14. Garokk #2
He attempts to help me stand. His small manipulators fold into a kind of harness and loop under my arms. He is absurd and irreverently brave, tugging me upright with the sort of patience that only a machine reprogrammed by a stubborn human can have.
“Do not try to be hero now, Garokk,” Reflector says. “You are not in a fight you can win via strength alone.”
I snort. The sound is a mixture of pain and a memory so hot I can taste metal: Isolde’s laugh, the way she bit a phrase and made a joke into a landing. She is gone. I am here. I let the grief be a cold stone in my gut, heavy and immovable, so I can move.
We limp toward the medstore. The corridor is half a ruin: exposed conduits, ash layers like snow on the floor, a smear where something flung across the plating and didn't stop.
The smell of the Hulk's insides—old coolant, warm oil, the sweet rot of burned insulation—sticks to my nostrils.
My hands leave damp prints on the railing.
There are sounds, too. Echoes of the ship’s last life. Somewhere a bulkhead creaks like a groan, and it sounds like someone calling my name when I am at my pruning worst—half awake, half a memory.
“Reflector,” I say as we reach the medstore and he begins the tedious and gentle work of clearing a path through the debris. He’s careful, considering my burned skin and the fact that my right hand trembles when I try to open it. “Are there any survivors aboard? Any registries?”
He taps into a panel with one stubby arm, and lights trace across a screen in a language the Hulk still remembers more fully than its crew's faces.
“The boarding manifest records fifteen individuals at time of breach. Lor—unresponsive. One Horn—mortally wounded. Bokis—registers as stable but lost in lower decks. Tobin Meyer—life signs absent from the collision survey. Snarl—life signs minimal; we cannot localize. Many croamer-suit signatures registered as destroyed. Radiation and structural collapse make accurate accounting—difficult.”
I want to call out his name like a curse. Tobin Meyer's absence feels like a loose tooth. He should be gone. He deserved it. I let that thought burn clean and then I move on because the immediate is more pressing than satisfaction.
The medstore smells like antiseptic and the sharp tang of chemical balms. Reflector rigs a patching field around a med-tray and fetches—through circuits and small folding arms—what's left in the dispenser: medgels, burn-scar salves, a few vials of analgesic that taste like cold iron when the injector hits my flesh.
“You will feel pain,” Reflector says as he administers the first dose. His tone is clinical, but there’s a little tremor of what I am coming to think of as worry. “We will stabilize the worst of your burns. Then we address mobility.”
I close my eyes, focusing on the chemical buzz under my skin, how it gathers in the damaged places and numbs them like a frost waiting at the edge of a thaw. Pain recedes to background noise. I let my teeth unclench.
“Reflector,” I breathe, afterward. “Run a nav sweep. I want to know how far we’re from the nearest safe vector.”
He does. He is machine-fast now, fingers scattering data, his single working lens a quicksilver mirror of failing stations and cursed coordinates.
The Hulk swings slow in the darkness; stars smear like bruises in the forward viewports.
The Badlands are not a place that forgives mistakes.
They are a weather you get lost in, if you are not careful.
“You’re drifting deeper,” he says finally.
“The course correction saved us from immediate hazard, but without mainframe control we cannot properly vector out. The Badlands will take time to travel through—if the hull survives the gravitational shear. There is also—” He purses his little arm like a thinker made of metal.
“There is resonance on long-range sensors. Something large is moving in our quadrant. Cannot classify under degraded telemetry. Could be—pirate freighter, could be Reaper band, could be—unknown.”
The word unknown lands like a weight. Unknown, in these parts, is never benevolent.
“Then we get moving,” I say. My jaw is tight. A plan is a rope thrown across broken things. “Patch what we can. Get the thrusters under manual. We’ll hand-fly it if we have to.”
“You lack authorization,” Reflector replies, and there’s a sharp little beep that sounds like protest. “We also lack a flight crew.”
“I can be the flight crew,” I say. The thought makes a fracture inside me tighten—do not overreach—but there’s muscle memory for moving a hull even if your hands are burned.
I have fought to keep things afloat. I have the scars to prove it.
And I have a debt of blood and promise that tastes like iron when I think of it.
Reflector processes that. He makes staticky noises, the way a radio pretends to cough.
