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 and held still. Not the locked stillness of someone afraid. The dormant readiness of a sheathed blade. She let the massive shadows of the hold 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 bars 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, the deck plating had grit and grease worked into every seam. It smelled of old lubricant and scorch marks from 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. She dropped soundlessly between two container stacks and landed light on the balls of her feet. Friction cloth wrapped her boots, muting 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, glowing lines of green 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 down 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 in the blink between scanner sweeps, slid under the heavy yellow joint of a magnetic loader arm, and flattened her back 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's fingers pressed flat against the cold deck plating. She kept her breathing shallow, waited for more. The men kept walking. Their boots rang dull against the corridor outside. One laughed about missed dinner before the sound finally faded behind the bulkheads.

Accelerated departure. She tapped the wrist display once, twice, and recalibrated the math 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 slow and ran the numbers. If departure was bumped by half an hour, she could still make it. She needed the crew to stay distracted with 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 the 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 one kissed a secondary line and started 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 machine 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.

"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 a different universe from the industrial hold. Polished metal walls gleamed under cool blue-white light strips running low along the baseboards. Flush door seams offered 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 own 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, shifting his weight. "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 warp in the polished steel trim. The first guard dragged his left foot a hair. Exhausted. Sloppy. The second kept his head up, his rifle steady, his eyes ticking over the seams. Sharp.

When their stride aligned with the sensor blink over the checkpoint arch, Kit took three fast steps, vaulted off a console, and caught the metal lip of an overhead maintenance recess. She hauled herself up, cinched her core tight, tucked her legs, and flattened her spine into the ceiling channel a heartbeat before the pair walked under her.

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

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

The sharp guard stopped. Kit stopped breathing. He looked back down the corridor, his hand resting on the grip of his rifle. Lean. A faint jagged scar at his temple.

He shook his head and moved on. Kit waited five agonizing heartbeats after the sound of their boots faded before dropping back to the deck. Her knees ate the shock.

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

"Rust," she hissed.

She crouched beside the access pillar, jammed the narrow end of her knife under the casing, and pried it off with a sharp crack. She stripped two wires with her fingernails, looped a bypass line around 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, massive tremor rolled through the deck plates. Mass transfer. A deep mechanical shudder ran the length of the ship as the station docking clamps disengaged from the hull. The corridor lights shifted from dock-amber to transit-white. No klaxons. The crew had expected a silent, rapid departure.

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 exactly one second.

Then she abandoned elegance and sprinted.

She ducked through the open seal and threw herself into the descent shaft chamber just as a heavier tremor rippled through the hull. Magnetic locks thudded home somewhere deep in the belly of the ship. Air pressure adjusted 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 vibrated under her boots as the engines spooled, physically pushing the warship out of the station's skeletal arms.

The vault door at the bottom of the shaft was a slab of reinforced composite bolted over military steel. A vertical slot demanded triple authentication. Two heavily armed security marines stood absolute watch on either side, hands resting on their weapons.

Kit melted behind a structural buttress before either guard glanced her way. 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 shudder. A rising mechanical whine tore through the hull and made the fine bones in Kit's wrists ache. Warp prep.

She backed into the shadows and retraced her path up the ladder.

"Stand by for transition."

Every light on the deck dimmed for a fraction of a second. Kit grabbed the ladder rail with both hands and braced her boots.

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 pulled straight through her bones, stretched her out, and snapped loose again. Then it was over. The screaming hum settled into a steady vibration deep beneath the deck plates.

The Valiant was in deep space.

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

A service hatch irised open below her on the catwalk. Two engineers in gray coveralls stepped into the corridor, wiping grease from their hands. Kit flattened against the shaft wall, suspended over open air, her muscles burning.

"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 directly beneath her boots and vanished into the vault corridor. Kit waited until their footsteps were lost in the engine hum, then hauled herself back up over the 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. The crew quarters left nowhere to vanish. Maintenance shafts. Dirty. Cramped. Unmonitored. Perfect.

She took a sharp left at the next intersection and nearly walked into a broad-shouldered crewman coming blind out of a side hatch.

The man shouted. His hand went for the comm on his collar.

Kit didn't think. She stepped inside his guard, planted her palm flat against the center of his chest, and twisted. She rode his panicked forward momentum and put him shoulder-first into the steel wall. The impact tore the wind out of him. She caught his wrist before his datapad could clatter to the deck, took his collapsing weight onto her own shoulder, and drove the edge of her hand into the side of his neck.

His eyes rolled back.

She caught him under the arms and dragged his limp body into the side hatch a fraction of a second before the corridor camera completed its rotation. Inside the supply room, she eased him down onto a pile of canvas tarps, two fingers on his throat to make sure he was still breathing, and stripped his dock technician badge.

"Sorry," she muttered. She wiped a smear of grease off her cheek. "Bad night to be competent."

She wedged a utility rag under his head so he wouldn't crack his skull when the ship shuddered, then slipped back out into the hall.

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 closed in on her, damp with freezing chill. Old black dust caked her sleeves. She crawled silently, scraping her elbows on rivets, until the shaft widened enough for her to kneel at a slitted vent grate overlooking a broad corridor one deck above engineering.

A squad of heavily armed security passed beneath the grate, led by the gray-eyed officer she'd seen at the checkpoint. The one with the jagged scar.

He stopped dead in the center 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 eyes swept 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. Even. Heavy with absolute authority.

"On mine."

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

A tall man stepped into view below. He walked into the corridor like he owned the air inside it. Silver at his temples. Immaculate uniform, not a wrinkle on it. A face cut from unyielding rules and old stone. Pale eyes that missed very little.

"You felt it too," the commander said.

"Yes, sir."

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

Kit pulled back from the grate. The metal was cold against her spine. She kept moving into the dark.

The shaft narrowed until she had to fully exhale just to squeeze her ribcage past a structural ring. Her wrist display flickered. The intrusion wafer still blinked on the map, riding the ship's background recalibration cycles, haunting the system from the inside. Going dormant. Ghosting.

She leaned her head back against the freezing metal. No one was coming for her. Vex would never risk his ship or his crew for the girl he'd trained like a disposable blade. She'd always known that. The same way she'd always known the freezing cold in the shafts, the grit in the recycled air, and the exact crushing weight of being completely on her own in the Null.

She bared her teeth in the pitch black.

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

Kit pushed off the wall, ignored the ache in her shoulders, and crawled until she found a junction where three narrow, rusted conduits met. One path vanished into old server lines and obsolete cooling pipes braided through the inner hull. Unused. Forgotten.

The ship's speakers carried one clipped, disembodied announcement: "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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