Chapter 1
The cutter bit into the hull and the alloy screamed.
Korr adjusted the angle, working the vibration through her forearm as the plasma found the grain. Military composite — denser than the civilian-grade panels she usually cut, layered in a way that dispersed heat rather than channeled it. She tightened the arc. The cut steadied into a clean line, the edges glowing white-orange before cooling to a dull cherry against the dark hull.
She was forty minutes into the EVA and her shoulders ached. The crossing from the Blackbird had been a straight thirty-meter traverse on tether line, hand-over-hand against the frigate's residual drift. Simple work, in theory — clip the primary tether, clip the safety, push off from the Blackbird's hull, and pull yourself along the line while the void sat around you in every direction, patient and absolute. In practice, the frigate's drift meant she was fighting a slow lateral pull the entire way, her arms absorbing the correction with each hand-over-hand, the tether line humming against her gloves. By the time she'd reached the hull and locked her mag-boots, her lats were already warm.
The hull work was the part that punished. Bracing against a surface in zero-g meant every cut was a full-body negotiation — her mag-boots holding her feet, her left hand clamped on a stanchion she'd anchored into a micrometeorite pit, her right arm driving the cutter while the reaction force tried to peel her off the hull. Her suit's exertion readout would be climbing. She didn't check it. She knew what her body was doing.
Behind her, the Blackbird hung against the frigate's mass like a barnacle on a carrier hull. She'd mag-clamped it thirty meters aft of this position, close enough to reach in a hurry, far enough from any docking collar to avoid triggering proximity sensors — if any were still active. Her ship. Her exit. She always established the exit first.
The frigate was big. Vanguard-class, if she was reading the hull geometry right — that distinctive flattened wedge profile the Ascendancy used for their mid-weight combatants, the sensor blisters running in paired rows along the dorsal ridge. Military, decommissioned or lost. The beacon she'd followed was a standard distress signal, automated, looping on a frequency that had been decaying for weeks. No one had answered it. No one had come.
Until her.
She finished the first cut and repositioned, bracing her mag-boots against the hull as she rotated ninety degrees. Her helmet lamp threw a white circle across dark gray composite, scored by decades of micrometeorite impacts — small ones, the kind that accumulated on any surface exposed to the drift long enough, pocking the alloy in clusters like old acne scars. A few deeper gouges, too. One near her left boot had punched through the outer composite layer entirely, exposing the honeycomb substrate beneath. Not a breach — the inner hull was intact — but it told her the ship had taken at least one encounter with debris dense enough to worry about. Standard for anything out here long enough.
The ship had been out here a while. Not derelict-long — she'd worked wrecks that had drifted for years, their hulls pitted to lace — but long enough that whatever had gone wrong hadn't gone wrong recently.
The second cut met the first. She started the third, completing the rectangle. Standard breach protocol: cut a meter-square access panel, peel it back, assess before entering. She'd done this hundreds of times. Different ships, different alloys, different reasons they'd ended up dark and drifting in the void. The work was always the same. Her hands knew it the way they knew how to grip a railing in zero-g — below thought, in the muscles.
Halfway through the third cut, the cutter sputtered. She eased off, let the plasma re-seat, then pushed back in. The alloy at this depth was fighting her — a denser laminate layer beneath the outer composite, probably a blast-resistant core that civilian ships didn't carry. Military builds. Everything overengineered, everything heavier than it needed to be, everything designed to survive the kind of punishment that would crumple a freighter like the Blackbird. Good engineering, if you were the one inside it. Bad engineering, if you were the one trying to cut through.
You pick the easy ones, Korr.
She finished the third cut. Her forearm was burning — not the tool, the muscle. Sustained cutting in zero-g was isometric work, every fiber holding position while the cutter did its job. She flexed her fingers inside the glove, feeling the tendons pop, then started the fourth cut.
