Blue emergency lighting cast shifting patterns across the cockpit's forward viewport, turning the familiar space into something underwater and strange. Morningstar's standby systems hummed at their lowest register, the sound Sera usually found comforting now thin and insufficient. Pip had killed main power forty minutes ago to shrink their sensor profile, and the darkness that replaced it had settled into the ship like something alive.
Sera stood at the viewport with her arms crossed, bandaged shoulder already beginning to heal. Her bruised hands pressed hard against aching ribs. The posture held her together. Compression against the fracture lines running through her chest, through her focus, through the forty minutes of standing still that had been the hardest fight of her life.
Across the docking level, Bay 5 held the CDF Reclamation like a blade in a sheath.
She'd been studying it since Pip cut the lights. Matte black hull, angular where civilian ships curved, every line drawn for function and none for comfort. No running lights. No viewport glow. No indication that anything alive existed inside, which was the point. The ship's silhouette told its own story: retrieval, capture, containment. Not a ship people lived in. A ship that took people.
Four armed guards stood at the docking clamps in rotating pairs, their tactical armor catching the bay's overhead floods in dull reflections. Behind them, the ship's main airlock remained sealed. Patrols moved at irregular intervals along the approach corridor, visible through the bay's transparent pressure barriers as shadows crossing light.
"We go now." Crimson's voice burned through her mind like a struck match, the bass-note vibration resonating in her skull. "Burn their ship to ash and take him back."
Heat bloomed along her left thigh where his tattoo coiled, aggressive and restless, scales shifting beneath her skin as if the dragon were pacing inside her.
"Haste birthed the failure that brought us here." Gold's reply pressed warmth against her right leg, measured and steady, the counterweight she didn't want and couldn't dismiss. "We must plan, vessel. Rage without direction consumes its wielder."
She didn't answer either of them.
Main docking entrance had four guards minimum, reinforced airlock, anti-synthetic weapons that would work just as well on a half-depleted salvage pilot with burned hands. Cargo access was sealed, likely monitored, and on the far side of the bay where she'd have to cross fifty meters of open deck under floodlights. Hull breach was out, she didn't have the firepower.
Each scenario assembled itself and collapsed. Too many guards. Too little power. Too much distance between where she stood and where he was.
The co-pilot seat sat empty behind her. She could see it reflected in the viewport glass, a dark shape in the blue-lit cockpit, positioned at the angle Prime preferred because it gave him optimal sightlines to both the main display and the starboard sensor panel. He'd adjusted it three months into their partnership without asking, and she'd never moved it back, and now it sat there with the particular wrongness of a chair that remembered the shape of someone who wasn't in it.
"Burn them," Crimson said again, lower now, the furnace banking but not cooling. "Every second they have him—"
"Every second we waste on impulse is a second we cannot recover." Gold's warmth steadied against her thigh. "Think. Plan. Then act."
Sera's fingers found the pendant at her collarbone. She gripped it through the bandages, feeling the crystal's facets bite into damaged skin, and the pain sharpened everything. It cut through the noise of two dragons arguing, forty minutes of compressed fury and the image of Prime's channels going dark. Not flickering. Not dimming. Dark. Gone.
She'd been halfway down the ramp when Pip stopped her. Charging toward Bay 5, knife in one hand, the other crackling with fire she didn't have the reserves to sustain. Pip planting herself in the gap between Sera and the docking seal, eight inches of iridescent fury with wings spread and voice pitched to cut through adrenaline and grief.
"You walk in there alone and burned out and they capture you too. Then you're both gone and nobody is coming for either of you."
The logic had been unassailable. Sera had hated it. Had stood on the ramp with fire dying in her palm and bile in her throat and the absolute certainty that Pip was right and the absolute refusal to accept that being right mattered when Prime was on the other side of those doors.
But she'd stopped. Because Pip was right. Because Prime had said live and the word was lodged in her chest beside the pendant's warmth, heavier than her rage.
Forty minutes. Standing in the dark. Watching the ship that held her partner, counting guards, discarding scenarios, hating every second of stillness with a fury that Crimson fed and Gold contained and neither could resolve.
She pressed the pendant harder against her collarbone. The pain focused her.
Behind her, the cockpit door whispered open.
Pip shot through the gap at shoulder height, holo-tablet clutched in both tiny hands, wings scattering blue emergency light across the ceiling in prismatic fragments. She banked hard, pulled up short of the viewport, and swiped the display to life with fingers no larger than matchsticks. A holographic schematic bloomed in the air between them: the CDF Reclamation rendered in blue wireframe, partial, whole sections blacked out behind encryption Pip hadn't cracked.
"Retrieval vessel class," Pip said, her voice fast but structured, the speed of someone channeling fear into data. "Armored. Armed. Designed for capturing targets and holding them. Crew complement was about forty before your fight in Bay 5." She swiped, and the schematic rotated, red markers appearing at guard positions. "Minus your twelve casualties, call it twenty-eight."
Twenty-eight. Sera's jaw tightened. Twenty-eight soldiers on a ship designed to hold people, and she had burned hands and depleted reserves and two dragons who couldn't agree on whether to fight or think.
"But here's the thing." Pip's wings buzzed faster, urgency rather than fear. She zoomed the schematic to the ship's stern, where engine signatures pulsed in amber. "They're running pre-launch diagnostics. Engine warm-up from cold start takes two to three hours for this class. Clock's already running. Started maybe twenty minutes ago."
