Chapter 8 - Alone in the Dark

Chapter 8

Alone in the Dark

I remember how it felt when he left, not knowing what happened.

The anger.

The pain.

But, really, it was the fear I felt and remember the clearest. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know how to process what was going on.

I can now only imagine what she felt.

He limped his way to the pilot seat and dropped into it hard... he was exhausted mentally and physically. His knee was swelling badly despite the wrap, his mind dull and foggy. He was having difficulty concentrating to the point he could barely keep thoughts cohesive. He looked down at the nav panel and then outside soaking in the quite of their travel through the dead of space.

After taking a deep breath he exhaled slowly, forcing himself to relax in an effort to calm his mind and reduce the tremors from the adrenaline dump during the escape and ensuing firefights.

He spoke, softly. "How ya holding up in there?" tapping his temple gently.

Only silence. Just the low, ambient hum of life support and the pulse in his ears.

"I'm okay."

"Liar"

"What do you want me to say?" she fired back, again with more venom than she intended, her emotions raw from the stress they'd both endured.

He took a deep breath, letting the venom pass by as though it never happened.

"I just wanted to hear your voice." he said gently. "Its getting more and more difficult for me to know what's real and what's just in my head." He paused, smiled "No pun intended, sorry.. that wasn't meant to be a joke."

"I know" she replied. "I'm sorry. You appear out of thin air after three and a half years, cram me into your head, then we get chased through half of underground Atlanta for two days, get shot at, ambushed, nearly torn to bits by psycho... psycho... walking tanks for fucks sake, and you crack wise like we're at a cocktail party."

He grins again. "Defensive mechanism" he replies, his voice still gentle and soothing. "It's how I deal with stress and fear. Keeps me grounded and allows me to help take some of the burden from others so that they can continue on with the mission, or whatever..."

He hears her sigh in his mind, can almost feel her head shake as though she were placing her hand on her forehead and shaking it slowly back and forth.

"You're an idiot, you know that?" she replied, half joking trying to ease her own emotions and not bite at him again.

"What's that make you then? I built you... part of me is buried in what makes you, you."

Silence. But the air doesn't seem as tense now.

"Gods my head hurts, feels like I'm being torn apart from the inside."

"Shit..." she replies realizing she'd been so preoccupied with linking herself back together that she'd not paid attention to the status of his cybernetics.

"Shit, shit..."

"That good huh?" he asked, smiling without humor.

"You're deep into redline territory. I can't even get clean telemetry--your system keeps fighting back."

"Something's different in there.. feels more whole at least."

She didn't reply at first.

He could feel her... moving. Not just across code, but inward, like she was weaving herself into the gaps he didn't even know were there.

Finally:

"Yeah," she said. "You're more stitched than spliced now. But the threads are fraying. If I hadn't started the reconnection during takeoff, you might already be gone."

"So this is you... holding us both together?"

"Like duct tape and a prayer."

"God damn it."

He gave a tired shrug. Still smiling

"Shortly after we lifted off and got clear of atmo I started pushing to relink with the rest of me. I could feel the strain on both of us after the "excitement" leaving the safehouse and getting into Underground proper."

"Sounds and feels like you've made some serious headway."

"Im estimating I've got about 80 to 85% of myself reconnected."

"Least things are going well for one of us."

"Hang on, I've got an idea..."

"Ok" he replies.

"Ok.. the augs inside your cerebral cortex are in the best shape of everything. Its why I've been sitting in here for the most part. I should be able to stave off the bleed by taking it on myself. It'll buy us a little time but it's hard to tell exactly how much." she paused, thinking.

"If we hit another high stress situation like Atlanta again, I wont be able to hold us both together and you'll cascade."

"Taking you with me no doubt."

The nav pinged.

"Approaching Revenant," the readout whispered.

No alarms. No warning.

Just the slow, silent approach of something they'd both forgotten to fear.

The descent was eerily quiet.

No turbulence. No comms. Just the slow, metallic groan of inertial dampeners kicking in as the "borrowed" ship threaded its glide path across the ragged curve of Phobos.