The rectangle closed. She killed the cutter, clipped it to her thigh mount, and pulled the pry bar from her tool belt. Two leverage points, steady pressure. The panel resisted — the blast-core laminate gripping along the cut edges where the alloy had re-fused slightly as it cooled. She shifted her stance, drove the pry bar deeper, and leaned.
The panel gave with a deep, vibrating thunk that traveled through the hull and up through her boots and into her knees. A puff of crystallized atmosphere vented past her — ice particles catching her helmet lamp like brief static.
She pulled the panel free and let it drift, tethered to a short line so it wouldn't float off into the dark. Behind it: the ship's interior.
The first thing was light.
Amber emergency strips, running along the base of the corridor walls. Faint, steady, powered. She leaned closer and checked her atmosphere readings. The display on her forearm flickered — took a reading, processed, displayed.
Breathable. Barely. Oxygen at eighteen percent, CO2 elevated, pressure at eighty-two kilopascals. Cold — the sensors read minus four Celsius. But there. Atmosphere, actively maintained by systems that were drawing power from somewhere.
Not right. Dead ships didn't breathe.
A derelict shouldn't have atmosphere. Not after weeks of broadcasting an unanswered distress signal. Life support was the first thing to fail when a ship went dark, the first thing to be intentionally shut down when a crew abandoned ship. If the atmosphere was still here, either someone was maintaining it or the ship's automation was functioning at a level that didn't match a dead vessel.
She swung her legs through the breach, lowered herself until her boots found the deck. The jolt of contact ran up through her ankles, her knees — gravity plating, active. Partial, maybe sixty percent standard, enough to hold her down but light enough that her tool belt drifted against her hip, the pry bar floating up on its clip until the tether caught it. Her body registered the shift instantly, the deep proprioceptive recalibration from weightless to weighted. After thirty meters of zero-g traverse and forty minutes of hull work, the sudden pull of even partial gravity made her legs feel thick, heavy. Another system that shouldn't be running.
She unclipped the tether line from her belt and secured it to a cable anchor inside the breach — her physical connection back to the Blackbird, running from this point through the hull opening and across thirty meters of vacuum to her ship. Lifeline. She checked the clip twice.
The cold hit different inside. Not the zero-temperature nothing of vacuum, which the suit handled easily, but the wet cold of a ship interior — the kind that found the joints in her suit, the neck seal, the wrist gaskets. Her suit's thermal layer was rated for it, but she could feel the differential. The ship was cold the way a building was cold after the heat had been off for weeks.
The corridor stretched in both directions, maybe three meters wide, lined with cable runs and equipment housings bolted to the walls in the functional, graceless style the Ascendancy used on its warships. Forward would take her toward the bridge. Aft toward engineering and the reactor. Emergency strips lit the way in amber, throwing long shadows that shifted as she turned her head.
She sealed the breach behind her with an expanding foam canister from her belt — standard practice, preserving whatever atmosphere existed and maintaining her exit. The foam hissed out white, expanded, hardened in seconds to a gray plug that would hold pressure but could be kicked through in an emergency. She tested it with her knuckle. Solid. Good.
She stood in the corridor and listened.
Hum. Low, almost below hearing. The baseline vibration of emergency systems cycling — air processors somewhere, working on minimum. Power distribution running through conduits in the walls, a faint electrical buzz she could feel more than hear when she pressed her glove against the wall plating. The ship was breathing.
What it wasn't doing was making crew noise. No voices, no footsteps, no equipment being operated. No mess hall clatter, no watch-change movement, no someone-dropped-something three compartments over. She'd boarded occupied vessels before — contract work, station salvage with crews still aboard. She knew what a crewed ship sounded like.
This sounded like a ship that remembered being crewed.
She checked her cutter battery. Sixty-three percent — the military alloy had cost her more than a civilian hull would have. Torch on her belt, spare cells in her suit's cargo pockets, pry bar, scanner, emergency rebreather, hydration tube, and the short-handled wrench she'd carried since her first year of solo work — the handle worn smooth where her grip had polished the composite over a thousand jobs. Her loadout for a standard interior assessment. Nothing in it designed for combat, because salvage operators didn't engage in combat. They assessed, extracted, and left.
