The frame stabilises. I rewind it. Forward. Backwards. The crowd blurs around them; everything else melts away. In that frozen moment, her eyes lock with the camera. That shock of recognition, the crooked half-smile, the strength in her stance.
And then?—
“She’s wearing the Verrix crest,” Reflector says softly. “Or a stylised version thereof.”
My breath stops. I taste the vacuum of space in my lungs. The air inside the command pit feels thicker now, electric.
“Isolde,” I whisper. The name is a blade. I feel it cut into me.
The screen blurs. The feed glitches and jumps back to wide-angle, the moment gone.
I lean back. My brain catches up slower than my lungs. My chest is hollow, yet roaring with things I cannot name.
Reflector’s voice reverberates. “Captain?—”
I don’t want to hear the “Captain” tag. Not now.
Instead, I say, “Keep recording. Archive all frames from this broadcast. Lock it. Do not leak. Understood?”
“Understood,” he says.
I turn from the console and into the hull’s pale light. My claws flex. I feel the metallic scent of the ship, the tang of burnt plating in the vent above. The Badlands around us rumble faintly—gravity waves, distant detonations.
I walk the corridor to the observation deck, boots heavy. The deck is empty. The hull hums around me. I stand before the viewport and stare into the black with the gold stars mocking.
Her face in the feed haunts me. Her child. My son?
My son.
The truth lands like an asteroid: she’s alive. He’s fathered. They exist in that orbit.
And I… I am here.
Breathing. Broken. Still fighting. Chasing shadows.
Fists unclench. I lift them to the glass, feel the cold press through. I press my forehead against it.
“Isolde…”
Suddenly, I can see again. Really see. And really Grok in fullness what’s become of my life. The crew reeks of anticipation.
Not the giddy kind. Not excitement. This is the thick, cloying scent of bloodlust. Greed. Desperation tangled with something older, meaner. A predator’s hum in the chest. Even before I open my mouth, I feel their eyes crawling over the viewport, watching the station grow bigger in our trajectory like it’s already cracked open and spilling guts.
They think this is a raid.
And why shouldn’t they? I’ve taken them into worse for less. Looted mining colonies, corporate convoys, even gutted a Black Sun courier shuttle and came out with three crates of bonded credits and a barrel of oxygenated rum. But those were survival. Necessity. Vengeance, sometimes.
This isn’t that.
This is her.
I don’t say her name. Not in front of them. She’s mine. And I’ll be damned if I let them twist that name into something raw and profane with their beast mouths. But I see her face. Clear as a war flare in my mind. That defiant little chin. Those stubborn brown eyes. The fire she holds in her voice even when she’s scared outta her glitter-painted skin.
“Target acquired,” growls Thresk, my new comms deck officer, a Reaper defector with a back like a stone wall and eyes like a ruined church. “Station reads eighty-five percent civilian occupancy. The rest? Alliance security. Mall-grade. Soft.”
A murmur spreads. Hungry. Eager.
“You see that promenade?” sneers Crik from engineering, his lipless mouth split into something that might be a grin if you’ve never seen joy before. “Five luxury jewellers in the span of one docking bay. I can smell the platinum already.”
