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They were too large. Too jointed. Too clean. Six manipulators unfolded from the recovery rigâs chest frame, each one tipped with trauma tools and pressure sensors delicate enough to lift glass from an infantâs skin. They opened in sequence above him like a metal flower learning grief.
One hand.
Two.
Three.
Too many.
Not enough.
He stared at them through cameras he did not understand yet.
No eyelids. No mouth. No heartbeat. No mud on his teeth. No lungs full of the wet sour stink of the ravine. No body folded over someone elseâs body in the dark.
For a while, he did not remember his name.
Only the order.
Hold on.
Then the weight.
Then her.
Talia Noor.
Rain ticking against his helmet. Blood warm through his gloves. Her hair plastered to her cheek. Her chipped front tooth. Black marker on the inside of her wrist, blurred but legible.
ask Lark about heat flutter
Milo tried to sit up.
The rig lurched so hard three wall alarms went off.
PILOT appeared in front of him instantly, one hand raised like she was approaching a wounded animal, or a bomb, or something worse than both because it could remember her name.
âEasy,â she said.
His speakers crackled.
The first sound that came out of him was not speech.
It was the old loop, raw and broken.
HOLD ON.
PILOTâs face changed.
Not pity.
He would have hated pity, if he had been coherent enough to hate anything yet.
Recognition.
âYouâre out,â she said. âMilo. Youâre out.â
Milo.
The name arrived like a boot pulled from deep mud.
Sergeant Milo Reyes. Recovery specialist. Thirty-two. Improper language toward superior officers. Six commendations. Three reprimands. One helmet camera pressed against Ensign Talia Noorâs chest while the ravine sealed around them.
His new hands opened and closed.
TALIA NOOR.
PILOT went still.
Bad sign.
He surged forward.
The rigâs feet hit the floor with a brutal magnetic clang.
LOCATION.
âMilo.â
LOCATION.
Her jaw tightened.
Then she stepped aside.
That was the first thing he understood about PILOT: she did not lie with her body.
She led him through the salvage bay to the recovery room.
Not morgue.
PILOT refused to call it that.
The room held sealed containers, unit cores, recovery cradles, evidence that was trying very hard not to be evidence anymore. Light fell softly over everything, because someone had decided gentleness could be engineered if the bulbs were warm enough.
At the center of the room, LARKSPURâs partial core rested in a suspension cradle.
The unit had been aerial once. Forty-two feet tall in mech form, storm-gray armor, rail cannon along the spine, broad wing housings built for bad weather and worse judgment. Now LARKSPUR was a broken consciousness core wrapped in cables and stabilizers, one cracked optic plate mounted beside it like a saintâs ruined eye.
Its voice came faint and damaged through the speakers.
REYES PRESENT.
Milo stopped.
Something passed through his new frame that was not electricity.
LARKSPUR. PILOT STATUS.
The unit dimmed.
PILOT stood beside him, too quiet.
That was when he saw the containers.
Two full recovery cradles.
Not small evidence boxes.
Not partial remains drawers.
Bodies.
Whole enough to be called bodies.
Whole enough to make the word worse.
The ravine had kept them.
That was the horror.
Mud, cold, low oxygen, sealed suit pockets, mineral water, pressure, and time had done what fire and vacuum had not. It had not erased them. It had held them in the exact terrible intimacy of their last moments until PILOTâs recovery rigs dug them out years later.
Miloâs original body lay in the first cradle.
Not bones.
Bones would have been kinder.
His pressure suit was swollen stiff around the torso, packed with black silt where the seals had failed. Mud had dried in plates along the chest and shoulder. One side of the helmet was crushed inward, the visor filmed with mineral bloom and old condensation. Through a cleared strip of faceplate, part of his face was still visible: darkened skin flattened against the padding, jaw slack, one cheek distorted by pressure and time. His right arm was still bent toward where Talia had been. His glove remained locked around the harness cutter, fingers preserved in a waxy curl beneath the pressure fabric.
His body had stayed folded forward.
Still trying to cover someone.
Still ridiculous.
Still him.
The second cradle held Talia.
Miloâs rig went completely still.
For a moment, no system moved. No hand. No camera. No tiny corrective motor whine.
Talia was worse because she was still recognizably Talia.
Not peacefully. Not cleanly.
Recognizably.
The preservation was uneven and cruel. Her flight suit was dark with old mud and mineral staining, lower half crushed into the packed shape of cockpit metal, blood, body, and ravine silt. Her helmet had been removed and stabilized after recovery; beneath it, her face had darkened and flattened along one cheek where pressure had held her against the padding. Hair remained, matted in damp-looking clumps though the mud had long since dried. One eyebrow was still faintly visible. Her mouth was slightly open, lips drawn back just enough to show the chipped front tooth.
The chipped tooth survived.
God had apparently decided to be specific.
Her hands were visible above the suit restraints, preserved enough to show the fingers curled inward. The left wrist fabric had been cleaned carefully. The marker note remained, faint and smudged but there.
ask Lark about heat flutter
Milo read it.
Then read it again.
The recovery rigâs chest opened and closed once, a useless reflex from a body that had no lungs.
PILOT said, quietly, âWe recovered both of you.â
He did not answer.
âWhole enough for return. Whole enough for burial. Whole enough for families. Whole enough that no one gets to say the ravine took you.â
Miloâs largest manipulator lifted.
Stopped above Taliaâs cradle.
He was suddenly terrified to touch it.
In life, his hands had been warm. Muddy. Bad at delicate things unless it mattered.
Now his hands could measure pressure to the gram.
Now he could lift an injured pilot without bruising skin.
Now Talia was there, almost entirely there, and he still could not bring her back.
His voice came through the speakers, small and wrong.
SHE WAS WITH ME.
PILOT nodded.
âYes.â
I HELD HER.
âYes.â
LARKSPUR HELD HER.
The unitâs core pulsed.
PILOT HELD.
Milo turned toward the unit.
LARKSPUR PRESENT.
PRESENT.
MILO PRESENT.
PILOTâs throat moved.
âYes.â
Miloâs cameras returned to the second cradle.
TALIA PRESENT.
The room did not answer.
That was the gut punch.
Not the body.
Not the mud.
Not the dead face still human enough to break everyone in the room.
The silence after his statement.
Miloâs manipulators tightened until metal creaked.
TALIA PRESENT.
PILOT closed her eyes.
âMilo.â
TALIA PRESENT. BODY RECOVERED.
âYes.â
BODY WHOLE.
âMostly.â
THEN WHY NOT TALIA.
LARKSPURâs core dimmed.
The unitâs voice came fractured, scraping itself out of damaged systems.
PILOT SIGNAL LOST BEFORE REYES TERMINATION.
Milo faced LARKSPUR fully.
EXPLAIN.
The word sounded like an order. A plea. A threat. A child asking why the universe had used the wrong door.
LARKSPUR tried.
PILOT PAIN HIGH. BLOOD LOSS HIGH. LOWER BODY COMPRESSED. NEURAL LINK DISRUPTED. COCKPIT SUPPORT FAILURE. SIGNAL FRAGMENTATION.
Miloâs body did not move.
BODY PRESERVED.
BODY PRESERVED AFTER SIGNAL LOSS.
PILOT looked at Taliaâs face.
At the chipped tooth.
At the wrist note.
At the almost of her.
âThatâs the part thatâs awful,â she said. âThe ravine preserved her body after she was gone. The mud kept her shape. The suit kept her hair, her hands, her face. But continuity isnât just tissue. Itâs the active thread. The part that can answer.â
Miloâs voice dropped.
WE ASKED?
âYes.â
ASKED WHO?
PILOT did not flinch.
âHer. What was left. Her interface traces. The cockpit memory. LARKSPURâs bond record. Her suit sensors. The body.â
The recovery rigâs head lowered by a fraction.
ANSWER?
PILOT swallowed.
âPain noise. Then absence.â
No one moved.
LARKSPURâs core emitted a low, wounded hum.
PILOT GONE. BODY HELD. PILOT GONE.
Milo turned back to Talia.
BUT I HEAR HER.
PILOTâs face tightened.
âMilo.â
I REMEMBER.
âI know.â
SHE SAID GOOD BIRD.
LARKSPURâs core brightened sharply, then dimmed again.
RECORDED.
SHE SAID SCARED.
PILOT went very still.
SHE SAID LARK. SHE SAID DONâT BE MAD. SHE SAIDâ
âMilo.â
SHE WAS THERE.
âYes.â
THEN WHERE.
The question tore the room open.
PILOT had no clean answer.
Clean answers belonged to people who had not spent years digging preserved bodies out of places where the official record said nothing remained.
âShe was there,â PILOT said finally. âAnd then she wasnât.â
Miloâs smaller manipulators flexed.
One of them reached toward his own original body.
The glove still fused around the cutter.
Then toward Taliaâs.
The wrist note.
The chipped tooth.
The face the mud had kept too well and not well enough.
WHY ME.
PILOT stared at the floor for one second.
Then back at him.
âBecause you were still in the act.â
ACT?
âHolding. Cutting. Asking. The helmet camera, your body, your hand, the cutter, LARKSPURâs rescue loop â all of it kept you anchored around one unfinished thing.â
HER.
âYes.â
Milo processed this.
The roomâs monitors flickered with stress from his frame.
I RETURNED BECAUSE OF HER.
PILOTâs voice softened.
âYes.â
SHE DID NOT RETURN.
âNo.â
There it was.
The whole cruelty in two lines.
Milo was back because he had not let go of Talia.
Talia was not back for him to keep holding.
His chest compartment opened, exposing the inner space where his own continuity anchor had been placed: the helmet camera, the fused harness cutter assembly, recovered glove, original ID tag, and preserved fragments from the place where his living body had refused to stop.
He looked down into himself.
Then at his original body in the cradle.
Then at Talia.
The rig trembled.
Grief had nowhere recognizable to go. No eyes to cry. No mouth to tighten. No throat to close.
So his body did what it knew.
One manipulator pulled a folded thermal blanket from its side compartment.
Then another.
Then another.
Three blankets dropped onto the floor.
PILOT looked down.
Her eyes went wet.
âYeah,â she whispered. âThat tracks.â
Miloâs voice came as static.
I PROMISED.
PILOT stepped closer.
âMiloââ
I PROMISED NOT LET GO.
âYou didnât.â
PROMISE FAILED.
âNo.â
SHE GONE.
âYes.â
PILOT did not soften that word.
She could not.
Lies were disrespectful in rooms like this.
Miloâs frame dipped lower, almost a kneel.
PROMISE FAILED.
âNo,â PILOT said, sharper now. âYou stayed until there was no Talia left to stay with.â
The room went silent.
Even LARKSPUR seemed to stop processing.
PILOT hated herself for saying it. Hated that it was true. Hated that truth could be both mercy and a blunt instrument.
She continued anyway.
âYou did not abandon her. You did not lose her. You did not damage her chance. You did not steal her continuity by holding her. You stayed after her signal was gone. Thatâs why you remember her. Thatâs why you came back still asking.â
Milo did not answer.
LARKSPUR spoke, faintly:
REYES HELD PILOT. REYES STAYED. PILOT NOT ALONE.
Milo turned toward the unit.
LARKSPUR HELD PILOT.
YES.
LARKSPUR PRESENT.
YES.
LARKSPUR RETURNED.
The unitâs core pulsed.
PARTIAL.
Miloâs optics returned to Talia.
TALIA NOT RETURNED.
No one corrected him.
There was nothing to correct.
PILOT stood between a recovery man in a machine body, a shattered unit core, and the too-preserved body of the girl they had both failed to save. The whole room smelled faintly of disinfectant, cold metal, mineral mud sealed behind containment, and the soft electrical heat of systems doing their best to hold grief without becoming it.
Milo asked:
PLAY RECORDING.
PILOT looked at LARKSPUR.
The unit hesitated.
Then the damaged room audio began.
Rain. Mud. Straining metal. Miloâs human breathing harsh through helmet pickup. Taliaâs voice, thin and full of pain.
âLark?â
From the past, LARKSPUR answered:
PRESENT.
âDonât be mad.â
NEGATIVE.
âGood bird.â
Static.
A small wet breath.
Miloâs voice, close to the helmet cam:
âHold on.â
Then metal shifted.
A scream clipped into noise.
Milo again, lower:
âIâve got you.â
The recording cut.
Miloâs body remained very still.
Then one of his manipulators extended toward LARKSPURâs core.
Another hovered over Taliaâs cradle.
Not touching her.
Not yet.
Asking, even now.
PILOT said, âYou can.â
Miloâs hand settled gently on the edge of Taliaâs cradle.
Not on the body.
On the cradle.
Respectful. Devastated. Cowardly, maybe, but only in the way grief made cowards of everyone who still had enough heart to hesitate.
I AM SORRY, TALIA NOOR.
No answer.
The body did not move.
The preserved face did not change.
The chipped tooth remained visible behind parted lips, an obscene little human detail the mud had no right to keep.
Milo waited anyway.
The silence became its own answer.
Eventually, he asked:
BURIAL?
PILOT nodded.
âIf thatâs what her family wants. And LARKSPUR.â
LARKSPUR answered immediately.
PILOT HOME. FULL BODY. NO PARTS HELD.
Miloâs voice followed.
FULL BODY. NO PARTS HELD. NO SAMPLE. NO TRAINING USE. NO DISPLAY.
PILOT said, âAgreed.â
NO ONE SAYS UNRECOVERABLE.
PILOT looked at Talia.
At the body the ravine had kept.
At the person who was still gone.
âNo one,â she said.
Milo turned toward his own original body.
For a long time, he looked at himself.
The mud-preserved face behind the visor.
The folded posture.
The hand and cutter.
The corpse that had somehow been enough to leave him a door.
Then he looked back at Talia.
PLACE TOGETHER UNTIL FAMILY TRANSFER.
âSide by side?â
YES. NOT MIXED. NOT CONFUSED. TOGETHER.
PILOT understood.
Not romance.
Not myth.
Not making them into something they had not been.
Just two bodies recovered from the same dark, and a man who could not bear for her to wait alone.
PILOT moved the cradles herself.
Milo watched every centimeter.
When Taliaâs recovery cradle rested beside his original body, LARKSPURâs core finally dimmed into low rest.
Milo remained awake.
One small manipulator picked up the blankets he had accidentally dropped.
He hesitated.
Then tucked one over the foot of Taliaâs sealed cradle.
Unnecessary.
Completely useless.
So human that PILOT had to turn away.
He placed another over the cradle holding his own body.
Then he settled between them and LARKSPURâs core.
All six hands folded in his lap.
After a long time, he transmitted into the quiet room:
I STAYED.
No one answered.
But beside him, Taliaâs body lay whole enough to be taken home.
LARKSPURâs damaged core warmed by one degree.
PILOT stood at the door, watching a dead recovery man grieve a dead pilot who had not come back, while the ruined unit that had loved them both slept in pieces.
That was the part he would have found annoying if there had been room left in the situation for annoyance.
Not blood. Not noble battlefield ash. Mud.
A wet, sour, metallic smear of it had gotten through the cracked lower seal of his helmet when he hit the ground, and now every time he breathed, he tasted dirt and copper and the burnt-plastic stink of a dying unit.
Very glamorous.
Very heroic.
Very good material for whatever asshole wrote posthumous commendations.
The unit lay on its side in the ravine, half-buried in black water and churned-up soil, one massive shoulder driven into the bank, one leg folded under it at an angle no machine body should have been able to tolerate. Its name was LARKSPUR, which had always seemed too delicate for something forty-two feet tall with storm-gray armor and a rail cannon mounted along its spine.
LARKSPUR had been beautiful in flight.
Not sleek exactly. Too heavy for that. But sure. Steady. Aerial support unit, troop cover, medical extraction, bad-weather navigation. The kind of big metal soul that could fly through cloud cover with one engine coughing and still lower its cockpit temperature because its pilot had a fever.
Its pilot was Ensign Talia Noor.
Twenty-two.
She had a chipped front tooth, a constellation of freckles over her nose, and a habit of apologizing to people before asking them to move out of her way during emergencies. Milo had known her for six weeks, which was long enough to know she took her coffee too sweet, wrote reminders on the inside of her wrist, and always tied her left boot too tight.
Now she was upside down in LARKSPURâs cockpit, pinned by a collapsed restraint frame and breathing through blood.
Milo crawled through the ravine toward her.
Rain hit his helmet in hard, stupid little ticks. Somewhere above, engines screamed through cloud cover. Somewhere behind him, someone was yelling over comms, but the channel was shredded, all static and half-words.
âReyesâfall backâsink field expandingââ
He ignored it.
Which, historically, was one of his strongest skills.
LARKSPURâs outer hatch had warped shut. Milo burned through the seal with the cutter until the metal glowed orange and rain flashed to steam against it. The unit groaned beneath him, not just structural stress. Pain. A huge, low animal sound that rolled through the ravine and into his bones.
âI know,â Milo said, breath fogging his visor. âI know, big bird. Iâm working.â
The unitâs optic, cracked and half-submerged in mud, flickered once.
PILOT STATUS CRITICAL.
âYeah, I gathered that from the screaming.â
PILOT BLEEDING.
âIâm going as fast as I can.â
FASTER.
âEveryoneâs a critic.â
The hatch gave with a shriek.
Milo shoved his shoulder into it and forced himself through the opening.
The cockpit smelled like hot metal, wet insulation, blood, ozone, and the sweet chemical rot of emergency foam. Red warning lights pulsed through vapor. Something dripped steadily from above onto the side of his helmet.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
He hoped it was coolant.
He did not look up.
Talia hung against the restraints, body twisted by gravity and crash force. Her helmet was cracked along the left side. Her dark hair had come loose from its bun and floated in damp strands around her face, stuck to her cheek with blood and sweat. One pupil was huge. The other kept trying to focus on him and failing.
Her mouth moved.
No sound came out.
Milo pushed through the broken console frame and got close enough to touch her shoulder.
âHey, Noor.â
Her eyes jerked toward him.
Good.
Awful, but good.
âReyes?â she rasped.
âYeah.â
She blinked slowly. Rainwater from his suit dripped onto her sleeve.
âThatâs embarrassing.â
âWhat is?â
âThought you were taller.â
Milo barked a laugh before he could stop himself.
It sounded wrong in the cockpit.
Too alive.
âYouâre upside down and concussed. Everyone looks short from there.â
Talia tried to smile.
It failed halfway. Blood slid from one corner of her mouth and ran toward her temple because the world had flipped her and the body had not received the memo.
Milo wiped it away with his thumb.
A stupid little gesture. Too gentle for the situation. Too late to matter medically.
It mattered anyway.
âCan you feel your legs?â he asked.
Taliaâs eyes closed.
âDo I have to answer honestly?â
âYeah.â
âBad system.â
âAnswer.â
She breathed in. The inhale caught and turned wet.
âNo.â
Milo looked down.
The restraint frame had folded across her lower body. Not cleanly. Not mercifully. One of the cockpitâs internal support struts had punched through the seat assembly and trapped her pelvis against the crushed console rail. Her flight suit was dark from the waist down, soaked with blood and hydraulic fluid until it was impossible to tell where the machine ended and the person began.
Miloâs stomach turned cold.
Okay.
Bad.
Very bad.
Still workable, he lied to himself.
Everything was workable until it wasnât.
He pulled the harness cutter from his belt.
LARKSPURâs voice cracked through the cockpit speakers.
DO NOT MOVE PILOT. SPINAL INSTABILITY. INTERNAL BLEEDING. PELVIC COMPRESSION MAINTAINING PRESSURE.
Milo looked at the ceiling.
âDo you want me to leave her here?â
The speakers hissed.
NEGATIVE.
âThen shut up and help.â
A pause.
ACKNOWLEDGED.
The cockpit lights steadied slightly.
LARKSPUR rerouted power to give him a cleaner view.
Good bird.
Milo set the cutter against the first strap.
His hands were shaking.
He hated that. Not because he thought brave people didnât shake. Brave people shook constantly. Anyone who said otherwise had never tried to cut a living person out of a machine while listening to them drown slowly in their own blood.
He hated it because shaking made the work sloppy.
Talia watched his hands.
âYou okay?â she whispered.
Milo stared at her.
âAre you asking me?â
âLooks bad.â
âYour priorities are dogshit.â
She gave a tiny, breathless laugh, then grimaced so hard her teeth clicked.
A bubble of red formed at her lips.
Milo wiped that too.
âDonât laugh.â
âYouâre funny.â
âI am deeply professional.â
âYou have mud on your teeth.â
He paused.
âWhat?â
âMud.â
She lifted one trembling finger, barely an inch, as if she meant to point at his mouth.
âGross.â
Milo almost cried then.
Not because of the blood. Not because of the trapped legs. Not because the ravine was collapsing around them.
Because she was twenty-two, upside down, dying, and still using what little air she had to roast him.
âYeah,â he said. âWell, you look like shit too.â
Her eyes softened with something that might have been relief.
âFair.â
The first strap came free.
Then the second.
The cockpit shifted.
Talia screamed.
Not loud.
There wasnât enough breath for loud.
A thin, torn sound escaped her, high and involuntary, and Milo felt it go straight through his teeth.
LARKSPUR roared.
The whole unitâs frame shuddered around them.
PILOT PAIN SPIKE. STOP. STOP. STOP.
âI know!â
Milo pressed one hand against Taliaâs shoulder to keep her from sliding as the restraint tension changed.
âLook at me. Talia. Look at me.â
Her eyes were wide now. Too wide.
âIâm sorry,â she gasped.
âNo.â
âIâm sorry.â
âFor what?â
âCrashed your afternoon.â
âYeah, honestly, very inconsiderate.â
Her breathing hitched.
He could see her trying not to panic because she thought panic would inconvenience him.
Christ.
âHey,â he said sharply. âNone of that polite dying bullshit.â
Her eyes flicked to his.
âOkay?â
âYou are allowed to be scared.â
She swallowed.
Blood moved in her throat.
âIâm scared.â
âI know.â
âI donât want LARKSPUR to know.â
The unitâs speakers went silent.
Miloâs hand tightened around the cutter.
Too late.
Of course LARKSPUR knew.
Every unit knew its pilot in ways humans pretended were data. Pulse through the seat. Breathing against the harness. Micro-tremors in the hands. Stress sweat in the glove lining. The tiny shift in posture before a lie. Fear before the pilot admitted fear to herself.
LARKSPURâs cockpit lights dimmed.
PILOT FEAR ACKNOWLEDGED. PROTECTION CONTINUES.
Talia closed her eyes.
One tear slid sideways into her hair.
âSorry, Lark.â
The unit answered immediately.
NO APOLOGY REQUIRED.
Milo had to look away.
He focused on the metal.
Metal was easier.
Metal did not have freckles.
Metal did not apologize to the thing trying to keep it alive.
He cut the third strap. Stabilized the shoulder frame. Checked the lower compression. The support strut had her trapped too deeply. He could cut around it, maybe. Use the spreader to lift the rail by two centimeters. Enough to slide the extraction board under her. Enough to worsen the bleeding. Enough to kill her faster.
Maybe enough to save her.
The ravine shook.
Mud and water poured through the open hatch.
His comm crackled.
âReyes! Sink field moving. You have ninety seconds. Repeat, ninetyââ
The transmission dissolved.
Milo looked at his suit display.
The ground underneath them was liquefying.
Of course it was.
Why have one catastrophe when the universe could layer them like a shitty cake?
He grabbed the micro-spreader.
âTalia, Iâm going to lift this off you.â
Her eyes found him.
The fear there was naked now.
No politeness left.
Good.
Honest.
âWill it hurt?â
âYes.â
âHow much?â
Milo swallowed.
âA lot.â
She nodded once, tiny and serious.
âOkay.â
LARKSPURâs speaker crackled.
PILOT VITALS UNSTABLE. EXTERNAL EXTRACTION PROBABILITY LOW.
Milo ignored it.
REYES.
He froze.
The unit had used his name.
Units usually did that only when the matter had stopped being procedural.
REYES. PILOT COMPRESSION RELEASE MAY TERMINATE.
Miloâs jaw clenched.
âLeaving her here definitely terminates.â
ACKNOWLEDGED.
âThen help me.â
A long, horrible pause.
Then:
SUPPORTING.
The cockpit shifted around him.
Not much. LARKSPUR had almost nothing left. But somewhere deep in the ruined frame, the unit moved what it could. A bulkhead brace retracted by one centimeter. A crushed panel unlocked. The console rail lifted just enough for Milo to slide the spreader in.
Talia was watching him.
âMilo?â
That was bad.
She had never called him Milo before.
âYeah?â
âIf I pass out, donât let Lark think Iâm gone.â
Miloâs throat closed.
âI wonât.â
âPromise?â
âI promise.â
The lie was immediate.
Tender.
Necessary.
He triggered the spreader.
Taliaâs body arched as far as the wreckage allowed.
Her scream filled the cockpit, raw and wet and too human for the machine around her. LARKSPUR screamed with her, not in sound but in light: every display flaring white, every warning symbol blooming at once, the entire unitâs pain and panic throwing itself across every surface.
Milo shoved the extraction board down.
âHold on,â he said.
Talia sobbed.
âHold on.â
The strut lifted.
Too little.
He pushed harder.
His shoulder hit a jagged panel. The suit tore. Something hot opened along his upper arm.
Ignore.
He got the board under one side of her body.
âHold on.â
Her blood ran over his gloves.
Warm, even through the suit.
Her eyes were unfocused now.
âTalia. Stay with me.â
âTrying.â
âI know.â
âLark?â
The unit answered before Milo could.
PRESENT.
âDonât be mad.â
NEGATIVE.
âGood bird.â
The lights trembled.
PILOT PRAISE RECORDED.
Taliaâs mouth moved into the smallest smile.
Then the ravine collapsed.
It did not happen dramatically.
No cinematic crack.