“I can assist,” he says. “I can mesh with auxiliary guidance. But manual override—requires multiple relay points and two operational actuators. One is corrupted. We need to locate auxiliary actuator twelve and patch it into the core.”
“Then we find it,” I say.
We move. It is clumsy work—me with a fractured jaw and a burned back, Reflector with one optic and a personality reboot—and yet there is a rhythm to it.
We are an odd pair: monster and drone, stitched together by survival and the raw, undignified need to keep breathing.
Sometimes I nearly laugh at the absurdity.
Other times I want to break something gentle because the world feels so unjust.
We roam the Hulk's ribcage, finding survivors in pockets.
Bokis is a creature of noise and quick hands; he hides in the vents with a laugh that is thin and maniacal and very much alive.
He hands over a packet of dehydrated protein and a crooked grin.
Snarl is there too, curled in a maintenance alcove, wing folded at a bad angle, making no sound until Reflector plays a low-frequency lull and she blinks and acknowledges us with a tilt of her head that means more than gratitude.
Lor is nothing but a body; his vents are dead and cold.
Tobin—no. Tobin's body is gone. I feel a small, elemental twist of satisfaction and then a guilty ash of something else because that doesn't make me whole.
We jury-rig relays from scavenged servos, reroute power through gutted panels, coax the stubborn thrusters to cough and arc.
The Hulk shudders under our ministrations, a giant waking up with a fever.
Sparks fly. Sometimes I catch them on my skin and they leave black pinpricks that sting like a thousand tiny reproaches.
At one point, Reflector squeals like a child when we find actuator twelve bolted behind a scorched plating. He performs a little orbital dance that makes one of his arms clang. I want to smack him, but I'm smiling and I don't want to be surprised by that.
“Got her,” he says. “Manual link established. We have a partial tether to the guidance array.”
“Well done,” I say, more than I mean to by way of praise. My lungs fill with the burnt air of the Hulk and, for the first time since I woke, hope blooms. It is a small, fierce thing.
We work through cycles of triumph and small disaster.
Panels explode. Alarms scream. The ship shifts around us like a living thing that has been stabbed and tries to find a place to bleed quietly.
Each time something tries to take us down, I push harder.
I throw my weight into the problem. I use scars like tools; I use anger like fuel.
By the time the last actuator catches and the guidance array accepts our manual lash-up, I am raw and alive and something like awake.
Reflector is frayed but steady, and in the brief pause where both of us catch our breath, the hull settles into the kind of stillness that speaks of temporary victory.
“We have limited maneuverability,” Reflector reports. “Sustained thruster burns are possible on a cautious profile. However—there is resonance on port-side sensors. Anomalous mass incoming.”
I run a hand through the mess of burned hair at my temples. “Then we don't loiter,” I say. “We plot for a course that uses gravity wells to sling us out. We take the path that saves the hull if it takes my hide in exchange.”
Reflector blinks. “High risk.”
“Life is risk,” I say. It sounds trite and small, but it is true. Life is whether you rise or you stay flat and let the dark take you.
The Badlands are a thing of teeth and weather.
They will not be friendly. But the Hulk is a stubborn beast and I—garokk who has been too long alone in the dark—am stubborn in a different way.
I will fight. For rusted metal and a drone with a loyalty complex, and for a woman whose laugh used to cut through my world like a bright knife.
You'd think nearly dying would take the fire out of a man.
Turns out, it just burns the fat off and leaves behind the steel.
I wake each cycle beneath the wreckage of what used to be the most feared battle-hulk in this side of the galaxy, skin blistered and thick with scar, muscles twitching from half-healed nerve endings.
Pain has become a background hum—like the ship herself, creaking and muttering and somehow refusing to die.
Every time I close my eyes, I see her.
Not the Hulk.
Her.
Isolde.
That damn look she gave me—fire in her throat, fists against the glass, her mouth shaping a promise she thought was a curse.
Don’t you dare die on me.
Too late, little light.
You already did.
Not with a bang. Not with the pod blast. But with the echo of her voice fading from the comm and the heat leaving my side. That’s when I died. Everything since has just been muscle memory.
I make myself useful. Or I die. There’s not a lot of in-between.
The Hulk limps through the Badlands like a war veteran too stubborn to fall.
No nav, no AI, just my fists and Reflector’s broken bird-rig of wires and salvaged circuits.
