The weapons relay was supposed to be clean.
Zeph had checked it at 2300âstandard post-docking diagnostic, the kind of sweep she ran every cycle because the *Requiem* was her ship and her ship didn't get to have problems she didn't know about. The relay housing on the starboard side had been standard military hardware. Wiring. Junction boxes. The copper-and-carbon interface nodes that connected the ship's targeting computer to the forward kinetic batteries. Nothing biological. Nothing strange.
That was seven hours ago.
Now the relay housing looked like it had grown a ribcage.
Zeph crouched beside the opened panel, her diagnostic scanner pressed against tissue that hadn't existed yesterday. The bio-growth had come through the conduit from the shield generatorâshe could trace the path, the biological material following the power routing the same way it had reached the thruster coupling two days ago. But this was different. The thruster growth had been tentative. Exploratory. A vine testing a new wall.
This was architecture.
The tissue wrapped the relay's junction nodes in a lattice structureâdense, layered, the biological equivalent of reinforced cabling. Where it contacted the copper interface points, the tissue had formed something Zeph's scanner couldn't categorize. Not metal. Not organic. A hybrid material that showed properties of both on the diagnostic readout, as if the bio-growth had studied the existing hardware and decided to build something better.
"You're not just spreading," Zeph whispered. Her fingers hovered over the growth, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from the tissue. Living warmth. The bio-material ran three degrees above ambient, its own metabolism generating heat as it processed the ship's power into structural change. "You're rebuilding."
The diagnostic display updated. The schematic she'd seen two days agoâthe projected growth map, the ship showing her its own blueprint for self-improvementârefreshed with new data. Integration had jumped from twelve percent to nineteen overnight. The timeline had compressed. Not 384 hours to completion anymore.
The display read: INTEGRATION: 19%. ESTIMATED COMPLETION: 247 HOURS.
Ten days. The ship had shaved six days off its own upgrade schedule by reaching the weapons relay. As if the weapons systems were a priority. As if the *Requiem* knew what was coming and had decided that shields and engines weren't enough.
Zeph sat back on her heels. The engine bay hummed around herâthe familiar vibration of the destroyer's drive systems, but underneath it something new. A pulse. Organic. The bio-tissue had its own rhythm now, distinct from the mechanical systems, and the two rhythms were beginning to synchronize. Heartbeat and engine beat, converging.
"I need to tell them about this," Zeph said to the ship. "Like, right now. Yeah?"
The diagnostic display flickered. A single line of text appeared at the bottomânot a standard readout, not engineering data. Something the ship's autonomous processes had generated on their own.
WEAPONS INTEGRATION: PRIORITY ALPHA.
Zeph grabbed her scanner and ran.
---
She found Kira in the observation gallery with Voss.
The doctor was running her morning scanâthe neural mapping routine that had become a twice-daily ritual, Voss pressing the scanner against Kira's temples while Kira stood at the gallery window and tried not to flinch at the cold contact. The warship sat in the dock below, dark and massive and breathing.
"Cap." Zeph came through the gallery entrance at a pace that was technically walking and practically sprinting. "We've got a situation. A good situation. Maybe. Probably. I need you to look at this, yeah?"
Kira turned from the window. Her eyes were clearer than they'd been in daysâthe constant squint of pain easing as the headache receded. The pathways were healing. Zeph could see it in the way Kira held herself. Less rigid. The woman's shoulders sat lower, the unconscious tension of a body fighting its own nervous system finally starting to release.
"Slow down," Kira said. "What's happening with the *Requiem*?"
Zeph held up the scanner. The diagnostic data filled the small displayâgrowth maps, integration percentages, the projected timeline that kept shrinking. "The bio-tissue reached the weapons relay overnight. Not just reached itârebuilt it. The growth is producing hybrid material at the junction points, some kind of bio-mechanical interface that's reading as both organic and synthetic on my scans. And the integration rate jumped seven percent in seven hours."
Voss lowered her own scanner. The doctor's expression shifted from medical focus to scientific hungerâthe particular look that crossed Elara Voss's face when data appeared that didn't fit her models.
"Show me the junction interface," Voss said.
Zeph handed over the scanner. Voss studied the readout, her lips moving slightlyâthe habit of a woman who thought out loud when the thinking was good enough. She scrolled through the growth map, the integration timeline, the structural analysis of the hybrid material at the relay nodes.