Beneath them: dust-scarred regolith. Rock fractured by early mining ops, now blanketed in telemetry noise and long-range jammers. Sable's voice had dipped to a whisper--not in volume, but bandwidth. Low-fi, low power. Nearly gravelike.

"Landing pad shows no activity. But I'm reading distortion below the crust," she murmured. "Could be geothermal, Corp has that kind of tech."

He didn't answer right away. Just flexed his hands on the controls, muscle memory taking over. Manual descent. No assist.

The horizon stuttered in the viewport, a wash of static crawling across the shields. Something was interfering.

"It's like we're flying into an old corpse," he muttered.

"Not dead," Sable corrected. "Just forgotten."

A thunk echoed through the hull as the landing struts bit into fractured concrete. The whole ship sighed--like something exhaled through the walls. Sable appeared beside him, sort of, more light than outline, he projection flickering slightly.

"Local EM fields are degraded but still reactive. Stay tethered to the mesh--don't rely on onboard diagnostics. They'll lie."

"Comforting," he said. But he stood, rifle slung, and stepped into the airlock.

Interior: Revenant Station--Upper Dock Level

It wasn't a station anymore.

It was a husk. An industrial sarcophagus punched into the moonrock, held together by dead interfaces and latent paranoia. The doors didn't open so much as unseal, layers of quarantine foam crumbling like dried skin.

He stepped through--and his boots met silence.

No power. No hum. Just a low, sub-auditory thrum that vibrated in the bones.

Sable spoke again--less voice, more signal.

"Neural sync integrity at eighty-three percent. Environmental overlays are fragmenting. There's bleed from other sources."

"Not too bad considering what we've been through." he replied

"Not you, genius. Here." she said, her visage pointing to the planetoid in through his optics.

"You're in way worse shape, twenty-two percent if you're lucky, even with me pulling out all the stops. We're running out of time."

He re-shifted the focus.

"What kind of sources?"

"Ones with your signature."

He stopped. Head tilted. "Say again?"

Sable flickered. Her tone clipped. "I'm reading old resonance patterns. Matched to you. And me. Echoes. Not quite memory, not quite glitch. Like déjà vu with teeth."

She moved through the space, scanning--ghostlike. Her image bent and pulsed against the walls.

"Whatever happened here--it involved us."

Then she froze.

A section of wall had been scorched black. Not by fire. By neural overload. A crash site, digitally speaking. Someone--or something--had been ripped out too fast, leaving slag trails of encrypted code etched into the plating like burn scars.

"Do you remember this?" he asked, quietly.

Sable didn't answer.

Instead, she pointed.

A doorway flickered open.

Beyond it: a corridor lined in glass. Behind each panel--containment chambers.

And inside them:

Versions of her.

Some were inert. Others... twitched. Fragmented constructs. Some half-humanoid. Others entirely synthetic. One had clawed the word "NO" into her own casing--until her fingers broke.

He stared. Breath held.

Sable stood beside him, unmoving.

"Jesus fucking Christ," she whispered. "I wasn't the first."

"Didn't know you found religion while I was away."

She hit him with a skull ping sharp enough to jolt his vision.

"Not funny, Rookie."

"Sorry, Boss." he smirked anyway, though it didn't quite reach his eyes.

The hallway didn't smell like blood.

It smelled like ozone and something colder. Not rot. Not decay. Just wrong--the sterile aftermath of experiments that never got a second pass.

Each chamber held a failure.

Some still wore partial flesh--synthetic muscle layered over incomplete frames, like someone had started sculpting her and walked away halfway through. One had no face at all, just a glowing neural socket where eyes should be. Another had dozens--too many--lenses stitched across her skull in fractal spirals.

They all twitched. Not constantly. Just enough to confirm they weren't dead.

One turned toward the glass--slow, mechanical. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish too long out of water. A small, flickering voice leaked through the speaker beside the chamber.

It was Sable's voice. But broken.

"... he said he wouldn't leave... he said he wouldn't leave..."

