The scanner chirps: not the usual hollow echo of dead metal, but something else. A harmonic resonance that makes her breath catch. The dimensional signature matching the encrypted data she traded two months of salvage credits for. The coordinates that have consumed her thoughts during every sleep cycle since.
Lucina kills the forward thrusters and lets momentum carry her closer, one hand hovering over the emergency burn while the other pulls up the verification protocols. The signature pulses across three separate bands, each one confirming what her gut already knows: pocket universe, pre-Collapse construction, Scientific Directorate configuration. The real deal.
She runs the numbers again. Has to be sure. Black market data is nine parts fiction to one part truth, and she’s been burned before: spent a week chasing phantom coordinates in the Kepler Wastes, found nothing but radiation and regret. But this… this reads clean. The dimensional membrane is holding, barely, throwing off quantum fluctuations that her salvage-grade sensors can barely interpret.
Her fingers drum against the console, a nervous habit from her mining days. Forty-seven days. The refugee processing center on Titan Station won’t grant extensions, not anymore. Not after the latest wave of Outer Rim displaced started flooding the Imperial core systems. She’s seen the detention barges, heard the stories about labor conscription, the way people disappear into the corporate mining operations and never resurface.
This could be it. This could be everything.
The scanner chirps again, insistent. A secondary reading resolves: mass estimate, power signature, structural integrity. The pocket universe is small, maybe two hundred meters diameter, but it’s active. Life support running. Emergency power holding. Someone built this place to last, and it’s been waiting here in the dark for decades, maybe longer.
She checks her chrono. Eight hours until the Imperial salvage drones complete their sector sweep. Eight hours of window.
Lucina engages the approach vector and starts suiting up.
Lucina’s hands freeze over the controls as her instruments paint the impossible across three separate displays. The dimensional membrane reads stable its quantum signature pulsing in rhythms her salvage-grade equipment wasn’t designed to measure. She toggles through spectral analysis, gravitational mapping, temporal displacement readings. Each scan layers another confirmation over her disbelief.
The sphere hangs there like a soap bubble made of folded spacetime, two hundred meters of laboratory compressed into a pocket of reality that shouldn’t exist. Not anymore. Not after the Directorate fell and took half the Outer Rim with it.
Her throat tightens. The broker’s data was genuine. Three months of paranoia, wondering if she’d been scammed, if the coordinates were bait for some corporate trap or Imperial sting operation: all of it dissolves into the amber glow of her scanner’s verification protocols.
She zooms the optical feed, watching the membrane’s surface ripple and distort. Beautiful. Deadly. Worth more than citizenship papers. Worth enough to disappear entirely, buy a new identity, start over somewhere the Empire’s refugee processing algorithms would never find her.
If she can crack it before the drones arrive.
She runs the signature through her analyzer three times, cross-referencing against the fragmented databases she’s collected from a dozen dead colonies. Each scan confirms what she already knows but can’t quite believe: pre-Collapse technology, Scientific Directorate origin, quantum architecture that predates the Imperial standardization protocols by half a century. The kind of score that appears in salvager folklore, whispered over cheap alcohol in refugee processing stations, but never materializes in actual space.
Her fingers tremble as she saves the scan data to three separate encrypted drives. Evidence. Proof of discovery. The legal foundation for a finders-rights claim, assuming she lives long enough to file one. Assuming the Empire recognizes claims filed by refugees whose documentation expires in forty-seven days.
The membrane pulses, patient and indifferent, waiting for her decision.
The chip’s cryogenic pulse syncs with her heartbeat (forty-seven days, forty-seven days) while her fingers dance across the navigation console, running probability matrices through salvager’s intuition. Eight hours before Imperial drones triangulate her position. Maybe six to extract something worth the risk. The numbers don’t balance, never have in her entire refugee existence, but she’s already cycling the airlock, already checking her suit seals, already choosing forward motion over the fatal paralysis of rational thought.
The membrane ripples like mercury suspended in vacuum, its surface tension holding back compressed spacetime. Lucina’s scanner reads impossible geometries: dimensions folded into configurations that shouldn’t exist outside theoretical papers. Beautiful, yes, but beautiful like a fusion core breach: mesmerizing right until it kills you. She adjusts her suit’s radiation baffles and keys the approach thrusters anyway.
Her fingers dance across the scanner array with practiced efficiency, filtering out false positives from radiation echoes and debris tumble: a skill honed through eight years of salvage work, reading the subtle signatures that distinguish valuable wreckage from worthless scrap, the difference between eating and starving. The good stuff whispers. Reactor cores sing a specific frequency. Pre-Collapse alloys hold heat signatures that cheap Imperial substitutes can’t match. And dimensional membranes? They hum like a tuning fork struck in another room.
This one’s humming clean. No harmonics suggesting imminent collapse. No quantum static indicating active defense grids. Just the pure, steady resonance of stabilized spacetime, folded and locked by people who knew what they were doing back when “knowing what you were doing” still mattered.
She toggles through spectral bands, cross-referencing against her salvage database. A collection of stolen technical manuals, black market schematics, and hard-won field observations compiled in margins and memory. The dimensional signature matches Scientific Directorate specifications from the glory days, before the Outer Rim collapse, before the refugee waves, before everything went to shit and stayed there.
Lucina allows herself three seconds of hope. Dangerous habit. Hope makes you sloppy, makes you miss the warning signs, makes you believe this time will be different. But the numbers don’t lie: power readings suggest active life support, which means intact systems, which means salvageable components worth ten times what dead tech fetches. Environmental seals holding steady. No breach indicators. No Imperial claim beacons.
She runs the calculations twice. Forty-seven days of refugee status remaining. This haul could buy forged papers with enough left over for fuel, supplies, and a down payment on information about her brother. Could buy her way out of the processing zones, off the registry lists, into something resembling a life.
The scanner chirps completion. Clean approach vector plotted. Membrane penetration point identified. Everything optimal.
Everything too optimal.
She checks the scanner calibration anyway, because eight years of salvage work also teaches you that perfect scores usually mean you’re reading the data wrong.
The readouts confirm what the broker promised. Stable pocket universe, pre-Collapse signature, Scientific Directorate encryption protocols still active. But active protocols mean power consumption, and power consumption means something inside is still drawing from the reactor core. Something automated, or something worse.
Lucina tabs through the security analysis. Defense grids: offline. Perimeter drones: no signal. Automated countermeasures: dormant. The lab’s been running on emergency reserves for decades, prioritizing life support and data preservation over active defense. Standard Scientific Directorate protocol when a station goes dark.
Which raises the question nobody wants to ask: what were they preserving?
She pulls up the broker’s data packet again, scanning for details she might have missed the first three times. Location coordinates, dimensional frequency, access codes for the membrane interface. Nothing about what the lab actually researched. Nothing about why it went dark. Just the promise of pre-Collapse technology and the implicit understanding that salvagers don’t ask questions about provenance.
The membrane shimmers on her forward display, patient and inviting. Forty-seven days. She keys the approach sequence before doubt can sharpen its teeth.
Her fingers pause over the membrane interface controls. The math is simple enough. Seventy-two hour patrol cycle means she’s got maybe sixty hours before Imperial drones sweep through, minus travel time, minus extraction time, minus the buffer she always builds in because the universe loves complications. Ten hours of oxygen inside, assuming the lab’s life support doesn’t decide to share. The membrane’s degradation curve plots clean on her secondary screen: one week until catastrophic collapse, give or take twelve hours depending on stress factors.
She’s done worse odds. The Kepler Station salvage had given her twenty minutes. The derelict hauler off Proxima had been actively venting atmosphere.
But those hadn’t been pocket universes. Those hadn’t bent spacetime into pretzel shapes.
Lucina runs the thermal signature through three separate filters, watching the patterns resolve into something that makes her gut clench. Not reactor decay. Too localized, too rhythmic. Biological heat distribution. Someone is alive in there.
She rechecks the calculations, hoping for sensor drift, equipment malfunction, anything but the complication currently painting itself across her display in accusatory orange pixels.
She cycles through spectral analysis bands, each filter peeling back another layer of the pocket universe’s dimensional architecture. The readings are pristine. Too pristine. No degradation signatures, no quantum foam bleeding through the membrane walls. Either this lab was mothballed yesterday, or someone’s been maintaining the stabilization fields for a hundred and forty-seven years. Both possibilities make her hand drift toward the plasma cutter on her belt.
The dimensional signature blooms on her display like a flower made of mathematics, its petals unfolding in spectral bands that mark it as genuine Scientific Directorate work. The broker’s coordinates were accurate, which means she paid good money for real intelligence instead of the usual scrap-yard rumors.
Lucina leans forward, gray eyes narrowing as she cross-references the signature against her salvage database. Pre-Collapse quantum architecture, definitely. The harmonic resonance patterns match the Directorate’s proprietary stabilization protocols, the ones they used before the Outer Rim went dark. She’s seen fragments of this work before: shattered pocket universes collapsed into exotic matter, their contents compressed into fist-sized singularities that fetch premium prices from Imperial research buyers who don’t ask questions about provenance.
But this one’s intact. Fully operational, if her instruments aren’t lying.
Her oil-stained fingers hover over the approach thrusters. The smart play is to mark the coordinates, sell them to a corporate salvage guild, take her finder’s fee and walk away clean. Fifty thousand credits, maybe seventy-five if she negotiates hard. Not enough for forged citizenship papers. Not enough to keep searching for her brother. Not enough for anything except another six months of running.
The refugee registration mark behind her ear itches the way it always does when she’s about to make a stupid decision.
She pulls up the Imperial salvage law database, skimming through the sections she’s memorized during sleepless transits. Finders-rights apply only to registered citizens. Anything she extracts without proper documentation is technically theft from the Imperial Scientific Recovery Office. They’ll confiscate her ship, revoke her salvager’s license, expedite her deportation.
But they have to catch her first.
And they can’t catch her if she’s forty-seven light-years from the nearest patrol route, working inside a pocket universe their drones can’t penetrate.
Lucina keys the approach sequence, feeling the familiar weight of calculated risk settle into her chest like ballast.
Her ship’s computer highlights the optimal entry point, a shimmer in space where the dimensional membrane is thinnest, and Lucina runs the numbers three more times because this is the kind of mistake you don’t get to learn from. The pocket universe’s signature pulses steady on her sensors, but steady doesn’t mean stable. She’s seen collapsed pocket universes before: spheres of twisted spacetime that fold in on themselves, crushing everything inside into quantum foam.
She pulls up the black market data packet again, studying the broker’s notes. “Laboratorium Argentum,” the file names it, with coordinates and a grainy scan of the dimensional architecture. No mention of what’s inside. No manifest, no inventory, no helpful warnings about experimental prototypes or containment failures.
Just a location and a price tag.
Lucina checks her suit’s medical readouts. The stimulants are holding, keeping her sharp despite sixteen hours of approach burns and course corrections. She’ll need that edge. Eight hours inside to survey, identify, and extract. Eight hours before dimensional sickness sets in: the nausea, the temporal displacement, the way your cells start forgetting which moment they’re supposed to exist in.
Eight hours to change everything.
The heads-up display in her helmet’s corner ticks down with merciless precision (47 days, 13 hours, 22 minutes until her refugee status expires) and she forces herself not to think about the processing stations, about the labor contracts that are technically voluntary but practically inescapable, about becoming another statistic in the Imperial integration program.
Her fingers drum against the control panel, a nervous habit she picked up during the Outer Rim collapse. The refugee registration mark behind her ear itches, always does when she’s stressed. She scratches at it through the helmet seal, knowing it won’t help. That mark is permanent, burned into her skin with bureaucratic finality. A brand that says: temporary person, conditional existence, deportable.
The dimensional membrane shimmers closer now, filling her viewport with impossible colors that shouldn’t exist in realspace.
She cycles through the calculations a third time, cross-referencing black market prices against the broker’s inventory manifest: quantum processors, temporal stabilizers, pre-Collapse data cores: any one piece worth six months of legitimate salvage work. The whole haul? Enough for papers, ship repairs, and a real lead on Marcus. Enough to stop being temporary. Her fingers hover over the approach thrusters, weighing survival against desperation.
She keys the approach sequence, her ship’s maneuvering thrusters firing in precise bursts that eat into her fuel reserves. The dimensional membrane swells in her viewport, a soap-bubble shimmer of bent spacetime that makes her inner ear scream wrongness. Forty-seven days. She toggles the cutting torch to standby and angles toward the breach point, committed now, past the moment where caution matters.
The scanner data scrolls across her helmet display: temporal variance at 0.7% per hour, dimensional integrity at 89%, energy signatures consistent with active stasis fields. Lucina’s practiced eye catalogs the implications while her fingers dance across the secondary console, pulling deeper analysis.
Something inside is still running. Still preserving.
She toggles through spectral bands, watching the energy signatures resolve into distinct patterns. The stasis fields aren’t random. They’re clustered in three distinct zones, suggesting deliberate preservation protocols. Whatever the Scientific Directorate deemed worth hiding in a pocket universe, they’d built redundancies to keep it safe.
Her salvage instincts war with unease. Active systems mean power draw. Power draw means functional reactors. Functional reactors in a destabilizing pocket universe mean variables she can’t predict.
But the signature profiles are clean. Pre-Collapse clean. The kind of tech that doesn’t exist anymore, that the Imperial guilds would kill for, that refugees like her never get within a hundred light-years of touching.
She runs a probability matrix through her suit’s limited AI. Seventy-three percent chance of recoverable high-value salvage, eighteen percent chance of structural complications, nine percent miscellaneous hazards. The numbers are good. Better than good for someone with forty-seven days and dwindling options.
Lucina zooms the scanner focus to the central energy signature, the one burning brightest through the dimensional membrane. It pulses with a rhythm almost like a heartbeat, steady and insistent. The spectral analysis tags it as a quantum resonance device, experimental classification, no commercial equivalent in any database.
She doesn’t know what it does. Doesn’t matter. Experimental means rare. Rare means valuable.
Her thumb hovers over the breach sequence, the cutting torch primed and ready. The membrane ripples like disturbed water, close enough now that she can see the frost-covered chrome interior through its shimmer. Close enough to smell the fortune waiting inside.
She initiates the breach.
The database match sends a jolt through her. Not just high-value, but citizenship-level value. Her fingers freeze over the controls as the itemized list populates: three intact quantum computing cores, their processing architecture two generations beyond anything the Imperial markets offer. Experimental graviton shunt assemblies that the drive manufacturers would liquidate assets to acquire. And there (her breath catches) a complete Scientific Directorate research archive, the kind of pre-Collapse data that academic collectors treat like religious artifacts.
She runs the credit calculations automatically, muscle memory from a thousand failed scores. The cores alone would cover forged papers with enough left over for six months of operational expenses. The drive components could fund her search for Marcus, buy information from sources who actually know something instead of the bottom-feeders she can currently afford. The archive might bring enough to purchase legitimate citizenship, the kind that doesn’t dissolve under Imperial scrutiny.
Her brother’s face flashes through her mind, younger, laughing, before the Outer Rim collapsed and swallowed him. Forty-seven days to find him. This score could buy forty-seven years.
She checks her suit’s integrity seals, testing each connection with practiced efficiency. The dimensional membrane ripples like oil on water, close enough to touch through the viewport. Standard protocol says she should wait, run extended diagnostics, maybe even burn credits on a professional assessment. Standard protocol was written for salvagers with time.
Her fingers drum against the control panel. Three taps, pause, three more. An old nervous habit from her guild days, before the refugee camps, before everything went lateral. The membrane’s instability reads at 0.7% degradation per hour. Eight hours maximum safe exposure. She could be in and out in four, maybe five if the layout matches the schematic her broker provided.
If the schematic is accurate. If anything about this deal is what it seems.
The data broker’s face flashes through her memory: too eager, too quick to accept her counteroffer. She scrolls through the facility specs again, searching for what isn’t there. No power consumption logs. No automated shutdown records. Just coordinates and a designation.
Someone wanted this found. The question is whether they wanted it found by her, or by whoever comes after.
The membrane’s surface tension reads point-seven-three and dropping. Worse than the broker’s data suggested. Lucina keys the final override, watching her suit’s legal liability waiver scroll past unread. Forty-seven days. She’s pulled salvage from worse odds. Her cutting torch ignites with a soft hiss as she angles toward the threshold, already calculating extraction routes, already ignoring how the membrane’s iridescence reminds her of decomposing flesh.
The dimensional membrane ripples before her like oil on water, casting prismatic reflections across her faceplate. Lucina’s suit sensors scream contradictory data. The quantum instability reads as both solid barrier and empty vacuum, both frozen and superheated. Her HUD flickers amber-red-amber in rapid succession, each warning light demanding attention she doesn’t have time to give.
She manually overrides the first safety protocol. Then the second. Her fingers move through the sequence with practiced efficiency, muscle memory from a hundred illegal salvage runs, though none quite like this. The stimulants are wearing thin now: she can feel the familiar tremor starting in her left hand, the way her focus wants to drift toward the exhaustion waiting at the edges of her consciousness.
The membrane’s surface tension drops to point-seven-one. Point-six-nine. The pocket universe is bleeding stability into realspace, and she hasn’t even breached yet.
Lucina pulls up the broker’s data one more time, overlaying it against her current readings. The discrepancy makes her jaw tighten. Either the collapse is accelerating faster than predicted, or someone sold her corrupted information. Either way, her extraction window just got narrower.
She keys through the final override, watching her suit’s legal liability waiver scroll past in dense legalese. She doesn’t bother reading it. Refugee salvagers don’t get legal protection anyway. The waiver exists only to protect the suit manufacturer’s corporate charter. Her status indicator blinks: UNREGISTERED OPERATOR. Forty-seven days until that becomes EXPIRED REFUGEE, and then the processing centers, the labor contracts, the slow grinding erasure of whatever autonomy she has left.
The membrane shimmers, almost inviting now. Almost hungry.
Her cutting torch ignites with a soft hiss as she angles toward the threshold, already calculating extraction routes, already cataloging which systems to hit first. The iridescence catches the light wrong, reminds her of something organic, something dying. She pushes the thought away and moves forward.
The dimensional membrane resists, then yields. Lucina’s entire body slides through in a stuttering sequence, shoulder, torso, hip, each part entering at slightly different temporal velocities. Her suit compensates with micro-adjustments, servos whining as they fight against the warped physics.
Inside, the air tastes wrong. Metallic and stale, yes, but also somehow old in a way that has nothing to do with filtration. Her boots find purchase on a floor that shouldn’t exist at this angle. The corridor stretches before her in impossible geometry, chrome surfaces reflecting her suit lights in fractal patterns that hurt to track.
The temperature gauge reads minus-fifteen Celsius, but frost patterns on the walls suggest it’s been colder. Much colder. For a very long time.
Her suit’s internal clock hiccups, resyncs, hiccups again. The timestamp jumps forward three seconds, then back two. She makes a mental note: time isn’t stable here. Navigation will be dead reckoning and instinct.
Behind her, the membrane seals with a sound like tearing silk. Her extraction window starts counting down: seven hours, fifty-three minutes before dimensional sickness sets in.
Seven hours to get rich or die trying.
The membrane’s resistance collapses and Lucina tumbles through, her momentum carrying her into a gravity field that shifts mid-fall. She catches herself against a chrome bulkhead, magnetic boots engaging with a satisfying clunk that echoes wrong. The sound arriving before she makes contact.
Her heads-up display flickers, struggling to map the space. The corridor branches in five directions, but her depth sensors insist there are only three walls. She blinks hard, forcing her brain to accept what her instruments can’t reconcile.
First rule of salvage: secure your exit. She marks the membrane’s location with a phosphorescent tag, watching it drift sideways against no discernible current.
The lab waits. Silent. Watching. Worth a fortune if she survives the next eight hours.
Lucina’s vision swims as the amber light refracts through her faceplate. The corridors branch and rebranch, frost patterns crawling across bulkheads in geometric impossibilities. Her suit’s gyroscope screams warnings. Three axes of rotation where only two should exist. She tastes copper, feels her equilibrium sliding sideways. The architecture doesn’t just defy mapping; it actively resists being perceived. She closes her eyes, relies on touch and instrument readings instead. Safer that way.
Her boots lock onto chrome decking that shifts beneath her, solid, then yielding, then solid again, like walking on frozen mercury. The suit’s thermal array strobes red-amber-blue, registering temperatures that swing forty degrees in microseconds. Behind her, the dimensional membrane contracts with a crystalline shriek, glass shards reassembling themselves, sealing her inside. The sound echoes wrong, propagating forward through time instead of outward through space.
Her fingers hover over the command panel, the haptic feedback pulsing against her oil-stained gloves in that familiar three-beat pattern. Drift. Broadcast. Lock. She’s executed this sequence at ninety-three salvage sites across four sectors, muscle memory carved into neural pathways by repetition and necessity. But the confirmation icon blinks amber, waiting, and her thumb won’t complete the gesture.
Once she crosses that membrane, the ship becomes a beacon. The encrypted claim will scatter across monitoring frequencies, a digital flare announcing her presence to every scanner within three light-hours. Corporate salvage guilds with their quantum-decrypt arrays. Imperial patrol drones running pattern recognition. Refugee enforcement vessels cross-referencing her ship’s signature against deportation databases.
Forty-seven days. The number pulses in her peripheral vision, overlaid on her suit’s heads-up display like a countdown to execution.
The ship’s AI chirps inquiry, a soft ascending tone that means awaiting input. She’s named it nothing, refused to personalize the system, but after three years it knows her hesitation patterns, can distinguish between tactical pause and genuine uncertainty.
“Confirm,” she finally says, her voice rough from recycled air and stimulant tabs. The panel flashes green. The broadcast array unfolds from the ship’s spine with a mechanical whisper she feels through the bulkhead more than hears.
Now she’s committed. Now she’s visible.
The locker beside the airlock contains everything she owns that matters: her brother’s last message chip, her mother’s salvage certification from before the Collapse, forged identity papers that wouldn’t survive serious scrutiny, three thousand credits in untraceable currency chips. Not enough. Never enough.
She keys the locker’s biometric seal, watching it glow blue confirmation. When she returns, if she returns, it will still be here. The ship will still be here.
She has to believe that.
The cockpit’s dimensions seem to contract as she pushes off toward the airlock, her trajectory carrying her past the pilot’s seat one final time. The cushioning has compressed into a perfect mold, shoulders, spine, hips, the ghost of her body preserved in synthetic foam. Three years of sleeping upright during transit burns. Three years of rationing water and recycling air. Three years of this cramped metal box being the only place in the universe she could call hers.
The seat’s armrest still bears the scorch mark from that panicked extraction in the Kepler Belt, when corporate enforcers had come within firing range. The environmental panel above it displays her preferred temperature settings, learned and remembered by systems that know her better than any person has in years.
She forces her gaze away, magnetic boots clicking against the deck plating as she reaches the airlock. The ship hums around her. Life support, attitude thrusters, the broadcast array now painting her location across the void. All functioning. All waiting for her return.
If she returns.
The membrane shimmers through the viewport, patient and alien, promising everything or nothing at all.
Her fingers hesitate over the locker’s biometric pad, then press. The seal breaks with a hiss of equalized pressure. Everything she owns: two patched salvage suits folded with military precision, her brother’s message chip in its cracked case, three words she’s memorized but still plays every transit, transit papers that cost her eight months of work and won’t fool a competent inspector, the ceramic knife that passed through her mother’s hands to hers on a station that no longer exists, and the data broker’s coordinates, burned into a disposable chip she should have destroyed days ago.
She takes the knife. Leaves everything else.
The locker seals behind her with a magnetic click that sounds too much like finality.