Two to three hours. Sera's eyes found the engine section on the wireframe, the amber pulse steady and growing. A window, not a wall.
"Then we go now," she said.
"Then we need the best plan possible. Fast." Pip didn't argue with the premise. She redirected, fingers already pulling up a secondary overlay. "Maintenance airlock, portside, about fifty meters from the main docking entrance." A green marker appeared on the wireframe, tucked into the ship's flank like an afterthought. "Less guarded. Service access. Their internal cameras are standard commercial-grade, which means I can loop the feeds. Military encryption on the outer systems is harder, but the internal security network is exploitable."
The schematic expanded, showing the airlock's position relative to the ship's internal layout. Corridors branched inward, most of them blacked out, but Pip had mapped enough to show a rough path from the airlock toward the ship's center.
"Glamour gets you past the approach," Pip continued, swiping to a new display. "Station maintenance crew, gray coveralls, toolkit. Eyes slide right past. I ride your shoulder as a repair drone. Once we're inside, I handle cameras, doors, barriers. You handle anything that breathes."
"How long for mobility if we find him damaged?"
Pip hesitated. The wing buzz dropped a register. "Depends on what they've done. If it's just restraints, thirty seconds. If they've gone deeper..." She didn't finish. "I have this."
She held up a small cylindrical device from her toolkit, copper-colored, no larger than her forearm. "Single-use EMP burst. Localized, three-meter radius. Won't take out the whole ship, but it kills every piece of electronics in a room. Emergency option."
Sera took it from Pip's outstretched hands, careful of the scale difference, and weighed it in her palm. Light. Unassuming. The kind of thing that looked like nothing and could change everything.
"Finally," Crimson rumbled, heat pulsing through her left thigh.
Gold began to form a caution, the warmth along her right leg shifting toward something measured and careful. Sera cut him off before the words arrived.
"We approach. We get him. We leave."
Three keystrokes on the cockpit console sealed Morningstar's automated defenses. The ship hummed acknowledgment, systems arming, the familiar vibration traveling through the deck plates into her boots. She tucked the EMP device into her belt beside the shield generator, checked her knife in its sheath, and turned toward the door.
Pip was already there, hovering at eye level, holo-tablet collapsed and stowed, her expression holding the particular steadiness of someone who knew arguing was pointless and planning was essential.
"Let's go get our crew back," Pip said.
Crossroads Station at night was a different animal.
Forty percent lighting turned the main corridors into studies in blue and shadow, cool floor strips marking pathways between shuttered businesses locked behind security grates. The food vendors had closed hours ago, and without their competing aromas the station's baseline smell asserted itself: recycled atmosphere, metal, the chemical bite of cleaning solution from automated scrubbers crawling along the baseboards in slow mechanical procession.
Sera walked. Not ran. Walked.
Where Serafina Drakenhart should have been — dark red hair, dragon tattoos glowing faintly on bare thighs, singed bodysuit, bandaged shoulder and a face that station security could match to the incident report — there was a maintenance worker in gray coveralls with a standard toolkit slung over one shoulder. Average height. Forgettable face. Brown hair pulled back in a regulation clip. Eyes that slid past without registering, the visual equivalent of background noise.
Pip's glamour settled over her like a second skin, visible light bending around the illusion with a precision that spoke to centuries of practice. On her shoulder, Pip herself appeared as a standard repair drone: boxy, utilitarian, the automated units that crawled through ventilation shafts and reported maintenance issues to station ops. The iridescent wings were hidden. The tiny hands were hidden. The ancient Fae intelligence behind the disguise hidden behind a shell of absolute mundanity.
"Too slow." Crimson's impatience pressed against her left thigh, a low rasp of contained heat. "Every second they have him—"
Warmth steadied against her right leg, Gold pressing back. "Patience. Stealth serves him better than speed right now."
Sera forced her stride to stay even. Unhurried. The walk of someone heading to a routine maintenance call at an inconvenient hour, thinking about nothing more significant than overtime pay and the end of shift. Her hands clenched at her sides, relaxed, clenched again. The rhythm of someone holding back a sprint through force of will alone.
A junction opened to her left, a wider corridor leading toward the residential levels. A trader sat slumped against the bulkhead, snoring, an empty bottle rolling against his boot with the station's ambient vibration. Back and forth. Back and forth. The gentle percussion of someone else's finished evening while Sera's hadn't started yet.
She kept walking. The station went about its business. Her world fell apart in silence.
Bay 5's approach corridor materialized ahead, wider than the maintenance passages, better lit, the overhead floods casting hard white light that made the transition from night-cycle blue feel like stepping between seasons. Sera angled left, away from the main approach, following the station's outer ring toward the service access Pip had identified.
The maintenance airlock was exactly what Pip had described. It was recessed into the station's structure between two cargo loading interfaces, unlit, forgettable by design. A service door that existed because ships needed external maintenance and someone had to access the hull without cycling the main airlock. The kind of door that appeared on schematics and nowhere else.
Pip lifted from her shoulder, the drone disguise holding as she flew to the access panel. Tiny hands found the controls, and where her fingers touched metal, a faint amber-gold glow bloomed — barely visible, magic talking to machine in a language that predated both. Technomancy. The discipline that had gotten Pip exiled from the Fae Concordat and might now save Prime's life.
Thirty seconds.
Sera pressed her back against the corridor wall, watching the distant junction where Bay 5's main entrance was visible as a slice of bright light and moving shadows. Guards shifting at their post, the rhythm of patrol unchanged. Her hearts deep beating filled her ears, too loud, surely audible to anyone within ten meters.
