Chapter Six: Ghosts of Velocity
The Solace responds to my call like a loyal beast—silent, cloaked, and ready. As we exit the decaying station into the void, its hatch opens mid-air, artificial gravity stabilizing as I pull Mira aboard with one arm and slam the seal shut.
"Jump drive primed," the ship's AI announces. "Coordinates set for Orias Drift."
I hit the ignition. The stars stretch, the silence bends, and the Solace punches into slipstream.
For a breathless moment, nothing exists but acceleration.
Then reality knits itself back together, slower than my pulse.
Mira collapses into the co-pilot's chair, sweat streaking her soot-stained face. I slide into the pilot's seat, hands still trembling. Not from fear—adrenaline. Old instincts. Buried reactions. War that never left.
We sit in silence for a minute, the kind that screams with everything unspoken.
"Why Orias Drift?" she asks eventually.
"Because if we want Adler, we go to the last place he was seen."
Mira exhales sharply. "He's not going to be happy to see me."
"Neither was I."
She looks at me, eyes dark. "You don't get to be bitter."
"Why not? I left because of what they turned us into. You stayed."
"To stop them."
"No," I say. "You stayed because you thought you could survive it."
She doesn't answer. Doesn't have to.
I run a diagnostic on the crystal she gave me—no signal, no data bleed. But there's something strange about its energy signature. Ancient tech, yet pulsing like a heartbeat.
"What's in it?" I ask, not taking my eyes off the screen.
Mira hesitates. "The original Requiem drive. The one they said failed."
My stomach drops. That drive wasn't supposed to exist anymore. It was condemned after it destabilized a moon during the Auric Skirmishes. Over a hundred thousand lost. Rewritten in the history logs as a "containment breach."
But she kept it. All these years.
"Do you know what they'll do with this if they recover it?"
She nods. "They won't just erase resistance. They'll rewrite truth."
The Solace hums around us like a heartbeat, warm and steady. The only home I've had in years. And suddenly, I'm not sure even space is far enough to hide anymore.
"You could've gone to anyone," I say. "Why me?"
Her voice softens. "Because despite everything, you never stopped running toward fire. You just needed someone to remind you what for."
The words lodge in my chest. Not because they're wrong. But because they're true.
"We'll find Adler," I say. "But if this crystal really holds what you say, we'll need more than him. We'll need a way to leak it, expose it."
She meets my gaze, the ghost of a smirk curling her lips. "I've already started."
Before I can ask what she means, the proximity alarm sounds.
We've been followed.