The airlock iris opens to vacuum and starlight. She checks the thruster pack twice: fuel cells charged, directional jets responsive, emergency beacon armed. The dimensional membrane ripples three hundred meters ahead, a soap-bubble distortion against the black, its surface crawling with colors that shouldn’t exist in realspace. Her suit computer flags radiation signatures it can’t classify. She kills the warning display and jumps.
The membrane approaches like a wall of liquid mercury, its surface tension visible even from fifty meters out. Her suit’s proximity sensors scream warnings she’s learned to ignore. Behind her, the ship’s transponder pulses its automated salvage claim into the void: a legal fiction that might buy her six hours before corporate enforcers arrive. She twists mid-flight, firing lateral thrusters, aligning her trajectory with the shimmering threshold. No turning back now.
The membrane’s surface tension breaks with a sound like tearing silk, and Lucina spills through into a gravity field that can’t decide which direction is down. Her stomach lurches as the orientation shifts twice in three seconds, then settles into a stable configuration that leaves her sprawled on flooring so cold it burns through her gloves.
Her HUD flickers, struggling to calibrate. The readouts make no sense: atmospheric pressure normal, temperature minus forty-three Celsius, gravity at point-seven standard but the vector keeps rotating through impossible angles. She’s done zero-g work in seventeen different wreck configurations, but this. This is something else entirely. The floor feels solid beneath her palms, but her inner ear insists she’s falling sideways.
Focus. Inventory. Assess.
The cutting torch. She tracks its trajectory with practiced eyes, watching it slide in a gentle arc that curves upward halfway through, defying momentum. It comes to rest against a bulkhead twenty meters away. Or what her brain interprets as twenty meters. Distance feels negotiable here, like the space between objects is a suggestion rather than a constant.
Her thermal regulator clicks on, flooding her suit with warmth that takes the edge off the brutal cold. She pushes herself upright, movements careful, testing each shift of weight before committing. The refugee mark behind her ear throbs with phantom pain: stress response, nothing more. She’s been in worse situations. That decompression job on the Meridian. The time she had to cut her way out of a collapsing cargo bay with fifteen minutes of air.
But those followed rules. Physics she understood.
This place: the amber emergency lighting casts shadows that fall in three directions simultaneously, and when she turns her head too quickly, the corridor seems to ripple like liquid metal. The chrome walls are covered in frost patterns that form mathematical proofs, crystalline structures spelling out theorems in a language she barely remembers from her brief formal education.
The thermal regulator kicks in, but the damage is done: her throat burns like she’s swallowed glass, and the fog of her breath doesn’t behave right. Instead of dispersing, it hangs suspended in geometric patterns, crystallizing into delicate structures that drift slowly upward before fragmenting into smaller versions of themselves. Fractal breath. Impossible.
She watches the cutting torch slide across the chrome panels, its movement too smooth, friction behaving like a variable someone forgot to set. The equations etched into the metal catch her eye. Not decorative, she realizes, but functional. Warnings, maybe. Or instructions. Her education ended at fourteen when the refugee ships came, but she recognizes enough: quantum field notation, temporal mathematics, the kind of theoretical work that existed only in university archives before the Collapse.
Her fingers find the suit’s emergency respirator, and she triggers it. Filtered air, pre-warmed, floods her mouth. Better. The panic recedes enough for her to think clearly. She needs that torch. She needs to move carefully. And she needs to figure out why every instinct she’s honed over fifteen years of salvage work is screaming that the physics here are fundamentally wrong.
The silence presses against her eardrums like physical weight, no ventilation hum, no electronic chatter, no ambient noise of functioning systems, just her respirator’s wheeze and something else. A crystalline sound, barely audible, like wind chimes made of glass. The frost formations she disturbs don’t simply break; they sing. Each fractal pattern releases a distinct frequency as it shatters, creating harmonics that shouldn’t exist in normal acoustic space.
She freezes, listening. The tones layer and interact, building into something almost like language. Almost like a warning. The patterns are too mathematically precise, too deliberately structured. Someone engineered this. The frost isn’t accumulation: it’s information, encoded in ice, waiting for disruption to speak.
Her hand hovers over the nearest surface, hesitating.
Her vision lurches trying to parse the architecture: corridors branching in configurations that make her inner ear scream protest. The walls fold through dimensions her salvager training never covered. She grips a support beam, forcing her gaze to follow one path at a time, but the observation windows betray her: chambers visible through three different panes occupy the same impossible space, closer when she looks away, receding when she focuses. The amber light doesn’t help, casting shadows that point toward sources that don’t exist.
She retrieves her torch with numb fingers, the metal so cold it burns through her gloves. Magnetic boots engage with a reluctant clunk, finally anchoring her to deck plating that hums with residual power. That’s when she sees the first body. A woman in a lab coat frozen mid-stride, one foot raised, mouth open in a warning that will never become sound. Frost claims her like sculpture, crystalline and terrible.
Lucina forces herself to move past the first body, each step a negotiation with her magnetic boots and her churning stomach. The corridor opens into what must have been the main operations center. A circular chamber three stories high, ringed with workstations and holographic displays frozen mid-flicker.
A technician floats three meters up, one arm stretched toward an alarm panel he’ll never reach. His face is locked in determination, jaw set, eyes focused with the intensity of someone who knows exactly what needs to be done and how little time remains to do it. Tools drift in a constellation around his suspended form, a plasma wrench, diagnostic scanner, three different sizes of molecular sealant, a half-eaten protein bar, like metal planets orbiting a flesh star. His other hand clutches a data slate, its screen still glowing with what looks like an emergency shutdown sequence. Only three steps completed out of twelve.
Frost grows on him in patterns that follow the thermal map of his final living moment: thickest on his outstretched fingers, his exhaled breath a cloud of ice crystals suspended before his mouth, the sweat on his forehead transformed into a crown of microscopic diamonds.
Lucina’s headlamp catches his identification badge: Yuri Castellan, Senior Systems Engineer. There’s a photo of two children tucked into the badge’s transparent pocket, their faces pressed together, grinning. She looks away.
The temporal stasis field around him creates a visible distortion, like heat shimmer in reverse. Her scanner screams warnings about localized chronometric instability. Time here doesn’t just flow differently. It’s shattered into fragments, each person trapped in their own private moment, their own personal forever.
She counts six more suspended figures in this chamber alone. All reaching for something. All failing to reach it.
The laboratory didn’t just freeze. It broke.
The researcher’s body is a study in violent physics interrupted. Her lab coat billows behind her, each fold and wrinkle locked in place, the fabric stiff with frost. The explosion, Lucina can see it’s from a ruptured containment vessel, the distinctive blue-white signature of a quantum cascade failure, has expanded to roughly two meters in diameter, its leading edge a fractal geometry of superheated plasma and shattered matter.
She’s young. Maybe twenty-five. Her defensive hands show chemical burns that never finished forming, the tissue caught between healthy and damaged, existing in both states simultaneously. The wedding ring is simple titanium, scratched from laboratory work. Lucina’s scanner reads the woman’s bio-signature as simultaneously alive and dead, her cells frozen mid-death, her neurons still firing the same terror signal on infinite repeat.
Dr. Sarah Okonkwo, Quantum Mechanics Specialist, the badge reads.
Behind her, through the frozen fireball, Lucina can see the containment lab. Equipment torn open like flowers. Scorch marks that stop mid-spread. And in the center, still humming with power, a device that resembles nothing so much as a mechanical heart, its crystalline chambers pulsing with captured light.
The coffee droplets hang like amber beads in the emergency lighting, each one a perfect sphere containing its own tiny reflection of the disaster: miniature worlds of frozen catastrophe. Lucina counts seventeen of them, suspended in a trajectory that her salvager’s eye automatically calculates: velocity, angle, impact point. The mug itself tumbles in slow-motion stasis, its Scientific Directorate logo clearly visible, the ceramic handle already fractured but not yet separated.
Beneath this constellation of mundane tragedy, the technician sprawls across the deck plating, his reaching hand forever inches from completion. His fingertips show the distinctive calluses of someone who worked with precision instruments. The coffee would have been cold anyway, Lucina thinks absurdly. The timestamp on his chronometer reads 07:[^23]:14, frozen mid-tick.
Lucina forces herself to approach the viewing port, her magnetic boots clicking against the deck. She positions herself beside the frozen woman, careful not to disturb the stasis field’s shimmer, and follows that eternal gaze outward.
Through the port: the laboratory’s central core, where something writhes within a containment sphere. Geometry that shouldn’t exist, angles that hurt to perceive, a darkness that somehow glows.
Fourteen in total, she counts methodically, forcing herself to catalog each frozen figure as she moves through the temporal graveyard. Each one suspended in their final heartbeat. Terror etched in widened eyes, confusion in half-formed gestures. Frost blooms across their features like invasive flora: delicate crystals on lashes, eyebrows, the corners of mouths frozen mid-scream. Her scanner logs them as obstacles, not casualties.
The equipment calls to her like a siren song. Her scanner breaks down the haul in clinical detail: seventeen quantum processing arrays, each one worth her current ship twice over. Twenty-three dimensional stabilizers still humming with active power, their market value astronomical. The kind of tech that corporate salvage guilds would kill for, that citizenship brokers would accept without questions or haggling.
She moves through the bay with practiced efficiency, her mag-boots finding purchase on the frost-slicked deck. The cutting torch feels good in her hand, familiar weight and balance. She’s done this a thousand times: identify, extract, secure, move on. Don’t think about the context. Don’t imagine the lives that depended on this equipment. Just hardware now. Just credits.
Her torch flares to life, blue-white flame reflecting off chrome surfaces. She positions it against the first mounting bracket, angles it for a clean cut that won’t damage the goods. Standard procedure. Textbook salvage work.
But the flame casts wrong shadows.
She notices it peripherally at first: the way darkness pools behind the equipment rack, deeper than the space should allow. The way the frost patterns spiral in geometries that hurt to follow. Her inner ear protests the room’s dimensions, insisting the far wall is simultaneously too close and impossibly distant.
The torch wavers in her grip.
Through her visor, the acquisition data scrolls endlessly: three hundred thousand credits minimum. Citizenship papers. A ship with her name on the registration. A permanent berth somewhere the Imperial refugee processors can’t reach. Everything she’s worked toward for six years of desperate salvage runs.
Her brother’s face flashes through her mind: the last transmission before the Outer Rim collapse, his voice saying he’d found something, something important, something in a lab just like this one.
The torch flame gutters. Dies.
She hasn’t released the trigger. The fuel cell reads full.
Around her, the equipment hums in frequencies that shouldn’t exist.
The torch reignites when she tries again, but the flame bends wrong: curves around invisible geometries, reaches toward the dimensional stabilizer like it’s being pulled by something other than convection. Her salvage instincts scream warnings in a language older than training: wrong wrong wrong.
She’s breached derelicts where the life support failed catastrophically, where bodies floated in frozen tableaus of their final moments. She’s cut through bulkheads still warm from reactor breaches, worked in debris fields where every surface could puncture her suit. This is different. This is the universe itself saying no.
The equipment hum shifts frequency. Just slightly. Just enough that her teeth ache.
Her scanner still shows three hundred thousand credits. Still shows citizenship papers and freedom and everything she needs. But her hands won’t move to make the cut, because somewhere in six years of desperate salvage work she learned the difference between acceptable risk and the kind of mistake you don’t survive long enough to regret.
The dimensional stabilizer’s readings flicker. The numbers don’t make sense. Power draw increasing while output remains constant, energy going somewhere the instruments can’t measure.
Behind her, the boy’s footsteps echo from too many directions at once.
She backs away from the stabilizer, torch dying to embers. The boy’s voice carries from somewhere that isn’t quite behind her: “The dimensional anchors are failing. You can see it, can’t you? The way space folds wrong?”
She can. God help her, she can. The corridor stretches and compresses with each breath, walls breathing in rhythms that don’t match her pulse. Her boot prints in the frost appear before she takes the step, then fade after. Causality itself is coming unmoored.
“How long?” Her voice sounds flat, absorbed by angles that shouldn’t exist.
“The membrane will collapse completely in four hours. Maybe less.” He’s closer now, though she didn’t hear him move. “Everything inside returns to normal spacetime. Violently.”
Three hundred thousand credits, atomized across seventeen minutes of subjective time.
The scanner’s corruption isn’t random: it’s consistent. The same equipment registers negative mass every third sweep, entropy reversing in precise seven-second intervals. Pattern recognition, the salvager’s most valuable skill, screams warning: this isn’t malfunction. The laboratory isn’t frozen in catastrophe. It’s cycling through one, over and over, a temporal loop grinding itself toward critical failure. She’s not documenting wreckage. She’s standing inside an active bomb.
She marks the equipment locations anyway (salvager’s reflex, even in a deathtrap) but her cutting torch stays holstered. The main corridor curves in a direction her inner ear can’t reconcile, gravity suggesting down while her eyes insist sideways. She follows it toward the circular chamber her scanner identifies as the cryobay, where something still broadcasts active status. Where something survived.
The cryobay reveals itself as a circular chamber where fifteen pods stand like monuments around a central monitoring station, their surfaces covered in the same frost that coats everything else, but here the ice glows faintly blue with residual cryogenic energy. Each pod is a vertical coffin of reinforced plasteel and smart-glass, seven feet tall, designed to preserve human tissue at the edge of absolute zero while nanite suspensions maintained cellular integrity across decades or centuries.
Lucina’s breath fogs in the frigid air as she approaches, her suit’s thermal regulators struggling against the cold radiating from the pods. The monitoring station in the center still pulses with amber light, its holographic displays flickering through diagnostic cycles in a language she can barely parse. She recognizes enough to know the systems are failing, have been failing for longer than she’s been alive, entropy winning its slow war against preservation technology.
The pods themselves are works of art and engineering. Curved surfaces etched with biometric readouts, each one a self-contained life support system capable of maintaining a human being in perfect stasis indefinitely, assuming nothing went wrong. Assuming the power held. Assuming the pocket universe remained stable.
She moves clockwise around the circle, her helmet lamp illuminating each pod in turn. Through the smart-glass she can see them: researchers in lab coveralls, technicians still wearing tool belts, a woman who might have been a medical officer clutching a data tablet to her chest. All frozen, all dead, their faces peaceful in the moment the systems failed and warmth flooded back into tissues that couldn’t survive the transition. The ice inside the pods is red-tinged in places where cellular rupture occurred.
Her scanner confirms what her eyes already know: no life signs in pods one through fourteen. But the fifteenth,
The fifteenth pod stands open, its smart-glass panel retracted, its interior empty except for wisps of cryogenic vapor still dissipating into the chamber’s dead air.
The script blazes across each pod’s interface in that distinctive pre-Collapse angular notation. Characters she’s seen on salvaged data cores worth more than her ship, the kind of writing that marks something as genuinely old, genuinely valuable. CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE repeats fourteen times with bureaucratic precision. SUBJECT DECEASED. REVIVAL IMPOSSIBLE. The words glow steady red, no longer warnings but epitaphs, memorial markers for people who died expecting rescue that never came.
She can read maybe one word in five, her education came from salvage manuals and black market tutorial chips, not the formal academies where they still taught dead languages, but the meaning is universal. These systems failed. These people died. Nothing can be done.
The consistency is what disturbs her most. Not random failures scattered across years, but synchronized catastrophe. All fourteen pods showing identical error codes, identical timestamps in that archaic calendar system. Whatever killed them killed them together, fast enough that the monitoring station couldn’t compensate, couldn’t reroute power, couldn’t save even one.
Except it did save one.
The viewport clears under her gloved hand, revealing what she expected and dreaded: a face locked in terminal awareness, mouth open in a scream that never finished, eyes wide with the understanding that came too late. The woman’s lab coat bears the same Scientific Directorate seal as the boy’s coveralls, pristine white fabric that will never yellow with age. Lucina’s gaze tracks across the circle: fourteen frozen tableaus of identical horror, fourteen people who knew exactly what was happening as their pods failed, as the cold bit deeper than preservation, as hope crystallized into certainty. Fourteen deaths wearing fourteen different faces, arranged like accusers around the monitoring station’s dead screens, their terror perfectly preserved in the pocket universe’s unforgiving stasis.
The pod’s interior gleams empty, medical sensors dangling loose from their mounting brackets, the cushioned cradle still bearing the compressed outline of a body. Frost patterns spiral across the display panel where someone’s fingers smeared through the ice. The green status light pulses steadily, mechanically cheerful, announcing success to a laboratory full of corpses. Recent success. Impossible success.
Her hand drops to the cutting torch at her belt, fingers finding the ignition stud by muscle memory while her mind catalogs impossibilities: the vapor’s trajectory defies the intermittent gravity, the boy’s chest rises and falls with breathing that shouldn’t exist after 147 years, and his eyes (gray as station steel) track her movement with an awareness that makes her salvager instincts scream valuable and dangerous in the same breath.
His skin carries the translucent quality of someone who hasn’t seen unfiltered light in generations, veins visible beneath like circuitry diagrams, and when he shifts his weight she catches the telltale tremor of muscle groups relearning coordination after decades of enforced stillness. The coverall hangs on him like a shroud. She can see where someone, perhaps a parent, had rolled the sleeves multiple times, the cuffs still dragging past his knuckles. The Scientific Directorate seal on the chest pocket has faded to ghost-gray, the double helix and star configuration barely visible against the synthetic fabric, but she recognizes it instantly. Pre-Collapse. Official. The kind of insignia that makes Imperial salvage auditors ask uncomfortable questions.
His feet are bare against the frost-slicked deck plating, and she realizes with a jolt that he must have been in the pod when the catastrophe hit: no time to dress, no time to prepare, just emergency protocols slamming him into cryosleep while whatever killed the others unfolded around him. The registration band on his wrist is the old style, the kind with biometric locks and clearance codes embedded in the polymer, and it’s sized for a child. He was twelve when they put him under. He’s still twelve now, despite the 147 years that have elapsed outside this pocket of frozen time.
She watches him struggle to stand fully upright, watches the way his knees threaten to buckle, the way he grips the pod’s edge with white-knuckled desperation. His fingernails are clean, perfectly manicured by cryogenic suspension, no dirt beneath them, no oil stains, no evidence of the hard living that marks every refugee she’s ever known. He looks like a museum piece. He looks like evidence. He looks like exactly the kind of complication that could derail everything she’s worked toward.
His question hangs in the recycled air between them, and Lucina feels the weight of it like salvage chains across her shoulders. She should tell him the truth: that there is no evacuation fleet, that the Directorate collapsed a century and a half ago, that she’s here to strip anything valuable before the pocket universe tears itself apart. Should tell him that in forty-seven days her refugee status expires and she’ll be processed into Imperial labor quotas unless she scores enough credits for forged papers. Should tell him he’s not a survivor waiting for rescue but salvage, same as the equipment, same as the data cores, same as everything else in this frozen tomb.
Instead she watches him sway, watches the way his pupils dilate and contract as they struggle to focus, watches him fight to remain conscious through whatever cocktail of revival drugs is flooding his system. The cryopod behind him cycles through diagnostic sequences, amber readouts reflecting in his too-wide eyes. He’s waiting for an answer. Waiting for someone to tell him everything will be fine.
She’s never been good at lying.
“Are you with the evacuation fleet?” he asks again, his voice carrying the careful enunciation of someone speaking a language learned from instructional recordings rather than living conversation, each syllable precisely formed in the manner of pre-Collapse academic institutions. The words emerge with textbook precision: vowels rounded exactly as the old phonetic primers prescribed, consonants articulated with academic clarity that no one’s used in a hundred and forty years. It’s the voice of dead universities, of lecture halls turned to debris, of a world that stopped existing before he ever woke. He doesn’t blink enough, she notices. Doesn’t shift his weight like someone accustomed to standing. The cryosleep has left him uncertain of his own body, moving with the deliberate caution of someone relearning gravity.
Lucina sees herself reflected in that calculation. The same threat-assessment protocols she runs on every salvage claim, every potential partner, every official who might check her papers. The kid’s reading her like she reads derelict hulls: searching for structural weaknesses, escape routes, whether the thing in front of him will hold or collapse. He’s measuring her trustworthiness in real-time, and she respects that even as it unnerves her.
His fingers are white-knuckled on the pod’s rim, and she notices the tremor running through his whole arm: not just cryosleep weakness, but the body-deep understanding that he’s clinging to the last fragment of a world that no longer exists. The laboratory hums around them, equipment still faithfully executing protocols for people who’ve been dead for a century and a half.
Lucina’s jaw works, but nothing comes out. She’s talked her way through customs checkpoints with forged manifests, negotiated salvage splits with armed claim-jumpers, lied to Imperial inspectors about cargo holds full of contraband tech. Words are tools she knows how to use.
But this,
“The evacuation,” she starts, then stops. Her breath fogs in the cryobay’s frozen air. The boy watches her with those too-old eyes, waiting with the patience of someone who’s already waited 147 years. Behind him, fourteen failure warnings pulse in steady crimson rhythm. Life support critical. Revival unsuccessful. Biological functions ceased.
She could tell him the Directorate dissolved in the Third Reformation. That the Outer Rim colonies went dark during the Cascade Wars. That his parents’ names exist only in corrupted data fragments she’d need citizenship-level clearance to access: clearance she’ll never have with a refugee mark burned behind her ear.
She could explain that Imperial salvage law doesn’t distinguish between experimental equipment and experimental subjects, that the cryopod he’s clinging to has a black-market value of forty thousand credits, that technically (legally) he’s unclaimed property in an abandoned facility.
That she has forty-seven days before her refugee status expires and she becomes salvage herself.
“It’s complicated,” she finally manages, and hates herself for the cowardice in it. She’s seen corpses frozen mid-scream in decompressed hulls, pulled bodies from wreckage still clutching photos of people they’d never see again. Death she can handle. Death is clean.
But this boy is alive, standing in a tomb, asking questions she can’t answer without destroying him.
The laboratory groans around them. Dimensional boundaries flexing, reality wearing thin. Somewhere deeper in the facility, equipment whines at frequencies that make her teeth ache. The membrane won’t hold much longer.
Neither will her excuses.
She watches his formal, expectant expression, the way he holds himself with the disciplined posture of someone trained in laboratory protocols that haven’t existed for a century and a half, and understands that the truth will shatter something fundamental in him. The same way her own refugee registration shattered her belief that citizenship meant protection, that papers and stamps and official seals were anything more than permission to exist at someone else’s sufferance.
His parents taught him to stand like that. To wait for proper authorization. To trust in institutional continuity.
All of it gone. Dust and corrupted archives.
The cryopod’s status display flickers behind him, throwing shadows across his too-pale face. She can see him doing the math, that brilliant mind working through variables she wishes he couldn’t calculate. How long does it take for emergency protocols to activate? For rescue teams to mobilize? For anyone to care about a pocket universe laboratory bleeding slowly into dimensional collapse?
The answer is there in her oil-stained salvage suit, in the cutting torch mag-locked to her hip, in the fact that she came here alone to strip valuable equipment from what everyone else considers a grave.
“I’m alone,” she says finally, and the words land like a hull breach.
She watches his face, that careful, protocol-trained composure, fracture in real time. Confusion first, a flicker of incomprehension as his mind rejects the data. Then the calculations begin, and she can see him working through it with the methodical precision of someone raised among scientists. The timeline. The silence. The fact that she’s wearing salvage gear instead of a Directorate uniform.
The horror arrives slowly, like hypothermia.
His lips form words he doesn’t speak: No rescue teams. No evacuation. No one.
The Scientific Directorate isn’t delayed. It’s gone.
She forces herself to hold his gaze while his entire universe collapses inward, smaller and colder than any pocket dimension.
His eyes dart past her shoulder, scanning the frost-rimed corridor with desperate precision: searching for movement, for silhouettes, for anyone. But there’s only amber emergency lighting painting dead chrome, only the whisper of failing life support, only two heartbeats in a tomb that’s unraveling itself molecule by molecule. His breath catches. She watches him understand, truly understand, that the universe outside continued without him.