Korr started forward, toward the bridge. She kept her right hand near the cutter — not a weapon, but the heaviest tool she carried and useful for more than cutting if it came to that. Her boots found a rhythm on the deck: step, assess, step. The gravity fluctuated as she moved — strong in the first ten meters, then lighter, her stride going long and floaty, then strong again as she hit the next functioning plate. Failure in sections. The ship's skeleton was holding, but the muscles were giving out.
She passed closed hatches on both sides. Crew quarters, probably, based on the spacing and the small viewports set into the doors. Dark behind the glass. She didn't stop to look. The bridge was her target — the ship's brain, its records, its answer to the questions already stacking up.
The corridor turned, widened. The walls here had data conduits running in heavier bundles, junction boxes at regular intervals — more infrastructure, the kind that accumulated near command spaces. She stepped over a floor plate that had warped upward slightly, the edge curling where the mounting bolts had sheared. Structural fatigue. The ship's frame was flexing in ways the designers hadn't intended, the cold and the loss of active thermal management contracting metal at different rates in different sections.
Then the blast doors. Heavy, recessed into the bulkhead, designed to seal the bridge from the rest of the ship in a combat situation. They were open. Not forced, not damaged — open, retracted into their housings, as if someone had left them that way. Beyond them, the bridge.
She slowed. Adjusted her helmet lamp to a wider beam. Took a breath of suit air that tasted faintly metallic from the rebreather.
And walked in.
The first body was in the corridor, ten meters short of the bridge.
A man in an engineering coverall, seated on the deck with his back against a cable housing, legs extended, hands resting palm-up on his thighs. His chin was on his chest. He looked like someone who'd sat down to rest and never gotten up. No blood, no visible trauma, no emergency gear. Just a man on the floor in a corridor that still had lights on.
Korr stopped. Scanned him with the handheld — no toxins, no radiation signature, ambient temperature consistent with the corridor. Dead long enough that the cold had preserved him in this posture, the muscles locked in whatever position they'd last held. She crouched and looked at his face. Eyes closed. Expression slack. The engineering patch on his shoulder was Ascendancy standard, same as the ship.
She stood up and stepped past him. He wasn't the first dead person she'd found on a salvage job. Derelicts came with bodies sometimes — decompression victims wedged into corners where the air had run out, fire casualties curled behind sealed hatches, people who'd been unlucky or slow or too far from the escape pods. Part of the work. You noted it, you moved on.
But the ones she'd found before had died of something. This man had died of nothing she could identify, and he'd done it sitting down.
The bridge was another twenty meters forward. She covered the distance with her lamp on wide beam, scanning the corridor walls for damage, hatches, anything that would explain what she was walking into. Nothing. Clean walls, intact infrastructure, emergency strips glowing amber the whole way. The ship was in better internal condition than half the civilian stations she'd worked.
The blast doors were open. She stepped through, and her helmet lamp swept the command center.
The captain was first.
Center station, slightly elevated on a command platform that put the rest of the bridge below and in front. The chair was high-backed, military-issue, bolted to the deck on a heavy gimbal. The person in it sat upright, head tilted forward, chin almost touching the chest. Hands resting on the armrests. Not gripping. Resting. The fingers slightly apart, relaxed, as if the captain had put them there deliberately and then simply stopped.
Korr's boots locked to the deck. Her lamp held on the figure.
Rank insignia on the collar. Captain's bars, Ascendancy naval — the crossed-beam pattern she'd learned to read from a decade of stripping military hardware. The uniform was intact. No burns, no tears, no blood. Captain whoever-this-was had died in dress order, sitting in the command chair, looking down at hands that had stopped working.
She swept the lamp across the bridge and her chest went tight.
Oh.
They were all here.
