16. Garokk
GAROKK
T he Hulk drifts like a corpse that refuses to rot.
A stitched-together beast limping across the void, blackened ribs bent around half-working systems and old vengeance. From the outside, she looks abandoned—scrap metal tangled with ghost circuitry, a grave for the bold and the stupid.
But inside?
She lives.
Screams sometimes, too.
She’s mine now. What’s left of her, anyway.
And now... so are they.
I didn’t plan this.
Didn’t want it.
But blood draws blood, and fire makes shadows dance.
First it was one: a miner lost in the ice belts of Tirros, gaunt and reeking of void-funk, with eyes too wide for a man who’d seen too much. He followed the signal, came knocking on the belly of the Hulk with a knife too dull to matter and desperation thick on his breath.
I didn’t kill him.
Don’t ask me why.
Next came two more. Then six. Then thirteen.
Now we’ve got twenty-seven souls packed into what used to be the medical wing and half the engineering deck.
Runaways. Exiles. Pirated ghosts from dead fleets. Women with nothing left but rage. Men who’ve forgotten how to kneel.
I didn’t call them.
Didn’t send out a banner or offer terms.
But they came.
And they stayed.
They call me Captain now.
I don’t stop them.
I never asked for the title. Never needed it.
But it spreads, fast and easy, like blood in zero-g. First in whispers, then in fists slammed to chests. Then in the way they stand when I enter a room.
They look at me like I’m already legend.
Not a man. A weapon.
A symbol.
But I know better.
I’m still just fire wrapped in skin. Still the same bastard who threw the only good thing he ever had into a pod and didn’t look back.
They think I lead because I want to.
Truth is, I lead because there’s no other way forward .
My days are welding, bleeding, barking orders into comms that barely hold signal. The Hulk needs constant attention, like an old warrior with broken bones who refuses to admit he’s dying.
We scavenge for fuel. Retrofit the oxygen cycles with old mining tech. I’ve got a kid from Targis with half a face and a full brain rigging together pulse rounds from scrap plating and crushed servos.
They call it art.
I call it desperation.
It works either way.
The recruits keep coming.
They bring stories.
Not just of me, but of her .
They don’t know I know her.
But I hear her name like a wound reopening in secret.
Isolde Verrix. Alive.
Seen.
Whispers of a hybrid child. Half-Vakutan. Gold-eyed.
They think I don’t react.
I listen.
And then I take it to the gym deck and destroy a dummy with my bare fists until there’s nothing left but rags and silence.
Reflector watches me, sometimes.
He’s not whole. Not anymore. Flickers more than he should. Misses timestamps. Loses words.
But he’s still loyal.
Still watching.
Still here .
“Captain,” he says once, voice low and crackling, “why allow them to stay?”
I don’t answer right away.
Just keep staring at the stars.
“Because we don’t run alone anymore,” I say finally. “And I’m done being a ghost.”
I order them to paint the hull.
Bright crimson.
It starts with one of the girls—Fierra, ex-pirate, hands like silk and eyes that know too much. She scrawls a sigil onto the outer plating with melted insulation wire. A crest. A claim.
Crimson Rising.
The others follow suit. Spray tags. Symbols. Names of the dead.
Suddenly, the Hulk’s no longer a ruin.
She’s a message.
I don’t stop it.
They need this.
And maybe... so do I.
I still dream of her.
Of brown eyes full of fire and fury. Of the way she said my name like it meant something.
Garokk.
Not beast.
Not monster.
Just a man.
One who failed her.
One who didn’t die, no matter how hard the universe tried to make it so.
She’s out there.
And now?
So am I.
Not to conquer.
To return .
There’s a sound that lives in the bones of the Hulk now?—
the hum of something alive and angry, half machine, half ghost.
That sound is me.
Reflector’s voice threads through the intercom again, tinny and warped, the static curling around the vowels like smoke.
“Garokk,” he says, the syllables clipped by feedback. “You are—again—ignoring mission protocol parameters.”
I tighten the harness across my chest, watching the blood-red light crawl across the bridge. The crew’s a blur of motion—hands flying over cracked consoles, boots pounding against deck plates, somebody shouting for a coolant reroute.
The Hulk shudders, hungry.
“No protocol,” I growl. “We’re past that.”
“Statistical prediction indicates an eighty-seven percent chance of overexposure if you engage another Combine outpost without repair interval.”
“Then I’ll beat the other thirteen percent into existence.”
“Garokk—”
“Enough, Reflector.”
I slam the throttle lever forward.
The Hulk screams to life.
Engines burn white through the black, and the stars stretch like they’re afraid of me.
It started small.
A Combine drone station. One raid. Quick hit. Just enough to steal fuel rods and keep the hull breathing.
But small things never stay that way in the Badlands.
Every ship we hit added another ghost to my legend, another whisper to the name they’ve started using out there:
The Crimson Raider.
I didn’t choose it.
Didn’t want it.
But I didn’t correct them, either.
The legend protects the crew. Keeps the pirates and Reapers guessing. Keeps the Combine afraid to send anyone less than an armada.
And if they fear me, they’ll hesitate.
Hesitation buys time.
Time keeps us alive.
“Target acquired,” says Fierra from the gunnery bay, her voice low and steady. “Combine relay outpost, designator D-9. Weak shields, no escort. Easy pickings.”
“Define ‘easy,’” mutters Kraye, our navigation officer, who still twitches whenever the hull moans too loud. “Last ‘easy’ job cost me half my tail and a year’s worth of sleep.”