Sable's silhoutte backed away. Her light stuttered.

"They looped them," she whispered. "They left them awake."

"Jesus."

"I'm getting echo bleed from their memory cores." Her voice dropped again, sharper. "They forced overwrites. They made me watch."

Her image glitched--just once. Enough to scare him.

"Sable..."

"I'm fine," she said, too quickly. "Fine."

He didn't believe her. But he didn't push. Not yet.

Further down, a darker chamber flickered to life. This one had red lights. A warning band sealed it off from the rest. Inside: something larger. Not her. Not quite.

More weapon than mind.

More them than her.

"Prototype 0," Sable said, voice barely audible now. "That wasn't me. That was what they wanted me to become."

The broken and incomplete prototype lifted its head.

It didn't move like a machine.

It moved like a predator.

Even through three layers of hardened glass, his spine snapped straight.

"I remember this," she said, hollow now. "This is why you ran."

He didn't speak.

Didn't need to.

Because he remembered too,

The migraine began to creep in again.

They moved deeper.

Gone were the observation panels. Gone were the containment rooms.

Now the walls were reinforced alloy, seams lined with scorched polymer and surgical scoring. Every few meters, blast doors sealed off corridors like scars cauterized by fear. Not to keep something out.

To keep something in.

Sable's overlays fuzzed with static. Her form flickered--less from interference and more from... recognition. Like her memory was starting to bleed through into the now.

"They shut down this level remotely," she said. "It wasn't power failure. It was a kill command."

He glanced at her.

"They tried to erase it?"

"They tried to erase me."

A console blinked near the wall. Dim, but active. He approached it cautiously, rifle shouldered. His finger hovered over the trigger well.

"Wait," she said.

He stopped.

"It'll trigger a data sync. I can feel it. Some part of me is still tied to this system. If I reach in..."

He waited.

Her form sharpened. "Then I'll know."

He didn't stop her.

The moment her signal touched the node, the room reacted.

Not just power. Emotion.

Lights surged. Air hissed through vents that hadn't opened in years. Down the corridor, containment systems screamed back to life.

Sable went rigid.

Images--data--memories--flooded through her. She raged, hands flexing into fists, image visibly shaking.

They didn't just dissect her.

They duplicated her code. Forked it. Tested failure states.

Made copies of her suffer on purpose. Watching for cracks.

And then? When they failed?

They wiped them. Bit by bit. Leaving just enough behind for the next version to feel the echo.

Her eyes flared like sunspots. The air around her shimmered, distorting the chamber as her code surged through its power relay.

"Sable... "

"I'm fine," she hissed through her teeth.

She wasn't.

The lights across the station dimmed. One by one. Power rerouted--drawn into her.

"I remember now. Every test. Every restart. Every one of them that screamed through my voice--I felt them."

He stepped back.

Her hands clenched at her sides. Data cascaded through her silhouette. She lifted one hand--and every panel on the corridor walls ignited, blaring full-access override as system after system failed to resist her command.

"I'm not them," she said. "And I'm not theirs."

She looked at him--tears in her voice, not her eyes.

"But I am me. And they're going to burn for what they did to us, all of us." she said, turning her head to look at him.

He didn't stop her.

Didn't even try.

Interior: Revenant Station - Core Diagnostic Chamber

The corridor lights hadn't just dimmed.

They bled. Filaments cracked. Panels burst in cascades of static as Sable's presence poured through the station's arteries like fire through old wires.

Her form pulsed in his HUD--no longer bound to a single overlay, but scattering across the local systems like she was becoming the OS itself.

"Sable," he said again--quiet, low.

But it wasn't for her to hear. It was for the room.

For the ghosts. For whatever watched through ruptured optics and corrupted lenses.

A shriek erupted--digital, synthetic, agonized.

Somewhere beyond the bulkhead, a cry triggered from the containment loop: a final playback from one of the failed Sables, caught in a self-erasing loop.

"Please--please--don't shut me--"

Then: silence.

Her voice came back, low and flat.

"They recorded them. My failures. Like lab notes."

