[POV: Nardia]

  —Silence is usually a trap in space.

  The mothership felt hollow inside.

  That was the scary part.

  On Shiratori, there was always life: a gentle vibration through the deck, tiny electronic chirps, the faint pressure of other people moving nearby. It all blended into this reassuring sense that the ship was awake and breathing alongside you.

  But the mothership—Al-Safar—was different.

  Her heartbeat felt deeper.

  Somewhere beyond the bulkheads, the reactor slept. In this ship, a large SER, a reactor that can extract the information contained in the vacuum, that is, dark energy, as pure energy is equipped. And when the reactor’s sleep grew shallow, the hull answered with a tiny shiver, like the ship was taking a slow, careful breath.

  Everyone was gathered on the bridge now.

  “Bridge” was one of those historical words Earth ships kept using even after the ocean was a memory. On large combat vessels, they often built the CIC/control room as a protruding section where the gravity-magnetic barrier density could be maximized. Because of the old days, they still called it the bridge.

  The lighting here was the same merciless white as the hangar—only colder. Higher color temperature.

  It made faces look faintly blue.

  Combat lighting, my instincts whispered. Not designed to make people look human—designed to make instruments look perfect.

  A system built to keep you tense.

  And somehow, it hid that tension well, too. So well it made the fear worse.

  “Striped-leap navigation. We’re going high-speed inflation pulse mode… it’ll shake.”

  Genichiro said it like he was reading a weather report.

  Then he kept going, because of course he did.

  “You already know this, but striped-leap drives do FTL by pulsing a pseudo-inflation event in υ-space—an inflation skid—down to the millisecond. In ‘high-speed’ mode, you shorten the interval between pulses, which means the tuning won’t be perfect.”

  He flicked his gaze at me like I was an idiot for still being here.

  “Translation: it’ll shake. Not like you’ll arrive that much sooner, though.”

  “If there’s a way to not shake, can we use that?” I snapped.

  Genichiro answered as if the concept of comfort was a math error.

  “This ship’s big. It won’t be too bad. And once we dock, it won’t shake.”

  “That’s not navigation!”

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  “This ship used to be a warship. A torpedo depot ship. Fast suits her.”

  Ahmad cut in, short and final.

  “We go.”

  That was enough to kill the joke.

  Ahmad pushed the throttle forward, and space thinned—pulled long and narrow.

  The stars turned into lines.

  I’d seen it plenty of times, but through Al-Safar’s displays the effect felt heavier, like there was pressure behind my eyes. Like my body was a fraction of a second slower than the ship.

  My stomach caught up half a beat late.

  The shake came.

  No—calling it a shake was wrong.

  For an instant, gravity’s direction went vague. The leap pulses were too fast for the G-cancelers to smooth out. It felt like my soles were searching for the deck… and the deck was searching for my soles right back.

  “…I hate this,” I muttered.

  Genichiro’s reply came instantly.

  “No one likes it.”

  It was strangely… gentle.

  Which somehow made me even angrier. If you were going to be nice, at least sound like it so I could react properly.

  Two days later—right around the time my body had finally stopped trying to revolt—striped-leap navigation ended.

  The instruments snapped back to real numbers all at once.

  And the bridge atmosphere changed with them.

  It was too quiet.

  Space is quiet by default. Sound doesn’t travel. Silence should be normal.

  But the silence on the displays was… too clean.

  There was barely any comm noise. In neutral space you’d expect weak commercial beacons scattered everywhere. Even on the frontier you’d catch junk reflections and drifting trash.

  But the entrance to the Almmina Sector —

  It looked tidy.

  “…That’s weird,” Thomas murmured. He was on radar duty right now, eyes fixed on the returns.

  I lifted my head. “What is?”

  “Not much reflection. Like the debris got… swept. Like someone cleaned the place up.”

  Genichiro snorted. “Cleaning the gate to a graveyard? Sounds like there’s a caretaker with bad taste.”

  Ahmad didn’t laugh. His eyes didn’t leave the screen.

  “Search,” he ordered.

  Thomas moved immediately.

  Multi-band radar. Neutrino arrays. Gravitational-wave sensors. Thermal analysis. Everything flipped into detailed search mode.

  Dots began to bloom across the display.

  More.

  More.

  More.

  “…Oh. Crap.” Thomas’s voice dropped an octave. “Multiple contacts. Lots of fighters. Two cruiser-class.”

  My mouth went dry.

  We were sitting in a mothership’s bridge, surrounded by steel and systems and weapons, and my tongue still felt like sand.

  “Pirates,” Ahmad said quietly.

  “Right away?!” I blurted. “That’s a really sloppy welcome!”

  “Welcomes are usually sloppy,” Genichiro said, blunt as ever.

  “Don’t agree with that!”

  The silhouettes on the screen were flying in formation.

  And their movement was synchronized.

  In GDC sims, I was taught you could smell greed on pirates: the scramble, the impatience, the ragged lines as crews fought each other for the best angle on prey.

  But this—

  This was disciplined.

  No jostling. No eager breakaways. No open-channel taunts, no bragging beacon, no sloppy transponder flare.

  Just silence.

  The kind of silence you got from people who expected obedience.

  A bad feeling tightened in my gut.

  Ahmad’s voice hardened. “We engage. Prepare the main gun.”

  The AI returned a calm acknowledgement. STATUS ICONS shifted. Target solutions began to draw themselves in ghostly lines over the tactical display—clean, confident geometry.

  “Wait—no warning? No hailing?” I snapped. “We’re not even going to talk?”

  “No,” Genichiro said with a shrug. “There’s no beacon or calling. Assume they’ll shoot first. This is a graveyard.”

  “Being in a graveyard isn’t a reason to shoot!”

  “In space,” Genichiro said, short and cold, “it is.”

  His tone didn’t make me angry so much as it made my posture straighten on instinct.

  Space common sense was colder than any planet-bound morality.

  Which meant you prepared, or you died.

  Al-Safar moved.

  A ship this heavy shouldn’t have been able to slide like that—yet the hull drifted sideways with unnerving smoothness. Not a dramatic maneuver. More like… a shift.

  Just slipping a few meters, a few dozen meters, off an enemy’s aim line.

  In space, that “just a little” decided everything.

  The bridge deck answered with a low groan.

  The reactor was waking, and the ship’s skeleton was stiffening for a fight.

  I tightened my grip on my harness.

  My fingertips felt cold.

  I was scared.

  But fear didn’t buy you a replacement out here.

  Ahmad’s voice cut through it.

  “Fire.”

  Al-Safar’s main gun howled.