“One hundred forty-seven years,” she says, and watches the number land like a physical blow. His lips move. She’s seen refugees learn their homeworlds are ash, seen colonists discover their contracts outlived their governments. But this is different. This boy is mathematics made flesh, and he’s just computed his own extinction. Everyone he knew became dust before she was born.
She lowers him against the bulkhead with practiced efficiency, the same care she’d use positioning a volatile fuel cell. His head lolls forward, breath fogging in the frigid air. The thermal blankets are in her pack, always pack for contingencies, first rule of solo salvage, but she hesitates before reaching for them.
Living witness. The words cycle through her stimulant-sharpened mind with the weight of a hull breach alarm.
Her scanner confirms what her gut already knew: the dimensional membrane’s degradation has accelerated to 1.2% per hour. Eight hours maximum before this pocket universe tears itself apart. Maybe six before the dimensional sickness starts. She’s seen footage of salvagers who stayed too long in unstable pockets. Not pretty.
The boy’s eyes track her movements with unnerving clarity despite his physical collapse. “You cannot… simply extract the equipment,” he manages, each word precisely articulated despite his gasping. “The quantum resonance array… maintaining membrane stability… remove it and…”
“And we both die. Yeah, I’m reading the same data.” She pulls out the emergency nutrient pack, tears it open with her teeth. The paste inside is frozen solid. She tucks it against her suit’s heating element, watching the readouts on her HUD. “How long were you in the pod?”
“Twenty-three years subjective. One hundred forty-seven objective.” He says it like he’s reporting instrument readings, but his hands shake. “Everyone else… the pods failed. I heard them dying through the cryosleep. Took decades.”
Lucina’s jaw tightens. She’s pulled enough corpses from failed pods to imagine it. The slow awareness, the frozen helplessness, the screaming that never makes it past paralyzed vocal cords.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Maxentius Flavian. My parents were Lead Researchers Marcus and Julia. She knows that name. Everyone in salvage knows that name.”Fuck.”
She eases him down with deliberate care, one hand supporting his skull, fragile as salvaged ceramic, the other guiding his spine against the bulkhead’s frost-rimed surface. His body folds wrong, joints bending at angles that suggest the connective tissue hasn’t caught up with consciousness. The coverall bunches around him, Scientific Directorate seal prominent against his chest like an accusation.
Gravity settles at 0.8G and holds. Small mercy.
Lucina runs a quick diagnostic sweep of the junction. Structural integrity nominal. Temporal variance minimal. The pocket of stability extends maybe three meters in radius. Enough space to work, not enough to feel safe. Through the amber emergency lighting, she can see where the corridor curves away into impossible geometry, walls meeting at angles that make her inner ear scream protest.
The boy’s skin has that translucent quality of long-term cryosleep, veins visible beneath like circuit traces. His pupils are responsive but dilated, tracking her movements with that same unsettling awareness. Not shock. Something else. Like he’s cataloging her decisions, calculating her reliability coefficient.
She needs him conscious. Needs what he knows.
His chest works like faulty bellows, rapid and shallow, each breath a negotiation his body barely remembers how to conduct. She’s seen this pattern before. Decompression victims in their final minutes, lungs fighting pressure differentials they can’t win against. But this isn’t vacuum damage. This is muscle memory erased by 147 years of suspension, a cardiovascular system that forgot the basic mechanics of circulation, intercostal muscles that atrophied to gossamer while he dreamed in frozen darkness.
The boy’s ribs stand out sharp beneath the oversized coverall. Each inhalation lifts his sternum maybe half a centimeter. Not enough. His lips are taking on a bluish tint that has nothing to do with the cold.
She’s got maybe four minutes before his system crashes completely.
She wedges him at a forty-degree angle, one hand steadying his skull against the bulkhead’s frost-slicked curve. The medical scanner unfolds from her forearm mount with a pneumatic hiss. She sweeps it across his torso, watching the readouts paint themselves in amber holographic script above his chest: muscle density at eighteen percent baseline, systolic pressure seventy over forty, core temp thirty-four point two and sliding. Textbook pre-shock cascade. Three minutes, maybe four before his system gives up entirely.
Her fingers find the carotid pulse. She tilts his head back, checks for obstruction. Clear. His lips are cyanotic at the edges. She strips off her outer glove, presses bare skin to his forehead. Ice-cold. The thermal blanket comes off her pack in a crinkle of metallized fabric. She wraps it twice around his torso, tucking the edges under his shoulders. Standard procedure, but her hands hesitate. Children weren’t supposed to be part of the salvage equation.
The gel packet tears open with a practiced twist, releasing the sharp chemical smell of concentrated nutrients. Algae base, synthetic proteins, vitamin compounds calibrated for metabolic stress. She squeezes a measure into her palm, then reaches for her suit’s water reservoir, the one she’d filled for what was supposed to be a solo eight-hour operation. The gel spreads thin under the water stream, turning from dense paste to something closer to broth, though the color remains that unappetizing gray-green.
“This is going to taste like recycled engine coolant,” she warns, scooping the mixture into the gel pack’s dispensing nozzle. “But it’ll keep you conscious.”
His eyes track her movements with that unsettling awareness, calculating, assessing. Even weakened, he’s reading her the way she reads structural integrity. Looking for stress points, failure risks. Smart kid. Dangerous combination with desperate.
She slides one hand behind his neck, supporting the weight of his head. The bones feel too prominent under her fingers, the muscle mass depleted by decades of suspension. The dispensing nozzle touches his lips and he flinches, just slightly, before his jaw works open.
The first squeeze releases maybe thirty milliliters. His throat convulses immediately, rejecting it, and she feels the tension spike through his entire frame. But she’s done this before: different context, different person, same fundamental biology fighting against necessity.
“Easy. Small breaths through your nose.” Her thumb finds the pressure point below his ear, the one that helps suppress the gag reflex. Not standard salvage training. Something older, from before the collapse, when she still had people to care for. “Your stomach hasn’t processed solid nutrition in a century and a half. It needs to remember how.”
She waits for his breathing to steady, counts five seconds, then administers another measured dose.
His throat works against the intrusion, muscles spasming in confused revolt. The gel comes back up partially, dribbling from the corner of his mouth, and she catches it with her sleeve before it can freeze against his chin. His eyes water, pupils contracting with the effort of keeping it down.
“I know,” she says, and the words come out softer than she intends. “I know it’s bad.”
Another measured dose. His hands clutch weakly at her forearm, not pushing away but anchoring himself, fingers barely able to maintain their grip. The second swallow goes down easier, though his face contorts with the effort.
She finds herself talking, filling the silence with steady commentary. “You’re doing better than most. Saw a guy come out of suspension on the Kepler Station, couldn’t keep anything down for three days.” Not quite true, but close enough. The rhythm of words seems to help, gives him something to focus on besides the revolt in his stomach.
Third dose. Fourth. His grip on her arm gradually strengthens, the tremors subsiding into something more manageable.
The metallicized polymer crinkles as she works, each layer catching the amber emergency lighting and throwing it back in fractured patterns. She tucks the first blanket tight around his torso, sealing heat against his core where it matters most. The second she wraps methodically around his legs, compensating for the way his left knee won’t quite straighten: old cryosleep damage, probably. Her hands move with practiced efficiency, the same motions she’d use securing cargo in a decompression scenario.
The third blanket she fashions into a crude hood, drawing it up and around until only his face shows: a pale oval in a silver cocoon. She adjusts the fold near his temple where the fabric bunches awkwardly, her oil-stained fingers surprisingly gentle.
The numbers scroll across her cracked display in clinical green: pulse dropping from 142 to 108, temperature crawling past 35 degrees Celsius, blood oxygen ticking upward as cellular respiration remembers its rhythm. She tracks the metrics with the same attention she’d give a hull breach calculation, watching biology assert itself against cryosleep’s lingering grip. The gel is working. He’ll stabilize.
His grip tightens, fingers digging into the reinforced fabric of her salvage suit with desperate precision. Those gray eyes hold hers: not pleading, but demanding recognition. She’s seen that look before, in the faces of survivors pulled from decompressed hulks: the terrible clarity of someone who’s already died once and refuses to do it again. Her scanner confirms what his intensity insists. Every reading screams danger she doesn’t yet understand.
He speaks through chattering teeth about cascade failures and dimensional harmonics, his breath fogging in the frigid air. The words tumble out in that archaic, formal cadence: not the rambling of confusion, but the precise terminology of someone who lived and breathed this work. He explains how the quantum resonance device maintains the pocket universe’s structural integrity through a web of interconnected power nodes, each one calibrated to compensate for dimensional drift. Cut one free, he insists, and the compensatory load redistributes. The mathematics cascade. Feedback loops amplify. The membrane doesn’t just destabilize. It tears.
Lucina’s jaw tightens. She’s pulled salvage from a hundred dead stations, navigated debris fields that would shred lesser operators. She knows when metal’s stressed past tolerance, when a hull section’s one torch-cut from explosive decompression. This should be no different. Except her scanner’s painting a picture that matches his warnings too precisely. The energy distribution patterns form a web, exactly as he described. Nodes pulse in synchronized rhythm, maintaining some kind of equilibrium she can barely parse.
“How long?” she asks, keeping her voice level. Professional. “Before it goes critical?”
The boy’s eyes track to a wall-mounted chronometer, its display flickering amber through the frost. His lips move silently, calculating. “At current degradation rates? Forty-three hours until membrane breach. But that assumes no additional stress factors.” His gaze shifts to the cutting torch mag-locked to her thigh. “Any disruption to the power grid accelerates the timeline exponentially. We could have minutes.”
She runs the numbers in her head. Forty-three hours objective, but time flows wrong here. Could be days outside. Could be minutes. Her refugee status doesn’t care about relativistic calculations. Forty-seven days until processing, and she’s burning time in a collapsing pocket universe with a kid who might be brilliant or might be broken.
The scanner chirps. Another spike near the equipment bays.
The salvager’s instinct screams at her to trust her own expertise, not some disoriented kid’s doomsday predictions. But the data doesn’t lie. The scanner’s thermal overlay shows stress fractures propagating through the dimensional membrane in real-time, concentrated exactly where she’d tagged the most valuable equipment. Power conduits snake through the walls in patterns that make her eyes hurt to follow: non-Euclidean routing that shouldn’t be possible but clearly is.
She zooms the display, tracking energy flow through what should be simple electrical systems. Except they’re not simple. Each conduit branches into quantum probability states, existing in multiple configurations simultaneously. The boy’s terminology, cascade failures, dimensional harmonics, suddenly feels less like archaic jargon and more like the only accurate description.
“Show me,” she says, crouching to his level and angling the scanner so he can reach it.
His fingers hover over the interface, hesitant. “You believe me?”
“I believe my equipment. And right now, it’s telling me you know something I don’t.” She meets his eyes. “So talk fast. What am I looking at?”
His fingers shake as they move across the display, tracing energy patterns that pulse in colors her scanner shouldn’t be able to render. “These aren’t standard power conduits,” he whispers, his formal diction cracking with urgency. “They’re quantum-entangled probability channels. See this node?” He taps a junction where six lines converge. “It maintains coherence across seventeen parallel states simultaneously. If you sever it, the decoherence cascade will propagate through the entire grid in approximately four minutes.”
She watches the readings shift as he manipulates the interface, revealing layers of data her standard salvage protocols would never have detected. The numbers don’t just add up: they multiply across dimensions she lacks the mathematics to comprehend.
“How do you know this?” she asks.
“I watched them install it. I was there.”
Her fingers hover over the cutting torch’s ignition, then deliberately move away. The math is brutal: three hundred thousand credits in rare-earth processors versus an eight-percent chance of catastrophic dimensional collapse. Except the boy’s readings suggest those odds are inverted. She’s survived fifteen years in salvage by trusting her instruments. His knowledge is an instrument. Just one that breathes.
She keys the facility schematic onto her wrist display, angling the projection so he can see. “Walk me through it,” she says, her voice stripped of the condescension she’d use on a standard client. “What stays connected, what breaks the chain.” His eyes widen. That particular species of shock when someone powerless discovers they’ve been granted authority. His skeletal finger traces glowing pathways across her screen, hesitant at first, then certain.
“Four hours for you,” she tells him, meeting those too-old eyes without flinching. “Maybe six for me if I push the stims. After that, the dimensional sickness starts eating our neural tissue. Permanent damage at eight hours. Death somewhere past twelve, though we’d be non-functional long before then.”
Maxentius doesn’t react the way children should: no tears, no protest. He just nods, processing the information like a research parameter. “The temporal differential will accelerate your symptoms,” he says, his formal diction at odds with the tremor in his voice. “Sections seven through twelve are running point-zero-three slower than realspace. Your subjective exposure compounds.”
She pulls up the decay projections, the numbers painting an ugly picture. The membrane’s degradation isn’t linear: it’s exponential. At current rates, they have maybe three hours before the pocket universe starts fragmenting, spilling its contents across multiple timestreams. Everything inside would be torn apart at the quantum level.
“So we prioritize,” Lucina says, already recalculating. Her mental inventory shifts from ‘most valuable’ to ‘most portable.’ The quantum resonance device (the prize that brought her here) masses four tons and connects to seventeen different systems. Extracting it would take days she doesn’t have and trigger the very cascade Maxentius warned about.
She tastes copper at the back of her throat, the first whisper of dimensional sickness or maybe just exhaustion. The stimulants are wearing thin.
“The research data,” she decides. “Crystalline storage cores, right? Those I can move.” She glances at the boy, registers his relief that she’s listening. “And we get you stabilized enough to walk. I’m not carrying you through non-Euclidean geometry on a deadline.”
“The cores are in the central archive,” Maxentius says. “But the path crosses through section nine. Time runs backwards there.”
Of course it does.
She forces herself to look at him directly, this child-shaped complication with physicist’s eyes. In her original timeline, she’d have been halfway through cutting the quantum array free by now, working in comfortable silence with only her scanner’s ping for company. Instead she’s rationing thermal blankets and trying to remember the last time she dealt with someone who couldn’t survive on stimulants and spite.
The numbers won’t balance anymore. Her mental ledger, always meticulous, always calculating mass-to-credit ratios, has a new variable that doesn’t convert cleanly to currency. One refugee boy, mass approximately thirty-five kilos, value undefined. The forged citizenship papers she needs cost 47,[^000] credits. The data cores might fetch 20,[^000] if she finds the right buyer. The boy’s testimony about the lab’s contents could be worth more, or could flag her to Imperial authorities as trafficking in Directorate secrets.
She catches herself doing it, the calculus of abandonment, the cold math of survival, and feels something twist behind her sternum. When did she become the kind of salvager who weighs a child’s life in credits?
His gaze doesn’t waver, those too-old eyes tracking every microexpression that crosses her face. She’s seen that look before: in airlock queues, in processing centers, in the faces of people waiting to learn if they qualify as human or cargo under Imperial taxonomy.
“You’re calculating,” he says, voice flat with exhaustion and something darker. “Mass versus profit. Extraction time versus membrane stability. Whether a witness complicates or enhances salvage value.”
The clinical precision of his assessment hits harder than accusation would. He’s not pleading. He’s simply documenting her decision tree, a scientist observing data even as he becomes the variable being optimized away.
“I’ve seen that arithmetic before,” he continues quietly. “My parents performed it on forty colleagues when the power failed.”
The gesture betrays her before conscious thought catches up: fingertips finding the raised scar tissue, that bureaucratic brand marking her as provisional, conditional, salvageable. Twenty-three years she’s carried that taxonomy. The boy’s watching her touch it, recognition flickering across his exhausted features. He knows exactly what that mark means, what calculations it represents. She’s been the variable optimized away too many times to replicate that arithmetic now.
The math strips clean in her mind like a hull plate under the torch: eight hours of operational window, four before the kid’s physiology fails, zero salvage value if she prioritizes extraction over profit. But the inverse equation writes itself too. Another twenty-three years carrying more than just a registration scar, the weight of choosing credits over someone who needed out.
Lucina watches the boy’s thin hands tremble as he recites the technical specifications, his voice never wavering even as his body betrays him. She’s catalogued enough wreckage to recognize structural failure when she sees it, whether it’s a hull breach or a human being coming apart at the seams.
The kid’s got maybe three hours before his muscles give out completely. Less if the gravity keeps fluctuating like this. She pulls a stimulant injector from her belt, considers the dosage. Too much and his heart might not handle it. Too little and he’ll be deadweight before she can make the extraction call.
“How fast?” she asks, cutting through his recitation. “The collapse. Give me numbers I can use.”
Maxentius blinks, refocuses. His gray eyes, too old for that face, lock onto hers with desperate intensity. “Current degradation rate suggests total membrane failure in six point three hours. Margin of error plus or minus forty minutes. But that’s assuming no additional stress factors.”
“And if I start cutting equipment free?”
His expression fractures, just for a moment. Fear bleeds through the formal mask. “Then we have perhaps ninety minutes. Maybe less. The dimensional anchors are load-bearing. Remove the wrong component and,”
“Cascade. Yeah, I got that part.” Lucina runs the numbers again, hating every variable. The quantum resonance device in the core. That’s the prize. That’s citizenship papers and a decade of breathing room. But it’s also exactly the kind of equipment that keeps pocket universes from collapsing into realspace like a fist through wet paper.
She looks at the boy, really looks at him. Sees her brother’s face in that desperate need to be heard, to be believed. Sees a hundred other refugees who didn’t make it out.
“Alright, kid,” she says, making the choice that’ll probably kill them both. “Show me what we can move without triggering your cascade.”
Lucina recognizes the pattern in his breathing, shallow, controlled, fighting the body’s betrayal through sheer discipline. She’s seen salvage crew chiefs do the same thing when their oxygen runs low, maintaining operational speech until the moment they pass out.
“Slow down,” she says, but he doesn’t. Can’t. The words are a framework holding him together.
He shifts against the thermal blankets, trying to gesture with hands that won’t quite cooperate. “The primary stabilizers in sector C-7 are integral to (” His voice cracks, just slightly, and he compensates by speaking faster, more precisely. “) to maintaining dimensional coherence across the western quadrant. If you extract the resonance device without first redistributing the quantum load to the secondary array,”
“I said slow down.” She grips his shoulder, feels the bird-bone fragility of him. “You’re burning oxygen you don’t have.”
Maxentius stops mid-sentence, his jaw working silently. His eyes are too bright, fever-sharp with stimulant crash and temporal displacement. When he speaks again, it’s barely a whisper: “I have to be useful.”
There it is. The raw edge beneath all that formal precision.
She knows this arithmetic intimately. The way you catalog your skills like inventory, speaking faster as if volume could compensate for the fundamental equation that never balances. She’s watched refugees list their certifications with the same desperate precision, as if being fluent in six dialects or understanding quantum mechanics could outweigh the simple fact of having no papers, no citizenship, no legal right to exist in the spaces between stars.
The boy is running the same calculation she’s been running for years, trying to solve for his own survival by proving his utility. Trying to make himself indispensable before someone decides he’s just another piece of salvage, another mouth consuming oxygen that could be monetized elsewhere.
The arithmetic crystallizes with brutal clarity. She recognizes his inventory of competencies, the way he catalogs his worth in technical specifications and specialized knowledge. It’s the same ledger she’s been maintaining, line-item justifications for why someone should spend resources keeping her breathing. He’s twelve years old and already fluent in the language of conditional survival, already negotiating for the right to not be abandoned.
The weight of it settles like hull-breach decompression. She’s been calculating survival margins in credits and citizenship papers, but here’s this kid pricing his existence in technical expertise, offering quantum physics like it’s enough collateral to justify rescue. The familiar arithmetic makes her throat tight. Some scores, she realizes, you measure in different currencies entirely.
She keys her comm to record. Not for evidence, but for memory. The gesture surprises her even as she makes it. Fifteen years of salvage work, and she’s never bothered documenting anything that didn’t have resale value. But something about the kid’s formal diction, the way he talks about catastrophic cascade like he’s discussing weather patterns, makes her want a record that he existed. That this conversation happened.
She gestures toward the nearest control panel, its amber displays flickering with pre-Collapse interface design. Maxentius struggles to his feet with the determination of someone who’s already lost everything except purpose. His legs shake, atrophied muscle protesting against even the laboratory’s inconsistent gravity. She can see the effort it costs him, the way his jaw sets against what must be considerable pain.
He’s maybe forty kilos soaking wet. She’s hauled heavier equipment through harder vacuum.
But he moves toward that console like it’s the only fixed point in a spinning universe, one hand trailing along the frost-covered bulkhead for support. The Scientific Directorate seal on his oversized coverall catches the emergency lighting. A phoenix rising from geometric flames, the motto underneath barely legible: Ex Scientia, Libertas. From knowledge, freedom. She wonders if he knows the Directorate was disbanded for crimes against Imperial stability. If he understands that his parents’ research was classified as seditious technology.
Probably does. Kid seems to understand too much.
His fingers find the control panel with practiced familiarity, dancing across interfaces that haven’t been touched in 147 years. The displays respond immediately, scrolling through diagnostic data faster than she can track. He’s reading it though, his too-old eyes scanning the information with the speed of someone who learned this language before he learned to walk.
“The quantum resonance device,” he says, his voice thin but steady. “It’s the anchor point. Everything else is peripheral.”
She watches his hands shake: not from fear, but from the simple physical strain of standing upright. The stimulants in her system make everything sharp-edged and immediate: the frost patterns on the console, the way his breath fogs in the failing life support, the mathematical certainty in his expression.
“Define ‘reach realspace,’” she says, though part of her already knows. Fifteen years of salvage work teaches you to recognize catastrophe in technical language.
“The debris field.” His voice stays level, but she catches the tremor underneath. “Forty-seven-point-three light-years of space. Everything within the resonance envelope would experience temporal fragmentation. Ships, stations, colonies.” He meets her eyes. “Approximately two million people in the affected zone.”
The number sits between them like a physical thing.
She’s pulled bodies from wreckage before. Knows what vacuum does to human tissue, what explosive decompression looks like from the inside. Multiply that by two million. Her hand tightens on the console edge, oil-stained fingers leaving prints in the frost.
“Show me the stabilization sequence,” she says. “Every step.”
He moves to the nearest terminal, each step a visible effort. His fingers find the interface with the certainty of someone who learned these systems before he learned to read: because he probably did. The screen flickers to life, displaying cascading equations that make her eyes ache.
“Here.” He traces a sequence through the holographic display, his hand trembling. “Resonance damping must reach point-seven-three before physical disconnection. Then the quantum buffers, in this order.” He pulls up schematics she can barely parse. “My parents designed seventeen safeguards. Standard salvage cutting would bypass all of them.”
She studies the procedure, counting steps, estimating time. Her jaw tightens.
“How long?”
“Six hours. Minimum.”
She overlays the scanner data against his timeline, watching probability curves collapse into grim certainty. The numbers don’t negotiate. Six hours to safely extract the resonance core. Maybe seven before the membrane fails completely. Her refugee status, her brother’s trail, her entire future. All of it balanced against the physics of a dying pocket universe and one exhausted child who knows too much.
“How much time do we have?” she asks, already calculating vectors and load capacities. Her hands move through familiar pre-extraction checks, torch calibration, harness tension, membrane thickness, even as the parameters shift beneath her. This isn’t salvage anymore. The weight of it settles in her chest: she’s choosing between fortune and survival, between the papers that mean freedom and the responsibility of keeping this boy alive.
Lucina’s scanner flickers as it attempts to quantify the quantum processors, their readings shifting between states of existence like a coin perpetually spinning. The numbers cascade across her display refusing to settle into anything she can log with confidence. She taps the screen twice, a salvager’s superstition, but the readings continue their quantum dance.
“They won’t stabilize,” she mutters, more to herself than the boy.