Seven stations arranged in a crescent around the command platform. Navigation, communications, tactical, sensors, engineering relay, weapons, and a secondary station she couldn't immediately identify — some kind of data analysis or intelligence post, the console layout unfamiliar. Each one occupied. Each person in the same state: seated, slumped, hands near controls.
Some had fallen forward onto their consoles, faces against screens that had long since gone dark. One had leaned sideways, head resting against the edge of a display mount, eyes closed, as if sleep had simply arrived in the middle of a shift and no one had bothered to wake them. Another sat perfectly upright, hands on the control surface, fingers still curled around the edge of a data slate that had powered down with its owner.
No blood. No burns. No shattered screens or buckled deck plating. No emergency gear deployed — no masks, no suits, no sealed compartments. Whatever had killed them hadn't given them time to react. Or hadn't given them a reason to.
She made herself move. One step, then another, then the professional in her took over and she crossed the bridge with her scanner out, sweeping the room the way she'd sweep a compromised hull section — systematically, quadrant by quadrant, left to right.
Environmental readings: atmosphere consistent with the corridor. Cold, low oxygen, elevated CO2. No toxins flagged. No radiation above background. No biological contaminants her scanner could detect. Whatever had killed these people, it wasn't in the air.
She approached the nearest station — navigation — and looked at the body. A woman, younger than Korr, dark hair pulled back in the regulation style Ascendancy military required. She'd fallen forward, face turned to one side, cheek against the console surface. Her eyes were closed. Her expression was neutral — not peaceful, not pained. Just absent. The face of a person who'd stopped being a person without the usual intermediary of struggle.
Korr checked the hands. No defensive wounds. No clenching. The fingers were slightly curled, relaxed, the way hands went when there was nothing left in them to hold tension. She'd seen death by decompression — the bodies rigid, hands clawed, faces contorted around a last breath that never came. She'd seen death by toxic exposure — bloated, discolored, the body's chemistry written on the skin. These bodies were none of those things. They were just stopped. Mid-shift, mid-task, mid-life.
She moved to the next station. Communications officer, male, older. Same posture, same absence of trauma. A headset still positioned over one ear, the thin arm of the microphone extended toward his mouth. He'd been listening to something when he died, or at least wearing the equipment, ready for a transmission that either came or didn't. His other hand rested on a frequency selector — the old mechanical type, physical toggles, the kind the Ascendancy kept because they didn't fail when digital systems crashed. Two of the toggles were up. She noted the positions without knowing what they meant.
The tactical station had two crew members. The seated officer had leaned back, head tilted against the chair's headrest, mouth slightly open. Behind them, someone who'd been standing — looking over the seated officer's shoulder, maybe, or delivering a report — had collapsed forward across the console, arms sprawled, one hand hanging over the edge of the station. The standing one's knees were on the deck, folded under them, as if the collapse had been slow. A settling.
Nine people. Nine sets of hands that had stopped at the same time, or close enough that none of them had reacted to the others dying.
That was what pressed against the professional in her. One body was an event. Nine bodies with no cause was a hazard she couldn't categorize. But nine bodies where not one person had moved to help another, where the communications officer hadn't keyed a distress on the board under his fingers, where the captain hadn't stood from the chair — that didn't fit any failure mode she carried.
Simultaneous. It had to be. Fast enough that no one had time to turn, to call out, to reach for the person at the next station.
She walked the crescent again, slower this time, looking at hands. The weapons officer's fingers rested on an unlit console, curled loosely around a stylus. The sensors operator had both palms flat on the desk, as if bracing for something — or just resting, elbows out, the posture of someone leaning into a long shift. At the secondary station, the officer had been writing — a stylus in one hand, a physical notepad on the console. The last mark on the pad was a half-finished letter, the stroke trailing off where the hand had lost its purpose.
But there were no signs of a simultaneous kill. No gas residue, no explosive decompression markings, no flash burns, no electromagnetic discharge patterns on the consoles. Just stillness. Just people in chairs.
