legion.
If Korr has even a fraction of that intel, this is the biggest payday in salvage history.
He would burn through a dozen crews to get his hands on this ship. He would burn through a hundred.
And he thinks I'm leverage.