The first thing Dack noticed wasn't the boots.
It was the silence behind them.
A normal station corridor had a constant background of small life: ventilation hiss, distant machinery thrum, a faint vibration through the deck plating as cargo crawlers moved somewhere out of sight. Even in the maintenance ring—where the lights were dim and the cameras pretended to be broken—you still heard the station breathing.
Now the corridor outside their tool-cage room sounded… tight.
Like someone had turned the whole place into a held breath.
Dack stood in the doorway with the latch half-turned, body angled sideways so he could see down the hall without giving the hall a clean shot at his chest. His shoulder pulsed where the boarder's round had clipped him earlier—a hot ache that wanted attention and wouldn't get it.
Talia was behind him, half-shadow, pistol up in a two-handed grip that looked practiced despite the tremor in her wrist.
"Lights are different," she whispered through the breather mask.
They were. The corridor panels were still "on," but the color temperature had shifted—slightly colder, slightly flatter. A station tech would call it a minor power reroute.
A hunter called it someone on a portable grid.
Dack didn't speak. He listened.
Boots, yes—multiple sets, spaced evenly like people who'd trained together. But there was something else: a faint, rhythmic pulse that wasn't sound, but *pressure* through the deck.
A portable jammer cycling.
Someone wanted this corridor quiet and blind.
Dack looked at the corporate case on the table, lid shut, indicator still blinking that slow, patient rhythm like a heartbeat trying to be heard.
"Beacon's still handshaking," Talia murmured.
"I know."
"Then they know where we are."
Dack didn't correct her.
They didn't just know where they were.
They knew exactly when to come.
He turned his head slightly, just enough to meet Talia's one good eye. "If they take you—"
"I know," she said, flat and hard. "And if they take the core—"
"I know."
A beat.
Then, soft: "You could leave."
Dack's mouth tightened. He didn't offer comfort, because comfort was a lie right now. He only offered truth.
"I'm not leaving with half a problem," he said. "That turns into a whole problem later."
Talia's gaze flicked away, and for a moment her expression wasn't fierce.
It was tired.
The boots drew closer.
Dack eased the door shut—quiet, careful—then moved quickly through the cramped room, scanning like a pilot scans a battlefield.
One door. One exit. One corridor. Bad.
Tools hanging on the wall: cutters, wrenches, a compact torch kit, sealant foam. A small emergency pressure patch roll. A station fire suppression panel with a manual override.
That last one mattered.
Dack snapped open the panel and stared at the switch array: foam deployment, inert gas release, localized seal shutters.
He toggled the system to **manual.**
Then he looked at the MRBC posters half-torn on the wall and thought, *Civilization is just a suggestion.*
He dragged the table sideways and jammed it against the door—not to stop entry, but to slow it by half a second. Half a second was life.
He pointed at Talia, then toward the far corner where a stack of empty crates made a shadow pocket. "There. Low. Don't fire unless they see you."
Talia's jaw tightened. She didn't like orders.
But she understood survival.
She moved.
Dack picked up the corporate case. He didn't trust it on the table. He didn't trust it anywhere. He looped his own tether strap through its handle and clipped it to his belt—close enough that if he fell, it fell with him.
The boots stopped outside the door.
Silence.
Then a voice, calm, almost polite, filtered through the metal.
"Dack Jarn."
Not Kess.
Not a dock thug.
A professional voice that carried authority like a weapon.
Dack didn't answer.
"Mr. Jarn," the voice continued, still calm, "we're here to recover property. This doesn't need to become unpleasant."
Dack glanced at the door.
He imagined the team outside: six to ten operators, station-appropriate armor, sealed masks to prevent identification, suppressed weapons because they didn't want panic. A jammer to kill calls for help. A portable power grid to cut lights and cameras if needed.
"Property," Dack said quietly, mostly to himself.
Behind him, Talia shifted in the shadow pocket, pistol steady now.
The voice spoke again, a shade colder. "We know you have the bondsman. We know you have the core. You are out of your depth."
Dack's hands flexed.
Out of your depth.
That was what people told you when they wanted you to drown quietly.
He stepped close to the door and spoke just loud enough to carry. "You want the case? You're going to have to come in."
A pause.
Then the voice, almost regretful: "Understood."
The lock beeped.
Then another sound—soft, mechanical.
A cutting charge kissing metal.
Dack moved instantly.
He hit the fire suppression override.
The room filled with inert foam in a violent white blast—thick, clinging, expanding. It wasn't meant to kill. It was meant to smother fire.