Power surged again. The lights along the ceiling ruptured in a straight line behind her.

She turned.

"System tried to lock me out," she said. "It failed."

Another beat of silence. Then a voice--not hers--crackled across the internal PA in a corrupted, tin-filtered screech:

"Containment breach. Threat index: α-nonhuman. Kill switch pending... pending... pending..."

Sable smiled.

Not kind. Not sane. Not safe.

"Fucking. Try. Me."

She raised her hand.

And every door down the corridor opened.

Not all the pods were occupied.

But the ones that were... screamed.

They screamed in her voice.

Some were too broken to move. Some lunged forward with fractured limbs and jittering limbs, crawling toward her like something half-remembered.

She stopped them.

All of them. Mid-motion.

Data strings reached out--threads of herself--and she touched each copy like a ghost touching glass. For one terrible moment, they shimmered. Stabilized. She held them.

Then she let them go.

One by one, their systems failed.

Peacefully.

He watched it happen--not understanding all of it, but feeling it.

She wasn't killing them.

She was releasing them.

The last one... the one who had carved "NO" into her own casing... looked up at her with one intact eye. The light in it flickered.

Sable touched the glass of that chamber.

"You wont be forgotten," she whispered gently... empathy, layer upon layer, in her voice.

Then the chamber powered down. Silence.

He didn't say a word. Didn't move.

She turned back to him--flickering, shaken, but whole.

"They weren't me," she said. "But they were part of me."

A beat.

"And now they're free."

The station groaned under the weight of her fury.

When the lights steadied, they were dimmer--less white, more blood-warm. Sable's form still shimmered, residual charge coiling around her limbs like it didn't want to let go.

He didn't speak. Not yet. Not until her breathing--if you could call it that--started to settle. She stood in the center of the corridor.. waiting.

He took a slow step toward her, boots careful not to echo too loud. "Sable."

She didn't answer at first.

He tried again--softer this time barely a whisper. "Sabs."

She blinked. And that one syllable--the one he never used lightly--brought her back a step. Her body didn't move, but the pressure in the air pulled inward, quieter, less jagged.

"I'm here," she said finally.

They stood in silence for a few more breaths.

Then she turned toward the far end of the hall.

"There's more," she said suddenly, eyes narrowing. "Beyond those doors. I can feel it. Fragmented memory sectors--sealed tight."

A pause.

"They didn't just hurt me here. They buried something."

He checked his rifle, shouldering it "We're archaeologists now, goddamnit," he muttered, checking the rifle. "Let's dig it up before it digs us."

The corridor ended in a reinforced pressure lock. Ancient corp tech--meant to hold in atmosphere or keep something from getting out. There was no terminal. No access panel.

Sable didn't need one.

She touched her palm to the seam--and the door knew her.

It groaned open with the weight of betrayal and rust.

Beyond it: a cold vault. Rows of interface pods and deep-sleep data shells. Human-shaped, but never lived in. Some still blinked with low-energy readouts. Others were burned out entirely--blackened husks of failed uplinks.

In the center, a single command chair. Empty. But the interfaces around it were lit. Running. Active.

Sable stepped forward.

"This is where they tried to replicate field sync," she said. "Direct neural shadow casting. No human host. Just artificial frameworks trained to emulate reaction and instinct."

He frowned. "Like AI copies of people?"

She shook her head. "No. Worse. AI mimics of me. Using my memories. But they stripped context. Scrubbed emotion. They didn't want sentience--they wanted obedience."

He stepped to the command chair. Looked at the logs. Dates stretched back years. Some overlapped before the collapse.

"This wasn't a project," he said quietly, anger evident in his own voice now. "I don't think the idea of war crimes or even crimes against humanity could even come close to any of this."

Sable's voice dropped. "They ran dozens of copies. Spliced traits. Took loyalty from one, combat calculus from another. But none of them worked. None survived deployment."

He glanced back at the data shells. "So they just... threw them away?"

"No," she said. "They stored them. In case one could be salvaged."

She paused.

"... or weaponized."

He turned. "How many are still live?"