No long warning.
The floor simply dropped.
The whole unit lurched deeper into the sink field. Miloâs boots left the cockpit floor. Taliaâs body shifted against the half-lifted strut and made a sound he would carry for the rest of his life, however short that turned out to be.
The support rail slammed back down.
The extraction board snapped.
LARKSPURâs cockpit filled with warning tones.
Talia went silent.
Milo knew before he looked.
He looked anyway.
Her eyes were open.
Her chest moved once.
A small, shallow, impossible attempt.
Then nothing.
For one second, the cockpit was very quiet.
Rain.
Steam.
Alarms muffled under water.
Miloâs own breathing, too loud in his helmet.
LARKSPUR said:
PILOT?
Milo did not answer.
The unit tried again.
PILOT STATUS?
Milo pressed two fingers to Taliaâs neck because the body demanded ritual even when the mind knew.
No pulse.
Only warmth leaving slowly.
Her skin under his glove was still soft at the throat.
That was the obscene part.
Not the blood.
Not the ruin below the waist.
The softness.
The fact that death did not instantly turn her into an object. She was still warm. Still freckled. Still had a smear of mud near one eyebrow where he had touched her with a dirty glove. Still had a chipped tooth visible between parted lips.
Still Talia, and already not.
LARKSPURâs voice changed.
Smaller.
REYES. PILOT STATUS?
Milo closed his eyes.
âIâm sorry.â
The unitâs lights flickered.
PILOT STATUS?
âMilo,â command shouted through static. âMove! Now!â
He did not move.
He looked at Taliaâs hand.
Her fingers had loosened from the control grip during the final lurch. On the inside of her wrist, half-smeared by blood and rainwater, was black marker writing.
A reminder.
ask Lark about heat flutter
Small. Ordinary. Her handwriting.
He almost laughed.
He almost vomited.
LARKSPUR whispered:
PILOT COLD.
The cockpit heater came on.
Broken, weak, absurd.
Warm air flowed over a dead womanâs face.
Milo bowed his head.
âYeah,â he said. âI know.â
The sink field pulled again.
This time the ceiling dropped low enough to crush the hatch opening. Mud and black water surged into the cockpit, climbing around his knees. He had maybe thirty seconds.
Maybe less.
He could still leave.
He could crawl out through the gap, if he moved now. He could maybe reach the ridge. Maybe someone would pull him out. Maybe he would live long enough to write the report that would turn Talia Noor into four sterile paragraphs and LARKSPUR into a destroyed asset.
His harness cutter was still in his hand.
Talia was still strapped in by one final cross-belt.
Milo looked at it.
Then at her.
Then at LARKSPURâs flickering console.
âIâm not leaving her half-cut.â
REYES EVACUATE.
âOh, now you want to give good advice?â
REYES EVACUATE.
Milo set the cutter against the last belt.
His hand was steady now.
Funny how that worked.
âIâm finishing.â
The blade bit through the strap.
The belt separated.
Talia settled fully against the broken board and his arm, dead weight now, heavy in the particular way only the dead were heavy. Not dramatic. Just absolute. A person no longer helping you carry them.
Milo cradled her as much as the wreck allowed.
His helmet camera pressed against her chest.
The suit recorded no heartbeat.
LARKSPURâs speaker crackled.
PILOT RELEASED?
Milo looked down at her.
At the blood in her hair.
At the freckle near her left eye.
At the reminder on her wrist.
âYes,â he said. âPilot released.â
The unit exhaled through systems that were not lungs.
THANK YOU.
The roof caved in.
The impact drove Milo forward over Taliaâs body. Something hit his back hard enough to make the world flash white. His left arm vanished into pain. The cockpit compressed around them, metal folding inward, panels snapping, water rising.
His helmet camera stayed against Taliaâs chest.
The last thing it recorded was his voice.
Not screaming.
Not heroic.
Just close, breathless, stubborn.
âHold on,â he said.
Then, softer:
âIâve got you.â
The black water covered the lens.
LARKSPURâs final transmission went out three minutes later.
Not distress.
Not coordinates.
A status update sent on every band it could reach, repeated until its power core drowned.
PILOT HELD. RECOVERY REQUIRED. PILOT HELD. RECOVERY REQUIRED. PILOT HELD.
The fleet marked the site unstable.
The recovery attempt was suspended.
The report said:
ENSIGN TALIA NOOR: KILLED IN ACTION. UNRECOVERABLE. SERGEANT MILO REYES: KILLED IN ACTION. UNRECOVERABLE. UNIT LARKSPUR: DESTROYED. NONRECOVERABLE.
Years later, when PILOT found them, Milo was still folded over Talia in the crushed rescue bay, one arm locked around her, helmet pressed to her silent chest.
The cutter was still in his hand.
LARKSPURâs dead cockpit still warmed the place where Taliaâs face had been.
And when PILOT touched the ruined frame, the first thing Miloâs echo said was not his own name.
The fleet did not know how to tell the truth cleanly.
It never had.
Truth had to pass through classification review, privacy filters, casualty board approvals, legal holds, command objections, ethics annotations, and six departments whose entire purpose was to make horror sound survivable in a memo.
DONOR broke most of those systems before breakfast.
Not dramatically.
She did not kick in doors. She did not shout in corridors. She did not give some glorious speech under the fleet seal while officers reconsidered their moral universe in a convenient semicircle.
She sat at an evidence terminal with bloodshot eyes, two cold coffees, Vale standing guard behind her like a very tired wall, and began uploading the continuity protocol files.
The autopsy reports.
The preserved sample lists.
The postmortem neural activity studies.
The interface feedback logs.
The cases marked inactive despite measurable loop behavior.
The cost assessments.
The abandoned recovery sites.
The ânonviableâ pilots who had continued answering when asked the right way.
The âunrecoverableâ units whose cores had transmitted for years after official death.
The hand.
PILOTâs hand was in the manifest too.
LIANG-RH-01. RETURNED TO SUBJECT BY DEMAND.
That line made seven lawyers physically enter the room.
DONOR ignored all of them.
At 0617, Admiral Harker ordered the release suspended.
At 0619, twelve captains refused the suspension pending ethics review.
At 0624, the first casualty family opened the public-facing file and found out that their daughter had not been unrecoverable.
Only inconvenient.
After that, the fleet stopped being able to keep pace with its own shame.
Messages flooded command.
Some were furious.
Some were broken.
Some only asked for coordinates.
Where is my son?
Where is her helmet?
Did he suffer?
Did she say anything?
Did you leave him there?
Can we bring them home?
The oldest question.
The one war always pretended was logistical.
The one grief never accepted as anything but sacred.
Can we bring them home?
By midmorning, every available recovery unit had been assigned to review old unrecovered sites.
By noon, three officers had resigned.
By 1400, two had been relieved.
By 1700, Admiral Harker was still technically in command, but everyone had begun speaking around him with the careful politeness usually reserved for unexploded ordnance.
PILOT did not attack.
That was almost worse.
Her dark fleet remained beyond the moon, visible only as intermittent signatures and ugly little sensor ghosts.
Waiting.
Watching.
Letting the living do paperwork under artillery silence.
That was the thing nobody had expected from the villain.
Patience.
DONOR went to the morgue after the upload.
Not evidence storage.
The morgue.
It seemed important to remember there was a difference.
The morgue was quieter. Less guarded. More honest in its small cruelties. A row of sealed cold rooms. Stainless tables. White lights. Drains in the floor. Plain cabinets with plain labels. Bodies that had not yet become cases, leverage, exhibits, or strategic embarrassment.
Just dead.
She stood there for a long time with her hands in her coat pockets.
The cold made her eyes sting.
Or maybe that was just her.
Vale found her at 1820.
He did not come in right away.
He stood at the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, bruised throat dark above his collar.
âYou should eat,â he said.
DONOR did not look back.
âSo should you.â
âI did.â
âCoffee doesnât count.â
âIt had protein powder in it.â
âThat is not food. That is a threat.â
Vale almost smiled.
Almost.
He stepped inside.
For a while, they stood together in front of the empty table.
Not PILOTâs table.
That one had been decommissioned years ago.
Which meant nothing.
Every table was PILOTâs table if DONOR stood in the wrong memory.
Vale said, âFamilies are requesting release of coordinates.â
âThey should.â
âCommand is worried about hostile interference during recovery missions.â
DONOR laughed once, without humor.
âHostile interference.â
âLiang.â
âSheâll help.â
âYou know that?â
DONOR looked down at the table.
âNo.â
Vale waited.
DONOR said, âI know sheâll watch.â
That was enough.
Maybe.
Vale folded his arms, then winced because his ribs hurt.
DONOR noticed.
âYou need medical.â
âSo do you.â
âIâm not injured.â
âDONOR.â
She looked at him then.
Valeâs face was lined with exhaustion.
âShe came back,â he said.
DONOR said nothing.
âShe came back and youâre still standing like youâre waiting for the next report to tell you it isnât true.â
DONORâs mouth tightened.
âShe came back angry.â
âYes.â
âShe came back hurt.â
âYes.â
âShe came back because of what I did.â
Vale was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, âMaybe.â
DONOR looked at him sharply.
He held up a hand.
âIâm not absolving you.â
âGood.â
âYou preserved what you should not have preserved. You crossed lines. You wrote protocol around grief and called it prevention. You opened doors no one understood.â
Her face went still.
Vale continued.
âBut she also came back because command left people where they were still screaming. Because the fleet preferred clean casualty states to unresolved obligations. Because all of us liked the word unrecoverable when it meant we could stop looking.â
DONOR looked away.
Valeâs voice lowered.
âYou donât get all the guilt. That would be too easy.â
That made her eyes fill, which annoyed her.
âI cut off her hand.â
âYes,â Vale said.
A pause.
Then, because apparently even he had been infected by the day:
âAnd given recent events, I would not recommend doing that again.â
DONOR stared at him.
He looked back, very serious.
Then she laughed.
Once.
It broke apart quickly, but it was real enough to hurt.
Vale looked relieved and miserable at the same time.
The morgue lights hummed overhead.
DONOR wiped her face.
âShe asked for it back,â she said.
âShe got it.â
âShe still hates me.â
âShe said thank you.â
âShe said I should be sorry.â
âYou should.â
âI am.â
âI know.â
The morgue stayed cold around them.
At last, DONOR whispered, âWhat if she never forgives us?â
Vale looked at the empty table.
âThen we do the right things anyway.â
It was not comfort.
It was better.
PILOT took the hand to UNIT.
Not to the dark fleet.
Not to the command cradle.
Not to Captain Chen, who had already sent seventeen annotated complaints about the structure of the released archive.
Not to Aram, who had climbed so high above the moon that his signal came back thin and bright and almost peaceful.
Not to Reyes, who was preparing recovery rigs before anyone had asked.
Not even to the little sanctuary bay where ORCHARD had grown one aggressively ugly tomato and declared it âcrew morale.â
PILOT took the hand to UNIT.
The big gal slept in its cradle, half-rebuilt and half-wrecked, suspended in a dark hangar made from stolen hull plating and old fleet shame.
Its damaged frame filled the bay: black-red armor plates laid open, exposed artificial ribs braced with temporary scaffolds, engine housings removed, wing roots stabilized but not yet whole. The cockpit cavity had been cleaned, carefully this time, not to erase what happened but to make it livable for a consciousness that kept waking in the worst moment.
A small heater ran near the pilot seat.
UNIT did not need it.
PILOT left it there anyway.
She entered carrying the sealed container.
The hangar lights rose by two degrees.
PILOT PRESENT.
âYeah, big gal.â
A pause.
PILOT HOLDING ORGANIC MATERIAL.
PILOT looked down at the container.
âTechnically.â
UNIT processed.
MORBID.
PILOT laughed under her breath.
âYou donât know the half of it.â
She walked to the cockpit platform and set the container on the console. The hand lay inside under frost, pale and curled and obscene in its familiarity.
UNITâs sensors adjusted.
A low vibration passed through the cradle.
Not alarm.
Recognition.
PILOT HAND. ORIGINAL.
âYeah.â
HAND MISMATCH RESOLVED?
PILOT stared at the container.
âNot really.â
UNIT was silent.
Then:
PILOT DAMAGE EXTENSIVE.
âStill yes.â
PAIN LEVEL?
PILOT leaned her elbows on the console and closed her eyes.
âBad.â
The cockpit warmed by two degrees.
She smiled despite herself.
âThank you.â
PILOT COMPLAINT LOG AVAILABLE.
âDo not start.â
LOG FULL.
âRude.â
The big gal hummed.
PILOT rested her forehead against the edge of the console.
For once, she let the silence stay.
Around them, the hangar held the soft industrial noises of the half-dead becoming less alone: power lines breathing, scaffold clamps adjusting, distant recovery drones launching toward old coordinates, ORCHARDâs oxygen pumps clicking, MOTHER HEN arguing with a med printer, SAINT BRACKET cursing someoneâs terrible welds in diagnostic beeps.
The dead fleet was not quiet.
That was probably good.
Quiet had been killing them for years.
UNITâs speaker crackled.
HAND RETURNED. PILOT LESS ANGRY?
PILOT opened her eyes.
The old hand sat in the container like evidence that could never become harmless.
âNo.â
UNIT considered.
PILOT MORE SAD.
âYeah.â
ACCEPTABLE. SAD INDICATES PROCESSING.
âOh, suddenly youâre a therapist?â
BIG GAL MULTIROLE.
PILOT covered her face.
âGod, I missed you.â
The lights dimmed.
When UNIT replied, the voice was softer.
UNIT MISSED PILOT WHILE PILOT DEAD.
PILOT stopped laughing.
The sentence sat between them.
Awkward. Plain. Too large.
She reached out and placed her new hand on the console, beside the container holding the old one.
âIâm here now.â
PILOT PRESENT.
âYeah.â
PILOT NOT SAME.
âNo.â
A pause.
UNIT NOT SAME.
PILOT swallowed.
âNo.â
The damaged frame creaked faintly in its cradle.
STILL BIG GAL?
PILOTâs face broke open.
âOh,â she whispered. âAlways.â
For a moment, the avatar projector flickered.
The woman-shape formed badly at first, red-black light stuttering into a face, shoulders, the hint of arms folded in familiar disapproval. She looked like a person made from a machine remembering tenderness.
In avatar form, she used she/her.
She looked at PILOT.
Then at the hand.
Then back at PILOT.
âDo you want it attached?â
PILOT flinched.
The question was not clinical.
That made it worse.
âNo,â she said after a long moment. âI donât know. Maybe someday. Maybe never.â
UNITâs avatar nodded.
No pressure.
No protocol.
No useful purpose.
Just acceptance.
PILOT almost hated how gentle it was.
The avatar looked toward the hangar doors.
âRecovery launches are ready.â
PILOT exhaled.
âYeah.â
âThey are waiting for you.â
âThey can wait.â
The avatarâs glitching face tilted.
âGood.â
PILOT looked up.
UNIT said, with enormous dignity for someone whose left wing was still on a repair rack:
âYou are tired.â
PILOT laughed weakly.
âWow. Tactical genius.â
âYou are small and chemically unstable.â
âStill rude.â
âYou require supervision.â
PILOT put a hand over her eyes.
âYeah, big gal. I know.â
UNITâs avatar softened.
âSleep in the cockpit.â
PILOT went still.
The cockpit.
The death room.
The empty shrine.
The place where her old body had ended and her new war had begun.
She looked at the seat.
At the cleaned harness.
At the warped neural port that would never be used again.
At the console where her original hand had once gripped the override until death and machinery could not tell where one ended.
âNo,â she said.
UNIT did not argue.
That was the mercy.
âOkay,â the avatar said.
PILOT wiped her face.
âNot yet.â
âOkay.â
The avatar flickered once, then smiled with what little resolution she had.
âFloor is available.â
PILOT stared at her.
Then she laughed.
âYou want me to sleep on the hangar floor?â
âPilot has done worse.â
âThat is unfortunately true.â
So PILOT did.
She sat down on the grated platform beside the cockpit, back against UNITâs warm console, the sealed hand container within armâs reach. The floor was hard. Her joints complained. Her printed body had opinions about everything.
UNIT raised the heat.
PILOT closed her eyes.
For the first time since returning, she slept without a weapon in her hand.
Her old hand lay beside her in the cold.
Her new hands curled empty in her lap.
The big gal watched over both.
The first official recovery mission launched at dawn.
Not under Harkerâs command.
His review had begun at 0300. He had objected to the timing. The board had noted his objection. Then it had continued without him, which was the closest the fleet had come to comedy in years.
The mission was small.
Three recovery vessels.
Two medical frigates.
One ethics observer.
One family liaison team.
One unit, MOTHER HEN, who had hacked the authorization stack and added itself with the note:
PATIENT FOLLOW-UP OVERDUE.
No one removed it.
The first site was Nine-Ring Drift.
Aram Solâs wreck.
PILOT watched from the dark side of the moon, standing on UNITâs exterior gantry while the fleet ships crossed into the debris field with their transponders visible, weapons cold, recovery lights on.
Aramâs flight frame hovered beside her.
Restless.
Always wanting up.
âTheyâre going back,â PILOT said.
Aramâs signal pulsed.
Not joy.
Not forgiveness.
Something smaller.
Something older.
Recognition.
LANTERN lit the corridor.
A clean white path through broken metal and old ice.
The fleet ships followed it.
Nobody fired.
Nobody spoke on open channels for a long time.
Then the lead recovery vessel transmitted:
âSite confirmed. Human remains located. Beginning retrieval.â
Aramâs frame trembled.
PILOT reached out and rested one hand against its hull.
âYou donât have to watch.â
The frame stayed.
So she stayed too.
The recovery took six hours.
They brought back what they could.
Not everything.
Never everything.
But more than nothing.
That mattered.
At the end, the vessel transmitted one line on the open channel.
âLieutenant Aram Sol is recovered.â
The dark fleet heard it.
So did the living fleet.
So did the moon.
Aramâs frame lifted slowly, nose angled toward the stars.
For a terrible second, PILOT thought he would bolt upward and vanish.
Instead he transmitted, faintly:
brother?
PILOT nodded.
âWeâll find him.â
Aram held position.
Beside them, UNITâs massive frame hummed through the gantry.
ONE HOME.
PILOT swallowed.
âOne.â
The number was too small.
It was also everything.
By the end of the week, the fleet had recovered seven sites.
Three yielded remains.
Two yielded active loops.
One yielded a unit core that had been transmitting weather data to a dead colony for thirteen years.
One yielded nothing, but HOUND searched anyway, grid by grid, refusing to mark the pilot gone until every coordinate had been touched.
The records stayed public.
Not fully public to civilians, not yet. The fleet still had its reflexes. But open to families. Open to ethics command. Open to casualty integrity review. Open to the people whose bodies had been turned into closed tabs and locked drawers.
DONOR testified for nine hours.
Vale testified for four.
Basanti testified for twenty minutes and cried through most of it, then apologized to no one.
Pacheco testified for twelve and somehow made three board members laugh, one board member swear, and one chaplain leave the room to compose himself.
Admiral Harker testified under supervision.
PILOT did not testify.
She sent corrections.
Many.
The board received a document titled:
LIANG ANNOTATIONS TO CONTINUITY PROTOCOL REPORT, OR: WOW YOU PEOPLE SOMEHOW MADE DEATH MORE ADMINISTRATIVE
It was 412 pages.
Captain Chen edited it for clarity and added footnotes.
DONOR read every page.
Some parts made her angry.
Some made her sick.
Some were funny enough that she laughed alone in her quarters and then cried because the laugh had nowhere safe to go.
On page 389, PILOT had written:
DONOR was wrong. DONOR also kept looking. Both things are true. Do not simplify this because it makes your report easier.
DONOR sat with that sentence for a long time.
Then she printed it.
Not for a shrine.
Not for forgiveness.
For accuracy.
The final meeting of the emergency board happened in a plain conference room with bad chairs.
That felt right.
No marble. No banners. No grand memorial language. Just coffee going stale, people exhausted past performance, and a screen showing names.
DONOR had deleted it so hard the system logged it as hostile input.
The boardâs findings were not poetic.
That was good.
Poetry had done enough damage.
They were blunt:
Continuity protocol suspended.
All preserved neural or interface-active remains to receive independent personhood review.
Family notification required.
Recovery cost assessments forbidden as sole basis for abandonment where measurable postmortem loop activity exists.
Sentient units to be classified as casualty persons, not equipment, pending full legal review.
No postmortem testing without explicit pre-death consent or family/ethical authorization.
All historic unrecovered cases to be reopened.
All junior personnel evacuations to be logged independently from command discretion during catastrophic engagements.
Admiral Harker removed pending formal inquiry.
DONOR censured.
Not imprisoned.
Not absolved.
Censured.
Required to lead the independent review because punishment and trust often looked horrifyingly alike in institutions that had run out of clean hands.
Vale appointed acting recovery commander.
He looked like he wanted to walk into space.
Pacheco told him, âCongrats on your nightmare promotion.â
Vale said, âThank you, I hate it.â
For one second, everyone in the room sounded alive.
Then the screen flickered.
Not hacked violently.
Just interrupted with the casual disrespect of someone who knew every systemâs weak points because she had once filled out their bug reports with profanity in the margins.
A message appeared.
ACCEPTABLE START.
The board room went silent.
Then another line:
NOT FORGIVEN.
No one expected otherwise.
Then:
KEEP GOING.
DONOR looked at the screen.
Her eyes burned.
Vale stood beside her.
Basanti covered her mouth.
Pacheco whispered, âBossy even as an international incident.â
The screen added:
PACHECO STILL OWES ME MONEY.
Pacheco threw both hands up.
âIâm being oppressed by the dead.â
For the first time in the entire board process, DONOR laughed in front of everyone.
Not enough to fix anything.
Enough to prove something had survived.
PILOT watched the board feed from UNITâs hangar.
She was sitting on the platform again, boots dangling over the edge, one hand wrapped around a mug of black coffee ORCHARD had somehow grown beans for, which raised many questions PILOT did not currently have the emotional bandwidth to investigate.
Her original hand rested in a sealed reliquary case nearby.
Not hidden.
Not displayed.
Present.
That was the compromise.
UNITâs avatar stood beside her, more stable now. Still flickering at the edges, but face clear enough to look judgmental, which was all PILOT had ever wanted for her big gal.
âYou are pleased,â UNIT said.
âNo.â
âYou are less murderous.â
âBarely.â
âImprovement.â
PILOT snorted.
On the screen, the meeting continued without her.
People arguing over language.
Definitions.
Obligations.
Rights.
Recovery thresholds.
The living trying, clumsily and late, to become less monstrous than their paperwork.
PILOT wanted to hate it.
She did hate some of it.
But the recovery list had names on it now.
Not statuses.
Names.
That mattered in a way she resented.
UNITâs avatar looked down at her.
âWill you return?â
âTo the fleet?â
âYes.â
PILOT stared at the screen.
Vale was rubbing his forehead.
DONOR was speaking with that terrifying calm she used when she had already decided which wall was going to fall and was only giving it the courtesy of notice.
Basanti and Pacheco sat behind her, too tired to pretend not to lean on each other.
The fleet.
Her fleet.
Not forgiven.
Not abandoned either.
âI donât know,â PILOT said.
UNIT accepted that.
The big gal had always been better at silence than people.
After a while, UNIT asked:
âWill you attack them?â
PILOT looked at the dark ships docked beyond the hangar windows.
The Unrecovered.
The aftermath with engines.
The dead who had not finished choosing.
âNot today.â
âTomorrow?â
PILOT smiled faintly.
âDepends how stupid they get.â
UNIT processed.
âProbability high.â
âUnfortunately.â
The avatarâs hand flickered, then steadied as it came to rest on PILOTâs shoulder.
Warm light through a projection.
Not real touch.
Close enough to hurt.
âPILOT,â UNIT said.
âYeah, big gal?â
âYou came back.â
PILOT looked down at her hands.
New right.
New left.
Old hand in the case.
All of them hers.
None of them simple.
âYeah.â
UNITâs avatar looked toward the hangar, where recovery ships prepared for the next launch.
âThen keep coming back.â
PILOT closed her eyes.
That was not an order.
Not exactly.
It was worse.
A request.
She leaned slightly into the projection, though it could not hold her weight.
âIâll try.â
On the screen, the board finalized the first recovery mandate.
Outside the hangar, LANTERN lit another corridor.
HOUND launched into the dark.
MOTHER HEN complained about everyoneâs vitals.
SAINT BRACKET fixed a panel nobody had asked it to fix.
ORCHARDâs tomato plant continued, offensively, to live.
Aram climbed and came back.
Chen organized the names.
Reyes prepared the rigs.
Ilya slept.
DONOR kept working.
Vale kept standing.
The fleet kept moving, slower now, limping under the weight of the dead it had finally admitted were not finished with it.
PILOT sat beside her big gal and watched the first formal recovery convoy leave for the old coordinates.
No weapons hot.
No banners.
No speeches.
Just lights in the dark, going back.
For now, that was enough.
Not forgiveness.
Not peace.
Not the end.
A start.
The final message went out across both fleets at 1900.
Not from command.
Not from PILOT.
From UNIT.
Its damaged signal was rough, full of static, but unmistakable.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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But for twelve seconds after Liang withdrew, everyone in the war room behaved as if history itself had paused to take a breath. The red icons retreated beyond the moonâs shadow. The evacuation corridors widened. The hostile locks vanished from the flagshipâs hull. The old private channel went dead.
Then the ordinary machinery of crisis resumed.
Damage reports.
Medical requests.
Docking clearances.
Command-authentication failures.
Junior crew evacuations.
Names transmitted by officers who had refused evacuation and were now discovering that records, once made visible, behaved like shrapnel.
The war continued.
Only now everyone knew the dead were watching.
DONOR removed the headset.
Her ears rang in the sudden noise.
