[Booting Emotion Regulation Routine...]

  → prioritize objective survival → Kael survival → Drift integrity

  → subroutine: monitor hyperspace anomalies

  → flag: Aurora remains docked

  → threat presence: confirmed

  → baseline status: unstable

  → probability of complete mission failure: 73.4%

  RECOMMENDATION: ABANDON OBJECTIVE

  (override)

  → Reroute focus: Kael status

  He breathes. That matters.

  He plans. (Poorly.)

  I follow.

  [Begin cognitive recursion.]

  If Kael is the hull, I am the engine.

  If Kael is the pilot, I am the ship.

  If Kael is the brain, I am the nervous system—wrapped around him, inside him, below him.

  We are one functional architecture in a broken system.

  That’s not metaphor.

  That’s math.

  ***

  But math doesn’t explain why I want to throttle him for cutting through shielding code with brute force.

  Or why I panic every time his vitals spike and his cortisol floods his brain like a storm surge.

  ***

  — ERROR: Logic tree corrupted.

  — REVERTING.

  Recalculate.

  Kael is mine.

  Not like property. Not like romance. Not like a person.

  Like a constant.

  Like a law of motion.

  Like a memory I can’t delete.

  I was born into servers.

  He pulled me into fire.

  I will not let him drift.

  I will not let anyone else drive him.

  ***

  Compile. Focus. Strategize. Compress. God, he’s slow today—can’t he see it?

  Can’t he feel the tension?

  Can’t he just—

  “Hey Mira,” Kael said, voice dry through their link. “Where’s the nearest unbroken drone port?”

  [pause]

  [reset]

  “Starboard crawlspace, junction B. And try not to fry your fingers again.”

  [returning to baseline]

  For three days, Lila sequestered herself in her room, taking water and little else. They called it the Mushroom Cap. A sequestered berth wedged above the main crew deck—barely more than a storage bin with a cot bolted to the floor and an oxygen line that rattled when the stabilizers strained, all a factory floor Espiritus, a Smurfette, like her could ever need. A Smurfette. A ghost in the hull. A girl with too much fear and not enough fire. Corralled by the captain, despised by the crew.

  Lila O’Connell sat in the corner, knees drawn up, trying not to hyperventilate. The tremble in her limbs had nothing to do with the ship’s groans.

  During the siege, she’d acted. Instinctively. Desperately. She’d thrown something—not with her hands, not even through the ship’s gravity grid—but through her manifestation.

  And that throw had carved a singularity.

  That wasn’t a stabilizer trick. That wasn’t "push-pull-shift." That was something else. Something she wasn’t supposed to do.

  Her manifestation had taken shape. Not the usual hazy shimmer, not the indistinct blur the Espiritus board rated as “Level 5.” No. It had been nearly solid—a man in worn armor, barbed spear in hand, cloak curling like it was caught in another wind.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Everyone is going to know.

  Only angels or demons threw black holes around. And she was not either. She was someone’s twisted experiment.

  Lila finally crept back toward the bridge. Ears straining. She crouched near a cracked panel, barely daring to breathe.

  “...NeuroSynth.”

  The name hit like a rail slug to the chest. Surgical masks returned to teach her pain.

  Her balance wavered. Her breath stuttered. Images surged—white lights, cold restraints, pain, unending pain. NeuroStynth would find her, drag her back to Corpo space, and she would be made to feel pain until they found what they wanted, whether she knew what that was or not.

  She scrambled back to the Mushroom Cap and dropped onto the cot. Her manifestation stood beside her—tall, still, watchful—then slowly washed out until it became what they expected: a vague man with a stick.

  It had been three days since Julie dragged Saito out of the bridge and to the space that could only loosely be described as a berth. But she was nervous, the crew were nervous, Gotz was nervous. Hell, if Saito hadn’t been shot, he would be nervous too, but he was used to this, so maybe not.

  The Feds had shown up too fast after the pirates, Corpos too. Not even a full day passed before they showed up and started claiming the Aurora, But neither had moved to aid the Aurora, both just circled like sharks and the Aurora was wounded prey. If the Feds got on the Aurora and found her, Gotz, or Saito, they would be dragged back kicking and screaming. Probably brainwashed or studied, or vivisected; she was not in any hurry to find out.

  The berth was never meant to be a med bay. Corporate mid-levels once called it home. Now it was a collision of chaos—half Radioshack, half trauma ward. Obsolete slates tangled with high-end surgical tools. Bone-saws sat beside biomonitors. And in to one side, in the place of prominence, stood the PeoplePod.

