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I needed a shower. My skin was starting to itch as I entered tower 4. But the smell of Gogo Zola’s noodles, something with protein and actual spice hit me and my stomach grumbled.

Biological contamination levels elevated. Caloric intake below optimal threshold. Virgil alerted me.

“Fine. Let’s eat first.”

Her kitchen sat in a converted maintenance alcove three junctions from my pod. She had always been there, acting like a grandma for everyone there. She knew everyone and had opinions, strong one on everything that happened in the towers of the habitat.

The alcove fit maybe eight people standing, four sitting. I dropped my pack by the counter and set the cargo net carry between my feet where I could feel it. It was late, the place was mostly empty. Nico Bulba was at the far counter with a bowl he’d pushed aside and a feed scrolling across his HUD, his eyes doing the unfocused drift of someone reading fast.

“Beatrix,” he looked up. Twenty-two, pale skin like his father, broad-shouldered in a way that hadn’t finished filling out yet. Hair still sleep-rumpled at the crown. “You look like you crawled out of a recycler.” His nose wrinkled.

“Vacuum’s a harsh beauty regimen.” I said.

Gogo Zola materialized from behind the partition. She was a large woman who moved through her own kitchen like it was two sizes too small for her, which it was. Sixty-something, gray-white hair pulled back tight, arms that had been lifting things for decades. She looked at me, made a sound that was not quite disapproval and not quite welcome, and turned back to the heating unit.

“You haven’t eaten well, Aliger,” she said. “The noodles are almost gone.”

“I’ve missed you too, Gogo.”

“Mmffhh.” Gogo Zola set a bowl in front of me without asking. “Prove it. Eat your noodles.” The broth was real. I took a deep breath to smell the scent. Gogo Zola’s face didn’t change, the woman was a deadly poker player. But her mood shifted visibly as I started eating, the slight relaxation around her eyes that was the closest she came to approval.

“You see the feeds?” Nico had turned on his stool, feed still up in his peripheral. His knee was bouncing. “Charon. They’re saying Charon is coming back.”

The broth worked through me like something I’d forgotten my body could do. “What do you mean, back?”

“That he’s registered. Or close to it. Someone pulled a shadow entry from the Grind’s pre-cert system and the specs match.” He leaned forward. “Imagine that. Charon. Back in the Grind.”

I knew the name. Everyone did. Charon was a staple of the Grind for as long as I remember. Dante was six when he got his autograph. Everyone was shocked when Jon Kane defeated him and broke every bone in Charon’s body before the Arbiter decreed Mercy. He was assumed dead. And now he was back.

But I didn’t share Nico’s enthusiasm. I was worried about something else.

“I hear you will try to qualify in the Culling,” I said.

His face split. “They are paying a million now. To the champ.” He raised his right arm. It had two black thick lines. It was the mark of those who had signed to the Grind. No way he could back down now.

“To the champ,” I agreed. I didn't look at the two black lines again. Thousands went into the Culling every year, trying to qualify. Most didn't come back out.

“Isithutha.” Gogo Zola said, directed at the ceiling, which was her standard address for opinions she wanted heard but not argued with. Virgil translated instantly. Fool.

“What?” Nico said.

“She’s not talking to you,” I said.

“She’s talking about me.”

“Probably.” I finished the broth, turned the bowl. “You going alone?”

“For now. Might recruit a team at the staging zone.”

I reached into my pack. My fingers brushed the module’s casing first, the cold of it, the pulse I could feel even through the carry. Two hundred fifty credits, Bodhi said. And it seemed like good advice. I moved past it. This could actually help him. The military medikit was underneath. I set it on the counter between us.

Nico looked at it. “What—”

“It’s sealed, it’s clean, it’s got trauma foam and coagulant. Carry it somewhere you can reach with your off hand.”

He picked it up. The bounce in his knee stopped while he read the spec panel on the back. Real attention, the kind he hadn’t been giving the feed. “What’s this? Are you stealing OMEGA convoys, now?”

“Yes. Went to Old Earth just to get it.”

“How much—”

“Just take it, Nico.”

He held it a moment, then tucked it into his jacket with the care of someone who understood what he was holding.

“Investing in the future champ.” He grinned. “Smart move, scav.”

I picked up my pack and the carry. Gogo Zola was watching me from the other side of the partition, both hands wrapped around her own bowl. Her expression was the one she used when she’d already decided something about a situation and was waiting to see if anyone else caught up.

I didn’t look at her long. Sent her the five credits for the noodles.

“Great food, Gogo,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You need to eat better, Aliger.” She made the sound again. “Too much muscle and no curves.”

Gods, I need a shower. I turned toward the door. The carry bumped my hip. My hand reached it, to make sure it’s there. It is. Cold and waiting.

Gogo looked at me. My hand moved away as a reflex. Her face didn’t change, but something behind her eyes did.

“Aliger,” she said. The voice she uses when she mad with one of her descendants. “You come back when you’re hungry. You hear?.”

I couldn’t answer that. I nodded once and went. The module hit my hip again on the way out. I didn’t shift it. I just walked.

The shower lasted sixty glorious seconds. Finally clean after five weeks.

