The medbay of the Stray Dog smelled of ozone and hot, stressed metal, a scent Kaelen now associated with survival. It was a world away from the sterile, odorless perfection of the Yama-Mitsui holding cell where he had last tasted true silence. He sat on the edge of a narrow cot, the deck plates beneath his boots humming with the steady, wounded vibration of the ship’s drive. The alliance was restored. He was rescued, Walter was reactivated, and Zaina was present, a solid, reassuring point of gravity in the chaos.
Zaina stood in the doorway, her face smudged with grime, a fresh cut weeping a thin line of crimson over her scarred eyebrow. She held out a simple plastic bulb of recycled water. He took it, his fingers clumsy. The simple weight of it, the reality of it, was an anchor. His body ached, a dull map of bruises from being thrown against bulkheads, but the real injury was the profound and absolute emptiness in his head. The Ghost-Eater Shunt on his neck was a useless weight of cold metal, its phantom pain gone, leaving only the scar tissue and the memory of a connection that had been severed.
— You’re in one piece, — Zaina said, her voice tight but even. — Mostly.
He nodded, the motion feeling disconnected from his will. In the corner, Walter Bell stood motionless, a sculpture of black composite and limp feathers. The single amber glow of his custom optic was back online, sweeping the small room in a slow, analytical arc. The raven Uplift had been rebooted from a backup, his chassis scarred but functional. He was a machine switched back on.
They gathered in the cockpit, a cramped nest of flickering screens and worn metal. The air here was thick with the bitter aroma of old coffee. Zaina took the pilot’s seat, her hands moving with ingrained familiarity over the controls, coaxing the damaged ship into a stable drift in the shadow of a nameless asteroid. Kaelen and Walter stood behind her, the three of them forming a tight, exhausted triangle. Walter had the cracked Mnemonic Spool, the one Julian had missed, cradled in his multi-jointed hands. It was the only thing they had left.
— The other anchors are gone, — Kaelen stated, the words tasting like ash. — The data is lost.
— Not all data, — Walter’s synthesized voice was flat, devoid of the triumph or despair that colored the moment. He placed the spool into a diagnostic cradle wired to the main console. — Fragments leave echoes. Psychic shrapnel. The original artifact may retain a structural index.
The archivist began his work. His slender fingers danced over the console, coaxing lines of code across the screen. The work was delicate, like picking apart a bomb with tweezers. Kaelen watched, feeling useless. He was a psychic without a signal, an Empath with nothing to sense but the hollowness inside him. The low hum of the console was the only sound, a counterpoint to the groaning protest of the Stray Dog’s damaged frame.
Walter’s amber optic narrowed. He froze, his entire chassis going rigid with focus. A shimmering data-weave, a three-dimensional projection of psychic signals, materialized in the air above the console. It was mostly noise, a chaotic storm of corrupted silver light. But through the static, a single, impossibly thin thread of pale gold pulsed with a steady, rhythmic light. It was a connection. A lifeline.
— The index is damaged, but coherent, — Walter reported. He tilted his head, his organic eye fixing on the golden thread. — The anchor for the seventh fragment is not an object.
Zaina turned in her seat, the weariness on her face sharpening into focus. — What does that mean?
— It means, — Walter said, his voice holding the cold finality of a system diagnosis, — it has bonded to a person.
The words hung in the recycled air of the cockpit. A ghost couldn't bond to a living mind. The psychic pressure would destroy the host. It was a violation of the known physics of the Resonance Field. It was impossible. And yet, the golden thread on the data-weave pulsed with undeniable reality. The rules of his quest, of his entire understanding of the ghost, had just been rewritten.
Walter’s fingers moved again, tracing the path of the golden thread to its termination point. A public identity file bloomed on the screen. A name: Corbin Vance. An occupation: unaligned courier. And a location, a place so deep in enemy territory it felt like a death sentence. Valles Marineris Grid. Mars.
— There is more, — Walter said. His synthesized voice was a scalpel, cutting away the last of Kaelen’s hope. He pulled up another file. A medical appointment. — Corbin Vance is scheduled for a routine psychic hygiene procedure.
The corporate euphemism was a punch to the gut. A mind-scrub. A clean wipe of stray data and unwanted emotional resonance. The procedure was scheduled at a Yama-Mitsui clinic. In less than twenty-four hours. The final fragment of Aris Volkov, the last piece of the truth, would be scrubbed away like a stain. The clock was ticking.
Kaelen looked at the face on the screen. Corbin Vance was nobody. A man with a bland, forgettable face, caught in the gears of a conspiracy he couldn't possibly comprehend. An innocent. The choice was laid bare, as sharp and cruel as any of Julian’s traps. Let the last fragment be erased forever, and with it, any chance of exposing the truth. Or rip that memory from a living, innocent mind, an act of psychic violence that would likely shatter him. Another victim on the altar of his redemption.
He remembered his vow in the cold, dark cargo container. He remembered the feel of the crushed spool, the dust of a man’s legacy on the floor. A record could be deleted. A witness had to be killed. He had been a tool of erasure. Now he would be a tool of preservation, no matter the cost.
— I will become the vault, — Kaelen said, his voice quiet but hard as forged steel. The hollowness in his skull was no longer a void; it was an empty space waiting to be filled. — I won’t take the memory from him. I’ll take it into me.
Zaina and Walter stared at him. The plan was insane. A direct mind-to-mind transfer of a fragmented consciousness, using his own mind as the storage medium. He would reverse his training. Not to sever, but to graft. Not to erase, but to integrate. He would become the living anchor. The Ghost-Eater Shunt, the symbol of his failure, would become the port for the most dangerous data transfer ever attempted.
— The probability of catastrophic psychic feedback is non-trivial, — Walter stated, his tone unchanging. It was not a warning. It was an assessment of fact.
— Get us to Mars, — Kaelen said, his eyes meeting Zaina’s.
Zaina held his gaze for a long moment, weighing the fuel, the risk, the sheer impossibility of it all. She looked at the star chart, the angry red dot of Mars glowing like a fresh wound. Then she nodded, a single, sharp motion.
— The Dog has enough life in her for one more burn, — she said, her hands already moving across the navigation controls. — I’ll get you there. The rest is on you.
The energy in the cockpit shifted. The despair was gone, burned away by a cold, clean fire of purpose. They gathered around the console, the three of them a tight knot of defiance against the system. The data-weave pulsed, showing the layout of the Yama-Mitsui clinic. The infiltration of the Valles Marineris Grid had begun.
The ship’s drive hummed, a low and steady thrum of agreement. The stars outside the viewport remained cold and distant.
They had eighteen hours to steal a ghost from a living man
