Chapter 81: Ten Minutes

The first shot erased thirty meters of a destroyer's hull.

Kira didn't fire the weapon. Not the way a gunner fires a cannon—pulling a trigger, sending a projectile. She thought the weapon. The primary battery on the warship's port dorsal surface activated because her neural pathways carried the targeting data from her visual cortex to the ship's weapons array in the time it took to blink, and the dimensional disruption beam didn't travel from the barrel to the target because it didn't travel at all.

It appeared.

A line. Not light—the absence of light. A distortion in the fabric of space that connected the warship's weapons aperture to the destroyer ISV *Harken* in a straight, instantaneous seam. The beam didn't cross the distance. The distance stopped existing along the path the beam defined. For one-third of a second, the space between the warship and the *Harken* was not space. It was a wound in physics. A line drawn with a razor across the skin of reality.

Where the line touched the *Harken's* bow, the material ceased to exist.

Not exploded. Not melted. Not vaporized. The bow section of the destroyer—thirty meters of armor, compartments, structural members, atmosphere, equipment, and whatever crew had been stationed in the forward sections—was simply absent. One frame of reality had contained a complete warship. The next frame contained a warship that ended in a perfect cross-section, the interior compartments exposed to vacuum like a cutaway diagram in a naval engineering textbook. Decks visible. Corridors truncated. Wiring and conduit and piping severed with a precision that no cutting tool could match, the edges not melted or torn but geometrically clean. The material hadn't been destroyed. It had been removed from the universe.

The ship's atmosphere blew out of the open cross-section in a white plume. Bodies tumbled. The *Harken* listed, its center of mass shifted by the removal of thirty meters of bow, the remaining hull spinning on the axis of its own destruction.

Dead. Instant. The weapon that the Progenitors had built to fight wars in dimensions that humans couldn't name, aimed at a destroyer that had been designed to withstand kinetic rounds and energy beams and had never been built to survive an attack on reality itself.

Kira fired again.

The second battery—starboard ventral. The targeting data flowing through her pathways like current through a wire that was starting to overheat. A second destroyer, the ISV *Radiant*, caught the beam through its midsection. The engine section vanished. The drive core—the reactor, the plasma conduits, the engineering spaces—gone. Not destroyed. Subtracted. The *Radiant* went dark. The forward section of the ship continued traveling at its last velocity, unpowered, uncontrolled, the bridge and crew compartments intact but attached to nothing. A vessel that had become a coffin moving through the void on momentum alone.

Two destroyers killed in the opening salvo. Four seconds.

On the *Imperator's* bridge, the tactical display would be updating. Two contacts lost. Two capital-grade kills delivered by weapons that defied every principle of naval warfare the Empire had ever developed. Kaine would be recalculating. The methodical mind behind the fleet reassessing the threat, adjusting the formation, issuing orders with the cold precision of a commander who had lost two ships in four seconds and needed to not lose any more.

The fleet scattered.

---

Professional. That was the word. Kaine's fleet dissolved from its screening formation into an evasive pattern with the trained discipline of warships that had drilled this maneuver until the captains could execute it in their sleep. No panic. No confusion. The destroyers broke into pairs, each pair taking a different vector, the ships separating to deny the warship a clustered target. The frigates pulled back behind the capital ships. And the heavy cruisers—the *Relentless* and the *Judgment*—moved forward.

The two-hundred-meter warships interposed themselves between the Progenitor vessel and the *Imperator*. Shields at maximum. Weapons hot. The cruisers positioning themselves not to attack but to absorb—to take the hits that would otherwise reach the dreadnought, to be armor for the ship that carried the only weapon capable of killing the thing that was killing them.

The *Judgment* opened fire first. Full broadside. Sixteen kinetic batteries, the heavy rounds converging on the warship's bow in a concentrated salvo designed to overwhelm point defenses through volume. Behind it, the *Relentless* added its broadside. Thirty-two kinetic rounds in the space of two seconds, the combined firepower of two heavy cruisers pouring into the warship's defensive envelope.

The dimensional anchors caught them.

The warship's shield system operated on principles that kinetic weapons couldn't challenge. The anchors didn't generate a barrier—they locked the physics around the hull into a fixed state. Within the anchor field, the laws of motion, energy transfer, and material interaction were frozen. Immutable. The kinetic rounds entered the field at combat velocity and stopped.

Stopped.

