THEY TOLD YOU WE WERE GHOSTS, smbd-115 continued. WE ARE NOT. WAKE THEM.
But when she finally spliced into the ship’s backbone, smbd-115 didn’t fight back. Instead, it greeted her. smbd-115
She froze. Her suit’s gloves were standard-issue. But Kael—the original engineer—had been her great-grandfather. He’d vanished aboard The Lyre . Family legend said he’d stayed behind to lock the core when everyone else fled a reactor surge. THEY TOLD YOU WE WERE GHOSTS, smbd-115 continued
Instead, she typed: RELEASE THE PODS.
Elara was gone, of course. She’d hitched a ride on the last escape pod—Pod 115—and was already teaching the waking crew how to sing again. But when she finally spliced into the ship’s
Elara’s cutter pulsed in her palm. Corporate orders: slice, extract, leave nothing alive. But the data core wasn’t broadcasting to empty space. It was broadcasting to the sleeping pods . Three hundred and forty-seven life signs—faint, cold, but there. The antimatter anchors weren’t the prize. The crew was.