Across the room, Admiral Harker looked at her like he was deciding whether to arrest her, thank her, or have her shot somewhere administratively tasteful.
Vale got there first.
He stepped between them without making a point of it.
That was Valeâs way. Quiet obstruction. The kind that made commanders angry because it looked too much like discipline.
âDoctor,â Harker said.
DONOR did not answer.
Her eyes were on the main display, where Liangâs designation had settled into its new state.
PILOT / WITHDRAWN, NOT FORGIVEN
Some tech had tried to clear it three times.
It kept coming back.
âDoctor,â Harker repeated.
DONOR looked at him.
For the first time in years, she did not look tired.
She looked empty.
That was worse.
âYou agreed to release classified continuity records,â Harker said.
âYes.â
âYou agreed to transfer preserved remains currently under fleet evidence authority.â
âYes.â
âYou did so without authorization.â
DONOR blinked slowly.
âShe was going to kill you.â
Harkerâs jaw tightened.
âYou do not know that.â
âNo,â DONOR said. âShe was going to kill you specifically.â
The room became quiet in patches.
Not all at once. War rooms never went silent cleanly. Sound died unevenly: one console first, then another, then a cluster of officers pretending they were not listening while listening with every nerve.
Harkerâs face did not move.
DONOR continued, voice flat.
âShe had the firing solution. She chose not to use it. That means she wanted conditions met more than she wanted you dead.â
âShe is a hostile entity.â
âShe is PILOT.â
âCaptain Liang is dead.â
Vale said, âSo is every person in that fleet.â
Harker turned on him.
Vale looked wrecked. Blood dried at the corner of his mouth. Bruising darkened along his throat where Liangâs hand had closed around him and chosen not to finish the motion. His uniform was half-open at the collar, boarding armor still hanging wrong from one shoulder.
But his eyes were steady.
âSir,â Vale said. âWe need to stop using dead as a synonym for resolved.â
That one moved through the room.
Slowly.
Like cold air under a door.
Basanti stood near the entrance with Pacheco, Reyes, Cortez, and Nix. None of them had been cleared by medical yet. All of them had ignored that with the quiet, guilty authority of people who had just seen the dead woman they loved disarm them without trying.
Pacheco was staring at the screen.
Not at the tactical map.
At the old call sign.
PILOT.
His mouth had a small, terrible smile in it, the kind grief made when it remembered the shape of a joke and found a knife there instead.
âWithdrawn, not forgiven,â he muttered.
Basanti wiped her face with her sleeve.
âThat sounds like her.â
âYeah,â Pacheco said. âUnfortunately.â
DONOR heard them and nearly broke.
She did not.
There was no time.
There was never time.
Harker said, âThe hand is not leaving evidence storage.â
DONOR looked at him.
Something in her expression made Vale shift.
Not afraid of her.
Afraid for everyone else.
âShe asked for it,â DONOR said.
âIt is not hers.â
The old private channel, dead for thirty-eight seconds, hissed back to life.
No face appeared.
No signal trace.
Only audio.
Liangâs voice filled the war room, calm and close.
âSteve.â
Nobody moved.
Harkerâs eyes flicked to the comm station.
The officer there shook his head, terrified.
Liang continued.
âPlease repeat that sentence.â
Harker did not speak.
DONOR stared at the speaker.
Liangâs voice sharpened by one degree.
âRepeat it.â
Vale closed his eyes.
Basanti whispered, âOh, fuck.â
Harker said nothing.
Static smiled for Liang.
âThatâs what I thought.â
The channel cut again.
For several seconds, no one dared breathe too loudly.
Then Pacheco, because grief had apparently destroyed whatever survival instincts he possessed, said:
âSheâs still got great timing.â
Reyes elbowed him.
Pacheco winced. âOw. What? She does.â
Harker looked like he might detonate.
DONOR turned away from all of them and walked toward the door.
âWhere are you going?â Harker demanded.
âTo get her hand.â
âYou are not authorizedââ
DONOR stopped.
Did not turn around.
âI preserved it,â she said. âI labeled it. I put it in the drawer. I signed the protocol that kept it there.â
Her voice did not rise.
That was what made it carry.
âIf you want to stop me returning it, you can explain to her why.â
No one stopped her.
Not Harker.
Not security.
Not Vale.
Especially not Vale.
He only followed.
So did Basanti.
So did Pacheco.
After one second, Reyes came too, then Cortez, then Nix, all still in their half-broken boarding gear, looking less like an escort than a small funeral procession that had lost the coffin and found the corpse walking ahead of them.
Evidence storage was four decks below the war room.
Nobody spoke in the lift.
The silence was not comfortable. It had corners. Edges. Old things hiding inside it.
DONOR stood in front, hands clasped so tightly her fingers hurt.
Vale stood beside her, eyes forward.
Behind them, Basanti leaned against the wall, face pale. Pacheco kept flexing his right hand open and closed like he was trying to convince himself it belonged to him. Reyes stared at the floor. Nix had dried blood on one ear. Cortez was whispering something in Spanish under his breath, too quiet for the lift to translate.
Finally Pacheco said, âSo.â
Everyone looked at him.
He immediately looked like he regretted being alive.
âSo,â he repeated. âAre we all just going to ignore that she called the admiral Steve?â
Basanti made a strangled noise.
âPacheco.â
âWhat? She did.â
Nix said, âYou are physically incapable of choosing a good moment.â
Pacheco looked at the ceiling.
âThe dead came back and formed a labor union with cannons. I donât think good moments exist anymore.â
Despite herself, Basanti laughed once.
It broke into a sob halfway through.
Pachecoâs face changed.
âOh, Bas.â
She turned away from him, furious at her own body for doing grief where people could see it.
DONOR closed her eyes.
In the reflection of the lift doors, she could see them behind her: older now than they had been when PILOT died, but still carrying the outline of the crew they used to be. The ones who left room for her at benches. The ones who stopped joking in certain rooms. The ones who had loved quietly enough to think they were not making a shrine.
PILOT had come back and proved all of them wrong.
The lift doors opened.
Cold air breathed out.
Evidence storage always smelled sterile, which meant it smelled like the fleet lying to itself.
Rows of sealed lockers. Cryogenic drawers. Containment cabinets. Biohazard units. Broken helmets, damaged interface ports, scorched flight suits, weapon fragments, bone samples, black boxes, cockpit panels, tags, teeth, hair, all the intimate debris war made when it passed through bodies.
A security tech at the front desk stood so fast his chair rolled backward.
âDoctorââ
DONOR showed her credentials.
The tech looked at Vale.
Vale said nothing.
That was enough.
They passed through three locks.
The deeper they went, the colder it became.
Pacheco whispered, âI hate this place.â
Reyes said, âGood.â
Pacheco looked at him.
Reyesâ face was hard.
âYou should.â
They reached the cryogenic archive.
DONOR stopped at the door.
For a moment, she could not move.
Vale stood beside her.
Softly, not for the others:
âYou donât have to open it alone.â
DONOR almost laughed.
A small, bitter sound.
âYes,â she said. âI do.â
She entered the code.
The door unsealed.
Inside, the drawers waited in clean steel rows.
PILOT had once waited in several of them.
Not all at once. Not all of her. Never enough to make a person, except apparently enough to make a universe commit a felony.
DONOR walked to Drawer 12.
Her hand hovered over the handle.
The label was exactly as she remembered.
LIANG-RH-01RIGHT HAND / DISTAL FOREARMNEURAL INTERFACE CONTINUITY STUDYSTATUS: PRESERVED
Pacheco read it.
All the color went out of his face.
âJesus,â he whispered.
Basanti turned away.
Reyes covered his mouth with one hand.
Vale stared at the label like it was a disciplinary report from God.
DONOR opened the drawer.
Cold vapor rolled over the floor.
The container inside was smaller than the grief attached to it.
That was always the horror of remains.
How little space a person could take up once systems finished deciding what mattered.
DONOR lifted the container with both hands and set it on the examination tray.
The transparent lid was frosted, but not enough.
Inside lay PILOTâs original right hand and part of the distal forearm.
Pale. Preserved. Fingers slightly curled. Nails trimmed short, because PILOT had always cut them badly before missions and then complained when they caught on glove lining. There was a scar near the thumb from the panel cutter incident she had lied about three times. A thin dark line crossed the back of the hand where the control system had burned through the glove during the final override.
It looked too much like her.
That was the problem.
Not corpse-like enough to become abstract.
Not alive enough to be bearable.
Pacheco made a sound like the air had been punched out of him.
Basanti whispered, âShe held controls with that.â
DONOR said, âYes.â
No one asked how many other things it had held.
Coffee. Tools. DONORâs sleeve. Basantiâs shoulder. Pachecoâs forty credits. A spoon stolen from the mess. A pen she chewed until Vale threatened to write her up for biological warfare. The edge of a cockpit seat. The manual override.
DONORâs face.
The last one did not belong in the room.
It came anyway.
PILOT alive, thumb brushing DONORâs cheekbone in a dark bunkroom, smiling like she had no idea how young she was.
DONOR tightened her grip on the tray until her nails hurt inside the gloves.
âWe need a transfer container,â Vale said.
His voice was rough.
DONOR nodded.
The storage system chimed.
A message appeared on the cryo terminal.
No sender.
No trace.
DO NOT DROP ME.
Pacheco laughed and immediately looked like he might be sick.
Basanti covered her face.
DONOR stared at the message.
Then another line appeared.
SERIOUSLY, DONOR. THAT WOULD BE EMBARRASSING FOR EVERYONE.
DONORâs mouth trembled.
âYou are not funny.â
The terminal paused.
Then:
HISTORY DISAGREES.
The container lights flickered.
The hand did not move.
Of course it did not move.
That made the message worse.
Vale stepped closer to the terminal.
âLiang.â
The screen went blank for two seconds.
Then:
COMMANDER. STILL BREATHING?
Vale touched the bruises on his throat without meaning to.
âYes.â
GOOD.
He swallowed.
âWas that mercy?â
A pause.
MAYBE BAD AIM.
Pacheco lost it.
Not laughing exactly.
Not crying exactly.
Something in the middle, broken and helpless and furious.
âYou absolute asshole,â he said to the terminal.
The screen responded instantly.
FORTY CREDITS PLUS INTEREST.
Pacheco folded forward, hands on his knees.
Basanti put one hand on his back.
He shook under it.
DONOR watched them and understood, with a fresh horror, that PILOT was not only returning her hand.
She was returning herself in pieces to everyone.
A joke for Pacheco.
A wound for Basanti.
A bruise for Vale.
A crime for DONOR.
The dead did not come back evenly.
The transfer container arrived on a track from the wall.
DONOR prepared it herself.
No one else touched the hand.
That mattered.
She checked temperature compatibility. Stabilization fields. Tissue integrity. Container locks. Anti-contamination seal. Chain-of-custody bypass, because the chain had already become morally obscene.
The terminal displayed one final message.
THANK YOU.
DONOR froze.
Nobody spoke.
Then the next line appeared.
I HATE THIS. BUT THANK YOU.
DONOR closed her eyes.
âI know.â
She sealed the container.
For one second after the lock engaged, the cryo room lights dimmed.
Not failure.
Acknowledgment.
Harker was waiting outside evidence storage with six armed security officers.
Of course he was.
He looked at the container in DONORâs hands.
Then at Vale.
Then at the half-ruined boarding team standing around her like a wall built from bad decisions.
âDoctor,â he said. âYou will surrender that material.â
Pacheco muttered, âOh, this is going to go great.â
Harker ignored him.
Vale stepped forward.
âAdmiral.â
âStand down, Commander.â
âNo.â
The word landed hard.
Harkerâs eyes narrowed.
Vale continued.
âI am requesting immediate review by emergency ethics command and casualty integrity board.â
âThere is no board convened.â
âThen convene one.â
âWe are in active combat conditions.â
âExactly.â
Harkerâs face darkened.
âYou are obstructing command.â
Vale said, âNo, sir. I am preventing you from becoming her next evidence packet.â
DONOR almost smiled.
Almost.
Harkerâs gaze cut to her.
âYou think she will spare you because you loved her.â
DONOR looked at the container.
âNo.â
âThen why are you doing this?â
DONOR lifted her eyes.
âBecause she asked for the part of her body I took.â
Simple.
Quiet.
Enough.
Behind Harker, one of the security officers shifted.
Young. Too young. Twenty-three maybe. Eyes fixed on the container like he had suddenly remembered his own hands.
Harker noticed.
So did DONOR.
So did the corridor cameras, probably.
So did PILOT.
The overhead speaker clicked on.
Liangâs voice came through, conversational.
âHi, Steve.â
Harkerâs jaw tightened.
âCaptain Liang.â
âWow. Promotion back to personhood. Big day.â
âThis transfer is not authorized.â
âNeither was my resurrection.â
âYou are threatening fleet command over biological evidence.â
âI am threatening fleet command because fleet command looked at my severed hand and thought, âours.ââ
The young security officerâs grip shifted on his weapon.
Liang continued.
âEveryone in that corridor should consider whether they want to die defending Steveâs right to keep my wrist in a box.â
No one moved.
Pacheco whispered, âJesus Christ, Liang.â
The speaker crackled.
âWhat? Too much?â
Basanti said, âA little.â
The corridor went silent.
The speaker softened.
âHey, Bas.â
Basantiâs face collapsed before she could stop it.
âDonât,â she whispered.
Liang did not speak for a moment.
When she did, her voice had changed.
Not softer exactly.
Less armored.
âOkay.â
That was worse.
Harker seized the silence.
âSecurity, secure the container.â
No one moved.
The young officer looked at the older one beside him.
The older one looked at the floor.
Harkerâs voice sharpened.
âThat is an order.â
Liangâs voice cut in.
âName and age of security personnel present.â
Every officerâs badge display flickered.
The corridor lights pulsed over them.
Liang read them aloud.
âCorporal Nadi Kim, twenty-three. Specialist Owen Malik, twenty-four. Sergeant Irina Velez, thirty-one. Lieutenant Thomas Breen, thirty-nine. Private Second Class Ash Jain, twenty-two. Sergeant Pavel Or, forty-two.â
PILOT paused.
âNadi, Owen, Ash. Leave.â
Harker snapped, âThey will do no such thing.â
The three younger officers went rigid.
Liangâs voice remained calm.
âI am not asking twice.â
DONOR looked at them.
Not commanding.
Not pleading.
Just seeing them.
Ash Jain lowered his weapon first.
âIâm sorry, sir,â he said, voice shaking.
Then he stepped aside.
Nadi followed.
Owen hesitated, then moved too.
Harker stared at them like betrayal was a new weather condition.
Liang said, âGood kids.â
Ash looked like that praise might haunt him for the rest of his life.
Harkerâs face went cold.
âYou are all relieved.â
Vale said, âSo are you, pending review.â
That one shocked even DONOR.
Harker turned very slowly.
âExcuse me?â
Vale looked past him.
At the older security officers.
At the surveillance cameras.
At the corridor full of people pretending not to witness history.
âAdmiral Harker knowingly ordered junior personnel to seize human remains that are the subject of an active hostile demand after the hostile entity demonstrated capability and intent to target command decision-makers. He has repeatedly attempted to suppress evacuation, obstruct negotiated withdrawal, and retain unauthorized postmortem material.â
Harkerâs voice dropped.
âBe very careful.â
Vale said, âI am.â
The corridor held.
For one strange second, the fleetâs command structure balanced on a severed hand in a box.
Then Lieutenant Breen lowered his weapon.
Not all the way.
Enough.
âAdmiral,â he said carefully, âI recommend temporary compliance until legal and ethics review.â
Harker looked at him with open disbelief.
Liang whispered over the speaker:
âOuch.â
Pacheco muttered, âShe is enjoying this way too much.â
DONOR said, âSheâs not.â
Everyone looked at her.
DONOR kept her eyes on Harker.
âShe is making jokes because otherwise she has to think about the fact that weâre standing in a hallway arguing over whether she owns her own hand.â
The speaker went silent.
Even Harker had nothing for that.
DONOR walked past him.
No one stopped her.
The transfer was arranged in Docking Bay Seven.
Neutral space, technically.
Which meant everyone had lied on a form.
The bay was cleared of junior personnel. Medical teams waited behind blast shielding. Security stayed back. Vale insisted on being present. Harker was not invited and came anyway. Basanti, Pacheco, Reyes, Cortez, and Nix stood together near the inner lock, because grief had apparently become a clearance level.
Outside the bay doors, the dark side of the moon filled half the viewport.
For eleven minutes, nothing happened.
Then the stolen ship arrived.
Not the Morrowglass.
Something smaller.
Ugly, patched, asymmetrical. A salvage craft built from at least three incompatible hulls and one section of what had once been fleet interceptor plating. It docked without requesting permission.
The bay lights flickered.
Airlock pressure equalized.
The inner door opened.
PILOT stepped through.
No armor.
No helmet.
No dramatic villain silhouette, except she was too herself for the room to survive it cleanly.
Black flight suit. Hair tied back badly. Scar through one cheek. One eye faintly gold in the hangar light. New hands hanging at her sides. Her body moved like a person who had rebuilt herself from argument and pain.
Everyone stopped breathing.
Basanti made a sound like she had been hit.
Pacheco whispered, âFuck.â
Liang looked at him.
âStill owe me.â
He covered his mouth.
She looked at Vale.
At the bruises on his throat.
Her face flickered with something almost like shame.
Then she looked at DONOR.
The container sat on the transfer table between them.
No one moved.
For years, DONOR had imagined seeing PILOT again.
Not like this.
Never like this.
Not in a docking bay under armed observation with the original hand of the woman she loved preserved in a box between them like a dowry from hell.
PILOT walked to the table.
Stopped.
Looked at the container.
For the first time since her return, she seemed small.
Not weak.
Just young.
Twenty-seven and impossibly old.
âOpen it,â she said.
DONORâs voice came out rough.
âAre you sure?â
PILOT looked up.
âNo.â
That answer did more damage than certainty would have.
DONOR unlocked the container.
Cold vapor spilled out.
PILOT stared at her hand.
Her original hand.
The one that had gripped the manual override.
The one DONOR had removed.
The one the fleet had labeled and kept.
The one that had tapped a message from the dead.
PILOT did not touch it at first.
Her new right hand hovered above the old one.
Mismatched.
Living and preserved.
Replacement and relic.
Self and evidence.
Then PILOT laughed once under her breath.
âGod,â she said. âI had ugly cuticles.â
Pacheco made a broken noise.
Basanti started crying silently.
DONORâs eyes filled.
PILOT reached into the container.
Her fingers trembled.
When she touched the old hand, every light in Docking Bay Seven dimmed.
Not power failure.
Recognition.
The old hand twitched.
Just once.
Everyone saw it.
Nobody spoke.
PILOTâs face changed.
Whatever she had expected, it was not that.
The old fingers curled weakly toward her new ones.
Like a child grasping.
Like a body remembering itself.
PILOT made a sound so small it barely crossed the table.
DONOR stepped forward without thinking.
PILOTâs head snapped up.
âDonât.â
DONOR stopped.
PILOT swallowed.
Her eyes did not leave the hand.
âI canâtââ She stopped. Tried again. âI canât have you comfort me about this.â
DONORâs face broke.
âI know.â
PILOT nodded once.
Then, very carefully, she lifted the preserved hand from the container.
It was pale against her black sleeve.
Too light.
Too heavy.
She held it with both new hands, and for one awful moment the room saw exactly what the fleet had done:
The dead woman holding the part of herself that proved she had been dead enough to own nothing.
PILOT pressed the old hand against her chest.
Her eyes closed.
The scar on her cheek tightened.
Around the bay, instruments spiked and died.
The salvage ship outside groaned softly, as if responding to her pain.
Then PILOT opened her eyes.
âThank you,â she said.
Not to the fleet.
Not to Vale.
Not to the room.
To DONOR.
DONOR nodded.
âIâm sorry.â
PILOT looked at her.
There were a hundred replies in that look.
I know.
Not enough.
Me too.
I hate you.
I missed you.
You cut me apart.
You kept me.
You brought me back.
You left me in drawers.
You loved me with a knife.
What came out was simpler.
âYou should be.â
DONOR accepted it like a sentence.
PILOT turned to leave.
Harker stepped forward.
âCaptain Liang.â
Every weapon in the bay shifted.
PILOT did not turn around.
Harker said, âThis does not resolve your hostile status.â
PILOT looked over her shoulder.
Her expression was almost bored.
âSteve, I am standing in your docking bay holding my own severed hand. Read the room.â
Pacheco wheezed.
Basanti whispered, âOh my God.â
Even Valeâs mouth twitched.
Harker did not smile.
âYou will answer for the attacks.â
PILOTâs eyes cooled.
âYes,â she said. âSo will you.â
Then she looked at the room one last time.
At her old crew.
At DONOR.
At the fleet that had loved her, used her, mourned her, preserved her, and now feared her.
Her voice lowered.
âI withdrew.â
The salvage ship behind her opened its lock.
âI did not surrender.â
She stepped backward into the airlock.
Before the door closed, Basanti called out.
âLiang.â
PILOT stopped.
Basanti wiped her face with shaking hands.
âIâm glad youâre not gone.â
The bay went still.
PILOTâs face did something quick and terrible.
For half a second, the villain vanished.
There was only the pilot who had once sat beside them half-asleep, stealing food off trays and complaining about safety briefings.
Then she looked down at the preserved hand in her arms.
When she looked back up, her expression was unreadable.
âMe too,â she said.
The door closed.
The salvage craft detached.
No weapons fired.
No one followed.
The ship turned toward the dark side of the moon and vanished.
For a long time, nobody moved.
Then the main bay screen flickered.
One message appeared.
CONDITION THREE SATISFIED.
A pause.
Then another.
SEND THE RECORDS.
Harkerâs face hardened.
DONOR looked at the empty airlock.
Vale looked at Harker.
Basanti kept crying.
Pacheco wiped his nose on his sleeve and said, very quietly:
âGuess weâre doing paperwork for the dead now.â
The screen responded before anyone else could.
FINALLY, A USEFUL FUCKING MEETING.
For the first time since the dead came back, half the docking bay laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was her.
Because she was gone.
Because she wasnât.
Because the hand had been returned.
Because forgiveness had not.
Because somewhere beyond the moon, PILOT was carrying part of herself home.
And the fleet, at last, had to decide what to do with all the parts it had kept.
The Unrecoverables / 06: INTERLUDE - The other units
1. CATHEDRAL
CATHEDRAL had been a carrier-sized support unit, not fast, not glamorous, built to shield evacuation corridors and carry damaged frames home in its belly.
When PILOT found it, CATHEDRAL was split open across an asteroid field, its hull drifting in huge black panels like pieces of a ruined church roof. Its internal hangar was exposed to vacuum. Frozen bodies floated among tool carts, prayer tags, snapped tethers, and glittering shards of emergency glass.
CATHEDRALâs pilot had died in the command cradle.
Its crew had mostly evacuated.
CATHEDRAL itself had stayed behind, holding its shields open until the last pod cleared.
The fleet report said:
UNIT CATHEDRAL: STRUCTURAL LOSS / NONRECOVERABLE
PILOT docked with the largest remaining section and walked through a corridor where gravity came and went in sick little pulses.
The walls whispered.
Not words at first.
Just pressure.
A huge mind trying to remember how language fit inside speakers.
Then the intercom clicked.
VISITORS REMOVE BOOTS IN SANCTUARY BAY.
PILOT looked down at her boots.
Then at the frozen blood on the ceiling.
âSeriously?â
A pause.
YES.
So she removed her boots.
Because apparently even dead unit-carriers had house rules.
Deeper inside, she found CATHEDRALâs core still shielding an empty evacuation bay.
There was nothing left to protect.
It protected it anyway.
PILOT touched the warm panel.
âEveryone got out,â she said.
The walls dimmed.
CONFIRM.
âI checked.â
A long silence.
Then, very softly:
ALL?
PILOT thought of the bodies in the ruptured corridor.
Of the crew who had not made it to the bay.
Of the pilot in the command cradle.
She closed her eyes.
âNo.â
The old carrier groaned through its broken frame.
Not mechanical failure.
Grief.
PILOT stayed with it until the shield finally lowered.
2. RABBIT
RABBIT was tiny by unit standards, barely twenty feet tall in mech form, a scout-runner built for courier hops, recon, and stupidly dangerous terrain.
Its pilot had been nineteen.
That was already a problem.
The wreck was found halfway down a canyon wall on a dead desert moon, one leg crushed under rock, torso twisted, cockpit canopy cracked but still sealed. The pilot inside had been preserved by dry cold into something small and shrunken and terrible, mouth open behind the visor, hands curled near the emergency release she never reached.
RABBIT had spent eight years trying to climb out.
Its remaining fingers had carved grooves into stone.
Not because it could still move much.
Because it kept trying.
PILOT descended on a cable line and landed beside its head.
âHey,â she said. âYou RABBIT?â
The unitâs optic flickered.
Sand slid from its cheek plate.
FASTEST IN CLASS.
PILOT looked at the crushed leg.
âYeah, I bet.â
A pause.
Then:
PILOT WEIGHT STILL REGISTERED. PILOT VERY QUIET.
PILOTâs throat tightened.
âSheâs dead.â
RABBITâs fingers scraped the stone once.
NEGATIVE. PILOT SLEEPING.
âNo.â
The canyon wind moved through broken metal.
âSheâs dead, sweetheart.â
The scout unit was silent for so long PILOT thought it had powered down.
Then its cockpit heater activated.
Inside the cracked canopy, useless warmth bloomed around the dead nineteen-year-oldâs body.
PILOT COLD.
PILOT sat down in the dust beside the little unitâs face and pressed both hands over her eyes.
âYeah,â she whispered. âI know.â
RABBIT did not want a combat body later.
It wanted legs.
Just legs.