I stood in the middle of my pod in a dry shirt with my hair dripping cold down my back, and the only thing touching my skin was air. The pod grumbled awake around me, systems clicking back on one by one after five weeks dark. Twelve square meters, a sleeping platform, a work table, the salvage rack that took up one entire wall. Five weeks of absence had settled on everything as fine gray dust and stale air.

My boots went by the door, toes out, the way Dante used to line his up when we were kids, like the floor was a chalk line and he didn’t want to cross it crooked. My tools were where I’d left them. Salvage kit at the door, diagnostic scanner on the second shelf, plasma cutter cradled below it. Frequency of use. Bodhi’s organization, absorbed without being taught.

The photo was on the shelf above the sleeping platform. Me, eight, missing a tooth. Dante, gap-toothed too, holding my hand up like I’d won something. Mom behind us, one hand on each of our shoulders, looking at the camera like she didn’t trust it. One of the good days, when the station’s lights were all working and we looked like people who lived somewhere worth living. I checked it the way I always did coming back: fast enough to confirm it hadn’t gone anywhere.

The scarf was next to the photo, folded into itself the way Mom used to fold it. I shook it out. Red, faded at the creases from years of the same fold. I held it to my face and breathed in, and for half a second there was lavender, the cheap soap that never bothered Mom’s hands. Then it was just fabric and recycled air. I wrapped it around my neck.

The carry came last. I opened the pack and set the module on the worktable.

The black circuitry pulsed in slow, even intervals. I lifted it out and looked around the pod for somewhere logical to put it. I carried it to the shelving unit instead and set it down on the second shelf, in the gap where my signal booster used to sit before I traded it to Bodhi for parts I never used. The module fit the space almost exactly.

The star pulsed once, harder, a flare and gone, like it had noticed being moved.

Confirmed, Virgil said. Power signature, momentary. Source unidentified.

The scanner sat on the same shelf, an arm’s length away. I looked at it longer than I needed to.

Then I looked at the rest of the shelf. The rest of the pod. Five weeks of gray dust on everything, and the module sitting in the middle of it without a speck anywhere, black and clean like it had been delivered that morning, making everything else look cheap.

I found a cleaning cloth under the sink and started on the salvage rack.

Incoming call, Virgil announced. Dante Aliger.

I set the cleaning cloth on the salvage rack and watched the call tag until it turned green.

The pod didn’t go anywhere. The rack stayed solid under my hand, the worktable a step to my left, the deck cool through my socks. But the air in the middle of the room thickened and resolved, and the far wall went pale blue and clean in the way that cost money. A bed took shape where there hadn’t been a bed, and Dante was on it, propped against pillows that didn’t exist in my pod and never would.

I crossed to the sleeping platform, the rack and worktable behind me now, Dante’s bed across the room to my left, and sat on the edge of it, the photo on the shelf just above my head.

He was pale and stretched too thin under the medbay’s sterile blue glow, dark hair grown in patchy around the neural ports at his temples, too many lines on a forehead that was barely eighteen.

“You look like you lost a fight with a recycling compactor,” he said, trying the old trick to make me smile. I had to remember to do it.

“Won, actually. The compactor’s in pieces. I kept the shiny bits.” He didn’t laugh. His eyes had already gone past me, to something on his own screen.

“They sent the final notice. The final-final one. With, like, embossed lettering.”

A second presence resolved near the foot of the bed, full body, like she’d stepped into frame mid-stride. Dr. Velsen, OmniMed: perfect teeth, expensive Humanware with ocular implants that probably came with a stock-ticker overlay, the kind of symmetrical, calibrated beauty that screamed never missed a credit payment.

“Good evening, Miss Aliger. I’m here to clarify the terms and timeline for the Tier IV intervention.”

“Just say the number,” I cut in.

“The Neural Regeneration Trial represents the absolute pinnacle of…”

“The. Number.”

Dr. Velsen’s professional smile glitched for a nanosecond. “Eight hundred forty-seven thousand, two hundred ninety credits. A non-refundable deposit of forty thousand credits is required within ten days to secure the treatment slot and initiate synthesis of the proprietary nano-regenerants. The full balance is due in thirty days to secure the slot in this year’s batch.”

The number meant nothing to me on its own. Numbers never did. Virgil ran it against our current account, against six months of salvage, against every job I’d taken since I was sixteen. The number didn’t move. It just sat there, and nothing I could throw at it made a dent.

847,290 credits.

“And if I... if we can’t make the deposit?” I asked. Dr. Velsen waited for her humanware to translate my question.

“Then we’d move Dante into our comfort program. It’s a very good program. Pain management, full mobility support, accommodations for family to stay close.” She said it the way she’d said it a hundred times, the way people like her talk to poor people. We stop. We make him comfortable. You come say goodbye in a nice room.

Dante’s face didn’t move. He’d heard this before. That was the worst part, that he’d had time to get used to it.

I killed the call with the doctor. She froze mid-motion, hand still lifted toward a tablet that wasn’t there, and then she was gone, the space where she’d been standing empty and pale blue, the same as the wall.

Dante looked at the spot where she’d been. Then at me. The pillows behind him sank as his shoulders dropped, the performance going out of him all at once.

“Eight hundred forty-seven thousand,” I said, the number a sour taste on my tongue. “In thirty days.”