“They can’t,” Maxentius says from his nest of thermal blankets. His voice carries that unsettling certainty again. “They’re entangled with the resonance device in the core. Quantum-locked across seven dimensional axes. Father’s design.”
Lucina glances at him, then back to her scanner. “Meaning what, in salvager terms?”
“Meaning they exist in superposition with the core’s operational state. Remove them incorrectly (” He makes a collapsing gesture with one pale hand. “) they’ll cascade into exotic matter. Probably take half the lab with them.”
She logs them as “unstable high-value” and marks them yellow in her inventory system: salvageable only if she can solve the bigger problem first. The color coding is her own. Red for immediate danger, yellow for conditional extraction, green for safe removal. So far, nothing’s rated green.
“How incorrectly are we talking?” she asks, zooming in on the processors’ housing. They’re beautiful pieces of engineering, worth six months of forged citizenship papers each if she can extract them intact.
“The extraction sequence requires seventeen specific steps in precise temporal order.” Maxentius shifts under the blanket, his movements still weak and uncertain. “I watched Mother practice it forty-seven times before the final test run. She never completed it.”
Lucina’s jaw tightens. Of course it’s complicated. Nothing in this damned pocket universe could be simple. She saves the inventory file and moves on to catalog the next items, her mind already calculating contingencies she doesn’t yet have.
The data cores prove more straightforward: seventeen crystalline matrices locked in protective housings, their quantum states collapsed and stable. Lucina’s scanner gives her clean readings: green across the board. Each one worth maybe two weeks of living expenses, not enough to change her situation but enough to matter.
Maxentius leans forward when she catalogs the third one, squinting at the etched label on its casing. “That’s Mother’s handwriting,” he says quietly. His finger traces the air above the archaic notation without quite touching the frost-covered surface. “Project Argentum, Trial Series, Subset J-7 through J-23.”
His voice catches on the word “Mother.” Not much, just a half-beat hesitation that makes Lucina glance up from her scanner.
She watches his face as he translates the remaining labels, noting how his formal diction slips when he reads his parents’ words aloud. The grief is genuine: that much is clear. But genuine doesn’t mean reliable. Emotional attachment clouds judgment, makes people see significance where there’s only sentiment.
Still, he hasn’t been wrong about the technical details yet. She marks that observation, files it away with the rest of her risk assessment.
Lucina pries open the emergency lockers, their seals cracking after a century and a half. Inside: stims in their foil packets, coagulant ampules still clear, radiation tabs showing green on their exposure strips. All viable. All valuable.
She catalogs each item with practiced efficiency, her scanner logging pharmaceutical codes and expiration dates that mean nothing after the Collapse. Maxentius glances over, dismisses them with a distracted wave. “Basic medical stores. Standard issue.”
Standard to him, maybe. In the refugee zones, clean supplies like these trade at triple their listed price: sometimes higher if you know the right clinics. She pockets three stim packets and a handful of coagulants without comment. Old habits. Survival margins measured in small scores.
The sensor arrays bristle from the walls like chrome antennae, their readouts still flickering amber beneath the frost. Maxentius watches her approach them, his voice sharpening. “Those feed the stabilization algorithms. Without continuous monitoring. She marks them red in her inventory: salvage of last resort. Touch them only when everything else has already gone wrong.
Lucina’s fingers hover over the dataslate, the tally glowing accusatory green. Forty thousand. Maybe forty-five if she strips the medical bay. Her forged citizenship papers cost thirty-two. Following her brother’s last known coordinates to the Kepler stations. Another eight. That leaves nothing for fuel, nothing for bribes, nothing for the ship repairs she’s been deferring for six months.
The quantum resonance device pulses in her mind like a second heartbeat. Worth millions. Probably. If it doesn’t kill her first.
Lucina’s suit sensors flare amber warnings as they pass through the threshold: radiation spikes, gravitational fluctuations, something her equipment labels simply as “ANOMALY-7.” She’s learned to ignore half the alerts in this place. The other half might kill her.
“How do you know?” she asks, watching the boy navigate with the certainty of someone walking their childhood home. Which, she supposes, this was. Is. Time makes the tense complicated here.
Maxentius doesn’t look back, just continues his shuffling gait through the chrome labyrinth. “We mapped it. Before.” His voice carries that same formal cadence, words chosen with archaic precision. “Father developed the measurement protocols. Mother refined them. I…” He pauses at a junction where three corridors meet at angles that shouldn’t sum correctly. “I was responsible for updating the charts every morning.”
Every morning, 147 years ago. Lucina swallows the observation.
The boy traces his fingers along the wall, reading something in the frost patterns she can’t see. “This section was stable when I went into cryo. The deviation has progressed.” He frowns, a child’s expression on a face that’s witnessed the death of everyone he knew. “The pocket is degrading faster than the models predicted.”
“How much faster?” Lucina asks, though she’s not sure she wants the answer. Her extraction timeline is already tight: six hours to identify, catalog, and prep the most valuable tech for removal. The dimensional membrane won’t stay stable forever.
“Difficult to calculate precisely.” Maxentius marks another intersection with her tape, the luminescent stripe glowing like a breadcrumb trail through a nightmare. “But the resonance device is accelerating the collapse. It’s been active, unsupervised, for over a century. Drawing power from the dimensional boundaries themselves.” He finally turns to face her, those too-old eyes meeting hers. “It’s eating the laboratory from the inside out.”
Lucina watches the frost patterns, tries to see what he’s seeing. They do move strangely: crystalline fractals forming and reforming in slow reverse, ice accreting backward toward liquid. Her stomach turns. Time shouldn’t be visible like this.
“The western labs,” she says, calculating. “Three-to-one differential. That’s where the high-value equipment would be, yeah? Quantum processors, dimensional stabilizers. The tech that doesn’t exist anymore outside.”
Maxentius nods, still marking the wall with methodical precision. The luminescent tape glows brighter here, reacting to something her instruments can’t measure. “Yes. Also where the cascade will originate if the resonance device fails.” He finishes the mark, steps back to examine his work. “Father’s last notes indicated critical instability in that sector. That was twenty-three years ago, my time.”
“And a century and a half of degradation since,” Lucina mutters. The math is ugly. High-value salvage in the most dangerous zone, with a ticking clock she can’t even see properly. “Can we stabilize it? Temporarily?”
The boy’s expression suggests she’s asked something foolish. “Not without understanding what my parents were attempting to achieve.”
Lucina’s scanner whines in protest at each junction, spitting contradictory data streams across its cracked display. Gravity lurches from moon-light to crushing within three meters. The atmospheric pressure holds steady, the only constant in this twisted place, but temperature readings swing forty degrees between one breath and the next. Radiation signatures bloom like phantom flowers, spiking into the red before vanishing completely, as if the universe itself can’t decide what’s dangerous.
The dimensional membrane’s shimmer catches in every chrome surface, multiplied into infinity. It’s moving faster now, she’s certain of it. More agitated than when she first breached six hours ago. The boundary pulses with an almost biological rhythm, quickening. Like something becoming aware of their intrusion.
She doesn’t argue. Whatever haunts that corridor, temporal echoes, quantum impressions, or just a traumatized kid’s grief, isn’t worth the salvage. The scanner’s already flagging the eastern wing’s chronometric variance at twelve percent drift. Time enough for voices to leak backward, for the dead to whisper across years they’ll never experience.
Some ghosts you leave undisturbed. Even when you’re desperate.
The tape peels from her dispenser with a soft hiss. Three parallel strips across the eastern threshold, bright as arterial blood. Maxentius’s breathing steadies as they retreat. She logs coordinates into her wrist-comp: three viable approaches to the core, two collapse-contingency exits. The numbers confirm her instinct: membrane degradation up seventeen percent since breach. Her ship’s mass, her body heat, her very presence accelerating the pocket universe toward catastrophic failure.
Lucina circles the device, keeping her distance, her salvager’s eye cataloging the mechanism even as her gut screams warnings. The rings aren’t metal: something denser, darker, drinking in light at their edges. Each rotation leaves afterimages burned into her vision, geometric patterns that shouldn’t exist in three-dimensional space. The bioluminescent pulse syncs with her heartbeat for three cycles before drifting out of phase, and that wrongness makes her teeth ache.
“How many tried to take it?” she asks, not looking away from the sphere.
Maxentius gestures weakly toward the chamber’s perimeter. She’d missed them in the device’s hypnotic glow: scorch marks radiating from four different positions, black streaks where reality itself had burned. The patterns are identical: approach vectors, tool marks on the suspension field generators, then sudden catastrophic failure. Char and silence.
“Four teams. Two made it this far.” His voice drops. “The others triggered cascades in the outer sections. We found their… fragments. Temporally dispersed.”
She crouches near the closest scorch mark, running her gloved fingers along the edge. The metal is cold enough to burn through the insulation, and the damage goes deeper than heat: the substrate itself looks wrong, like someone tried to fold steel through the fourth dimension. Her wrist-comp stutters when she aims it at the mark, unable to parse the readings.
“Your parents built this?” She stands, joints protesting. The stimulants are wearing thin.
“Built it. Stabilized it. Died protecting it from the Directorate’s shutdown order.” Maxentius’s reflection warps across the nearest ring. “They knew what it could do. What it would do if the wrong people understood its function.”
The device pulses again, and this time Lucina feels it in her chest. A pressure, like standing too close to a ship’s reactor core. Like standing at the edge of something vast and hungry.
“So what does it do?”
Maxentius straightens despite his weakness, and his voice shifts: no longer the disoriented child but the researcher he was trained to be. “Controlled probability collapse,” he says, each word precise. “The device doesn’t generate power. It selects realities where specific outcomes have already occurred.”
Lucina’s hand drifts to her cutting torch, then stops. “In salvager terms.”
“It reaches into parallel universes and pulls out the results you want. Need a fusion reaction that produces twice normal yield? The device finds a timeline where it already happened and anchors that probability here.” His fingers trace patterns she can’t follow. “My parents theorized you could retrieve anything. Lost ships. Dead colleagues. Alternate histories where the Collapse never occurred.”
The implications crawl up her spine like ice water. “And if someone disconnects it wrong?”
“The probability fields destabilize. The pocket universe stops selecting this reality as its anchor point.” He meets her eyes, and she sees the weight of 147 years in that gaze. “We become quantum uncertainty. Every possible version of our deaths, simultaneously.”
Lucina follows his unsteady gait around the device’s perimeter, her boots crunching on frost that shouldn’t exist in a temperature-controlled lab. The scorch marks tell stories she knows too well. Hasty cuts, panic decisions, the universal language of salvagers who realized too late they’d grabbed something lethal. Three separate torch patterns, three different escape attempts. She counts the abandoned tools: two plasma cutters still glowing faintly, a pry bar wedged in a conduit junction, someone’s glove melted to a control surface.
“How long did they have?” she asks.
“Between triggering the cascade and the membrane rejecting them?” Maxentius touches a blackened console. “Forty seconds. Maybe less.”
She does the math on their own timeline. Not enough margin for error.
She forces herself to breathe against the rhythm, refusing to let the device dictate her pulse. Her hand hovers over the nearest connection point: a crystalline junction pulsing with trapped light. Maxentius grabs her wrist with surprising strength.
“That one first,” he says, “and we die in twenty seconds.”
The frost beneath her boots cracks in sympathy with the device’s acceleration.
She studies the crystalline lattice through her visor’s magnification, tracing power conduits that branch like frozen lightning. Maxentius leans closer, his breath fogging her screen as he overlays equations she can’t parse but recognizes as survival math. His finger trembles pointing at a junction she’d marked safe. He shakes his head once, decisive. She deletes the marker, recalculates. The device’s pulse quickens.
Lucina’s datapad glows between them, casting pale blue light across their faces in the amber-lit theater. She sketches the extraction sequence with quick, efficient strokes: stabilization first, then data transfer, power reduction, selective component removal. Each step flows from her years of salvage work, the practiced choreography of stripping value from dead ships.
But Maxentius watches with an intensity that makes her hands hesitate.
She’s being evaluated. Judged by someone who understands these systems better than anyone alive, better than anyone who’s existed for a century and a half. His gray eyes track each line she draws, and she can feel the weight of his assessment: not hostile, but exacting. Clinical.
“The membrane stabilizers,” she says, keeping her voice level, professional. “We anchor them to these four nodes, create a reinforcement grid.”You’ll need to account for the phase variance between the nodes. They’re not synchronized anymore.”
She pauses mid-stroke. “How far out of sync?”
“Unknown. The temporal distortion fields have been degrading for,” He stops, swallows. “For longer than I was alive before they froze me.”
Lucina adds a notation, marks the nodes with question marks. Her salvager’s instinct screams that unknowns kill you, that you don’t cut into systems you don’t understand. But everything here is unknown. Every surface hides variables she can’t measure.
“What else?” she asks.
Maxentius leans closer, studying her work. His breathing sounds thin, labored. The boy needs rest, needs proper medical care, needs things she can’t provide in a collapsing pocket universe. But his mind is sharp, cutting through her assumptions with the precision of someone who grew up in this impossible place.
“The data cores,” he says finally. “You’ve marked them for second-phase extraction.”
“Standard procedure. Stabilize first, then,”
“They’re tied to the membrane integrity system. Remove them wrong, and we lose six hours of stability.”
She deletes the sequence. Starts again.
He reaches for the datapad with trembling fingers, the muscle atrophy obvious in how they shake. Lucina tilts the device toward him rather than surrendering it. A compromise that keeps the tool in her possession while granting him access. Control matters, even here. Especially here.
His fingertip traces across the display, leaving annotations in symbols she half-recognizes from technical manuals she’s skimmed but never truly understood. Quantum flux coefficients. Temporal buffer calculations. Membrane resonance frequencies written in notation that predates the Collapse, mathematical languages that died with the Scientific Directorate.
Each correction he makes peels back another layer of her confidence. The extraction sequence she’d sketched with such certainty (born from a hundred successful salvage operations) suddenly looks crude. Dangerous. She’d been planning to dismantle a quantum resonance laboratory with the same tools she’d use on a derelict cargo hauler.
“This junction,” Maxentius says, his child’s voice steady despite his physical weakness, “connects to the primary dimensional anchor. You’ve marked it for phase-two extraction.”
“High-value components come out early,” she says, but the words sound hollow even to her.
“It would catastrophically destabilize the pocket universe,” he continues, his archaic diction making the apocalyptic scenario sound like a classroom lecture. “The membrane would undergo cascading resonance failure. Approximately 2.[^3] seconds from severance to total dimensional collapse.”
Lucina studies the junction: just another power coupling in her original assessment, the kind she’s yanked from a thousand dead ships. Her instinct had screamed valuable, accessible, extract early. That same instinct would have killed them both.
“And this one?” She points to another component she’d flagged.
“Temporal buffer regulator. Remove it before step twelve and time desynchronization will make the remaining sequence impossible to coordinate. We’d be moving at different rates.”
The gap between her experience and his knowledge isn’t a gap. It’s an abyss.
She adds his modifications to the datapad, watching her straightforward four-step salvage plan metastasize into seventeen precisely sequenced actions, each dependent on the last. The margins for error are measured in seconds and millimeters. It’s the difference between stripping a derelict and defusing a bomb, and she’s only ever done one of those. Her fingers hover over the schematic, tracing failure points she can’t afford to acknowledge.
She holds his gaze and says “Yes” with the easy certainty she’s used to talk her way past customs agents, guild enforcers, repo crews. The word tastes like copper. Her mind’s already running failure scenarios. Membrane rupture at step nine, cascade initiation at step twelve, her own body crystallizing in temporal shear while he watches. They’re salvaging a bomb with a dead man’s instructions. But she’s been dying slowly for years. At least this would be quick.
She cycles through communication frequencies one final time. Nothing living. Nothing that could help or hinder them. The isolation should feel like safety, but instead it feels like drowning in vacuum.
Lucina adjusts the gain on the long-range scanner, pushing it past recommended parameters until the interference patterns resolve into certainty: they have at minimum forty-eight hours before any vessel crosses within detection range of this debris field. Probably longer. The Outer Rim collapse scattered the shipping lanes, and this particular coordinate sits in the dead zone between Imperial patrol routes and corporate salvage territories. It’s why the pocket universe lab survived undiscovered for a century and a half. It’s why she could reach it.
It’s why no one will find their bodies if this goes wrong.
She keys the scanner to passive mode and watches the boy (Maxentius, she reminds herself, he has a name) huddle deeper into her thermal blanket. He’s studying the quantum resonance device schematics on her datapad, lips moving silently as he works through calculations she can’t begin to follow. His fingers are too thin, knuckles prominent, the kind of malnourishment that comes from extended cryosleep. She’s seen it before in refugee ships, the ones that drifted too long between colonies.
The observation theater’s emergency lighting flickers, casting his shadow across equipment that hasn’t moved in 147 years. Frost sublimates from a nearby console in lazy spirals that defy standard atmospheric convection. Wrong physics. Wrong time. Wrong place for a child who should have grown up, grown old, died of natural causes generations ago.
She pulls up the extraction timeline on her wrist display. Seventeen steps. Estimated duration: six hours, forty minutes. Margin for error: functionally zero. Her refugee status expires in forty-seven days, but that deadline suddenly feels abstract compared to the membrane degradation percentage ticking upward in the corner of her vision.
The Persephone’s Gambit registers nominal across all critical systems when Lucina queries her ship’s status through the dimensional membrane’s three-second lag. Oxygen recyclers holding at 94% efficiency: good enough. Water reserves calculated for eighteen days solo operation, twelve if she’s feeding two mouths. Fuel cells sufficient for three weeks of low-power drift or one hard burn back to Waystation Tannhäuser, assuming she doesn’t need maneuvering thrust for debris avoidance.
Numbers that looked generous during her approach vector now feel like a noose tightening.
She runs the math again, this time factoring Maxentius into every variable. A twelve-year-old body doesn’t consume much oxygen, but the cryosleep damage means he’ll need supplemental nutrition, medical supplies she doesn’t have in quantity. The kid can’t work a cutting torch or haul equipment in zero-g. He’s dead weight in every practical sense.
Dead weight who’s the only person in the universe who knows how to extract the quantum resonance device without killing them both.
She saves the resource projection without voicing the numbers aloud. Some calculations don’t need an audience.
The membrane degradation pattern glows amber on her wrist display. Exponential decay, not linear. Physicist’s nightmare rendered in salvager’s shorthand. She’s worked debris fields where hull breaches gave her minutes, navigated fuel leaks that counted down in heartbeats, but those were mechanical failures. Predictable. This is spacetime itself coming apart at the seams.
Forty-eight hours, she revises mentally, watching the curve steepen. Maybe less if the quantum device destabilizes faster than Maxentius predicts. And that’s assuming she can even extract it, assuming his 147-year-old theoretical knowledge translates to practical engineering, assuming a half-starved kid who can barely walk can guide her through procedures that killed his parents.
Too many assumptions. Not enough time to find better options.
She’s seen that look before: in docking station mirrors, in the eyes of other refugees queuing for expired ration cards. The hollow mathematics of survival. The blanket slips from his narrow shoulders and he doesn’t notice, too focused on the datapad displaying his parents’ final calculations. His fingers trace equations like prayers. She could leave him in cryosleep, tell herself he never woke up. The thought makes her sick.
She tabs through the manifest again, fingers hovering over the delete key. Sixty-three thousand. Four years of breathing recycled air and dodging corporate claim-jumpers. The device glows amber in her peripheral vision, worth three times her life’s work. Worth two sets of papers instead of one. The boy coughs, wet, shallow, and she thinks of her brother’s last message, seventeen years silent. She saves the file without modifications.
Lucina watches the chronometer tick to 04:[^47], each second a measured drain on their shrinking window. The boy shifts beneath the thermal blankets she’d layered over him. Three silver sheets meant for emergency hull patches, now serving as bedding in an observation theater that smells of frost and failing circuits.
She’s been productive. Three sections cleared, the salvage arranged in careful rows near the membrane’s shimmer: power cells still holding sixty percent charge, sensor arrays with intact quantum processors, a medical scanner worth eight months of standard salvage runs. Her fingers won’t stop trembling: the stimulants have her in their grip now, that familiar wire-tight focus edged with nausea. She flexes her hands, watches the tendons jump beneath oil-stained skin, and returns to sorting.
The math is simple enough. Two trips per hour through the dimensional membrane before the stress readings spike into dangerous territory. That means prioritization, ruthless and calculated. High-value items first: the components that’ll fetch premium rates from the right buyers. Bulk salvage only if the timeline permits, only if the membrane holds stable, only if the universe doesn’t collapse around them first.
She’s tagged forty-seven items as priority extraction. Another hundred and twelve as secondary targets. The quantum device sits in its own category, a problem she’s been circling around for hours while her hands stayed busy with easier questions.
Maxentius stirs, a small sound in the amber-lit silence. His breathing changes rhythm. Shallow sleep giving way to waking. Lucina pulls a ration bar from her kit, checks the water supply. Two liters remaining. She’d planned for a solo operation, not a passenger, but the boy needs calories after 147 years of cryosleep.
She crosses to him, movements careful in the intermittent gravity, and crouches beside his makeshift bed. Time to see if their timeline survives contact with reality.
She touches his shoulder, careful, the muscle atrophy makes him fragile, and watches those too-old eyes open. Recognition comes faster than it should for someone pulled from cryosleep. The boy’s already calculating, already afraid.
“Eat first,” she says, pressing the ration bar into his hand. “Then we talk timelines.”
Maxentius sits up slowly, accepts the water with formal precision. He chews methodically while she runs through the extraction plan, her voice clipped and efficient. Four hours mapping connections. Four fabricating the cradle. Six for extraction. Eight held back for when everything goes sideways.
He swallows, sets down the water. “The power-down sequence requires twelve hours minimum.” His voice is steady, matter-of-fact. “Attempting rapid extraction will trigger cascade failure across the dimensional membrane. The math doesn’t negotiate.”
Lucina’s jaw tightens. She pulls up her timeline on the wrist display, watches the numbers turn hostile. “Then we’re already behind.”
“Yes.” No apology in it. Just physics, indifferent as vacuum. “We need to begin the shutdown now. Immediately.”
She tastes copper. The stimulants, or just fear.
They huddle over her wrist display, numbers bleeding red across the projection. Lucina maps the physical work. Torch time, fabrication tolerances, margin for equipment failure. Maxentius overlays the quantum mathematics, his finger tracing decay curves she can barely parse.
“Here,” he says, highlighting a cluster of secondary storage units. “These contain rare-earth composites, but removing them costs ninety minutes we don’t have.”
She calculates fast. Forty thousand credits, maybe more. Enough to bribe three different officials. Her throat closes.
“Gone,” she decides. The word tastes like ash.
His hands move across the ancient interface without hesitation, muscle memory surviving 147 years of sleep. The quantum resonance device begins its long descent toward dormancy, harmonics dropping through frequencies she feels in her teeth.
The fabrication bay becomes their shared classroom. Lucina guides his pale fingers across seam lines, teaching him the language of stressed metal: the whisper of microfractures, the singing tension of overtorqued bolts. He returns the lesson, pointing out components that shimmer wrong in the amber light, matter that remembers different physical laws. They work without speaking much, their collaboration finding rhythm. Outside their bubble of focused labor, dimensional boundaries groan like ship hulls under pressure.
By hour eight, Maxentius fumbles a calibration tool, his atrophied muscles trembling. Lucina reads the signs. Cryosleep recovery hitting hard.
“Two hours down. Non-negotiable.”
She works alone, dragging salvaged components through corridors where gravity stutters. The staging area takes shape near the membrane’s shimmer. Her stimulant crash lurks behind her focus, a predator waiting.
The chronometer mocks her: twenty-two hours left. The resonance device’s shutdown sequence crawls toward fifty percent, each percentage point bought with precision she can barely maintain.
