“Do not try to be hero now, Garokk,” Reflector says. “You are not in a fight you can win via strength alone.”
I snort. The sound is a mixture of pain and a memory so hot I can taste metal: Isolde’s laugh, the way she bit a phrase and made a joke into a landing. She is gone. I am here. I let the grief be a cold stone in my gut, heavy and immovable, so I can move.
We limp toward the medstore. The corridor is half a ruin: exposed conduits, ash layers like snow on the floor, a smear where something flung across the plating and didn't stop. The smell of the Hulk's insides—old coolant, warm oil, the sweet rot of burned insulation—sticks to my nostrils. My hands leave damp prints on the railing.
There are sounds, too. Echoes of the ship’s last life. Somewhere a bulkhead creaks like a groan, and it sounds like someone calling my name when I am at my pruning worst—half awake, half a memory.
“Reflector,” I say as we reach the medstore and he begins the tedious and gentle work of clearing a path through the debris. He’s careful, considering my burned skin and the fact that my right hand trembles when I try to open it. “Are there any survivors aboard? Any registries?”
He taps into a panel with one stubby arm, and lights trace across a screen in a language the Hulk still remembers more fully than its crew's faces. “The boarding manifest records fifteen individuals at time of breach. Lor—unresponsive. One Horn—mortally wounded. Bokis—registers as stable but lost in lower decks. Tobin Meyer—life signs absent from the collision survey. Snarl—life signs minimal; we cannot localize. Many croamer-suit signatures registered as destroyed. Radiation and structural collapse make accurate accounting—difficult.”
I want to call out his name like a curse. Tobin Meyer's absence feels like a loose tooth. He should be gone. He deserved it. I let that thought burn clean and then I move on because the immediate is more pressing than satisfaction.
The medstore smells like antiseptic and the sharp tang of chemical balms. Reflector rigs a patching field around a med-tray and fetches—through circuits and small folding arms—what's left in the dispenser: medgels, burn-scar salves, a few vials of analgesic that taste like cold iron when the injector hits my flesh.
“You will feel pain,” Reflector says as he administers the first dose. His tone is clinical, but there’s a little tremor of what I am coming to think of as worry. “We will stabilize the worst of your burns. Then we address mobility.”
I close my eyes, focusing on the chemical buzz under my skin, how it gathers in the damaged places and numbs them like a frost waiting at the edge of a thaw. Pain recedes to background noise. I let my teeth unclench.
“Reflector,” I breathe, afterward. “Run a nav sweep. I want to know how far we’re from the nearest safe vector.”
He does. He is machine-fast now, fingers scattering data, his single working lens a quicksilver mirror of failing stations and cursed coordinates. The Hulk swings slow in the darkness; stars smear like bruises in the forward viewports. The Badlands are not a place that forgives mistakes. They are a weather you get lost in, if you are not careful.
“You’re drifting deeper,” he says finally. “The course correction saved us from immediate hazard, but without mainframe control we cannot properly vector out. The Badlands will take time to travel through—if the hull survives the gravitational shear. There is also—” He purses his little arm like a thinker made of metal. “There is resonance on long-range sensors. Something large is moving in our quadrant. Cannotclassify under degraded telemetry. Could be—pirate freighter, could be Reaper band, could be—unknown.”
The word unknown lands like a weight. Unknown, in these parts, is never benevolent.
“Then we get moving,” I say. My jaw is tight. A plan is a rope thrown across broken things. “Patch what we can. Get the thrusters under manual. We’ll hand-fly it if we have to.”
“You lack authorization,” Reflector replies, and there’s a sharp little beep that sounds like protest. “We also lack a flight crew.”
“I can be the flight crew,” I say. The thought makes a fracture inside me tighten—do not overreach—but there’s muscle memory for moving a hull even if your hands are burned. I have fought to keep things afloat. I have the scars to prove it. And I have a debt of blood and promise that tastes like iron when I think of it.
Reflector processes that. He makes staticky noises, the way a radio pretends to cough. “I can assist,” he says. “I can mesh with auxiliary guidance. But manual override—requires multiple relay points and two operational actuators. One is corrupted. We need to locate auxiliary actuator twelve and patch it into the core.”
“Then we find it,” I say.
We move. It is clumsy work—me with a fractured jaw and a burned back, Reflector with one optic and a personality reboot—and yet there is a rhythm to it. We are an odd pair: monster and drone, stitched together by survival and the raw, undignified need to keep breathing. Sometimes I nearly laugh at the absurdity. Other times I want to break something gentle because the world feels so unjust.
We roam the Hulk's ribcage, finding survivors in pockets. Bokis is a creature of noise and quick hands; he hides in the vents with a laugh that is thin and maniacal and very much alive.He hands over a packet of dehydrated protein and a crooked grin. Snarl is there too, curled in a maintenance alcove, wing folded at a bad angle, making no sound until Reflector plays a low-frequency lull and she blinks and acknowledges us with a tilt of her head that means more than gratitude. Lor is nothing but a body; his vents are dead and cold. Tobin—no. Tobin's body is gone. I feel a small, elemental twist of satisfaction and then a guilty ash of something else because that doesn't make me whole.
We jury-rig relays from scavenged servos, reroute power through gutted panels, coax the stubborn thrusters to cough and arc. The Hulk shudders under our ministrations, a giant waking up with a fever. Sparks fly. Sometimes I catch them on my skin and they leave black pinpricks that sting like a thousand tiny reproaches.
At one point, Reflector squeals like a child when we find actuator twelve bolted behind a scorched plating. He performs a little orbital dance that makes one of his arms clang. I want to smack him, but I'm smiling and I don't want to be surprised by that.
“Got her,” he says. “Manual link established. We have a partial tether to the guidance array.”
“Well done,” I say, more than I mean to by way of praise. My lungs fill with the burnt air of the Hulk and, for the first time since I woke, hope blooms. It is a small, fierce thing.
We work through cycles of triumph and small disaster. Panels explode. Alarms scream. The ship shifts around us like a living thing that has been stabbed and tries to find a place to bleed quietly. Each time something tries to take us down, I push harder. I throw my weight into the problem. I use scars like tools; I use anger like fuel.
By the time the last actuator catches and the guidance array accepts our manual lash-up, I am raw and alive and somethinglike awake. Reflector is frayed but steady, and in the brief pause where both of us catch our breath, the hull settles into the kind of stillness that speaks of temporary victory.
“We have limited maneuverability,” Reflector reports. “Sustained thruster burns are possible on a cautious profile. However—there is resonance on port-side sensors. Anomalous mass incoming.”
I run a hand through the mess of burned hair at my temples. “Then we don't loiter,” I say. “We plot for a course that uses gravity wells to sling us out. We take the path that saves the hull if it takes my hide in exchange.”
Reflector blinks. “High risk.”