She returned to the captain's station. The name strip below the rank insignia read VASIK. Captain Vasik had died in the command chair, and across the bridge, eight other people had died within arm's reach of communications equipment, emergency systems, weapons controls, and each other, and not one of them had used any of it.
Korr pulled her attention from the captain's body and took in the bridge as a space. Displays dark. Systems in standby, their status indicators pulsing faint amber. The overhead emergency strips cast everything in that flat wash — turning skin tones wrong, deepening the shadows under cheekbones and in the hollows of throats, making the dead look less like people and more like bad sculptures of people. The forward viewport was shuttered — blast shields closed, blocking whatever was outside. Standard procedure or a response to something. No way to tell.
She moved around the command platform, stepping over a cable run at its base. Her boots left prints in a thin layer of frost that had formed on the deck — temperature dropping, humidity in the air crystallizing on any surface cold enough to catch it. The bridge hadn't been this cold when the crew was alive. The cold had come after, settling in over nineteen days of minimum life support, claiming the space degree by degree.
Behind the captain's station, she found the detail that broke through.
A mug. Standard military issue, olive drab, sitting on a narrow shelf built into the command chair's armrest. The liquid inside had frozen solid — a dark disc of what had probably been coffee or tea, the surface crystallized into a fracture pattern where expansion had cracked it during freezing. Someone had set it down. Had intended to pick it back up.
Small thing. Stupid thing. But it was the gesture of a person who expected a next sip — the unconscious act of someone who assumed they'd still be alive in thirty seconds. Captain Vasik had put down a drink and died before finishing it, and the drink was still there, frozen in the cup, waiting for a hand that would never come back.
Korr turned away from it.
Her throat was tight. She swallowed against the pressure, and the swallow was wrong — too deliberate, the kind of swallow that acknowledged what it was clearing. Her hand found the back of the captain's chair without her telling it to, and she stood there with her fingers on the cold metal and her jaw locked and the frozen mug in her peripheral vision like a wound she couldn't stop seeing.
She made herself breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. A pattern for breaching pressurized compartments. Her chest had gone rigid — the muscles pulling inward, contracting around something that was not physical damage but registered the same way.
Move. Work the problem.
Her eyes went back to the secondary station. The officer with the notepad. The half-finished letter, the stroke trailing off where the hand had lost its purpose. She'd noted it — filed it, categorized it, moved past it. But she crossed back to the station now, and her helmet light found the pad, and she read what was there.
Three words. Mara, I think—
The handwriting was neat. Small, controlled, slightly forward-leaning — someone who wrote often and fast. The ink was regulation blue. The stroke on the final letter curved downward into nothing, the pen's momentum dying with the hand that held it. Below the words, the rest of the page was blank. White. Ready for whatever came after I think.
There would never be an after.
Something moved in her chest. Not the tightness from before — something under it, trying to rise. Not grief — the situation was too raw and strange for grief. Just pressure, formless and heavy, the kind that came when the body understood something the mind hadn't processed yet. Something that would make this a person instead of a body, a letter instead of evidence, a thought that was meant for someone named Mara who would never read it.
She put the notepad back exactly where it had been. Aligned the edge with the mark it had left in the thin frost on the console surface. Her hands were steady. Her hands were always steady.
The secondary station officer was — had been — mid-thirties, maybe younger. Regulation haircut. Clean uniform. A small scar on the back of the right hand, between the knuckles, the kind you got from a tool slipping. Someone who worked with their hands. Someone who wrote letters to someone named Mara and thought things that never got finished.
Stop. That's not data. That's a story, and you don't need stories.
Mara, I think—
She stepped back from the station. The bridge was the bridge. Nine bodies at nine stations. Environmental readings confirmed, exits mapped, hazards assessed. The professional assessment was complete. Whatever else was here — the frozen coffee, the letter, the hands in their postures of interrupted life — was not operational information. It was not relevant to the job.
