The alarm screamed before I could even catch my breath.
Senna's hand slammed the console. "Four fleet interceptors. Twelve minutes out."
I was still shaking from the sim. That maneuver—the one I shouldn't know, the one that nearly ripped the ship apart and sent Senna into the wall hard enough to crack her visor—it was still buzzing in my bones. My fingers hurt. My head hurt. Everything hurt.
"Kira." Senna's voice cut through the noise. "Did you hear me?"
"Yeah." I pulled myself into the pilot seat. The straps bit into my ribs. "Twelve minutes. Got it."
Echo-7's voice came through the comm, smooth and unbothered like always. "The graveyard beacon is seven minutes at current velocity. You will not outrun the interceptors."
"Thanks for the math," I muttered.
Senna leaned over my shoulder, her breath still uneven from the hit she took. Blood crusted at the corner of her mouth. She didn't wipe it. "Echo. What's at the beacon?"
"The black box," Echo said. "Lieutenant Voss hid it in the wreckage of the *Kestrel*. It contains evidence of the cartel agreement and the Starfire kill order."
I twisted around. "My mentor hid it in a *shipwreck*?"
"Correct."
"In the *graveyard*. Where fleet patrols sweep every seventy-two hours."
"Also correct."
Senna made a noise that might've been a laugh or a cough. "Your mentor was either brilliant or insane."
"Both," I said. My hands were already on the throttle. "Echo, send me the coords."
The map blinked onto my screen. A dense cluster of wreckage markers, most of them flagged red for radiation or structural collapse. The *Kestrel* was buried in the middle, surrounded by the crumpled remains of a dozen other ships from the Third Expansion. Nobody went in there unless they had a death wish or a salvage license.
I didn't have either.
"Senna," I said. "You got any tricks left?"
She was already pulling up the weapons array. "Couple plasma charges. One EMP pod. That's it."
"That's not it."
She looked at me. Her face was pale under the blood. "What do you want me to do, Kira? We're in a cargo hauler with a busted cooling system and no armor. They've got military-grade interceptors and enough firepower to vaporize us before we even see the beacon."
"Then we don't let them see us."
Her eyes narrowed. "What are you thinking?"
I pulled up the graveyard overlay. The wrecks weren't just debris. They were cover. Radiation pockets. Blind spots. If I could thread us through the densest section, the interceptors would have to slow down or risk shredding their hulls on the scrap.
"I'm thinking," I said, "we go in fast and we don't come out the same way."
Senna stared at the screen. Then at me. "You've never flown the graveyard."
"No."
"Most pilots who try it don't make it out."
"I know."
"Kira—"
"I did that maneuver, Senna." My voice came out harder than I meant it to. "I did it and I don't even know how. Maybe I can do this too."
She didn't answer right away. The countdown ticked under the alarm. Ten minutes.
Finally, she sat back and locked her straps. "If you kill us, I'm haunting you."
"Get in line."
I punched the throttle.
The hauler lurched forward and the stars blurred into streaks. My stomach dropped. The graveyard filled the viewport—a churning wall of twisted metal and frozen vapor trails. It looked like a mouth.
Echo's voice: "Interceptors have adjusted course. Nine minutes to contact."
"Kira," Senna said, her hand on the plasma controls. "They're splitting up. Two breaking left, two right. They're going to box us in."
"Let them try."
I dove.
The first wreck—a split freighter hull—came at us like a guillotine. I rolled hard, felt the hauler groan, and we slipped under it with maybe a meter to spare. Senna swore. The second wreck was closer. I cut the throttle, flipped us ninety degrees, and squeezed through a gap that shouldn't have fit.
My hands knew what to do. I wasn't thinking. I was just moving.
"Kira, we've got company!" Senna's screen flared red. "Lead interceptor's on our tail. Eight hundred meters."
I pulled up, threading between two shattered engine cores that were still leaking radiation. The Geiger counter screamed. The hauler's shields sparked and buckled.
"They're firing!"