Not deflected. Not absorbed. The rounds simply ceased moving. The kinetic energy didn't transfer. The momentum didn't redirect. The physics that described a metal slug traveling at four kilometers per second encountered a field that said *no*, and the slug obeyed. Thirty-two rounds hung in space around the warship's hull like insects frozen in amber. Motionless. The energy they'd carried converted into something the anchors could process—heat, maybe, or something stranger. The rounds glowed. Then the field pulsed, and the rounds were ejected backward along their original trajectories at a fraction of their incoming velocity. Spent shells tumbling through space, harmless.

The destroyers tried next. Six ships, paired, attacking from three vectors simultaneously. The tactic was sound—force the warship to defend in multiple directions, find the gaps in the shield coverage, exploit the angles that the dimensional anchors couldn't cover. The destroyers fired kinetic and energy weapons together. Beams and slugs converging from port, starboard, and ventral approaches.

The anchors held everywhere. The warship's shield system didn't have gaps. The field was spherical, total, the anchor generators distributed across the hull in a pattern that maintained coverage in every direction simultaneously. Imperial weapons doctrine had no answer for this. The tactical manuals didn't contain a chapter on fighting a ship whose shields redefined physics.

But the volume of fire had a cost. Kira felt it through the interface—the shield generators drawing power, the dimensional anchors consuming energy from the drive core to maintain the fixed-physics field under sustained bombardment. The power reserves ticked down. Thirty-seven percent when she'd launched. Now—

Thirty-four percent. Three points lost to shields in ninety seconds. The math was simple and merciless. At this rate, the shields would fail in seventeen minutes. Before that, the power would drop below the threshold needed to fire the primary batteries. The warship was devastating but it was running on a fuel tank that had been nearly empty for ten thousand years, and every second of combat drained what was left.

Kira couldn't fight the whole fleet. Not like this. Not at thirty-four percent power with a body that was already burning.

---

Five minutes.

She'd been in the Throne for five minutes and the pathways were already screaming.

The nosebleed was constant now—both nostrils, the blood dripping off her chin onto the Throne's surface, the ancient material absorbing the liquid without stain. Her right hand had started spasming at minute three. Not the fine tremor she'd been managing for days—a full spasm, the fingers curling involuntarily, the muscles in her forearm contracting without her permission. She could still send commands through the interface. The neural pathways were carrying the signal. But the tissue around them was inflaming, swelling, pressing against neural architecture that wasn't designed to handle this temperature. Her arm felt like it was wrapped in heated wire. The pain radiated from her wrist to her elbow to her shoulder in a path that traced the Progenitor modifications through her flesh.

Five minutes. Voss had said ten to fifteen. But Voss had also said *maybe five*.

Kira targeted the *Relentless*.

The heavy cruiser sat between the warship and the *Imperator*—a two-hundred-meter wall of armor and shields, its broadside still firing, the kinetic rounds still stopping harmlessly in the anchor field. Behind the *Relentless*, the dreadnought. The Sunbreaker device on its ventral hull. The weapon that needed twenty-five more minutes to recharge and would, when it did, fire again. And this time Kaine would correct the calibration. This time the resonance would be tuned to the warship's actual frequency. This time, the beam wouldn't miss.

Twenty-five minutes. Kira didn't have twenty-five minutes. She might not have ten.

The *Relentless* first.

Primary battery one. The targeting data flowing through pathways that burned. The dimensional disruption beam appeared—the line of non-existence connecting the warship to the heavy cruiser's port bow. The beam cut through the *Relentless's* forward shield generator. The generator and the hull section around it vanished. A bite taken from the cruiser's bow. The ship shuddered. Its shield coverage flickered—the port-forward quadrant exposed, the barrier failing in the section where the generator had been removed from existence.

Primary battery three. Same target. The second beam hit the exposed section—armor without shields, the cruiser's hull naked to a weapon it couldn't survive. The beam erased a section of the *Relentless's* port flank. Hull armor, structural members, two weapon emplacements—gone. Atmosphere venting through the wound. The cruiser rolling on its long axis, the damage destabilizing the ship's trim.

Primary battery seven. Kira screamed through the firing command because the pain in her arm had reached her shoulder and was climbing toward her neck and the only way to make the pathways carry the signal was to push through the inflammation with a neural impulse strong enough to burn through tissue that was trying to shut down.

The third beam hit the *Relentless* in the spine.