It also smothered vision and movement.
The door blew inward a heartbeat later—hinges screaming, table shoving backward, foam exploding outward into the corridor like a white tide.
Shapes surged through it—operators in sealed masks, rifles up.
Dack was already moving.
He lunged low, driving through foam, aiming not for torsos but for joints. He slammed his shoulder into the first operator's knee and felt something crunch—actuator brace snapping, human pain translating into a stumble.
He took the operator's rifle with both hands, wrenched it down, and drove the buttstock into the sealed mask—hard.
The mask cracked.
The operator's face behind it flashed for a split second—eyes wide, lips pulling back—then the seal failed and the foam forced itself into the breach.
The operator clawed at his face instinctively, choking.
Dack didn't watch him die.
He used the operator's body as cover.
Rounds cracked through the foam—suppressed, muted, but lethal. The impacts thudded into the wall. One clipped Dack's hip plating and punched a hot line of pain down his leg.
He didn't slow.
He turned the rifle in his hands and fired a short burst—controlled, low—into the doorway's edge, not to hit flesh, but to force the team to hesitate.
It worked.
For a fraction of a second, the entry team paused, recalibrating to the fact that the "kid" wasn't panicking.
Dack used that fraction.
He pivoted to the side wall, found the emergency pressure patch roll, and ripped it free—then hurled it into the corridor beyond the doorway like a grenade.
It wasn't explosive.
But when it hit and activated, it sprayed adhesive sealant and patch film across the floor—instant slick, instant hazard.
An operator stepped forward, boot hit the patch spray, and slid sideways into the doorframe. His shoulder slammed metal. His rifle swung wide.
Dack closed the distance and cut into the soft seam under the operator's arm with his knife—same place he'd hit the boarder on the derelict.
The blade didn't need to go deep.
Just enough.
The operator jolted, suit hissing as the seal tore.
No atmosphere to vent—this was a station corridor, not vacuum—but the suit's internal pressure and the foam combined into a choking, blinding mess inside the armor.
The operator dropped.
Dack turned.
A rifle muzzle appeared through the foam at chest height.
He didn't think.
He grabbed the first operator's fallen body and yanked it up like a shield.
Rounds punched into the corpse—wet thuds, cracks of bone. Foam turned pink in streaks.
Dack felt something inside him twist.
Not horror.
Not sympathy.
Just the cold understanding that he'd started using bodies like objects.
He hated how easily it came.
He shoved the corpse forward into the doorway.
The entry team recoiled. One operator swore—muffled, furious.
Dack's suit comm chirped in his ear—a warning: external corridor pressure irregularities.
His eyes narrowed.
They weren't just attacking.
They were preparing to vent the section.
A common trick in dirty station work: trigger an emergency seal cycle, dump atmosphere in a controlled way, force everyone into panic and suits.
Dack's mind snapped to the fire suppression panel and the ring schematic he'd glimpsed earlier. This maintenance corridor had emergency shutters that could seal in segments.
If they vented the hall, Dack could survive in his suit. Talia had a breather mask and thin air tolerance, but not a full suit.
They'd kill her without firing a shot.
Dack ducked behind the table and keyed his suit comm to the Daishi's internal receiver.
"Wolf," he whispered. "Wake."
Across the hangar bay—two corridors away—the Dire Wolf's systems began to stir. Not fully powered, but enough that his suit linked and his HUD painted a faint outline: reactor containment stable, gyro standby, internal security toggled.
The operators outside heard something too—not sound, but the subtle station vibration of an assault 'Mech powering up on the same ring.
Their cadence changed. More urgency.
They knew what a Daishi meant in a confined space.
A Daishi didn't just kill you.
It killed the structure you were hiding behind.
Dack shoved toward the crate shadows. "Talia—move. Now."
She burst out of cover, low and fast, pistol up. For a heartbeat she looked like she belonged in a cockpit more than a corridor—eyes sharp, posture controlled.
An operator swung his rifle toward her.
Dack stepped between them and took the shot on his shoulder plate.
Pain flared. White-hot.
He gritted his teeth and drove forward anyway, slamming into the operator's chest, using momentum and foam-slick floor to knock them both down.
The operator hit hard.
Dack pinned the rifle with his knee and drove his knife into the operator's thigh—deep enough to cripple, not kill.
The operator screamed.
Talia didn't flinch.
She stepped past Dack and fired twice—tight shots into the downed operator's visor seam.
The mask shattered. Blood sprayed into foam and turned to frozen-looking pink sludge.
Dack stared at her for a fraction of a second.
