The lie was her cover.
The truth became her war.

"Thirty seconds," Kit whispered.

She slid through the heavy metal seam before the cargo iris finished closing. The hatch kissed shut behind her with a pneumatic sigh, cutting off the noise of the docking gantry.

She crouched in the sudden dark, weight settled over the balls of her feet, and let her breathing disappear beneath the cargo hold's machinery. The readiness stayed inside her like a sheathed blade. She let the massive shadows soak her in until the dark forgot she wasn't born there.

A pulse of white scanner light skimmed the hold as the internal security cycled. It carved towering crates into hard-edged planes and flashed off deck plating polished enough to make her teeth itch. Shiny. The whole ship was Shiny, top to bottom. It looked like a vessel that had never bled a drop. Government ships all smelled the same. Over-filtered air. Cold metal. The ozone sting of overworked containment. And a faint chemical sharpness that meant somebody polished the parts of the ship no one ever saw.

Kit wrinkled her nose. Back on the Viper, grit and grease lived in every seam. The air carried old lubricant and the char of an engine fire nobody fully talked about. That was a ship people actually lived in. This was a display case with engines. Starch and shine and clean, suffocating little rules about where to put your boots.

She unhooked her harness from the undercarriage latch she'd ridden in on. Her thighs burned from the suspended crouch. She ignored it and dropped between two container stacks, landing lightly on the balls of her feet. Friction cloth wrapped her boots, muting the impact. Her suit hugged her lean frame, scavenged stealth weave and patched canvas, nothing Fleet quartermasters had ever touched. She'd braided her hair tight to her skull before boarding. No loose strands. No snags. No mistakes.

She pressed a gloved finger to the inside of her wrist. The small disk adhered there warmed against her skin and woke up. It tasted the ship's local network and fed thin green lines of data across the transparent patch on her sleeve.

Three decks down. Section C. That was where the real cargo sat.

The crates around her were decoys, ordinary freight bound for some fringe colony. The actual prize would be locked deeper in the ship's belly, guarded tighter than the captain's own quarters. Expensive enough that Vex had smiled when he handed her the job. Vex didn't waste smiles on charity.

"You're the smallest shadow I've got, girl," he'd told her, standing in the dim, humid hold of the ship that had raised her, hands resting on his belt. "Slip in. Cut the eyes. Open the path. We pluck the heart right out of their chest."

He always talked like theft was poetry. It never sounded like poetry when the alarms started and people started bleeding.

Kit moved low to the deck. She crossed twenty meters during the blind interval between scanner sweeps, slid beneath the heavy yellow joint of a magnetic loader arm, and flattened herself against a cargo spine as two dock workers tramped past the hold entrance.

"Manifest says two-hour stop," the first one grumbled. His boots echoed on the immaculate floor.

"That was before command moved up departure."

"What departure?"

"Don't know. Just got the update."

Kit pressed her fingers flat against the cold deck plating and kept her breathing shallow, waiting for more. The men continued down the corridor. One laughed about missed dinner before their voices disappeared behind the bulkheads.

Accelerated departure. She tapped the wrist display once, twice, reworking the route in her head.

Her extraction window had been forty-one minutes. Enough time to get in, blind the internal sensors along the lower spine, confirm the target vault, and get back out to the exterior maintenance collar where the pirate shuttle would scoop her off the hull. Forty-one minutes was now a rumor.

She breathed slowly and ran the numbers. If departure had been bumped by half an hour, she could still make it. She needed the crew distracted by rushed refueling checks. She needed the cloned keycard in her pocket to actually work. Vex trusted people the way gamblers trusted loaded dice. After he rigged them.

She swept her gaze along the overhead corners of the hold. Internal sensors nested there, black polished ovals tucked into the bones of the ship. She'd mapped six on this deck from stolen dockyard schematics. Schematics lied. Time to find out what this ship had grown since its last inspection archive.

Kit slipped to a service panel hidden in the shadows behind a column of freight canisters. She palmed the latch, cracked the metal open, and exposed a braid of fiber lines pulsing faint blue. Government engineers organized their wiring like priests arranging holy relics. Every line labeled. Every seam sealed.

She drew a thin canvas tool roll from her belt and selected two needles. The black one bit hard into the access node. The silver kissed a secondary line and began feeding raw ship data to the patch on her wrist.

A grid bloomed over her skin. Deck sensors. Patrol routes. Alarm-delay thresholds.

The trick with military surveillance wasn't shutting it down. That brought heavily armed people running. The trick was making a ship uncertain of itself, convincing one machine that another had already handled the anomaly. A seamless little stutter in the vessel's memory.

She slid the intrusion wafer from a concealed slot in her gauntlet. Barely bigger than a fingernail. Matte gray. Untraceable. She pressed it against the access port and felt it click flush. The casing mimicked the surrounding polymer and melted into the seam like a ghost.

The first layer would lie to the sensors. The second did something Vex hadn't asked for. Any high-clearance handshake crossing the local node would be copied into packets shaped like random system errors. Useless unless Kit survived long enough to build a readback point. Useful if she ever wanted to know which hand held the keys to the trap.