The teaching harness takes twenty minutes to configure properly. Lucina works methodically, threading cargo webbing through the cutter’s balance points, creating a distributed support system that compensates for Maxentius’s atrophied deltoids and forearms. The friction tape goes on in overlapping spirals, building up the grip diameter until his fingers can maintain purchase without constant strain.
“The trigger’s binary,” she explains, positioning herself in the cramped corridor behind him. “Either it’s cutting or it’s not. No halfway. You commit or you abort.”
Maxentius nods, his pale fingers finding their positions with surprising precision despite the tremor running through his arms. She can feel him calculating angles, compensating for the tool’s weight distribution in the fractional gravity.
“That conduit.” She points to a non-critical housing three meters ahead, its surface already scored from some long-ago experiment. “Straight vertical cut. If you drift, pull back and reset.”
He raises the cutter. The tremor intensifies as he extends his arms, fighting against muscles that haven’t borne load in subjective decades. The plasma igniter hums, building charge.
“Breathe out when you trigger,” Lucina says quietly.
The beam ignites. A thin line of superheated blue-white that immediately wavers left, tracking the shake in his hands. She sees his jaw clench, watches him force his breathing into the pattern she described. The beam steadies incrementally, finds the conduit surface, begins to cut.
Metal parts like water. The smell of ionized alloys fills her helmet’s atmospheric scrubbers. Maxentius maintains pressure, keeps the angle consistent, walks the cut down the housing’s length with the methodical focus of someone translating theoretical knowledge into physical action.
The severed section drifts free in the low gravity, edges still glowing cherry-red.
Lucina catches it with her magnetic grapple before it can tumble into the temporal distortion zone visible as a shimmer two corridors over.
The plasma beam wavers, describing a shallow sine wave before Maxentius compensates, finding his center of mass against the harness’s distributed support. The cut straightens, tracking true down the conduit’s length. Not perfect but functional. Clean enough that the housing separates without stress fractures.
Lucina watches his reflection in the chrome bulkhead. That flash of satisfaction in his eyes, quickly suppressed beneath layers of scientific objectivity. He’s already rotating the severed piece, examining the heat-affected zone with the critical assessment of someone comparing practical results against theoretical models.
“Grain structure’s consistent with the pre-Collapse titanium composites,” he murmurs, more to himself than her. “The crystallization pattern confirms the foundry specifications from the procurement logs.”
She secures the housing in her salvage net. The kid’s translating everything into data, converting small victories into intellectual validation. It’s a coping mechanism she recognizes. Reducing the emotional weight of achievement to manageable facts.
“Good cut,” she says simply.
His shoulders straighten fractionally. He doesn’t respond, but his grip on the cutter firms, tremor diminishing as confidence builds neural pathways his atrophied muscles can follow.
Lucina points to a junction box half-buried in frost. “That one. Quantum storage array, pre-Collapse manufacture. Worth eight months of basic income.”
Maxentius moves closer, his borrowed boots scraping chrome. He traces the conduit paths with one finger, lips moving through silent calculations. “Connected to the tertiary stabilization grid. Removal will accelerate membrane degradation by point-two-three percent.” He pauses, considering. “Acceptable within current parameters. But sever the lower connections first: the feedback will route through the abandoned medical wing.”
She nods, already positioning her tools. “You’re certain?”
“The architecture follows Castellan-Webb principles. Redundancy cascades downward, never lateral.” He steadies himself against the bulkhead. “My mother designed this section.”
His voice doesn’t waver, but Lucina catches the microscopic hesitation before mother. Filing grief under technical specifications.
By hour three, their staging area near the membrane contains seventeen intact data cores, each one carefully logged in Maxentius’s precise handwriting. A habit from his parents’ research methodology. He insists on documentation even as Lucina argues they’re burning time, but she relents when she realizes the records prove legitimate salvage rather than looting. More than that: his meticulous notations include extraction timestamps, original installation dates, and cryptic notes about “temporal provenance”. Details that might satisfy an Imperial customs inspector’s questions about how a refugee accessed restricted technology.
The system works until hour four, when Lucina miscalculates and steps into an unmarked intersection between green and red zones. Time fractures around her. Her left arm moving at normal speed while her right lags three seconds behind. Maxentius’s shout reaches her as a drawn-out wail. She freezes, fighting panic, until his careful instructions guide her into synchronized movement, crawling back to stable spacetime.
Lucina’s suit sensors scream warnings as she crosses into the red-marked junction, but the power coupling is right there: three meters away, worth eight thousand credits minimum. She reaches for it.
Time fractures.
Her hand extends in slow motion while the world accelerates around her. The coupling’s degradation alarm cycles once, twice, three times in what her stretched perception registers as heartbeats. She tries to pull back but her muscles respond like they’re moving through syrup. The alarm hits its fourth cycle. Fifth. The coupling’s containment field is failing in real-time while she’s trapped in temporal molasses.
“Lucina!” Maxentius’s voice reaches her as a distorted wail from the corridor’s edge, stretched across frequencies. She can’t turn her head to look at him. Can’t do anything but watch the coupling’s status indicators cascade toward critical.
Then his voice comes again, clearer, he must be compensating for the time differential. “Don’t, fight. It. Match, the, flow.” Each word arrives in staccato bursts. “Hand, signals, only.”
She forces her panic down. Stops trying to move fast. Instead, she lets her body sync with the accelerated timestream around her, moving deliberately within the distortion. Her fingers close on the coupling just as its containment hits fifteen percent. She yanks it free from its housing, feeling the magnetic clamps resist, then release.
The alarm goes silent. She has the coupling.
Now she just needs to get out.
Maxentius’s hand signals guide her, small, precise gestures she can track even through the temporal distortion. Left. Down. Forward. She follows them like a liturgy, each movement synchronized to the warped flow. Her boot finds the threshold. She pushes.
Reality snaps back with nauseating force. She stumbles into normal time-flow, gasping, her inner ear screaming protest. The coupling is clutched against her chest, still warm, still intact.
She works methodically in her bubble of stolen time, disconnecting the quantum processor array with surgical care. Each connection point requires precise torque: too much force and the crystalline matrices will fracture, rendering them worthless. Through the temporal membrane, she watches Maxentius maintain his position at the panel, his face tight with concentration. He’s holding the inversion stable for her.
The array comes free in sections. She secures each piece in her salvage pack’s cushioned compartments, checking radiation levels, verifying structural integrity. Her hands move with practiced efficiency, no longer fighting the distorted timeflow but riding it. This is what she’s good at: extracting value from wreckage, finding treasure in ruins.
Thirty subjective minutes pass. The array is packed, secured, safe. Worth more than the power coupling, worth maybe six months of her citizenship fund. She signals Maxentius through the shimmer: complete.
He releases the inversion. Time equalizes with a sound like tearing silk. Lucina staggers but keeps her feet, the salvage pack’s weight reassuring against her spine. Three minutes have elapsed outside. Three minutes, and he’s just made her rich.
The temporal eddy shivers around her like a soap bubble as Maxentius makes the adjustment. His hands move with muscle memory older than his conscious mind. The Scientific Directorate trained its children young. The stasis field generator whines, cycling through frequencies that shouldn’t exist in standard physics, and suddenly Lucina feels the change.
Time stretches. Her heartbeat slows to a distant drum. Through the shimmering membrane, Maxentius becomes a statue, barely breathing, holding the configuration steady with every ounce of concentration his atrophied body can muster.
She has forty minutes now. Maybe more. A pocket of stolen time carved from seconds, and he’s given it to her without hesitation. Trusting she’ll use it well, trusting she’ll come back.
Inside her forty subjective minutes, Lucina works with salvager’s precision honed by necessity. Each connection severed, each coupling catalogued in muscle memory. Her brother’s voice echoes across years: Respect the tech and it respects you back. No corporate brutality here, no plasma cutters through delicate circuitry. Through the temporal shimmer, Maxentius remains motionless at the generator, a child-shaped anchor holding her lifeline steady. She won’t waste his effort on carelessness.
When the eddy finally releases her, Lucina stumbles through the temporal boundary, processor array secured in her salvage harness. The corridor snaps back to normal time. Maxentius slides down the wall panel, trembling from concentration-burn, his child’s hands still pressed against the generator controls. She kneels beside him, unseals the array’s protective casing. His exhausted eyes widen: not calculating credits, but recognizing his parents’ work. “They’d be proud,” she says quietly, and discovers she means it.
The vault’s interior defies the laboratory’s decay. Climate control still functional, preservation fields humming with steady power. Lucina’s practiced eye catalogs the contents in seconds: three cylindrical prototype housings, each suspended in its own quantum stasis field, their surfaces reflecting amber emergency lighting in perfect mirror finish. Beside them, the data repositories sit in shock-mounted cradles, their indicator lights pulsing slow green. Intact. Uncorrupted. Worth more than six months of standard salvage runs.
Maxentius moves past her with careful steps, his oversized coverall whispering against the deck plating. He stops before the middle prototype, and something in his posture shifts: shoulders drawing back despite his physical weakness, chin lifting. Recognition.
“Phase-locked resonance manifolds,” he says, voice barely above a whisper. “My mother’s design. She was trying to stabilize the dimensional membrane from inside the pocket universe.” His thin fingers hover centimeters from the suspension field, tracing the component’s elegant curves without contact. “She never got to test them.”
Lucina checks her scanner’s readout, translating the technical specifications into salvage value. The numbers make her breath catch. These three components alone could buy forged citizenship papers for a dozen refugees. She could disappear into the Imperial Core, start over, never see another processing station.
She watches Maxentius instead. The boy’s reflection ghosts across the prototype’s surface, pale, exhausted, ancient eyes in a child’s face. His lips move silently, perhaps reading the technical inscriptions, perhaps speaking to memories 147 years cold.
“Will they work?” she asks. “For stabilization?”
He blinks, pulled from whatever distant place he’d gone. “I… I think so. If we had time to install them. If the dimensional mathematics haven’t drifted too far.” He turns to her, and there’s something raw in his expression. “But you’re not here to save the laboratory. You’re here to strip it.”
The statement hangs between them. Not accusation, just fact.
Lucina runs her scanner across the data repositories, watching the integrity metrics scroll past. Ninety-seven percent. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. Uncorrupted data from the Scientific Directorate’s final years. The kind of information that corporate intelligence brokers would kill for. Her fingers move through the cataloging sequence automatically, muscle memory from a hundred salvage operations.
Beside her, Maxentius drifts between the prototypes like a ghost haunting his own past. His hands hover millimeters from the suspension fields, close enough to feel the quantum hum against his palms but never making contact. She recognizes the gesture. The way you touch things you’ve already lost.
The message crystal sits in its cradle, smaller than her thumb. Personal encryption seal. When her scanner beam crosses it, Maxentius goes rigid.
She stops. Pulls her hand back slowly, deliberately, making the motion visible. “Yours,” she says simply.
His shoulders drop half a centimeter. Relief, or maybe just exhaustion. He doesn’t thank her. Doesn’t need to. Some things you just understand when you’ve lost enough yourself.
He angles himself toward the vault’s far corner, the crystal cupped in both hands like something that might shatter. She reads the body language (privacy requested) and makes a show of wrestling with the prototype housings, letting the mechanical work fill the silence. Her cutting torch hisses. Magnetic clamps click into place. She counts the seconds without meaning to: an old salvager’s habit, tracking oxygen consumption, structural stress, the cost of every moment.
Four hundred twenty seconds. Seven minutes exactly.
When he returns, his eyes carry that raw-edged redness, but his voice has found its center again. Steadier. He tucks the crystal deep into his coverall pocket, and she doesn’t ask. Some cargo you don’t inventory.
She splits the protein bar with her thumbnail, the wrapper crinkling loud in the vault’s stillness. He takes his half without the elaborate thank-yous from before, just a small nod. They eat standing there among the prototype housings, neither speaking, the simple act of sharing food somehow sealing something unspoken between them, partnership, maybe, or just mutual recognition that they’re both too far from home to pretend otherwise.
The schematic blooms blue-white between them, a ghost of the lab’s original architecture. Maxentius’s finger, trembling slightly from muscle fatigue, traces a luminous thread through the observation theater’s curved wall. “My mother used this route when she worked late.” His voice catches on the past tense. He transfers the coordinates to Lucina’s wrist display with practiced efficiency, the gesture oddly adult. Her nav system recalculates: ninety minutes saved. Time they’ll need for what comes next.
The recycler’s breach manifests as a hairline fracture across the unit’s primary membrane. Barely visible, but her suit’s diagnostic overlay paints it in accusatory crimson. Lucina keys through the damage assessment with oil-stained fingers, each readout worse than the last. The cascade started when that impossible geometry shift threw her against a bulkhead. Now micro-tears are propagating through the filtration matrix at point-three percent per hour.
She runs the extraction timeline again, adjusting variables. Strip the secondary labs, skip the cryopod documentation, go straight for the quantum device specs. Still eleven hours minimum. She drops non-essential systems, pushes her suit’s efficiency curves into the red zones. Ten hours, if nothing else goes wrong.
Her air supply counter blinks: 07:[^54]:33.
Maxentius watches her from where he’s slumped against the corridor wall, his breathing still labored from the shift. The kid’s sharp enough to read her silence. Those too-old eyes track her fingers as she pulls up a different route: the direct path back to her ship’s airlock. Four hours with margins. She’d make it easily.
“You’re calculating whether to abort.” Not a question. His formal diction makes it sound like an experimental observation.
Lucina doesn’t answer immediately. She zooms out on her nav display, studying the facility’s remaining accessible sections. The quantum device Maxentius keeps warning about sits in the central core. Still reachable, still worth enough to buy citizenship papers for a dozen refugees. But the path requires threading through three more unstable zones, and her air is bleeding away with each breath.
The boy hasn’t moved, hasn’t pleaded. He just watches her with that unsettling awareness, waiting to see what she’ll choose. Behind him, the amber emergency lighting flickers, and somewhere deep in the lab’s twisted geometry, something groans like a ship’s hull taking pressure.
The silence between them stretches like the warped corridors around them. Lucina’s fingers hover over the wrist display, the route calculations glowing against her oil-stained gloves. Eight hours. The number sits in her chest like a stone.
She’s made harder choices. Left crew behind when ships were breaking up. Watched refugees get turned away at processing stations because she couldn’t spare the fuel to take them further. This should be easy: the kid’s already dead by any reasonable measure, a ghost from a century-old disaster who just hasn’t stopped moving yet.
But he guided her through the non-Euclidean sections. Showed her which conduits would hold and which would fold space around her fingers. Trusted her with the knowledge that could have kept him valuable, kept him leverage.
She thinks of her brother, disappeared in the Outer Rim collapse. Wonders if someone made this same calculation about him.
The recycler’s fracture spreads another micron. Her air counter drops another second. Maxentius still won’t meet her eyes, giving her the dignity of making this choice without witness.
Lucina’s jaw tightens. She kills the route calculation with a sharp gesture, the display winking out. “Shut up,” she says, but there’s no heat in it. She’s already moving, fingers flying across her suit’s interface, pulling up the secondary systems diagnostic. “That quantum resonance thing in the core: you said it’s drawing power from the dimensional membrane itself, right?”
Maxentius blinks, confusion breaking through his careful composure. “Yes, but,”
“And if we shut it down properly, the collapse rate decreases.” She’s not asking. Her gray eyes finally meet his, calculating but no longer cold. “So we’re not abandoning anything. We’re changing the extraction sequence. Show me how to do it without killing us both.”
Maxentius watches her hand hover, watches the calculations flickering behind her gray eyes. Citizenship versus conscience, survival versus complicity. He’s seen this moment before, in the final logs his parents left, when the Directorate ordered evacuation and every researcher chose what to save. He doesn’t plead. Doesn’t argue. Just waits, twelve years old and 147 years displaced, to learn what kind of person found him.
Lucina’s fingers drift from the abort sequence. She meets Maxentius’s ancient gaze. Not salvage, not liability, but witness to something she’s only beginning to comprehend. “Show me,” she rasps, stimulant-hoarse. “How your parents actually worked here. Not protocols. How they thought.”
Something cracks in his expression. Hope, maybe. Disbelief. He nods once, turning toward the central deck with sudden purpose, navigating corridors only he remembers.
The corridor tilts forty degrees without warning. Lucina’s magnetic boots compensate, but her inner ear screams protest. Maxentius moves through the shift like he’s walking on level ground, one hand trailing along the chrome wall.
“Mom mapped these currents every morning,” he says, his formal diction softening with memory. “She’d stand here with a cup of synthesized coffee, terrible stuff, she always complained, and just… feel the dimensional flow. Said it was like reading weather before a storm.”
He stops at a workstation where frost-covered tablets hover in a temporal eddy. With surprising gentleness, he extracts one, the stasis field releasing it with a sound like breaking glass. The screen flickers to life, displaying handwritten notes in elegant script.
Day 847: The pocket universe resisted today’s stabilization attempt. Marcus says I’m anthropomorphizing, but I swear it has preferences. When we align our equations with its natural harmonics rather than imposing external constraints, the dimensional stress drops by 34%. It’s not a container we’ve built. It’s a partner we’re learning to dance with.
Lucina reads over his shoulder, her salvager’s instinct for valuable tech warring with something else. She’s spent fifteen years reading the corpses of dead stations, extracting value from failure. But this…
“Your father’s logs?” she asks.
Maxentius nods, pulling up another tablet. The handwriting is different, angular, precise, covered in mathematical notation that spirals into philosophical tangents.
The universe doesn’t collapse. It transforms. We keep calling this ‘instability’ because we’re afraid of change. But what if we’re witnessing birth rather than death? Julia thinks I’m being poetic. She’s probably right. But the numbers support poetry today.
“They weren’t trying to freeze it in place,” Lucina says slowly, understanding crystallizing. “They were trying to teach it. Guide it.”
“Yes.” Maxentius’s voice cracks. “And we interrupted the lesson.”
The observation deck’s holographic arrays shimmer to life under Maxentius’s touch, projecting data streams that spiral through three dimensions. Lucina watches the pocket universe’s dimensional signature rendered in luminous geometry. Not the chaotic death-spiral she expected, but something rhythmic, purposeful. Waves of probability cascade through the visualization like tides responding to an invisible moon.
“Metamorphosis, not decay,” Maxentius says, his voice steadier now, falling into the cadence of a lecture he’s internalized. His thin fingers trace equations suspended in amber light, following mathematical poetry his parents wrote. “The instability everyone feared. It’s the lab trying to evolve into something else. A chrysalis phase.”
He pulls up comparative models, showing how the dimensional stress patterns match biological growth curves rather than structural failure. His parents had overlaid quantum mechanics with developmental biology, treating spacetime like living tissue.
“They weren’t trying to stop it,” he continues, and Lucina hears pride beneath the grief. “They were trying to guide it. Midwife it into whatever it was becoming.” He gestures at the pulsing hologram. “This isn’t a tomb. It’s a womb.”
Lucina’s throat tightens. “Why?” The question comes out rougher than intended. “Why put you under if they understood what was happening?”
Maxentius goes very still, his fingers hovering over the holographic interface. Then, with deliberate precision, he pulls up a final video log. Marcus and Julia Flavian materialize in the amber light, gaunt, sleep-deprived, but their eyes burn with discovery. They speak directly to the camera, to their son, explaining in technical terms that soften into something like wonder. The quantum resonance device isn’t a tool. It’s a seed. Something designed to germinate.
“We’re staying,” Julia says, her hand finding Marcus’s. “Someone needs to witness the metamorphosis from inside.”
“You’ll witness what comes after,” Marcus adds, looking straight through time at his son.
They put him in cryosleep not as salvation, but as succession.
Lucina circles the observation deck, her salvager’s instincts recalibrating. The warped corridors aren’t structural failure. They’re evolution. Temporal stutters aren’t system degradation. They’re the pocket universe teaching itself new physics. She calls up her manifest, finger hovering over the deletion command. High-grade quantum processors. Dimensional stabilizers. Resonance dampeners.
“These aren’t treasure,” she says slowly. “They’re restraints.”
Each component she’d marked valuable is actually preventing metamorphosis. Keeping transformation caged.
Maxentius’s comprehension spreads across his features like frost patterns: beautiful and cold. “The restraints aren’t failing,” he whispers. “They’re dissolving on schedule.”
Lucina pulls up the resonance device specifications, her jaw tight. “How close to inhabited lanes?”
“Forty-seven light-years. Refugee processing stations at fifty-two.” His voice cracks. “Mother calculated blast radius at sixty.”
The observation deck suddenly feels smaller. They’re not salvagers anymore. They’re ordnance disposal technicians working on a dimensional bomb.
Lucina’s hands hover over the data extraction interface, the holographic display casting blue light across her oil-stained fingers. The crystalline processing cores gleam in their housings: fifty thousand credits each, maybe more on the black market. Enough for citizenship papers twice over. Enough to stop running.
Her hand moves past them. Deliberately. She keys in commands for basic storage drives instead.
Maxentius watches from his position braced against the console, his thin fingers white-knuckled on the edge. His expression doesn’t change, but something shifts in those too-old eyes. Recognition. Understanding the exact weight of what she’s choosing not to take.
“The data integrity is what matters,” Lucina says, more to herself than to him. Her voice has the flat tone of someone talking themselves through a decision they’ve already made. “Warning protocols, resonance cascade models, containment failure progressions. This is what people need.”
She pulls up the research logs, watching file trees unfold across the display. Twenty-three years of experimental data, compressed and encrypted. Her salvager’s instinct screams at her. The cores are right there, easily removable, worth more than six months of legitimate work. Her refugee registration mark itches behind her ear.
Maxentius shifts his weight, and she hears the soft wheeze of his atrophied lungs. Forty-seven days until her status expires. Forty-seven light-years to the nearest inhabited lanes. Sixty light-years to the blast radius if this thing goes critical.
The math is simple. The choice isn’t.
“Basic drives have faster write speeds anyway,” she mutters, initiating the download sequence. “Less likely to corrupt during membrane transit.”
It’s a thin justification, and they both know it. But Maxentius’s grip on the console loosens slightly, and something that might be trust flickers across his pale features.
“These warning protocols,” she says, pulling up schematics of the quantum resonance device. The wireframe rotates in the holographic field, all elegant curves and lethal mathematics. “If we get them to the right people (independent researchers, not corporate guilds) they could prevent this from happening again.”
Maxentius studies the display with the focused intensity she’s learned to recognize. His thin fingers trace patterns in the air, following resonance cascade pathways only he can see. “The Collegium Arcturus,” he says finally. “Station Mendel. The Freehold Archives.” He reaches for her datapad with careful deliberation, his movements still uncertain in the variable gravity. “My parents had colleagues there. Before.”
The coordinates appear on her screen, each one accompanied by authentication codes 147 years out of date. Might as well be archaeological artifacts. But Lucina copies them anyway, watching him add notations in archaic scientific shorthand. “They might be dead,” she says, not unkindly.
“Their work isn’t.” His voice carries absolute certainty. “Someone will remember. Someone has to.”
The temporal monitoring array comes free with a hiss of released pressure seals, frost cascading from its housing. Lucina braces the unit against her shoulder. Forty kilos that would fetch maybe two hundred credits on the open market, worthless compared to the quantum core components she’s leaving behind. But the data crystals nested inside pulse with 23 years of continuous readings, irreplaceable.
“Clamp here,” she directs, and Maxentius positions the magnetic restraint with methodical care, his weakened hands steady despite the tremor. He’s learned her rhythm: anticipates when she’ll need to shift her grip, activates the secondary lock before she asks.
“Good,” she says, and means it. They’re efficient now. Almost graceful.
The stimulant hits her bloodstream like cold fire. Lucina watches Maxentius’s pupils dilate, his breathing steady. He’s twelve and she’s dosing him with military-grade compounds that carry liver damage warnings. But he’s right: the membrane shimmer has intensified, reality bleeding at the edges.