We scavenge from our own ribs—stripped plating, burst fuel cells, half-alive drones crawling out of collapsed vent shafts like they’ve been dreaming of sunlight and hate.
I weld with my left hand. My right’s too raw, knuckles split and regrown over the same breaks. I bind what’s left of the rations into edible bricks, wash with the drip system behind medbay, sleep in the old cryo-hold that smells like ozone and lost memories.
Reflector talks less now.
He’s deteriorating. Every day a few more files corrupt. Every cycle he forgets something—an access code, a phrase, a joke he used to tell about my snoring.
But he stays.
Stupid, loyal bolt heap.
“Garokk,” he says one night, his voice static-laced. “What is the plan?”
I don’t answer at first. I’m mid-strike, beating a vent panel flat to forge into a secondary heat shield. My breath comes in grunts, sweat pooling between my scales.
When I do speak, my voice is quieter than I expect.
“Live,” I say. “That’s the plan.”
Reflector bobs once, his light dimming. “Uninspired. But statistically sound.”
I grunt. “I’m not done yet.”
The grief cuts deeper than the burns.
It’s not loud. Not theatrical.
It’s in the way I check every corridor twice, listening for footsteps I know won’t come. It’s in the way I hoard food like I’m waiting for someone else to show up, like I can share it.
It’s in the way I hear her laugh sometimes when the engines groan.
And the dreams?
I see her eyes.
Every damn night.
Brown like dusk, like safe places I’ll never get back to. Her voice finds me in my sleep, saying nothing, just looking. Like she’s waiting for me to answer a question I never got to ask.
I wake up clawing the floor.
Every. Single. Time.
So, I build.
That’s what keeps me moving. Building keeps the grief from rotting.
A comm array, first. The big kind—long-range, illegal even by Combine standards. I dig it out from the Hulk’s spinal antennae, splice it with old cargo beacons and the last functioning dish Reflector salvaged from the dead captain’s chair.
I angle it toward every net I can remember.
No pings.
No signals.
Only static.
But I keep broadcasting. Coordinates. Emergency tags. No words. No name.
Because she’s smart.
If she’s alive, she’ll know .
Then come the tags.
It’s a ping in the middle of a routine vent flush—a sharp, cold alert across the auxiliary board. Bounty markers. Someone placed Combine-level tags on the Hulk’s hull, backdated and reactivated with a new kill order.
Not just a bounty.
A reclamation .
They think I’m a weapon left to rust. And they’re coming to fetch what’s left.
Reflector confirms the signal within minutes.
Combine isn’t subtle.
They send scouts first—slim, quiet ships that drift too close and vanish when hailed. I let them scan. Let them think I’m scrap. Then I power up the old gunnery arm and fire once—just once.
The shockwave rips a hole clean through the second ship's flank. The debris hits their third tail-first.
Then I cut the signal and go dark.
Next come the pirates.
Not bounty hunters. Worse.
Scavvers.
They come teeth-first, hauling salvage claws and boarding spears. They try to crawl through the Hulk like parasites.
I leave bodies in the vents for the rest to find.
They don’t come back.
The legend grows.
I hear it sometimes—leaked through static-channels, whispered across the Badlands' black.
A ghost ship, dead but moving. A monster captain, face burned to ruin, who speaks in war-code and keeps trophies of the men he kills. A machine god at his side, half mad, half divine.
Some call me "The Hulk-Widow."
Others, "Scourge of Tharsk."
My favorite?
"The Last Brutal."
None of it’s true.
But I let them believe it.
Because fear keeps the small ones away. Fear keeps the bounty low, keeps Combine eyes off my trail while I dig in deeper.
Fear buys me time.
I’m not here to conquer.
I don’t want to rule.
I want out .
I want her .
I want the thing I never believed I’d want: home.
Not the blood-pit where I was raised. Not the arena. Not the throne of skulls Meyer thought I’d claw my way back to.
Her.
Isolde.
Soft. Strong. Mouth like a blade.
She’s the first person who didn’t flinch.
The first who called me something besides monster.
She made me choose .
And I did.
I chose her life over mine.
But fate screwed up, because I’m still breathing.
So now I choose again.
Not war. Not rage.
Not survival.
Return.
I’m coming back.
Stars help anyone who gets in my way.