Blake walked slowly through the pressurised section of the dreadnought.
Not because he was being cautious.
But because his brain had entered full "if I move too fast I will die" mode, and was refusing to release control.
His helmet lights swept pale arcs across the corridor walls, revealing rows of doors, recessed panels, and scuffed deck plating that told a very uncomfortable story.
This place had been used.
Which meant it had been lived in.
Which meant—
"Oh nope," Blake muttered. "Nope, nope, nope. I hate this already."
To be fair, there were worse places to be trapped.
That thought did absolutely nothing to help.
The living quarters were extensive. Military-standard. Efficient. Grim in a way that suggested no one involved in the design process had ever once asked, "But what if this makes people sad?"
Fold-down bunks lined the walls inside small private rooms. Narrow desks. Lockers bolted down like they were afraid someone might steal the walls. Everything was durable. Everything was functional.
Everything assumed the occupants would eventually leave.
The communal kitchen sat near the center of the section, opening into a mess hall that was… disturbingly intact. The food synthesizer still hummed faintly, blinking on and off with intermittent power like it was stubbornly refusing to accept reality.
A gym occupied another wing. Half the equipment was dented or drifting at weird angles, but Blake could still recognize resistance frames, tread units, and something that looked suspiciously like a grav-bench that had lost a fight with a bulkhead.
In another life, this would've been fine.
A place to sleep between shifts. Eat questionable food. Complain about command decisions.
Now?
Now it felt like a prison that had pretended to be a home.
It didn't matter that the rooms were private. Or that there was food. Or even light.
If the doors wouldn't open, you were still trapped.
And kids had lived here.
Alone.
Blake stopped just inside the mess hall doorway, exhaling slowly. The faint hum of the synth unit echoed off the empty tables.
"…Okay," he whispered. "Okay. I'm not thinking about that. Not today. Brain, we're not doing that."
His brain immediately did that.
Images flooded in uninvited.
Someone standing on a chair to reach the controls.
Someone learning which buttons not to press the hard way.
Someone rationing food without ever being taught how.
Someone staying awake at night because if the lights went out, there wouldn't be anyone else to fix them.
Waiting by the airlock.
Waiting.
Blake swallowed hard.
"Later," he told his own thoughts. "We're shelving the trauma for later."
If he didn't, he was going to do something incredibly stupid, like hunting down whoever abandoned them with a wrench and zero planning.
Unfortunately, the reason they were here wasn't even this section.
The mechanical repair bays—the actual objective—were adjacent, past sealed bulkheads that had been depressurised for a very long time. This whole area existed purely so people could sleep close to where they worked.
Efficient.
Logical.
Emotionally horrific.
Repair bots didn't live where people lived.
Which meant Blake was done here.
He toggled his comm. "Aubrey."
"Yes, Captain?"
"Real talk. Am I about to get murdered by automated defenses?"
"Unlikely."
"That is not a comforting word."
"Security in mechanical bays is generally minimal."
"So no turrets?"
"Not unless the original designers were unusually paranoid."
Blake grimaced. "That's still not a no."
"…It is the closest approximation I can provide."
"Great. Love that for me. Access point?"
"Return to the launch bay. Mechanical bay personnel airlock is located on the lower deck walkway. Ensign Connelly and the children have arrived aboard The Aubrey and are proceeding to the mess hall."
Blake paused mid-step.
"…They're back?"
"Yes, Captain. I have prepared a nutritionally balanced meal."
Something tight in his chest loosened, just a little.
"…Thanks."
"You are welcome."
He cycled back through the airlock and into the ruined launch bay.
The temperature drop hit instantly.
Cold.
Dead.
Everything here felt wrong in a way that made his instincts itch.
His suit lights cut through drifting debris—torn hull panels, shattered fighter frames, metal fragments lazily spinning in zero-G like the universe had given up on cleaning.
The breach leading back to the habitation section gaped behind him, bright and warm compared to the rest of the bay.
Blake very deliberately did not look back at it.
He picked his way toward the personnel airlock leading into the mechanical sector.
