The blind pocket holds for six minutes before the Core starts learning around it.
I know because the ship’s sound changes.
The Drifting Truth sits dark inside the old atmospheric exchange bay beneath the east stacks, engines dropped to a low concealment hum, heat bled through dead auxiliary flues to keep our thermal profile flat against the shale. The hollow around us eats noise. It takes the cargo bay’s small sounds—Rhett’s scanner, Tavi’s careful breathing, Arya’s fingers shifting against my sleeve, the cooling regulator ticking under its tarp—and gives them back muffled, deadened by ancient fan housings and meters of slag overhead.
When I open my eyes, the hold is still bathed in emergency red. The floor is cold against my bare feet, but the warming wrap along my left side has taken the worst of the tremor out of my ribs. My right leg remains heavy, the brace locked at the knee where the sheared actuator pin catches.
Nix’s voice comes over the shipwide link, tight and quiet. “False trail is still pulling west, but the Core search grid widened again. They haven’t found us, but they’re done believing the ghost on faith.”
Thane stands by the forward passage, positioned where he can see the cargo hold without crowding my pallet. “How long?”
“Depends on their processing cycle,” Nix says. “They’re cross-referencing thermal bloom against the telemetry match. When they realize the Stack Twelve loop is repeating old ore manifests without fresh engine wake, they’ll collapse the canyon perimeter.”
Rhett stays seated on his crate, med slate resting against his knee. He watches the steady rise of my chest before checking his scanner. “Her core temp is stabilizing, but the tranquilizer is still fouling neural recovery. She can’t take another discharge.”
“I’m listening,” I say, my voice scraping like gravel.
“Good,” Rhett replies calmly. “Then hear this: lie still.”
Across the bay, Tavi adjusts the thermal wrap over his splinted arm. The cooling patch on his bruised throat is peeling at one corner, but he doesn't touch it. He looks at me, then at Thane. “They’ll drop containment drones down the stack flues. If they seal the exchange throat, we’re trapped under the slag.”
“We’re not staying under the slag,” Thane says. He looks toward the cockpit link. “Nix. The climb.”
“It’s ugly,” Nix replies. “We punch out through the exchange throat, ride the slag shadow up along the stack line to mask our burn, then break for upper atmosphere before their orbital sweep recalculates.”
“Odds?” Thane asks.
“Terrible. But if we sit here another two minutes, they drop to zero.”
The Truth shudders as Nix brings the main drive up from standby. The low hum deepens, vibrating through the deck plates and into my spine.
The SpineLock answers with a dull, familiar pulse of heat behind my ear.
Arya’s fingers tighten in my torn sleeve. She looks at the forward bulkhead display, where the pale blue lines of the Core search grid are already bending back from Stack Twelve, testing the edges of the canyon.
“They’re anticipating the climb vector,” ORIN says through my neural port, keeping his signal off the general comm. “The pursuit grid is closing on the upper rim.”
I push myself up against the crate behind my pallet. The effort pulls hard on my cracked ribs, but the gray haze in my vision clears enough to see the display.
“They’ll force us into the open,” I say.
Thane glances back. “You know their recovery doctrine.”
“Three sweep cones,” I say, the conditioning supplying the data with cold clarity. “First cone sweeps the floor. Second cone covers the ridge. Third cone holds the orbital climb lane. If Nix burns for orbit, the third cone catches the thermal bloom the second we clear the stack line.”
“Then we give them three targets,” Nix says from the cockpit. “Except I only have one ship.”
“Nix,” Thane says. “Begin the burn.”
The engines roar to life.
The Drifting Truth lunges forward. The sudden acceleration presses me down into the blanket, my brace squealing as it bites the iron deck. On the exterior feed, the exchange hollow strips away in a blur of rusted fan blades and hanging cables. Then we are out in the canyon, the towering silhouettes of the extraction stacks rising like black teeth against the dust-choked sky.
Nix banks hard, hugging the vertical wall of the slag shadow.
A high-pitched chime cuts through the cargo hold.
“Partial paint,” ORIN reports. “Core search array on the ridge has detected our upper wake.”
The cargo display flickers. A pale blue vector locks onto our rear quarter.
“They’re correcting,” Nix grunts, thrusters firing in short, violent bursts as they throw the ship into a weaving ascent. “I can’t shake the lock without clearing the stack shadow, and if I clear the shadow, orbital has us.”
We have forty seconds before the lock solidifies into a firing solution.
In my mind, an old simulation surfaces—stark, white-lit, absolute. The Cradle’s tactical simulator. Straps binding my wrists to the chair arms. A simulated cockpit suspended behind reinforced observation glass. Vire’s voice over the speaker: Vessel telemetry compromised. Override the guidance grid through your field. Force the interceptor wide.
I had seized for four minutes after the test. But the interceptor missed.
“ORIN,” I say internally.
“No,” ORIN responds instantly through the interface. “The Drifting Truth is an active, unshielded mechanical system. Interfacing with her flight harmonics while under tranquilizer rebound will trigger severe cascade failure.”
“Nix can’t outfly Core math.”
“Your neural architecture will not survive coupling with the main drive.”
“Not the drive,” I say, my breath hitching as the ship rolls violently. “The sensor array. The external transponder. I bend the wake geometry. Make the Core see the return five degrees off our true heading.”
A beat of absolute silence in the port.
