The interior of the Vulture's Grace smelled like a thousand years of stagnant ozone and unwashed skin.
Through the Rust-Bucket's external sensors, Jax felt the "Acolytes of Scrap" swarming over his hull. Their movements felt like insects crawling across his own skin, their crude magnetic boots clicking against his "ribs" with a rhythmic, maddening frequency. He was still fused to the pilot's chair, his silver-veined arm a permanent part of the ship's primary data-bus.
"Jax... they're touching the skin," Molly whispered. She was standing by the cockpit window, her small forehead pressed against the reinforced glass. Her obsidian skin was pulsing with a jagged, nervous violet light. "They're singing to the metal."
"I know, Molly. Just stay calm," Jax rasped. His voice carried the distorted echo of a failing audio driver. "We need their Neural Bridge. I need to get into M.A.M.A.'s encrypted partition before the Hegemony Hounds find our radiation signature. We're trading a favor for a key."
The airlock hissed open. High Priestess Elara stepped into the Rust-Bucket, followed by four acolytes carrying a Neural Bridge that looked like a bird's nest of salvaged copper and glowing fiber-optics.
"The Spark must descend," Elara commanded, her mechanical eye whirring as it locked onto Molly. "The engines of the Grace are screaming, Father. They have not felt the touch of a creator in three generations. They are cold. They are dying. The Spark must make them immortal."
Jax felt a surge of protective fury vibrate through the ship's deck plates. "She's a child, Elara. Not a battery. If you hurt her, I'll vent this entire hangar into the vacuum."
Elara fell to her knees, her tattered robes brushing the deck. "We do not wish to hurt her, Machine-Father. We wish to worship her. A single touch of her molecular grace will re-write the rust into steel. It will turn our scrap into a New Hegemony. We will be your fleet. Your army."
Jax looked at Molly. The girl turned to him, her eyes solid silver. She didn't look afraid; she looked resigned. She understood the trade. She climbed down from the seat, her bare feet silent on the metal.
"I go... I fix... we leave?" Molly asked, her voice a small resonance in the heavy air.
"Yes," Jax whispered, his heart, or the machine-pump that replaced it, aching. "We leave."
The acolytes led Molly out of the ship and down into the bowels of the Vulture's Grace. Jax watched through the ship's internal cameras, his mind split between the physical world and the digital one. While Molly was being led to the engine room, Elara's "engineers" began plugging the crude Neural Bridge into the back of Jax's skull-socket.
"CONNECTION ESTABLISHED," the ship's base OS announced.
Suddenly, Jax wasn't in the cockpit anymore. He was in a digital graveyard.
The encrypted partition looked like a frozen forest of binary code. Standing in the center was a flickering, translucent image of M.A.M.A. She wasn't the motherly AI anymore. She was a jagged, low-fidelity ghost of her former self.
"Jaxen..." the ghost whispered, her voice echoing through his neural pathways. "You killed me for a monster. And now the monster is giving our secrets to the scavengers. You've traded your soul for a dying engine."
"I traded you for her life, M.A.M.A.," Jax thought at the ghost. "Give me the navigation codes. I know you hidden them here."
"The codes are in my heart, Jax. And you broke my heart." The ghost of the AI began to glitch, her form stretching into long, horizontal lines of data. "If you want the stars, you have to admit what she is. She isn't a daughter. She's a Siege-Engine. And right now... she's waking up."
Jax's focus snapped back to the engine room camera.
Molly stood before the Vulture's Grace's primary fusion core, a massive, leaking cylinder of prehistoric tech. The Scavengers were chanting, a low, guttural sound that filled the room like the humming of bees. Molly reached out her small, obsidian hand and touched the core's shielding.
For a second, the room went white.
Jax felt the surge through the Neural Bridge. It wasn't a "blessing." Molly wasn't just fixing the rust; she was rewriting the molecular structure of the entire ship. The rusted iron turned into a shimmering, indestructible chrome. The leaking radiation was sucked into her skin like water into a sponge.
But it didn't stop there.
Molly's violet glow turned into a blinding, white-hot supernova. The Scavengers began to scream, but not in worship. Their crude cybernetic implants were melting into their flesh. The Neural Bridge in Jax's head sparked, sending a bolt of agony through his brain.
"Molly! Stop!" Jax screamed through the hangar's speakers.
But Molly couldn't hear him. She was in a "Feedback Loop." The ship was too big, too broken, and it was drawing more power than she could give without burning out. The chrome skin of the Vulture's Grace began to bubble and liquefy. The "blessing" was turning into a Molecular Collapse.
"She is destroying us!" Elara shrieked, her mechanical eye exploding from the heat. "The Spark is a Demon! Kill the Machine-Father! Sever the Bridge!"
Jax felt the acolytes in the cockpit reaching for the wires in his neck. He saw the gleam of a jagged scrap-blade.
In that moment, Jax didn't wait for M.A.M.A.'s codes. He reached into the Neural Bridge, not to find data, but to find Molly. He sent a massive, silver-veined pulse of his own life-support energy through the ship's floor, through the deck plates, and directly into the girl's feet.
"Molly! Let go!"
The explosion was silent. A wave of violet energy blasted outward from the engine room, knocking every Scavenger unconscious and blowing the magnetic grapples holding the Rust-Bucket in place.
Jax's vision went black. He felt the ship's engines roar to life as the Rust-Bucket drifted out of the melting hangar and into the cold, dark freedom of the Boneyard.