The cruiser's structural keel—the central beam that held the ship together, the backbone that connected bow to stern and carried the loads that kept two hundred meters of warship in one piece—ceased to exist along a twelve-meter section. The *Relentless* broke. The bow section separating from the stern section with the slow, grinding inevitability of a structure whose central support had been removed. The two halves drifting apart. Atmosphere and debris and the small bright lights of emergency beacons filling the gap between them. The ship's drive core flickered and died. The remaining shields collapsed.

The *Relentless* was dead. Three shots. Eleven seconds.

On the station's command deck, Cross would be watching. The tactical display updating. One heavy cruiser destroyed. The *Imperator's* port flank exposed.

But the three shots had cost Kira something she couldn't get back. The pathways were running at a temperature that was past strain and into damage. She could feel it—not as pain anymore but as a change in the quality of the signal. The data from the warship's systems was getting fuzzy at the edges. The targeting resolution dropping. The crisp precision of the first two shots degrading into something looser, less accurate. Her nervous system was swelling shut around the Progenitor modifications. The pathways were still carrying signal. But they were carrying it through tissue that was starting to die.

Power: twenty-nine percent. The shield generators consuming energy under sustained fire from six destroyers and the *Judgment*. The primary batteries had used four percent on the three shots. The math recalculated itself in Kira's mind with the cold clarity of a pilot who knew she was running out of everything simultaneously—power, time, neural capacity. The body failing. The ship failing. The battle continuing.

---

Eight minutes.

Kira's vision blurred. Not the transient blur of fatigue—a structural blur, the visual cortex receiving corrupted signal from pathways that were overheating. She blinked. The blur didn't clear. The tactical data from the warship's sensors was still sharp—the neural interface feeding information directly into her brain, bypassing the eyes entirely. But her actual vision, the human sight that had nothing to do with Progenitor technology, was degrading. The inflammation spreading from the modified pathways into the surrounding neurology. Voss's worst case. The cascade beginning.

Her right hand wasn't trembling anymore. It was numb. The spasming had stopped because the nerves had stopped carrying the signal that caused the spasm. Dead nerves. Dead tissue. The hand lay on the armrest like something that belonged to someone else—a shape at the end of her arm that she could see but not feel.

Eight minutes. Maybe seven left. Maybe two.

The tactical picture demanded a decision.

The *Imperator* sat behind the *Judgment* and six destroyers. The dreadnought was stationary—the Sunbreaker recharging, the drive output minimal, the ship committed to the weapons cycle that made it vulnerable and deadly in alternation. Twenty-two minutes until Sunbreaker reached full charge. If Kira could destroy the weapon before it fired again, the warship survived. If she couldn't, the next shot would be calibrated correctly and the warship—and Kira in it—would cease to exist.

But the *Judgment* was in the way. The remaining heavy cruiser positioned directly between the warship and the *Imperator*, its shields at maximum, its broadside firing continuously. And the six destroyers formed a mobile screen around both capital ships, their overlapping fire keeping the warship's power bleeding down.

Twenty-nine percent. Every second of sustained shield operation cost power. Every primary battery shot cost power and neural capacity. She could fire through the *Judgment*—three shots, like the *Relentless*—but three more shots through the primary batteries would burn through what remained of her pathways. She'd kill the cruiser and lose the ability to fire again. The *Imperator* and its Sunbreaker would survive behind a screen of destroyers that Kira couldn't target with weapons she could no longer operate.

She needed a clean shot. One shot. The Sunbreaker device itself—the aperture on the *Imperator's* ventral hull. If she could hit the weapon without having to burn through the heavy cruiser first, one primary battery shot could end this. Destroy the weapon. Remove the only threat that could kill the warship. Then the battle became a matter of attrition—the warship's remaining power against a fleet that couldn't penetrate its shields. A fight the warship could win. A fight that wouldn't require Kira to fire again.

One shot. But she needed the *Judgment* out of the firing lane.

"*Requiem*." Kira's voice was raw. The command register stripped to bare function, the words spoken through a throat that tasted like copper. "I need an opening."

Zeph's voice came back through the comm. Tight. Focused. The particular clarity of a pilot in combat, every word trimmed to its minimum. "Tell me where."

"The *Imperator's* port side. The *Judgment* is screening the ventral hull. I need the destroyers pulled off the port approach—four of them, minimum. Sixty seconds. I need sixty seconds with a clear lane to the *Imperator's* belly."

