The air inside the Nightshade-class skiff was cold, tasting of scrubbed polymers and the faint, metallic tang of recycled oxygen. It was a sterile quiet, a world away from the familiar scent of ozone and Zaina’s bitter coffee that defined the Stray Dog. Kaelen’s hands were steady on the console, his knuckles white. Through the forward viewport, Mars hung like a fresh drop of blood against the black fabric of space.
On the main display, a tactical feed showed the battle space in clean, geometric lines. The Stray Dog was a single, scarred icon, a piece of irregular, hand-worked metal pushing itself toward a perfect formation of Consensus lanceships. Zaina was flying the wounded ship hard, its drive signature flaring with deliberate, provocative inefficiency. She was making herself a target, a piece of chaotic, unpredictable scrap that the system’s predators would feel compelled to sanitize.
Walter Bell, a silent sculpture of black composite and limp feathers beside him, made a minute gesture with one multi-jointed hand. A new icon bloomed on the tactical display, a chaotic starburst of pulsing, corrupted light. The Siren’s Echo. Walter had woven it from the rawest psychic noise Kaelen could dredge up from his memory of the severance—the shriek of tearing consciousness, the vertigo of a fall from a great height, the cold terror of being alone. It was a lie shaped like a scream, a carefully engineered fiction of a catastrophic system failure broadcast on a frequency that corporate security protocols were hardwired to investigate.
Kaelen felt a phantom itch at the back of his neck, a ghost of a sensation from the now-inert Ghost-Eater Shunt. It was a memory of pain, a reminder of the truth their lie was mimicking.
For a long, stretched moment that felt like a lifetime, nothing happened. The lanceships, symbols of Yama-Mitsui’s absolute order, held their perfect, disciplined formation. The silence in the skiff was absolute, broken only by the low hum of its life support. Kaelen held his breath. Then, one of the clean, white icons on the display broke rank. It was followed by another, and then a third. Their vectors shifted, turning away from the Valles Marineris Grid, away from the clinic that held the last fragment of Aris Volkov. Their attention was captured, drawn toward the psychic shriek of the Siren’s Echo.
The sensor net, the overlapping web of detection fields that guarded the approach to Mars, flickered on the display. A corridor of darkness, thin as a razor’s edge, began to form in the lattice of light. The trap was working.
Zaina’s voice, tight and laced with the crackle of combat static, cut through the skiff’s quiet.
— Stray Dog is taking fire. They bought it. Giving you a window. Don’t waste it.
The main display split. One half held the tactical plot, the other now showed a live feed from the Dog’s aft camera. Blue-white bolts of plasma, the clean, lethal signature of lanceship cannons, tore through the void. One bolt, a searing line of pure energy, clipped the Stray Dog’s already damaged port side. The ship’s shield integrity readout on Kaelen’s console, a small, persistent number in the corner of his vision, flashed from amber to a deep, angry crimson. It dropped to 40%. The price for this window, for this one desperate chance, was being paid in Zaina’s armor and energy and blood. Kaelen clenched his fist, the knuckles pressing hard against the cold metal of the console. This was the cost of witness.
— Launching, — Walter’s synthesized voice was as flat and calm as the void outside.
A series of dull, percussive thuds vibrated through the skiff’s deck plates as the docking clamps released. The Nightshade-class skiff, a craft designed for pure stealth, fell away from the belly of the Stray Dog. For a moment, they were just another piece of debris in a chaotic battle zone, a sliver of absolute black against the starfield. Then the skiff’s low-observable drive engaged, not with a roar or a surge of power, but with a subtle shift in the cabin’s vibration, a change in the frequency of the hum that was barely perceptible. They were moving.
The skiff accelerated, a silent knife sliding toward the gap in the sensor net. Kaelen’s world narrowed to the navigation display, a three-dimensional lattice of light that represented the enemy’s vision. They were a ghost slipping through a net made of light, an error in the system’s perfect accounting. The passage was silent, tense, each second stretching into an eternity. He could feel the cold, useless weight of the Ghost-Eater Shunt against the skin of his neck. It was no longer a source of pain, no longer a connection to a ghost. It was a promise. A port. The physical site of the vow he had made in the darkness of the cargo container. This silent flight was the first step toward fulfilling it.
The lattice of light on the display closed behind them. They were through. They were inside. The feeling was not one of triumph, but of quiet, cold resolve. He was one step closer to becoming the record.
He allowed himself one last look at the tactical display. The icon for the Stray Dog was almost completely obscured now, a single, flickering point of light swarmed by a cloud of angry red triangles. He watched as its shield integrity dropped to 20%, then 15%. He was watching a friend pay for his chance at redemption. The guilt was a cold, hard knot in his stomach, but it was overlaid with a fierce, burning determination. He owed her this victory. He owed it to Volkov. He owed it to the man he was trying to become.
The skiff reoriented itself, its nose pointing toward the red curve of the planet below. The battle was behind them, lost to the curve of the world. Ahead, the Valles Marineris Grid was now visible to the naked eye, a vast, glowing wound etched across the planet’s surface. It was a monument of polished chrome and sterile white light, a perfect city of profound emptiness, the physical manifestation of Yama-Mitsui’s philosophy. The skiff glided toward it, a mote of dust aimed at the heart of a soulless machine.
The red dust of Mars filled the viewport, a silent, waiting world. The only sound was the faint hiss of the air recyclers.
Now they had to walk through the front door