“Don’t.” Dante’s voice was louder than before. “I can see you doing the math. I can see you adding up every bolt and scrap of conduit we don’t own and coming up with a total so impossible it only has one insane answer.”

“I will fix it.” Again.

“Yeah? What? You gonna sell the pod? We’d get maybe twenty grand… Damn.” He ran a thumb over the neural port at his temple, a nervous tic that made my skin crawl. “It’s impossible. It’s… like, the only place to get that kind of money is the Grind.” He let out a short, breathy laugh that held no humor. “It’s crazy.”

The Grind.

The insane, terrible math clicked together. The show Bodhi had called a meat grinder. The tournament Dante used to watch with stars in his eyes, reciting fighter stats and aug-loadouts like they were religious texts, yelling at the screen as if the gladiators could hear him. The thing my mother feared the most.

They are paying a million now. To the champ.

“It’s crazy,” I said. I barely controlled the urge to turn and look at the module.

“Bix, listen. Really listen.” He leaned closer. “I know you. I know you are thinking of finding a wreck that will solve this. Or joining a Corporation. Or, even worse, a Clan.”

He paused, seized by a violent, hacking cough. “I’d rather die as myself than live knowing you destroyed yourself to buy me a few more months. Promise me you won’t turn into somebody else.”

The bed was three meters away and not really there, and I reached for his arm anyway. My hand passed through the edge of the blanket, a faint pressure where there should have been weight, the system’s best guess at touch.

“I’ll still be me when this is over,” I said.

I built it myself, on the spot, to fit exactly what I needed it to fit. And I believed every word of it.

His vitals are dropping toward baseline, Virgil said.

“I have to go,” I said, cutting off the protest forming on his lips. “I will fix it.”

“Bix…”

“Love you.”

The medbay thinned, the pale blue wall fading back into the gray of my salvage rack, the bed dissolving until the floor was just floor again. My pod came back around me, smaller than it had been five minutes ago, the way it always was after.

The module sat on the shelf where I’d left it, pulsing the same slow rhythm. The scarf was still around my neck, smelling like nothing at all.

I sat there a minute. Then I got up, picked the cloth back off the rack, and went back to it.

The rack still had four bins of salvage from the walk back, things I’d been too tired to sort five weeks ago. I dragged the first bin out and started.

Ferrous in one pile, composite in another, anything with a working chip set aside to test later. The way Mom taught us.

I worked fast, I wasn’t trying to be careful. Crates dragged instead of lifted, stuck latches forced instead of worked loose. By the time the last bin was sorted, my neck was damp under the scarf and I’d run out of excuses to stay on this side of the room.

The worktable was next. I wiped it down, moved a dead plasma torch to the tool rack, straightened the marking pens by color because my hands needed something to do. My PADD was still where I’d dropped it, screen dark, a number sitting on the roster icon I didn’t let myself read. I picked it up, set it face-down on the far end of the table, and didn’t open it.

Incoming call, Virgil announced. Bodhi.

I turned my arm so the light faced the floor and let it ring.

The recruiting reel was still running on the wall panel by the door, three ships turning slow against a painted nebula, the scrolling font asking nicely if I wanted to be something bigger than a scavenger. I’d watched it a hundred times. I knew the pitch by heart. I wiped the dust off the frame and left the screen on.

There was nothing left to clean except the shelf.

I turned around. The module sitting in the dust-rectangle where my signal booster used to be. Black casing, no seams, the twelve-point star catching the light. The scanner sat next to it, an arm’s length away, right where I’d left it.

I touched the scarf without meaning to. The fabric was warm from my neck, the lavender long gone. My fingers found the frayed edge, the friction burn I’d never trimmed, and held there for a second.

I picked the module off the shelf and crossed to the sleeping platform. Cleared a space. Lined up my tools. Swabbed the surfaces. Then I picked up the scanner. The charge was full. Good.

SCANNING. I waited for a response.

UNAUTHORIZED SCAN DETECTED.

My hand pulled the scanner back like it had bitten me. The star on the module’s casing flared, brighter than before, and stayed lit. Light washed across the shelf, across my hand, across the scanner’s display, and then resolved into text I hadn’t seen before, like it had been waiting for a reason to show itself.

SYSTEM COMPATIBILITY ANALYSIS

A number started climbing underneath it. Forty. Sixty. Eighty.

I didn’t move. Virgil didn’t say anything either, which was its own kind of answer.

100%.

INITIATE INSTALLATION [Y/N]

Warning, Virgil said. I have no record of this unit. No manufacturer, no model, nothing in any database I can reach. I can’t tell you what it does or whether it can be stopped once it starts.

“It’s legit, right? OMEGA?”

That’s all the data I have. No installation has run this configuration to completion before.

I looked at the tiny window. Towers two and three, rusted metal catching the sun’s orange rays. Then the walls. The rack on one side, the shelving unit on the other, the sleeping platform between them, the whole pod no more than four steps end to end.

Then I checked the old cranial jack for continuity, then checked it again. Tied my hair back and sat with the module between my knees, small and black as a coffin.

I pressed Y.

The interface ports lined up with my Humanware like they’d been built for it. Bodhi’s voice, from some other conversation: military hardware, made to plug into anything. Soldiers were just people with better gear and worse choices.