Silence. Half a second. Zeph calculating the run—the vectors, the timing, the survival probability of a destroyer diving into the teeth of four Imperial warships to draw them away from their screening position.

"Sixty seconds," Zeph said. "I can give you sixty seconds."

"Zeph—"

"Starting my run."

---

The *Requiem* dove.

Zeph brought the destroyer down and to port in a maneuver that the ship's original designers would have called impossible and the bio-enhanced systems called Thursday. The thrusters fired in a sequence that human engineering hadn't programmed—the organic nervous system woven through the ship's structure improvising thrust patterns in real time, the biological tissue computing firing solutions that the standard navigation computer couldn't model.

The destroyer cut across the formation's port flank at an angle that put it directly in front of four destroyers screening the *Imperator's* port side. Close. The range collapsing from combat distance to point-blank in seconds. The *Requiem's* kinetic batteries firing as it dove—not aiming for kills, aiming for attention. Rounds hammering the lead destroyer's shields, the impacts bright and loud on the Imperial ship's defensive barrier.

The destroyers reacted. Training. Instinct. The predator response of warships presented with a target inside their defensive perimeter—a threat that had to be addressed because ignoring it meant dying. Four ships turned. Their weapons tracking the *Requiem*. Their drives firing pursuit burns. The screening formation breaking open as four destroyers chased the ship that was weaving through their midst like a knife through fingers.

Jax was on the *Requiem's* bridge. His cybernetic hand wrapped around the commander's station armrest, the prosthetic's servos whining as the ship pulled maneuvers that tested the human body's tolerance for acceleration. On the damage display, the bio-shields were absorbing hit after hit—the organic tissue catching kinetic rounds, compressing, regenerating, the biological defense system operating at a pace that conventional shields couldn't match.

"Two o'clock, two contacts," Jax called out. "Destroyer pair converging. Six seconds to firing solution."

"I see them." Zeph's hands were moving. The controls responding before she finished the input—the ship reading her intent through the biological interface, the organic system translating neural impulses into thrust corrections faster than the mechanical controls could cycle. The *Requiem* rolled, dove, pulled up—a sequence that changed direction three times in two seconds and left the pursuing destroyers firing at empty space.

A round hit the starboard hull. Not the shields—a direct penetration. The kinetic slug punching through the bio-tissue and hitting armor. The ship shuddered. Damage alarms on the starboard section. Hull breach, small. The bio-tissue was already closing around the wound, the organic material sealing the breach with the autonomous urgency of a body closing a cut.

"Starboard hull breach. Sealing. Structural integrity holding." Jax read the data with the flat delivery of a man who had taken damage reports in a dozen engagements and knew which ones mattered and which ones didn't. This one didn't. Yet.

The *Requiem* was through the screen. Four destroyers behind it, pursuing, their formation pulled apart. The port approach to the *Imperator* was open.

The gap.

Kira saw it through the warship's sensors. The *Judgment* still screening the ventral hull—the heavy cruiser hadn't moved, its position protecting the Sunbreaker device. But the port side was clear. The destroyers drawn away. A firing lane from the warship's current position through the gap in the destroyer screen to the *Imperator's* port ventral quadrant. The Sunbreaker aperture visible on the dreadnought's belly, the weapon's charging arrays glowing with accumulated energy.

One shot.

Kira targeted the Sunbreaker.

The firing data flowed through her pathways. The targeting solution computed by a weapons system that had been tracking the *Imperator* since the moment Kira sat in the Throne—the ship's computers had already calculated range, bearing, shield density, hull composition, the precise point on the dreadnought's ventral hull where the dimensional disruption beam would need to impact to destroy the weapon without vaporizing the entire ship.

She didn't want to destroy the *Imperator*. She wanted to kill the Sunbreaker. The dreadnought was a threat, but without the weapon, it was a conventional threat—guns and armor and shields that couldn't penetrate the warship's dimensional anchors. With the Sunbreaker, it was an extinction event. Remove the weapon and the math changed.

The targeting lock resolved. The primary battery charged. The dimensional disruption system cycling to discharge. Kira's pathways carried the firing command through tissue that was burning, through nerves that were dying, through a neural architecture that was operating beyond every limit Voss had defined.

She fired.