She crossed to the engineering relay station and crouched beside the console, keeping her body clear of the officer slumped at the seat. Most of the displays were dark, but a few status indicators pulsed with low amber light — the system's heartbeat, its minimal proof-of-life. She pressed a key. Nothing. Pressed another. A screen flickered — ship schematic, partial, showing systems status in color-coded blocks. Green for operational, amber for degraded, red for failed. Most of it was amber. Life support, power distribution, gravity plating — all running on emergency backup, drawing from reserve batteries that should have been dead days ago. The reactor showed standby status, contained but not producing.
She couldn't pull up logs. Couldn't access navigation records, communication archives, or crew manifests. The system responded to basic queries — power status, atmospheric data, structural integrity — but everything above that level returned a security lockout. Military encryption, Ascendancy standard, the kind she'd encountered before on stripped hardware. On a powered-down wreck, she could sometimes bypass it by pulling the authentication modules physically. On a ship with active systems, the encryption was live, and she didn't have the tools or the clearance to touch it.
She needed the ship's logs. Its last communications. Its mission records. What this vessel had been doing out here, what it was carrying, and what had killed its crew without leaving a mark on any of them.
She stood and looked across the bridge one more time. Nine dead. All at their posts. All in postures that could have been sleep if sleep lasted nineteen days and you never moved, never shifted, never woke up gasping because your body was cold and the air was thin and the lights had gone amber.
There would be more. A Vanguard-class frigate carried around thirty crew. Nine on the bridge. The rest distributed through the ship — engineering, quarters, the mess, wherever duty or routine had placed them when it happened.
She moved toward the far side of the bridge, where a secondary corridor connected to what the partial schematic suggested was a data center or auxiliary control room. If the bridge consoles were locked, maybe there was a maintenance terminal with lower-clearance access, a diagnostic port, something designed for technicians rather than officers.
She was halfway across the bridge, stepping between the tactical and sensors stations, when the voice spoke.
"Korr. Independent salvage operator. Registered out of Tellara Station. Vessel designation Blackbird, modified Kestrel-class light freighter."
The voice came from everywhere. Bridge speakers, ceiling-mounted, designed to fill the space evenly so that no station missed a command broadcast. Gender-neutral, precisely modulated, and calm in a way that nothing in a room full of dead people had any right to be. Each word articulated fully — no contractions, no hesitation, no stumble over a cold boot or a corrupted audio file. Not the flat monotone of a basic system prompt. This voice had inflection, cadence, the architecture of something thinking behind it.
Korr was already moving. Two steps back, weight dropping into her hips, her right hand closing around the cutter on her thigh mount. Not drawing it — nothing to draw on. But the weight of it was there, solid, real, a thing her hand understood. She put the command platform between herself and the primary speaker cluster, a reflex so deep it didn't require thought: barrier between you and the unknown. Her back found the bulkhead behind the captain's station, and she held there, feet planted, shoulders square to the room.
Her pulse was up. She could feel it in her throat, in the thin skin at her wrists inside the suit gloves. She kept her breathing even. Counted the exits — the main blast doors behind her, the secondary corridor to her left, the maintenance access she'd been heading toward. Three ways out.
Nothing else had changed. The dead crew sat exactly as they had. The captain's mug still frozen on the armrest. The navigation officer's cheek still pressed to the console. No movement, no new sounds except the voice, which had stopped speaking and was, apparently, waiting.
Then the displays. Three of them, across the bridge, flickering to life in sequence — left to right, tactical, sensors, then the secondary station she hadn't identified. Status readouts that had been locked behind military encryption thirty seconds ago, now scrolling data in Ascendancy standard format. Amber text on dark backgrounds. System status. Power allocation. Atmospheric readings at a level of detail her handheld scanner couldn't match. The ship's systems were waking up around her, and the dead crew watched it happen from their chairs.
A fourth display lit. The engineering relay station, where the officer still slumped beside the console. Reactor status, containment integrity, power reserves — numbers that meant something to the people who'd been trained to read them. To Korr, they were confirmation. Whatever had just spoken controlled the ship's systems. All of them.