“Thirty minutes,” he estimates, reading instruments she can’t interpret. “Maybe less.”
She helps him stand. They move.
His fingers dance across the interface with academic precision, layering encryption over encryption: each protocol a ghost of institutions that no longer exist. She watches him work, then keys the buoy coordinates into memory: three scattered vectors, redundant drops. Corporate hunters will come. Imperial auditors will ask questions her forged papers won’t answer.
“Ready,” he says quietly.
She nods. “Then we’re both fugitives now.”
Lucina’s fingers danced across her wrist console, the motion automatic from a thousand illegal salvages. The distress beacon screamed into the void on Imperial military band seven: quarantine breach, biological hazard, immediate containment protocol. A lie wrapped in the right frequencies, dressed in the codes that made corporate drones hesitate.
The phase-disruption beams flickered. Stuttered. Went dark.
Seven seconds. Maybe eight if the verification algorithms were sluggish.
“Now,” she barked, her voice cutting through the amber-lit chamber.
Maxentius was already moving, his atrophied limbs propelling him across the frost-slicked floor with desperate efficiency. His hands found the quantum device’s control interface. A constellation of holographic inputs that shimmered in configurations Lucina couldn’t parse. Pre-Collapse notation, the kind that predated standardized Imperial systems.
“Controlled destabilization,” he muttered, his child’s voice steady despite the tremor in his fingers. “Bleed the resonance into the dimensional substrate. Father’s emergency protocol. I watched him drill it forty times.”
Forty times, 147 years ago.
The device responded to his touch like it recognized him. Probably did: biometric locks, genetic keys, the paranoid security measures of the Scientific Directorate. Symbols cascaded across the interface, equations that hurt to look at directly. The quantum core’s pulse shifted from frantic to merely urgent, its light dimming from violent violet to something closer to controlled burn.
Outside, the drones completed their verification sweep. Found nothing. Corporate efficiency reasserted itself over Imperial caution.
The beams reignited.
“How long?” Lucina asked, watching her sensor array paint the new cutting pattern in harsh red lines.
“Four minutes to safe discharge levels.” Maxentius didn’t look up from his work. “They’ll breach in three.”
The math was simple. The math was impossible.
Lucina’s hand dropped to the plasma cutter on her hip, her salvager’s instinct calculating angles, weak points, desperate measures. You didn’t survive the refugee zones without learning when to fight.
The membrane shuddered, reality folding wrong where the phase-disruption beams carved their new pattern. Lucina’s sensor array painted the revised cutting frequency in amber. Not triggering cascade. Just breaching.
Her biometric signature bloomed across the lead drone’s scanner array. She watched it happen in real-time: facial recognition, gait analysis, the refugee registration mark behind her ear lighting up in their database like a flare. Forty-seven days of legal existence, gone. Replaced by warrant codes that would follow her across every Imperial checkpoint from here to the Core.
“Move,” she growled, grabbing Maxentius by his oversized coverall.
The quantum device dominated the central laboratory through the observation window: a sphere of contained violence, its containment field stuttering between violet and that sickly green that meant the mathematics were coming undone. The pulse had rhythm now, a heartbeat counting down to something catastrophic.
Maxentius stumbled, his legs betraying him mid-stride. Lucina caught him before he hit the frost-slicked deck, his weight barely registering in her arms.
Three steps later his knees buckled. No warning. Just muscle failure, the kind that came from spending decades frozen while your body forgot how to carry itself.
Lucina caught him under the arms, pivoted, hauled him across her shoulders in a salvager’s carry. Forty kilos, maybe less. Like hauling equipment.
“Seventeen degrees starboard,” he gasped against her neck, his breath cold. “Bypass the secondary junction, temporal gradient’s inverted there, you’ll age six months in three meters,”
The whine started low, subsonic pressure behind her eyes. Then climbing. Her molars vibrated. The device was singing itself apart.
Through the viewport: chrome piercing membrane, reality smearing like wet paint around the intrusion.
The chamber compressed around them. Walls breathing, floor rippling like water. Maxentius’s fingers danced across the console, each input precise despite the tremor. Lucina stacked equipment racks against the entrance, mag-welding them into a makeshift barrier.
“How long?” she demanded.
“Ninety seconds for full initialization.” His voice cracked. “The implosion radius is,”
Chrome shrieked. The second drone punched through membrane, reality peeling back like burned skin.
Her fingers find the emergency override. A manual lever the boy’s weakened hands couldn’t pull. The drones breach the barricade, their scanners painting her face with identification lasers. Maxentius whispers coordinates, equations, final warnings she doesn’t understand. She pulls. The device screams. Reality fractures. She sees her reflection in the chrome console: gray hair spreading like frost, her hands gnarled, the refugee mark behind her ear fading into age-spotted skin.
The control station looms before them, a cathedral of chrome and pulsing indicators. Lucina slams Maxentius against the console, holding him upright while her free hand sweeps frost from the interface. The screens flicker through languages she doesn’t recognize (pre-Collapse scientific notation, the boy called it) before settling on something approximating standard Imperial.
“Talk me through it,” she growls, her gray eyes scanning the incomprehensible readouts. Behind them, the dimensional membrane shrieks like tearing metal. Twenty-seven minutes. The drones’ scanning beams penetrate deeper, casting strobing shadows through the laboratory’s amber emergency lighting.
Maxentius’s small fingers dance across the lower panel, muscle memory from a childhood 147 years dead. “The resonance cascade. It’s feeding on the external scanning frequency. We can’t stop it, but we can redirect it.” His breath comes in shallow gasps. “Channel the collapse energy back through the membrane. It’ll fry their sensors, buy us time.”
“Time for what?” Lucina’s hands move where he indicates, following his whispered instructions. Her oil-stained fingers leave prints on pristine controls that haven’t been touched in over a century.
“To choose.” The boy’s voice carries that unsettling adult awareness again. “The device can stabilize one exit vector. Either we save the research data, route it to your ship’s storage banks before the pocket collapses, or we save ourselves. The membrane won’t hold for both.”
A gravity fluctuation hits. Lucina’s stomach lurches as her boots lose contact with the deck. She hooks one leg around the console’s support strut, anchoring them both. The scattered medication pills float past like tiny satellites, each one a day of the boy’s survival she’s just cost him.
“How long to transfer the data?” she asks, though she already knows she won’t like the answer.
“Fourteen minutes. Maybe fifteen.” Maxentius meets her calculating gray eyes. “We’d have thirteen minutes to reach the membrane. Through non-Euclidean corridors. In the dark.”
Lucina’s hands hover over the crystalline ports, each one sized for smaller fingers than hers. The interfaces pulse in alternating rhythm (red, then blue, then red again) demanding perfect synchronization. She’s seen this before, in the Outer Rim colonies: fail-safes designed by paranoid researchers who understood that some knowledge required commitment.
“Simultaneous means simultaneous,” Maxentius whispers, his trembling fingers already positioned over the lower port. “Margin of error: point-zero-three seconds. My parents tested it. Seventeen times before they got it right.”
The drones’ cutting beams breach her barricade with a shriek of tortured metal: she can hear their mechanical voices declaring salvage rights, claiming Imperial authority. Thirty seconds, maybe less, before they reach this chamber.
Lucina positions her oil-stained fingers over the upper port. The crystal feels warm, almost alive, responding to proximity. Through the amber emergency lighting, she catches the boy’s reflection in the console’s dark screen. A ghost from 147 years past, trusting her with everything his dead parents built.
“On three,” she says. “And kid? Your parents were smart to require two.”
The count begins. Three. Her pulse hammers against her eardrums, drowning out the drones’ mechanical declarations. Two. Maxentius’s fingers shake: cryosleep atrophy making precision nearly impossible, but his gray eyes hold steady, calculating angles and timing with the certainty of someone who’s watched his parents die for their equations. One.
They press simultaneously.
The ports flare white-hot, searing her fingertips. Data streams through her nervous system like liquid fire. The device screams, harmonics shifting from catastrophic to merely critical.
“Stabilization sequence accepted,” Maxentius gasps, blood trickling from his nose. “But the extraction protocol,”
The drones breach the doorway.
Maxentius crawls to the opposite port, each movement precise despite the tremors wracking his frame. Blood droplets trail behind him, drifting upward in lazy spirals that mock gravity’s conventions. “On my mark,” he whispers, positioning his atrophied hands above the quantum interface. The device pulses in recognition, twin ports awaiting synchronized input. “We execute together, or the cascade rejects partial commands.” His gaze finds hers across the chamber. Ancient understanding in a child’s face. “The temporal eddy will age me forward. Decades in seconds.”
The device screams in frequencies that bypass her ears entirely, vibrating directly through bone and marrow. Lucina’s hand burns against the crystalline interface. Not heat, but time itself scorching her palm. Through the pain, she watches the drones’ weapons achieve full charge, their targeting lasers painting her chest in accusatory red. Her brother’s face flashes through her mind. Maxentius’s blood spirals upward, defying physics. She presses down.
Her hands find the medical kit through muscle memory alone, fingers fumbling past cutting torch cartridges and breach sealant to locate the emergency stimulant injector. The kit exists in three positions simultaneously. Clipped to her belt, scattered across the floor, still sealed in her ship’s cargo hold. She grabs the version that feels most solid, most now, and jams it against Maxentius’s neck.
The hiss of the injector cuts through the quantum device’s bone-deep scream. The boy’s eyes snap open, pupils dilated to black voids, and he gasps something in pre-Collapse scientific notation that her translator chip can’t parse. His fingers clutch at her salvage suit with surprising strength, leaving bloody prints on the patchwork fabric.
“The harmonics,” he chokes out, switching to a dialect she recognizes. “You’re. You’re creating a feedback loop. Stop touching the interface!”
But she can’t. Her palm is fused to the crystalline surface, not by heat or adhesive but by temporal entanglement. She watches her own hand in three states: pressed against the device, pulling away successfully, and reduced to ash. The pain cycles through all three possibilities, her nerves unable to distinguish which timeline is real.
Through the dimensional membrane, the Imperial drones’ weapons achieve full charge. The targeting lasers paint her chest in accusatory red, and she knows with absolute certainty that in one timeline, maybe this one, she dies here. The refugee registration mark behind her ear burns like a brand. Forty-seven days left on her papers. Her brother’s face flashes through her mind, frozen at the age he was during the Outer Rim collapse.
Maxentius’s blood spirals upward in defiance of gravity, each droplet catching the amber emergency lighting. The boy is saying something urgent, his archaic diction cracking with desperation, but the words arrive three seconds before he speaks them.
Her vision fragments into a kaleidoscope of overlapping moments. She sees herself kneeling here, standing three meters left, running toward an exit that ceased existing two timelines ago. The temporal fracture spreads outward from the quantum device in concentric waves, each one peeling reality into translucent layers like synthetic skin from a burn victim. She tries to focus on the boy in her arms, but there are three versions of him now, each bleeding at slightly different rates, each gasping different final words.
The chrome floor beneath her knees exists in superposition: pristine, cracked, and melted simultaneously. Her salvager instincts scream at her to assess, to calculate, to find the angle that lets her walk away with something valuable. But the refugee mark behind her ear pulses with heat, reminding her that she’s already worthless in Imperial accounting. Forty-seven days. Her brother’s disappearance. The forged papers she’ll never afford now.
Maxentius’s blood doesn’t fall. It hangs in the air, suspended between gravity and its absence, each droplet a tiny mirror reflecting her fractured face. The boy’s lips move, speaking words that arrive before sound, after meaning, during silence.
The injector’s tip finds flesh. Or the ghost of flesh, or the memory of what flesh will become. She depresses the trigger and watches the coagulant disperse across three simultaneous injection sites, the pharmaceutical fog spreading through overlapping necks like ink through water. Her other hand clamps down on his shoulder, trying to anchor him, but her palm passes through two phantom versions before finding solid matter.
The stimulants betray her now, sharpening her perception of the horror: she can feel his pulse in triplicate, each heartbeat slightly desynchronized, a biological echo that shouldn’t exist. The coagulant takes hold in one timeline, fails in another, never existed in the third. She’s gambling on quantum probability with a child’s life as the stake.
The boy’s eyes flutter open (all three versions synchronized for one terrible moment) and he whispers something she can’t hear over the rising whine of the destabilizing device. His lips are turning blue, or were blue, or will be blue. The temporal shear is pulling him apart across multiple probability streams. She watches his chest rise in one timeline, fall in another, remain perfectly still in the third. Her hand trembles as she reaches for a second injector, knowing she might be medicating a ghost while the real boy suffocates in a parallel moment she can no longer perceive.
Blood spatters chrome in impossible geometries: droplets suspended mid-fall, hanging in fractured time. Lucina tastes copper as her own nose bleeds, dimensional sickness burrowing into her brainstem. Through tripled vision she watches the medical kit’s contents scatter across three simultaneous positions, supplies rendered useless when she can’t determine which timeline is real. Maxentius goes slack in her arms. She clutches tighter, refusing to believe she’s cradling an echo.
Lucina’s hands shake as she lowers Maxentius against the frost-covered wall, muscle memory overriding panic: the same careful positioning she’d use for injured crew, for salvage partners caught in decompression accidents. Her salvager’s instinct screams at her to run, to calculate her own survival trajectory, to abandon this liability and make for the membrane while her neural pathways still fire in linear sequence. But her grip on his thin shoulders remains firm, fingers pressing into the oversized coverall, feeling the fragile architecture of cryosleep-weakened bones beneath.
The amber light flickers, once, twice, a third time that might be temporal echo, casting his pale face in alternating shadow and illumination. Each pulse marks seconds they don’t have, seconds bleeding away into the collapsing pocket universe. She forces herself to breathe through the nausea, counting inhales like she’s running pre-salvage diagnostics: one, assess structural integrity; two, identify load-bearing elements; three, determine extraction sequence. Think past the dimensional sickness clawing at her perception, past the way the corridor seems to stretch and compress simultaneously, past the metallic taste flooding her mouth.
Because this boy, this impossibly knowledgeable child who speaks in equations and reads dead languages, just said there’s a way out. Not maybe, not theoretically. A way. His eyes held certainty even as his body failed, and Lucina has built her entire career on reading tells, on knowing when someone’s bluffing and when they’re holding the only card that matters.
She needs to understand it before her mind fractures completely, before the dimensional sickness progresses from nosebleeds to seizures to that final neural cascade the medical databases warn about. Before she becomes another ghost suspended in broken time, another cautionary tale whispered in salvager bars about the dangers of pocket universe work.
“Talk fast,” she manages, wiping blood from her upper lip with the back of her hand, leaving an oil-and-crimson smear across her salvage suit’s thermal sleeve. The quantum device’s shriek penetrates even through the reinforced walls of their corridor, a sound that shouldn’t exist in normal physics: frequencies that bypass her ears entirely and vibrate directly against her inner ear bones. She watches the chrome surfaces begin to ripple like liquid metal, the molecular bonds losing coherence as spacetime itself forgets how to hold matter together. Twenty-two minutes. Maybe less if the cascade accelerates.
The drones’ scanning beams paint geometric patterns across the dimensional membrane visible through the observation port. Hexagonal grids of crimson light probe for weaknesses, for entry vectors, for salvage rights violations they can prosecute. Each pulse destabilizes the membrane further, feeding energy into the very collapse they’re trying to document. Standard Imperial procedure: scan first, understand never, claim everything.
Lucina’s refugee mark burns behind her ear like it always does when her future narrows to a single chokepoint. She’s run out of time, out of options, out of clever salvager tricks that let her slip between the cracks of Imperial law.
“They tried everything,” Maxentius says, each word measured against the shrieking device. “Forty brilliant minds spent three years searching for alternatives. The mathematics are absolute: quantum resonance requires quantum consciousness. A living observer to collapse the probability wave.” His fingers trace equations on the frost-covered floor, muscle memory from a childhood spent among researchers. “But I’m already temporally displaced. My neural pattern exists across multiple timeframes simultaneously. The cryosleep made me…” he searches for words a twelve-year-old shouldn’t need, “…compatible with non-linear states.”
Lucina watches those small fingers draw symbols she can’t read, understanding blooming like poison in her chest.
Her hands move before conscious thought: checking the charge on her cutting torch, calculating breach angles through the membrane, mapping escape vectors her ship could never fly. Salvager instinct: assess, extract, survive. But she’s already seeing it: the boy’s fragile body against the device’s core, those thin shoulders bearing mathematics that killed forty scientists. Her throat closes. “You’re twelve fucking years old.”
Lucina’s salvager mind catches on the technical term, tries to strip it down to components and trade value, but the human translation cuts through: sacrifice. A living mind locked into collapsing spacetime, holding reality together while everything unmakes itself around them. She’s seen what happens to bodies caught in dimensional shear. “How long?” Her voice sounds distant. “How long would they stay conscious?”
Maxentius pulls himself upright against the console, leaving a smear of blood on the chrome surface. His small hands grip the edge with surprising strength, knuckles white against the metal. When he speaks, his voice drops into that formal cadence. The one that makes him sound like he’s reading from a technical manual written by ghosts.
“The collapse can be channeled. Directed into a controlled implosion instead of a cascade.” Each word is measured, precise. He’s not explaining: he’s reciting. “But the quantum field requires a conscious observer inside its event horizon to maintain coherence during the final sequence.”
Lucina watches his face, sees the way his jaw tightens. Twelve years old and already carrying the weight of impossible knowledge.
“The observer’s neural patterns become part of the stabilization matrix.” He says it clinically, like he’s describing a piece of equipment. Like he’s not talking about a human mind being threaded through quantum mathematics until there’s no distinction between consciousness and calculation.
The pause stretches. Frost patterns crawl across the console between them, fractal and wrong.
“They call it a quantum anchor.” His voice cracks slightly on the word anchor, the first hint of the child beneath the scientist’s vocabulary. “My parents designed it as a failsafe. They never intended anyone to actually use it.”
But they knew someone might have to. That’s what failsafes are: contingencies built on the assumption that everything else has already gone catastrophically wrong. Lucina can picture them, these researchers she’ll never meet, coding this horror into their systems. Hoping it would never be necessary. Knowing it probably would be.
The quantum device’s hum shifts pitch, climbing toward ultrasonic. The dimensional membrane ripples like disturbed water, and somewhere in the facility’s depths, something structural gives way with a sound like breaking glass.
Lucina’s throat constricts, understanding arriving like a hull breach, sudden, catastrophic, irreversible. One of them dissolves into the machine’s mathematics, consciousness threaded through quantum fields to anchor reality while the other runs. Her salvager’s mind automatically catalogs the exchange rate: one life for the collapse contained, for the drones outside left with nothing to find, for millions who’ll never know how close they came.
“How long?” The words scrape out. “How long does the anchor have to. Maxentius cuts through her question with clinical precision, but something flickers behind his eyes. Knowledge he wishes he didn’t carry.”But time dilates inside the field. Relativistic effects. It will feel like years.” His voice drops. “Decades, perhaps. Alone with the equations as everything collapses inward around you.”
The membrane shudders. Imperial scanning beams punch through the dimensional barrier, coherent light cutting through the amber emergency glow in sharp, accusatory shafts. Proximity alarms erupt throughout the facility, harsh, overlapping klaxons that measure their remaining time in seconds.
The quantum device’s shriek climbs into registers that shouldn’t exist, harmonics that make her teeth ache and her vision blur. Lucina watches Maxentius’s fingers dance across the controls with practiced certainty: muscle memory from a childhood spent in his parents’ shadow, learning equations instead of games.
“The field recognizes neural patterns,” he continues, voice steady despite the tremor in his hands. “Specifically mine. My parents encoded it that way. Failsafe against unauthorized access.” He glances up, and for a moment he’s just a frightened child. “I’m the only key that fits this lock.”
The membrane groans. Reality itself protests the violence being done to its boundaries.
“Your brother,” Maxentius says suddenly. “The Outer Rim collapse. Check the Tertius Station manifests. Refugee processing. He might still.
The words land like hammer blows. Lucina’s throat constricts. She’s spent seventeen years clawing through the refugee machinery, every choice calibrated for survival. This boy is asking her to witness, to carry testimony instead of treasure. Her fingers trace the emergency beacon at her collar: one press summons Imperial mercy, buys cooperation credit, might shave years off her processing sentence. But it also means watching him die alone, unmourned, his sacrifice catalogued as equipment malfunction. The mathematics are suddenly, horrifyingly personal.
The decision crystallizes in that fractured instant. Not noble, not heroic, just the brutal arithmetic of who gets to continue. She yanks the first power cell free, her suit’s temperature gauge immediately spiking red. “Show me,” she says, voice flat as vacuum. “Show me how to stabilize it.” Maxentius’s expression shifts.
The cold hits different when you’re choosing it. Not the sudden decompression cold she’d trained for, but a creeping numbness that starts in her extremities and works inward like a patient predator. Her HUD flickers. Thermal regulation offline, oxygen recirculation at 40%, magnetic boots drawing their last reserves. The suit’s AI tries one final protest, a synthesized voice she’d named Vera years ago on a salvage run near Kepler Station: Core temperature declining. Seek immediate shelter.
“Yeah, I know,” Lucina mutters, her fingers already working the second cell free from her tool harness. The motion is automatic, muscle memory from a thousand repairs in a thousand dying ships. She’d rebuilt an entire life support cascade once in the Tharsis Belt wreckage while her air supply counted down, her brother Kael talking her through it over comms, his voice steady even as their transport burned behind them. Her hands remember that precision, that focus that narrows the universe to socket and seal, connection and flow.
Third cell. Her breath plumes white now, the lab’s failing heat sinking away into whatever dimensional void surrounds them. The power cell is slippery in her grip: condensation or her own sweat freezing on the metal casing. She compensates, adjusting her grip the way you learn to when your gloves are too thick and the work too delicate.
“Port seven next,” Maxentius says, his young voice carrying that eerie certainty. “Then three, then eleven. The sequence matters. It’s creating a resonance cascade buffer.”
Fourth cell. Her suit’s heating elements are just dead weight now, thermal paste in the lining already crystallizing. She can feel her heartbeat slowing, her body trying to conserve what warmth remains in her core. The refugee mark behind her ear burns with cold, a phantom brand reminding her of everything she’s running from, everything she’s about to lose.
Or save.
Fifth cell. Her fingers fumble. She forces them steady.
The boy’s hands move with unexpected grace, each power cell clicking home like tumblers in a lock she can’t see. His lips shape words that might be mathematics or incantation. She can’t tell anymore, can’t focus past the cold eating through her ribs. The quantum resonance device drinks the power hungrily, its hum climbing from subsonic rumble to a pitch that vibrates her molars.
“Fourteen,” Maxentius whispers, and she realizes he’s counting. Counting cells, counting seconds, counting something.
Her sixth cell slips. She catches it against her thigh, the impact sending pain lancing through hypothermic muscle. The device’s frequency shifts, and for a heartbeat the lab’s geometry lurches: walls bending at angles that shouldn’t exist, her inner ear screaming contradiction.
“Steady,” the boy says, and there’s her brother’s voice in it, that same calm in crisis. “You’re doing it right.”
Seventh cell. Her vision tunnels, darkness creeping in from the periphery. The device pulses, and each pulse syncs with her struggling heartbeat, as if it’s learning her rhythm, matching her, becoming something neither machine nor human but desperately, dangerously between.
The Imperial frequency cuts through her suit’s dying comms. Authorization codes, threat protocols, the bureaucratic machinery of confiscation grinding into motion. Lucina’s fingers, barely responding now, trace the sequence Maxentius recites in that too-old voice. Each keystroke feels wrong, counterintuitive, as if the device requires her to think sideways through reality.