Unlike literally everything else on this ship, this door looked fine.
No scorch marks.
No bent plating.
No obvious attempts by the universe to kill him.
It just sat there.
Waiting.
Both doors cycled open smoothly as he approached.
Blake hesitated. "How is this working with no ship power?"
"Independent power supply," Aubrey replied calmly. "Airlocks are required to remain operational regardless of main power state."
"Of course they are. Because dying inside the airlock would just be rude."
He stepped through.
The mechanical repair bay unfolded around him like a cathedral built by people who hated joy.
Huge.
Dense.
Packed with machinery.
Rails ran across the ceiling. Cranes hung frozen mid-task. Assembly arms reached toward nothing. Tools drifted lazily, bumping into one another with soft metallic taps.
And bodies.
Lots of bodies.
Armored figures floated in silence. Some clutching tools. Some holding weapons. None moving. None ever moving again.
Blake swallowed.
"Okay," he said quietly. "This is officially worse."
A frigate sat on the bay floor, tilted where one landing gear had collapsed. Unlike the wreck outside, this one was intact. Scorched, but sealed.
Blake stared at it. "…That one didn't even explode."
"Correct," Aubrey replied. "It is potentially salvageable."
"Fantastic," Blake muttered. "A ghost ship inside a graveyard. No notes."
He swept his lights across the bay. "Before I step on one—what do repair bots look like?"
"They resemble terrestrial beetles," Aubrey said. "Multi-legged, with wheels and magnetic traction pads."
"…Space cockroaches."
"An imprecise but acceptable comparison."
"I hate that."
He moved deeper into the bay.
Before he found bots, he found weapons.
A rack of laser carbines floated along one wall, held by weakening magnetic clamps. Nearby lockers drifted open—sidearms, spare power cells, protective vests.
Blake grinned despite himself. "Oh, Connelly's going to be very happy."
"She is en route with a grav-sledge," Aubrey replied.
Right on cue, Elenor's voice crackled in. "Captain, I see you found guns."
"Take all of them."
"I was going to."
Blake moved on.
He found his first repair bot crushed beneath a collapsed beam.
It was the size of a large dog. All metal. All legs. Like a cockroach that had gone to engineering school.
Dead.
Blake crouched beside it and placed his hands on the shell.
The Repairman skill surged.
Metal straightened. Circuits realigned. Power flowed.
The bot jolted, vented compressed air, and dropped neatly to the deck.
Tools deployed. Retracted.
"All yours," Blake muttered.
"Control assumed," Aubrey replied instantly. "Processing efficiency increased by forty-nine percent."
"…I didn't mean to do that."
"You are becoming more efficient," Aubrey said smugly.
"That's not reassuring."
The next hour blurred.
Seven small bots.
Three medium.
Each one scarred. Bent. Broken.
Each one fixed.
By the end, Blake was sweating inside his suit.
"What's next?" he asked.
"Turret hardpoints are under construction," Aubrey replied. "Weapon control systems are being installed."
"…Already?"
"Yes."
Blake checked his HUD.
[REPAIRMAN STATUS]
Level: 3 — 35%
"Thirty-five percent? That's it?"
"Progression curves steepen," Aubrey said helpfully.
"Of course they do."
At last, there was nothing pressing left to do.
"Captain," Aubrey said gently, "you should rest."
Blake exhaled.
"For once… you're right."
And for the first time since entering the graveyard—
He stopped shaking long enough to breathe.
Booth had nothing left in his emotional tank. He'd already explained this three times, and Captain Gresham was still staring at him like Booth had personally invented quantum mechanics just to annoy him.
"I've got nothing, Captain," Booth said again, in the flattest voice he could manage without fully dissociating. "It didn't explode, and it didn't leave. It must've landed and shut down somewhere."
Gresham's face did a thing Booth had come to recognize as his captain's standard operating mode: confusion trying to fistfight reality.
"Where the hell are they gonna land?" Gresham demanded, sweeping an arm at the viewport like he expected the missing ship to pop up and wave. "There's nothing but wrecks out there!"