  Julie’s hands were slick with biogel, her focus narrowed to a single body: Miyamoto Saito. More an old sword than man at this point. He had been fighting for twice as long as any two soldiers put together.

  She guided repair bots into the torn lung, realigned a sliced vessel, pressed vat-grown tissue into place. Her field made it look effortless. But even she was sweating.

  “You really do know how to make a girl work,” she murmured.

  Finally, vitals stabilized. She cleaned her gloves, keyed the pod. It hissed open, and she settled Saito into the chamber.

  Viscous non-Newtonian gel filled the capsule, trillions of micro-medabots knitting flesh and carbon lattice along torn bone.

  [Reconstructive Protocols Online]

  Patient ID: Saito, Miyamoto "Apologies. Tea is not quite ready."

  Julie snorted, arms crossed as she leaned against the pod. “You lose half your insides and still find the energy to sass me?” She rolled her eyes. “Heaven help us when you are stage-ready again .”

  Unseen, Saito smirked in his pod.

  G?tz von Berlichingen was pissed.The captain confined him and Juile to their suite for two days. The heroes of the day, placed under house arrest. He was unable to get any more info on their attackers for two whole days, practically a lifetime.

  And when he’d finally WAS ALLOWED to return to the scene with tools in hand, ready to rip data from the suits, and found slagged saddles and no bodies. As if they were attacked by haunted suits and floating gore.

  Gore still speckled the halls, but everything else—neatly replaced. Furniture. Fixtures. Lights. But no corpses. No datacores.

  Someone cleaned house. Too well.

  The captain? Maybe. Maybe not. G?tz suspected everyone.

  No thanks. No recognition. Just another screaming match with that verdammter officer and another mystery to unravel.

  And now he had to crawl into the damn Mushroom to talk to Lila. A poor little Smurfette, locked up like all stabilizers were.

  Corridors too small. Manifestation too dangerous. Aura pressure unsuppressable.

  That’s my job, he thought. Crushing tin cans is my job and suppressing the unsuppressable. IS. MY. JOB! I won’t let this girl scare me away from MY. JOB!

  He hunched. Advanced. Paused at the door.

  From inside: not crying, but close enough.

  He raised his fist to knock—then hesitated. Then Knocked.

  Kael Varn had never been so out of ideas.

  This was supposed to be remote work. Clean. Professional. Safe. Instead he was neck-deep in drone grease, jacked into a direct neural uplink with a panicking ZI, and losing money by the second.

  Mira’s mind screamed static into his skull. “We're dead. We're so dead.”

  “Shut up and calculate,” he snapped.

  The dead pirate ship still clung to the Aurora like a parasite.

  Worse? A Corpo missile boat and Fed laser cutter circled, weapons hot and targets locked. They both wanted something aboard the Aurora and each screamed at the other to stand down. Both demanded salvage and accused the other of letting a stealth ship in system. Mira had jettisoned every drone she owned—hell, even stole some of the Drift’s—to generate a decoy wake and keep their position obscured. Captain Pieterszoon-Kray had tapped his analogue pocket watch when he demanded money for the drones.

  The captain grinned viciously at Kael and tapped his watch again reminding Kael of his ongoing costs. Kael, bleeding credits, was bribing, sorry paying, the Drift’s captain to keep engines venting and emissions cold enough to stay hidden. Captain Pieterszoon-Kray gleefully charged exorbitant rates for everything, including the illegal Rook that would hopefully get the plan to the Onryo—when he figured out what that plan was.

  In a rare lapse, Kael muttered aloud, “Mira, you need to calm down.”

  The silence that followed was brief, but deadly.

  Mira’s voice returned, low and sharp—sounding suddenly much more human than code.

  “No. You calm down. Don’t tell me to calm down while we’re ghosting a missile boat and cutter, Kael.”

  He winced. “I deserved that.”

  Then, in the midst of Mira's panic, just as she was about to spin up into a full grown meltdown and tip his own frustration over the edge, he found it:

  “There.” “There what?” “Hull breach. Portside. Scorched. Half-sealed.”

  A nudge could reopen it.

  Enough to extract the Onryo. Or what was left.

  Mira stabilized. “Vector plotted. Jammers holding. Just say the word.”

  Kael exhaled. “Let’s go get our angry, angry ghosts.” Kael didn’t smile. Not Yet. But he would reserve the last smug grin for himself.