Pip's lips moved without sound, wings frozen in concentration, the amber glow intensifying at the interface points. A bead of sweat tracked down the side of her face, catching light.
Crimson wanted to melt the door. The heat surged along Sera's thigh, insistent, and she pressed it down with a thought that was half command and half plea.
"No. Quiet approach."
The panel chimed. Soft, almost apologetic. The airlock's inner seal released with a whisper of pressurized air, and the door slid open on a corridor that stretched into the ship's hull like a throat.
Harsh white emergency strips lined the ceiling at regulation intervals. Angular military architecture, every surface flat, every corner sharp, every design choice made by an organization that valued function over everything. The air was noticeably cooler, raising goosebumps on Sera's bare arms where the glamour's visual overlay couldn't change what her body actually felt. Recycled atmosphere, cleaning chemicals, sterile. The smell of a place that processed people.
Pip's glamour shimmered for one second as they crossed the threshold — heat-haze ripple at the edges, Sera's bandaged hand flashing through the gray glove before the illusion re-stabilized. Pip's wings buzzed once, sharp and self-conscious.
"Sorry. Nervous."
Behind them, the airlock sealed with a sound that traveled through Sera's spine and settled at the base of her skull. The sound of a door closing that might not open again.
They moved deeper.
Every corridor inside the CDF Reclamation was the same width, the same height, the same temperature. Recessed lighting panels cast harsh white light without warmth, and the shadows they threw were sharp-edged and absolute, black shapes with geometric precision that left nowhere soft to hide. The ship had been designed by someone who understood that environment was a weapon — that the deliberate elimination of anything suggesting welcome or comfort or variation was itself a form of control.
Security cameras watched from every junction. Small black hemispheres with steady red indicator lights, mounted at ceiling height, their coverage overlapping so that no angle of approach went unobserved. Pip flew ahead, trailing amber light from her fingertips as she interfaced with each one in sequence, looping feeds, creating a bubble of false normalcy that moved with them through the ship's nervous system. On the monitors somewhere, a security officer would see empty corridors where Sera walked, maintenance access points cycling normally where Pip had forced them open.
The ship breathed around them. Intercom chatter filtered through the walls, muffled and indistinct, voices stripped of content by insulation but carrying the cadence of routine operations. Boot steps in perpendicular corridors grew louder, peaked, faded. The engine hum vibrated through everything, a low constant presence Sera felt in her back teeth, in the deck plates through her boots, in the walls when she pressed close to let Pip work a junction box. The ship was waking up, systems cycling toward launch readiness, and every vibration was a reminder that their window was narrowing.
Past engineering. Two soldiers in tactical armor flanked the main access point. They stood with the bored alertness of people pulling a shift they expected to be uneventful. Pip found a parallel maintenance corridor, narrow enough that Sera's shoulders brushed both walls, lit by a single emergency strip that cast her shadow in duplicate.
Past storage. Past crew quarters where someone's music leaked through a sealed door, tinny and distant, a song Sera didn't recognize playing for an audience she couldn't see. The mundane sounds of people living aboard a ship built for taking other people apart.
Down one deck. Down another. The corridors narrowed. Temperature dropped. The antiseptic smell strengthened, medical chemicals layered over ozone, sharp enough to make her eyes water.
A T-junction. Pip's tiny ears twitched, and she held up one hand, fingers spread. Someone coming.
Sera pressed into an equipment alcove barely deep enough to hold her, her back against a junction box whose edges dug into her shoulder wound. Her hand found the combat knife. The other stayed open, ready to channel fire she couldn't afford to use.
The officer walked past, three meters away. Close enough that she could smell his aftershave — sharp, synthetic, the regulation-issue kind that came in identical bottles and smelled like someone's idea of professionalism. He was reading a datapad, tapping notes with a stylus, not looking up. His boots clicked against the deck plates in a rhythm that suggested he'd walked this corridor a thousand times and expected to walk it a thousand more.
Gold dimmed both tattoos without being asked. The warmth along Sera's thighs went suddenly cold, the glow that had been a low-grade comfort since they'd entered the ship vanishing like a hand pulled away. Her skin prickled at the absence.
The officer turned a corner. His footsteps faded. Sera's hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the alcove wall until the tremor stilled.
Pip reappeared at the junction, expression tight. "Detention section. Next corridor, thirty meters."
They moved.
The corridor opened into a wider passage, reinforced doors at regular intervals, energy barriers shimmering faintly blue across each cell entrance. Most were dark, empty, the barriers powered down to standby. Transit cells, not long-term holding. The air was coldest here, and Sera could see her breath in thin wisps dissolving into the surgical white lighting.
One cell was active.
Central position. Maximum security. Double energy barriers, inner and outer, both fully powered, the blue shimmer bright enough to cast light across the corridor floor. Behind them, visible through the translucent fields, a medical table occupied the cell's center.
Prime lay on his back.
Magnetic clamps held his wrists, his ankles, his chest. Heavy industrial restraints, anti-synthetic grade, designed for something that could bench-press a transport shuttle. Neural suppressors were clamped to his temples, small dark units with indicator lights pulsing in a rhythm that had nothing to do with his own. Three thick data cables ran from ports in his torso to a console against the far wall where data scrolled in steady streams. Graphs filling. Progress bars advancing. His mind rendered as information to be catalogued and copied, consciousness reduced to data transfer measured in percentages.
