19. Nyra
NYRA
Pressed like a shadow against cold stone, my fingers lock onto the edges of the cooling pipes while my lungs burn for real air. Below me, through the narrow slats of the ventilation grate, the boots of the boarders create a heavy, unbroken thunder.
The mark is an aching coal. It moves in perfect synchronization with the ship’s erratic heartbeat. I feel every stutter in the reactor, every groan of the hull as the invasive code continues its feast.
"K-Seven, remain silent," I instruct, the sound barely a ripple in the charged dark.
The drone hovers near my shoulder, its lenses spinning with a frantic, muted clicking.
It projects a sliver of light onto the control panel I just forced open.
The manual bypass is active. I have given the ship back its ability to feel its own skin, even if only for a few sectors. I have given the Warlord his sight.
Suddenly, the whine of the conduits changes.
The noise shifts from a dull drone to a sharp, high-pitched whine.
The data-stream is reversing. Selra has found the leak.
I watch as the violet shade of the manual bypass begins to turn a stagnant, bruised gray.
The ghost code is tracing the connection back to the source—back to the scavenger in the walls.
"Unit detects a surge in local thermal signatures," K-Seven chirps, its voice a tiny spark of alarm. "The boarders are repositioning. They are converging on this access node."
Scrambling backward, my boots slip on the slick surface.
The shaft's claustrophobia morphs from a comfort into a vice, leaving me feeling like a trapped animal.
Pushing hopelessly against the rear panel, I search for a secondary exit only to find the lockdown remains absolute.
The ship is protecting the core, and in doing so, it seals me in this narrow throat.
A sharp, metallic clack echoes through the grate below.
I freeze. The sound of heavy boots stops. Silence fills the corridor—a heavy, suffocating weight that exceeds the terror of the noise.
"The feedback loop is radiating from here," a smooth, chillingly calm voice says from the other side of the obsidian. I know that voice from the comms. Selra. "Someone is playing with the bypass. The ship is fighting me, but its secondary nervous system is bleeding from right behind this bulkhead."
I lean my back against the trembling conduits, my pulse rattling through me in a frantic wave. I grab the heavy wrench I used to force the dial, my knuckles white as I grip the cold metal. Small and unarmored, I still possess the scavenger’s knowledge of how to bite when backed into a corner.
The sound of a thermal cutter ignites.
A needle of blue-white flame stabs through the dark panel. It hisses as it eats through the ancient stone, spraying a shower of molten sparks into the shaft. The heat is immediate, a searing wave that blisters the air. I squint through the glare, the smell of burning stone filling my lungs.
"K-Seven, find a way out!" The command punches through the thick, oily vibration of the cutter, a sharp spike of sound that momentarily splits the roar in two.
"Unit is scanning… all secondary exits are fused! The invasive code has locked the pressure seals!"
The blue flame completes a circle. The onyx plate, a piece of the ship’s history, flushes red at the edges before it is kicked inward. The plate hits the floor of the shaft with a heavy, final thud.
A flood of harsh, artificial light pours into my hiding spot, blinding me. I raise my arm to shield my eyes, my other hand tightening around the wrench.
"Well, well," the voice from the corridor says. It carries a dark, twisted humor that makes my skin crawl. "We were looking for a processor, and we found a rabbit."
"Bring her into the light," Selra commands, stepping into my field of vision.
The pale lavender of her skin is stark in the dim, gray corridors, the silver implants at her temples thudding in sync with the ship's frantic heartbeat.
Her dark, reflective eyes lock onto me, stripping me down to my components with a single glance.
A massive, armored hand reaches through the opening. The gauntlet bears scars and the grease of a dozen salvaged hulls. It is the hand of a butcher.
I swing the wrench with every ounce of my desperate strength.
The metal connects with the gauntlet with a satisfying clang, sending a shudder up my arm that numbs my elbow. The boarder grunts, his hand jerking back, yet he remains at the breech. Before I can swing again, a second hand catches the shaft of the wrench.
The strength behind the grip is absolute. It is the strength of hydraulic servos and cold, industrial intent. He wrenches the tool from my grasp and tosses it into the dark behind me. Then, he reaches in and grabs the front of my tunic, his fingers twisting into the fabric.