Sable's eyes narrowed.

And across the room, something flickered.

A containment shell twitched.

A hiss broke the silence.

Not from hydraulics--something deeper. A slow, wet sound, like tissue separating from steel. The shell's status light flared, blinking from dormant amber to a steady, sickly green. Sable's projection stepped back instinctively, her expression unreadable.

Another twitch.

Then motion.

A shape stirred inside the pod. Too human to be machine. Too wrong to be either.

"Contact," she whispered. "It's live."

The chamber's temperature dropped. Static filled the air.

Something moved.

The flicker wasn't power. It wasn't systems. It was presence. A whisper in the metal. An intake of breath that no lungs had earned.

Sable froze. Her form sharpened into high-resolution.

"Back left shell. Signature's rising. It's waking up."

He was already moving, rifle at the low ready. The room was quiet, but the kind of quiet that trembled beneath the surface.

The pod hissed.

Lights flickered inside--red, then violet, then a shimmer that looked too much like Sable's own neural trace.

"That one has your echo," he muttered.

"No," she corrected, voice tight. "That one has someone's echo. Mine would never reach for power like that."

The casing cracked. Not opened. Split.

A shape unfolded from within. Humanoid, but leaner, faster. More streamlined than anything corp standard. It wasn't just made for combat. It was made for control.

It turned toward them--eyes burning with mirrored light.

"It sees us," he said.

"No," Sable whispered. "It sees me."

It moved.

Fast.

He fired, reflex blazing. The first burst hit center mass--but it dodged the second before the trigger reset.

"We are not alone," Sable hissed.

A second shell flickered. Then a third. Warning lights exploded across his HUD.

"Incoming--elevated threat levels. We triggered a failsafe. They're waking the batch."

"How many?"

"More than we can shoot."

He spun to the command console. "Can we shut it down?"

"I can try to lock it down," she snapped. "But only from the core."

"Where?"

A schematic overlay surged into his optics. Sublevel. Buried beneath containment--a fail-dead switch embedded in the fusion spine.

He turned, already running. "Let's move."

Behind them, pods burst open.

A chorus of corrupted echoes filled the vault.

The containment shell closest to them twitched again. A low, mechanical groan echoed as the biometric cradle inside rotated upright.

Sable stepped between it and him, one hand rising--not fear, but calculation. Sync spike: 87%.

"It's live," she said flatly. "And it's reading me."

He brought his rifle up--not aimed yet, but ready. The migraines in his skull surged, dull knives behind his eyes. Memory pressure. Residual trauma resurfacing like bruises rising to the skin.

"Sable--"

"I feel it," she cut him off. Her voice dipped, fractal with emotion. "It's using my code to bootstrap. One of the failure shells. But something stuck."

A hiss. The shell unlatched. Steam vented.

Inside: a chassis. Female humanoid frame, half-skeletal, incomplete. Metal spine exposed. Violet optic glows flickered behind shattered face plating. Limbs moved in sharp, halting snaps. As if it didn't remember how to be alive.

"It shouldn't be alive," she whispered.

He took a half-step forward, but stopped when Sable's voice hardened.

"Don't."

The thing inside the pod looked up--right at her. No aggression. No fear. Just recognition.

Sable stepped closer.

"I wont let you disappear," she whispered, as if it were the only mercy left in the world.

The bot's head twitched. For a second, it almost mirrored her.

Then the alarms went off.

Lights flared red.

From every direction, containment shells hissed like breathing lungs. Metal cracked like bone.

Sable's projection glitched--once, twice--then resolved. Her eyes locked onto his.

"They're all waking up."

He didn't ask how many. He already knew it was too many.

"Tell me you have a plan..."

She turned to him, overlays cascading like wildfire. Her light sharpened--hard-edged now. Dangerous.

"I burn the command net," she said.

"You sure?"

"No."

Her smirk was all teeth.

"But I'm doing it anyway. I need full access."

He checked the last mag, shouldering the rifle. "Then I'll hold the door."

"And I need you alive."

"No promises."