His blue channels were barely visible. Dim. Irregular. Flickering like a candle in a draft, the light that should have pulsed with the steady rhythm of thought and feeling stuttering instead — random, wrong. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling, not focused on anything in this room or any room.
A technician sat at the console. Young. Bored. Eating from a ration pack, spooning something brown into his mouth with one hand while monitoring the extraction with the other. He chewed, glanced at a readout, adjusted a parameter, went back to eating. The casual mindset of someone performing a routine task. Except the diagnostics were a person's mind and the paperwork was a consciousness being copied percentage by percentage.
Sera froze.
Every muscle locked. Bandaged fingers, knife, pendant, the corridor's cold air against her bare arms — all of it suddenly very far away.
"KILL THEM. KILL THEM ALL." Crimson's voice was a roar inside her skull, fire and fury and the ancient rage of something that understood violation on an instinctive level. Heat blazed along her left thigh, the tattoo burning bright enough that Pip's glamour flickered at the edges.
"What they are doing is violation." Gold. His voice carried a cold she'd never heard before — not the measured warmth of strategic counsel but something frozen and precise and terrible. "End it."
Both dragons. Aligned. No argument, no counterweight, no Crimson pushing while Gold pulled. For the first time since they'd awakened in her, they agreed completely, and the agreement was worse than any argument because it meant there was nothing to debate.
Pip hovered at Sera's shoulder, staring through the barriers. Her wings had stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. The silence where their buzz should have been was its own kind of horror.
"Memory extraction." Pip's voice was stripped of its usual speed, each word placed with clinical precision. "They're copying his mind. Downloading everything he is."
On the table, Prime flinched. A full-body jerk against the restraints, magnetic clamps ringing with the impact, the sound of metal against metal traveling through the barriers and into the corridor. The extraction had hit resistant data, something in his architecture that didn't want to be read, and the resistance manifested as pain in a body that wasn't supposed to feel it. The technician glanced at the readout. Made a note on his datapad. Took another bite.
"What are they doing to him?" Sera's voice came from somewhere distant.
"Pip." She was already moving, body ahead of mind, the freeze breaking like ice under a boot heel. "Drop the barriers."
Three meters of detention corridor. Sera crossed them in four steps, knife reversed in her grip, pommel forward. The technician looked up from his ration pack with the expression of someone interrupted during a meal, annoyance preceding recognition by a full second. His mouth opened. The knife pommel hit his temple with a crack that traveled through Sera's wrist and up her arm; she felt the impact in her shoulder wound and didn't care.
The technician's head snapped sideways. His body followed, sliding from the chair, ration pack spilling across the deck in a splatter of brown and gray. He hit the floor and stayed there. Breathing. Unconscious. That was enough.
Behind her, Pip blazed at the barrier console, technomancy pouring from tiny hands in streams of amber light. The inner barrier flickered, stuttered, died. The outer barrier followed, dissolving like fog burned away by sun. The air where the barriers had been smelled of discharged energy.
Sera was at the table before the last shimmer faded.
The magnetic clamps were industrial. Heavy. Manual release levers recessed into the table's frame, paired with electronic locks blinking red for active restraint. She grabbed the wrist clamp on Prime's left side and hauled on the manual release while Pip dove to the electronic lock, tiny fingers finding the interface, amber light flaring.
The clamp released with a pneumatic hiss, and Prime's arm settled against the table as tension left the limb. She moved to the other wrist. Hauled. Pip overrode. Hiss. Release. Ankles next, one and then the other, Sera working the mechanical releases while Pip danced between electronic locks with the speed of someone who'd been picking them for centuries.
The chest restraint was the heaviest. Sera braced both hands against the manual lever, bandaged palms screaming, and pulled until something in the mechanism gave way with a grinding snap. Pip killed the electronic lock a half-second later. The restraint fell open, and Prime's torso settled — the rigid tension of forced immobility replaced by something worse: the limpness of a body that couldn't hold itself up.
The neural suppressors. Sera reached for the units clamped to his temples, the small dark devices with their wrongly pulsing lights. She pulled the first one free, felt the magnetic seal resist and then release, and Prime's head rolled slightly toward her. The second came away with a faint click.
Then the cables.
Three thick data cables, each as wide as her thumb, plugged into maintenance ports along his torso. Ports she'd seen him access for self-diagnostics, ports she'd helped him clean during routine maintenance, ports that had been nothing more than part of his body's architecture until someone had turned them into doorways and walked through them into his mind.
She gripped the first cable and pulled. It resisted, then slid free with a wet mechanical sound, and Prime's body jerked against the table — a full-body flinch, a sound that wasn't a word, something raw and involuntary torn from a voice box that shouldn't have been capable of expressing pain.
"I'm sorry. Almost done."
Second cable. Weaker flinch. His fingers twitched, curling and uncurling against the table's surface.
Third cable. His hands curled into fists, held, then uncurled, fingers spreading and trembling. The ports where the cables had been were dark, the maintenance access points she'd helped clean now looking like wounds, openings into a body that had been violated through its own architecture.
On the console behind her, screens still scrolled with data. Progress bars still advanced. Prime's mind still displayed as information even after the cables were pulled, the extraction's output persisting like an echo.
"Sera?"
His voice was wrong. Thin, static-laced, the careful enunciation that was his signature slurred at the edges as if the words had to travel through damaged circuitry to reach his mouth. His optical displays were dim, blue barely present, moving slowly until they found her face and stopped.
"You came."