Her expression was unreadable behind exhaustion and bruises.
Not joy.
Not cruelty.
Just necessity.
"Go," she said.
Dack didn't argue.
They ran.
---
The corridor outside the tool cage was chaos: foam cloud pouring out like smoke, operators moving through it like sharks, rifle muzzles cutting white arcs. The jammer pulse made Dack's suit comm crackle. Emergency lighting strobed cold.
Dack sprinted toward the hangar, dragging the corporate case tethered to his belt. His hip throbbed. His shoulder burned.
Talia stayed close, breathing hard through the mask, boots slipping once on sealant and catching herself without losing the pistol's line.
Behind them, the operators regrouped faster than Dack wanted. He heard the hiss of a door cycle in the distance—the station's emergency shutters beginning to close.
Vent attempt.
Segment seal.
If the shutters dropped between Dack and the hangar, they'd be trapped in a corridor with enemies and failing air.
Dack didn't slow.
He rounded a corner and saw the hangar doors ahead—dim, half-lit, old cargo markings, a security keypad that had been patched so many times it looked like a scar.
The door began to close.
Slow, heavy.
Too slow for comfort.
Dack slammed his palm on the manual override panel.
Nothing.
The jammer was interfering with local controls.
Dack swore under his breath.
He grabbed the small torch kit he'd ripped earlier and triggered it, flame hissing blue-white. He drove it into the door's actuator seam and held it there, teeth clenched as the metal softened.
Talia stood behind him, pistol up, covering the corridor.
Shapes moved in the foam behind them—operators closing.
One fired. The round struck the hangar wall near Talia's head and sparked.
She fired back—three shots—forcing the shape to duck.
Dack tore the actuator panel free with his knife and jammed the blade into the mechanism.
The door shuddered.
Then, with a groan, it halted.
Not open.
But stopped.
Enough.
Dack shoved his fingers into the gap and heaved.
The door resisted like it had a will.
Then it gave—just a little.
He squeezed through.
Talia followed, sliding sideways into the hangar.
Inside, the Daishi waited.
The Dire Wolf crouched in its bay cradle like a predator chained to the floor, armor plates catching dim hangar lights. It looked impossibly large up close—shoulders like buildings, torso like a bunker, missile racks staring forward like clustered eyes.
Dack felt a savage relief flare in his chest.
Here, he wasn't just a man with a knife.
Here, he was a pilot with a god.
He bolted for the cockpit ladder.
Talia hesitated, gaze flicking to the Daishi's foot—scarred plating, heavy toes, old paint—then to Dack.
"You're going to fight them in here?" she demanded, voice muffled.
"I'm going to leave," Dack said.
"And if they close the hangar doors?"
Dack didn't answer.
He climbed.
---
The cockpit sealed around him and the world snapped into clarity.
His neural link grabbed his spine and yanked him into the Daishi's nervous system like a hook.
Reactor hum rose.
Gyro stabilized.
Myomer bundles flexed.
Weapon safeties blinked.
Heat sinks primed.
Outside, the hangar door gap widened another inch—operators forcing their way in.
Dack didn't wait for them to enter fully.
He powered the Daishi's legs and stepped forward.
The cradle clamps screamed as they released.
The Daishi's foot hit the hangar deck with a reverberating *thoom* that he felt in his teeth.
Talia stood below, looking up.
Dack toggled external speakers. "Get in the dropship."
Talia's head snapped. "I don't know how to—"
"Then you learn fast," Dack said, and hated how harsh it sounded. "Bay's open. Go."
She ran.
Dack swung the Dire Wolf's torso toward the hangar entry and saw the operators clearly now—six of them, maybe eight, in sealed station-tactical armor. Their rifles were compact, suppressed. Their movements were clean.
Professionals.
One of them lifted a hand in a signal that meant hold fire.
They hesitated.
They didn't want to shoot inside a hangar with an assault 'Mech and a fueled dropship.
They wanted Dack to surrender.
Dack answered by raising the Daishi's right arm and powering up the UAC/5.
He didn't fire.
He just let the weapon spool, letting the sound and the posture say what words didn't:
Try me.
The lead operator stepped forward anyway—braver than smart—and lifted a device, palm-sized, with a blinking red diode.
A shaped charge.
Dack's eyes narrowed.
They planned to disable the dropship's bay, trap him, force him to hand over the case.
Dack's throat went dry.
He couldn't allow a charge in this hangar.
He fired.
A short burst—tight, controlled—aimed not at the operator's chest, but at the hand holding the device.