Booth fought the urge to point out that half the "wrecks" out there were the size of cities.
Instead, he took the diplomatic approach, because diplomacy kept you alive.
"Sir, if they powered down inside the debris field, they'd look like everything else. The ships around here are blocking our scan returns."
Gresham's stare narrowed. "You're telling me a whole ship just disappeared into junk."
Booth nodded, dead inside. "Yes, sir. That's… kind of what junk fields do."
Gresham slapped the arm of his chair. "That's bullshit."
Booth wanted to agree. Unfortunately, physics didn't care what Captain Gresham thought was "bullshit." Physics had no HR department.
Rawley—who had been hired because he could scream loudly while pressing buttons—leaned toward his console with a grin. "Maybe they're ghosts, Cap."
Gresham snapped his head around. "Don't be a moron."
Booth silently added, Says the man trying to intimidate a graveyard.
He'd only been on this rusted-out excuse for a salvage ship for two weeks, and already he was reconsidering every decision that had led him here. It wasn't like he'd had good options. The outer colonies weren't exactly bursting with "safe" work unless you liked starvation as a lifestyle.
But salvage with a "gray-zone" vibe was one thing.
This?
This smelled like piracy.
And piracy smelled like dying while someone yells at you for dying wrong.
Booth had just decided he was going to start praying to whatever gods existed in deep space when Rawley jerked upright.
"We got a transmission coming in, Cap!"
Gresham's eyes lit up like a toddler who'd found a rock and decided it was an enemy. "That means we know where they are!"
Booth's soul tried to leave his body. "Sir… no. An open transmission gives away a position if the sender is incompetent."
Gresham jutted his chin. "Then they're incompetent."
Booth considered slamming his own head into the console until unconsciousness claimed him.
"Play it," Gresham barked. "Maybe they wanna surrender."
Booth muttered, "Nobody ever surrenders to you, Captain," mostly because if he didn't whisper it, he'd scream it.
The message played.
"This is Captain Fisher of The Aubrey. Do you need assistance?"
Booth blinked.
That was… not what he expected.
No threats. No bluster. No posturing.
Just a calm voice asking if they needed help like this was a roadside breakdown, not a ship graveyard full of dead war hulks.
Gresham scoffed. "Why the hell would we need assistance from you?"
"Well," Fisher replied, tone so dry Booth could've used it to sandblast metal, "I've seen your ship. So I thought I'd ask. But okay. You here for salvage?"
Rawley snorted. "Insulting us. I like him."
Booth did not like him. Booth liked living.
Gresham leaned forward, suddenly grinning. "Yeah. Soon as YOU show up, we can get on with it."
Booth's stomach dropped.
That wasn't salvage talk.
That was "I'm about to get us killed" talk.
Fisher's voice came back, still calm, still maddeningly relaxed. "Gresham. You don't want to start trouble with us. In that ship, you've brought a knife to a gunfight."
Booth's eyes flicked to the sensor screen.
Nothing.
Still nothing.
And yet Fisher sounded like a man sitting behind a loaded weapon, sipping tea.
Gresham barked a laugh. "What, you gonna scare us? You're a cargo ship!"
Booth tried one last time. "Captain, he's calm. That's—"
"Shut up, Booth."
Booth shut up. He started planning his escape in his head. Step one: survive ten more seconds.
Blake Fisher was having what could only be described as a professionally sanctioned panic spiral.
The difference between a normal panic spiral and Blake's panic spiral was that Blake's involved being in space, which really elevated the stakes.
He had rolled out of bed, half awake, hair sticking up like he'd been electrocuted, and immediately got slapped in the face by Aubrey's update.
"All construction projects are now complete, Captain."
Blake froze mid-stretch. "—What?"
"All construction projects are complete," Aubrey repeated, with the calm satisfaction of someone who had been waiting to say those words for hours.
Blake blinked hard. "…How long was I asleep?"
"Six hours and twenty-one minutes."
"That's not sleep, that's a depression nap."
"Technically, Captain, you were horizontal with reduced brain activity. It qualifies."
