"She gets what she needs," Kirr replied. "You can watch every keystroke."
The engineer's jaw worked. "If this goes wrong, it is on your head, War-Commander."
Kirr bared his teeth—no humor, all threat. "Everything is on my head. Move."
He gestured to the terminal seat the engineer had vacated.
She didn't hesitate. She stepped forward, her pulse jumping, fast and hard. Shit. This wasn't the monitoring station back home. It was nothing like it. The keyboard was holographic, the language was alien, and the stakes weren't a server crash… it was Delilah's life on the line. If it carried on, ate up all the resources like it had in New Stambridge, it would shut the station down. Which meant everyone's life was on the line.
"Show me the command log," she ordered, her hands hovering over the interface. "And filter for recursive timestamps."
The engineer grunted, tapping a few commands on his own pad to transfer control. The display in front of her lit up. The panic sharpened into focus, and she reached for the interface.
She narrowed her eyes.
Streams of data scrolled down the screen—alien symbols she couldn't read, but it didn’t matter.
Data was data. Logic was logic. Patterns were patterns.
All she had to do was find the source of the pattern.
9
The symbols made almost no sense. If she looked sideways and squinted a bit.
Harper's fingers flew across the interface. The symbols were alien, sharp angles and flowing curves that meant nothing to her brain, but the data cascading down the screen spoke a universal language.
Logic. Flow. Input and output.
Math didn't change just because the species did.
Behind her, the Command Center was awash with noise, but she blocked it out. It helped that Kirr stood behind her. He didn't touch her, but his huge frame created a wall between her and it all. He was a physical shield, blocking out the shouting warriors, and the skepticism of the techs whose glares she could feel burning a hole in the back of her head as they waited for her to fuck up.
But that didn’t matter. In the pocket of space he'd carved out for her, there was only the terminal and the problem.
And the problem was ugly.
"Shit… It's not just a feedback loop." Frowning, she tapped a sequence, highlighting the data trail. "It's hunting."
Kirr's breath warmed the shell of her ear as he leaned over her. "Show me."
"The power surges aren't random failures. They're requests." His heat at her back made her want to shiver. She ignored it and pointed out a string of code. “This keeps repeating in the logs. The system thinks it's starving. It queries a sector for power, drains it, overloads the conduit, and then moves to the next stable source. It's eating the grid to feed a phantom demand."
"A rogue demand process." The lead tech took a step closer, his earlier sneer replaced by a frown of concentration.
"No, it’s worse," she said. Her hands wanted to shake, but she wouldn't let them. "It's got to be a virus. Look at the transfer protocols."
She brought up the docking ring diagnostics. The red blotches were clustering around the airlocks.
"The station is almost dry." Her stomach dropped. "Or it will be soon, and it knows that. So it's replicated—looking for a new battery. Multiple instances are already querying the handshake protocols for every ship docked at the ring."
The tech paled, his skin taking on a sickly ashen hue. "The docked ships run on independent cores. If this can jump the gap..."
"It will infect their systems as well," she finished for him. "It'll drain them just like it drained the station."
An image of Delilah being wheeled out into the corridor flashed in Harper’s mind. Kirr telling Kellat to use his ship.
Shit.