"This isn't repair," Voss said. "The bio-tissue isn't replacing damaged components. It's creating new pathways parallel to the existing ones. Redundant systems. The ship is building..." She trailed off. Scrolled again. "Backup infrastructure. If the primary weapons relay fails, the biological network takes over. Instantaneously. No switchover delay."
"The ship's making itself harder to kill," Kira said.
"In a manner of speaking." Voss handed the scanner back to Zeph. "The growth prioritized weapons systems. Not life support. Not navigation. Weapons. That suggests the autonomous processes driving the bio-tissue are responding to a threat assessment."
"The ship knows we're about to be in a fight," Zeph said. "Right? That's what this is. The *Requiem* is getting ready."
Kira looked down at the warship through the gallery window. The dark hull. The micro-adjustments. The ancient vessel that sat in its dock and reached through the station's walls and connected to the destroyer that carried its biological offspring.
"How does the *Requiem* know?" Kira asked. "The ship's autonomous systems shouldn't have access to tactical data. Zeph, did youâ"
"I didn't feed it anything. I don't even know how to talk to the autonomous processes. They just... do things." Zeph's hands moved as she spokeâthe restless energy of a seventeen-year-old whose ship was turning into something she couldn't fully explain. "But the *Requiem's* bio-systems are connected to the warship's energy grid through the station's power network. The warship knows we're being watchedâthose scouts at sensor range. If the warship is passing threat data through the energy grid to the *Requiem's* bio-tissue..."
"Then the ships are communicating," Voss finished. "The warship is directing the *Requiem's* evolution."
The gallery was quiet. The three of them standing at the window, looking down at a Progenitor vessel that was using a human-built destroyer as an extension of itself. Not a tool. Not a weapon. An offspring. A child being prepared for the fight its parent couldn't yet join.
"Two hundred and forty-seven hours to full integration," Zeph said. "Ten days. If the bio-tissue keeps acceleratingâand it has been, every cycle faster than the lastâit could be less. But I can't predict by how much."
"We may not have ten days," Kira said. "Keep monitoring. Document everything. If the growth reaches any critical systemsâlife support, the drive core, anything that could compromise the crew if it failsâyou flag it immediately."
"Copy that, Cap." Zeph paused at the gallery entrance. "One more thing. The ship generated a text readout on my diagnostic display. Not a standard output. It said 'Weapons Integration: Priority Alpha.' The *Requiem* doesn't have a text generation system. That came from something else."
Kira's hand pressed against the gallery window. Below, the warship's hull was dark. But the flutter was thereâthe connection through the glass, stronger today, the murmur becoming a voice.
"I know where it came from," Kira said.
---
FULCRUM responded at 0914.
Aria-7 intercepted the signal as it arrived through Cade's relay architectureâthe three-node civilian bounce that delivered MI communications to the station's QMesh interface. The AI had been monitoring the frequency since Cade's fabricated report went out, tracking the relay nodes, mapping the signal pathway for intelligence that Cross would catalogue and Kira would use.
Cross was already in the converted storage room when Kira arrived. The admiral stood at the communications console, her datapad in hand, her posture the rigid attention of an intelligence officer receiving a product.
"Four hours and fourteen minutes," Cross said. "Fast response. FULCRUM is either close to a relay node or the handler considers Cade a priority asset."
"Or both," Kira said. "What did they send?"
"Aria-7. Display."
The AI projected the decrypted message onto the storage room's wall display. White text on black. The format was MI standardâheader, body, footer, the structure that Cade had described and Cross had used to build their fabrication.
The header confirmed receipt of Cade's report. The footer carried a standard acknowledgment codeâno anomalies, no suspicion flags, no indication that FULCRUM had detected the fabrication. The fake had passed.
The body was the problem.
Kira read it twice. Cross read it three times.
UPDATED TASKING: PRIORITY COLLECTION ON FOLLOWING:
1. PROGENITOR VESSEL HULL COMPOSITION - MATERIAL SAMPLES IF OBTAINABLE. SPECTRAL ANALYSIS IF NOT.
2. ANY OBSERVED RESONANCE FREQUENCIES DURING VESSEL ACTIVATION OR STANDBY CYCLES.
3. ELECTROMAGNETIC EMISSION PATTERNS FROM VESSEL DURING POWER STATE CHANGES.
4. CONFIRM/DENY PRESENCE OF CRYSTALLINE STRUCTURES IN VESSEL INTERIOR.
NOTE: ABOVE SUPERSEDES ALL PRIOR TASKING. RESPOND WITHIN 48 HOURS.