Like me.

I pressed my forehead to the casing. The circuitry pulsed against my skin, patient. I set the connector against the base of my skull. The jack bit cold, familiar. One breath. Two.

I pushed the connector home.

Pain came fast and clean. The pod vanished like silk pulled from under dishes. For one heartbeat there was nothing to fall past and nothing to fall toward, just a held breath let go all at once, gravity arriving from the inside instead of from below.

Then the dark around me stopped being empty.

Above me, or what had been above a second ago, the black thinned into something pale and endless, lit from no direction I could find. Small shapes moved through it in buzzing formation, turning together, too far off to be anything but shapes. First option: Dronemancer. Nothing to hit, nothing to grab, nothing for anything to reach.

To the side, corridors of light branched and rebranched, paths glowing where walls should have been, the whole maze folding back on itself until depth stopped meaning anything. Second option: Neuromancer. No edges to corner, no shape to pin down, nowhere that stayed anywhere long enough to be found.

Below me, the dark thickened instead of thinning, and heat came up to meet me before anything else did. Hot metal, warped flesh, claws and scales glowing the way metal glows when it’s too hot to touch, something enormous breathing slow and patient, somewhere down in it, waiting. Third option: Dreadnought. A body too big to overlook, too heavy to be outweighed, built to take a hit and give it back doubled.

“Yes.”

I was already falling toward it. The other doorways faded like smoke.

Cold took me first, every nerve at once, like the air had been pulled out of a room I was still standing in. Then heat, underneath it, in the same places, my blood running two temperatures that refused to mix. Something moved under my skin, threading itself through muscle and bone, lattice by lattice, a million small machines weaving carbon fiber into the marrow of me.

Something that felt armor the way other things felt skin.
Something that hit like a bulkhead deciding to move.
Something that wouldn’t recognize the girl who made that promise.

Lavender hit me, thick enough to taste, filling my throat and sinuses and sitting heavy on the back of my tongue. It didn’t fade.

Your hands are for building, Bix. Promise me. Promise you’ll stop.

I promised. “I won’t fight.”

Warni— Virgil’s voice drowned in the bubbling muck, like sugar in hot oil. Something viscous flowed relentless into the space where he’d been. It spoke low, each word landing with weight behind it, a voice that didn’t need volume because it had already won.

Welcome, Operator.

Then darkness, all the way down, and this time I didn’t fall into it. I was already there.

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Ilion System | Asteroid Ring | Stardate 2439.06.11

My plasma cutter spat molten alloy that died instantly in the vacuum.
Rush and you warp it. Steady. Don’t rush.

The Fearless shuddered. Not with sound obviously, but through the deck plates and up through my magnetic boots in a long, structural groan. I’d been here over a month and I still hated that about derelicts. The kilometer-long ship had been sitting in this asteroid field for months and it was still settling, still shifting, still expressing opinions about where it had ended up. It shouldn’t complain that much. At least it’s not crashing into any of the nearby asteroids.

The metal glowed guilty white. The last remaining weld holding the giant hatch door was almost done. The pressure burned across my reinforced glove. My right hand was shaking from holding the line. I didn’t let it.

Temperature on panel edge exceeds safe handling parameters, Virgil droned in my ear. Recommend cool-down.

“It can hold.” Virgil is the AI component of my Humanware. I can only afford a standard model, configured for salvage work. He monitors structural data, reads atmospherics, worries too much and never, ever laughs at my jokes. Even the good ones. His loss.

The weld snapped.

Slowly, I breathed out. A drop of sweat rolled from my forehead to the tip of my nose. I killed the arc, hooked my pry bar into the seam, and shoved. The blast door surrendered with a silent shudder that vibrated up my bones. Couldn’t help but smile. Got you.

I opened the hatch. The dark corridor beyond had never seen scav light. Emergency strips flickered on, glowing sickly yellow, and died. Not enough power.

“Virgil, send in the boys.”

Two DV-Mini drones detached from my back and moved through the corridor ahead, sweeping light across the walls in steady arcs. I watched their feeds on the left quadrant of my HUD.

“Fearless. Let’s see what you’ve got for me.” I jumped into the darkness.

The corridor beyond the hatch was short. Ten meters fifty-one, according to the boys. They swept it in two passes and mapped it: three doors, two on the sides, one at the end. Standard military composite walls, scuffed from years of use.

The floor was stained. I moved the light of my helmet to follow it.

The time in the vacuum had dried it into rust-brown that had soaked the floor plating and spread up the wall to hip height. Someone had used the wall to hold themselves up, bloodied hand-marks trailing lower and more ragged until they dropped to floor level for the last four meters. The end door was where the trail finished with a body.

One of my drones drifted toward the end door and cut out. I pulled it back. Mmhh.

It was a man. He was on his side against the door panel, one arm outstretched toward the controls he hadn’t reached. Entry wound in the back, left shoulder. Shot from behind. He’d chosen to come here and crawled the whole corridor. His fingertips had left marks on the panel housing. Reaching, right up until he couldn’t anymore.

I crouched next to him.

Dead men don’t need their gear. Six years of Bodhi’s voice in my head, practical and correct and something I hated every time.