Blake rubbed his face. "Okay. Time check."
"It is eight o'clock on a Tuesday morning."
Blake stared at the ceiling. "…You kept the days of the week?"
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because humans refuse to let time be simple," Aubrey replied. "Multiple alternate methods have been proposed. None succeeded. The most commonly cited reason is that humans are, and I quote, 'too damn bloody-minded.'"
Blake snorted. "That's… accurate."
"I have observed this pattern, Captain. You operate on the chance of success rather than the odds of failure."
"That's the human condition," Blake said, trudging out into the corridor. "Irrational optimism, stubbornness, and a deep denial of consequence."
"That aligns with my data."
He walked faster, which for Blake meant he walked like a man trying not to sprint because sprinting would imply he was scared.
He was scared.
He was always scared.
He just tried to keep the fear from becoming loud.
"Okay," he muttered. "Turrets done. Great. Love that. We're armed. We're safe. Probably. Maybe. That's fine."
"Your heart rate suggests you disagree," Aubrey noted.
"Heart rate is a liar."
"Your sweating suggests your heart rate is telling the truth."
"Shut up."
"No."
Blake exhaled sharply through his nose. "Fine. First, I check on the kids. Then I upgrade turrets. Then we leave the space graveyard where everything wants to kill me."
"A structured plan," Aubrey said. "I am proud of you. This will not last."
Blake found them in the Mess.
Elenor was standing with hands on hips in full "I outrank your nonsense" posture while the kids sat at the table staring at their plates like they'd been personally betrayed by reality.
"But why, Elenor?" Luna whined. "We ate what we wanted before. Why do we have to eat this stuff now? It's yuk."
"Because what you were eating before was 'sometimes food,'" Elenor said, unflinching. "And you were eating it all the time. You need proper nutrients."
William made a face like the vegetables had insulted his entire bloodline.
Blake leaned against the doorway, quietly relieved.
At least they were fighting about food and not… everything else.
"Hey," Blake called. "You two behaving?"
Both kids jumped like he'd appeared out of thin air. William went red. "Yes, sir."
Blake raised a brow. "Good. Because I was planning to have Ensign Connelly and Aubrey teach you how to become Navigators."
The effect was immediate.
Both kids sat up straighter like he'd promised them a puppy and a jetpack.
Blake smiled. "To do that, you need to follow instructions. Even the weird ones. And trust your crew."
Luna nodded so hard she nearly headbutted her bowl.
William nodded with equal seriousness, like he was signing a contract.
Blake leaned in conspiratorially. "Also… I might have an idea."
He turned to the food synthesizer like it owed him money. "Aubrey."
"Yes, Captain?"
"Hypothetically… if I upgrade the synthesizer… does the food taste less like regret?"
"Hypothetically, Captain, you are asking me if better equipment produces better results."
"Yes."
"…Yes."
Blake grinned. "Science."
He opened the interface and upgraded the unit.
The synthesizer gave a soft hum. The casing shifted, reconfigured into a sleeker design. The lights brightened like it had just been promoted.
Luna gasped like Blake had performed a miracle.
William leaned forward like the machine was about to dispense treasure.
Blake stepped back, hands raised. "Okay. Taste test. Report findings. This is important research."
Elenor rolled her eyes. "You're spoiling them."
Blake shrugged. "I'm bribing them into eating vegetables. That's parenting."
"It is also bargaining," Aubrey added. "A core human survival technique."
After grabbing his EVA suit, Blake made his way to the forward airlock.
Crossing the hull should've been routine by now.
It was not.
It was "routine" in the sense that falling off a building would eventually feel familiar if you did it daily, but you would still prefer not to.
Blake stepped onto the armored plating, magnetized boots clamping down. Stars wheeled overhead. The dreadnought's vast hull created a shadowed canyon around him, turning the void into something almost… contained.
Almost.
He reached the twin laser turrets and paused.
They were sleek. Armored. Predatory. The dome slid back, exposing the assembly like some mechanical flower opening its teeth.
