"I don't care if it's an aesthetic choice by some dead corporate board, Vela, make the floor stop looking like an infinite drop into lime sherbet!" Orion shouted, gripping the back of the pilot's chair so hard his knuckles turned the color of bleached bone."I can't just tell the gravity plates to stop hallucinating, Cap!" Vela yelled back over the deafening, bass-heavy thrum vibrating straight up through the soles of their boots. Her fingers flew across the secondary console, leaving faint trails of residual light in the air like sparklers. "The atmospheric scrubber intake is sucking in whatever neon fog is clinging to the hull. It’s mixing with the oxygen recirculators. Unless you want us all to asphyxiate, I suggest you get used to the floor breathing at you!""It’s not just the floor," Theron whimpered from the ceiling conduit he was still clinging to like a frightened loris. His eyes were wide, tracking invisible, geometric shapes that drifted past his nose. "Do you see those tri

"I don't care about the principle, I care about the fact that the walls are literally vibrating in B-flat!" Orion shouted, pointing an accusing finger at the reinforced steel ribbing of the galley.The entire Star-Skipper was shuddering. A deep, resonant hum—somewhere between a whale’s mating call and a dying tractor engine—was clawing its way through the ship’s frame, shaking loose flakes of aged paint and rattling the remaining silverware in the drawer.Magnus didn’t look up from his charred bread. He chewed slowly, his eyes fixed on the ceiling paneling as if he were grading the acoustics. "A-flat, actually. Notice the slight harmonic wobble on the downbeat. Classic nineteenth-tier terraforming architecture. They used acoustic resonance to keep the sub-level laborers from falling asleep on their shift.""They're going to keep us from sleeping by melting our eardrums!" Orion pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling a familiar, blistering headache bloom right behind his eyes courtesy

"I don't care if it's speaking ancient corporate binary or reciting interstellar poetry, just rip the cord!" Orion shouted, whirling away from the cockpit entrance as the ship gave a sudden, sickening lurch that sent a cascade of loose tools rattling across the deck plating.Before Vela could fire back a retort from the grease-streaked depths of the navigation console, a sharp, metallic clatter echoed from the narrow corridor leading back toward the galley. It wasn't the rhythmic, structural humming of the bulkheads or the high-pitched whine of overstressed circuitry. It sounded heavy. Final. Like a collapsed bulkhead door hitting the floor."Lyra?" Orion froze, his boots sliding half an inch on the slick metal as he spun around. The anger that had fueled his frantic pacing a second ago evaporated, instantly replaced by a cold, prickling dread that wormed its way down his spine. "Lyra!"He didn't wait for an answer. Pushing past the threshold of the cramped cockpit, he sprinted down t

"Magnus, move!" Orion snarled, shoving his estranged father hard against the frost-rimed bulkhead of the sub-zero corridor. The charred piece of sourdough clattered uselessly onto the frozen deck plates as Magnus finally dropped his aloof act, his expression hardening into a look of absolute, clinical focus."Stop shaking her, Orion, you're only accelerating the toxin's spread through her lymphatic system," Magnus snapped back, dropping to his knees beside Lyra with surprising speed for a man his age. He unclipped a heavy, dented multitool from his belt, its laser-welder attachment clicking as it powered up with a high-pitched whine. "Vela! Get down here with the secondary manual override lever and hold her shoulders flat against the deck. If she spasms while I'm cutting into the clavicle regulator, she’s paralyzed for life."Vela scrambled out from the cockpit access panel, her face streaked with black soot and neon-pink grease. Without a word, she dropped her weight onto Lyra’s uppe

"That's not a civilian transport," Cassian muttered, his voice dropping into a tense, breathless register as he stared at the massive silhouette filling the main viewport. "That's the Iron Sovereign. Class-M military freighter. The exact heavy cruiser we used as a shield six jumps ago, and by the look of their forward rail-guns, they've been waiting right here for our spatial wake to stabilize."Orion slammed his hand onto the console, the warning lights flashing a harsh, pulsing amber across the cramped flight deck. "They tracked our displacement vector out of the anomaly. Cassian, tell me you have a ghost-ping ready. Tell me our transponder isn't broadcasting our real registry right into their tactical loop.""Working on it!" Cassian snapped, sweat plastering his dark hair to his forehead as his fingers blurred across the manual override keys. "The quantum spoofing array is still sluggish from the anomaly's residual EMP discharge. If I dump the secondary coolant lines into the buffe