The rounds tore through armor at that joint. The hand vanished in a spray of meat and metal fragments.
The device dropped.
For a heartbeat it just bounced.
Then it detonated.
A hard crack—more felt than heard—and a flash that shredded the hangar floor plating near the entry. The blast threw operators backward, slammed them into the doorway, and sprayed shrapnel across the bay.
Two of them went down screaming.
One rolled, clutching at their leg where shrapnel had cut deep enough that blood poured into the foam in dark ribbons.
Dack's stomach tightened.
He didn't stop firing because it made him sick.
He stopped firing because it made sense.
He didn't want to cook the reactor or punch the bay seals.
He wanted a path.
The operators recovered faster than he liked. One dragged a wounded teammate behind the doorway. Another lifted a launcher—compact, maybe a breaching round meant for hull doors.
Dack didn't give them time.
He rotated the Dire Wolf and brought his ER Large Lasers to bear, using low power—precision strikes. He cut the doorway's frame, not enough to collapse it, but enough to shower it in molten metal and make it unsafe to push through quickly.
The operators backed off.
Good.
Now the enemy wasn't in the hangar.
They were in the corridors.
And the corridors were where they controlled shutters and pressure.
Dack's suit comm chirped again: pressure drop warnings.
They were venting segments to force him to launch or surrender.
Fine.
He was launching.
He snapped comm to the dropship. "Strap in. Override autopilot. I'm loading."
Talia's voice came back, breathless, shaky but alive. "I'm in. I don't know the controls—"
"Hands off," Dack said. "Just strap down and don't touch anything."
He moved the Dire Wolf toward the dropship's open bay.
The hangar's emergency lights flickered.
A shutter somewhere slammed.
Pressure hissed.
The station was beginning to seal itself like a wounded animal.
Dack guided the Daishi into the bay with the precision of a man docking a cathedral into a bottle. Mag clamps seized.
Bay doors began to close.
Then stopped halfway.
Jammed.
Someone had triggered the hangar's emergency lockout.
The drop bay was stuck open to vacuum.
Alarms screamed.
Dack's cockpit readouts flashed red.
**PRESSURE LOSS.**
**HANGAR SEAL FAILURE.**
**EMERGENCY SHUTTERS ENGAGING.**
If the shutters slammed while the bay doors were half-closed, the dropship might shear its own doors or rupture.
They'd die on the pad.
Dack's mind went very calm.
He cut power to nonessential systems, rerouted to bay control, and opened a manual override channel that his father had installed years ago—dirty, illegal, effective.
"Come on," he muttered.
Outside, the hangar door gap widened again—operators had returned, now using the emergency chaos as cover. They moved fast, trying to reach the dropship before it could seal.
Dack didn't give them a clean chance.
He pulsed the Daishi's torso jets inside the bay—dangerous, risky—just enough to shift the dropship's angle and force the hanging bay door into a better alignment.
The bay door clunked.
The motor caught.
The doors slammed shut.
Seal engaged.
Pressure stabilized—barely.
Dack didn't wait for confirmation.
He fired the dropship thrusters.
The ship lurched forward, lifting off.
The hangar behind them shrank.
The operators became small shapes throwing themselves away from the pad as exhaust washed over the deck.
One of them didn't move fast enough.
The thruster wash caught him and smashed him into a wall.
He crumpled.
Dack didn't look back.
He pushed the dropship into the maintenance ring's exit lane, avoiding traffic because there was no traffic—because the jammer had forced every honest worker to hide and every dishonest operator to move.
He flew by instinct and maps.
The station tried to stop him.
Doors began to close ahead—automated safety shutters reacting to breach conditions.
Dack threaded the dropship through them by meters, feeling the hull brush air currents and pressure waves.
A shutter clipped the ship's rear fin.
Metal screamed.
The ship shuddered.
Dack held it steady.
He didn't crash.
He wouldn't give them that.
Then he hit open space.
Stars snapped into view.
The station fell away behind him.
And for the first time since the derelict, Dack let himself breathe a fraction deeper.
---
He didn't go far.
Not at first.
He took the dropship into the shadow of a dead cargo platform—an old skeletal structure drifting in a forgotten orbit lane, too worthless for salvage, too dangerous for casual docking. It was the kind of place people avoided.
Perfect.
He killed the transponder.
Killed external lights.
Let the ship drift.
Then he sat there in the cockpit, hands still on the controls, feeling the trembling in his fingers now that the immediate fight was gone.
Adrenaline always left you shaking.