Blake cracked his knuckles. "Alright. Let's make you scarier."
"That is your primary hobby," Aubrey said.
"I don't have hobbies. I have stress responses."
He upgraded the turret.
System glow cascaded. Conduits thickened. Targeting arrays sharpened. The whole unit gained mass and presence, like it had been lifted into a higher weight class.
Blake stepped back, admiring it for half a second before his brain slapped him.
You're outside in space.
"Okay. Done. Great. Going inside now. I don't like being out here where my mistakes are punished by immediate death."
"A reasonable preference," Aubrey said. "Many humans share it."
Blake started back—
And Aubrey's tone shifted.
Not dramatic.
Just… slightly tighter.
"Captain. Please climb atop the repair bot approaching you. Another vessel has entered the vicinity."
Blake froze.
His brain did a full reboot.
"What."
"Please climb atop the repair bot approaching you now. It will return you to the airlock."
Blake looked up and saw the stag-beetle bot barreling toward him like a loyal mechanical horse.
He didn't argue.
He climbed on like a terrified space cowboy.
"This is not happening," he muttered. "This is not happening. I upgraded a turret and now pirates showed up like the universe is running on comedic timing."
"Captain," Aubrey said, "the universe is absolutely running on comedic timing."
The bot hauled ass back toward the airlock.
Blake clung to the shell like a man riding a demon lawnmower across a rooftop.
Blake yanked his helmet off as soon as he was inside. "Aubrey. Have they seen us?""I believe not," Aubrey replied. "Our null-sensor profile remains intact. Visual detection is unlikely given the limited lighting."
Blake exhaled shakily. "Okay. Okay. So they're just… sniffing around?"
"They are likely here because the last direction of your signal pointed toward the dreadnought."
Blake's face tightened. "What kind of ship are they running?"
"Optimized for piracy."
Blake blinked. "Like… actually piracy?"
"Yes, Captain."
"…Of course it is. Of course the first people we meet in this universe are criminals. The universe saw me wake up alone and went, 'You know what would help? Pirates.'"
"It is a popular narrative escalation," Aubrey said. "Very traditional."
Blake rubbed his face. "Standing order still applies. We don't kill unless we must. No slaughter. No turning people into red paste because they annoyed me."
"Understood, Captain."
"How's comms?"
"We can contact them without revealing our position."
Blake paused. "Wait. How?"
"Electronic warfare," Aubrey said, almost smugly. "I am highly proficient."
Blake stared. "You didn't mention that before."
"You did not ask."
"I didn't know to ask!"
"That is also traditional."
Blake pointed at nothing. "Okay. Fine. You're the strategist. What's the play?"
"We begin with words," Aubrey said. "Then we proceed to humiliation."
Blake frowned. "Can we skip to the part where nobody dies and they leave?"
"Captain, pirates rarely respond to kindness."
"…I hate that you're right."
"I know," Aubrey said. "It sustains me."
Blake inhaled deeply.
"Alright," he said, trying to sound calm while his internal organs attempted to flee. "Let's talk."
"With pleasure."
Back on Gresham's ship, Rawley leaned over the console, grinning like a man who'd never once learned the concept of consequence.
"That voice sounded confident, Cap."
Gresham's grin widened. "Good. Confident means they think they're safe."
Booth stared at the console like it had personally betrayed him.
Confident didn't mean safe.
Confident meant they had options.
And pirates never liked when the prey had options.
Gresham jabbed a finger at the comms display. "Tell 'em we're here for salvage."
Booth swallowed. "Sir… we're not doing salvage anymore."
Gresham's eyes narrowed. "We're doing whatever gets me paid."
Booth's soul quietly screamed.
Rawley slapped the console. "Play the message again!"
Booth didn't. He didn't want to hear it again. It was too calm. Too controlled. Too not scared.
That was the worst kind of enemy.
And somewhere out in the dark, Booth had a horrible, sinking feeling—
That the calm voice belonged to someone who was scared as hell…
…and had decided to act anyway.
Which meant it wasn't bravado.
It was commitment.
And commitment killed pirates.