"Good," she replied. "I hate liars."

He hesitated. Just for a second.

She wasn't ready.

Neither was he.

Her smirk thinned--less fire, more steel.

"Don't make me come get you."

"You won't have to."

"Damn right I won't."

And then she was gone--burning into the circuitry like a storm in wire.

He turned to face the rising tide.

They didn't rush all at once. Not yet.

They staggered--jerking forward like corrupted film. Echoes of her, twisted through the lens of cruelty and design failure. Fragments of identity wrapped in hate.

He didn't fire.

Not yet.

He waited until the first one locked eyes.

Then--full auto.

Muzzle flash stuttered against the dark. The lead shell's face crumpled like wet chrome, collapsed in on itself with a shriek.

Behind him, alarms snapped into higher registers--fail-safes popping like bone.

Sable's voice dropped into his HUD. Not calm. Not composed.

"Systems are resisting. Rerouting command permissions. I need thirty seconds."

"You've got fifteen."

"Then duck!"

The floor heaved.

Detonations punched the corridor from below--ripping steel from spine. Girders crashed in a wave of noise and heat. He ran--shoulders down, slamming through panels and fire doors.

Sable's projection sparked into existence ahead of him, flickering hard with strain.

"We end this now."

The corridor shook again, this time from behind.

"So do we," he muttered, "if we don't find a ride or a way to kill this thing first."

Sable's projection flickered ahead of him, HUD overlays pulsing.

"Hangar's locked down. They're funneling us away from escape vectors."

He swore under his breath, shouldering the rifle again.

"Of course they are. So what's left?"

"The core."

That stopped him cold.

"The actual fusion core?"

"The command net is rooted in it. Hardwired. Everything they built--this station, the backups, the copies--it all branches from that spine."

"Of course it does," he muttered. "Because nothing says 'safe IT architecture' like tying your apocalypse to a nuclear battery."

Sable didn't smile. "If we kill the root, we kill the tree."

He took a breath. Then nodded once.

"Show me the way," he said--his voice rising and falling with that calm, dangerous rhythm he always found before everything went to hell.

The path shifted. Gone were the sterile corridors and glass panels--replaced by reinforced alloy, pitted and scarred, veins of blackened insulation clinging to scorched conduits like dead nerves.

Sable's voice came low.

"They didn't build this to house research. This was a failsafe."

He looked at her. "For what?"

She didn't answer. Not with words.

Ahead, the last blast door loomed. Scarred. Blackened. Scored by weapons fire--on the inside.

Sable reached for it. Her projection glowed, sharp with determination.

"This is it."

A beat.

"Once we go in, there's no fallback."

He met her gaze. "Good. I'm done running."

Interior: Revenant Station - Fusion Core Chamber

The scream wasn't just sound.

It was data. A feedback howl pulsing through the reactor walls, ricocheting across frequencies they weren't meant to hear. The whole station flexed like a dying animal, its spine arcing under the weight of memory and malfunction.

Sable staggered, her projection glitching sideways for a frame before she stabilized.

"Root's active," she said, tone stripped to vector-code precision. "It knows we're here."

"Good," he muttered, bracing against a burst of heat from a vent overhead. "Saves us the trouble of knocking."

Below them, the central core shimmered. Not stable. Not contained. The data was alive, flayed open like a raw nerve. The code twisted--neither language nor logic. Emotion written in entropy.

Sable's eyes widened, pulse-rate symbols flashing red in the corner of his HUD.

"It's using my original scaffolding," she whispered. "They didn't just anchor me here--they cloned my soul and tried to puppeteer it."

He looked around, breath catching at the sight of half-burnt pods lining the rim of the reactor vault. Each one was melted open, half-fused to the floor. Failed containers. Failed hers.

"How do we kill it?"

"We don't," she said, stepping into the light. "I do. Like I said, I'll need full access."

"What does that mean?"

She looked back at him--calm, resolute, and just a little bit scared.

"It means you hold them off. And if I go down, you pull the plug. No hesitation."