"Resonance frequencies," Kira said. The words tasted wrong. Specific. Too specific for a standard intelligence query about an unknown alien vessel. "They're not asking what the warship can do. They're asking how it vibrates."
"They're asking for a targeting solution," Cross said. Her voice was flat. The professional mask at maximum density, which meant the information behind it was bad enough to warrant the full barrier. "Hull composition tells you what weapons to use. Resonance frequencies tell you how to destabilize the structure. Electromagnetic emission patterns tell you when the ship is vulnerable during power transitions. Crystalline structuresâ" She stopped. Something moved behind her eyes. "Crystalline structures are a known weakness in Progenitor technology. Documented in classified Imperial research. If the warship's interior contains crystal-lattice components, a tuned energy weapon could shatter them from outside the hull."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I read the classified research." Cross set her datapad down. The motion was controlled. Precise. A woman putting down an object because her hands wanted to do something elseâclench, maybe, or break something. "Twelve years ago. Project Sunbreaker. A joint operation between Imperial Naval Research and MI. They recovered Progenitor fragments from a wreck in the Shattered Expanse and spent three years analyzing the material properties. The project was discontinued when the research team suffered... losses."
"Losses."
"Void exposure. The fragments were active. Three researchers died. Eight were institutionalized. The project data was classified APEX-level and buried." Cross looked at the message on the display. "FULCRUM isn't asking these questions because Kaine is curious. These are Sunbreaker parameters. Someone with access to that classified research is feeding Kaine a kill-list for Progenitor technology."
The storage room was small. The walls close. The amber light from the station's systems casting everything in the color of a warning that had been playing so long it had become background noise.
"Kaine isn't planning a standard assault," Kira said. "He's building a weapon."
"Or deploying one that already exists." Cross picked up her datapad. "Project Sunbreaker's final report recommended the development of a resonance disruption deviceâa weapon specifically designed to exploit Progenitor structural vulnerabilities. The project was cancelled before the device was built. If someone has revived that researchâ"
"Then every piece of data FULCRUM is requesting is a calibration parameter. They're tuning the weapon to our warship."
Cross nodded. One dip of the chin. The acknowledgment of a woman who had spent thirty years in the Empire's intelligence apparatus and was now watching that apparatus build the instrument of her destruction.
"We feed them nothing," Kira said. "New response through Cadeâdelay, deflect. The warship's dormant, limited observation opportunity, whatever buys time."
"Agreed. But the request itself is intelligence. They're telling us what they're planning." Cross moved to the door. "I'll draft the response. And I'll query Cade on Sunbreakerâif MI briefed their deep-cover assets on classified research programs, he may know more than the message tells us."
She left. Kira stood in the storage room with the message still glowing on the display. Resonance frequencies. Crystalline structures. The Empire wasn't just coming with ships and guns. They were coming with something built to kill the one advantage the station had.
Four to six days. And somewhere in an Imperial shipyard, someone was calibrating a weapon to the frequency of a ship that was trying to heal the woman bonded to it.
---
Kira went to the gallery at 1100.
Not the planned visitâVoss had scheduled the next scan for 1400, and Cross needed her on the command deck at noon. This was unscheduled. Unauthorized, if she was being honest about the doctor's instructions regarding rest and stress avoidance and the general principle of not doing things that made the neural pathways burn.
She pressed her palm against the gallery window and the warship answered.
Not the flutter. Not the murmur. Something louder. Clearer. The connection that had been building through damaged tissue for days reached a new threshold as Kira's hand touched the cold glass, and the warship's signal came through like a radio finding its frequency after days of static.
She could feel individual systems.
Not the vague sense of power levels and status that she'd reported to Voss yesterday. This was architecture. The warship's internal layout blooming in her awareness like a blueprint being drawn in real timeâpower conduits running through the hull like veins, weapons systems in their standby cradles, the drive core sitting in the ship's center mass pulsing with the low, patient energy of a heart that had been beating for millennia.
The defensive grid. Cycling on automatic, the pattern repeating every forty-seven secondsâa sweep of the surrounding space, mapping the station's structure, the docked ships, the empty void beyond. The grid was watching. Vigilant. An immune system running its patrol.
And beneath all of it: a mood.