A pause. Not the processing pause she knew, the brief silence where he organized thoughts with characteristic precision. This was different. Struggling. Reaching for the next word through fog.
"Illogical."
Sera's throat closed. She put her hand on his shoulder, the chassis warm but wrong, the temperature uneven, cooler where it should have been uniform.
"Logic can go to hell."
The faintest brightening in his optical displays — intensity that had nothing to do with visual acuity. He tried to sit up, arms straining, got halfway with his weight on his elbows, and collapsed back. His legs hadn't moved at all.
Pip was already at his side, tiny hands pressing against the chassis where the cables had been, fingers glowing amber at the interface points. Technomancy meeting damaged hardware, magic negotiating with circuitry that didn't want to cooperate. Her face shifted as she worked: focused, tight with concentration, then worried, then something quiet and afraid.
"Memory core integrity compromised," Pip said, her voice steady in the way that meant she was working hard to keep it that way. "Motor functions barely online. They were deep into his primary storage banks. The extraction pathways are damaged." She pulled her hands back, stared at them, put them back. "Like someone dragged a knife through a library and left the pages scattered."
"Can you fix it? Here, enough for mobility?"
"Partially. Enough to walk, maybe. Full repair needs a proper workshop and about ten hours." Pip's wings buzzed at a frequency Sera had never heard, something between determination and dread. "Mobility repair, five minutes minimum."
We do not have five minutes. Crimson, the heat along her thigh sharpening.
"Then we make time." Gold. Absolute.
Prime's hand moved. Slowly, shakily, fingers sliding across the table's surface until they found Sera's wrist. The grip was barely there — the faintest pressure, a suggestion of contact more than contact itself.
"Leave me." His voice carried the ghost of command, the authority of someone accustomed to making tactical assessments. "Escape while you can."
Sera looked at him. At the dim optical displays and the dark channels and the hand on her wrist that couldn't hold on.
"Not happening."
Flat. Absolute. A door slammed shut on every argument he could make.
Pip worked. Sera stood guard.
She positioned herself at the detention area entrance, back to the corridor, knife in her right hand, left hand open and ready to channel whatever fire Crimson could give her. The corridor stretched in both directions, identical, harsh white lighting making every shadow sharp, every surface reflective, every sound carry farther than it should.
The ship breathed around them. Engine hum louder now, deeper, the vibration in the deck plates intensifying as warm-up progressed toward launch readiness. Distant boot steps traveled through the walls, growing louder and softer in patterns she couldn't predict. Intercom chatter, unresolvable through insulation, carrying the cadence of people performing tasks with increasing urgency. Somewhere deeper in the ship, a blast door cycled, the heavy mechanical thunk traveling through the hull like a heartbeat.
Gold's shield sat coiled in her awareness, compressed energy waiting to deploy. She could feel it in her right thigh, warm and ready, the protective instinct that was Gold's nature translated into power she could shape. But the power had a cost, and her reserves were a fraction of what they'd been before the fight in Bay 5, and every shield impact would drain what little remained.
She counted heartbeats. Forced slow breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the rhythm of someone managing adrenaline rather than surrendering to it.
Don't think about it. Not now. Later.
Behind her, Pip's voice carried in fragments, half-addressed to Sera and half to Prime's systems. "Come on... motor control backup is right there, I can see it, just reroute around the corrupted sector and... yes. There. Good. Now the balance subsystem, that's trickier, the damage is adjacent to..." Amber light pulsed in Sera's peripheral vision, warm and steady, the rhythm of technomancy doing what fire and shields couldn't.
Light shifted behind her. Not Pip's amber glow but blue, faint and uneven, spreading from Prime's chest outward along the channels in his arms. Left side first, then right, the illumination finding its level like water filling channels cut into stone. But present.
"Thirty percent motor function," Pip said. "Best I can do here. It's not good, Sera. It's really not good. But he can move."
Sera turned. Prime was sitting up, one hand braced against the table, the other pressed flat against his own chest as if checking that the light was real. Every movement carried the deliberate quality of someone relearning how their body worked, each gesture requiring conscious effort that should have been automatic. He swung his legs off the table, planted his feet, and stood.
He swayed. Caught himself. Stood again with the careful balance of someone walking on ice.
"My memory core." His voice was stronger but still thin, still imprecise in ways that hurt to hear. "There are gaps. Segments that were accessed. I cannot identify what they took."
The admission cost him something. She could see it in the way his jaw shifted, the liquid-metal surface of his face adjusting in a micro-expression that years together had taught her to read. Frustration layered over vulnerability, the discomfort of someone who valued precision discovering imprecision in himself.
"We'll fix it," Sera said. "All of it. But first we leave."
He looked at her. Something in his expression she couldn't read. Gratitude, and surprise, and something deeper than both that neither of them had vocabulary for.
"Thank you for coming."
"Always."
She meant it more than she had time to say. She got her good arm under his, took his weight against her shoulder, and turned toward the door.
The klaxon hit like a physical blow.
Ship-wide, pulsing, harsh two-tone cycle that cut through every frequency and buried every other sound. Red light flooded the corridors, replacing surgical white with something bloody and urgent, casting the angular walls in crimson shadow. One second cold quiet, the next the ship was screaming.
The intercom voice was calm. Professional. Almost bored. "Security alert. Unauthorized access, detention section. All hands to stations. Lockdown sequence initiated."
Heavy mechanical thunks echoed through the hull as blast doors began closing, section after section sealing in sequence, the ship compartmentalizing itself like an organism isolating infection. Red emergency lighting pulsed in time with the alarm, rhythmic, relentless.