The quantum resonance device answers. Not with mechanical precision but with something that feels like recognition. A pulse that travels up her arm, synchronizes with her sluggish heartbeat, whispers through her hypothermic nervous system. She’s not operating it anymore. They’re conversing. Her fingertip hovers over the final input, and the device waits, patient as a held breath, as if her choice matters more than the physics that built it.
Through the membrane’s shimmer, she watches Imperial drones tractor her salvage ship into their holds: escape route, accumulated credits, every physical possession vanishing into bureaucratic confiscation. The loss registers distant, academic. She stopped calculating survival three power cells ago, somewhere between the moment this boy’s trembling hands showed her his parents’ research logs and when he looked at her like she might actually stay. The refugee mark behind her ear burns cold against the lab’s failing atmosphere.
The device accepts the final command with a sound like a bell struck underwater. Non-Euclidean corridors straighten, impossible angles resolving into comprehensible geometry as Maxentius pulls up the hidden subroutine. Lines of code intersperse with personal messages. His mother’s handwriting converted to light, instructions for this exact scenario. When the world ends, someone kind might find you. Lucina’s vision tunnels, her oxygen-starved brain parsing equations she’ll never understand, trusting a twelve-year-old’s trembling certainty.
Lucina’s throat tightened as she read the instructions over his shoulder, her salvager’s instinct already calculating masses and ejection velocities, already seeing how the membrane would buckle and tear as it expelled the laboratory’s compressed payload. The numbers worked. The physics held. But that red warning pulsed like a dying star.
“Someone has to stay,” Maxentius said, his voice steady despite the tremor in his hands. “The resonance field requires constant adjustment. The automated systems can’t compensate fast enough for the dimensional fluctuations during collapse.”
She’d seen the cryopods. Fourteen failures. This kid was the only one who’d survived, and now he was explaining his own death with the clinical detachment of someone three times his age. Maybe a hundred and fifty years of subjective-objective time did that to you.
“How long?” Lucina asked, though she already knew the answer would be bad.
“Seventeen seconds from initiation to final collapse.” His finger traced the timeline on the display. “The operator needs to maintain the field for sixteen point nine seconds. After that…” He didn’t finish.
After that, the pocket universe would fold in on itself, taking everything at the core with it. Clean. Instantaneous. A mathematical certainty.
Lucina’s hand went to the tether coil at her belt: thirty meters of smart-cable rated for fifteen-G acceleration, designed to retrieve salvage through debris fields and radiation storms. Her ship’s autopilot could track the tether’s beacon, could calculate intercept vectors in milliseconds.
“What if someone wasn’t at the core when it collapsed?” she asked. “What if they were… in motion? Being expelled with everything else?”
Maxentius looked up at her, those ancient eyes widening with something that might have been hope. His gaze dropped to the tether coil, then back to the display, fingers already moving to recalculate the variables.
“The equations don’t lie,” Maxentius said, his finger hovering over a schematic that showed the pocket universe’s dimensional structure like a flower closing its petals. “The resonance field needs constant modulation. Micro-adjustments every 0.[^3] seconds to compensate for the collapse gradient. The automated systems have a 1.2-second response lag. Fatal margin.”
He pulled up another screen, this one showing energy distribution curves that looked like heartbeat monitors flatlining. “Everything gets compressed into a coherent stream, matter, data, energy, and pushed through the membrane. But the field has to hold perfect coherence or the stream fragments. Fragments don’t survive the transition.”
Lucina watched the simulation: a clean ejection, everything shooting outward in a stable packet while the pocket universe folded inward like a crushed can. Beautiful physics. Terrible math.
“My parents designed it this way deliberately,” Maxentius continued, his archaic diction cracking around the edges. “They knew. Someone maintains the field until the final moment. Someone holds the door while everyone else escapes.” His hand fell away from the controls. “Someone stays behind.”
“The resonance field collapses inward at exponential velocity,” he said, each word carefully measured like he’s reading from one of his parents’ research papers. “Manual compensation requires haptic feedback through the neural interface. You feel the dimensional gradient as physical pressure. The operator experiences time dilation. Objectively, 3.[^7] seconds.”
His fingers traced the interface’s contact points, showing her where hands would rest. “The stream achieves coherence at 94% compression. The operator achieves coherence never. Quantum decoherence begins at the extremities. Works inward. Consciousness persists until. Swallowed. Started again with a child’s voice instead of a scientist’s.
“It doesn’t hurt. The math says it doesn’t hurt.”
Lucina’s hands move before her mind catches up. Unspooling the salvage rig’s quantum-rated tether from her suit, the same cable that’s pulled her through a hundred decompression events. “Your parents built fail-safes into everything else,” she says, voice rough with stimulant crash and something fiercer. “They’d have built one into this.”
Her fingers work the carabiner locks. “We’re finding it.”
The tether’s quantum-rated weave gleams dully in the amber light as she works, designed to hold against dimensional shear. “My ship’s autopilot can track this cable’s signature through the membrane,” she mutters, more to herself than him. “We trigger your parents’ protocol, ride the ejection wave, and my rig catches us both on the other side.” She meets his disbelieving stare. “It’s salvage work. Ugly, improvised salvage work.”
“Not happening, kid,” Lucina says, and her hands are already moving: releasing the primary tether from her rig’s hardpoint with three sharp twists that echo through the failing laboratory. The cable sings as it unspools, that particular high-pitched whine of quantum-rated weave under tension, a sound she’s heard in a dozen dying hulks.
She wraps it around his narrow chest first, the reinforced braid looking absurdly thick against his atrophied frame. Her fingers work the rescue configuration automatically. Then her own waist, pulling it tight enough that the pressure seals on her salvage suit compress with a hiss of protest. The quick-release knot sits between them, the kind she’s used for unconscious salvagers who can’t help with their own extraction, her muscle memory overriding the part of her brain that’s screaming about the mathematics of what she’s attempting.
The tether binds them at a distance of maybe forty centimeters. Close enough that she can smell the antiseptic staleness of his too-large coverall, see the way his pupils have dilated with something between terror and hope.
“This is insane,” Maxentius whispers, but his hands clutch at the cable like it’s the only solid thing in a universe of collapsing probabilities.
“Yeah, well.” Lucina tests the connection with a sharp tug that makes them both grunt. “Insane’s been working for me so far.”
The cable’s rated for dimensional shear: she’d verified that before entering the pocket universe, back when she’d thought she’d be hauling out equipment, not people. Not children. The quantum weave should hold through a membrane breach. Should. The word tastes like copper and bad decisions, but her hands keep moving, checking each connection point with the methodical precision that’s kept her alive through sixteen years of salvage work.
Her suit’s control panel lights up angry red. Safety interlocks screaming warnings about unauthorized system access, corporate liability protocols, the kind of safeguards designed to prevent exactly this brand of desperate stupidity. But Lucina’s cracked tougher encryption on salvage rigs that didn’t want to give up their navigation logs, and her oil-stained fingers dance through the emergency command sequence with the fluid certainty of someone who’s made a career out of ignoring what machines think is safe.
The authentication bypass takes four seconds. The system architecture override takes six more. Then she’s in, routing control, slaving her ship’s entire retrieval array, tractor beams, magnetic grapples, emergency recovery protocols, to the single pulsing beacon embedded in the tether wrapped around their bodies.
The confirmation chirp sounds obscenely cheerful, a bright little melody that belongs in a training simulation, not in the last minutes of a collapsing pocket universe. Her ship acknowledges the new parameters with the bland efficiency of an autopilot that doesn’t understand it’s being ordered to catch two human beings expelled from a dimensional membrane at velocities that should liquify organic matter.
Her fingers translate desperation into coordinates. Position: three meters from the membrane’s outer surface, close enough to catch them but far enough to avoid the dimensional backwash. Power distribution: everything non-essential routed to the tractor arrays, life support on minimum, engines hot for emergency burn. The retrieval corridor: 2.[^7] meters wide, calculated from the membrane’s current diameter and projected contraction rate.
Then the instruction that makes her stomach clench: lock onto any mass signature crossing the threshold in the three-second window after beacon activation. Pull with maximum force. No safety margins. No abort protocols.
The ship confirms with another cheerful chirp.
Lucina stares at the blinking acknowledgment, thinking about all the ways this can fail, all the variables she can’t control. Then she stops thinking.
“When I say ‘now,’ you trigger the collapse,” she tells him, her voice steady despite the tremor in her oil-stained fingers as they check the tether’s connection points one final time, testing the tension with a sharp tug that sends them both swaying in the failing gravity. “The membrane will contract fast: your parents’ equations say we’ll be expelled like a cork from a bottle. My ship catches us before we tumble into the debris field or the dimensional shear tears us apart.”
His thin fingers hover over the quantum resonance controls, trembling from more than just cryosleep atrophy. “If the tether fails.”Then we die together instead of you dying alone,” she says flatly. “I’ve seen worse partnerships.” The amber emergency lights flicker, casting their joined shadows across warped chrome walls.
The laboratory’s dimensional boundaries contract with each completed sequence, and Lucina watches the boy’s lips move through calculations that should be impossible for someone his age: except he learned them when he was younger still, before the universe aged without him. His voice threads through the failing systems like a lifeline: “Quantum coherence at point-seven-three, adjust the harmonic resonator by negative four degrees.”
She translates his abstract mathematics into concrete action, her salvager’s instincts reading the laboratory’s death throes in the pitch of grinding metal and the frequency of electromagnetic whine. “Resonator adjusted. Core pressure climbing: eighty-three percent and rising. We’ve got maybe four minutes before the cascade goes critical.”
“Three minutes forty seconds,” he corrects, and she doesn’t argue because he’s probably right.
The frost on the walls begins to sublimate, filling the air with crystalline fog that refracts the amber emergency lighting into copper and gold. Lucina’s fingers work by feel now, muscle memory from a hundred emergency repairs guiding her through the unfamiliar interface. Maxentius’s formal diction fragments under stress, the archaic precision giving way to something rawer: “The next node (I can’t remember if it’s sequence seven or eight, my mother always)”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lucina cuts him off, her voice steady despite the way her hands shake from stimulant crash and hypothermia. “We’ll try seven first. If the system rejects it, we go to eight. That’s how salvage works: you try things until something doesn’t explode.”
A sound like tearing fabric ripples through the pocket universe. The non-Euclidean corridors visible through the observation window begin folding in on themselves, chrome surfaces meeting at angles that hurt to perceive.
“Sequence seven,” Maxentius whispers, and presses the activation stud.
The laboratory screams its acknowledgment, and they move to the fourth node together, bound by tether and desperate mathematics.
She doesn’t let him fall. Her salvager’s reflexes catch his weight before conscious thought registers the collapse, redistributing his mass against her hip while her left hand continues the sequence they’ve started. His fingers are ice against hers, trembling from more than just muscle atrophy, but she guides them to the quantum interface with the same steady pressure she’d use threading a fusion coupling in hard vacuum.
“Keep pressure there,” she instructs, her voice stripped to essential function. “Don’t let the connection break.”
Her right hand moves independently, years of zero-gravity work translating to this crisis: the cutting torch ignites with a practiced twist, blue flame painting their combined shadow across walls that fold through dimensions she doesn’t have names for. Twelve shadows, fourteen, the count meaningless as geometry fails. She strips insulation from the power conduit in one smooth motion, exposing the charged core beneath.
“Harmonic resonance at point-nine-one,” Maxentius reports through chattering teeth, his formal diction reduced to raw data.
“Good enough.” She bridges the connection, and the node screams acknowledgment as reality bends around them.
The cold reaches her core at the seventh junction, vision contracting to a pinpoint of amber emergency light. Frost crystallizes across her suit’s seals: she can hear the micro-fractures spreading, feel the heat bleeding into vacuum-cold air. Her fingers are distant things, clumsy approximations of tools.
Then his hands cover hers. Small. Skeletal from cryosleep. But steady with the certainty of inherited knowledge.
He guides her to the relay, pressing her numb fingertips to contact points she can no longer see. His voice splits into harmony. His own child’s tenor overlaid with deeper registers, his parents speaking through him, twenty-three years of recorded instruction surfacing as muscle memory.
“Capacitor discharge on my mark,” he says in three voices simultaneously. “Mark.”
She triggers it blind, trusting his geometry.
The walls fold like origami in reverse, unmaking themselves into component dimensions. Maxentius counts down coordinates she cannot comprehend while her salvager’s instinct finds handholds in collapsing geometry. His mathematics, her momentum. His parents’ ghost-voices naming the path, her oil-stained hands cutting it open with plasma torch and pure stubborn refusal to let physics win.
The tether locks with a magnetic thunk she feels through her jaw. Maxentius’s skeletal frame presses against her salvage rig as reality inverts around them: equipment raining upward, frost crystallizing into geometric patterns that spell out failed calculations. The dimensional membrane contracts like a dying star. Through the chaos she spots it: the manual trigger, a wheel of honest steel amid all this quantum madness, waiting at the core where spacetime folds thinnest.
The interface cradle closes around Maxentius’s wrists with surgical precision, and he makes a sound (half gasp, half sob) as the quantum resonance device bridges into his nervous system. Lucina feels him go rigid against the tether, every muscle locked.
“I have it,” he whispers, but his voice carries harmonics that shouldn’t exist in human speech. “The frequency, I can see it. Mother’s equations, Father’s corrections. The laboratory responds: a subsonic hum that Lucina feels in her teeth, in her bones, in the magnetic seals of her salvage rig. The amber emergency lighting shifts through the spectrum, red, violet, colors she doesn’t have names for.
She’s already moving, dragging them both toward the core. The tether cable spools out behind them, a lifeline to her ship waiting in realspace. Maxentius weighs nothing in the failing gravity, but his body jerks with involuntary spasms as the device floods his consciousness with data.
“Hold it steady,” she growls, more prayer than command.
“Trying.”The resonance wants to spike. If I lose the frequency for even a second, ”
“Then don’t.”
The mechanical failsafe emerges from the dimensional distortion: a wheel of pre-Collapse steel, honest and simple, its surface etched with warnings in six languages. Manual Override. Emergency Collapse Protocol. No Remote Activation.
Lucina’s hands find the wheel’s grips. Cold burns through her gloves. She pulls. Nothing. The hydraulics are frozen solid, locked by time and temperature and the weight of abandoned years.
Behind them, something in the laboratory’s superstructure shrieks. A corridor folds in on itself, chrome walls meeting at impossible angles.
“Lucina.”The frequency is destabilizing. Thirty seconds before cascade failure.”
She sets her jaw, plants her boots against the bulkhead.
Pulls.
The wheel resists. Lucina braces her boots against the bulkhead, feeling the mag-locks engage with a click she registers through her spine. She pulls. Every muscle in her back and shoulders ignites.
Behind her, Maxentius convulses against the tether, his voice fracturing into overlapping frequencies: “Eighteen seconds I can’t. She tastes blood where she’s bitten her tongue.
The wheel moves. One degree. Two.
The laboratory screams. Not metaphorically. The dimensional boundaries produce an actual sound as they compress, a shriek of tortured spacetime that bypasses her ears and vibrates directly through her skull. A corridor to her left folds like origami, chrome walls meeting at angles that make her eyes water. Another section simply ceases, edited from reality mid-collapse.
“Five seconds. The wheel surrenders with a grinding crack of liberation. Ancient hydraulics engage. Somewhere in the core, relays close. The sequence initializes.
Maxentius gasps: “It’s working.
The failsafe engages with a sound like breaking glass magnified through cathedral acoustics, and the dimensional membrane doesn’t just rupture: it inverts, peeling back like skin from a wound, turning the pocket universe inside-out as it begins its programmed death sequence. Everything not molecularly bonded to the dissolving framework gets ejected in a violent exhalation of matter and energy.
Lucina feels the pull before she sees it. A tide of force that grabs them both and hurls them toward the expanding rupture. The tether goes taut between them, carbon-fiber singing under impossible strain. Data cores stream past like chrome bullets. A cryopod tumbles end-over-end, frost sublimating into vapor trails. Equipment she’d catalogued hours ago cartwheels through the chaos. The membrane swallows them.
The membrane tastes like copper and ozone. Lucina’s salvage suit screams proximity warnings as they tumble through silver that isn’t light or liquid but something fundamental tearing. Maxentius goes rigid in her grip, back arching, the neural interface burning patterns across his temples. She holds him tighter. Data cores ricochet off her helmet. Reality fractures, reassembles wrong, fractures again. Her inner ear can’t find vertical. Then. Stars.
The shockwave hurls them through the membrane’s dying aperture. Geometry collapsing into itself like a fist closing on nothing. Then: stars. Real stars. Blessed, fixed, predictable stars. They tumble through hard vacuum, the tether between them singing tension, surrounded by a constellation of their own making. Data cores. Experimental modules. Chrome fragments catching distant sunlight. Her suit’s beacon shrieks coordinates. Somewhere beyond the debris field, her ship is already burning toward them.
Lucina’s HUD floods with acquisition confirmations as the cargo bay swallows them whole. The tether retracts with mechanical precision, drawing them through the threshold between void and atmosphere. Her suit registers the pressure change. Vacuum to standard in three seconds, fast enough to make her ears pop even through the helmet seal.
She doesn’t let go of Maxentius until her boots mag-lock to the deck plating.
The boy is shaking. Not from cold, the suit’s thermal regulation kept him stable, but from the bone-deep understanding of how close they came. How many ways the mathematics could have failed them. Lucina knows that tremor. She’s felt it herself, every time a salvage run goes sideways and somehow she’s still breathing after.
“We’re clear,” she says, voice rough. Her throat tastes like copper and adrenaline crash. “Kid, we’re clear.”
Around them, the cargo bay is organized chaos. Salvage drones dart between floating equipment, cataloguing and securing each piece with magnetic clamps. A data core the size of her torso drifts past, its surface etched with equations she’ll never understand. Worth more than her ship. Worth more than ten ships.
The main display shows the debris field outside, already dispersing according to orbital mechanics. And there: three red signatures accelerating hard from the Imperial checkpoint, their transponders broadcasting salvage authority codes. Still four minutes out. Maybe five if they’re running standard patrol configurations.
Lucina’s fingers find the emergency release on Maxentius’s helmet. The seals hiss open and he gulps recycled air like a drowning man finding surface. His eyes are too wide, too bright.
“The prototype,” he manages. “Did we,”
“Bay three, secured and shielded.” She nods toward the aft section where her ship’s most valuable acquisitions get stored. “Your parents’ life’s work. Safe.”
For now. Until they figure out what the hell to do with a boy who technically doesn’t exist and technology that could rewrite physics.
The tether goes taut with a jolt that rattles her teeth, inertial dampeners screaming as they convert momentum into heat. Maxentius’s vitals spike on her suit’s medical readout and she pulls him closer, one arm locked around his too-thin frame as the cargo bay’s maw swallows them whole.
The automated systems work with salvager’s precision, magnetic clamps catching equipment mid-tumble. A quantum resonance component spins past her helmet, its housing still radiating cold from the pocket universe’s failing life support. Data cores tumble in formation like a school of chrome fish. A cryopod’s intact control matrix, worth six months of standard salvage work, gets tagged and secured by a drone before it can impact the bulkhead.
Her ship knows this dance better than she does. Every piece catalogued, every acquisition logged with timestamps that will matter when the Imperial drones arrive demanding manifests and finders-rights documentation she doesn’t have.
Maxentius gasps something against her shoulder, words lost in the suit’s insulation, but his grip on her arm is desperate-strong despite the muscle atrophy.
The membrane’s dissolution registers on her HUD as a cascading probability failure: quantum states collapsing into mundane certainty. One moment the shimmer exists in her peripheral vision, a migraine-bright wrongness bending light around its edges. The next, nothing. Just void.
Her ship’s sensors sweep the coordinates where Laboratorium Argentum spent 147 years hiding from realspace. The readings come back clean except for a gravitational whisper, a ghost-print in spacetime already dissipating at measurable rates. In six hours, the pocket universe will be nothing but a footnote in sensor logs, another unexplained anomaly in the Outer Rim’s catalog of mysteries.
The salvage is real, though. Forty metric tons of it, currently being secured in her cargo bay with mechanical efficiency.
The drones’ approach vectors paint themselves across her tactical display in hostile crimson. Three-forty klicks and closing, but cautious: military surplus AIs programmed for claim-jumping, not combat. They witnessed the dimensional collapse, registered the scatter pattern of ejected materiel. Now they’re calculating salvage rights, running legal subroutines through Imperial maritime code while her cargo bay’s magnetic clamps lock down forty tons of technically-never-existed research equipment.
She’s got maybe four minutes before they’re close enough to contest ownership.
Maxentius’s vitals hold steady: elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, but stable. The cargo manifest scrolls past: quantum resonance components, data cores, cryogenic medical equipment. Enough to buy citizenship papers ten times over. Enough to disappear completely.
She lets herself exhale, fingers still gripping the tether release. The dimensional sickness hasn’t hit yet. That’ll come later, in the shakes and nightmares. Right now there’s only the deck beneath her boots and the boy beside her, both impossibly alive.
Lucina finally removes her helmet, the seal breaking with a soft hiss that sounds like surrender. The cargo bay air fills her lungs. She reaches over to help Maxentius with his borrowed emergency mask, her oil-stained fingers surprisingly gentle as she lifts it away from his pale face. His tears leave clean tracks through the frost residue on his cheeks, cutting through the temporal dust like rivers through ash.
She doesn’t tell him to stop. Doesn’t offer the empty comfort she’s heard a thousand times in refugee processing centers, those hollow words that mean nothing when everything’s already gone. Instead, she begins unwinding the tether that binds them together, coil by careful coil, her movements deliberate and unhurried. The salvage-grade cable has left pressure marks on both their suits, proof written in compressed fabric that they rode the dimensional collapse together, that neither was left behind.
Her hands work automatically, muscle memory from ten thousand equipment checks, but her eyes stay on the boy. He’s trying to control his breathing the way someone taught him. Probably his mother, probably in another lifetime when the Directorate still existed and pocket universes were the future instead of tombs. The technique isn’t working. His chest hitches irregularly, and his fingers clutch at the oversized coverall like it might anchor him to something solid.
Lucina knows that feeling. The desperate need for something to hold onto when the universe has proven itself fundamentally unstable. She’s felt it every day since the Outer Rim collapsed, since the registration mark was burned behind her ear, since her brother’s transport dropped off every tracking grid in known space.
The tether comes loose in her hands, forty meters of braided carbon-fiber that kept them alive through impossible physics.
“They knew,” Maxentius says between shaking breaths, his formal diction cracking into something raw and young. “My parents. They built the collapse protocol knowing someone might have to use it. Knowing they might not. Lucina’s hands pause on the tether. She should finish unwinding it. Should start cataloging the salvage, running diagnostics, checking for Imperial drone signatures. Should maintain professional distance from this boy who is technically cargo, technically equipment, technically nothing under the law that matters.
Instead, she pulls him closer.
The tether stays half-coiled between them as she lets him press his face against her salvage suit, his shoulders heaving with grief that’s been frozen for 147 years and is only now permitted to thaw. His hands clutch at the reinforced fabric, and she can feel each sob through the layers of insulation and armor plating, each one a small earthquake against her ribs.
She wraps one arm around his thin shoulders, awkward with the gesture but committed to it. Her other hand rests on his head, feeling how fragile his skull is, how easily the universe could have taken him too.
The ship’s computer acknowledges the registration with a soft chime. Lucina watches the data propagate through her vessel’s systems, creating a paper trail that will hold up to everything except deep Imperial scrutiny. And by the time anyone looks that closely, they’ll be far from here.
She glances down at the data cores, their soft glow painting Maxentius’s face in shifting colors. The research they contain could buy her freedom, but it would also put a target on both their backs. Corporate interests. Imperial audits. Questions she can’t answer without exposing him.
“We’ll need to be smart about this,” she murmurs, more to herself than him. “Selective sales. Different ports. Nothing that draws attention.”