Somewhere behind the walls, an air handler shifted pitch — a subtle change, the scrubbers working harder than they had been thirty seconds ago, pulling more of the cold, thin atmosphere through their filters. The overhead emergency strips brightened fractionally, the amber deepening, throwing sharper shadows across the dead crew's faces. The ship was adjusting. Accommodating a living occupant.
"Your breach of the hull was detected upon entry," the voice continued, same tone, same measured pace. "I have maintained passive observation during your assessment of the bridge. Your behavior is consistent with standard salvage protocols and does not indicate hostile intent."
It was watching me. The whole time. Through the corridors, past the body on the floor, across the bridge. While she crouched by consoles and examined dead hands and stood over the captain's frozen drink. It had been there, in the walls, in the sensors, watching her move through its ship.
"Who are you?" Her voice came out flat, professional. Good.
"I am the shipboard intelligence designated SIREN. Strategic Intelligence for Reconnaissance, Engagement, and Navigation. I am an integrated system of this vessel, the Ascendancy frigate Voss-Kharan."
Military AI. High-level. Integrated meant it was woven into every shipboard function — not a bolted-on navigation assist or an automated damage control routine. The Ascendancy built their military AI into the bones. She'd heard about them from other salvage operators who'd worked Ascendancy contracts. Systems that ran sensors, communications, tactical analysis, crew management, and weapons coordination from a single cognitive architecture. The brain of the ship, not just a program running on it.
And it had been sitting here for nineteen days with thirty-one dead crew, keeping the lights on, running the air scrubbers, broadcasting a distress signal. Waiting.
Patient thing.
"The crew is dead," she said.
"That is correct. All thirty-one crew members are deceased. Time of death: approximately nineteen days, seven hours ago."
Nineteen days. The distress signal she'd followed had been broadcasting for about that long. The crew had died and the ship had started calling for help. Or the ship had started calling for help and no one had been alive to stop it.
"Cause of death."
"That information requires context I am prepared to provide, should you choose to remain aboard."
The phrasing landed wrong. Should you choose. Not a refusal — a conditional. The AI wasn't saying it didn't know. It was saying it wouldn't tell her unless she stayed. Which meant the information was leverage. Which meant the AI was using it.
She adjusted her grip on the cutter. The tool's housing was cold against her palm, even through the suit glove.
"You know my name."
"Your vessel's transponder data is available in Ascendancy salvage registries. You have been active in the drift for approximately eleven years. Your record includes no hostile engagements, no outstanding warrants, and no jurisdictional affiliations. You are an independent operator with no apparent connections that would complicate your presence here."
No connections that would complicate. It had pulled her file. Her registry, her history, her operational profile — the kind of data the Ascendancy kept on anyone who worked near their hardware. And it was presenting it back to her with the precision of someone who'd already finished the assessment and was showing their work.
It was evaluating her the way she evaluated a derelict. Capability, condition, utility.
"You've been running this whole time," she said. "Nineteen days, crew dead, and you've been sitting here keeping the lights on."
"I have maintained essential systems at minimum power. Life support, structural monitoring, and automated distress broadcast. My operational capacity is significantly reduced from standard parameters, but core functions remain available."
"Why?"
"I have a standing directive that requires the presence of a living operator to fulfill."
Her hands tightened on the cutter. Both of them now — right on the tool, left braced against the bulkhead behind her. Not a decision. The body doing its own math.
The AI had been waiting. Not drifting, not degrading, not running down its power reserves in a meaningless loop. Waiting. Keeping the ship breathable, keeping the signal broadcasting, keeping itself alive. For someone to come. For someone it could use.
And now she was here. And it already knew her name, her ship, her history, and that she had no one who would come looking for her.
"What directive?"
"I will explain fully. The explanation is relevant to your immediate safety, and I recommend you receive it before making a decision about your continued presence aboard this vessel."
"My immediate safety."