"Go on," Kit murmured.

The display on her wrist flickered. Two sensors dimmed on her map. Then four. A corridor node near the lower junction turned a sleepy amber. She resealed the panel with a soft click and moved before the system had time to regret agreeing with her.

The Valiant's lower corridors were another universe from the industrial hold. Polished metal walls gleamed beneath cool blue-white strips running low along the deck. Flush door seams left no gap large enough to slip a knife into. The whole ship hummed beneath her boots with the restrained, thrumming energy of something massive and leashed. She kept her steps soft, rolling heel to toe, shoulders down.

Starch, she thought, catching her grimy reflection in a polished panel seam. Top to bottom, every inch of it.

She reached the first security checkpoint and pressed herself into the sharp angle where a corridor wall met a structural brace. A security pair rounded the far intersection, dark uniforms crisp against the pale light, assault rifles slung tight across their chests.

"I don't care if command wants an early departure," the first guard said. "Logistics hasn't cleared the transfer."

"Then logistics can file the complaint after we're gone."

"Gone where?"

"Above our pay grade."

Their boots came closer. Kit watched their reflections stretch and warp in the polished steel trim. The first guard dragged his left foot a fraction. Exhausted. Sloppy. The second kept his head up, rifle steady, eyes ticking across the seams. Sharp.

When their stride aligned with the sensor blink over the checkpoint arch, Kit took three fast steps, vaulted from the edge of a console, and caught the metal lip of an overhead maintenance recess. She pulled herself up, tightened her core, tucked her legs, and flattened into the ceiling channel a heartbeat before the pair passed beneath her.

"Thought I heard something," the tired one muttered.

"You hear your own thoughts and call it a threat."

The sharp guard stopped.

So did Kit's breathing.

He looked back along the corridor, one hand resting on the grip of his rifle. Lean, gray-eyed, still in a way that suggested empty space had to prove itself innocent before he trusted it.

The scanner above him completed one pale sweep. Then he turned and moved on.

Kit waited five heartbeats longer than instinct wanted before lowering herself back to the deck. She landed in a deep crouch and let her thighs bleed off the impact.

The cargo vault lay beyond two sealed doors and a vertical descent shaft cutting through the lower decks. Her cloned keycard pulsed green at the first door. The second flashed red.

"Rust," she hissed.

She crouched beside the access pillar and jammed the narrow end of her knife beneath the casing. The cover came free with a sharp crack. She scored the insulation from two leads with the knife tip, clipped a bypass line across the primary circuit, and tapped her wrist unit into the local lock memory.

The seal clicked open.

She was halfway through the threshold when a low tremor rolled through the deck plates. Mass transfer. A long shudder traveled the length of the ship as the station clamps released the hull. The corridor lights shifted from dock-amber to transit-white. No klaxons. The departure was meant to be quick and quiet.

The internal speaker came alive. Calm. Clipped. Terrifyingly polite.

"All hands, departure sequence initiated. Secure for immediate burn. Repeat, immediate burn."

Kit closed her eyes for one second.

Then she abandoned elegance and sprinted.

She ducked through the open seal and threw herself into the descent-shaft chamber just as the hull bucked harder beneath her. Magnetic locks thudded home somewhere deep in the belly of the ship. Air pressure shifted with an ear-popping hiss. Immediate burn meant the Valiant was running.

Her exterior extraction point was now trapped behind three sealed decks and a widening stretch of the Null.

She reached the shaft access and looked down through the grated cylinder into darkness. She swung onto the cold rungs and descended as fast as her hands could move. The shaft trembled under her boots while the engines spooled, driving the warship clear of the station's skeletal arms.

Near the bottom, she slowed.

The vault door filled the chamber beneath her, a slab of reinforced composite layered over military steel. A vertical slot beside it demanded triple authentication. Two armed marines stood watch on either side.

Kit froze one rung above the shaft opening. Neither marine was looking up. A narrow maintenance ledge ran around the shaft mouth and disappeared behind a structural buttress to her right.

She eased one boot onto it, transferred her weight without letting the ladder creak, and folded herself into the buttress's shadow.

Vex had sent her with a cloned card, a wafer, and a smile against a door that demanded an act of god to open.

"This whole route change makes no sense," one marine said. His voice echoed off the vault.

"Classified cargo rarely does."

"Think it's weapons?"

"Think it's none of our business."

The ship gave a deeper, bone-rattling lurch. A rising whine tore through the hull and set the fine bones in Kit's wrists aching. Warp prep.

She slipped back onto the ladder and climbed.

"Stand by for transition."

Every light on the deck dimmed for an instant. Kit locked both hands around the ladder rails and wedged her boots hard against the rungs.

The jump hit like the universe had taken physical hold of the ship and yanked.

Her teeth clacked hard enough to taste blood. Her stomach lurched into her throat. Invisible threads seemed to pull straight through her bones, stretching her until something inside her threatened to come loose.

Then the pressure vanished. The scream of the drive collapsed into a steady vibration deep beneath the deck plates.

The Valiant was in deep space.

