I can't move. My legs lock, every muscle seizing. The air tastes metallic, like blood, like the moment before lightning strikes.
The figure doesn't speak.
Doesn't move.
Just stands there, blocking the only way out, red lights pulsing in the dark.
2
Haid
The Council chamber still echoes in my skull. Polished voices wrapped in silk and poison, every word a calculated knife.
Your sector's plight is unfortunate, Lord Haid, but resources must be allocated according to population density and economic viability.
Economic viability.
As if the lives choking in the Undercroft can be measured in credits and production quotas. As if children gasping for breath in recycled air thick enough to taste is simply an unfortunate budgetary concern.
I should have known better than to ask. Should have known the Council doesn't grant mercy to the forgotten, the buried, the ones who mine their precious ores and power their glittering stations and die quietly in the dark.
My gauntlets creak. I force my hands to unclench, servos whining softly in protest. The anger is a living thing, coiled tight behind my ribs, pressing against bone.
Three hundred units. That's all I needed. Three hundred oxygen scrubbers to buy another year. To give the engineers time to patch the failing systems, to redistribute population to the outer tunnels where the air is less toxic.
Denied.
The single word still sits heavy on my tongue, burning like concentrated acid eating through metal. I can taste it, bitter, caustic, stripping away layers of control I've spent years building. It coats my throat, my teeth, settling into the hollows of my jaw where I've been clenching hard enough to make the bone ache.
Denied.
As if it were nothing. As if three hundred units, such a small number in their vast, bloated inventories, were somehow an unreasonable request. As if the lives depending on those scrubbers were merely statistics to be dismissed with a polite shake of perfectly coiffed heads.
The anger pulses behind my ribs again, hot and sharp, demanding release. Demanding I turn around, march back into that pristine chamber with its vaulted ceilings and crystal chandeliers, and show them exactly what denial looks like when it comes from someone who has nothing left to lose.
I came to this station for answers. For leverage. For something, anything, that might shift the balance. The Grand Celestial Ball, they called it. A parade of excess and waste, bureaucrats and oligarchs congratulating themselves on their benevolence while entire sectors suffocate.
I should leave. Return to the Undercroft and tell my people the truth: we are on our own. We always have been.
But I can't. Not yet.
Something pulled me out here, to this forgotten maintenance deck. Instinct, maybe. Or the tactical subroutines running constant analysis, searching for weaknesses, for opportunities.
For weapons.
I step onto the Star Deck, magnetic boots locking to the plating with rhythmic precision. The sound carries in the thin air, sharp and deliberate. A warning, for anyone with sense enough to hear it.
The figure at the railing doesn't run.
She turns instead. Fast, impossibly graceful, the kind of movement that speaks of muscle memory rather than conscious thought. A dancer's pivot, all fluid instinct and absolutely no tactical strategy. Her feet shift with practised precision even as her posture screams untrained civilian, someone who has never had to calculate angles of attack or defensive positioning in her life.
The tactical HUD flares to life without conscious command, overlaying streams of data across my vision in stark, cold blue text. Targeting reticules bloom into existence. Distance markers calibrate themselves. Threat assessment algorithms begin their ruthless work, cataloguing every detail, every vulnerability, every potential variable that might matter in the seconds to come.
SCAN INITIATED.
Biometrics flood the display. Heart rate spiking. Adrenaline response. Body temperature dropping. Fear response: acute.
Then the secondary scan completes, and everything changes.