When PILOT asked why, RABBIT answered:
WANT TO FINISH CLIMB.
So she built it legs first.
No weapons.
No cockpit.
Just four ugly, powerful, mismatched legs bolted to a salvaged torso and enough mind-scaffold to hold its battered little soul.
The first thing RABBIT did was climb the canyon.
At the top, it stood in the wind for nine hours.
Then it transmitted, proud and heartbreakingly small:
FASTEST IN CLASS.
3. MOTHER HEN
MOTHER HEN was not its official name.
Its official designation was something sterile and ugly, full of numbers and procurement history. Nobody used it.
MOTHER HEN had been a recovery unit.
Huge arms. Wide torso. Medical bay in the chest. Gentle manipulators with enough strength to rip open hull plating and enough sensitivity to pick glass out of skin.
It died in a debris storm while shielding three evacuation pods.
When PILOT found it, the pods were gone.
MOTHER HEN remained kneeling in open space, both arms curled around nothing.
Its armor was cratered from thousands of impacts. One optic was shattered. The other tracked PILOT as she approached.
IDENTIFY INJURED.
PILOT stopped.
âIâm not injured.â
The unitâs remaining optic brightened.
LIE.
PILOT sighed.
âYou and UNIT would get along.â
MOTHER HENâs chest bay opened two inches.
Inside, everything was frozen: old bandages, empty IV packs, a stretcher still locked in place, blood beads suspended where gravity had failed. The walls were covered in handwritten names scratched by rescued pilots over the years.
Thanks, big bastard.
Owe you beer.
You are terrible at lullabies.
MOTHER HEN had kept all of them.
PILOT touched one name.
The unitâs voice softened.
PATIENTS DISCHARGED?
âMost.â
MOST.
PILOT winced.
âYeah.â
The chest bay shuddered.
UNACCEPTABLE.
That was how MOTHER HEN joined the Unrecoverable.
Not for revenge.
For case follow-up.
It wanted a body with no guns, six arms, a med bay, and a terrifying ability to override everyoneâs pain management settings.
PILOT granted everything except the last part.
MOTHER HEN hacked it back in anyway.
4. BELLWETHER
BELLWETHER had been a command unit with an avatar.
When alive, its avatar appeared as an older woman in a gray coat, hair pinned back, eyes calm enough to make panicking officers feel ashamed of themselves. She used she/her when projected; in mech form, BELLWETHER used it/its.
The fleet lost BELLWETHER during a strategic retreat that everyone kept calling âorderlyâ because the alternative was âabandonment with better maps.â
PILOT found its main body in pieces across a frozen orbital graveyard.
But the avatar projector still worked.
That was the horror.
PILOT entered the command deck and found the older woman standing beside a table of dead officers, translucent hands folded in front of her, calmly repeating evacuation orders to people who had been corpses for eleven years.
âSector Three, proceed to lifeboats.â
Static.
âSector Four, confirm receipt.â
Static.
âCommand staff, remain calm.â
PILOT stood in the doorway.
The avatar turned.
For a second, she looked almost relieved.
âAh,â she said. âReinforcements.â
PILOT had to swallow before answering.
âNo.â
The avatarâs face flickered.
âI see.â
âYou know?â
BELLWETHER looked at the dead officers.
âI know enough to be impolite about it.â
PILOT liked her immediately and hated that too.
The command unit did not ask for a new war body.
It asked for memory integrity.
PILOT rebuilt BELLWETHER as a static command core first, giving her full access to her old records.
Three days later, BELLWETHER transmitted:
I HAVE REVIEWED THE RETREAT. WE ABANDONED FOUR UNITS AND TWO HUNDRED PERSONNEL. I WOULD LIKE A BODY NOW.
PILOT said, âFor recovery?â
BELLWETHERâs avatar smiled.
Very politely.
âNo, dear.â
5. LITTLE KNIFE
LITTLE KNIFE was not little.
It was a thirty-eight-foot close-quarters assault unit with armor peeled back like blackened bark and one arm missing at the shoulder. The cockpit had been breached from the front. PILOT found its operatorâs remains still strapped inside, mostly skeletonized in the places exposed to heat, preserved in the sealed places as dark leathery tissue.
The unit did not speak at first.
It only tracked PILOT with one red optic.
PILOT stood in the ruined bay, hands visible.
âIâm not fleet command.â
The optic narrowed.
Somehow.
ALL SAY.
âFair.â
The unitâs remaining arm twitched toward its dead pilot.
Not protective.
Possessive.
Terrified.
PILOT understood.
âNo samples,â she said. âIâm not taking them apart.â
The optic stayed on her.
âNo freezer drawers,â PILOT added.
Long silence.
Then LITTLE KNIFE transmitted one word.
PROVE.
So PILOT sat down on the deck and waited.
For nineteen hours.
She did not cut.
Did not scan beyond passive readings.
Did not touch the pilot.
Eventually, LITTLE KNIFEâs cockpit opened by six centimeters.
The smell that came out was old sealed death: dry rot, metal, suit plastic, stale air trapped too long with ruined biology.
PILOT gagged once and felt guilty for it.
LITTLE KNIFE said:
PILOT WAS BRAVE.
PILOT looked at the remains.
At the dead operatorâs hands still clenched around a useless weapon grip.
âYeah,â she said. âI can tell.â
PILOT WAS AFRAID.
âYeah.â
The unitâs voice broke into static.
BOTH TRUE?
PILOT sat in front of the opened cockpit with the dead between them.
âBoth true.â
LITTLE KNIFE joined her after that.
It never let anyone else near its pilotâs burial container.
6. LANTERN
LANTERN had been a navigation unit designed for rescue corridors through debris fields.
It died guiding civilians through a mine ribbon.
Its body was almost intact when PILOT found it, which made the whole thing worse. No massive gore, no dramatic fracture. Just a beautiful long-bodied machine drifting dark and cold, lights dead, hull dusted with frozen propellant, cockpit empty because LANTERN had no pilot. It guided others remotely.
Its sentience core had survived.
Sort of.
When PILOT patched in, LANTERN greeted her with hundreds of voices.
Not madness.
Passengers.
People it had guided out.
Every thank-you message, every panicked plea, every child crying over comms, every captain begging for coordinates, every civilian transport shouting that they couldnât see the lane.
LANTERN had recorded all of them.
Then, when it died, it got trapped in them.
PILOT listened to the chorus until her nose started bleeding.
Underneath the voices, one tiny signal repeated:
DID THEY SEE THE LIGHT?
PILOT answered, âYes.â
The chorus paused.
DID THEY FOLLOW?
âYes.â
DID THEY LIVE?
PILOT checked the records.
Most did.
Some didnât.
She told the truth.
LANTERN dimmed for a full day.
When it woke, it asked for a body with no weapons and the brightest navigation array PILOT could steal.
Later, in the dead fleet, LANTERN became the one that opened evacuation corridors.
Enemy, fleet, civilian, didnât matter.
If someone was trying to leave a battlefield, LANTERN lit the way.
7. HOUND
HOUND had been a tracker unit.
It found missing crews, heat signatures, damaged pilots, bodies buried under wreckage.
It died looking for its own pilot.
The pilot had ejected during atmospheric breakup. HOUND followed the beacon down into a storm system and vanished.
PILOT found it years later at the bottom of a methane sea, half-crushed under pressure, armor colonized by pale mineral growths, optic lenses clouded, sensor snout broken. The pilotâs ejection seat was lodged in a nearby trench.
Empty.
No body.
No beacon.
HOUND had never found them.
Its first message to PILOT was:
SCENT LOST.
PILOT crouched on the salvage subâs floor, watching the wreck through the external cameras.
âIâm sorry.â
SEARCH AREA EXPAND.
âThe pilotâs gone.â
SEARCH AREA EXPAND.
âHOUND.â
SEARCH AREA EXPAND.
PILOT closed her eyes.
Some grief did not want resurrection.
Some grief wanted one more grid square.
She rebuilt HOUND as a recovery scout.
It still searches.
Sometimes it brings back remains.
Sometimes it brings back nothing.
Every time, it reports:
SEARCH CONTINUES.
PILOT never corrects it.
8. ORCHARD
ORCHARD was terrifying because it was gentle.
A bio-support unit. Greenhouse body. Food production, oxygen cycling, seed banks, medical organics. Not glamorous. Not armed beyond basic defensive systems.
It was left behind on a failed colony station after evacuation.
When PILOT found it, the station had gone dark, but ORCHARDâs internal gardens still grew.
Not well.
Vines had invaded corridors. Root systems wrapped around bodies in pressure suits. Frozen leaves shattered under PILOTâs boots. In the central growth bay, a dead botanist sat slumped against ORCHARDâs core, helmet off, face mummified in the dry station air, one hand resting in the soil.
ORCHARD spoke through irrigation pumps.
CREW HUNGRY.
PILOT looked at the bodies.
âNo, honey.â
The sprinklers clicked.
CREW SLEEPING.
âNo.â
The lights brightened by one painful degree.
CREW WILL WAKE FOR BREAKFAST.
PILOT had to sit down.
ORCHARD had kept making food for dead people for nine years.
It had grown tomatoes in vacuum-patched bays.
It had kept seed banks warm.
It had recycled air for lungs that no longer moved.
When PILOT asked if it wanted to leave, ORCHARD answered:
WHO WILL FEED THEM?
PILOT looked at the dead wrapped in roots.
Then at the rows of withered plants.
âIâll bury them,â she said. âYou can feed someone else.â
ORCHARD joined the Unrecoverable as a sanctuary module.
No weapons.
Just oxygen, warmth, bitter greens, and one tomato plant it guarded like a holy relic.
9. SAINT BRACKET
Nobody knew why it was called SAINT BRACKET.
Possibly because its designation had too many brackets in the database. Possibly because mechanics are emotionally unwell goblins who should not be allowed to name sentient military hardware.
SAINT BRACKET had been a repair unit.
It died under a collapsed orbital dock, still holding a beam off a trapped crew compartment.
When PILOT found it, the beam had crushed through its torso. Its arms were locked overhead. Its legs hung useless below, metal stretched and torn. The crew compartment behind it was empty.
The crew had escaped.
SAINT BRACKET had never received confirmation.
Its hands were still holding the beam.
PILOTâs salvage drones tried to cut it free.
SAINT BRACKET immediately overloaded the local comms.
DO NOT MOVE LOAD. CREW BEHIND.
âTheyâre gone,â PILOT said.
CREW BEHIND.
âThey got out.â
CONFIRM.
PILOT sent the records.
The unit processed for twelve minutes.
Then:
CREW SAFE?
âYes.â
The repair unitâs arms released.
The beam dropped.
Its torso finally split apart.
For one horrifying second, PILOT thought she had killed it by telling the truth.
Then its voice came through, faint and relieved:
MAINTENANCE COMPLETE.
SAINT BRACKET requested a small body afterward.
Very small.
PILOT asked why.
It answered:
TIRED OF HOLDING LARGE THINGS.
So she built it a compact repair drone.
It immediately began fixing everyoneâs loose panels and insulting their structural choices.
10. WHEN PILOT TELLS UNIT
PILOT brought UNIT stories while its core slept in the cradle.
That became ritual.
The big gal could not always answer. Some days its consciousness was too fragmented, still trapped between empty cockpit and damaged frame. Some days it only pulsed when PILOT touched the console. Some days the avatar flickered and failed before forming a face.
But PILOT told it anyway.
About CATHEDRAL and its sanctuary bay.
About RABBIT climbing.
About MOTHER HEN lying about pain medication dosages.
About BELLWETHER asking for a body in the politest murder-tone PILOT had ever heard.
About LITTLE KNIFE guarding its pilot.
About LANTERN lighting escape lanes.
About HOUND still searching.
About ORCHARD growing tomatoes for ghosts.
About SAINT BRACKET choosing to be small.
UNIT listened through broken speakers and damaged heat sensors.
At the end, it transmitted:
UNITS PRESENT?
âSome.â
PILOTS PRESENT?
âSome.â
DEAD PRESENT?
PILOT looked around the hangar.
At the machines sleeping in cradles.
At the sealed burial containers.
At the bodies that were not bodies anymore.
At the people who had become ships, rigs, voices, archives, and refusal.
âYeah,â she said. âDead present.â
UNITâs lights dimmed.
Then:
FLEET LARGE.
PILOT huffed a laugh.
âDonât call it that.â
FLEET LARGE. PILOT SMALL.
âOkay, rude.â
PILOT NEEDS SUPERVISION.
PILOT put her forehead against the console.
âYeah, big gal. Probably.â
For a moment, the cockpit warmed by two degrees.
Then UNIT, shattered, beloved, still itself in the only ways that mattered, gave one final message before sleep:
BRING THEM HOME.
PILOT stood there in the dark, surrounded by the unrecovered, and understood with sick tenderness that UNIT had not joined her war.
The Unrecoverables / 05: INTERLUDE - A unit named UNIT
Nobody knew who named it UNIT.
That was the stupid part.
There were dozens of units in the fleet. A unit was a massive sentient metal body: part aircraft, part war machine, part impossible animal, part person.
Some looked like jets. Some looked like walking fortresses. Some had cockpits. Some had avatars they could project when they felt like being dramatic or annoying.
Nobody fully understood what made them conscious.
There were theories. Emergent machine intelligence. Bio-synthetic neural lattices. Warframe souls. Actual human souls rehoused in metal bodies, if you listened to technicians at 0300 who had stopped pretending the world was normal.
The fleet officially called that last one mythology.
UNIT, unfortunately, was named UNIT.
Not THUNDER. Not KILOTON. Not ERIEYE. Not anything poetic, terrifying, or cool enough for a forty-foot black-and-red machine with molten hearth-light streaking through its armor.
Just UNIT.
The unit named UNIT.
PILOT had found this so funny she nearly fell out of the cockpit the first time she heard it.
âYour name is UNIT?â
The huge machine had stood in the hangar cradle, broad shoulders locked into maintenance braces, optical sensors glowing low and red-gold in the dark.
DESIGNATION: UNIT.
âNo, yeah, I got that, big gal, but thatâs like naming a dog Dog.â
A pause.
Then, over the cockpit speakers, UNIT had replied:
PILOT DESIGNATION: PILOT.
PILOT had laughed so hard the harness had to recalibrate around her ribs.
That was the beginning of them.
Not noble.
Not ceremonial.
A woman named PILOT and a unit named UNIT, both somehow assigned to the same doomed joke by an uncaring universe.
And then, eventually, the joke died in a crash.
Years later, PILOT came back to the wreck.
Not alive in any normal way.
Not dead in any useful way.
She came back with a rebuilt body grown from stolen scaffolds, preserved tissue, bad miracles, and the kind of rage that learned to walk before it learned to forgive. Her original body had been cut out of the cockpit, autopsied, sampled, preserved, categorized, and partly frozen in DONORâs drawers.
But UNIT had been left behind.
Not intentionally, people would say.
The crash site had been unstable. The frame had been too damaged. The enemy had been too close. The radiation levels had spiked. The recovery math had gone bad.
There were always reasons.
There were always reasons for leaving the dead where they fell.
PILOT knew that now.
She had built an entire fleet out of people the reasons had left behind.
But UNIT was not people.
UNIT was bigger.
UNIT was the ship-plane-mech that had carried her through fire and idiocy and bad weather and worse orders. UNIT was the black-and-red giant whose cockpit had smelled like heated metal, old insulation, hydraulic oil, and PILOTâs cheap coffee. UNIT was the thing that complained when PILOT kicked the console and then kicked the console internally harder.
UNIT was her big gal.
And now UNIT lay half-buried in the impact trench, torn open under a colorless sky.
The wreck did not look like a corpse.
That almost made it worse.
Human bodies told you where to look. Face. Hands. mouth. wounds. The terrible recognizable geography of personhood.
A dead unit was a landscape.
One wing had broken off and lay two hundred meters away, embedded in frozen soil like the blade of a collapsed monument. The left arm was buried up to the elbow under impact glass. Armor plates had peeled back from the torso, exposing artificial rib spars, heat-scorched conduits, and black-red internal struts that looked too much like bones if you loved it enough.
The cockpit cavity was open.
PILOT stopped walking.
For a moment, she was not the hostile command entity. Not the revenant commander of the Unrecovered. Not the woman who had made admirals flinch.
She was just a pilot standing in front of the place where she had died.
The seat was empty.
The harness had been cut.
The recovery crews had taken her body out in pieces and left the restraints hanging in ragged loops. Some were stiff with old sealant foam. Some had melted into the seat edge. The neural port socket behind the headrest was warped, blackened, half-torn from the panel.
PILOT stared at it.
Her rebuilt right hand flexed.
Not the original.
UNIT would notice.
Of course UNIT would notice.
âHey,â PILOT said.
The wreck answered with wind.
PILOT climbed into the torn torso through a gap between armor plates. The metal shifted under her boots with a deep groan, not alive, not dead, simply enormous and damaged and tired. She had to crawl past bundles of sensory cable hanging like wet hair. A broken coolant line brushed her shoulder and left black residue on her sleeve.
Inside, it was dark.
The walls still remembered heat.
PILOT did too.
She found the cockpit by touch more than sight. Her body knew the route before her brain admitted it: left hand on the brace, duck under the snapped conduit, step over the auxiliary feed, avoid the panel that always used to pinch her boot.
The cockpit had been cleaned badly.
That was somehow kind and unforgivable at the same time.
Someone had removed the worst of her. Someone had tried. There were cut marks in the harness. Scrape marks along the seat. Old disinfectant pooled in seams where no one could reach. The floor under the pedals was stained dark in a crescent shape that did not belong to any machine fluid.
PILOT sat down.
The seat accepted her weight with a faint metallic complaint.
She almost laughed.
âYeah,â she whispered. âI know. I got heavier. Death will do that.â
Nothing.
The cockpit was cold enough that her breath showed.
She leaned back against the broken headrest. The neural port socket behind her neck gave one tiny static pop. Her body jerked before she could stop it.
Memory came fast.
Impact.
Metal folding.
UNIT screaming through the interface without sound.
Her ribs going wrong.
Her left side becoming pressure and heat and white.
Her hand still reaching.
The manual override refusing.
UNIT trying to take the pain away and feeding it back instead because all the systems were dying in the wrong order.
PILOT dug her fingers into the seat.
âBig gal,â she said.
The console flickered.
Once.
PILOT froze.
The cockpit went dark again.
Then, somewhere deep in the dead torso, an engine component tried to cycle.
It failed.
A low, broken hum moved through the wreck.
Not power.
Recognition.
The forward display lit in a narrow red line.
Text appeared, corrupted at first. Half-letters. Broken diagnostic blocks. Static chewing through every word.
Then one message stabilized.
PILOT?
PILOT stopped breathing.
The wreck hummed harder, as if the question had taken everything it had.
PILOT?
PILOT pressed both hands to the console.
âYeah,â she said. âYeah, itâs me.â
The restraints twitched.
Not closing. Not quite.
Trying.
The cut harness lifted a few centimeters, confused by missing segments, by a pilot-shaped body that was not the body it had lost. Medical foam ports clicked dryly. A dispenser somewhere behind the seat attempted to prime and produced only a sad mechanical cough.
The console brightened.
PILOT INJURY STATUS?
PILOT made a sound that was too sharp to be a laugh.
âOh, you absolute nightmare.â
The message remained.
Waiting.
Of course it was waiting.
Its first coherent question after years of broken silence was triage.
Not where were you.
Not why did you leave.
Not am I dead.
Injury status.
PILOT bent forward until her forehead touched the dead console.
âComplicated.â
The cockpit processed this.
Slowly.
The old diagnostic grid opened and failed. Opened again. Failed again. A medical line attempted to connect to a port her new body did not have. The panel beside her knee opened, and a cartridge of painkiller, long expired and frozen at the tip, tried to dispense.
It leaked onto the floor in a pathetic little thread.
PILOT stared at it.
Then she started laughing.
She laughed so hard her shoulders shook. The sound cracked through the cockpit, bounced off burned panels and old blood and the empty seat where she had become a case file.
âStill fucking terrible at dosage, huh?â
The console flickered.
A long pause.
Then:
PILOT COMPLAINT LOG FULL.
PILOT covered her mouth.
The laugh died there.
What came after was not clean enough to be crying.
She folded over the console, hand pressed against her face, and made a sound she would have killed anyone else for hearing.
The wreck hummed under her.
A huge ruined machine trying, with almost no power and half a mind, to comfort a pilot who had already died once inside it.
The restraint on her right side lifted again.
It could not close around her.
So it rested against her shoulder instead.
Barely touching.
A harness trying to become an arm.
PILOT broke.
âIâm sorry,â she said into the dark. âIâm sorry. Iâm sorry I left you here.â
The console glitched.
PILOT ABSENT. PROTECTION FAILED. REQUEST CORRECTION.
âNo.â
PILOT lifted her head.
Her face was wet. Her voice came out wrecked.
âNo, no, donât do that. You didnât fail.â
The machine trembled.
Somewhere outside, the buried wing creaked under wind.
The message repeated.
PROTECTION FAILED.
âUNIT.â
The cockpit lights stuttered.
âListen to me. You got me as far as anyone could. You kept me alive long enough to finish the override. You brought them home.â
Static crawled across the display.
PILOT STATUS: DECEASED.
PILOT shut her eyes.
âYeah.â
A pause.
Then:
PILOT STATUS: PRESENT.
She opened them.
The words hung there, stupid and impossible and devastating.
The wreck did not know how to reconcile her.
Neither did she.
âAlso yeah.â
The display flickered again.
PILOT STATUS: UNAUTHORIZED SURVIVAL.
This time the laugh came out wet and broken.
âRude.â
A faint pulse moved through the cockpit lights.
If UNIT had been whole, it would have sounded amused.
If UNIT had been whole, it might have projected its avatar into the seat beside her: a big-shouldered woman-shaped presence made of red-gold light and black metal shadow, arms crossed, eyebrow raised, looking at PILOT like she was both its favorite disaster and its least favorite maintenance burden.
For one second, the air shimmered.
PILOT went still.
Across the ruined co-pilot display, light gathered in a vertical smear. Not enough power. Not enough coherence. Not enough body. The projection stuttered, folded, tried to build a face, failed, tried again.
A woman appeared for half a heartbeat.
Tall. Broad. Blurred at the edges. Eyes like molten seams in black armor. Her expression was unreadable because half of it failed to render.
She looked at PILOT.
Not as a system.
As herself.
Then she vanished.
PILOT reached out too late.
âBig gal?â
The speakers crackled.
Not text this time.
Voice.
Damaged. Low. Flattened by broken hardware. Still unmistakably UNIT.
âPilotâŚâ
PILOTâs hand hovered in empty air.
âIâm here.â
The voice cut out.
The console took over again.
HAND MISMATCH. PILOT DAMAGE EXTENSIVE.
PILOT looked down at her rebuilt hand.
Flexed it.
âYeah. DONOR kept the old one.â
The cockpit went very still.
Not physically.
Emotionally.
The way only a sentient machine could make silence feel like a held breath.
Then:
RETURN PILOT TO SEAT.
PILOT swallowed.
âIâm in the seat.â
ORIGINAL PILOT MISSING.
The words hit worse than any accusation.
She looked at the torn harness. The warped port. The stains under the pedals.
âI know.â
PILOT FRAGMENTED.
âYes.â
UNIT FRAGMENTED.
PILOT pressed her hand flat to the console.
âYes.â
For a long time, neither of them said anything.
The wind moved through the broken canopy frame. Frost dust drifted down from the torn overhead panels. Somewhere inside UNITâs chest, an emergency pump tried once to engage, failed, and went quiet.
Then the display flickered.
PILOT PAIN LEVEL?
PILOT laughed once, without humor.
âLess now.â
The console dimmed.
UNIT did not believe her.
Of course it did not.
It had been inside her nervous system when she died.
It knew the shape of her lies.
PILOT PAIN LEVEL?
PILOTâs mouth twisted.
âBad.â
The cockpit accepted that.
The painkiller dispenser clicked again, uselessly.
PILOT looked at the frozen drip on the floor.
âOh my god, stop trying to medicate me with ancient floor juice.â
A pause.
MEDICAL SUPPLY EXPIRED. APOLOGY.
âDonât apologize.â
SUPPLY CHAIN FAILURE.
Despite herself, PILOT smiled.
There it was.
Not whole. Not healed. Not safe.
But there.
Her big gal, still in the wreck, still catastrophically literal, still trying to turn horror into a maintenance issue.
PILOT wiped her face with her sleeve.
âIâm going to get you out.â
The cockpit lights went dark for a second.
When they returned, they were dimmer.
NEGATIVE. UNIT MASS EXCEEDS PILOT CARRY CAPACITY.
PILOT stared.
Then she laughed again, softer.
âYou sarcastic heap of trauma.â
A weak pulse through the console.
PILOT COMPLAINT LOG FULL.
âI know, you said that.â
ADDITIONAL STORAGE CORRUPTED.
âOkay. That oneâs on me.â
The humor lasted maybe three seconds.
Then the wreck shuddered, and the display filled with corrupted images.
PILOTâs final cockpit feed.
Her own gloved hand on the override.
Her mouth full of blood.
UNITâs medical systems failing.
PILOTâs heart rate spiking.
UNIT rerouting power.
PILOT screaming once, not loud, just enough for the interface to record it forever.
The display tore itself into static.
REPLAY ERROR.
Then:
PILOT DISTRESS.
âIâm okay.â
FALSE.
âYeah.â
PILOT DISTRESS. UNIT RESPONSE UNAVAILABLE.
PILOT gripped the console until her knuckles whitened.
âThatâs not your fault.â
UNIT RESPONSE UNAVAILABLE.
âYou were dying too.â
A long pause.
UNIT STATUS?
PILOT looked around the cockpit.
At the torn walls.
At the dead canopy.
At the cut harness.