The vacuum had pulled every drop of moisture from him, leaving leather skin stretched over bone. His uniform hung loose, a size too big now. His data chip was still clipped to his chest harness. Frosted over. I brushed the ice away with my thumb.

His name tag read Go Dae-hyuk, LT. Signals corps designation on the shoulder patch, communications, not combat. The chip was biometrically sealed, but the credential header was readable without authentication: authorization level, access clearance, compartment assignments. His name again, and a compartment number that matched the door he’d died on.

He’d had access. He’d just run out of time. And blood.

I stood and read the door panel.

BIOMETRIC VOICE AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED.

Warning: Forced entry triggers terminal seal. Virgil said.

The door wanted a voice. Specifically, it wanted Go’s voice, the right phrase, the right sequence. Cut the frame and it locked forever. Military scorched-earth protocol, designed for exactly this situation: someone with a cutter and no authorization trying to get in.

Atmospheric analysis. Section is hard vacuum. Acoustic propagation: zero.

“I know.” I put Go’s chip in my pocket and went to work on the side rooms.

The briefing room had been mid-use when everything went wrong. A situation table, chairs still angled toward it like the meeting had just paused. Data drives in a wall rack, six units. My scanner read four corrupted, one partial, one clean. I pulled the viable two. On the table, a variance coupler and a disassembled comms relay sat in a careful line of components, someone’s interrupted work. I looked at the pieces for a moment, then bagged them separately.

The berths took four minutes. Personal footlockers, effects not worth the pack weight. A military-grade medikit in a wall mount, sealed, still within tolerance. That was something. I took it.

Five weeks on this run and the math still didn’t close. The tally ran through my head while I worked: the cargo bay haul from week one, power relays and a navigation package I’d already moved. A cryogenic medical unit from week two, still in my speeder’s cargo bay waiting for a buyer. Now the data drives, the medikit, the relay components. Good professional numbers. Enough to keep going. Not enough to change anything.

I don’t believe in luck. I leave that to Dante. But dammit.

I exhaled once and came back to Go’s door with the relay components in my palm.

The door’s system needed a voice. What it was actually verifying was an authorization signature, transmitted acoustically because that was how the designers had built it, but acoustic was the delivery method, not the requirement. The signature itself was in Go’s credential header. Readable. The relay had a short-range transmission array. If I bypassed the acoustic input and drove the signal directly into the panel’s electronic port, the reader might not care how it arrived.

I observe you are constructing something, Virgil said.

“Driving his credential through the electronic interface. Bypassing the voice requirement.”

The probability of—

“Let’s bet if you are so sure.”

Virgil didn’t respond. He was on a losing streak betting against me. AIs are such bad losers.

Nine minutes. The array wasn’t designed for this and the credential was partial, enough to confirm Go’s access level, not a full biometric match. But the door wasn’t asking for a full match. It was asking for an authorization signature from someone cleared for Compartment Seven. I pushed the fragment through the relay into the panel’s secondary port and let Virgil handle the handshake.

The panel clicked.

PARTIAL CREDENTIAL ACCEPTED. SECONDARY VERIFICATION COMPLETE.

The door opened. No sound, just a vibration up through the deck plates and my boots, and then a gap where the seal had been.

I looked down at Go.

He’d almost had it.

“Virgil. What’s the first rule of Scav Club?” I said quietly.

Use the garbage.

As I said. Bad loser.

The field around the vault had cut one of the boys out already. I sent them both back to map the outer corridor and went in alone.

The atmosphere panel was beside the door, behind a locked cover I had open in four seconds. Emergency reserves, two tanks of compressed air, a scrubber system, still sealed. I checked the pressure gauge.

Eighty-three percent. Not bad.

I hit the activation switch. The hiss was the first sound the room had made since the Fearless died. My suit tracked the buildup: pressure rising, oxygen stabilizing, scrubbers engaged. I watched the numbers climb and thought about military engineering with something close to respect.

Atmosphere viable, Virgil said. Composition: standard breathable mix, slightly elevated nitrogen. Temperature: fourteen degrees.

I was already unsealing my helmet.

The first breath was flat and metallic, like the inside of a sealed machine. But real air moved against my face without a filter between us. I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall and let my lungs do something uncomplicated for a minute.

The vault was small. Four meters by three, maybe. Dark grey walls under yellow lights. A workstation along one wall — chair, console, an emergency terminal dark for eleven years. Document storage on the opposite wall. A supply cabinet. The overhead lighting ran clean and steady, same dedicated source that had been keeping the outer door powered all this time. No windows. No ornamentation. A room built to outlast everything around it.

Whoever designed it had been serious about the job.

I needed a break. Took my gloves off and opened the top of the exosuit.

The supply cabinet had standard military rations — protein blocks, electrolyte packs, a water reclamation unit. And at the back, behind the utility packs, a smaller sealed container marked MORALE SUPPLEMENT / LONG DURATION / CLASS A CLEARANCE.

I opened it. Four strawberries, individually vacuum-sealed in a flat case.

Small and red, shaped like something’s heart. People have gone viral just by eating one. I’d seen them used to signal wealth in a hundred different contexts and never once touched one.

Nutritional content, Virgil started. Estimated caloric value per—

“Virgil.” I held one up in the vault’s clean light. The scent reached me before the taste did.