"Come here, little rabbit," he growls.
He yanks me forward, my body scraping against the sharp edges of the cut obsidian. I kick, my boots striking the plating of his chest, but it is like kicking a mountain. He hauls me out of the shaft and throws me onto the cold deck of the corridor.
I hit the floor hard, the air rushing out of my lungs. I roll, trying to find my feet, but two more boarders are already there. One pins my arms behind my back, his grip like a set of iron manacles. The other stands over me, the barrel of a pulse-rifle level at my chest.
I look up, my hair falling over my face, and see the man with the stitched-together face. Rovik.
Cruel, raised scars stitch his face into a patchwork of violence.
One piercing, predatory blue eye stares out, contrasting against the other—a clouded, milky sphere of dead tissue.
He wears a specialized engineering suit, heavy with the weight of harvesting tools and gene-market hardware.
He stands with his arms crossed, watching me with a clinical, terrifying curiosity.
He steps closer, his heavy boots clicking on the deck. He reaches down and tilts my head back, his fingers digging into my jaw. He pulls the collar aside, revealing the mark. The brand is flaring, a brilliant, defiant amber.
Selra steps forward, her dark, reflective eyes analyzing the mark with detached precision. She traces a finger inches above my skin without touching me, her implants pulsing a steady, calculating blue.
"Anomalous," Selra states flatly, her voice devoid of inflection.
"This isn't a mere territorial claim. Look at the energy transfer, Rovik.
She is a biological anchor. The invasive code—my ghost script—encountered resistance because the ship's neural lattice is actively filtering its commands through her biological rhythm. "
Selra touches her temple, opening a direct channel. "Korr. We didn't just find a hostage. We found the Warlord's leash. She's a glitch in his armor. If we trigger the girl, we scramble his matrix. We control the girl; we control the Reaper."
Rovik chuckles, a dry, rattling sound in his throat.
I spit at his boots. Terror remains, deep and cold, yet a rising, white-hot fury churns beneath the surface. From the girl surviving the Fringe’s dirt emerged the woman who made her choice: the monster on the bridge.
"He’s going to kill you," I rasp with a certainty that surprises even me.
Rovik just chuckles, a dry, rattling sound in his throat. "He’s going to try, sweetheart. And that’s exactly what we want."
He nods to the boarders holding me. "Take her to the breach. Let's see how much of a storm he's willing to walk into for a scavenger."
The boarders haul me upright, their fingers digging into the soft flesh of my underarms. I struggle, twisting my torso to break their momentum, but the man on my left slams a heavy gauntlet into my side.
The impact steals my breath, leaving a blooming heat spreading through me.
I sag for a second, my boots dragging across the glossy floor, before the fury returns.
I look back over my shoulder toward the maintenance shaft.
K-Seven hovers just inside the dark opening, its lenses spinning in a frantic, silent blur.
Seeing it there, safe in the shadows and away from these heavy, scarred hands, brings a sharp spark of relief.
He remains in the walls, functional and whole, a witness to the violation they are committing.
Rovik ignores the drone entirely. To him, the unit is merely ancient scrap, beneath the notice of a man who harvests empires. He focuses on the corridor ahead, his pace relentless.
They drag me through Sector Six, a part of the ship resembling a graveyard.
Virex Prime’s light vanishes here, turning into the flickering, sickly gray of Selra’s ghost code.
The walls are weeping—actual condensation from the failing climate seals runs down the surface in long, dark streaks.
I feel the ship’s agony through the soles of my boots.
It is an almost inaudible groan of structural failure, a giant gasping for air as its lungs fill with lead.
"You are killing it," I grit out, trying to plant my feet as we pass a junction. "The ship is dying. You are going down with it."
The boarder on my right, a thick-necked man with a jagged tattoo of a serpent winding up his throat, chuckles. "We only need it to stay together long enough to strip the meat, girl. After that, it can turn into stardust for all we care."
We reach a wider transit hall, and the scale of the violation hits me.
Virex Prime reads like a construction site for butchers.
They have set up portable lighting rigs that cast harsh, industrial shadows across the ancient statues.
Massive power cables, thick as my waist, snake across the floor, siphoning energy from the ship’s secondary veins into the salvage leeches clamped to the hull.