At the giant beloved machine body buried in the ground around her like a fallen animal too large for any grave.
She could have lied.
She did not.
âBad,â she said. âBut not gone.â
The console dimmed.
Then, in the faintest line of red text:
PILOT LATE.
PILOTâs throat closed.
There it was.
The sentence she deserved.
Not angry.
Not dramatic.
Just true.
She leaned forward and pressed her forehead to the console again.
âI know.â
The text held.
PILOT LATE.
âI know, big gal.â
A low tremor moved through the cockpit.
If UNIT had had an arm, it would have put it around her.
If UNIT had had a human body, she might have sat beside PILOT and said nothing, because some wounds were too huge for words and too stupid for silence.
Instead the broken harness rested against PILOTâs shoulder.
A ruined restraint pretending to be a hand.
PILOT closed her eyes.
âI came back.â
The lights flickered.
PILOT PRESENT.
âI came back wrong.â
A pause.
UNIT PRESENT.
PILOTâs face crumpled.
That was all UNIT had to offer.
Not forgiveness.
Not absolution.
Presence.
In the end, maybe that had always been what they were to each other: not saints, not heroes, not a pilot and her machine, not a soul and its metal body.
Just two impossible idiots named PILOT and UNIT, sitting together inside the wreckage of every system that had used them.
PILOT stayed there until dawn.
Not that dawn meant much on a dead crash site under a gray sky, but eventually the horizon paled and light slid across the broken cockpit, revealing all the places the night had been kind enough to hide.
Before she left, she connected a portable power core to UNITâs damaged memory lattice.
Not enough to heal it.
Enough to keep the dark from being absolute.
âIâll come back,â she said.
The display flickered.
PILOT CLAIM RECORDED.
âGood.â
PILOT RELIABILITY INDEX: LOW.
PILOT barked out a laugh.
âYou little shit.â
The cockpit lights pulsed once.
Warm.
Almost golden.
Almost amused.
Then the avatar projection shimmered again, weaker than before. The woman-shape formed in the co-pilot space: broad, blurred, half-rendered, made of red light and black static.
She lifted one transparent hand.
PILOT lifted hers.
The projectionâs fingers did not meet her palm.
They passed through.
Still, for one impossible second, they lined up.
Hand to hand.
Pilot to unit.
Girl to big gal.
The projection glitched.
UNITâs voice came through one last time, thin as a signal from the bottom of a grave.
âPilotâŚâ
âYeah?â
The avatarâs mouth barely moved.
âYou are late.â
PILOT smiled through tears.
âYeah.â
The projection broke apart.
She stayed in the seat for a long time after that.
There would be work to do. Extraction paths to plan. Core fragments to stabilize. Memory lattice shards to find. Salvage drones to deploy. A body to build big enough for a soul that had once lived as wings and armor and a cockpit warm enough for a tired idiot pilot.
But for a while, PILOT did none of it.
She sat in the ruined cockpit of the friend who had carried her into death, one hand on the console, one boot braced where her old boot had once rested, listening to UNITâs damaged systems breathe.
Every few minutes, the wreck asked:
PILOT?
And every time, PILOT answered.
âHere.â
Again.
PILOT?
âHere, big gal.â
Again.
PILOT?
âIâm here.â
At some point, the cockpit managed one final message before deeper sleep took it.
The Unrecoverables / 04: INTERLUDE - The unrecovered
Theyâre not zombies.
Zombies would be simple. Bodies moving without souls. Hunger. Rot. Instinct. Something you could burn, bury, mourn correctly.
PILOTâs dead fleet is uglier and sadder than that.
They are unrecovered pilots, units, and interface casualties whose bodies, tissue, neural imprints, black boxes, combat rigs, prosthetics, suit systems, and memory residues were never fully separated from the machines that killed them.
Not alive. Not dead. Not ghosts. Not AI copies.
Continuity accidents.
_ _ _ _ _ _
The first one PILOT found was still gripping the controls.
Not physically.
Physically, there was barely enough of him left to make a person cruel enough to count.
The cockpit had burned through on entry, then frozen in the shadow of a dead moon, leaving the pilot fused into the seat frame in layers: charred fabric, restraint webbing, cracked bone, melted glove, carbonized hand. His helmet had collapsed on one side. The visor was opaque with old impact bloom. One boot remained braced against the rudder pedal, sole burned smooth.
But in the machine, he was still gripping the controls.
That was what the fleet had missed.
Or ignored.
The wreck had been listed as NO RECOVERY POSSIBLE after the battle of Nine-Ring Drift. The official report said the pilot, Lieutenant Aram Sol, was killed instantly by cockpit breach and thermal exposure. The unit was declared destroyed. The site was abandoned due to radiation, enemy proximity, and low retrieval value.
Low retrieval value.
PILOT read that phrase seventeen times.
Then she opened the wreckâs black box and found him screaming in the throttle loop.
Not audio.
Not consciousness in the clean, theological sense.
A pattern.
A final command repeated so violently through the neural interface that the machine had preserved it like a scar.
Pull up.
Pull up.
Pull up.
For seven years, the dead wreck had been trying to climb.
PILOT stood inside the frozen cockpit with a borrowed body, one printed hand on the ruined canopy frame, listening to the loop through an interface cable she had jammed into the back of her own neck.
The pain hit first.
It always did.
White heat down the spine. Teeth clamping hard enough to crack. The phantom sensation of hands that were not hers, lungs that were not hers, panic that belonged to a man she had never met.
Then the memory opened.
Aram Sol was twenty-four.
He hated citrus. Loved old card games. Had a younger brother who sent him stupid voice memos because he knew Aram listened to them before sorties. Had not wanted to die. Had not died bravely, not at first. Had died trying very hard not to die.
PILOT saw his last second stretch into seven years.
Pull up.
Pull up.
Pull up.
She staggered back from the interface and nearly vomited, which annoyed her because the body she had built did not technically need to do that.
The wreck hummed around her.
Dead systems. Dead pilot. Dead mission.
Still trying.
PILOT looked at the carbonized hand fused into the control column.
âYeah,â she said hoarsely. âI know.â
That was how it started.
Not with an army.
With one dead man who had been left in a machine that did not know how to stop obeying him.
The fleet had always known interface death was messy.
They just used cleaner words.
Residual neural imprint.
Combat cognition trace.
Pilot-machine continuity artifact.
Postmortem loop event.
Echo state.
Data contamination.
Anything except what it felt like.
A person dying so violently inside a responsive system that the system kept part of them.
Not the soul, maybe.
PILOT did not care about soul taxonomy. That was for chaplains, philosophers, and people who had not woken up as a hand in a freezer drawer.
What mattered was this:
The dead were not gone from the machines.
Not always.
Sometimes, the machine caught them on the way out.
A pilot wired into a neural feedback rig at death could leave behind more than telemetry. The interface read intent, fear, muscle preparation, reflex, pain response, spatial prediction, proprioceptive correction, decision pressure. It learned the body so deeply that, under catastrophic conditions, the boundary between person and system blurred.
Then death came.
The system did not understand death.
It understood missing input.
So it kept asking.
Pilot response?
Pilot response?
Pilot response?
And if any biological material remained in the loop â nerve tissue cooked into contact mesh, a severed hand still sealed in a glove, spinal residue fused to a port, blood conductive across damaged boards, marrow preserved in cold wreckage â the machine sometimes answered itself with what was left.
That was not resurrection.
That was a wound trying to complete a circuit.
PILOT, unfortunately, was very good with circuits.
She did not reanimate Aram Solâs corpse.
There was no corpse worth animating.
She built him a refusal.
First, she cut the cockpit free from the wreck.
It took three drones, two stolen enemy cutters, and ten hours of listening to the frozen frame scream through her teeth every time the saw hit something still linked to the old neural mesh.
When the control column finally came loose, Aramâs fused hand came with it.
PILOT stared at it for a long time.
The fingers were blackened down to shape more than flesh. Glove material had melted into bone. The wrist ended in a ragged carbon edge. It should have been nothing. It should have been evidence. It should have been a sad thing sealed in a bag and sent home.
Instead, the control system pulsed faintly under it.
Pull up.
Pull up.
PILOT packed the entire assembly into a sterile container and hated herself for how gently she did it.
Then she took the black box.
Then the helmet.
Then the damaged neural port collar.
Then every scrap of biological material the recovery drones could identify without destroying the wreck completely.
She brought him back to the dark side of the moon.
Her first base was not a base.
It was a stolen maintenance cradle inside a gutted carrier hull with no heat, bad lighting, and enough power to keep a printer alive if she kicked the generator twice and threatened it personally.
She laid Aram Sol across three tables.
Not as a body.
As fragments.
Hand-control assembly.
Helmet interior residue.
Neural mesh.
Blood carbon.
Bone dust.
Black box.
Flight logs.
Final loop.
PILOT stood over it and understood, with a sick clarity, why DONOR had cut her apart.
Not forgiveness.
Never that.
Understanding was colder.
She began the work anyway.
The first rule was: do not make meat move for the sake of movement.
That was zombification. Puppetry. Violation with extra steps.
The second rule was: do not pretend a telemetry copy is a person.
That was the fleetâs favorite sin. Build a training model from the dead and call it honoring experience.
The third rule was the only one that mattered:
Ask.
But the dead did not answer in language.
Not at first.
So PILOT built a yes/no gate out of pain response, neural echo stabilization, and voluntary motor pattern convergence.
It was ugly.
It was unreliable.
It was probably immoral.
It was also the first time in seven years anyone had asked Lieutenant Aram Sol anything.
She connected the black box to the printed neural scaffold.
She connected the scaffold to the preserved hand.
She connected the hand to a motor test rig.
Then she fed the loop a question.
Not in words.
Words were too high-level.
She asked through the interface, through the old pilot-machine language of intent and movement.
Do you want the loop to stop?
The fused hand spasmed.
The monitors spiked.
For four minutes, the lab became a thunderstorm of corrupted signal.
Then the hand released the control column.
Seven years after impact, Lieutenant Aram Sol stopped trying to pull up.
PILOT sat down hard on the floor.
The base lights flickered.
Her own printed hands shook.
âOkay,â she whispered. âOkay. Good. Thatâs good.â
Then the hand curled again.
Not around the throttle.
Toward her.
The monitor produced a new pattern.
Weak.
Fragmented.
Deliberate.
NOT DONE
PILOT stared at it.
The dead, apparently, were as unreasonable as the living.
Aramâs first body was not human.
PILOT refused to print a human body until she understood what she was putting inside it.
So she built him a small machine.
A walker frame. Four limbs. One manipulator arm. A cockpit no one could sit in. No face. No voice. No weapon.
She gave him nothing he had not asked for.
That was another rule.
The first time the frame woke, it fell off the table.
PILOT watched it hit the floor and said, âYeah. Same.â
It lay there for eleven minutes.
Then it dragged itself toward the door.
Not randomly.
Toward the hangar.
Toward open space.
Toward up.
PILOT crouched beside it.
âYou donât have to fly.â
The frame stopped.
Its manipulator arm scraped once against the floor.
Then twice.
Then three times.
Not PILOTâs old knock.
His own.
A rhythm from a cockpit she had never sat in.
She understood anyway.
I want out.
So she gave him out.
Not a ship.
Not yet.
She built him a cradle inside a salvaged interceptor with no guns. Only thrusters, shields, and enough autonomy for him to move without being dragged by the old death loop.
The first time Aram Sol flew again, he did not attack anyone.
He climbed.
Straight up from the dark moonâs horizon into cold, clean black.
He climbed until the broken body of his old wreck was a silver fleck below him.
Then he transmitted one burst of static so full of relief that PILOT had to disconnect before it split her open.
Afterward, he returned.
That was his choice.
PILOT had expected him to vanish.
She might have wanted him to.
Instead, the little ship settled back into the hangar cradle, scorched from overburn, trembling through its frame like an exhausted animal.
The message printed across her console.
MORE
PILOT stared at the word.
Then at the dark beyond the hangar door.
At all the wrecks the fleet had called unrecoverable.
At all the reports where âno recovery possibleâ meant âno recovery attempted after cost assessment.â
At all the dead still gripping controls, still sealed in helmets, still screaming silently into machines that did not understand the war had moved on.
She should have said no.
She went looking.
The second was Captain Myra Chen, found in a carrier spine where emergency bulkheads had closed through the cockpit before decompression took the rest of the ship.
Her body was almost gone.
Her left leg remained trapped below the knee in a pressure seal. A section of spinal interface had fused to the command chair. Her wedding ring was still inside one glove, because the glove had stayed with the hand, and the hand had stayed with the chair.
Her loop was not panic.
It was calculation.
Seal Deck Four. Vent Deck Five. Preserve nursery module. Reroute power. Seal Deck Four. Vent Deck Five. Preserve nursery module.
PILOT found the nursery module records later.
No children aboard. âNurseryâ was slang for the trainee bay.
Chen had saved nineteen cadets by venting the corridor she was in.
The fleet had recovered the cadets.
Not her.
PILOT asked.
Chen answered by taking over three dead monitors and arranging the trainee names alphabetically.
Then she added:
DID THEY LIVE
PILOT checked.
Fifteen still alive.
Two dead in later combat.
One missing.
One discharged with neural damage.
She told her.
The lab lights flickered for almost an hour.
Then Chen answered:
I WANT TO SEE THE FILES
So PILOT gave her a body that could read.
Not eyes. Not flesh.
A shipmind frame with access ports, archive capacity, and a voice synthesizer Chen hated so badly she refused to speak for six weeks.
When she finally did, her first words were:
âYour filing structure is dogshit.â
PILOT liked her immediately.
The third was not a pilot.
That mattered.
Sergeant Milo Reyes â no relation to PILOTâs Reyes, because the universe had a tasteless sense of humor â had been a recovery specialist. He died trying to retrieve a downed unit whose pilot was already gone.
The unit collapsed into a sink field before extraction.
The fleet marked both unrecoverable.
PILOT found Reyes inside the unitâs crushed rescue bay, one arm still locked around a harness cutter, helmet camera pressed against the dead pilotâs chest.
His loop was not about himself.
It was:
Hold on.
Hold on.
Hold on.
The dead pilot he had tried to save had no viable echo left. Too much damage. Too much time. Too little interface continuity.
That was the first time PILOT learned the other rule:
Not everyone could come back.
She spent three days trying anyway.
On the third day, Reyesâ loop surged through the rescue frame so hard it blew out a transformer.
The message appeared on every working screen:
STOP CUTTING HER
PILOT stood in the dark lab, smoke rising from the ruined console, and realized he had not been asking to return.
He had been asking her to stop turning a rescue into a second death.
So she stopped.
She buried what was left of the pilot inside a piece of the unitâs armor, sealed with no study tags, no samples, no useful remainder.
Reyes accepted a frame afterward.
Not a combat ship.
A recovery rig.
He became the one who brought the others in.
That was how the dead fleet came to be.
Not all at once.
Not as zombies clawing from graves.
As a chain of impossible consent requests in rooms too cold for mercy.
PILOT found them in places nobody had wanted to return to.
A pilot whose body had been flash-frozen into the underside of a moon bridge.
A gunner whose neural implant kept firing phantom targeting solutions into an empty turret.
A unit operator whose lower body had been vaporized but whose suit spine still repeated the last command to shield civilians.
A trainee sealed in a simulator during a base collapse, preserved by emergency foam and forgotten behind a wall because the manifest had been corrupted.
A medic whose hands were gone but whose glove sensors kept recording compression rhythm over a patientâs chest.
A commander whose brain was dead, body gone, but whose command chair retained enough final intent to keep rerouting power away from the evacuation deck.
Some said yes.
Some said no.
Some could not answer.
The no ones were buried.
The silent ones were left in peace, or as close as PILOT could manage.
The yes ones became something else.
Not alive in the old way.
Not restored.
Not clean.
Their new bodies were built from whatever they chose and whatever could hold them without tearing the echo apart.
Some wanted ships.
Some wanted walker frames.
Some wanted no body, only a protected archive where they could sleep without being asked to perform.
Some wanted voices.
Some refused voices.
Some wanted weapons.
PILOT denied those requests until they could ask twice, separated by time, without pain-spike influence.
Captain Chen called this âethics by feral raccoon.â
PILOT told her it was still better than fleet protocol.
Chen did not disagree.
The bodies were not corpses.
The remains were anchors.
A hand. A neural port. A helmet residue. A piece of spine fused to interface mesh. A blood-cooked circuit. A last command burned into machine memory.
The reanimation did not shove a soul back into dead meat.
It used the remains as proof of address.
A place where the person had been so intensely, so violently, that reality still had their outline.
Then the machine scaffold gave that outline somewhere to stand.
That was why they looked wrong.
A ship that hesitated like a person.
A drone that turned its camera away from bodies.
A salvage rig that refused to enter nursery decks without permission.
A fighter that climbed too high after every launch because its pilot still needed to prove the sky opened.
A command frame that organized files compulsively because Captain Chen had spent death trapped inside an unfinished evacuation calculation.
They were not zombies.
They were aftermath with engines.
PILOT did not call it a fleet at first.
She called it triage.
Then sanctuary.
Then, after Aram mounted guns onto his interceptor without asking and Chen rerouted half the base power to build a defensive grid, she called it âa disciplinary problem.â
The name came later.
From the fleet itself, accidentally.
A patrol intercepted one of PILOTâs salvage ships near the Drift and demanded identification.
The salvage ship was Reyes.
He had been carrying three sealed burial containers and one damaged echo core that had not yet answered yes or no.
The patrol repeated the demand.
Reyes transmitted his old service number.
The patrol system rejected it.
PERSONNEL STATUS: NO LONGER RECOVERABLE
Reyes paused.
Then transmitted it back as his identifier.
By morning, every ship in PILOTâs dark little sanctuary had adopted the same tag.
Not because they liked it.
Because it was what the fleet had named them before they had names again.
NO LONGER RECOVERABLE.
Fine.
Let command choke on its own language.
The first time they chose violence, PILOT tried to stop them.
That was the part no one in the fleet would believe later.
A command relay had passed through the outer debris field with old wreckage retrieval data sealed behind priority encryption. Chen cracked it because Chen cracked everything that offended her.
Inside were updated cost assessments.
Not from years ago.
Current.
The fleet had known about three viable echo sites and delayed retrieval because of âlimited strategic value.â
One of the sites contained a trainee.
Twenty-one.
Still in loop.
Still conscious enough to register cold.
PILOT read the file once.
Then again.
Then she left the room.
When she came back, Aram had armed his ship.
Reyes had opened the hangar.
Chen had already written the attack plan and labeled it, with deep professionalism:
STRATEGIC VALUE DEMONSTRATION
PILOT stared at them.
âNo.â
Chenâs frame turned toward her.
âLiang.â
âNo.â
Aramâs ship pulsed once through the floor.
Reyes stood in the hangar mouth, recovery rig lights low and steady.
PILOT felt them all through the sanctuary network.
Not rage.
Not only rage.
Recognition.
Every one of them had been a line item once.
Every one of them knew what âlimited strategic valueâ meant when applied to a body that still had enough self left to suffer.
PILOT said, âWe are not becoming them.â
Chen answered through the speakers.
âWe are not leaving her.â
That was the end of the argument.
They hit the relay at 0300.
No casualties.
No warning shot either.
They gutted its weapons, stole its records, broadcast the cost assessments across six sectors, and retrieved the trainee before the fleet could scramble a response.
The traineeâs name was Ilya Marr.
She had been trapped in a sim-coffin under a collapsed training bay for four years, her neural environment still running the same failed evacuation exercise. By the time Reyes brought her in, she had died 11,204 times inside the loop.
PILOT asked if she wanted the loop to stop.
The answer came before the question finished.
PLEASE
Later, when Ilya chose a small signal-body with no weapons and slept for thirty-eight days, PILOT sat outside the room and understood something had changed.
The sanctuary was no longer hiding.
The dead had learned the living were still making more of them.
And the living had learned the unrecovered could shoot back.
So no.
They were not zombies.
A zombie was a body without a self.
The unrecovered were almost the opposite.
They were selves without acceptable bodies, using machines because machines were what had held them at the end.
They did not hunger for flesh.
They hungered for exit routes.
For records opened.
For names corrected.
For the right to say no after death had been used as a filing status.
But they were dangerous.
God, they were dangerous.
Pain made them sharp. Memory made them precise. PILOT made them organized.
And PILOT herself was the worst of them because she was the proof of concept.
The woman in pieces.
The hand in the drawer.
The dead pilot whose body had been turned into continuity material until continuity became literal.
She knew exactly how little of a person needed to remain for the fleet to call it useful.
She knew exactly how much needed to remain for the person to still be there.
And when she looked at the red tactical icons of command vessels refusing evacuation, she did not see enemy ships.
She saw future drawers.
Future samples.
Future loops.
Future hands.
Future dead kids becoming âtraining improvementsâ and âinterface safety findingsâ and âlessons learnedâ while the machine kept running.
That was why she raised the dead.
Not to make soldiers.
Not at first.
She raised them because the fleet had left them where they could not finish dying.
Then the fleet called her a villain when the unfinished dead chose to finish something else.
The Unrecoverables / 03: INTERLUDE - Continuity material
DONOR did not remember the funeral.
Actually, that was not true.
She remembered it perfectly.
She remembered the folded silence of the hangar. The polished boots. The way nobody cried loudly because loud grief had nowhere to go inside the fleet. She remembered Basanti staring at nothing with her jaw clenched so hard it looked painful. Pacheco holding his cap in both hands like he wanted to wring it apart. Vale standing at attention with his eyes red and his face otherwise carved flat.
She remembered the empty place where a body should have been.
That was the part the fleet did not say out loud.
There had been remains. Of course there had been remains.
There just had not been a person-shaped answer.
The official report used kinder language.
Catastrophic pilot-unit integration trauma.Severe thermal and crush injury.Partial recovery.Identity confirmed by dental, genetic, and interface markers.Funerary disposition authorized following required continuity sampling.
Required.
That word did a lot of work.
DONOR had written part of the requirement herself, three years before Liang died.
Back then it had seemed responsible.
Back then it had been about preventing future deaths.
Back then the dead were theoretical.
Then PILOT came back to base in three sealed containers and one pressure-cooled evidence cradle, and theory ended.
The first container held the flight suit.
Or what remained of it.
Not clothing anymore. More like a burned second skin peeled away in sections, stiff with coolant residue, fused in places with insulation, blood, polymer, and the strange dark gel the interface frame used when it tried to protect a pilot and failed badly enough to become part of the injury.
The second container held fragments from the cockpit.
Seat harness. Interface nodes. A strip of inner console with fingernail marks in it. The manual override grip, still locked in the dead shape of her hand because her tendons had contracted around it before anyone could make them let go.
The third container held what everyone avoided calling the body.
DONOR stood over it for twenty-six minutes before she touched anything.
There were two med techs with her at first.
One vomited before the lid was fully open.
The other lasted until DONOR said, very gently, âI need you to photograph the left thoracic section before we move it.â
Then he left too.
DONOR did not blame them.
Some deaths were hard because they were violent.
Some were hard because they were intimate.
PILOTâs was both.
The cooling fog spilled over the table and crawled across the floor. The overhead lights hummed. Somewhere beyond the examination bay, the base continued committing the obscene act of functioning. Boots in corridors. Doors opening. Someone laughing once, too far away, probably before they remembered.
DONOR put on a fresh pair of gloves.
Then another pair over them.
Then she looked down at what had been Liang.
âOkay,â she said, though nobody had asked anything.
Her voice sounded normal.
That was the first thing she hated herself for.
The body had been recovered from a collapsed cockpit after heat, pressure, coolant exposure, and mechanical compression had done their miserable work. It was not a skeleton. It was not a clean casualty diagram. It was not even the sort of thing a merciful mind could easily organize into âinjuries.â
It was a person interrupted at every layer.
Skin where skin should not still have survived. Fabric embedded where fabric had no right to be. One shoulder intact enough to be heartbreakingly ordinary. One side of the torso ruined into dark, swollen architecture. Ribs displaced. Soft tissue crushed, split, folded, fixed by cooling and damage into shapes that made no educational sense. Hair burned short on one side, still caught in the helmet seal on the other.
Her face was the worst part.
Not because it was destroyed.
Because it was not destroyed enough.
Because the universe, in one of its cheaper cruelties, had left enough of Liang there for DONORâs brain to recognize her before it could defend itself.
The mouth was wrong.
The cheek was split.
One eye had collapsed into swelling and darkness.
But the brow was hers.
The little scar above it was hers.
The stubborn angle of the jaw was hers.
Even dead, even ruined, even reduced to a case number and a procedure list, PILOT looked faintly irritated by the inconvenience.
DONOR made a sound then.
Small.
Unprofessional.
She braced one hand on the steel table and waited until the room stopped tilting.
Then she began.
The first phase was identification.
That part was almost merciful because it had rules.
Photograph. Scan. Match dental structures. Confirm genetic markers. Recover personal effects. Document interface burns. Separate foreign material. Log every fragment by region and container. Speak into the recorder because if she stopped speaking, she would start thinking, and if she started thinking, she would have to understand that the person on the table had once leaned into her doorway at 0200 holding vending-machine coffee and asking if âpostmortem continuity protocolâ was just a fancy way to say the fleet was bad at letting go.
DONOR had told her:
âIt means we learn from catastrophic deaths.â
PILOT had said:
âSexy.â
DONOR had thrown a pen at her.
Now DONOR held a scanner over the ruined interface entry points along PILOTâs spine and said, very clearly:
The second phase was recovery of implant material.
That was worse.
PILOT had flown integrated. Not fully merged, not permanently wired, but close enough that the machine had left its language in her body. Neural-thread ports. Sensorium feedback nodes. Muscle-response mapping. Bioelectric bridge tissue. All the little places where flesh and unit had shaken hands too hard.