Yes.

“I need a moment alone. No interruptions. Go do whatever your kind does whenever you are alone.”

Acknowledged.

I sighed. Looked at it again. Then took a bite.

The flavor hit me like a problem I didn’t have vocabulary for. Sweet and sharp at once, and something underneath both that I still don’t have a word for. Something that made five weeks of nutrient paste taste like what it was. I ate the entire strawberry before I made myself put the case down, seal it back up, and tuck it in my pack.

Bodhi could have one when I got home.

I drank some water and went to work.

The document storage was a locked drawer, standard office lock, not military-grade. I cracked it in twenty-two seconds. Damn, I’m good. Inside: printed documents, a classification header on every page, names and coordinates I didn’t recognize. Military intelligence, the kind worth real money to people with the right networks. Bodhi and I moved physical goods, not information. I flipped through them, found nothing I could use, and set them back exactly as I’d found them.

Ion-9 Stunner was clipped in a holster under the workstation surface. The charge was full and the weapon was intact. I kept it.

The neuro pills were in the supply cabinet behind the rations, military-grade cognitive compounds, pharmaceutical issue, sealed in a clinical case. I recognized the packaging. Combat-spec, designed to sharpen Humanware response time under stress. I didn’t know the exact formulation. I didn’t take things I didn’t know the formulation of. I pocketed the case anyway.

I stood in the middle of the vault and turned around slowly. Classified documents I couldn’t sell. One sidearm. Neuro pills. Emergency rations. After five weeks.

This is why I don’t believe in luck.

“There is juice here. Has to be.”

I was thinking about an old Bodhi story when my boot came down on the floor beside the workstation chair and the sound came back wrong.

He’d told it once, the way he told most things, more interested in the technical detail than his own near-death. Back when he ran with Cerberus, a salvage job that had seemed stripped until he’d moved the chair. Construction always runs service conduits under the floor, he’d said. All the access panels sound solid when you knock them. But hidden storage rings hollow. You hear it if you’re paying attention.

I moved the chair aside and stomped again.

Hollow.

I went around the room: solid, solid, solid, solid. Just the one section, roughly a meter square, directly beneath where the chair had been. I crouched and ran my hands across the plating. No visible seam. When I pressed the corner of my pry bar along the edge, I felt the give, a recessed pressure release, the kind with no handle, the kind you’d need to know was there.

I pressed it. The panel lifted. Bingo.

It was the size of a field kit, sitting in a padded recess that had been cut to fit it exactly. It was black, made of a material that absorbed light the way deep space did, like it had decided not to return what it received. I reached in before I’d finished thinking about it.

It was colder than the ambient of the vault. Ice cold. Steady, like the object was doing it deliberately. The circuitry beneath the surface pulsed in slow, even intervals, I saw it shift in my peripheral vision, and when I looked directly at it, it was still. I looked away. It moved again.

At the center of the surface, etched deep: a twelve-pointed star.

“Virgil. What is this?”

I turned it over. There was a barcode on the base. I held it steady and let him scan.

Analysis, Virgil said. A pause I hadn’t heard from him before. Unregistered Humanware module. Power state: active, below threshold. Security schema: no match in database. Classification: OMEGA. Experimental. Unit three-six-nine.

OMEGA. Old Earth tech. The cradle of the MAGI. The place where everybody ate strawberries.

No market value available, Virgil said. The codebar is registered to a program with no public record. I cannot complete an assessment.

I turned the module over. The twelve-pointed star caught the vault’s steady light and held it.

“So it’s either nothing,” I said, “or it changes everything.”

I don’t believe in luck. I just push until I find it.

The asteroid field was behind me now, a haze of glitter and shadow shrinking in the rear feed. Ahead, Umbra-3 was a loose cluster of lights against the dark, habitat modules and docking rings pressure-welded together over forty years of necessity, connected by umbilicals to the nearest spar of Ilion’s unfinished spine.

Home, sweet home.

I ran the Gate 9 approach manual. The proximity beacon drifted four degrees off-center, same as always. I compensated without thinking about it. The speeder’s left thruster housing had a loose panel that rattled on deceleration, I braced my knee against the console and it settled. Some things you just knew.

My salvage bag was sorted. I’d gone through it during the transit: the heat-shielding strips, the nav components, the intact servos from the inner passage. Good weight, honest finds, I had numbers for all of it. The module sat on the seat beside me in the cargo net carry I’d rigged in the Fearless’s outer corridor. I had no number for that yet. I left it alone.

The docking clamps caught the speeder with a solid thunk. I ran through post-flight, seals confirmed, thruster cooldown logged, cabin pressure equalized, and by the time I’d unclipped my harness supervisor Handke was already at the bay station.

He was a grizzled slab of a man who had been at Gate 9 longer than the beacon had been broken. His face didn’t register much. His gaze went to the carry before it went to my face.

I slung my pack, collected the carry, and came down the ramp. I held out the coupler.

“Tell me that’s the variance coupler Priya’s been chasing.”

Handke looked at it. “Depends. Is Priya still speaking to you?” His eyebrows rose.

“Close enough.” I set it on the scanner hood between us. “Mark-four series. Should drop right in.”