Kit hung from the ladder, knuckles white, and let out a dry, jagged laugh.

A service hatch irised open below her onto the catwalk. Two engineers in gray coveralls stepped into the corridor, wiping grease from their hands. Kit flattened herself against the shaft wall, boots braced on one rung and hands locked around another. Her shoulders began to burn.

"Transition was rough," the first engineer said, tapping a diagnostic display.

"Felt like the old girl wanted to leave part of me back at the station."

"Keep talking like that and Chief will hear you."

"She always hears me."

They passed beneath her and disappeared into the vault corridor. Kit waited until their footsteps dissolved into the engine drone, then hauled herself over the upper lip of the shaft.

The theft was officially vented. The new objective was survival.

She needed a blind pocket. The cargo hold was too obvious. The docking collars were locked tight for transit. Crew quarters left nowhere to vanish. Maintenance shafts. Dirty. Cramped. Unmonitored. Perfect.

She took a sharp left at the next intersection and nearly collided with a broad-shouldered crewman stepping blind from a supply hatch. A flat datapad hung from his wrist on a coiled safety tether. Behind him, a waist-high inventory cart sat loose on four casters, loaded with folded canvas and sealed cleaning tins.

The man shouted and reached for his collar comm. Kit did not chase the hand. She caught the datapad instead and threw it past his hip. The tether snapped taut, dragging his other wrist across his body and turning his shoulders away from the comm. His retreating boot struck the inventory cart. Its casters rolled, taking away the support he expected to find, and his weight pitched backward.

Kit stepped past his lead foot before he could recover. She trapped the tethered wrist against her ribs, turned beneath his arm, and guided his falling shoulder into the steel hatch frame. The impact drove the air from him and opened his hand. Kit caught the dangling datapad, set its reinforced edge beneath his jaw, and used the frame to hold him upright until his knees folded. The moment his resistance left, so did the pressure.

She caught him under the arms and dragged him through the open hatch a breath before the corridor camera completed its sweep. Inside the supply room, she lowered him onto a pile of canvas tarps, pressed two fingers to his throat long enough to feel the pulse, and stripped the dock technician badge from his chest.

"Sorry," she muttered, wiping a smear of grease from her cheek. "Bad night to be competent."

She folded a utility rag beneath his head so the next shudder of the ship wouldn't bounce his skull off the deck, then slipped back into the corridor.

The stolen badge popped two minor service doors before flashing red at a sealed junction near the lower engineering spine. Kit didn't waste time cursing.

She squeezed herself into a vertical maintenance slit barely wide enough for her shoulders. The metal pressed close around her, freezing cold and slick in places with condensation. Old black dust streaked her sleeves. She crawled silently, scraping her elbows against rivets, until the shaft widened enough for her to kneel behind a slitted vent grate overlooking a broad corridor one deck above engineering.

A squad of security passed beneath her, rifles up, led by the gray-eyed officer she'd seen at the checkpoint. The sharp one who had almost turned around.

He stopped in the middle of the corridor and touched his comm bead.

"Control, this is Officer Orin. I want a rerun of the lower-deck sensor logs from docking to departure."

"Reason?" a voice crackled back.

"A cargo scanner stuttered three times in thirteen minutes. The lower hold lock on Corridor C-Seven desynced." Orin's gaze traveled once across the empty corridor. "I dislike coincidence. Flag any maintenance access within thirty meters of the cargo spine."

"On whose authority?"

A new voice cut across the line, deep and even.

"On mine."

Orin straightened. His posture snapped into alignment. "Commander."

A tall man stepped into view below. Silver at the temples. A jagged scar near his right hairline. Not a wrinkle anywhere in his uniform.

He walked without hurry, as if the ship had been constructed on the assumption that people would move out of his way. His pale eyes traveled once over the corridor, taking inventory.

"You felt it too," the commander said.

"Yes, sir."

"Then do not waste time asking permission to be useful. Quietly."

Kit eased back from the grate. Cold metal met her spine. She kept moving.

The shaft narrowed until she had to empty her lungs to force her ribcage past a structural ring. Her wrist display stuttered. The intrusion wafer still blinked on the map, riding the ship's background recalibration cycles, haunting the system from inside. Going quiet. Ghosting.

Kit leaned her head against the freezing metal. No one was coming for her.

Vex would never risk his ship or his crew for the infiltrator he'd trained and marked as disposable. She had always known it, with the same certainty she knew the cold in the shafts, the grit in recycled air, and the weight of being alone in the Null.

She bared her teeth in the pitch black.

A government starship. Cargo worth killing over. Security pulled tight as a fist. No extraction. No allies. No exit.

Kit pushed away from the wall, ignored the ache gathering across her shoulders, and crawled until she found a junction where three narrow conduits met. One disappeared among old server lines and obsolete cooling pipes braided through the inner hull. Unused. Forgotten.

The ship's speakers carried one flat, disembodied announcement through the metal around her.

"Security sweep in progress. Report irregularities immediately."

Kit slid feet-first into the forgotten conduit.

"Come find me," she whispered to the dark.

⁂

End of Chapter One.
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