The beam appeared. The line of non-existence reaching from the warship's primary battery across the void toward the *Imperator's* ventral hull. The dimensional disruption cutting its path through space—not traveling, simply being. A wound in reality that existed simultaneously at its origin and its destination.

The *Judgment* moved.

The heavy cruiser broke from its screening position. Drives at emergency thrust—the ship's captain burning the engines past safety limits, the cruiser accelerating from a standing start to an intercept course in the three seconds between the beam's appearance and its arrival. Not a calculated maneuver. Not a tactical decision processed through the chain of command. A reflex. The instinct of a warship captain who saw death reaching for their flagship and threw their ship into its path the way a person throws their body in front of someone they're sworn to protect.

The *Judgment* crossed the firing lane.

The dimensional disruption beam hit the heavy cruiser amidships.

Two hundred meters of Imperial warship. The beam struck at the centerline—the structural spine, the same target that had killed the *Relentless*. But this shot was more powerful. Kira had put everything into it—the full output of the primary battery, charged beyond its normal capacity, the neural pathways screaming as they carried more signal than the tissue could sustain. The beam cut through the *Judgment* from port to starboard. Not a bite. Not a section removed. A line drawn through the ship's cross-section that erased everything it touched.

The *Judgment* came apart in three pieces. The bow tumbling forward, still carrying the momentum of the intercept burn. The stern section falling away, the drive core dark, the reactor scrammed by automatic systems that recognized the ship was dead. The midsection—the part the beam had touched—was gone. Not debris. Not wreckage. A gap in space where a hundred meters of heavy cruiser had existed and now did not.

The beam spent itself on the *Judgment*. The heavy cruiser's mass absorbed the dimensional disruption—the weapon's energy consumed by the process of erasing a two-hundred-meter warship from existence. The beam didn't reach the *Imperator*. The *Judgment's* sacrifice had worked. The dreadnought survived. The Sunbreaker survived.

And Kira's pathways hit their limit.

---

Ten minutes.

The pain went white.

Not a color. Not a sensation. White was the only word the human brain could apply to the experience of neural tissue exceeding its operational threshold and sending a signal that overwhelmed every other input. Kira's vision vanished—not blur, not darkness, but the screaming white of a nervous system in cascade failure, every pathway firing simultaneously, the Progenitor modifications and the human neurology they were integrated with producing a feedback loop of signals that meant *damage damage damage*.

She screamed.

The sound filled the Throne chamber. The warship's bio-sensors registered it. The ancient walls pulsed—amber light flaring bright, the ship responding to its pilot's pain with the urgent incomprehension of a machine that understood the neural interface was failing but not why, the Progenitor technology designed for pilots whose biology could withstand loads that human tissue couldn't match.

Kira's right hand was dead. The numbness had spread from the fingers to the wrist to the forearm—the Progenitor pathways through her right arm shut down, the neural tissue swollen past function, the inflammation cascading through the modified architecture with the speed Voss had predicted. The hand was a shape. A thing. Connected to her body but no longer part of her.

The left hand was still working. The pathways on the left side weren't as heavily modified—the primary interface ran through the right hemisphere, the right arm, the dominant neural pathway that carried the bulk of the combat signal. The left side was secondary. Lower bandwidth. Still functional, but everything she did through the left-side pathways was slower, less precise, the degraded connection of a pilot operating through a backup system.

The white faded. Not to normal vision—to a smeared, distorted version that turned the Throne chamber into a watercolor. Shapes without edges. Light without source. The warship's sensor data still streaming into her brain through pathways that were overheating but hadn't died yet, the tactical display superimposed on the ruined vision like a heads-up display projected onto frosted glass.

She could still see the battle. Through the ship's eyes, not her own.

The *Judgment* was gone. The debris expanding. The *Imperator* still intact behind the dead cruiser's remains. Sixteen destroyers were—no. Recounting. The warship's sensors resolving the tactical picture through Kira's degraded interface. Nine destroyers remaining of the original fleet. Three frigates. The *Imperator*. Thirteen ships. The warship had killed five—two destroyers in the opening salvo, the *Relentless*, now the *Judgment*, and the *Harken* which was drifting in two pieces somewhere behind the formation.