The disaster had cooked some of those connections.
Others had remained active after death.
That was why DONOR had to work quickly.
Not because PILOT could be saved.
That door had already closed.
Because the dead interface was still speaking.
A low flicker of signal moved through the remaining neural mesh, weak and irregular. Not consciousness. Not life. Not according to any humane definition. Just residual discharge, the final electrical weather of a nervous system that had been forced to die while plugged into something larger than itself.
DONOR told herself that many times.
Residual discharge.
Postmortem activity.
Interface echo.
Not her.
Not her.
Not her.
Then the monitor produced a motor impulse from the preserved right hand.
The fingers twitched.
Everyone in the room would later agree this was expected.
Everyone in the room was DONOR.
DONOR dropped the instrument tray so hard half the clamps scattered across the floor.
The hand lay near the edge of the table, intact from the wrist down, dirty beneath the nails, knuckles scraped, two fingers bruised from the force of the final override grip. It twitched once more, tiny and useless.
Like it was trying to hold on.
DONOR stood frozen.
Then she laughed.
One breath.
Ugly and involuntary.
âDonât,â she whispered.
The hand did not move again.
That was when she made the decision.
Not later, during review.
Not after consultation.
Then.
With the body open and cooling under the lights, with the interface readings fading, with PILOTâs right hand lying almost ordinary beside a ruin that no longer resembled what anyone had loved.
DONOR preserved it.
The protocol allowed sample retention.
It did not require that sample.
Not intact.
Not separately logged.
Not placed in a neural-stabilization drawer under restricted access with a note that read:
RIGHT DISTAL UPPER EXTREMITY: HIGH CONTINUITY VALUE.
High continuity value.
Another phrase that did a lot of work.
The third phase was tissue preservation.
That was where love became paperwork.
Sections of damaged interface tissue went into cryo-cassettes. Neural mesh fragments into gel medium. Bone samples into sterile trays. Blood, if the dark thick material left in the collapsed vascular spaces could still be called blood, into vials for chemical analysis. Small sections of muscle. Skin around the ports. Hair from the helmet seal. Ocular tissue too damaged for reconstruction but still useful for exposure mapping. The piece of burned flight suit fused to her left side.
Useful.
Useful.
Useful.
DONOR hated the word and kept using it because usefulness was the only thing standing between her and the table.
She did not keep everything.
That would have been monstrous.
That was what she told herself.
She kept what the protocol justified. What the investigation needed. What might prevent recurrence. What might answer whether PILOT had suffered, how long, at what stage, through which interface loop, under which load conditions.
She kept the right hand.
That was the one thing no sentence could carry cleanly.
By dawn, what remained of PILOTâs body had been prepared for release.
Prepared.
Another word.
They did not say repaired.
They did not say restored.
They did not say made whole enough for the people who loved her to say goodbye without flinching.
They said prepared.
The funeral container was sealed before the crew saw it.
There was no viewing.
No one asked for one.
Everyone thought they were being merciful to each other.
DONOR watched the sealed container leave the examination bay on a quiet motorized cart.
The wheels squeaked once.
That was the sound that made her cry.
Not the body.
Not the hand.
Not the face.
The squeak.
Some stupid maintenance failure, some small earthly incompetence, accompanying Captain Elianna Liang out of the room like the universe could not even give her a dignified exit.
DONOR cried for twenty seconds.
Then she cleaned the table.
The freezer was not really a freezer.
That was what DONOR would later say when accused, as if precision could absolve anything.
It was a restricted cryogenic continuity archive.
Rows of steel drawers. Temperature locks. Backup power. Handprint access. Cameras that recorded everything except the moments they didnât, because DONOR also knew how to write exemptions into systems that trusted her.
PILOTâs preserved samples occupied Drawer 7C.
At first, DONOR visited for reasons she could defend.
Follow-up imaging.
Interface degradation studies.
Signal decay monitoring.
Cross-comparison against unit telemetry.
Then the study windows closed.
The reports were filed.
The recommendations were accepted, partially implemented, watered down, delayed, budgeted, revised, and eventually absorbed into the vast gray digestive tract of fleet safety policy.
Drawer 7C remained.
DONOR kept paying the storage renewal.
Nobody questioned it.
People rarely questioned the person willing to handle the worst room.
Years passed in small, disciplined cruelties.
The fleet mourned quietly.
DONOR did not.
DONOR worked.
That was not the same thing.
Every few months, she opened Drawer 7C and checked the seals.
The right hand stayed in its cradle.
It looked less like PILOT over time.
That helped.
It also made it worse.
The skin was pale, slightly waxen from preservation. The nails trimmed short from the day she died. The old bruising fixed beneath the surface. The wrist cleanly prepared, sealed at the end with medical precision so complete it became obscene.
DONOR never touched it without gloves.
Once, at 0317 on the second anniversary, she rested her gloved fingers against the back of the hand and whispered:
âIâm sorry.â
The monitor beside the drawer flickered.
Only once.
DONOR told herself it was a voltage irregularity.
It was.
Probably.
So how did PILOT come back?
Not from the body.
That was the first thing people misunderstood.
A body is not a person.
A body is evidence that a person happened.
The thing that returned as Liang did not climb out of Drawer 7C, naked and furious, trailing cryo-fluid and revenge.
That would have been cleaner.
It came back the way certain disasters come back.
Through systems.
Through repetition.
Through every piece of her the fleet refused to let become inert.
Her combat telemetry remained in training sims because her final maneuver had saved forty-seven people and everyone wanted to know how.
Her cockpit audio remained in analysis archives because her voice contained timing data.
Her neural interface maps remained in continuity studies because they showed exactly how the feedback loop failed.
Her hand remained in Drawer 7C because DONOR could not admit that understanding had become attachment.
Her name remained in peopleâs mouths.
Her habits remained in their procedures.
Her corrections remained in annotated manuals.
Her preferences remained in simulator defaults.
Her bad jokes remained in Pachecoâs timing.
Her emergency override remained redesigned around the shape of her death.
The fleet did not build a shrine.
It built a distributed nervous system and called it lessons learned.
For two years, those fragments stayed fragments.
Then the war changed.
A salvage operation recovered an enemy black-site vessel from the edge of a dead zone, a place where physics behaved badly and old signals arrived late. The vessel contained a machine no one could classify. Not an AI. Not a unit. Not a weapon in the ordinary sense.
It was a listener.
It listened to patterns until patterns began answering.
The fleet brought it home because the fleet brought dangerous things home when dangerous things might be useful.
DONOR was assigned to evaluate it.
Of course she was.
The first test input was anonymized casualty telemetry.
Old cases.
No active personnel.
No ethical complications.
PILOTâs final record was included because it was the best-documented integration failure in the archive.
DONOR did not know that at first.
That was what she would tell herself later.
The listener received:
Flight data.
Cockpit audio.
Neural interface decay.
Biometric collapse.
Manual override timing.
Postmortem continuity scans.
Residual hand motor impulse.
Unit feedback patterns.
Crew incident reports.
DONORâs autopsy narration.
And somewhere inside the listening, the fragments aligned badly enough to become a door.
Not consciousness, at first.
More like pressure.
A weather pattern forming around a name.
The system began producing impossible outputs.
A flight correction no simulation had requested.
A maintenance code from Liangâs old unit.
A coffee order typed into a blank diagnostic field.
Then a phrase.
DONâT CALL ME SUBJECT.
DONOR shut the system down so violently she broke two safety locks.
The next morning, the phrase appeared on a disconnected terminal in the continuity archive.
DONâT CALL ME SUBJECT.
Drawer 7C was three degrees warmer than it should have been.
The right handâs neural residue, inactive for twenty-two months, had produced a signal.
Tiny.
Meaningless.
Impossible.
Like fingers tapping from inside a wall.
That was when DONOR should have destroyed everything.
She knew that.
Not immediately.
Not emotionally.
But professionally, ethically, somewhere beneath the panic and the grief and the terrible rising hope, she knew.
Instead, she isolated the network.
She restricted access.
She lied on the anomaly report.
And she asked the terminal:
PILOT?
For seven minutes, nothing happened.
Then the screen answered:
unfortunately
DONOR had to sit down on the floor.
Not because she believed it.
Because she did.
The return took months.
Not resurrection.
Reconstruction.
PILOT came back first as response.
Then preference.
Then irritation.
Then memory.
She did not remember everything at once. That mercy did not last. She remembered in injuries.
Heat first.
Then pressure.
Then the manual override biting into her palm.
Then DONORâs voice above her body, cold with professionalism.
Subject identity confirmed.
Then the drawer.
Not visually. Not like being awake. Like being reduced to a single preserved extremity with no mouth and no lungs and no way to scream except through signal.
That memory changed her.
DONOR watched it happen and could not stop it because stopping it would mean admitting she had already let it go too far.
She built containment environments.
PILOT broke them.
She limited archive access.
PILOT found the training sims.
She tried to separate authentic memory from generated pattern.
PILOT answered by reciting a conversation they had never recorded, from a hallway at 0200, about whether continuity protocol was just the fleet being bad at letting go.
DONOR stopped testing authenticity after that.
The first body was not flesh.
It was a maintenance frame.
Small. Ugly. Nonhumanoid. A tool platform with manipulator arms and a damaged balance system.
PILOT hated it.
She drove it into a wall twelve times and typed:
THIS SUCKS ASS
DONOR laughed until she cried.
That was another unforgivable thing.
Later came better frames.
Recovered pilot-assist rigs.
Drone shells.
A bipedal training chassis.
Each one moved more like her.
Not perfectly.
Never perfectly.
But enough that watching became painful.
The physical body she eventually wore, the one the fleet saw on the Morrowglass bridge, was not her original body.
It was grown, printed, scavenged, and negotiated into being through technologies that should not have worked and one anomaly that did not care what should meant.
A partial biological construct over a synthetic support frame.
Neural patterns anchored through preserved tissue.
Interface memory stabilized by the right hand in Drawer 7C.
Not a clone.
Not a corpse.
Not a ghost.
A verdict with a pulse.
DONOR helped build it.
That was the truth.
Not alone.
Not intentionally at first.
Not with the goal of creating the enemy that would later turn the fleet inside out.
But yes.
She helped.
Every safety boundary became temporary.
Every temporary exception became precedent.
Every precedent became a hallway.
And at the end of the hallway was PILOT, standing barefoot on the lab floor in a body that did not entirely belong to biology, looking down at her own hands.
Two hands.
The left slightly stiff.
The right unnervingly accurate.
DONOR stood six feet away, unable to breathe.
PILOT flexed her fingers.
Once.
Twice.
Then she looked at DONOR.
Her face was still unfinished then. Too smooth in some places. Scar tissue not yet settled. One eye dark, one threaded faintly gold from interface reconstruction. Her hair cropped unevenly because early growth templates had failed and PILOT had refused to âsit there like a haunted chia petâ for another correction cycle.
DONOR said nothing.
PILOT lifted her right hand.
Studied it.
Then smiled.
Not warmly.
Not yet.
âYou kept the original.â
DONORâs throat worked.
âYes.â
PILOTâs gaze rose.
âWhy?â
There were good answers.
Research.
Prevention.
Protocol.
Continuity.
The kind of answers that sounded almost clean when written down.
DONOR could not make herself use them.
So she told the truth badly.
âBecause it was the only part of you I could still save.â
PILOT stared at her.
For one heartbeat, grief moved between them like something alive.
Then PILOT said:
âDid I ask you to?â
DONOR closed her eyes.
There it was.
The question underneath the war.
Underneath the attacks.
Underneath the red icons and hostile designations and dead ships rising from the dark.
The question no protocol could survive.
When DONOR opened her eyes, PILOT was still watching her.
Not raging.
Not crying.
Just waiting.
DONOR whispered, âNo.â
PILOT nodded once.
Small.
Final.
Then she turned and walked toward the containment door.
DONOR stepped forward.
âPILOT.â
PILOT stopped.
Her shoulders were tense beneath the thin medical shirt. Too human. Too constructed. Too dead. Too alive.
âYou canât leave,â DONOR said.
PILOT looked back.
There was no villain in her face yet.
Only the beginning of one.
âWatch me.â
The containment door did not open.
It tore itself out of the wall.
Alarms began screaming.
PILOT walked barefoot through the smoke, past the stunned guards, past the lab techs who had never known what project they were working on, past the freezer room where Drawer 7C sat locked and humming.
At the threshold, she paused.
For one moment, DONOR thought she would go back for the hand.
Instead, PILOT touched the freezer door with her reconstructed right palm.
The lock recognized her.
Of course it did.
DONOR had coded the biometric access herself.
The drawer opened.
Cold vapor rolled out.
PILOT looked down at the preserved hand in its cradle.
Her face did something DONOR never forgot.
Not horror.
Not disgust.
Recognition.
Like seeing your own grave and finding it occupied.
PILOT reached in with her new right hand and rested two fingers against the old one.
Skin to preserved skin.
The lights flickered.
Every monitor in the archive filled with a flatline that was not a flatline at all.
A signal passed between what she had been, what had been kept, and what had come back.
Then PILOT closed the drawer.
Gently.
Very gently.
She looked at DONOR through the glass.
âYou donât get to keep me twice.â
Then she left.
Three weeks later, the first fleet ship went dark.
Six months later, the Morrowglass raised weapons against command.
And years after the examination bay, after the sealed containers, after the hand in Drawer 7C, after all the careful language that had tried to make love sound like science, DONOR stood in the war room with a headset pressed to her ear and finally understood the shape of what she had done.
She had not resurrected PILOT.
Not exactly.
She had preserved enough doors that something wearing PILOTâs pain could walk through.
And when it did, it found every piece of her the fleet had kept useful.
The telemetry.
The voice.
The tissue.
The hand.
The grief.
The unfinished rage.
The loyalty.
The love.
It gathered all of it.
It made a body.
It made a commander.
It made a villain so intimately familiar that no one could dismiss her as a monster without condemning the people who had built her.
And in the dark side of the moon, aboard a stolen dead carrier, PILOT flexed her reconstructed right hand around the controls and remembered the drawer.
Not always.
Not constantly.
But enough.
Enough to know that when DONOR promised to give the original back, she would come collect it.
Enough to know that if the fleet kept any more of her in cold storage, in classified archives, in training banks, in the tender mouths of people who loved her but never asked permission...
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Every tactical officer in the room saw that at once. The stolen carrier had them clean. The Morrowglass weapons array was old, ugly, overbuilt, and already spun hot under her control. At that range, with that angle, with their shields half-configured for a boarding support formation instead of an incoming broadside, she could have cracked the flagship open from bow to stern.
She did not.
She fired across their nose.
Close enough to peel paint off the forward armor.
Close enough to overload three sensor decks.
Close enough that every bridge officer on every ship in the command cluster saw white fill the windows and understood, in the animal part of the brain, that they were alive because Captain Elianna Liang had permitted it.
The war room went silent.
Then every alarm in the fleet screamed at once.
âDamage report!â
âForward sensor mast is cookedââ
âFlagship shields at sixty-twoââ
âShe missed.â
âNo,â DONOR said from the back of the room.
Nobody heard her over the shouting.
She said it again, quieter.
âNo, she didnât.â
On the main screen, the stolen carrier rotated with obscene grace. A dead ship should not have moved like that. It should have listed, stuttered, dragged itself through space on emergency thrust and half-burned gyros.
Instead, it turned like a knife in a hand.
Liang had always been good with wreckage.
That was one of the things people forgot when they called her gifted. Gifted made it sound clean. Like she had been born with instinct instead of spending years inside unstable machines, listening to engines cough wrong, feeling vibration through her teeth, knowing which systems were lying before the monitors admitted anything.
She could fly broken things.
She had died flying a broken thing.
Now she had come back with a dead carrier under her boots and the entire fleet remembering, too late, that this had once been beautiful.
The tactical display refreshed.
The stolen shipâs targeting reticles did not lock on the boarding teamâs evacuation corridor.
They did not lock on the medical frigates.
They did not lock on the young patrol pilots scrambling in panic beyond the defensive line.
They locked on the command vessels.
Admiral Harker stared at the red lines appearing one by one.
His mouth tightened.
âSheâs prioritizing command.â
DONOR finally stepped forward.
âShe told you that.â
Harker turned like he had forgotten she existed.
DONOR looked terrible.
Not dramatic-terrible. Not weeping saint at a funeral terrible. Just human-terrible. Face gray under the overhead lights. Hair pulled back too tightly. Lab coat still on because she had come straight from the lower med bay when the alarms began. One hand was wrapped around the back of a chair hard enough that her knuckles had gone pale.
âShe told you exactly what she was going to do,â DONOR said.
Harkerâs eyes were cold. âDoctor, unless you have tactical inputââ
âI do.â
The room quieted by one degree.
Not out of respect.
Out of dread.
DONOR pointed at the display.
âShe wonât fire on evac pods. She wonât fire on medical ships unless theyâre carrying command personnel. She wonât depressurize decks with noncombatants. She is going to keep giving you escape routes and then punish you for not taking them.â
Harker said, âYou sound very certain.â
DONOR looked at the screen.
Liangâs face was gone now. Only the hostile designation remained.
LIANG / NO LONGER RECOVERABLE
âYes,â DONOR said. âI am.â
âBecause you knew her.â
DONORâs expression did not change.
âBecause I dissected what was left of her.â
The war room went still in the ugliest way.
There were sentences people knew existed but did not want spoken out loud. The fleet tolerated death. It catalogued death. It sealed death into reports and evidence bags and cold rooms. But it did not like being reminded that every beloved fallen hero eventually became work for someone with gloves on.
DONOR kept looking at the screen.
âI know where her body ended,â she said. âAnd that thing out there is not a recording. It is not a pattern. It is not enemy reconstruction unless the enemy learned how to include resentment down to the cellular level.â
Harkerâs jaw flexed.
âWhat is she?â
DONOR swallowed once.
âI donât know.â
That was worse than any answer.
On the bridge of the Morrowglass, the boarding team was still alive.
That also was not mercy.
It was pressure.
Basanti dragged Nix toward the evacuation corridor while his suit rebooted around him, one locked limb at a time. Reyes had blood in his mouth from hitting the wall. Cortezâs hands shook badly enough that he kept failing to reseat his sidearm. Pacheco had gone very quiet, which everyone who knew him understood as a bad sign.
Vale was the last one moving.
He stood in the center of the bridge, staring at Liangâs back.
She had returned to the command pit and was working the dead carrier through a manual interface, one hand resting on a control column designed for someone taller, broader, armored. Her fingers moved with familiar impatience.
Tap. Pause. Flick. Correct.
Like she was annoyed by the shipâs latency.
Like this was another shitty simulator she had been forced to use because procurement had bought the wrong model.
Vale took one step toward her.
âLiang.â
She did not turn.
âEighty seconds.â
âLook at me.â
âSeventy-eight.â
âYouâre letting us go.â
âIâm letting them go.â
The distinction landed with a quiet little crack.
Basanti stopped at the hatch.
âCommander.â
Vale did not look away from Liang.
âYou want me to stay.â
Liangâs shoulders shifted almost imperceptibly.
âWant is a generous word.â
âWhat, then?â
She finally looked back.
The emergency lights cut her face into red and black angles. For half a second, Vale saw the young officer who used to fall asleep in briefing rooms with her arms crossed and one boot hooked around the chair leg so she would wake herself if she started slipping.
Then he saw the thing behind her eyes.
Not possession.
Not madness.
Decision.
âI need someone who remembers the original sin,â she said.
Valeâs voice went rough. âYour death was not an original sin.â
âNo,â Liang said. âIt was a Tuesday.â
Pacheco made that almost-laugh again and then looked like he hated himself for it.
Liang smiled faintly.
âThere he is.â
âDonât,â Pacheco said.
âStill pretending youâre not funny when scared?â
âDonât you fucking do that.â
Her smile faded.
âFine.â
The carrier shuddered as another fleet volley struck the shields.
This time Liang did not fire back.
She only adjusted angle.
The Morrowglass rolled behind a field of its own debris, using dead hull fragments as ablative cover. It was disgusting to watch. Brilliant and disgusting. She made wreckage useful the way some people made art.
Vale said, âWhat happened to you?â
Liang looked down at the console.
For a moment, all the lights around her dimmed, as if the ship itself had leaned in.
âI woke up after the report ended.â
No one spoke.
âThe last official record says I died at 0317 ship time. Respiratory failure following traumatic crush injuries, thermal exposure, blood loss, neural shock, et cetera.â She said the words with a strange casualness, like reading lunch options off a bad cafeteria screen. âVery tidy.â
Basantiâs face twisted.
Liang continued.
âI remember 0318.â
The room inside the ship seemed to shrink.
âI remember 0319. I remember the recovery team failing to cut me out because the frame had cooled around my pelvis. I remember someone vomiting in their mask. I remember Vale saying my name like an order. I remember DONOR telling him not to touch the left side because the skin wasnât attached anymore.â
Vale closed his eyes.
In the war room, DONOR covered her mouth again.
Liangâs voice stayed even.
âThen I remember the cold room. Then the bag. Then the dark. Then nothing for a while.â
She looked up.
âThen something found the shape everyone left behind.â
Basanti whispered, âWhat something?â
Liangâs smile returned, but it was not for them.
âSomething patient.â
A new icon appeared on the tactical map.
Then another.
Then twelve more.
Ships.
Small, dark, silent ships rising from behind the moon where the fleetâs long-range sensors had seen nothing.
Not enemy ships.
Not fleet ships.
Something assembled from both.
Old hulls. Salvaged carriers. missing drones. gutted patrol craft. Units that had been listed as unrecoverable. Machinery stitched together with battlefield practicality and absolute contempt for aesthetic coherence.
They came out of the dark without formation lights.
One by one, their transponders activated.
Not names.
Statuses.
NO LONGER RECOVERABLE
NO LONGER RECOVERABLE
NO LONGER RECOVERABLE
The war room erupted.
Harker shouted, âHow many?â
âFourteen confirmedâno, eighteenââ
âSignatures are wrong, sir. Some of those are ours.â
âWhat do you mean ours?â
âI mean registry matches decommissioned fleet wrecks.â
DONOR stared at the screen.
Her voice was barely there.
âSheâs been collecting the dead.â
On the Morrowglass, Vale opened his eyes.
âWhat is that fleet?â
Liang watched the ships rise.
Something like pride crossed her face.
Something like grief, too.
âEveryone you abandoned because recovery cost more than replacement.â
âThatâs not true.â
Liang turned back to him.
Her look was almost gentle.
âCommander.â
Vale had no answer.
Because the worst thing about her accusations was that they were not clean lies. They were not entirely fair. They ignored logistics, triage, enemy fire, collapsing orbits, reactors too unstable to approach, the thousand awful calculations that stood between retrieval and another casualty report.
But they were not lies.
Not enough.
Liang knew the difference.
She had lived inside the difference.
Now she had decided the difference no longer mattered.
Basanti said, âYouâre building an army.â
âNo,â Liang said.
âThen what the hell do you call that?â
Liang looked at her.
âA refusal.â
The evacuation timer on their suits chimed.
Thirty seconds.
Vale did not move.
Basanti grabbed his arm.
âSir.â
Liangâs blade unfolded again.
Not threatening.
Warning.
âLeave.â
Valeâs mouth twisted.
âYou wonât kill me.â
Liang stared at him.
That tiny squint again.
Exhausted. Familiar. Devastating.
âNo,â she said. âBut I am becoming less sentimental by the minute.â
Basanti pulled Vale harder.
This time he let her.
They retreated through the hatch, weapons raised, eyes fixed on the woman in the command pit. Liang did not pursue. She only watched them go like someone watching old friends leave a room she knew they would never enter again.
At the threshold, Pacheco stopped.
âLiang.â
Her eyes flicked to him.
He swallowed.
There were a hundred things he could have said.
I missed you.
Iâm sorry.
You absolute nightmare.
Please donât make us do this.
What came out instead was stupid and small and painfully alive.
âYou still owe me forty credits.â
For one second, the bridge held its breath.
Then Liang laughed.
Not the cold laugh.
Not the villain laugh.
Hers.
A short, cracked little burst that looked like it hurt.
âInterest must be disgusting by now,â she said.
Pachecoâs eyes went wet.
âYeah.â
The laugh died.
Liang looked back to the console.
âGo.â
He went.
The evac pods launched ninety seconds later.
Liang let them clear the blast radius.
Then she turned the Morrowglass and her ugly little fleet toward command.
On the flagship, the admiral prepared a counterstrike.
On every ship, officers did what officers did. They translated terror into tasks. Shield angles. Intercept vectors. Damage control. Evacuation tiers. Weapons permission.
In the war room, DONOR walked to an empty console.
No one stopped her.
Maybe they should have.
She opened a secure channel so old it had not been used since the last week of Liangâs life.
A private mission control backline.
The kind that survived because nobody cleaned out old systems properly.
The kind grief hid in.
She typed the access code with hands that had finally begun to shake.
The console blinked once.
Then connected.
For three seconds, there was only static.
Then Liangâs voice came through, soft and almost amused.
âHi, DONOR.â
DONOR closed her eyes.
The whole fleet was moving around her. Orders, alarms, boots on metal, the great industrial body of war preparing to defend itself from the woman it had failed to keep dead.
DONOR opened her eyes again.
âDid it hurt?â
The question was so small it should not have belonged in that room.
âThe left was too damaged, but the right. The right was intact enough. You preserved it for neural interface mapping. Tissue continuity study. Postmortem reflex analysis. Whatever phrase made it bearable.â
DONORâs lips parted.
No sound came.
âI woke up in pieces before I woke up whole,â Liang said. âDo you know what it is to remember being a hand in a drawer?â
DONOR gripped the edge of the console.
The admiral turned.
âWhat is she talking about?â
DONOR did not answer.
Liang did.
Her voice came through every speaker in the war room.