The blast clipped our port side. The ship shuddered. Alarms layered over alarms. I yanked us into a spiral, using a dead cruiser's hull as a shield, and the second shot hit the wreck instead. Metal shrieked. A chunk the size of a shuttle spun past my canopy so close I could see the serial number.
"Senna, the EMP—"
"Already on it." She launched the pod. It spiraled back, weaving through the debris, and detonated right in the interceptor's path. The pulse lit up my screen like a flashbang. The interceptor went dark and started to tumble.
"One down," Senna said, breathing hard. "Three to go."
Echo: "The *Kestrel* is two kilometers ahead. Beacon activation requires a proximity handshake. You will need to hold position for forty seconds."
"Forty seconds?" Senna's voice cracked. "We won't last ten."
I didn't answer. I was too busy dodging a satellite carcass that came out of nowhere. The hauler's right thruster misfired. We spun. I fought the stick, fired the left, and barely corrected before we smashed into a field of frozen coolant pods.
The *Kestrel* appeared through the haze. It was bigger than I expected—an old military corvette, split down the middle, one half still trailing a tangle of cables like entrails. The beacon was buried in the aft section, a faint blue pulse barely visible through the wreckage.
"There," I said. "Echo, I see it."
"Approach vector is clear," Echo said. "However, the remaining interceptors are closing. Six hundred meters. You will not have forty seconds."
Senna turned to me. Her face was white. "Kira. We need to run."
"We need that black box."
"We need to *live*." She grabbed my arm. "My father died chasing this. I'm not letting you do the same."
I looked at her. At the blood on her mouth, the crack in her visor, the way her hand was shaking even though her voice wasn't. She'd pulled me off that execution block. She'd thrown away her career, maybe her life, to get me out.
And now she was asking me to walk away.
"Senna," I said. "If we don't get that box, they win. Your father stays a traitor. I stay a weapon. We stay dead."
Her jaw tightened. She let go of my arm.
"Then we do it fast," she said.
She pulled up the plasma charges and armed them both. "I'll buy you time. Get to the beacon. Hit it. Get out."
"What are you—"
She fired the charges. Not at the interceptors. At the wreckage behind us. The explosion tore through a cluster of fuel cells and sent a wave of fire and shrapnel cascading back toward the fleet ships. They scattered. One of them clipped a hull fragment and started venting atmo.
"Go!" Senna yelled.
I punched the throttle and we shot forward. The *Kestrel* loomed. I could see the beacon now, a small black module half-buried in the torn metal. I angled us in, killed the engines, and let momentum carry us the last fifty meters.
"Proximity achieved," Echo said. "Initiating handshake."
The hauler shuddered. My console lit up with a data stream I didn't understand—coordinates, file fragments, encryption keys. The beacon was talking to us.
"Twenty seconds," Echo said.
Senna's screen flared red. "Kira, they're coming around. I've got nothing left."
I looked at the countdown. Fifteen seconds.
The lead interceptor broke through the debris field. Its targeting laser painted our hull.
"Kira—"
"I know."
Ten seconds.
The interceptor fired.
Senna screamed something I didn't catch. She grabbed the yoke and yanked us hard to starboard. The blast hit the *Kestrel* instead. The wreck exploded in a bloom of white light. The shockwave hit us like a fist. My head snapped forward. Blood filled my mouth.
"Transfer complete," Echo said, calm as ever. "Black box data acquired."
I couldn't breathe. The viewport was full of fire and spinning metal. Alarms. Senna's voice, far away. My vision tunneled.
And then I was somewhere else.
A briefing room. Cold. Fluorescent lights. A man in a fleet uniform standing at the front. His face was blurred but his voice was clear.
"Project Starfire is a go. Terminate all remaining units. No exceptions."
I blinked. I was back in the hauler. Senna was shaking me.
"Kira! Kira, stay with me!"
I turned to look at her. My mouth moved before I knew what I was saying.
"All units will be neutralized upon retrieval," I said. My voice sounded wrong. Flat. Recorded. "No exceptions."
Senna's face went white.
"What did you just say?"
I didn't answer. I couldn't. My head was full of static and someone else's words.