The archive hadn't changed — but everything inside it had.
The schematics rotated slowly above the central vault platform like a solar system of dead bones, skeletal rings of kinetic maps circling a black data core at the center. The light they cast wasn't warm. It was surgical. Cold.
In that silence, the plans to breach Scorpio's final vault looked less like a strategy and more like an autopsy in progress.
Dekra moved through the projections with casual authority, her fingers leaving faint afterimages as she selected three different access paths and stretched them into a triangular pattern.
"Three routes," she said. "One still breathes. One's rigged to devour you from the inside out. The last one caved in two years ago — not from damage, from abandonment. If you guess wrong, I'm not dragging your nervous system back in a sack."