That was the wrong word. Kira knew it was the wrong word even as her brain reached for it, because the warship wasn't human and didn't have moods. But the signal carried something that her neural architecture interpreted as emotional contentâa state, a condition, a quality of the ship's awareness that translated through the Progenitor pathways into something Kira's human mind could process.
The warship was afraid.
Not the sharp, reactive fear of an immediate threat. Something older. Deeper. The fear of a thing that had seen what was coming before and remembered how it ended. The ship's memoryâif ships could remember, and this one could, Kira was certain nowâcontained something that the current situation had activated. A pattern recognition. The gathering of hostile forces at the edge of detection range. The countdown to an assault. The preparation for a fight that the ship had fought before, in another time, against another enemy, and the outcome had beenâ
The vision hit her like a fist.
Ships. Hundreds of them. Not Imperial vesselsâsomething older, something with hull designs that Kira's naval training didn't recognize. Closing on a station that looked like this one but wasn't, a facility orbiting a planet with two moons in a system that didn't appear on any chart Kira had ever studied. The ships were firing. The station was firing back. And at the center of the battle, a warshipâthis warship, or one identical to itâburning through the attacking fleet with weapons that tore reality open in lines of white fire.
The warship won. The attacking fleet broke. The ships scattered, retreating into void space, leaving debris and bodies and the expanding clouds of atmosphere from ruptured hulls.
But the station was dying. The damage too severe. The people insideâKira could feel them, a ghost-memory of minds that had touched the same pathways she touched now, operators who had bonded with the warship the way she was bonding with itâwere dying with it. And the warship couldn't save them. The ship hung in space above the burning station, its weapons still hot, its enemies retreating, and its people dying in the wreckage below.
The vision broke.
Kira gasped. Her hand jerked from the glass. The gallery tiltedâthe floor shifting under her feet as the neural pathways screamed, the inflammation flaring in a hot spike that drove the nail behind her right eye three inches deeper.
She caught herself on the railing. Stood there, breathing hard, her vision swimming between the gallery's amber light and the ghost-image of a battle fought millennia ago by people she'd never know.
The warship's signal was still there. Quieter now. The fear was still there tooâbut underneath it, something else. Urgency. The ship had shown her that vision deliberately. Not a random memory surfacing through damaged pathways. A message.
*I've seen this before. I couldn't save them then. Help me save them now.*
"I'm trying," Kira whispered. Her hand found the glass again. The warship pulsedâonce, faint, the ancient vessel acknowledging the only answer she could give.
---
Jax called the militia assembly at 1300 in the main corridor on Level Two.
The same corridor where Kira had read the names yesterday. The same amber light. The same walls that had absorbed the silence of a memorial and now had to absorb the noise of thirty-seven people who were scared and angry and trying to decide whether scared was a good enough reason to leave.
Jax stood at the head of the corridor. Full uniform. Clean. The cybernetic arm at his side, the servos quiet, the weapon he didn't need to display because everyone in the corridor knew what it could do. His face was the zero-temperature maskâflat, professional, the expression of a man who had called this meeting because the alternative was letting fear ferment until it became something worse.
"I'll be direct," Jax said. His voice carried the way it always did in a briefingâclear, measured, the cadence of a man who had addressed troops before battles and after them and knew that the after was harder. "The convoy operation failed. Sixteen people are dead. The *Talon* is damaged. Imperial scouts are at our sensor perimeter. Vice Admiral Kaine is assembling a fleet, and that fleet is coming here."
No sugarcoating. No softening. The facts delivered with the same temperature as the room.
"Some of you are thinking about leaving." Jax didn't make it a question. He didn't need to. The conversations had been happening in corridors and quarters and the mess hall for twelve hoursâquiet voices, worried faces, the particular arithmetic of survival that civilians performed when the military situation turned from bad to worse. "If you choose to leave, no one will stop you. This station does not hold prisoners or conscripts. Commander Vance has never asked anyone to stay who wanted to go, and that policy has not changed."
Silence. The thirty-seven militia volunteers standing in the corridor, some in the light armor they'd been issued, some in civilian clothes, all of them carrying the expression of people hearing a soldier tell them they were free to run.