“You require an interface bridge,” ORIN says, his tone shifting from warning to precise tactical execution. “I will route your field through the cargo emergency diagnostics bus. I will filter the feedback and isolate your motor functions. But if Core command frequencies penetrate the link, the SpineLock will attempt an override.”
“Then don't let them penetrate.”
“I am an AI, Kaelin, not a blast wall.”
“Good enough.”
I drop my left palm flat against the exposed diagnostic port set into the deck rib beside my pallet.
The connection hits like a lightning strike.
Active machinery is not like the dead crawler in the basin. It is alive with current, heat, and violent vibration. The ship’s engine pulse slams directly into my central nervous system. Coolant flow feels like ice water dragging through my arteries; the friction of atmospheric drag against the forward hull burns across my skin.
My back arches. My right leg locks straight, the damaged brace shuddering against the floor.
“Field spike!” Rhett shouts, dropping to his knees beside me, hands hovering over my shoulders without pinning me down. “Kaelin, break the contact!”
“Do not touch her,” ORIN’s synthetic voice booms from the cargo speaker, distorted by feedback. “She is anchoring the ship's telemetry.”
Through the cockpit link, Nix yells, “What just happened to my sensor trim? The wake return is splitting!”
“Fly your vector!” Thane commands.
I can’t speak. My mouth fills with the sharp, metallic taste of copper. Blood drips from my left nostril, warm and fast.
In the dark behind my eyes, the ship’s signature is a jagged line of heat tearing through the sky. Above us, the Core recovery ship’s search cone sweeps down like a searchlight.
I reach out with my field, pushing through the diagnostic bus, gripping the ship’s broadcast harmonics. I drag the telemetry five degrees west, into the turbulent wake of the Stack Twelve decoy. Then I split it again—feeding the Core array a stuttering, fragmented ghost of a failing thruster bank.
On the cargo screen, the blue search cone hesitates. It swerves toward the false vector, tracking a phantom ship into the upper canyon wall.
“Paint broken!” Nix screams. “Punching through the ridge!”
The Truth surges into the clear sky, engines howling at maximum burn.
Then the Core counter-signal hits.
It doesn't come as a sensor sweep. It comes as an encrypted override packet riding the carrier frequency straight down the diagnostic bus into my neural port.
QO-7. STAND DOWN. COMPLETE THE CIRCUIT.
The Cradle command detonates in my skull.
The SpineLock seizes. My spine bows backward off the deck, muscles locking in violent, rigid extension. The lab conditioning tears through my conscious control: Asset identified. Cease resistance. Surrender control.
“Command injection detected!” ORIN’s voice fractures into static inside my head. “Severing bridge—I am blocking the frequency—Kaelin, release the port!”
I can’t. My fingers are frozen against the metal casing, clamped by my own locked tendons. The ship’s diagnostic bus is feeding the command loop directly into my motor cortex.
Arya lunges forward.
She ignores Rhett’s reaching arm, ignores the violent arc of static snapping along the deck plates, and slams both small hands down over my wrist.
Her skin is freezing cold.
The contact doesn't stop the pain, but it shatters the loop. It gives me a single point of reference that is not the Core, not the ship, not the burning wire in my spine.
Let the circuit die.
I rip my hand away from the diagnostic port.
The feedback snaps like a severed cable.
My body crashes back onto the blanket, convulsions tearing through my limbs as the cascade failure takes hold. My vision flashes white, then red, then drowns in suffocating static.
Rhett is there instantly, rolling me onto my left side to protect my airway, his voice calm and rapid despite the chaos. “Airway clear. Lateral position. ORIN, track respiration!”
“Respiratory interruption at four seconds,” ORIN reports, his voice thin, warbled by corrupted sub-routines. “Neural overload severe. Cascade ongoing.”
Tavi’s voice comes from across the bay, hoarse and shaken. “Is she—did the Core take her?”
“No,” Thane’s voice cuts through, steady as iron from the passage threshold. “She broke the lock.”
The seizure runs its course in jagged waves, shaking the frame of my brace against the floor plates until the electrical storm in my nerves finally burns down to ash. My breathing comes in shallow, ragged gasps against the rough wool of the blanket.
Through the ringing in my ears, Nix’s voice drops through the comm, sounding completely hollowed out.
“We cleared the upper band,” Nix says. “Atmospheric transition complete. We’re in low orbit.”
Silence hangs in the cargo hold, broken only by the hum of the orbital thrusters and the steady hiss of the air scrubbers.
“Core status?” Thane asks.
“Blind,” Nix replies. “They’re sweeping the lower ridge. No clean lock. We’re dirty, we’re drifting, but we’re off-world.”
Thane lets out a slow breath. “Keep us dark. Minimum burn until we clear the orbital lane.”
“Understood.”
In the cargo bay, Rhett eases back onto his heels, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He checks his slate, then looks down at me. “You’re back. Don't try to talk.”
I don't. I couldn't if I wanted to.
Arya remains kneeling by my shoulder, her fingers resting lightly on the torn fabric of my sleeve. Across the hold, Tavi leans his head back against the structural rib, his good hand resting limp across his chest as he watches us in the dim red light.
The ship is quiet now, coasting through the cold vacuum above Ashkaru.
Inside my port, ORIN’s signal pulses once—faint, scarred by static, but whole.
“Telemetry severed,” he whispers into the dark behind my eyes. “We are clear.”
I close my eyes, letting the vibration of the hull carry me into the deep, dreamless quiet of the drift.