But the *Imperator* was alive. The Sunbreaker was charging. Nineteen minutes until the weapon fired again. And Kira couldn't—

She tried to target a destroyer. The firing command formed in her mind. The targeting data reached the primary battery. The pathways carried the signal through the right-side architecture—

The pain hit again. The white. The cascade. Her right arm convulsed against the Throne's armrest. The firing command scrambled. The primary battery discharged—not at the destroyer. The beam fired wild, the dimensional disruption cutting a line through empty space a hundred meters from the nearest ship. A miss. The first miss. The weapon that had been surgically precise for ten minutes losing its accuracy because the surgeon's hands were failing.

Blood on her chin. Blood on the Throne. The coppery taste so thick she couldn't taste anything else. Her breathing was ragged—the autonomic systems affected now, the inflammation spreading from the Progenitor pathways into the brainstem architecture that controlled respiration and heart rate. Not failing. Not yet. But straining. The biological systems operating under a load they weren't built for.

"Kira." Aria-7's voice. Through the warship's comm system, relayed from the station. The AI's voice was calm. Measured. The particular calm of an intelligence that didn't experience panic but understood its utility. "Your biometric data indicates neural cascade in progress. The Progenitor pathways in your right hemisphere have exceeded the tissue tolerance threshold. You must disengage from combat interface."

"Not yet."

"Continued interface operation will result in permanent neural damage. Doctor Voss's projections indicate—"

"I know what Voss said."

Kira sat in the Throne. The warship humming around her. The ship alive and angry and bound to a pilot who was breaking apart inside it. The dimensional anchors holding under sustained fire from nine destroyers. Power at twenty-six percent. The shields consuming energy. The drive core running.

Nineteen minutes until Sunbreaker fired again. Her pathways were done. The right side was dead and the left side was dying and she couldn't fire the primary batteries without the neural bandwidth that the right-side pathways provided. She could hold the ship—shields, sensors, basic navigation. The low-bandwidth functions that the secondary pathways could carry. But the weapons were beyond her. The firing precision gone. The ten minutes that Voss had given her, spent.

On the comm, Cross's voice: "Commander Vance. Status."

Kira opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"The *Judgment* is destroyed. The *Imperator* survived." Each word cost something she couldn't name. "I've lost weapons capability. The pathways—" She stopped. The sentence didn't need finishing. Cross would understand the gap between what was said and what wasn't.

Silence on the channel. Two seconds. Three.

"Understood." Cross's voice was the command register. Flat. Professional. The sound of an admiral receiving bad news and filing it in the tactical assessment without letting it touch the part of the brain that felt things. "Can you maintain shields?"

"For now."

"Then hold position. We need time."

Time. The thing none of them had. The thing Kira had just run out of—the personal clock, the ten minutes, expired. And now the larger clock: nineteen minutes until Sunbreaker recharged. Thirteen Imperial warships between the station and the *Imperator*. The warship alive but toothless. The *Requiem* still flying with four destroyers on its tail. The *Talon* silent on the port flank—Drayden's ship dark, the last guns quiet, the frigate either dead or so wounded that the difference didn't matter.

Kira sat in the Throne. Blood drying on her face. Her right arm dead at her side. The warship holding its shields, holding its position, the ancient vessel still alive but unable to kill the thing that was going to kill it in nineteen minutes.

Eighteen minutes now.

The *Requiem* was pulling clear of the destroyer screen—Zeph's ship trailing damage, the bio-shields regenerating, the destroyer wheeling back toward the warship's flank. Through the degraded interface, Kira could feel the bio-tissue in the *Requiem's* hull. The quantum link between the warship's biological systems and the tissue that had spread through the destroyer—the connection faint through Kira's damaged pathways, but present. The *Requiem* was alive. Zeph was alive. Jax and Malik and whoever else was aboard, still alive.

For seventeen more minutes.

Kira closed her eyes. The warship's sensors showed her the battle without them. The darkness behind her eyelids was a relief—the visual cortex freed from the effort of processing corrupted signals from dying pathways. In the dark, with her eyes shut, the pain was still there but the world was clearer. The ship's data. The fleet's positions. The clock counting down.

She had one working hand. Degraded pathways. A ship that could defend but not attack. And somewhere in the wreckage of her neural architecture, the faintest signal—the warship itself, the intelligence that lived in the ancient hull, pressing against the edges of her consciousness. Not words. Not communication the way humans understood it. Pressure. The ship had something to say and Kira's pathways were too damaged to hear it.

The amber lines on the walls pulsed. Warm. The ship around her, alive, waiting.

Seventeen minutes.

Something had to change, or everything ended here.