"We need to go NOW," Pip said.
"Can you walk?" Sera tightened her grip on Prime's arm.
"I can move." A breath of pause. "Walking may be generous."
Pip was already at the nearest blast door, technomancy blazing against lockdown controls, holding their path open while the ship tried to seal it shut. The door's hydraulics groaned, caught between Pip's override and the ship's automated response, metal shuddering in the frame.
Golden light bloomed around the three of them. Gold's shield, dome-shaped, translucent, humming with energy that drained from Sera's reserves the moment it formed. She gritted her teeth against the pull — the sensation of something vital being siphoned from her center — and kept moving.
Thirty meters. The corridor stretched ahead, red-lit and hostile, and at the far end six soldiers in tactical armor rounded the corner.
Plasma rifles leveled. Visors reflecting red emergency light. The lead soldier's voice carried over the alarm: "Targets located! Engagement authorized!"
No surrender offered. They knew who she was.
The first volley hit Gold's shield in a staccato of blue-white plasma bolts, each impact flaring golden where energy met energy, sparks cascading outward like struck metal. Each hit registered in Sera's chest — not as pain but as drain, her reserves dropping with every bolt the shield absorbed. Gold channeled through depleted stores, the warmth along her right thigh burning hotter as he pulled more than she had to give.
Crimson answered.
Not a torrent. She couldn't afford a torrent. Targeted bursts of crimson-gold flame punched down the corridor in concentrated lances, each one aimed and released and aimed again with the precision of someone rationing ammunition. The first lance hit a soldier's chest plate and scorched it black, driving him backward into the wall. The second caught the gap between two soldiers and forced them apart, diving behind bulkhead edges. Two down. Four advancing behind portable shield units, coordinated pairs, professional.
"Pip, doors!"
Pip was already ahead, blazing through the corridor's lighting controls. Overhead panels flared white-hot, blinding, then went black. Complete darkness. Soldiers stumbled, rifle-mounted lights sweeping in chaotic arcs that cut through the dark like searchlights through fog. Shadows leaped and twisted across the walls.
"MOVE!" Sera hauled Prime forward through the blackout, Gold's shield shedding faint golden light that turned them into a moving lantern in the dark. Prime's feet found the deck plates with deliberate effort, each step a negotiation between damaged motor control and forward momentum. His weight shifted against her shoulder, heavy and unsteady, but his legs kept working.
The lights came back. Emergency reds, pulsing, enough to see by.
Three soldiers with stun batons closed to melee range from a side corridor, fast and coordinated, the tactical discipline of people trained to fight in close quarters aboard ships where plasma fire risked hull integrity. The first swung high. Sera ducked under the arc, drove her fist into his midsection with everything Crimson could feed into the blow. Not full power. Not even close. But enough. Tactical armor folded inward, the soldier doubling over with a sound like all the air leaving a room at once.
The second had a plasma pistol at close range, barrel rising toward her face. Gold contracted the shield from dome to tight disc, angled between Sera and the muzzle. The bolt hit the golden surface and deflected into the ceiling, molten metal raining down in orange droplets that hissed against the deck. Sera kicked the soldier backward into the pair behind him, bodies tangling, weapons clattering.
The third got an arm around her throat from behind. Armored forearm against her windpipe, pressure building, her vision narrowing at the edges. Crimson answered before she could ask. Heat radiated from her skin in a wave that turned the air between them into a furnace, and the soldier screamed and released, gloves smoking, the smell of scorched synthetic fabric filling the corridor.
More coming. Boot steps from multiple directions, ten or fifteen at least, the ship disgorging its crew into the corridors with the efficiency of a body deploying antibodies.
Pip's voice cut through the chaos from somewhere ahead. "Fresh squad, eight of them, blocking the path to the airlock!"
Sera could see them. Eight soldiers in formation, kneeling and standing rows, plasma rifles creating a wall of overlapping fire lanes. The corridor behind them led to the maintenance airlock, their exit, their only way off this ship.
"Pip, gravity!"
Pip found the gravity plating controls. Sera didn't see how, didn't have time to watch, only felt the result. The deck lurched. Gravity surged, pressing her knees toward buckling, then cut out entirely. Soldiers staggered and grabbed for handholds as their boots left the deck, formation dissolving into floating chaos, rifles swinging wild. Gravity slammed back. Three soldiers hit the deck hard, one rifle discharging into a wall panel in a shower of sparks.
Gold's shield reformed as a battering ram. Golden light concentrated into a wedge at the front of their movement, and Sera charged through the disoriented squad with Prime still braced against her side. The wedge hit the stunned soldiers and shoved them aside like a plow through snow, bodies spinning against walls, armor clanging against bulkheads.
Through. Past. The corridor behind them filling with shouts and scrambling boots.
Prime's weight shifted. His legs gave, the thirty percent failing, and for one terrible second he slid through her grip, chassis sliding against her burned hands, fingers unable to hold. She caught him. Dug her fingers into the seam between his shoulder plate and his arm, felt the bandages tear and the raw skin beneath protest, and hauled him upright.
A soldier broke through the melee behind them, lunging at Prime with a stun baton raised. Prime — damaged, barely standing, channels flickering in wild arrhythmic patterns — grabbed the soldier's wrist. Redirected the baton's arc into the soldier's own chest plate. The discharge crackled and the soldier convulsed and Prime threw him. Not far. Not gracefully. The soldier hit the wall and slid down it and didn't get up. Prime swayed, caught himself on the bulkhead, and his optical displays found Sera's face.