"But I will tell you what leaving means." Jax's voice didn't change register. Same temperature. Same cadence. The words landing with the precision of ammunition. "If you leave, you take a shuttle to the nearest Fringe port. From there, you scatter. Find a station. Find a colony. Find a hole and climb into it. And when Kaine finishes hereâand he will finish, because his fleet outnumbers us and his resources exceed ours and the only thing standing between his victory and his defeat is the people in this stationâwhen he finishes here, he moves on to the next station. The next colony. The next place where people are hiding from the Empire's reach."
A pause. The corridor hummed.
"There is no safe port. There is no hole deep enough. The Empire is not coming for this station because we stole a warship. The Empire is coming because we exist. Because anyone who refuses to kneel is a threat to the order they've built, and they will chase that threat to the edge of the galaxy if they have to." Jax's cybernetic arm whirredâa soft sound, barely audible, the mechanical fingers adjusting their grip on nothing. "You can leave. You can run. But you cannot hide. Not from this. Not anymore."
He let the silence sit for five seconds. Then: "Dismissed. Anyone who wants to leave, report to the shuttle bay. Anyone who wants to stay, report to your duty stations."
The corridor emptied in groups. Some left quicklyâthe ones who had already decided, who had come to the assembly looking for permission they didn't need. Some lingered. Most walked toward duty stations. Not all.
Malik waited.
He stood at the back of the corridor, against the wall, arms folded, tattoos dim. He hadn't spoken during the assembly. Hadn't needed to. Jax's briefing was Jax's territoryâthe military address, the stark logic, the cold math that soldiers used to frame the choice between fighting and running.
Malik's territory was different.
The kid was maybe nineteen. Thin. Colony-born, from the look of himâthe narrow frame and pale skin of someone who'd grown up on a station with recycled air and artificial light. He stood in the corridor after the others had gone, his hands in the pockets of a jacket two sizes too big, his eyes on the deck plates.
Malik walked over. Slow. The big man's stride unhurried, his boots quiet on the deck. He stopped beside the kid and leaned against the wall.
He didn't speak.
The kid looked at him. Side-eye. The wary assessment of a young person trying to decide whether the large man with the glowing tattoos was about to give him a speech or leave him alone.
Malik looked at the opposite wall.
A minute passed.
"I signed up because of Pol Vasik," the kid said. His voice was thin. "He came to my colony six months ago. Supply run. His crew fixed our water recycler for free. Wouldn't take payment." The kid's hands were deep in his pockets, his shoulders up around his ears. "When I heard he was bringing his ship here, I caught a transport. Wanted to crew for him."
Malik said nothing.
"He's dead now. The ship's gone. His whole crew." The kid's jaw worked. "I don't even know how to fight. I signed up for militia training three weeks ago and all I've learned is how to hold a rifle without dropping it."
Malik waited. The corridor hummed. The amber light washed the kid's face in colors that made him look younger than he probably was.
"My grandmother said something once," Malik said. Low voice. The accent threading through. "She said that courage isn't the absence of fear. That's the easy version. The one they put in speeches." He paused. "She said courage is being afraid and deciding that the fear isn't in charge. That you are."
The kid looked at him.
"Pol Vasik was afraid." Malik's voice was quiet. Certain. The voice of a man who had been afraid more times than he could count and had decided, each time, that the fear wasn't in charge. "He flew a cargo hauler with bolt-on guns into a firing lane. He wasn't brave because he wasn't afraid. He was brave because he was terrified and he flew anyway."
"And he died."
"He did." Malik didn't flinch from it. Didn't soften it. "Sometimes courage kills you. Sometimes it saves you. You don't get to know which one ahead of time. That's what makes it courage and not a calculation."
The kid stood in the corridor. Nineteen years old. Colony-born. Three weeks of militia training and a dead hero and a station full of people waiting for a fleet that was going to try to kill them all.
"Stars witness," Malik said. Soft. Almost to himself. "Whatever you choose."
He pushed off the wall and walked away. His boots were quiet on the deck plates. The tattoos on his forearms flickeredâa brief pulse of blue-white light, the warship's energy reaching through the station walls, touching the marks that Malik had carried since before any of this had started.
Behind him, the kid stood in the corridor for a long time.
Then he turned and walked toward his duty station.
---
Cross found Kira on the command deck at 2147.
Kira was reviewing the scout positions with Aria-7âthe two contacts still sitting at the edge of sensor range, patient, professional, their drive signatures steady at the minimum output that kept them alive and observing. They hadn't moved in twenty hours. Watching. The unchanging vigil of reconnaissance assets that had been told to map a target and would map it until someone told them to stop or the target stopped existing.