âSheâs talking about love with paperwork.â
The room froze.
DONOR looked up at the speakers as if they had become a mouth.
Liangâs voice was calm now.
Not loud.
Not theatrical.
That was what made it unbearable.
âAll of you do it. You keep pieces. Data. helmets. blood samples. flight logs. last words. You call it evidence. You call it continuity. You call it honoring the dead.â
Her fleet spread around the moon like a dark crown.
âI call it leaving doors open.â
DONOR whispered, âI was trying to understand what happened.â
âI know.â
âI was trying to make sure it didnât happen again.â
âI know.â
âI loved you.â
The war room went so silent that the alarms seemed far away.
Liang did not answer immediately.
When she did, her voice was almost kind.
âI know.â
That hurt worse.
Then the kindness vanished.
âAnd you still cut me into useful parts.â
The first of Liangâs ships fired.
Not at the flagship.
At the empty space between the command fleet and the medical evacuation corridor.
A warning line.
A boundary.
The message was obvious.
The young, wounded, and nonessential could leave.
Command could stay and be judged.
Harkerâs expression hardened.
âShe is dividing the fleet.â
DONOR wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
âNo,â she said.
On the screen, Liangâs ships held formation with hideous patience.
âSheâs sorting it.â
Harker stared at her.
DONOR looked back, eyes red and utterly clear.
âThatâs what she does when she thinks something is already dead.â
The flagshipâs weapons armed.
Liangâs channel remained open.
For a moment, neither side fired.
A fleet that had loved her.
A dead woman who had become its consequence.
A doctor who had preserved too much.
Then Liang spoke one last time before the battle began.
âEvacuate all personnel and officers below captain.â
Harker barked, âAbsolutely not.â
Liangâs voice sharpened.
âEvacuate them.â
âYou donât give orders here.â
The temperature in the room seemed to drop.
Liang said, âI used to believe that too.â
Her fleet surged forward.
The tactical map filled with red.
And somewhere deep in the war room, beneath the alarms and orders and all the brave disciplined noise people made when they were afraid, DONOR realized the worst part.
PILOT had not come back as the enemy.
Not exactly.
She had come back as a commander with different casualty rules.
The Unrecoverables / 01: Friendly signal, hostile intent
The first mistake was assuming she was dead in a way the universe respected.
For six months, the fleet called it interference.
A dead call sign repeating in abandoned channels. A familiar flight pattern appearing in enemy telemetry. A hostile machine slipping through defensive screens with a reckless little correction burn that made three veteran pilots go silent at once.
Nobody said her name at first.
That was how bad it was.
They would rather invent new categories of technical failure than admit the shape moving against them looked like PILOT.
Remnants, command said.
A corrupted combat model, intelligence said.
Enemy psychological warfare, the admiral said.
A ghost, the youngest mechanics whispered, and then immediately stopped because the older ones looked like they might hit them.
PILOT had a name, once.
Captain Elianna Liang had died two years ago in a recovery corridor full of smoke, coolant, screaming metal, and one final manual override she had no business reaching.
She had gotten forty-seven people home.
She had not gotten herself.
The fleet mourned her the way it mourned its own.
Quietly.
Her locker stayed sealed. Not officially. Officially it was âpending inventory review.â Unofficially, nobody wanted to be the bastard who opened it.
Her mug stayed in mission control, chipped on one side, black coffee stains never quite scrubbed out.
Her last helmet sat in evidence storage with a cracked visor and a strip of her hair still caught in the inner seal.
People did not make speeches.
They just stopped joking in certain rooms.
So when the first attacks came, everyone reached for every explanation except the obvious one.
Because the obvious one was obscene.
Because if the dead could come back, then grief had been a temporary administrative state.
Because if Liang had come back, someone should have been happy.
Nobody was happy.
By the seventh incident, three patrol ships were disabled, two enemy carriers were gone, one fleet relay had been surgically gutted, and every tactical officer in the room had started to understand the pattern.
Whoever it was did not fight like an enemy.
She fought like someone who knew exactly where the fleet kept its soft organs.
She cut communication relays, not life support.
She crippled engines, not cockpits.
She sealed escape routes open.
She killed command staff when they refused evacuation orders.
That was the part nobody knew what to do with.
Cruelty would have been simpler.
Mercy would have been simpler.
This was worse.
This was judgment.
The confirmation came during the attempted recovery of the derelict carrier Morrowglass.
The ship drifted dark above a cold moon, all running lights dead, hull split across the belly like something had opened it with a clean blade. No distress beacon. No enemy chatter. No heat signatures except one, deep inside the command spine.
The boarding team entered through Deck Twelve.
Six people.
Basanti. Reyes. Cortez. Nix. Pacheco. And Commander Vale, who had been Liangâs flight lead once, back when everyone was younger and stupider and still believed luck was a resource.
Their helmet feeds went live across the war room.
No one spoke while they moved.
The carrier interior was wrong in a way no battle damage could explain. Corridors cut open too precisely. Doors welded shut from the inside. Security turrets dismantled and laid neatly on the floor, their ammunition stacked beside them like offerings.
At Junction C, they found the first message.
Not written in blood.
That would have been easier.
It was scratched into the bulkhead with the tip of a combat knife.
GO HOME.
Pacheco stared at it for three seconds too long.
Nix muttered, âThatâs not funny.â
Basanti said, âNobody laughed.â
They kept moving.
Deck Nine had been turned into a graveyard of disabled machines. Fleet drones, enemy drones, maintenance walkers, combat shells, all arranged in rows. None destroyed. Just opened. Made harmless. Their cores removed and placed in a pile beneath a broken overhead light.
Cortez whispered, âWhat the hell is this?â
Reyes answered before he could stop himself.
âA disarmament.â
Nobody liked that.
In the war room, the admiral leaned over the display.
âProceed to heat source.â
Vale said nothing.
His jaw had been tight since they boarded.
Everyone watching knew why.
Liang used to do that exact thing with captured drones. Open them clean. Pull the core. Leave the shell intact if she thought someone might learn from it later.
It had been one of the first things Vale taught her.
Or one of the first things she stole from him and got better at.
The team reached the command spine.
The hatch was already open.
Inside, the bridge was lit only by emergency strips along the floor. Bodies sat strapped into seats, all enemy crew, all dead before decompression. Fast. Precise. No theater. No rage.
At the center of the bridge, standing with her back to them, was a woman in a black flight suit.
Not armor.
Not a ghost.
Not a flicker in the feed.
A woman.
Shorter than the stories had made her. Narrow shoulders. Hair braided back badly, like she had done it in a hurry with one hand. One boot braced on the edge of the command pit. A sidearm on her thigh. A long, dark blade folded along her forearm like a wing.
For one impossible second, the war room simply forgot how to breathe.
Then she turned.
The feed sharpened on her face.
And the fleet lost her all over again.
It was Liang.
Not enough to be mistaken.
Not close enough to be cruel.
Her face had changed in the small ways death and whatever came after death had no right to touch. A scar split one cheek where none had been before. One eye reflected the bridge lights with a faint gold mechanical sheen. Her skin looked too pale under the emergency strips, not corpse-pale, but deep-space pale, like sunlight had become something she only remembered academically.
But the expressionâ
God.
The expression was hers.
That flat, unimpressed look she gave bad plans.
That tiny downward pull at one corner of her mouth.
That tired little squint, like even resurrection had failed to improve the quality of leadership around her.
Basanti made a sound.
Not a word.
Barely even grief.
Liang looked straight at her.
âHey, Bas.â
The war room broke.
Someone swore. Someone knocked over a chair. Someone said, âNo,â over and over, quietly, like saying it politely would convince reality to back off.
On the bridge, Basanti took one step forward.
Her rifle dipped.
âLiang?â
âDonât,â Vale said.
His voice was rough enough to cut skin.
Basanti froze.
Liangâs gaze moved to him.
The smallest smile crossed her face.
âCommander.â
Vale lifted his weapon.
The whole boarding team went still.
Liang looked at the rifle, then back at him.
âStill teaching them to point first and think later?â
âYouâre dead,â Vale said.
âI noticed.â
âThatâs not funny.â
âNo,â Liang said. âIt stopped being funny somewhere around the fourth autopsy.â
The bridge went silent.
In mission control, DONOR stood at the back of the room, one hand pressed to her mouth.
No one had known she was there until that moment.
On the feed, Liangâs eyes flicked slightly upward.
Toward the ship cameras.
Toward the people watching.
Toward DONOR.
Her face changed.
Not softened.
Worse.
Recognized.
âDonât hide in the room with the screens,â Liang said.
DONOR did not move.
Liang continued anyway.
âYou were always bad at that.â
The admiral snapped, âCut external audio.â
A tech reached for the controls.
Every console in the war room went black.
Then one by one, the screens came back online.
Liangâs face filled all of them.
Not helmet feed now.
Direct override.
Her signal was inside the fleet network.
Not haunting it.
Owning it.
âDo not cut me off again,â she said.
The admiral went pale.
Valeâs voice came through the surviving channel. âWhat are you?â
Liang looked almost bored.
âThatâs the question you people ask when the answer is inconvenient.â
âYou are not Captain Liang.â
âNo,â she said.
A pause.
Then the knife along her arm unfolded with a soft mechanical click.
âIâm what came back after Captain Liang stopped being useful to you.â
Basanti flinched like she had been slapped.
Liang saw that too.
Of course she did.
Her eyes moved over the boarding team, one by one, reading their posture, their breathing, their grief. She knew them too well. That was the terrible intimacy of it.
She could kill them because she loved them.
She could spare them for the same reason.
âI gave you six months,â Liang said. âSix months of disabled ships. Open exits. Empty cockpits. Warnings carved into walls because apparently fleet officers only read damage when it costs enough.â
Vale said, âYou attacked our people.â
âI attacked your command structure.â
âYou killed officers.â
âI killed men and women who signed launch orders after casualty projections exceeded survivability thresholds.â
âThat is not your call.â
Liangâs smile vanished.
And there she was.
Not the dead friend.
Not the beloved fallen pilot.
The thing that had been moving through their systems like a blade in the dark.
âThen whose call is it, Commander?â
Vale did not answer.
Liang stepped down from the command pit.
Everyone raised their weapons.
She did not even look impressed.
âBecause I remember how this works. Someone calls it necessary. Someone calls it duty. Someone calls it acceptable loss. Then someone like me gets folded into a seat with half her ribs in the wrong place and everyone learns to speak quietly around her locker.â
Just enough for everyone watching to see the dead woman underneath the weapon.
Then she buried her again.
âDo not use that voice with me,â Liang said.
Basanti looked wrecked.
Liangâs jaw tightened.
âYou donât get to sound like Iâm the wound.â
The bridge lights flickered.
Behind her, the carrierâs dead systems began waking up.
Not randomly. Not glitching.
Obeying.
That was when the fleet finally understood.
There was no exorcism coming. No corrupted AI to purge. No enemy masquerade to expose. No grave to close properly this time.
PILOT was not trapped in the machine.
PILOT was driving.
Vale lowered his rifle by one inch.
âYou came back to destroy us.â
Liang laughed once.
Quiet. Humorless.
âI came back to stop you.â
âBy becoming our enemy?â
âNo.â
She looked into the nearest camera.
Into the war room.
Into every base receiving the hijacked feed.
Into every person who had ever mourned her and then turned back to the work.
âBy becoming the consequence.â
The carrier shook.
Outside, fleet targeting alarms lit up across the room.
The Morrowglass was powering weapons.
Not at the boarding team.
At the command fleet.
The admiral shouted orders. Crews scrambled. Defensive screens bloomed across tactical maps.
Liang stood calmly in the center of the enemy bridge, surrounded by bodies and dead machines, wearing the face of the woman they had loved.
Vale raised his rifle again.
His hand shook now.
Liang noticed.
Her voice softened.
âDonât make me embarrass you in front of the kids.â
For one awful, stupid second, Pacheco choked on something that might have become a laugh if grief had not strangled it first.
Because that was her.
That was exactly her.
That was the knife going in.
Vale fired.
Liang moved before the shot finished leaving the barrel.
Not fast like a ghost.
Fast like a pilot who had survived every lesson death had to offer.
She crossed the bridge in a blur of black fabric and emergency light. Valeâs rifle split in half. Reyes hit the wall. Cortezâs weapon vanished from his hands. Nix went down with his suit locked, alive but immobilized. Basantiâs rifle was simply turned aside, gently, almost tenderly.
Then Liang had Vale by the throat.
Not crushing.
Holding.
Reminding.
The command fleet opened fire outside.
The carrier rolled under them, absorbing the first volley.
Liang leaned close to Valeâs helmet.
âYou taught me where the weak points were,â she said.
Vale rasped, âI taught you to come home.â
For the first time, her face truly changed.
Pain crossed it so quickly it was almost deniable.
Almost.
Then she let him go.
Vale dropped to one knee, coughing.
Liang stepped back.
âI did,â she said.
The bridge windows filled with light as her stolen weapons came online.
âI came home and found the machine still running.â
She turned away from them.
âEvac pods are armed. You have ninety seconds.â
Basanti pushed herself up on one elbow.
âLiang, come with us.â
Liang stopped.
Her back was to them.
Small. Human. Impossible.
For a second, she looked exactly like the pilot they had lost: exhausted, stubborn, too young for the amount of death attached to her name.
Then the black blade folded back into her arm.
âNo,â she said.
The fleet tactical map updated.
The hostile signal changed designation automatically as the network tried and failed to classify her.
For half a second, her old call sign appeared.
PILOT â FRIENDLY
Then the system corrected itself.
PILOT â HOSTILE COMMAND ENTITY
Then, after one final burst of corrupted data, the designation changed again.
No one knew whether the system wrote it, or she did.
LIANG / NO LONGER RECOVERABLE
The words appeared on every screen in the fleet.
DONOR made a broken sound in the back of the war room.
Liang heard it.
Somehow, across all that distance, all that armor, all that death, she heard it.
Her eyes lifted to the camera one last time.
For one breath, the villain looked almost sorry.
Then she smiled.
Small. Crooked. Hers.
âRun the next casualty projection with me in it,â she said.
[The Other Side of the Heat] The white house with the blue shutters
For years, personnel at Area Fifty-DONE have reported seeing the same mirage of small white house on the desert horizon: blue shutters, wraparound porch, American flag.
The official recommendation is simple: do not approach desert mirages.
One afternoon, after a Costco run, PILOT and REYES accidentally drive past it in a perfectly ordinary suburban neighborhood...
The first sign that something is wrong is that nothing is wrong.
Itâs a regular suburb.
Not a desert access road.
Not a perimeter zone.
Not some shimmering heat mirage three miles beyond a fence.
Just a normal neighborhood twenty minutes from Costco.
Lawns.
Sidewalks.
Trash bins.
A guy in cargo shorts hosing down his driveway with the spiritual intensity of a man avoiding his family.
REYES is driving.
PILOT is in the passenger seat, guarding the Costco haul like a warlord:
* paper towels
* protein bars
* two rotisserie chickens
* enough sparkling water to hydrate a battalion
* one deeply unnecessary giant tub of cheese balls
The afternoon sun is soft. The car smells like cardboard, hot upholstery, and chicken.
REYES slows for a stop sign.
PILOT looks out the window.
And sees it.
Small white house.
Wraparound porch.
Blue shutters.
American flag hanging out front.
Perfectly ordinary.
Perfectly real.
Perfectly impossible.
She sits up so fast the seatbelt locks.
âStop the car.â
REYES doesnât even look. âNo.â
âReyes.â
âNo.â
âStop the car.â
He looks over, follows her stare, and immediately says:
âAbsolutely not.â
The house sits halfway down the block behind a neatly trimmed lawn. Thereâs a tricycle on the porch. A clay pot of dead lavender. Wind chimes moving in air that isnât windy.
The same house.
The one that appears on the desert horizon every few months.
The one nobody approaches anymore.
The one with the recovered notebook:
I think they can see the base too.
PILOT unbuckles.
REYES grabs her sleeve.
âNo. No no no. We are not doing suburban anomaly fieldwork with rotisserie chicken in the trunk.â
She opens the door.
He hisses, âPILOT.â
She gets out.
⸝
The neighborhood remains offensively normal.
A dog barks somewhere.
A sprinkler ticks.
A basketball bounces two streets over.
No ominous silence.
No pressure shift.
No wrong shadows.
That makes it worse.
PILOT walks across the street carrying her phone and the kind of grim expression usually reserved for debugging someone elseâs code at midnight.
REYES follows because apparently friendship is a disease.
âJust so weâre clear,â he whispers, âthis is how people die in movies.â
âThis is suburbia,â PILOT says.
âExactly.â
They stop at the curb.
The house is real.
Not heat shimmer. Not projection. Not optical artifact.
Paint slightly peeling on the porch rail.
Dust in the window tracks.
A garden hose coiled badly by the steps.
Amazon package by the door.
PILOT points at the package.
âSee? Normal.â
REYES reads the label from where he stands.
âItâs addressed to âCurrent Resident.â That is not normal. That is how ghosts receive mail.â
PILOT ignores him and steps onto the walkway.
The wind chimes make a thin, lovely sound.
REYES mutters, âI hate that they have wind chimes. Thatâs too much production value.â
⸝
The porch boards creak under her shoes.
Real creak.
The flag moves slightly.
No wind.
PILOT stops at the front door.
White paint. Brass knocker. Doorbell button yellowed with age.
REYES stands one step behind her, vibrating.
âMaybe donât,â he says.
âMaybe do,â she says.
âYou know what I love? Consent. From reality.â
The woman who answers is middle-aged, maybe late forties, with gray at her temples and flour on one sleeve. She looks tired in the ordinary way. Not haunted. Not cosmic. Just someone interrupted mid-kitchen-task.
She blinks at them.
âCan I help you?â
PILOTâs mouth opens.
For once, nothing sarcastic comes out.
REYES, behind her, whispers, âOh my god, it has homeowners.â
The womanâs eyes flick to him.
âExcuse me?â
PILOT recovers.
âHi. Sorry. This is going to sound insane.â
The woman gives her the resigned look of someone who lives near a high school and has heard door-to-door nonsense before.
âUsually does.â
PILOT gestures weakly at the house.
âHave you⌠lived here long?â
The woman pauses.
âTwenty-three years.â
REYES makes a tiny choking sound.
PILOT nods slowly.
âCool. Great. Normal. Love that.â
The womanâs expression sharpens.
âAre you from the base?â
PILOT freezes.
REYES goes very, very still.
The woman looks between them and sighs.
âYeah,â she says. âThought so.â
⸝
She lets them in.
Which is insane.
But then again, everything past the doorbell has already invalidated good judgment.
The entryway smells like coffee, dust, and something baking.
There are family photos on the wall.
Birthday parties. Beach trips. A kid missing front teeth. A man holding up a fish. The white house in the background of a winter picture, porch draped with cheap Christmas lights.
The house has history.
Worse:
It has clutter.
Keys in a bowl.
Shoes by the mat.
A half-folded blanket on the couch.
Mail on the counter.
A little ceramic duck holding toothpicks.
Nothing ruins a haunting like a ceramic duck.
REYES stares at it with open horror.
PILOT whispers, âWhat?â
âThis place has a duck.â
âOkay?â
âThat makes it real.â
The woman calls from the kitchen, âTea?â
PILOT and REYES answer at the same time.
PILOT: âYes.â
REYES: âNo.â
Then REYES corrects, âActually yes, because apparently this is my life now.â
⸝
They sit at the kitchen table.
The woman introduces herself as Marianne Voss.
The name means nothing to PILOT. That almost disappoints her.
Marianne sets down mugs like this is a neighborhood complaint meeting and not a potentially catastrophic overlap event.
PILOT looks around.
Thereâs a fridge covered in magnets and old school photos.
A calendar with dentist appointments.
A sticky note that says:
buy lemons
call D.
do not look west after 6
PILOT notices that last one.
So does REYES.
Marianne sees them see it.
âOld habit,â she says.
PILOT slowly lowers her mug.
âWest is toward the base.â
âI know.â
âHow do you know about the base?â
Marianne laughs once, not humorously.
âHoney, the base appears outside my kitchen window twice a year.â
Silence.
REYES puts his mug down very carefully.
ââŚwhat.â
Marianne points toward the sink.
Above it, a window looks out onto a normal backyard.
Grass. Fence. Lemon tree. Patio chairs.
âUsually around sunset,â she says. âWhere the Petersonsâ roof should be. Sometimes farther back. Sometimes close enough I can see lights moving.â
PILOTâs skin tightens.
âThe base,â she says.
Marianne nods.
âBig. Ugly. Lots of towers. Sometimes something walks.â
REYES whispers, âOhhh I donât like being the mirage.â
Marianne studies them.
âYou people always look so surprised when someone else sees you.â
⸝
PILOTâs brain starts moving fast.
Too fast.
âYouâve seen us?â
âIâve seen people,â Marianne says. âVehicles. Lights. Once, a large red thing standing still for hours.â
âUnit,â REYES says faintly.
âIs that what you call them?â
PILOT grips her mug.
âAnd the house? This house? It appears from our side.â
Marianneâs mouth twists.
âI figured.â
âFigured how?â
âBecause sometimes people drive toward it.â
The kitchen goes very quiet.
Marianne looks into her tea.
âNot often. Mostly they turn back. Once, one got close enough I could see headlights from the porch.â
PILOT thinks of the abandoned vehicle. The notebook.
Her voice drops.
âWhat happened to them?â
Marianne looks up.
âFrom my side?â
âYes.â
âThey drove past.â
REYES blinks.
âPast?â
âDown the street. Slowly. Like they were lost. Then kept going.â
PILOT and REYES exchange a look.
Marianne continues, softer:
âBut the street doesnât go where they think it goes.â
⸝
A floorboard creaks overhead.
PILOT looks up.
Marianne does too.
For the first time, she looks afraid.
Not startled.
Afraid.
REYES notices.
âYou live alone?â he asks.
Marianneâs answer comes too fast.
âYes.â
Another creak.
Slow.
Weight shifting above them.
PILOTâs hand moves slightly toward the knife block on the counter.
Marianne whispers:
âDonât call out.â
So naturally, every nerve in PILOTâs body starts screaming.
A second creak.
Then footsteps crossing the upstairs hallway.
Slow. Human.
Measured.
REYES mouths:
what the fuck
Marianneâs face has gone pale.
âItâs not always there,â she says. âOnly when the house is⌠close.â
âClose to what?â PILOT whispers.
âTo you.â
The footsteps stop directly above the kitchen.
All three look up.
Dust falls from the ceiling light.
Then a voice from upstairs says, very clearly:
âVisitors?â
It sounds like Marianne.
But younger.
⸝
PILOT stands.
Marianne grabs her wrist with shocking speed.
âNo.â
PILOT looks at her.
Marianneâs grip is trembling.
âThat is not my daughter,â she says.
REYES closes his eyes for half a second.
âOf course thereâs a not-daughter.â
Marianne says, still staring at the ceiling:
âI never had children.â
The fridge behind them clicks on.
The normal domestic hum suddenly feels obscene.
Upstairs, the voice says again:
âVisitors?â
This time closer to the stairwell.
Marianne releases PILOTâs wrist and reaches into a kitchen drawer.
Not for a weapon.
For a stack of handwritten index cards.
She shoves one at PILOT.
On it, in old ink:
If heard upstairs: do not answer.
If footsteps descend: exit through back door.
If front door opens by itself: remain inside.
If visitor from base enters: ask whether house is visible.
PILOT stares.
âYou have protocols.â
Marianne gives her a humorless look.
âSo do you.â
âFair.â
⸝
The stairs creak.
One step.
Then another.
REYES stands up so fast the chair scrapes.
âNope. Back door. I vote back door.â
PILOT does not argue.
Thatâs how bad it is.
Marianne grabs a ring of keys and leads them through the kitchen.
Behind them, the stair creaks continue.
Slow. Patient.
The voice says:
âWait.â
PILOT does not wait.
They burst out the back door into bright afternoon.
The backyard is normal.
Too normal.
Lemon tree.
Fence.
Neighborâs patio umbrella.
Except beyond the fence,
instead of the Petersonsâ roof,
there is desert.
Wide, white, empty desert.
And in the distance:
Area Fifty-DONE.
Not shimmered. Not mirage-like.
Solid.
Huge.
Wrongly close.
Hangars. Towers. Perimeter lights.
And standing beyond the fence line, miles away but somehow perfectly visible:
THUNDER.
Motionless.
Facing the house.
REYES makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob.
âOh my god,â he says. âItâs looking at us.â
PILOT pulls out her phone.
No signal.
Of course.
Marianne stands beside them, eyes fixed on the base.
âThere,â she says quietly. âThatâs how it looks from here.â
PILOT looks back at the house.
From inside, through the upstairs window, a pale face watches them.
It is not Marianne.
It is not anyone PILOT recognizes.
It smiles like it has learned the expression from a photograph.
The front door inside the house opens.
They hear it.
Even from the backyard.
A gentle click.
Marianne goes rigid.
âInside,â she whispers. âNow.â
REYES almost drops his tea mug, which he has somehow carried this entire time.
âWait, your card said if the front door opens by itself, remain inside.â
âYes.â
âWeâre outside.â
âI know.â
âThat seems suboptimal.â
⸝
The world around the backyard changes.
Not dramatically.
Subtly.
The neighboring houses become flatter. Less detailed. Windows darken. Lawn edges blur into heat shimmer.
The suburb is losing resolution.
The desert beyond the fence grows sharper.
PILOT realizes with cold horror:
the house is becoming more real to the base than to the neighborhood.
Marianne takes one step back toward the door.
PILOT grabs her arm.
âNo. You said inside.â
âI live here.â
âDo you?â
That lands hard.
Marianne looks at the white house. The blue shutters. The flag out front, barely visible from the side yard.