He picked it up, turned it over once with a quick, unhurried assessment. Set it in his chest pocket. His gaze moved back to the carry, then to my face. “You eat today?”

“Of course. Found strawberries, Handke.”

“That’s a no.” He waved me through.

The corridors in this section were wide enough for two people moving in opposite directions if both of them turned sideways, which they did, because they’d learned to. I knew every junction. Which overhead conduit runs were live. Which repair patches would hold and which were decorative. Which lighting panel had been flickering for eleven months because the work order got logged and never filled.

I spotted the hair from forty meters out.

The woman was at the junction near the workshop units, bent over a handheld scanner, and the color-shifting app in her hair was running a slow teal-to-violet cycle, the kind you left on when you were concentrating on something else. I’d seen her around for months, the same way you tracked things that were hard to miss. Two weeks ago, I’d heard it third-hand through a dockworker who ran the loading shifts in this section. Minos enforcers in the workshop corridor twice in the same week. A collection schedule that was starting to look less like a tax and more like a claim.

I reached into my pack without slowing. The Ion-9 was a sidearm I’d pulled from a holster mount under the workstation in the vault, charge full, weapon intact. I’d almost kept it. But there was a limit to what I needed that the woman at this junction did not.

She looked up when I slowed.

“Heard Minos has been making your corridor interesting,” I said.

The hair shifted, teal going cooler, more guarded. “Who told you that.”

“Nobody had to.” I held the Ion-9 out flat on my palm. “Low-yield stun setting, civilian ceiling. Won’t kill anyone. It’ll ruin their afternoon, though.”

She looked at the weapon. Then at me. Then, for just a second, at the carry. A technician’s reflex, quick and involuntary. She pulled her eyes back.

“I can’t pay you for this,” she said.

“I know.” I set the Ion-9 on the edge of the scanner console between us. “That’s how this works.”

I picked up the carry and kept moving. Behind me, I heard the scanner console shift as she reached for it.

That was enough.

The shop had the smell of solder flux, machine oil, and things barely holding together. I grew up with it. Tool racks. Salvage shelving. The accumulated layers of rust. Two maintenance drones crawled the upper racks on six-legged mounts, cataloguing inventory with the slow patience of machines that had been doing the same job longer than I’d been alive. A robotic arm assembly on the bench extension sorted components into bins without being asked.

Most of the wall frames had gone dark or corrupted, deteriorated video caught in loops of gray noise, a fighter’s arm frozen mid-arc, a crowd reaction stuck on the beat before the sound arrived.

One frame ran clean. It was centered above the main workbench, under its own spotlight, and it played the same forty seconds on a loop: a young Bodhi with mecha3 gloves moving through a bigger opponent with the precision of something that had already decided how it ended. He caught an elbow, turned the weight, drove the finish. Hakuho Sho III went down in the left corner of the frame. Bodhi stepped back and waited for the count without expression.

I had watched that clip approximately ten thousand times. Dante tried to steal it once to hang it our room.

Bodhi was at the bench beneath it, his back to me, running a grinding stone along the edge of a salvage knife. He was big in the way rooms noticed, broad through the shoulders, solid through the middle, fifty-two years packed into a frame that still looked like it could end an argument. His prosthetic left arm worked the stone with the same precision as the real one: chrome and carbon fiber, military-grade and a decade outdated, functional past the point it should have quit.

He didn’t turn. Never did. The subtle ping of his Humanware connecting with mine ran between us, a veteran’s handshake.

“Mr. Bodhi,” I said, “can I get an autograph?”

“You smell like the inside of a reactor casing.”

“Weeks in vacuum. Consider it natural perfume.”

“Consider a shower.”

I dropped my pack on his least-important stool and set the cargo net carry on the floor beside it.

He put the knife down. “How much did you give away on the way in.”

I sighed. Handke always pinged him my loads.

“Handke needed a coupler. Mark-four, found it on the Fearless.”

“And.”

“There was a woman near the workshop junction. Minos trouble.”

“What did you give her.”

“A sidearm.”

He made a sound that wasn’t quite a word.

“She needed it.”

“Everyone in this section needs something.” He turned on his stool. The motion was unhurried, deliberate, he’d learned to move like that, the way fighters learn to carry size without announcing it. His face was weathered in the deep-water way, salt-and-pepper stubble. “One day there won’t be a piece left for you.”

“Then I’ll scav another load.”

He grumbled and shook his head, but he didn’t argue. He’d learned what arguing with me cost.

I reached into my jacket and pulled out the flat case. The spotlights above the workbench, the ones he used to read circuitry, to find the fault before it failed, caught the vacuum seal and lit them from the inside. One sealed strawberry for him, small and red, glowing under the work light like something that had no business being here.

Bodhi looked at the case. Looked at me.

“You?”

“Had one already.” I pushed the case toward him. “Saving two for Dante. When he’s out of the hospital.”

“You should sell this one.”

“Just eat it.”

He picked up one strawberry the way you picked up something that had been a long time coming. Held it for a moment under the light. Then he opened the seal and ate it slowly.

His face did the thing. The grumpy default of it, the deep-water set he wore like structural material, shifted for one beat into something like surprise. And a smile. I swear he smiled. He didn’t put it away fast enough.