"Commander." Cross's voice was wrong.
Kira looked up from the display. Cross stood in the command deck entrance. The admiral's posture was regulationâshoulders back, chin level, hands at her sides. Everything correct. Everything in order. Except her face.
Cross's face was the color of recycled paper.
"Admiral." Kira straightened from the display. "What is it?"
Cross walked to the communications console. Her steps were steady. Her hands were notâa tremor in the right, barely visible, the kind of tremor that discipline could control in the fingers but not in the tendons of the wrist. She pulled up a signal log on the console. Recent intercepts. The frequencies that Aria-7 monitored continuouslyâmilitary bands, civilian channels, the QMesh relay traffic that constituted the background noise of a galaxy at war.
"Aria-7 flagged this twelve minutes ago," Cross said. Her voice was level. Controlled. The professional register at maximum, which meant something beneath it was not controlled at all. "Unencrypted civilian frequency. Standard distress beacon format. Broadcasting on a repeating loop from a position approximately two light-hours from the station, bearing one-nine-three by negative eight."
"A distress beacon." Kira frowned. "Civilian vessel in trouble?"
"The beacon carries an authentication code." Cross's hand rested on the console. The tremor was visible nowâa vibration in her fingers that she made no effort to hide, which was the most alarming thing about it, because Helena Cross never let her body betray what her face wouldn't show. "Imperial Navy authentication. Old format. Decommissioned nine years ago when the Navy switched to the current encryption standard."
"A nine-year-old Navy auth code on a civilian distress beacon. Someone's running old hardware."
"No." Cross stared at the signal log. The characters scrolled across the displayâthe beacon's repeating message, the authentication code embedded in the header, the position data that placed the source two light-hours away in empty space. "The authentication code isn't generic Navy. It's unit-specific. Assigned to a single ship."
Kira waited.
Cross didn't turn from the console. Her back was straight. Her shoulders level. The posture of a woman holding herself together with the same discipline she used to hold a fleet together, the structural integrity of a career spent controlling every variable she could reach.
"The code is assigned to the ISV *Carthage*," Cross said. "My former flagship. The ship I commanded before my promotion to flag rank. The *Carthage* was decommissioned and scrapped seven years ago." She paused. The tremor in her hand spread to her wrist. "There are four people in the galaxy who know that ship's unit-specific authentication code. Two of them are dead. One of them is me."
The command deck was quiet. The tactical display glowed. The two scout contacts sat at the edge of sensor range like eyes in the dark.
"Who's the fourth?" Kira asked.
Cross didn't answer. She pulled up the beacon's position data, overlaid it on the tactical display, and stared at the point of light that pulsed two light-hours away in the direction that no Imperial ship should be coming from.
Her jaw was locked. The muscles working beneath skin that had gone gray-white under the amber light.
"Admiral." Kira's voice sharpened. "Who is the fourth person?"
Cross turned from the console. Her eyes met Kira's. Whatever lived behind those eyesâwhatever the signal meant, whatever the authentication code implied, whatever ghost was broadcasting on a dead ship's frequency from a position that made no strategic senseâCross sealed it behind the professional mask with a force that Kira could almost hear. The sound of a bulkhead slamming shut.
"I need to verify the signal," Cross said. "Before I say anything else, I need to verify it. Give me twelve hours."
"We don't have twelve hours to spare onâ"
"Give me twelve hours, Commander." Cross's voice cracked. One fracture. Hairline. Sealed immediately, the composure reassembling around the damage like hull plating closing over a breach. "Please."
Kira had never heard Helena Cross say please.
The word hung in the command deck like something that didn't belong thereâa civilian word in a military space, a concession from a woman who had spent thirty years never conceding anything. Cross stood at the console with her hand trembling and the color gone from her face and the single word sitting between them like evidence of something that the admiral's entire career had been built to prevent.
Vulnerability.
"Twelve hours," Kira said. "Then I need to know everything."
Cross nodded. She gathered her datapad from the consoleâthe movement precise, controlled, the professional autopilot engaging while whatever was happening inside her happened behind closed doors.
She left the command deck without another word.
Kira stood alone with the tactical display and the scouts at the edge and the distress beacon pulsing from a dead ship's frequency, two light-hours away, carrying a ghost that had turned Helena Cross the color of ash.
