18. Draevik
DRAEVIK
The first boarder dies before he finishes raising his rifle.
The search ends three levels below the bridge in the junction of Sector Five, where six men wait, their helmet lights cutting white scars across the ancient dark.
The closest one sees me at the same instant I spot him.
His mouth opens behind his visor. The word he wants to say—probably contact, probably target, probably something profane and small and human—never arrives.
My pulse-blade punches through his chest plate, shears through the polymer beneath, and exits between his shoulder blades in a wet spray of sparks and copper.
I wrench the blade free and let him drop.
Five left. They scatter like vermin exposed to light.
A correct Commander would hold this position.
The junction controls access to the primary spine—three corridors converge here, a natural choke point designed by engineers who understood that architecture is warfare.
I could plant myself in this intersection and force every boarder on this ship to come through me, one squad at a time, until the floor is ankle-deep in their dead and the surviving crew's radio Korr to report that the derelict has teeth.
That is the optimal tactic. That is the solution the combat matrix is screaming for, a red imperative blinking across my HUD in urgent script: HOLD POSITION. ESTABLISH KILL ZONE. DEFEND THE CHOKEPOINT.
I ignore it.
Nyra is three decks below me and forty meters to port, moving through a maintenance artery I sealed during lockdown.
The mark throbs with every step she takes—a hot, searing tracking signal I cannot mute, cannot ignore, cannot mistake for anything other than what it is.
She broke through the Sanctum's perimeter. She pried open an access panel using the brand I burned into her skin as a key, and now she is threading herself along the ship’s veins and conduits like a needle through living tissue, heading toward the central spine, heading toward the boarders, heading toward the danger I put a mountain between her and precisely to prevent.
Abandoning the defensible chokepoint, I break into a run, guided solely by the mark tracking her every movement.
This is the part the Reaper archives omitted—this involuntary, continuous awareness of another body occupying my own perceptual field.
I feel the constant rise of her breathing layered beneath the thunder of my boots on the deck plating.
I feel the slight elevation in her cortisol when a distant detonation shakes the hull around her.
I feel the stubborn, grinding determination in her jaw, and it translates through our shared mark into a pressure behind my molars that feels foreign yet still lives in me.
She is afraid. She is moving anyway. The bond reports both facts simultaneously, and neither surprises me.
The combat matrix registers the decision as a tactical error.
I feel the disapproval as a cold pressure behind my eyes—the trained architecture of my mind pushing back against a body that has already overruled it.
Every meter I move from the junction leaves behind a stretch of undefended corridor for the boarding party to exploit.
I know this. I have fought wars across a hundred systems, and I know how territory works, and I give it away with both hands because the gold smudge on my internal sensors is drifting toward a part of the ship where armed individuals are cutting through bulkheads.
The second squad finds me at the base of the gravity well.
These are different. Better equipped, better trained.
They carry tower-shields that project kinetic dampening fields—zones of thickened space that drag at my limbs like wading through setting concrete.
Their movements are coordinated and rehearsed.
Somebody briefed them on Reaper physiology.
Somebody told them where the armor gaps sit, how the servos lock under lateral stress, and which joints to target with shock-batons to short the neural bridge.
Selra. The name surfaces through the corrupted data still bleeding across my HUD. A tech specialist. She is somewhere outside the hull, feeding my ship poisoned data, and she has also fed these men a manual on how to kill me.
I charge into the dampening field. The world goes thick and slow.
My pulse-blade swings, and the arc that should bisect the nearest shield-bearer takes twice as long to complete, the kinetic field dragging at the energy projection like fingers catching in honey.
He ducks. The blade carves a gouge across the top of his shield instead of through his throat, and the man behind him jams a shock-baton into the exposed seam at my knee.
The pain is immediate and total. Lightning arcs up through my femur and detonates in my hip joint, locking the servos on my left side in a spasm that nearly drops me.
My HUD strobes white. For one sickening instant, the corridor vanishes into a wall of static, and all I can see is the flutter of the mark—Nyra's heartbeat, unchanging and fast, thirty meters below my feet and moving.
Lunging for the baton, my gauntlet closes around the shaft and the man's fist together, crushing them both.
He screams. I use his body as a ram, driving him into the shield-bearer behind him, and the dampening field collapses as its projector cracks against the bulkhead.
In the space that opens, speed returns with a violent, renewed clarity.
The pulse-blade takes the screaming man's head.
The shield-bearer dies on the backswing.
Three remain. They fall back into a defensive line, rifles up, barrels tracking me. A proper Commander would pursue. A proper Commander would press the advantage, clear the corridor, and establish fire superiority.
I turn my back on them and drop through the maintenance hatch.
Behind me, I hear them regroup. Boots are shuffling; voices are barking coordinates into helmet comms. Within thirty seconds, they will have reported my position and my direction of travel, and Rovik will know the Warlord abandoned a defensible position to go deeper into the ship.
A competent tactician will interpret that correctly.
A competent tactician will understand that I am protecting something and will begin searching for it.
The knowledge sits in my throat like swallowed glass. Every kill left unfinished serves as a breadcrumb leading them toward her.
The combat matrix howls. I feel it as a physical wrenching in my chest—the trained mind clawing at the instinct-driven body, demanding compliance, demanding I return to the tactical framework I was bred to follow.
Leaving hostiles at your back represents a violation of every principle the Hegemony hammered into my nervous system before I was old enough to speak.
You do not leave enemies alive behind you.
You do not yield ground. You do not run from lesser creatures who should be ash and memory beneath your boots.
I run. I drop through decks like a stone through water, my armor scraping the narrow shaft walls, my forearms' veins flaring with each impact.
The mark pulls me. I navigate by the fire in my sternum—driven by a source far removed from the corrupted HUD, the ship's garbled sensor feeds, or anything my training recognizes as data.
I follow the heartbeat of a woman who weighs a fraction of what my gauntlet weighs; she possesses only her own resolve, devoid of weapons, armor, or training.
She is crawling through the guts of a warship toward professional killers because she decided—entirely of her own volition, ignoring the dark vault I designed for her safety—that I require her help.
I land hard on the plating of Sector Six.
The impact cracks the bio-mat beneath my boots.
Across the bond, I feel Nyra pause—a hitch in her heartbeat, a spike of alertness—and I know she felt the rumble of my landing through the walls.
She is close. Twenty meters, maybe less, separated by two layers of hull and a tangle of neural conduits I could tear through in seconds.
I hold back from tearing through them. Breach the artery wall, and I expose her position to the boarders who are already converging on this deck, drawn by the noise of my descent.
Instead, I plant myself in the corridor directly above her, a ceiling of flesh and dying armor between her and whatever comes next.
Commander. The ship’s voice grates into my mind, distorted, battling the invasive code that has been eroding its cognition since the breach. Multiple biological signatures converging on Sector Six transit nodes. Breach-charges detected on secondary bulkheads. The internal perimeter is compromised.
I know. I can hear the charges—a deliberate, muffled thumping that travels through the hull plating. They employ shaped explosives to punch through the sealed doors I layered between the breach and the spine. Each detonation brings them a step closer.
Through the floor, I feel Nyra reach the manual bypass valve.
I feel her stop, her heart rate spiking, her hands gripping cold metal.
She is prying at the core's nervous system—trying to break the tech’s hold on the internal sensors, trying to give me back the targeting data the invasive code stripped away. She is trying to save me.
The tremor starts once again in my left hand.