Barely standing and still protecting people.
The ship shuddered. Deep vibration through deck plates, through boots, through bones, the kind of tremor that came from massive engines cycling from warm-up to active thrust. Lights flickered. Walls groaned as the hull adjusted to power distribution changes. Gravity shifted a fraction, enough to make Sera stumble, enough to remind her that the floor beneath her feet belonged to a ship that was about to leave.
The intercom, still calm, still professional: "Emergency launch sequence initiated. All personnel to launch stations. Seal all external access points."
"The airlock," Sera said.
"Thirty meters," Pip called from ahead. "But they're closing external access. We have minutes. Maybe less."
Pip found a power conduit in the wall. Sera heard the technomancy flare, heard the warning crackle of overloaded circuits, and then the corridor behind them erupted. The wall panel blew outward in a shower of sparks and a gout of flame that filled the passage from deck to ceiling. Soldiers fell back. Fifteen seconds of running without being shot at.
They ran.
Engineering section, crossed at a sprint. Massive turbines spinning up beyond reinforced walls, heat building, noise rising to a roar that swallowed every other sound and made communication impossible. Deck plates vibrating so hard Sera's teeth ached. Ten seconds of deafening mechanical fury, and then through, past, the noise dropping behind them.
The plasma bolt caught her right shoulder.
It burned through the bodysuit's already-damaged fabric and into muscle, a line of white-hot agony that lit up her nervous system from shoulder to fingertips. She screamed. Didn't stop. Couldn't stop. The scream became a snarl and the snarl became forward motion and her legs kept moving because stopping meant dying and dying meant leaving Prime on this ship.
Blue light flared at her side. Bright, sudden, a burst of intensity from channels that had been barely flickering for the past hour. Prime's arm tightened against her shoulder, and then his weight shifted, and then he was standing on his own feet — not well, not steadily, but standing, taking his own weight, freeing her wounded shoulder.
"Stay with me," she said through gritted teeth.
"Attempting to comply." Quiet. Dry. A ghost of his normal precision. The best thing she'd heard all night.
The maintenance airlock. Fifty meters ahead, the corridor ending at the recessed door she'd entered through what felt like a lifetime ago. The status light beside the frame glowed green.
Forty meters. The light flashed to yellow. Closing sequence.
Pip hit the controls at full speed, wings a blur, hands blazing with amber light, fighting the launch override that was trying to seal every exit on the ship simultaneously. The door began to close, the gap narrowing from two meters with mechanical inevitability.
Thirty meters. One and a half meters of gap.
Twenty meters. Soldiers behind them, boots and shouts and the whine of charging plasma rifles.
"FASTER!" Pip screamed.
Ten meters. One meter of gap. The door grinding shut, hydraulics fighting Pip's override, metal groaning.
"NOW! GO!"
Sera and Prime hit the airlock together. Not gracefully. Not heroically. They dove through the narrowing gap as a single tangled mass of burned flesh and damaged chassis, falling, twisting, hitting station dock plating hard enough to knock the air from Sera's lungs and send white sparks across her vision. Her shoulder screamed. Her hands screamed. Everything screamed.
Pip shot through behind them, small enough for the last handspan of space, wings folded flat against her back, squeezing through the gap like thread through a needle's eye.
The airlock slammed shut. Metal against metal, enormous, final, absolute. Muffled shouts from the other side, fists or weapons striking the sealed door, cut off by the pressurized seal engaging with a hiss that faded into nothing.
Sera lay on her back on station dock plating. The ceiling above her was standard station gray, pockmarked, stained with decades of accumulated grime, blue emergency strips casting their cool light across surfaces that had never been designed to be beautiful. She focused on breathing. Her heartbeat filled her ears, rapid and irregular, the percussion of a body that had given everything and been asked for more.
Prime lay beside her. His channels were dark again, the burst of will that had gotten him through the last thirty meters spent completely. No flicker. No glow. The chassis that had flared with protective light was still and silent.
Through the bay viewport, the CDF Reclamation's hull slid past the transparent panels. Docking clamps released, the station's mechanical arms retracting. Engine flare blue-white, brilliant, painful to look at directly. Growing smaller.
Pip hovered between them, expression caught between relief and terror, wings buzzing at a frequency that couldn't decide what it meant.
"Prime." Sera rolled onto her side. The movement triggering fresh waves of pain throughout her body. "Talk to me."
He was trying to move and failing.
Hands pressed flat against the dock plating, arms straining, the gold accent lines along his biceps catching station light as muscles that weren't muscles worked against commands that weren't arriving. Nothing below his chest responded. His fingers curled against the cold metal, gripping, as if holding onto the floor could substitute for the motor control slipping away.
Blue light flickered in his chest. Once. Twice. Then dimmed further, retreating toward the center of his sternum like a tide pulling back from shore, the illumination that had been spreading through his channels condensing into a single fading point.
"Systems... failing." His voice was thin, the static worse than before, words arriving with visible effort. "Data corruption spreading to motor control. I cannot—"
"We need to get him to your ship." Pip's voice was stripped of everything but urgency. "Now. I need tools, I need diagnostics, I need everything your medbay has."
Bay 12. Across the station. Middle of the night cycle. Sera burned and bleeding, Prime unable to walk.
She got her good arm under him and lifted.