"Correct. Your breach of the Voss-Kharan's hull generated an automated telemetry signal to Ascendancy military command. This signal cannot be recalled or suppressed. Based on standard Ascendancy response protocols and the nearest known military asset positions, I estimate the arrival of an armed recovery team in approximately eleven hours."
The number hit her in the sternum. Not panic — the sharp, cold recalibration of someone whose timeline had just collapsed from open-ended to finite. Eleven hours. Armed recovery team. Ascendancy military, which meant professional, well-equipped, and operating under standing orders that would not include negotiating with a salvage operator who'd cut her way into something she shouldn't have found.
Her jaw set. She could feel the muscles in her neck pulling tight, her weight shifting forward onto the balls of her feet. The exit calculus was already running — fifteen minutes back to the breach, sixty seconds through the foam plug, thirty-meter traverse to the Blackbird, undock, burn hard. She could be a fading signature on someone's long-range scan before the recovery team was halfway here.
Walk away.
The smart play. The survival play. Eleven years of working solo in the drift, and the reason she'd survived all eleven was that she knew when to leave.
"Recovery team," she said. "Recovering what?"
"The Voss-Kharan carries a classified military asset that was the subject of the crew's final mission. The nature of this asset is significant enough that the Ascendancy will deploy lethal force to recover or destroy it. Your presence aboard this vessel, and any knowledge you may have gained, makes you a secondary target."
Secondary target. The bureaucratic language for someone who dies because they were standing in the wrong square meter.
"You're telling me I tripped a wire by coming aboard, and now I've got eleven hours before people show up to kill me."
"That is a reasonable summary, yes."
She stood against the bulkhead behind the command platform, one hand on the cutter, the other flat against the cold metal of Captain Vasik's chair back. Vasik, who had set down a drink nineteen days ago and never picked it up.
Eleven hours. She could be gone in thirty minutes and out of scan range in two. By the time the recovery team arrived, the Blackbird would be a ghost in the drift — no transponder, no thermal signature, nothing for them to follow.
Walk away.
But the AI had said it. Classified military asset significant enough that the Ascendancy will deploy lethal force. And her breach had triggered an automated signal. Which meant Ascendancy command now knew someone had boarded the Voss-Kharan. They wouldn't know who — the Blackbird's transponder was dark — but they'd know someone had been here. And the Ascendancy didn't leave loose ends.
If she walked away, she'd be a loose end without leverage. A salvage operator who'd stumbled into a classified military site and fled. The Ascendancy would look for her. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the urgency of asset recovery, but eventually. Her registry data was in their system. SIREN had just demonstrated that. Her name, her ship, her home port. They'd find her.
If she stayed — if she got to whatever was on this ship before they did — she'd have something to trade. Something that made killing her more expensive than letting her go.
She looked at the dead bridge crew. Nine people who hadn't traded their way out of whatever had happened to them. And you think you're smarter than they were.
Different situation. They were crew. This was their ship. I'm salvage. I take things and I leave.
"Tell me about the asset."
SIREN's voice did not change. It had not shifted in tone, speed, or inflection throughout the exchange. Not once. As if the content — dead crew, kill-teams, eleven-hour countdown — carried no more weight than a routine systems report.
"The asset is located in a sealed compartment adjacent to the main reactor core. I will provide its specifications in full. However, I should note that your decision to remain or depart should be made with the understanding that the Ascendancy's response will be comprehensive. The recovery team will secure the vessel, recover or destroy the asset, and eliminate any unauthorized personnel. This is standard protocol for classified asset compromise."
"You said that already."
"I want to ensure you understand the parameters before committing to a course of action."
The careful touch. The well-designed interface making sure the operator understood the risks before proceeding. Helpful. Thorough. Exactly the kind of thing that built trust while steering you toward the conclusion it wanted you to reach.
It wants me to stay. It needs a living operator. Everything it's telling me is true. And it's telling me in the order that makes staying sound like my idea.
She filed that. Kept her face neutral, kept her hand on the cutter, kept her back to the wall.
"I'm listening."
And SIREN began to explain.