If the virus jumped to the Ra’Tervas, the ship would go dark. The stasis pod keeping Delilah alive would fail. Which meant that evacuation hadn’t been a solution; it had just moved the target.
Her throat closed. She wanted to scream at them to undock the ships, to cut the physical connections and shove them into the void. Save Delilah. Just save Delilah. Who cared about the station?
“We need to undock all ships from the station,” Kirr barked. “Now!”
But the readout showed the truth. The docking clamps were mechanical—physical locks that needed power to retract. No power, no release. By the time they manually blew the bolts, the handshake would be complete, and the virus would be on the ships.
“What kind of supposedly advanced alien technology uses fucking mechanical clamps?” she hissed to herself.
There was no running from this. She had to kill it.
"It won't work. We’re not going to be fast enough to get them all." She jabbed the docking ring cluster on the display. "We have to cut the hunger."
"We've tried," a second tech argued. "We can't pin it. Every call looks clean until it isn't."
"You're hunting the wrong monster." Her finger struck the timestamp hard enough to ripple the hologram. "Don't chase the request—find what isn't dropping with the sector."
She pulled up the sector map. "Track the last three jumps." She flicked highlights onto the map. She tapped Sector 7. "And Sector 4. They're dark, but they're still pinging the central processor. They aren't dead. They're zombie nodes broadcasting the hunger signal."
The lead engineer stared at her screen. "Draanth…" He rechecked the ping timestamps, jaw tight. "If that's real, we've been feeding it."
"If we cut them..." he started.
"No! Cutting triggers the emergency bypass—the system thinks it's a failure and reroutes around it." She slashed a hand through the air. "We have to make the nodes drop themselves. That makes it a voluntary disconnect, not forced."
She glanced up at the holographic display. The red was inches from the docking ring. Minutes. Less. Probably seconds.
"We trick it." She flexed her hands once, then went still. "Spam the bus with full power signals from the maintenance subroutines. Make them look big and juicy, then when it goes for the bait, we drop the infected nodes out of the system, isolating them."
"To force a voluntary disconnect, we have to spoof the nodes into thinking they're shutting down for maintenance." The tech wet his lips. "That requires reactor-level authorization. If the system doesn't buy it, it'll read the spoof as an attack and emergency vent the core."
He looked at Kirr. They all did.
She met his gaze levelly. This was it. She was asking him to bet the station, his career, everyone on board—on her. A human woman who used to fix servers for a living.
“You should get someone to check…” she said hesitantly. After all, what did she know about alien technology? She was just Harper, the girl who couldn't even keep her cousin safe in a flyer.
Kirr didn't flinch. He leaned down, his face inches from hers. The room vanished. "I trust you, kelarris."
Her breath caught. He wasn't just letting her try. He believed she would succeed.
Then he straightened, his gaze cutting across the engineers. "Do it. Now. Override the safeties. Give her the command bus."
The engineer scrambled to obey. "Safeties disengaged. Command bus is open."
Her hands hovered over the keys. "Ready?"
Kirr didn't look away from the schematic. "Do it."
Her fingers flew. She initiated the broadcast, sending a massive wave of 'power full' signals into the starving network.
The red blotches on the map pulsed angrily.
"It's fighting back," she called out. "It's trying to reroute through the environmental controls. Sector 9 is spiking."
"Isolate Sector 9!" Kirr bellowed to the room at large.
From the main floor, a voice cut through the alarms. "Sector 9 isn't responding—forcing hard isolation now!"