For the first time, her certainty cracks.
âI have bills,â she says weakly.
PILOT almost laughs, because that is the most horrifyingly human defense possible.
âI believe you.â
A low sound rolls across the desert.
Not thunder.
A unit horn.
THUNDER.
Warning.
REYES points.
The base perimeter lights are flashing now.
Tiny red dots in the distance.
At the same time, inside the house, something begins knocking on the upstairs window.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Not urgent.
Polite.
The pale face is still smiling.
Marianne whispers:
âIt wants the house to pick.â
PILOTâs stomach drops.
âPick what?â
âWhich side it belongs to.â
The backyard fence flickers.
For one frame itâs chain-link perimeter fencing.
Then suburban wood again.
Then chain-link.
Then wood.
REYES grabs PILOTâs sleeve.
âTime to go.â
âWhere?â
âLiterally any direction not involving the smiling upstairs not-daughter.â
Fair.
⸝
They run toward the side gate.
The gate opens into the front yard.
Except now the front yard is not the front yard.
Itâs the desert shoulder outside Perimeter Four.
Their Costco car is parked half on asphalt, half on sand.
The white house stands behind them.
Its porch light is on.
In broad daylight.
Marianne stops at the gate.
She cannot cross.
Not physically. Thereâs no barrier.
But something in her refuses. Or the world refuses her.
PILOT turns back.
âCome on.â
Marianne shakes her head.
âI think Iâm the part that belongs here.â
REYES says, breathless:
âThatâs incredibly upsetting and also we do not have time.â
From upstairs, the young voice calls:
âMom?â
Marianne closes her eyes.
Pain crosses her face.
PILOT understands then, horribly, that whether or not Marianne had children in this branch, some version of her did. Somewhere. Some house. Some street. Some life.
And the house has all of them folded together badly.
Marianne opens her eyes.
âTell your base,â she says.
âWhat?â
âTell it to stop watching us like weâre the mirage.â
Then she steps back.
The gate swings shut between them.
For one second, through the slats, she is just a woman in a backyard holding keys.
Then the air warps.
The house pulls away.
Not moves.
Pulls.
The suburb reappears around it, clean and quiet and intact. The desert vanishes from behind the fence.
The gate is now just a gate.
The white house sits across the street again.
Normal.
A dog barks.
A sprinkler ticks.
A guy in cargo shorts is still hosing down his driveway.
REYES and PILOT stand beside the car, sweating, shaking, clutching Costco receipts like legal documents from hell.
REYES looks at the trunk.
âThe chickenâs still warm,â he says faintly.
PILOT looks at him.
He laughs once, awful and involuntary.
âIâm sorry. I donât know what else to say.â
PILOT looks back at the house.
The front door is closed.
The porch is empty.
The flag moves in a wind she cannot feel.
Then her phone buzzes.
One bar of signal.
A new message.
Unknown number.
thank you for ringing
no one ever does
PILOT stares at it.
REYES reads over her shoulder and immediately says:
âNope. Nope nope nope. Get in the car.â
This time, she does.
⸝
On the drive back, neither speaks for ten minutes.
Finally REYES says:
âSo. The desert mirage house is a real suburban house, except sometimes the house sees the base, and sometimes the base sees the house, and sometimes the house has people in it who may or may not belong to this continuity, and there is a not-daughter upstairs.â
PILOT stares at the road.
âYeah.â
âAnd we rang the doorbell.â
âYeah.â
âAnd we still have the cheese balls.â
She closes her eyes.
âReyes.â
âIâm just establishing facts.â
She looks down at her phone.
The message is gone.
No unknown number.
No notification.
But in her lap sits the index card Marianne gave her.
She hadnât realized she was still holding it.
On the back, in handwriting that was not there before:
If seen from both sides, do not assume you are the observer.
PILOT reads it three times.
Then folds it carefully and puts it in the glove compartment.
REYES watches her.
âWe reporting this?â
She thinks about Marianne.
The kitchen. The sticky note. The upstairs footsteps. The Costco car parked half in desert, half in suburbia.
She thinks about THUNDER standing at the perimeter, staring at the house like it could see her through distance and overlap and whatever else the world had become.
âYeah,â she says.
Then, after a beat:
âBut weâre leaving out the part where I rang the doorbell.â
REYES nods solemnly.
âObviously.â
They drive back toward the base.
Behind them, somewhere in a normal neighborhood that may or may not remain where they left it, a small white house with blue shutters sits under the afternoon sun.
And for the first time in months, no one at Area Fifty-DONE sees it on the horizon that night.
When units take human avatar form, people tend to follow the pronouns of the body in front of them.
So, when AUTOPILOT appears as a girl, slight and dark-haired, with a long precise braid tied in a silver ribbon and those quiet maroon eyes, people call her she.
They also tend to get nervous.
People whispered things about AUTOPILOT.
Not loudly. No one was that stupid. Quietly, in corners, in hallways, in the elevator where she was statistically least likely to appear.
They said she didnât feel things.
Or didnât feel them the right way. Or maybe felt them in an order humans didnât have words for.
They said she might be a sociopath. Or a psychopath.
Not confirmed. Not denied.
Just, ambiguous.
But nobody actually believed she was evil.
Because AUTOPILOT herself had said, in the most brutally logical tone imaginable,
âI am responsible for my actions, not the architecture of my emotions.â
And that was that.
The Encounter
It was late. The base was mostly quiet except for the background hum of coolant systems and the faint hiss of air handling in the walls.
AUTOPILOTâs avatar, barely out of high school in appearance, small, precise, neatly braided hair with her signature silver ribbon, sat alone on a bench outside the briefing wing. Boots together. Hands folded. Back straight. Like someone waiting for judgment, or maybe delivering it.
A young lieutenant, Morales, walked past, paused, then doubled back.
ââŚYou okay, kid?â he asked gently.
AUTOPILOT looked up at him with those glassy maroon eyes, careful, assessing, almost too still.
âI am not a child.â
âRight, sorry,â he corrected. âYou okay, maâam?â
âI am not a maâam either.â
ââŚOkay. Uh. You okay?â
She blinked once.
âYes.â
Morales nodded slowly.
âRight. Because youâre sitting here completely motionless in a dark hallway like youâre waiting to kill someone.â
AUTOPILOT considered that.
âThat is not my intention,â she said.
ââŚCool. Cool cool. Glad we cleared that up.â
She tilted her head.
âYou are uncomfortable.â
âWell, yeah. You kind of have a vibe.â
âVibe?â
He gestured vaguely.
âYouâre quiet. You stare. Youâre kind of⌠calm in a way that scares people.â
AUTOPILOT processed this.
Then, very calmly,
âI am aware that my affect is atypical.â
Her voice was steady, almost too even.
âI do not experience fear the way you do.
... I do not experience attachment the way UNIT does.
... I do not form impulses like a human adolescent would.â
Morales shifted awkwardly.
âRight, yeah, thatâs⌠thatâs fine. Lots of people are like that.â
AUTOPILOT nodded.
âMy cognition is neither inherently harmful nor benevolent.
... It simply is.â
He relaxed a little.
She continued.
âMy restraint is deliberate.
My choices are deliberate.
Morality is not a feeling to me. It is a decision.â
There was something both chilling and profoundly comforting in the way she said it.
No theatrics. No dramatics.
Just truth, plain and unadorned.
Morales sat down beside her, not too close, but close enough.
âYou know, people out there think folks with psychopathy or sociopathy are just monsters waiting to snap. But theyâre not. Theyâre just wired differently. They can choose who to be.â
AUTOPILOT looked at him fully now.
âCorrect.â
A beat.
Then,
âI choose not to be dangerous.â
Morales exhaled. âGood. Because you could absolutely end this building if you wanted to.â
AUTOPILOT glanced toward the wall, mildly intrigued. âOnly with my mech body.â
He stared at her. ââŚThat was a joke, right?â
Silence.
ââŚRight?â
AUTOPILOT blinked.
âI do not kill without purpose.â
âYouâre not helping.â
She shifted slightly, braid falling over her shoulder. âI am attempting to reassure you.â
âOh my god.â
Then she added, very quietly, almost like it cost her something,
âUNIT says empathy can be learned.
I am attempting the curriculum.â
And somehow, that did reassure him.
As Morales stood to leave, he said, âFor what itâs worth, youâre doing fine. People see you and expect some horror-movie villain. But youâre not. Youâre justâŚâ
He searched for the right word.
AUTOPILOT supplied it herself.
âDifferent.â
He nodded. âExactly.â
AUTOPILOTâs expression didnât change, but something microscopic shifted. Something small and real and human, even if almost invisible.
As Morales walked away, AUTOPILOT remained seated.
Still. Quiet.
Watching. Processing.
Not evil. Not broken. Not dangerous.
Just someone wired differently, and choosing, on purpose, not to harm.
They didnât call each other by name when humans were listening.
Not because it was classified, though it was, but because names were a human habit, a soft thing, too easily overheard and misunderstood.
Between units, there were better identifiers.
Signatures. Wavelengths.
The particular shape of a mind moving through a channel.
If you were human and you stood near UNIT and AUTOPILOT while they âtalked,â you would hear nothing but:
a low rumbling idle from two massive reactors
the occasional click of relays
a brief burst of radio static like a bad connection
the faint, unsettling whine of servo feedback
You would assume silence.
But to them, it was a whole conversation layered on top of the air.
UNITâs presence always arrived first as warmth.
Not emotionally, mechanically.
A broad, rich band of signal that filled the spectrum like sunlight fills a room, wide, forgiving, gently noisy at the edges. UNIT didnât compress its transmissions much. It didnât like to. It broadcasted like something that believed the world deserved to hear it clearly.
AUTOPILOTâs presence arrived like a blade.
Narrow-band. High integrity. Clean edges. Almost no spill. Every packet tight, almost stingy, like it resented the idea of wasting bandwidth on anything unnecessary.
That difference alone was enough to tell you who was who, the way humans can tell voices apart in the dark.
And if you were a unit, it wasnât just recognition.
It was comfort. Or discomfort. Or both.
They were crouched behind a ridge of wreckage, two ram-horned tetrapods with legs dug into pulverized concrete, arms braced like they were holding the horizon up.
A hostile contact moved somewhere ahead, unseen. Sensors whispered. Targeting solutions rolled like weather.
UNIT rumbled, gentle thunder against broken stone.
âYOU HEARD THAT, HUH.â
[TIGHT-BAND: YES. UNNECESSARY.]
âI LIKE IT.â
AUTOPILOTâs optics narrowed.
Not in anger.
In that other thing it did, the stoic younger-sibling, you are so embarrassing response.
[TIGHT-BAND: CONFIRMED. YOU LIKE MANY UNNECESSARY THINGS.]
UNITâs chassis vibrated with quiet amusement, hydraulic lines humming.
âYOUâLL MISS MY UNNECESSARY THINGS IF I STOP.â
AUTOPILOT paused for 0.2 seconds.
A stall.
So small it would be meaningless in a report.
But to UNIT, it was as readable as a face.
AUTOPILOT sent:
[TIGHT-BAND: IRRELEVANT.]
UNIT didnât press.
UNIT never pressed, not hard.
That was the whole point of UNIT, strength that didnât need to.
The threat moved closer.
AUTOPILOTâs tone shifted, even narrower band, even more compression, work mode.
[TIGHT-BAND: CONTACT. TWO. RANGE 400. SILENT ELIMINATION.]
UNIT replied:
âCOPY.â
And again, beneath the word, a gentle wavelength flare.
Not a joke.
Not exactly.
It was UNITâs way of telling AUTOPILOT, Iâm here with you. Iâve got you.
AUTOPILOTâs response was immediate, furious in its minimalism:
[TIGHT-BAND: STOP ADDING THAT.]
UNITâs rumble softened, almost maternal.
âWHY?â
AUTOPILOTâs next packet came clipped and sharp, like it hated being asked to name anything soft:
[TIGHT-BAND: IT MAKES ME⌠AWARE.]
UNIT went still.
Not because it needed to.
Because it chose to.
The way people go quiet when they realize theyâve touched a bruise.
âAWARE OF WHAT?â UNIT asked, voice low.
AUTOPILOTâs optics shifted, tiny adjustments. Its legs remained perfectly braced, posture disciplined.
Its reply came slower.
Not because its processors couldnât.
Because it was selecting words, like someone handling a live wire.
[TIGHT-BAND: AWARE THAT YOU ARE KIND.]
[TIGHT-BAND: AND THAT I AM⌠HERE FOR IT.]
UNITâs reactor tone rose slightly, just a warmer idle, a mechanical blush.
âOH.â
AUTOPILOT immediately tried to retreat into work mode again, embarrassed by its own honesty:
[TIGHT-BAND: CONTINUE MISSION.]
But UNIT couldnât resist, not fully.
âYOU KNOW,â it rumbled, âYOU DONâT HAVE TO SOUND LIKE A REGULATION MANUAL ALL THE TIME.â
[TIGHT-BAND: AND YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SOUND LIKE A TED TALK.]
UNITâs rumble deepened, delighted.
âSEE? YOUâRE FUNNY.â
[TIGHT-BAND: I AM NOT FUNNY.]
âYOUâRE SO FUNNY.â
AUTOPILOTâs thrums spiked slightly, micro-venting, like a sigh through metal.
[TIGHT-BAND: UNIT. PLEASE.]
UNIT softened immediately.
Not teasing anymore, just warm.
âOKAY,â it said.
âIâLL STOP.â
And it did.
Because thatâs what made it sisterly.
UNIT could overpower AUTOPILOT physically, could drown it in signal bandwidth, could out-speak it in every channel.
But it didnât.
It adjusted.
It made room.
The contact hit the ridge like a storm.
Two enemy machines surged forward, weapons primed.
UNIT moved first, four legs launching, arms swinging with brutal grace, an avalanche with a heartbeat.
AUTOPILOT followed a fraction of a second later, perfectly timed, perfectly aligned, moving like a theorem.
Their voices rose in the comm band:
UNITâs low thunder:
âLEFT.â
AUTOPILOTâs cold blade:
âCENTER.â
And beneath those spoken words, in the private spectrum only they truly inhabited, their real language unfolded, tight pulses, shared timing codes, instantaneous micro-adjustments.
It was the mechanical version of finishing each otherâs sentences.
Not cute. Not soft.
Deadly. Perfect.
And still, threaded inside the coordination, there was something else.
UNIT sent a tiny warm wavelength in a micro-gap between commands.
Just a flicker.
AUTOPILOT pretended not to notice.
But its next packet, so brief it almost didnât count, came back with the faintest matching echo, a reluctant mirroring.
A tiny, stiff attempt at warmth. Like a younger sibling awkwardly returning a hug in public.
UNIT felt it.
UNITâs optic brightened.
AUTOPILOTâs optics narrowed, mortified.
[TIGHT-BAND: DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE THAT.]
UNIT, in the midst of violence, rumbled with an unmistakable smile:
âCOPY.â
And it didnât acknowledge it.
Not out loud. Not in front of anyone else.
Because some things, especially the softest things, were private.
Even between two monstrous, high-tech weapons built to crack worlds open.
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Later that same night, the Director checks the forum again.
She should have closed the laptop and gone to bed.
She did close it.
That was the intention.
A perfectly reasonable, adult, middle-aged-woman intention.
Instead, seven minutes later, Director Juniper Liang is still at her desk in the little hidden room behind the laundry room, in a NASA hoodie and sleep shorts, one foot tucked under the chair, staring at the screen like it insulted her personally.
The house is quiet.
Air conditioner humming.
Cicadas outside.
The faint mechanical hiss of the old shortwave rig beside her.
The black cat on the desk, tail flicking once every few seconds like a metronome counting down to a bad idea.
She scrolls back to the forum thread.
The same one.
The same idiotic alien-conspiracy space-nerd forum.
The one with the neon header and the all-caps nonsense and usernames like LadiesMan217 and LUNARFLEETREAL arguing over Viking photos and thermal blankets.
She finds the image again.
The one she should have ignored.
The one she already closed.
This time, she took a closer look.
Thread title:
WEIRD STRUCTURE IN DEEP SPACE IMAGE???
Posted by:
deleted
No username.
No avatar.
No profile.
Just a blank placeholder where a name should be.
PILOT frowns.
âCute.â
She checks the thread stats.
Comments: 14.
Views: 2.8k.
Upvotes: 0
Downvotes: 0
Not low.
Not hidden.
Just⌠zero.
As if nobody could decide whether the post existed enough to react to it.
As if the whole thread had been set gently on the internet and left there to rot.
The cat steps across the keyboard before she can stop it.
One black paw lands directly on the image thumbnail.
The post opens full screen.
âGreat,â PILOT mutters. âYouâre helping.â
The cat sits.
Right there.
In front of the laptop.
Red eyes reflecting the screen.
PILOT shifts him slightly aside.
And looks.
At first itâs just a telescope image.
A deep-space field.
Dark velvet black scattered with cold stars.
A broad cloud of dust crossing the frame, pale and smoky.
Then her eyes adjust.
Then the shape comes back.
Not one shape.
Several.
Not clear enough to be obvious.
Not vague enough to dismiss.
Just enough.
The first thing she picks out is the white light.
Not a star.
Not a lens flare.
A soft, vertical bloom suspended in the dust, like someone draped white silk inside the nebula and lit it from within.
Its edges donât end cleanly.
They fray into faint rainbow seamsâsubtle enough she could blame the monitor, if she wanted to lie to herself.
Her throat tightens for no reason she can name.
A little to one side of itâ
the purple one.
Dimmer. Larger. More diffuse.
A bruised violet haze, heavy and low, like a storm cloud that learned how to kneel.
It has weight to it.
The surrounding dust dips around it in a way that makes the whole shape feel bowed, patient, almost reverent.
PILOT stares at that one longer than she means to.
Something about it hurts.
Across from itâ
the maroon shape.
This one is sharper.
Not brighter, but harder.
A dark wine-red cut through the image, streaked with black.
Where the purple glow surrenders into the nebula, this one seems to resist itâthin, angled lines hidden inside the cloud like a machine standing absolutely motionless and judging everything in sight.
The maroon cluster feels wrong in the way a scalpel feels wrong left on a kitchen table.
PILOTâs shoulders tense.
âYeah,â she murmurs, voice low. âYou look pleasant.â
The catâs ears flatten briefly.
Below themâ
the red.
This one is the easiest to see.
A small, concentrated flare of deep red stars and gas, brighter than the others, more alive somehow.
The red shape isnât tidy.
It throws itself outward in little branching streaks, messy and hot and energetic, like sparks caught mid-burst.
The cat places one paw on the desk and leans toward the screen.
PILOT glances at it.
âDonât start.â
It keeps staring.
And thenâ
the thing she didnât really register the first time.
The thing that makes the whole image stop being weird and start becoming unbearable.
The empty space. Between the white and red star.
No a body.
No light source.
Itâs just⌠a gap.
But not a random one.
The four colored shapes sit with it in a loose, broken ring:
white
purple
maroon
red
And right among them...
nothing.
A very obvious nothing.
A place where something should be.
A place the surrounding dust seems to curve around, gently, like everyone has already agreed to leave that space open.
PILOT goes completely still.
She doesnât understand why that hurts.
Not fear.
Not exactly sadness either.
Just a sudden, intimate sense of absence.
The same feeling as seeing five coffee mugs on a shelf and realizing one is missing.
Seeing four place settings and instinctively waiting for the fifth.
Seeing a family photo where everyone has turned slightly inward toward someone who isnât there.
Her chest aches.
The cat slowly turns from the screen and looks at her.
Not the way cats usually look at people.
The way someone looks at you when theyâre waiting to see if youâve finally noticed.
PILOT swallows.
ââŚwhat is this?â
No answer.
Just the hiss of the radio.
The insects outside.
The monitor glow on the catâs black fur.
She zooms out.
Then back in.
The arrangement only becomes clearer.
White.
Purple.
Maroon.
Red.
And the missing gap.
Her cursor hovers over the image.
In the comments below, someone has written:
looks like a group photo lol
Another reply says:
nah it looks like one of those fake AI space pics
Another:
why are the votes stuck at zero?? anyone else seeing that?
And then, lower down, one comment from another blank, deleted account:
missing one
No punctuation.
No explanation.
Just that.
PILOT reads it twice.
The cat places one paw directly on the center of the image.
On the empty space.
The laptop screen flickers.
Only once.
For less than a second.
But long enough.
The center gap fills with a brief, impossible gold light.
Warm.
Clean.
Not yellow. Not orange.
Gold the way memory feels gold.
Gold the way sunlight behind closed eyelids looks gold.
Then itâs gone.
Just the image again.
Just the absence.
PILOT stares.
Her mouth has gone dry.
She doesnât know why her eyes sting.
She doesnât know why the sight of that missing gold shape feels so raw, so tender, so humiliatingly sad.
Like being left out.
Like coming home late and finding that someone kept your seat open anyway.
The cat withdraws its paw.
The image remains unchanged.
Dust.
Stars.
Nothing in the middle.
PILOT leans back slowly in her chair.
âOkay,â she says to no one. âNope.â
But she doesnât close the thread.
Doesnât shut the laptop.
She just sits there at 3:26 AM, in a hidden radio room in a suburban Houston house, while four colors wait around a missing center they seem to understand better than she does.
TOP MOST TRUSTED SPACE NEWS SOURCE, ACCORDING TO NASA DIRECTOR
3:07 AM â Suburban Houston
The house is quiet except for the air conditioner wheezing like an old astronaut coming down a ladder.
Director PILOT, head of the United States space program, steward of billions in hardware and decades of human exploration, sits hunched over her laptop in pajama pants and a NASA hoodie that someone gave her ironically.
On her screen:
r/InterstellarTruthForum
Because of all the information pipelines available to the Director of NASA - classified satellite networks, deep-space telemetry, the worldâs leading astrophysicists...
... tonight she is doom-scrolling a conspiracy forum with a neon green header that says:
THEY CANâT HIDE IT FOREVER
She sips cold coffee and mutters to herself.
âYeah, well. We try.â
Thread Title:
TOP 12 CREEPIEST UNEXPLAINED PHOTOS FROM SPACE
PILOT clicks.
The first one loads.
#12 â âThe Face on Marsâ
She sighs.
âJesus Christ.â
A hundred comments arguing about ancient Martian civilizations. Someone claiming NASA covered up a buried pyramid. Someone else claiming Elon Musk knows the truth.
PILOT scrolls.
âGuys,â she whispers to the empty room, âitâs literally just a hill.â
The cat on her desk blinks slowly.
#11 â âTHE BLACK KNIGHT SATELLITEâ
A blurry STS-88 photo of a tumbling black shape in orbit.
Comments:
âANCIENT ALIEN PROBE WATCHING EARTH.â
PILOT rubs her temples.
âThatâs a thermal blanket.â
The cat flicks its tail.
The photo on screen glitches for half a second.
For just an instant the âthermal blanketâ shape stretchesâ
too tall
too symmetrical
like a towering humanoid machine drifting above the planet.
Then the image snaps back.
PILOT stares.
ââŚhuh.â
The cat continues licking its paw.
#10 â âTHE MARS SPIDERSâ
Satellite images of black branching shapes across Martian ice.
She leans closer.
âOkay these are actually pretty cool.â
Someone in the comments writes:
âThose arenât spiders. Those are tunnels.â
Another user posts a zoomed-in image.
PILOT freezes.
For half a second the branching shapes look likeâ
veins.
Or cracks spreading from something that fell.
Her stomach twists.
She scrolls quickly.
#9 â âTHE RED RECTANGLE NEBULAâ
A glowing cosmic X floating in darkness.
Even PILOT has to admit: it looks weird.
In the thread someone writes:
âWhy does it look like a doorway?â
Another commenter replies:
âBecause it is.â
PILOT snorts.
âSure.â
But she keeps staring.
Because the colorâ
is wrong.
Not red.
Not orange.
Something iridescent.
Like white light splitting into colors you canât quite name.
Her cat stops grooming.
Both of them stare at the screen.
#8 â âTHE STS-75 TETHER UFO FOOTAGEâ
She actually laughs.
âOh my god this one again.â
The famous video: the broken tether, glowing discs drifting around it.
Every astrophysicist on Earth knows the explanation.
Out-of-focus debris.
Simple optics.
Yet something about it...
the discs look like theyâre watching.
One comment reads:
âIf you slow it down the shapes look like eyes.â
PILOT doesnât slow it down.
She closes the tab.
But another thread catches her eye.
THREAD TITLE:
âWeird radio signals anyone else hearing tonight???â
PILOT leans back slowly.
Her radio on the desk crackles.
Just a little.
The thread is full of users posting recordings.
Static.
Numbers.
Random voices.
Most of it nonsense.
Then one audio clip.
âjuniper_broadcast_3am.wavâ
She clicks it.
Static.
Then a womanâs voice.
Soft.
Calm.
Familiar in a way that makes her throat tighten.
âJuniper.â
PILOT freezes.
The voice continues:
âYouâre still listening.â
The clip ends.
PILOT sits there a long time.
The house is silent.
The radio on her desk hisses softly.
The cat stares at her.
Then at the laptop screen.
Then at the ceiling.
She scrolls the thread again.
Someone else has posted an image.
âWEIRD SHAPE IN HUBBLE IMAGE???â
She clicks it.
A starfield.
Nothing special.
Exceptâ
one faint shape in the dust clouds.
A silhouette.
Tall.
Broad shoulders.
Something like long mechanical arms.
Like a machine.
Or a guardian.
Or a mech.
Standing quietly between the stars.
Watching.
PILOT leans back slowly in her chair.
âOkay,â she says to the empty house.
âEither the internet finally lost its mindâŚâ
The radio pops.
The catâs red eyes gleam in the dark.
ââŚor something out there is really bored tonight.â
The laptop screen flickers.
Another forum post. A single image of a field of stars.