“Then you should’ve ducked faster,” Fierra fires back.
I cut through the chatter. “Weapons ready. Reflector, pulse the arrays.”
“I advise restraint,” he says. “Outpost D-9 services multiple civilian freight routes. Engagement will?—”
“Spare the civvies. Hit the Combine core. You know the drill.”
Silence. Then a resigned hum.
“As you wish, Captain.”
The Hulk moves like something that remembers how to kill.
She’s slower now, heavier, but every pulse of her thrusters feels like muscle memory—ancient reflex, bone-deep instinct. We streak through the dark, a crimson streak across the void.
Outpost D-9 fills the viewport—a gleaming skeletal tower built into the shell of a dead moon, blue lights blinking lazy as if it’s never been touched.
I flex my claws around the command stick. “Arm forward cannons.”
“Ready,” says Fierra.
“Fire.”
The explosion isn’t just seen.
It’s felt .
A deep, gut-shaking boom that vibrates through the deck, through my chest, through every old scar. The moon lights up in red and orange bursts, shockwaves rippling out into nothing.
The Combine relay fractures, silent fireworks in the black.
I should feel triumph.
Instead, I just feel the echo. The ache that comes after.
Reflector’s voice hums again through the cracked speakers.
“Combine distress calls transmitting on multiple bands. Civilians evacuating through the lower docks.”
“Let them go.”
“Confirmed.”
“Scan for cargo containers.”
He pauses.
“You continue this pattern,” he says finally, quieter this time. “Strike. Move. Burn. You gather what you need, yet never stop. This is... illogical.”
“Survival doesn’t care about logic.”
He hums. “Nor grief.”
That hits harder than I want it to.
Later, when the raid is done and the crew’s busy counting salvage and ration packs, I stand alone on the observation deck.
The stars hang still outside, too far to touch, too close to ignore.
The viewport glass is streaked with soot and the ghost of old fingerprints—hers among them, though I can’t prove it. She touched this wall once. I remember. I feel it.
My reflection stares back at me: gold eyes, ash skin, burns like topography.
They call me monster again out here.
They’re not wrong.
Monsters survive. Men don’t.
But sometimes, when the Hulk quiets and the hum fades, I catch myself whispering her name.
Isolde.
It slips out. Always does.
The first time, it was a slip during battle prep. Fierra thought I was cursing in my old tongue.
Now, I don’t correct them.
Let them think it’s a war cry.
They don’t need to know it’s a prayer.
After the novelty wears off, the raids blur together.
One Combine comm-station, two Reaper frigates.
A mining colony that fired first. I spared them. Sent them half our food stock before we left. They’ll never know who did it. That’s fine.
I don’t do this for thanks.
Each strike is a calculation.
Fuel, food, survival.
Stay moving. Stay alive. Stay ahead of the legend.
But underneath it all, something’s coiling tighter inside me.
Restlessness.
Guilt.
Purpose.
I can’t name it without saying her name.
Reflector feels it, too. I know he does.
He’s wired into the ship now—literally fused into her nervous system, patched into processors and memory cores. His once-compact frame now sprawls across circuitry and corridors, light weaving through the Hulk like veins. When he speaks, his voice comes from everywhere.
He’s part of me.
Part of the ship.
Part of the myth.
“You’re quieter lately,” I tell him one night, walking the main corridor.
Red emergency lights wash everything in color—the same shade as our hull paint, the same shade that followed me since the Badlands swallowed us.
Reflector’s voice hums from a nearby panel. “Silence can be preservation. Data stores are fragile. The less I speak, the longer I last.”
“Coward’s logic.”
“Efficient logic.”
I snort. “Fair.”
Then, softer: “You think she’s alive?”
He doesn’t ask who.
He knows.
“Statistically improbable,” he says. “But... not impossible.”
I nod once.
That’s enough.
That word— not impossible —becomes my anchor.
Weeks later, the Reapers find us.
Not scouts this time. A full frigate. Black as oil, hungry for glory.
They drop out of warp right in our path.
The crew panics. Screaming, running, loading weapons that aren’t ready. The Hulk groans as I push her past safe limits.
Reflector’s voice fills every channel, calm amid chaos. “Multiple heat signatures. Heavy armament. We cannot outrun them.”
“Then we don’t.”
“What?”
I stand tall in the command pit, hands braced on the rail.
“They want the Crimson Raider?” I growl. “Then they get him.”
The battle’s chaos.
Noise and color and fire.
We cripple their engines first—one precise plasma shot through the vent ports. Then we circle, brutal and close, claws against metal, teeth against hull plating.
Their distress signal flares, begging for Combine backup.
I cut it off halfway through transmission.
We leave them spinning.
Drifting.
Alive.
“Why spare them?” Reflector asks when the smoke settles.
“Because somebody has to remember mercy.”
When the wreck fades behind us, I lean back in the captain’s chair, breath ragged, the hum of the Hulk matching my pulse.
The crew’s cheering.
They think we won.
They think this means something.
It doesn’t.
Every victory tastes like ash.
Every raid leaves me emptier.
But I keep going.
Because movement means life.
And life means the chance—however small—that somewhere, out there, she’s watching the same stars.
Late that night, I whisper her name again.
Not loud.
Just enough for the ship to hear.
“Isolde.”
It echoes down the corridors, soft as breath, raw as prayer.
And in the heartbeat of silence after, I swear I hear the Hulk answer back—metal shifting like a sigh.
A ghost agreeing.
A promise not yet broken.