That was worth the weeks in vacuum.

“Thanks,” he said.

I set the black module on the workbench beside him with a solid thunk.

Whatever remained of good mood in his face died.

He set the knife aside with exaggerated care, like he was handling live ordnance. His prosthetic fingers hovered just above the module’s surface, not touching, as if it were a divine relic that might burn through his chrome.

“Where,” he said, his voice dropping to a quiet that felt heavier than a shout, “did you get that?”

“The Fearless. Told you it had juice.” I pushed it closer. The module sat under the work light. The spotlight that usually showed Bodhi fractures and fault lines now found a surface with no fractures to show: black material that absorbed the light instead of returning it, liquid circuitry pulsing in slow even intervals beneath the surface, the twelve-pointed star etched at its center. “What is it?”

His mouth worked silently for three full seconds before finding words. “A mistake. Let’s hope it’s not yours.”

“Humanware?”

“A kind.” He leaned closer, studying the etched markings. The prosthetic whirred softly as he traced the air above the code bar. “That’s not tech, kid. That’s a leash.” He finally looked at me. “OMEGA-made, with the MAGI’s blessing. I knew a soldier, a good one, who whispered about things like this after too many drinks. You don’t wear this. It wears you.”

The hairs on my arms lifted. My fingertips brushed the module’s edge. A sudden, sharp jolt shot up my arm. The request flared, a torrent that hit my interface and stopped being polite about it. Authentication protocols, compatibility handshakes, a single query burning in the center of my corneal display.

> REQUESTING SYNC. [Y/N]?

I pulled my hand back. The query faded. The module sat where it was, circuitry pulsing, undisturbed.

Something had moved in my face. I read it in Bodhi’s. The way his hand turned into a fist. My eyes went to the frame above him. Forty seconds on a loop. Hakuho Sho III going down again in the left corner.

Bodhi’s prosthetic hand came down flat on the workbench once. He followed my look. Stared at the loop.

“Since you like to share,” he said, “sell it to Bulba’s son. He’s going to the Culling next week. He’ll pay two hundred, easy. Maybe two-fifty.”

“Nico is going to the Grind?”

“He’s been looking for an edge. That’s one.”

I looked at the module. Nico Bulba was twenty-two years old with a mouth full of borrowed confidence and the kind of optimism that hadn’t been tested against anything real yet.

“Nico doesn’t know what he’s walking into,” I said.

“No,” Bodhi said, his eyes fixed on me. “He doesn’t.”

He looked at the holoscreen in the corner. A fighter working her opponent toward the cage wall, reading the geometry before her hands moved. Then he looked back at me.

“Whatever you think that module changes, it doesn’t change what the Grind does to people who walk in alone. The Grind chews up lone wolves. I’ve watched it do it for twenty years. One person, no matter what they’re carrying, is just a longer timeline to the same ending.”

“I’m not fighting in the Grind,” I said. “I made a promise.”

Bodhi looked at me for a long moment.

“You better keep it,” he said. “I promised her I’d make sure of that.”

The shop went quiet. On the screen, the fighter with metallic arms dropped her opponent at a nearby rock and stepped back, and the crowd noise rose and held.

I reached for the module.

The notification hit before my fingers closed around it. Dante’s hospital icon, urgent red, pulsing at the corner of my vision.

My hand stopped. Bodhi watched my face. I accepted the call. Audio only.

His voice came through thin, the poor connection he always had from the ward. “Bix. Hey. Don’t panic.”

He always started with don’t panic.

“They did another scan.” He took a deep breath. “The neuro-drip efficacy is dropping faster than projected. Dr. Velsen says we can’t wait the full cycle. The treatment window got moved up. Way up.” Another breath, thinner than the first. “She wants to meet tomorrow. Go over the numbers. The timeline.”

“What numbers?”

A long pause. “The new protocol. It’s not covered. None of it. Bix, she said... she said it’s going to be expensive. I’m sorry. I know you’re already—”

“Don’t.” My voice came out louder. “I’ll fix it.”

“Bix—”

“Get some rest. Send me the meeting.” I closed the call.

The shop. The screen. The module on the workbench, circuitry pulsing, patient as it had always been. The strawberry case beside it, two left, sealed, for when he got out.

Bodhi reached under the bench without a word and set a protein bar on the surface between us. Vacuum-sealed. One of the green ones, that tasted like compressed survival and made no apology for it. I looked at it.

“The things you need,” Bodhi said, “always taste bad.”

I pocketed the bar. I picked up the module. I went.

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A progression sci-fi novel about a underdog fighter, bonded to experimental military tech to save her dying brother, who must claw up the nine circles of the galaxy’s deadliest blood sport before the arena turns her into the monster the crowd is screaming for — ideal for readers who love the brutal ascent of Red Rising, the lethal broadcast spectacle of Dungeon Crawler Carl, and the becoming-the-monster dread of Attack on Titan.

Kaiju Protocol is the first serialized novel of my Neuronomicon universe, with new chapters dropping every week.

If you’re just getting started, take a look at the Table of Contents:

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Thanks for being here. I’m having the time of my life releasing this, and I hope that if you’re interested in synthetic minds, kaijus, and paramilitary fights, I’ll see you inside the Grind.

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