He doesn’t argue, just nods slowly, understanding the fiction they’re building. “My parents would have appreciated the elegance,” he says quietly. “A truth that functions as camouflage.”
She almost smiles. “Salvager’s first rule: the best lies are ninety percent real.”
The display confirms: identity established, legal relationship documented, Imperial protocols satisfied. Two refugees now, instead of one alone.
The isolation that has defined her existence since the refugee camps, the careful distance, the deliberate solitude, the survival strategy of needing no one, shifts like a dimensional membrane accepting passage. Maxentius’s hand finds hers, small and cold and trusting in a way that terrifies her.
She doesn’t pull away.
Through the viewport, debris tumbles past. The pocket universe’s coordinates show empty space now, just confused Imperial drones circling nothing. Her refugee mark still burns behind her ear. Her brother remains lost in the collapsed Rim. But the crushing weight has transformed into something different: still heavy, but distributed across two sets of shoulders instead of one.
The station’s interior corridor smells like recycled air and hot metal. Lucina keeps one hand on Maxentius’s shoulder as they navigate the crowd, not steering so much as anchoring. Around them, the chaos of Crossroads unfolds in a dozen languages and twice as many accents: traders haggling over component prices, a family arguing about berth assignments, someone singing in a dialect she hasn’t heard since the Outer Rim fell.
Maxentius moves through it all with wide eyes, his formal diction momentarily abandoned. “There are so many people,” he murmurs, and she realizes this might be the first crowd he’s seen since waking: since his world ended and reformed around the silence of failed cryopods.
“Stay close,” she says, though he already is. Her salvager’s eye catalogs the station’s bones automatically: pre-Collapse structural members welded to newer corporate modules, the seams visible where different life support systems have been jury-rigged together. It’s a patchwork, like her suit, like her ship, like the life she’s building from scraps.
They pass a bulletin board flickering with job postings, missing persons notices, and bounty listings. Her brother’s name isn’t there, she checks, always checks, but for once the absence doesn’t hollow her out. The data cores in her ship’s hold are worth enough to hire proper investigators, the kind who can trace disappearances across jurisdictional boundaries.
Maxentius stumbles slightly, and she steadies him. “Medical bay first,” she decides. “Then we find quarters. Then,”
“Then we examine the research data,” he finishes, some of his formal precision returning. “The quantum resonance calculations require,”
“Then we eat something that isn’t protein paste,” she corrects, and catches the ghost of a smile on his pale face. “The universe can wait eight hours. We’ve earned that much.”
The airlock cycles open with a pneumatic hiss that makes Maxentius flinch. Still not used to sudden sounds after decades of silence. The customs agent is a broad woman with prosthetic eyes that flicker blue as they scan Lucina’s refugee mark. For a heartbeat, Lucina’s hand tightens on the boy’s shoulder, ready for the questions, the holds, the polite detention that always comes with her status.
But the agent just grunts, her gaze already sliding past them to the queue behind. “Medical bay’s in spoke three if the kid needs evaluation.” She waves them through without even glancing at the cargo manifest, at the data cores that could buy a small moon.
Lucina exhales slowly, feeling the tension drain from her shoulders like air from a breached seal. Here, on Crossroads, she’s just another salvager with a dependent in tow. Ordinary traffic. Anonymous in the best possible way.
“Is it always like this?” Maxentius asks quietly, watching the agent process the next arrival with the same efficient disinterest.
“Only in the good places,” she tells him, and means it.
They navigate the station’s central hub together, Maxentius leaning on her arm but insisting on walking himself, his formal diction drawing curious looks from passersby who see only a determined child rather than a temporal refugee from a dead century. She finds herself matching her pace to his, pointing out the market levels and repair docks, narrating their surroundings like a guide rather than a scavenger assessing resources.
“That’s the independent traders’ exchange,” she says, gesturing toward a crowded arcade where holographic price tickers flicker in a dozen languages. “No Imperial oversight. Fair rates, mostly.”
“Mostly?” He catches the qualifier with that unsettling sharpness.
“Everywhere has sharks. Here they just can’t hide behind badges.” She steers him past a group of void-workers arguing over salvage percentages, their voices loud with the confidence of people who answer to no registry. “But you learn to spot them.”
His grip on her arm tightens slightly: not from weakness, she realizes, but something like trust.
The clerk’s stylus hovers over the approval field. “Guardian designation requires biometric confirmation from both parties.” She glances at Maxentius, expecting him to understand this is performance, legal theater. But he’s already extending his hand toward the scanner, that too-old gaze meeting hers with something like question, like choice. Her palm finds the reader beside his. The system chirps acceptance, and the word guardian burns itself into her file like a brand she didn’t know she wanted.
The workspace she negotiates costs twice what she’d planned to spend, but it has two terminals, adjustable seating for his still-recovering frame, and a privacy lock that keeps station authorities from cataloging what they’re analyzing. When Maxentius settles into the second chair (his chair) and begins unpacking the first data core with reverent hands, she doesn’t calculate lost profit margins. She watches him work and thinks: investment.
The scanner interface hovers between them, casting blue light across Maxentius’s attentive face. Lucina’s fingers trace the spectral analysis curves, isolating the telltale signatures.
“See this resonance pattern?” She magnifies a section of the readout. “Amateurs mistake it for power conduit decay. They cut in expecting copper alloy, find corroded nothing.”
Maxentius leans closer, his eyes tracking the data streams with that unnerving focus. “But the harmonic suggests contained energy. Residual charge in capacitor arrays?”
“Exactly.” She pulls up a comparison scan from her archive: a Veridian-class hauler she’d stripped two years back. “The frequency tells you what’s worth extracting. This signature? Pre-Collapse battery technology. Stable for centuries. Worth fifty times standard salvage.”
She’s showing him her edge. The pattern recognition that kept her alive when other salvagers came back empty or didn’t come back at all. Information she’d coded in private logs, encrypted against theft.
“The structural stress readings overlay the energy signatures,” Maxentius says, manipulating the display with growing confidence. “You’re reading both simultaneously. Calculating approach vectors that avoid compromised sections while reaching high-value targets.”
“Takes most salvagers five years to develop that integration.” The words emerge before she can stop them. “You got it in twenty minutes.”
He looks up at her, something uncertain crossing his features. “I’m… taking advantage of your expertise. The knowledge you’ve earned.”
Lucina thinks of the salvagers who’d tried to recruit her, to extract her methods through contract clauses and surveillance. Who’d seen her skills as resources to exploit.
“You’re learning,” she says. “There’s a difference.”
She adds another layer to the display: gravitational stress indicators, her personal innovation. Maxentius absorbs it like he’s been waiting his whole life for someone to teach him how to read the bones of dead ships.
Maybe he has been.
She finds him slumped over the navigation console at 0300 hours, one hand still resting on the data tablet displaying his parents’ final research notes. The blue glow illuminates tear tracks dried on his cheeks. His breathing has that deep, exhausted rhythm that comes after crying yourself empty.
Lucina stands there calculating: optimal sleep environment, crew quarters, proper rest cycle protocols. The efficient choice. The survivable choice.
Instead, she lifts her salvage jacket from the chair (the one with reinforced shoulders and a dozen pockets containing tools worth more than most people’s monthly credits) and settles it carefully over his thin frame. It swallows him completely, this armor she’s worn through vacuum breaches and corporate shakedowns.
The jacket’s worth maybe three hundred credits on the secondary market. The gesture costs her nothing measurable.
But watching his breathing steady, his fingers relaxing against the tablet, she feels something shift in the equations she’s used to navigate the universe. A variable she hasn’t accounted for. A kind of profit that doesn’t convert to currency.
She doesn’t have words for it yet.
She doesn’t need them.
The ship’s galley becomes an impromptu classroom at odd hours. Between jump calculations and meal rations. She sketches jump-point trajectories on napkins with a grease pencil, her oil-stained fingers tracing vectors through realspace. He counters with quantum field equations, his formal diction stumbling over salvager slang until they create their own hybrid language.
Their conversations weave between her practical experience and his theoretical knowledge of why spacetime curves that way. The boundaries blur. She explains why certain routes cost more fuel; he explains the physics that makes jump-drives possible at all.
She can’t remember the last time learning something didn’t come with a price tag attached. Can’t remember when teaching someone didn’t mean losing a competitive edge.
The equations taste different now. Less like hoarded secrets. More like shared tools.
The navigation computer flags another Imperial patrol route, and she reroutes without conscious thought, fingers dancing across the interface while simultaneously explaining orbital mechanics to Maxentius. His shoulders unknot as the patrol marker fades from the display. She notices this, notices that she notices, and realizes her threat assessment protocols now include a twelve-year-old’s trauma responses alongside fuel consumption and structural integrity. The math still works. It just means something different.
She catches herself mid-sentence explaining to Maxentius not just what the research means, but why it matters. Refugees like her, dimensionally displaced, caught between collapsed space and Imperial processing centers. The words taste unfamiliar: we instead of I, could help instead of could profit. His parents’ work becomes their work, salvage transformed into legacy, and she doesn’t recognize this version of herself who plans beyond the next fuel stop.
The forged citizenship papers she once obsessed over sit unprocessed in her ship’s data queue, their purchase price representing two years of dangerous salvage runs she’ll never get back: the Kepler Station debris field where she nearly lost three fingers, the corporate hauler graveyard in the Veil where radiation sickness kept her bedridden for a month, the pre-Collapse military depot that still gives her nightmares about automated defense systems. The ache of that loss feels distant now, like mourning credits spent in a previous lifetime, by a different Lucina who believed documentation could transform her into someone who belonged somewhere.
She pulls up the file sometimes, late in the ship’s night cycle when Maxentius is asleep in the converted cargo bay she’s turned into something resembling quarters for him. The papers are still there, still technically valid, still promising entry into Imperial space with a manufactured history that would erase the refugee mark behind her ear. The forger’s contact information blinks at the bottom, awaiting final confirmation and credit transfer.
Her finger hovers over the delete command more often than the purchase button now.
The corporate guild contracts that once represented security, steady work, legal protection, a place in the salvager hierarchy, now look like chains she never has to wear. She remembers the recruitment officer at Ganymede Station, how he’d smiled when reviewing her credentials, how that smile had faltered when he’d scanned her refugee status. “Provisional membership,” he’d said, which meant all the obligations with none of the protections, meant working twice as hard for half the share, meant one administrative review away from deportation back to processing centers where people disappeared into bureaucratic limbo for decades.
She closes the file without deleting it. Not yet. But the weight of it no longer presses against her sternum with every breath.
The forty-seven-day deadline passed somewhere in transit, she thinks it was during the third sleep cycle after leaving the pocket universe, though temporal displacement makes her uncertain, and she realizes she hasn’t checked Imperial bulletins in three days, hasn’t felt that familiar clench of anxiety when the system pings her refugee status. The absence of that fear feels strange, like discovering a tooth has fallen out without her noticing, leaving only the ghost of pressure where constant dread used to live.
She should care. The expired status means automatic flagging in Imperial space, means detention if she crosses the wrong checkpoint, means the refugee processing centers with their endless queues and casual cruelties. But the data cores in her cargo hold contain research worth more than a dozen forged identities, and Maxentius asleep in the converted bay represents a responsibility that transcends bureaucratic categories. The boy doesn’t fit into Imperial classifications: not equipment, not citizen, not quite refugee. He exists in the spaces between their rigid definitions.
Maybe she does too now. Maybe she always did, and just couldn’t see it while scrambling for their approval.
The corporate guild contracts that once represented security now look like chains she never has to wear. She pulls up the latest offer from Meridian Salvage. Steady routes, legal cover, a percentage that sounds generous until you calculate the equipment fees and docking costs. The math was always designed to keep her hungry, keep her compliant. They’d want the data cores, would classify Maxentius as “recovered assets requiring corporate custody,” would reduce everything she’s done to line items in a salvage report.
She archives the contract without responding. The silence feels like shedding weight, like the moment her cutting torch finally severs a stubborn bulkhead and the scrap falls free into the dark.
She keeps his last known coordinates bookmarked not as a destination but as a compass bearing, a direction to move toward while building the resources and networks that might eventually close the gap. The search hasn’t ended. It’s simply learned to breathe at a sustainable pace, to recognize that desperation burns through leads faster than methodical persistence ever could.
The station represents sanctuary without stagnation: a harbor where they can process what they’ve survived, decode the research cores, and plan their next moves with the luxury of time. She’s learned that forty-seven-day deadlines are artificial urgency imposed by systems that profit from desperation. Real work, the kind that matters, requires the patient accumulation of resources, allies, and knowledge that only stability can provide.
The research cores pulse against her hip in their shielded case. Twenty-three years of experimental data that most salvagers would fence to the highest bidder without reading past the file headers. She’s spent the last three hours in the cockpit learning to parse the quantum notation, Maxentius’s patient voice walking her through equations that describe how spacetime folds around itself like origami made of mathematics. His parents wrote these. Every variable carries their handwriting, their way of thinking about problems that wouldn’t exist for another century.
She understands now why he needs to complete their work. It’s not about legacy or honoring the dead. It’s about refusing to let their questions die unanswered, their methods forgotten, their careful observations erased by time and Imperial indifference. The Collapse took their lives but it doesn’t get to take their meaning.
Her brother’s trail has gone cold and warm and cold again over the years, a pattern of near-misses and outdated leads that used to feel like failure. Now it looks different: evidence that searching itself is a skill, that persistence creates its own momentum, that every dead end teaches you to read the next set of clues more carefully. She can teach Maxentius how to follow traces through bureaucratic debris fields and black market whisper networks. He can teach her to see patterns in data that look like noise, to recognize when absence means something was deliberately hidden rather than simply lost.
The independent stations matter because they’re built by people who understand that survival isn’t about papers or citizenship stamps. It’s about what you know, what you can do, what you’re willing to share. A salvager who can read quantum mathematics and a physicist who understands structural integrity of damaged systems? That’s a partnership worth more than any forged documents. That’s how you build something that lasts.
The independent stations scattered beyond Imperial jurisdiction matter as more than havens. They’re ecosystems of the displaced, built from salvaged modules and shared expertise, where reputation flows through back-channel networks faster than any official registry. Places where a refugee salvager who can read structural stress patterns and navigate zero-gravity extraction becomes valuable not despite her lack of papers but because papers mean nothing when hull integrity fails. Where a twelve-year-old who understands quantum mathematics isn’t classified as equipment or curiosity but as essential personnel, someone whose knowledge might prevent the next catastrophic cascade, whose warnings about temporal instability could save lives that Imperial bureaucrats would never bother counting.
She’s studied the coordinates: Freehold Station, Crossroads Anchorage, the Drift Collective. Communities assembled from survivors who learned that mutual necessity builds stronger bonds than legal fiction ever could. They’ll ask what she brings to the table. She’ll show them the research cores, introduce them to Maxentius, explain what they’ve already survived together. That’s currency the Empire can’t devalue. That’s how you earn a place worth keeping.
The brother she’s searching for matters as more than personal mission now. She’ll need to explain why certain coordinates pull at her navigation choices, why she monitors refugee processing channels with particular intensity, why some silences in the cockpit stretch longer than others. The search isn’t separate from their survival together; it’s woven through it, another variable in the equation of what they’re building. Maybe having someone who understands loss makes the searching sustainable rather than consuming. Maybe two incomplete families can navigate better than one.
The citizenship papers she’s chased for years matter differently now. Not as escape velocity from refugee processing but as shield and framework. Maxentius needs legal protection she can’t provide while classified as transient. The forged documents won’t suffice; he deserves documentation that withstands Imperial scrutiny, that establishes guardianship with enough legitimacy to keep corporate salvage guilds from reclassifying a brilliant child as recoverable research property.
The forty-seven days collapse from abstract countdown to tactical window. She needs legitimate residency before the refugee designation expires: not the ghost-paper citizenship she’d planned to purchase, but documented guardianship that survives database audits. The kind of legal architecture that transforms her from transient salvager into someone who can shield a child from reclassification, who can negotiate research partnerships instead of selling stolen data to the highest bidder.
The administrative AI doesn’t accept her documentation immediately. It cross-references, queries external databases, flags inconsistencies in her vessel’s maintenance logs. Lucina watches the processing indicators cycle through amber to red and back to amber, her hand resting casually near the data pad that contains three backup identities and a dead-drop protocol she’d rather not activate.
Maxentius sits beside her in the processing bay, too small for the station-issue chair, his legs dangling. He’s learned not to speak during these interrogations: learned it fast, the way he learns everything. His silence is strategic now rather than shocked.
The AI’s avatar flickers: a neutral face rendered in blue wireframe. “Guardian designation requires proof of biological relation or legal custody transfer documentation.”
“Emergency dependent provisions,” Lucina counters, keeping her voice level. “Section 47-C of the Independent Station Compact. Minor child recovered from life-threatening situation, no living relatives identifiable, immediate protective custody granted to rescuing party pending tribunal review.”
She’d spent six hours in her ship’s database memorizing that statute. Six hours she should have spent sleeping.
The avatar processes. Maxentius’s hand finds hers. She squeezes once. Doesn’t let go.
“Tribunal review scheduled in forty-two days,” the AI finally announces. “Temporary guardianship granted. Medical evaluation mandatory within seventy-two hours. Educational enrollment required within fourteen days. Dependent tracking beacon must remain active.”
The processing indicator shifts to green.
Lucina exhales slowly, doesn’t let the relief show on her face. Forty-two days. Five days less than her refugee status expires. She’ll need to accelerate everything. The residency application, the business registration, the transformation from salvager to consultant. The math is tight but possible.
“Understood,” she says. “Transmit the compliance requirements to my ship’s system.”
Maxentius’s grip loosens slightly. Not much. Enough.
The first week is a brutal education in the difference between surviving and belonging.
Lucina finds them quarters in the lower commercial ring. Two rooms above a noodle shop, the air thick with synthetic protein steam and recycled cooking oil. The rent is manageable. The noise is constant. Maxentius flinches at every hydraulic hiss.
The medical evaluation takes four hours. The station physician documents cryosleep trauma, muscle atrophy, bone density loss. Prescribes supplements and physical therapy. Doesn’t ask questions about where he came from. Lucina pays in hard credit, no records trail.
Legitimacy, she discovers, isn’t forged in a single transaction. It’s built through repetition. Through documentation. She registers a consultation business: “Corvax Technical Analysis.” Files tax declarations. Obtains a vendor license. Begins the slow, careful process of transforming raw research data into marketable expertise: sanitized reports on pre-Collapse engineering standards, structural integrity assessments, materials analysis.
Each form filed is a brick in a wall between them and Imperial jurisdiction.
Each day without flags or inquiries is a small victory.
She checks the compliance tracker obsessively. Forty-one days remaining.
The boy’s grief ambushes them both. He stands paralyzed in the market concourse, two hundred bodies flowing around him like water around stone, his breathing shallow and rapid. She has to guide him back by the elbow, his skin cold through the sleeve.
That night he discovers the noodle shop doesn’t carry kelp broth anymore. Hasn’t for a century. The crying is worse than the screaming. Quiet, hopeless, the sound of someone mourning an entire world.
At 0300 she sits on the floor beside his bunk, back against the wall, talking about nothing. Breathing patterns the trauma counselors taught her in processing. Four counts in, hold, six counts out. Her own nightmares never got this treatment. She was always alone.
The orientation coordinator asks about his medical history. Lucina improvises, growth delay, specialized treatment, private physicians, each lie requiring three more to support it. Afterward, her hands shake. The social services officer smiles too much, asks why a salvager wants guardianship. Lucina forces herself to meet those evaluating eyes, to be seen, to let this stranger’s judgment matter. Every instinct screams to run.
The engineering collective meets in Workshop Seven, where the air smells of solder and ozone. Maxentius gravitates toward a fabrication table where a woman is debugging a quantum oscillator. Within minutes they’re sketching formulas on a shared slate, his archaic notation blending with her modern shorthand. Lucina positions herself near the door, watching his shoulders lose their perpetual tension, his voice gaining confidence. She’s not building a family. She’s maintaining perimeter security around something fragile and essential.
The coffee arrives in mismatched ceramic cups, real ceramic, not printed polymer, and Lucina finds herself studying the chip on the rim of hers instead of cataloging the cafe’s emergency exits. The station’s ambient noise washes over them: the hiss of espresso machines, the multilingual chatter of engineers and dock workers, the distant clang of hull plating being moved in the commercial sector. Sounds of permanence. Sounds of people who stay.
Maxentius has his datapad angled so both he and Dr. Chen can see it, his stylus moving in quick, confident strokes. The equations flowing across the screen are beautiful in a way Lucina doesn’t fully understand. Elegant curves and nested brackets that make Chen’s eyebrows rise with what she’s learned to recognize as professional respect. Not the patronizing patience adults usually show children. Actual respect.
“The temporal compression ratios here,” Chen says, tapping a section of the formula. “You’re accounting for relativistic drift across the dimensional membrane?”
“The membrane itself introduces a phase variance,” Maxentius explains, his voice steady, no longer the desperate pitch of someone trying to convince adults that danger is real. “My mother’s calculations suggested. The grief still catches him sometimes, sudden as decompression. But Chen waits without filling the silence, and after a breath, Maxentius continues.
“She suggested that standard salvage equipment would read the variance as structural instability. Which it is, but not in the way they’d think.”
Lucina takes a sip of her coffee. It’s bitter, slightly burnt, nothing like the stimulant paste she lived on for years. She drinks it anyway. Through the viewport, her ship (their ship) catches the station’s running lights, and she realizes she’s already thinking about where to install the second bunk, how to partition the storage bay into something resembling private quarters.
She’s not building a family.
The lie tastes worse than the coffee.
Dr. Chen’s questions come faster now, technical and probing, the kind that assume competence rather than test for it. Maxentius answers without hesitation, his archaic formality dissolving into the fluid shorthand of shared expertise. He gestures at the equations, explaining cascade patterns and dimensional harmonics, and something in his posture shifts: shoulders back, chin lifted, no longer bracing for disbelief.
Lucina has seen this transformation before. In salvagers who found crews that valued their instincts. In refugees who stopped apologizing for taking up space. In herself, maybe, though she’s only now recognizing it.
The boy, no, the researcher, because that’s what he is when someone bothers to listen, sketches a three-dimensional model that rotates on the datapad’s surface. Chen nods, makes a note, asks about temporal shear coefficients. They’re speaking the same language now, one Lucina doesn’t fully comprehend but understands the significance of.
She’d worn that same expression once. The first time someone looked at her battered ship and called it home instead of asking when she’d move on to something better.
The server brings the cups on a tray that’s seen better decades, and Lucina slides one across the scratched composite table without breaking her observation of the conversation behind them. The gesture is automatic now, muscle memory from three weeks of shared meals and cramped quarters. She catches herself adding the sweetener packets, two, always two, before Maxentius even reaches for them.
When did that happen? When did she stop counting resources and start anticipating preferences?
The boy, no, her ward, the legal documents were clear about that, doesn’t notice. He’s too absorbed in explaining something about quantum substrate decay to Chen, his hands moving in excited arcs that nearly knock over his cup. Lucina’s hand shoots out, steadying it, another reflex she doesn’t remember acquiring.
The name still feels strange (Argentum’s Promise) sentimental in a way salvagers don’t survive being. But watching the decals gleam against scarred plating, she understands what Maxentius meant when he’d suggested it: not a monument to what was lost in that collapsing lab, but a contract with what they’d both salvaged from the wreckage. Each other. Something worth more than forged papers or pre-Collapse data cores.
She doesn’t look away. Doesn’t reach for her comm. Doesn’t calculate the station’s security rotation or memorize the cafe’s secondary exits. Just holds his gaze and nods. A small gesture that acknowledges what they’ve both learned in three weeks: that trust isn’t salvaged from wreckage. It’s built in moments like this, one clean hand at a time.