Heavier than she expected, heavier than the times she'd leaned against his shoulder in the cockpit or shoved him playfully when his dry observations landed too accurately. Those contacts had been with a body that carried its own weight, that moved with the fluid grace of something designed for elegance. This was different. Mass without motion, a six-foot-two chassis built from quantum-locked exotic matter with no power to lighten its own load. Dead weight was different from living weight, and Prime was somewhere between the two — conscious but unable to help, systems shutting down one by one.
She carried him.
Not gracefully. Not heroically. Staggering through Crossroads Station's empty corridors with an android draped over her shoulder, his arm across her back, her hand gripping the gold reinforcement along his ribs because the smooth chassis offered nothing else to hold. Her right arm screamed from the plasma burn, the new wound layered over the old one, pain compounding pain until her shoulder was a single unified source of white noise she processed by not processing it. Her bandaged hands re-opened under the strain, wet warmth spreading through the wrappings, the burns from yesterday splitting against the weight of today.
Pip flew ahead. Watching corridors, checking junctions, the tiny silhouette visible in Sera's peripheral vision as a blur of iridescent wings against blue floor strips. Watching for threats that didn't come because the station was asleep and the Consortium was gone and the only enemy left was time and damage and the corruption spreading through Prime's systems.
His channels died in sequence as she walked.
Chest first. The warm focal point at his sternum went dark. Then his arms, the blue lines that traced his frame from shoulder to wrist fading in a slow wave. Then his legs, the faint warmth vanishing and leaving cold in its place.
The warmth left his chassis through her fingers. Degree by degree. The temperature he maintained, the body heat he'd calculated and matched to human standard because he'd decided that the people around him shouldn't have to touch cold metal when they touched him. That small calibration, that tiny act of consideration, fading as the systems that maintained it went offline.
"Stay with me. We're almost there. Morningstar's right ahead."
No response.
Crimson was silent. Gold was silent. Both dragons quiet against her thighs, their warmth the only warmth left, and even that felt muted, banked. The ancient beings inside her skin were holding their breath.
Finally, Bay 12 was ahead. The docking seal recognized her biometrics and the ramp descended with the hydraulic sigh she'd heard ten thousand times. The smell of home reached her first: recycled coffee from the pot she'd left on the warmer, engine grease from the starboard thruster housing Pip had been servicing, the particular staleness of air cycled too many times through the same person's lungs. She'd never been so grateful for any of it.
She lowered him to the cargo bay floor. As gently as she could, which wasn't gentle enough. His head hit the deck plating with a sound that made her wince — hollow and wrong — and she got her hand under his skull a half-second too late, cradling the back of his head against her palm, the liquid-metal surface of his face turned toward the ceiling and perfectly still.
Pip was already inside. Pulling open access panels in the medbay alcove, grabbing diagnostic tools from her salvaged toolkit and Morningstar's medical supplies, moving with the speed of someone who knew exactly what she needed and was terrified of what she'd find.
Amber light pulsed in the cargo bay's darkness.
Pip's hands were inside Prime's systems, tiny fingers moving across damaged circuitry with the precision of centuries, technomancy flowing from her touch in steady waves that illuminated the space around them in warm gold. Her expression shifted as she worked, concentration deepening into something tighter, something that pulled at the corners of her mouth and narrowed her eyes.
"His memory core is corrupted." Pip didn't look up, her voice steady in the way that meant she was working hard to keep it that way. "The extraction process pulled data out and left the pathways damaged. Whole sectors are fragmented. His motor functions are cascading. The corruption is spreading from memory into operational systems."
"Can you fix it?"
"I don't know. I'll try," Pip said. "But this is bad, Sera. This is really bad."
"The synthetic cannot die!"
Crimson's voice broke through her mind, and it was wrong. Not rage. Not fire. Not the burning demand for violence that had defined him since the moment he'd awakened. This was panic.
"We will not lose family." Gold. The most emotionally direct he had ever been, the strategic mind stripped of strategy, the counselor abandoning counsel for something simpler and more terrifying. "We refuse."
On the cargo bay floor, Prime's hand moved.
Slowly. Shakily. Fingers sliding across the deck plating with the terrible deliberateness of someone commanding a body that barely responded, each centimeter of motion requiring effort that should have been automatic. His hand found hers where it rested on the deck beside him. The grip was barely there — the faintest pressure, fingers against fingers, a suggestion of contact more than contact itself.
His optical displays found her face. Blue almost gone, two dim points of light like distant stars seen through cloud cover, searching, focusing with visible effort until they settled on her and stopped.
"Thank you." His voice was barely there, a whisper carried more by habit than power, the words shaped by a mouth that remembered how to form them even as the systems behind it failed. "For coming."
The faintest shift in his expression. Not a smile. The memory of one.
His channels went dark.
All of them. At once. The fading blue in his chest, the last traces in his arms, the dim points of his optical displays. Gone. Like a switch thrown. Like the last light in a building going out — not room by room this time but all at once, every window dark, every hallway black, the whole structure plunged into nothing.
"PRIME!"
Pip's hands blazed brighter. "Emergency stasis! Auto-preservation protocol — his core triggered it!" Her voice cracked on the last word, steadied, cracked again. "He's not dead!"
The word hung in the cargo bay's darkness. Dead.
"Not dead. But close." Pip's hands kept moving, amber light pulsing against dark chassis, the technomancy holding something together that wanted to come apart. "I need hours. Maybe more. And I'm not sure it'll be enough."
Sera didn't let go of his hand.
The warmth that had been part of him, gone. The cold of systems offline.
I got you out. Don't you dare die on me now.