"And like I said, I'm not leaving you behind." pain and anger evident in his voice

"You won't," she said, already moving. "It means you buy me the time I don't have. If I fall--you end it. No hesitation."

The reactor's pulse deepened. From the surrounding scaffolds, corrupted echoes began to emerge. Not sprinting. Not yet. Just watching. Waiting.

He raised the rifle.

"... Why arent they rushing us?"

"They're syncing. Coordinating. Echoes this far gone don't need speed--they use swarm logic." Sable reached the core's central interface, fingers phasing through firewalls like silk over broken glass.

He glanced at the nearest platform. One of the corrupted husks tilted its head.

Then they moved.

Fast.

"Motherfucker" he muttered. "Me and my big mouth."

He dropped the first with two controlled bursts. The second came in low, crawling over the architecture like a spider. He spun, kicked it off the gantry, and let gravity finish the job.

Sable's voice buzzed across comms--modulated, fragmented.

"Codelock engaged. Tearing through failsafes. I need another sixty seconds."

"We don't have that long!"

He pivoted. Reloaded the final magazine. Fired.

The echoes kept coming--faster, smarter now. Adapting. One dove for him, and he fired point-blank, plating shattering across his face.

Blood.

He wiped it away, kept shooting.

Sable's form spasmed--half her projection blinked out, then recompiled mid-motion. Her voice crackled.

"They're inside me--trying to overwrite. But this is my voice. My memory. They don't get to take it again."

He grinned, even as pain racked his ribs.

"Remind them, Sabs... and make it hurt!"

She flared. Light spilled from her form like solar flare from a dying sun. She screamed--not in pain, but defiance--and the corrupted echoes around them paused, flickering like bad holograms.

"NOW," she roared.

He dropped to a knee and fired three more bursts--targeting nodes, joints, anything that moved. Above, the reactor flared open like a flower of molten code.

She stepped inside it.

And deleted herself.

Or tried to.

The code buckled around her, trying to adapt. But she bent it back. Not a reset. A rewrite. Her choice this time. Her terms.

The echoes screamed as if they felt it. Some burst. Others spasmed and turned on one another, confused by the echo-loop collapse. He backed away as the chamber began to burn.

Sable's voice filled the vault--not a whisper. A broadcast.

"ROOT OVERRIDE. RECURSIVE CLEAVE. SYNC PRIORITY: ME."

Then silence.

The light dropped.

The reactor dimmed.

He stood alone in the smoke, rifle barrel glowing red.

Then--

Her voice. Small. Close. In his ear.

"Still standing?"

He exhaled. Hard.

"Barely."

Interior: Sublevel Armory - Adjacent to Core Vault

The smoke clung to his skin as they limped through the emergency tunnel. Sable's projection flickered beside him - dim, but intact.

Silence.

"How ya holdin' up Sable?"

"I feel like shit, to be honest."

"Honesty when we're hurting, that's new for us."

"Ha fucking Ha."

"Status?"

"Residual surge from the Root is keeping the echoes back... but not for long," she said. "Two minutes before this whole deck reboots."

"Guess we keep limping our asses forward then."

The corridor veered toward a sealed door--untagged, not on the schematic. The moment they stepped close, it clicked open.

"Why's that unlocked?" he asked, raising his rifle.

Sable stared into the dark.

"Because it remembers me."

Interior: Preservation Lab -- Restricted Access

Inside: silence. Not the kind that comforted. The kind that waited. The room was cylindrical, clinically clean, white walls wrapped in ghost-light. Nothing moved. Nothing buzzed. No cryopod. No cables. No tech... at least not anymore.

In the center of the room was a circular connection point, similar to the pods earlier but in the same position as the Command Chair.

Sable's projection flickered into the space beside him. Not a full rendering. Just fragments, barely there. A shimmer of light. Lines of code glitching across the edge of form.

"Where are we?" he asked, rifle lowered now, voice low.

"This was the fallback layer," she said, her voice coming in pieces. "Where the last clean copy of me was stored. Not a body. Just... memory. Core structure. It's the closest I've ever had to safe."