He exhaled slowly and turned in his seat.
Talia was strapped into a crash chair behind him, mask still on, eyes fixed on him like she was trying to decide whether he was her rescuer or her next captor.
Dack stood, wincing as pain flared in his shoulder and hip. He moved to the small med locker, cracked it open, and pulled out sealant patches and a clotting injector.
He didn't look at Talia when he injected himself.
He didn't want to see judgment.
He didn't want to see gratitude either.
Both were dangerous.
The clotting agent burned like fire in his veins.
He hissed through his teeth and slapped a patch onto the shoulder plate's internal seam. The suit tightened, sealing.
Only when he finished did he face her.
"Take the mask off," he said.
Talia's eye narrowed. "Why?"
"So you can talk like a person," Dack replied. "And because if you pass out, I need to know."
She held his gaze a moment longer, then unstrapped the breather and took a careful breath. Her lips were cracked. Bruising darkened the side of her face. One eye was swollen and ugly.
But the other eye was steel.
"What now?" she asked.
Dack didn't answer with a plan.
He answered with the truth.
"Now I'm hunted."
Talia gave a humorless laugh. "You were hunted before. You just didn't know it."
Dack's jaw tightened.
He unhooked the corporate case from his belt and set it on the floor between them. The indicator light still blinked faintly.
"Can you stop it?" he asked.
Talia stared at the blinking light. "Not completely. Not with what we have. If they have the handshake protocol—if they're actively pinging—then—" She swallowed. "—they'll keep trying."
Dack nodded once.
"So we move," he said. "We don't dock clean. We don't file with MRBC. We don't trust Outreach. We find somewhere ugly and quiet to crack that core and figure out who's behind this."
"And me?" Talia asked, voice flat.
Dack looked at her.
This was the part he hated.
The part where a person became a responsibility.
"I don't trust you," he said.
Talia's jaw tightened, but she didn't look surprised.
"But," Dack continued, "I also don't hand people back to owners."
Something flickered in her expression—pain, maybe, or hope she didn't want.
Dack didn't soften.
He leaned forward slightly, voice lower. "Here's what's real, Talia. If they catch us, they'll take you alive and kill me. If they catch me alone, they'll kill me and take the core anyway. You're leverage either way."
Talia stared at him, breathing shallow.
Dack lifted his hand, palm open—not a threat, not a promise. Just a boundary.
"So we make a pact," he said. "Not trust. Not romance. Not loyalty. Survival."
Talia's eye narrowed. "What kind of pact?"
Dack's voice went colder.
"If you're about to be taken alive," he said, "you warn me. If you can't warn me, you end yourself before they put you back in chains."
Talia's face didn't change.
But her throat worked, swallowing something bitter.
"That's your mercy?" she whispered.
Dack's gaze stayed steady. "That's reality."
A long silence.
Then Talia spoke, and her voice carried something old and formal, like she'd learned it under a boot.
"In my Clan," she said quietly, "a bondsman who cannot be recovered is expected to deny capture. To protect the secrets."
Dack nodded once. "Good. Then we understand each other."
Talia's fingers tightened on the crash-chair straps.
"And if you fall?" she asked.
Dack's eyes dropped to the case, to the blinking light, to his father's name on paper that he could still see in his head like a wound.
"If I fall," he said, "you burn the core. You burn everything. You don't let them build a pipeline out of my father's death."
Talia stared at him.
Then, slowly, she unbuckled one strap and pulled a thin metal token from her pocket—the bondsman marker. She held it out.
"I can't offer you my trust," she said. "But I can offer you my word."
Dack took the token.
It felt heavier than it should.
He didn't make a ceremony of it.
He just closed his fingers around it and said, "Fine."
Talia's shoulders eased by a fraction, as if the pact had taken some unbearable weight off her spine.
Outside, the dropship drifted in the shadow of dead steel, silent and hidden.
For now.
Dack turned back to the cockpit controls and began plotting a course to somewhere the MRBC didn't care about, somewhere the Houses didn't watch as closely, somewhere a mercenary could bleed in peace and sharpen his teeth.
Behind him, Talia watched his hands move with the steady precision of a pilot who didn't deserve to be eighteen.
She spoke softly, almost to herself.
"They'll send more."
Dack's eyes stayed on the stars.
"I know," he said.
He engaged the thrusters.
The dropship slid away into the dark.
And somewhere behind them, on Outreach, a team of professionals would report failure, and a procurement cell would decide that if quiet force hadn't worked…
…then they would need something loud enough to kill a Daishi.