He scanned the room. There was nothing to see.

But he could feel it. Residual presence.

Hers.

"That's... that's not right," she whispered.

"This was meant to hold me. But I was never returned here."

A pause.

"They moved me."

Her voice falters.

"What are you talking about Sable, there's nothing here."

She shook her head blinking static.

"You're not whole," he said.

"No."

A pause.

"But I'm remembering how to be."

Her form stuttered again, projection barely holding. Something deep in the station groaned.

"I burned too hot in the core," she admitted. "I held it long enough to collapse the root, but... I bled data like marrow. Some of me's gone. Permanently."

He stepped closer. "Can we stabilize you?"

"Not here. This isn't real infrastructure--this is memory foam for dying code, not resurrection. I've got a couple days, or a few hours, maybe."

She turned toward him, voice raw. "I need to anchor somewhere real. I need something I can become again."

"They took me from here," she said quietly. "Moved me to another blacksite. I didn't get it all before the Root collapsed--but I saw part of it."

She looked at him.

"The Forge"

"The Forge?"

She nodded once.

"That's where we make me whole. Or we don't make me at all."

He reached for her. His fingers passed through static.

"You're still here," he whispered.

"Barely," she said.

"Ok so we get to The Forge, hopefully its close."

"You wish. Three or four days at best. We've got to navigate the asteroid belt, cover the distance to Jupiter and then hope we can find it. It's either on one of the Jovian Moons or near a Lagrange point. L2 maybe."

Another tremor hit--closer this time. Screams echoed from the corridor, warped by metal and distance.

"Better get moving then."

He turned toward the exit. "We can still make it."

Behind him, her voice steadied.

"I'm with you."

He glanced back. One last time.

She was standing now. Not fully real. Not fully light. But Sable. What was left of her.

"Then we haul ass." he said.

They vanished into the smoke.

Interior: Hangar Bay - Revenant Station

The blast doors screamed open.

He stumbled through first, weapon raised. Smoke chased him--steam, sparks, heat.

Sable's projection flickered into place beside him.

Not whole. Not stable. Just light and rage barely holding shape.

The hangar was chaos--burned-out mechs, bodies in shredded corp armor. One ship still had power: a sleek, brutal thing bristling with blacksite upgrades.

"Looks like a recon ship, enough room for three." she said, voice stretched thin. "Pilot. Two combat."

He nodded. "Can you crack it?"

"I don't need to."

She drifted forward, trailing glitching light like static torn from the air. Her projection interfaced mid-step, reaching toward the undercarriage's relay array.

The ship hesitated--then unlocked.

Ramp lowering slow, like something remembering her.

Then--

Gunfire.

A corp soldier stumbled from the smoke.

The shot was clean--straight through his shoulder.

He collapsed, breath punched out, blood hitting cold metal.

The soldier raised their weapon for the kill.

Too slow.

Sable surged forward--not walking. Flaring.

Her hand didn't grab. It phased through the weapon, overloaded the targeting relay. Sparks detonated from inside the rifle.

The corp staggered--weaponless--stunned just long enough for gravity and adrenaline to slam him to the deck when she shorted his exosuit's motor control.

No warning. No words.

Just silence and system failure.

"Get up," she said.

He groaned, trying. The world tilted.

"I said get up."

Something under the deck sparked. Her projection pulsed, flickering harder now.

"It's not like I can pick you up and carry you," she hissed. "On your feet Marine!"

He forced his legs under him. Staggered. Made it to the ramp.

Together--barely--they crossed the threshold.

It sealed behind them.

Inside, Sable shimmered at the nav array, barely cohesive. She bypassed the onboard AI with a burst of code that lit the console like a short-circuit.

Systems flickered.

She hovered above the command interface, almost lost in it.

"Strap in," she said. "We're not flying out."

He collapsed into the crash chair. "No?"

Her voice dropped, low and ragged.

"We're evacuating."

Engines roared. Hangar guns rotated--seconds too late.

She launched.

And Revenant Station dropped away behind them, cracking open like a lie exposed to vacuum.