—Warships pretending to be pirates usually kill you with impeccable manners.

  Genichiro had called our main gun the FL Strangelet Plasma Gun—an artifact of Ancients tech. This weapon fires a plasma ball that stably traps a Strangelet, a kind of truly dangerous matter.

  When it fired, the “shadow” came before the light.

  For a heartbeat, my vision dimmed like someone had draped a sheet over my eyes. It wasn’t glare. It was the opposite—my retinas bracing on instinct, flinching before the brightness arrived.

  Then the beam lanced out.

  Space has no sound.

  But a ship does.

  The recoil traveled through Al-Safar’s metallic bones and turned into a low, animal roar. The deck trembled under my boots. My heart lagged half a beat behind, like it had to ask permission to keep beating.

  “…Hh.”

  I sucked in a breath.

  The line of light swept through the enemy fighter wing.

  A dot vanished.

  Another.

  Another.

  The way they disappeared had no mercy in it—less like shooting down aircraft, more like waving a bug-zapper through a swarm. Asymmetrical. Clinical. Unfair.

  “So it wasn’t bragging,” I whispered. “She really is armed like a battleship…”

  When Genichiro had boasted about it, I’d assumed it was engineer exaggeration. But that torrent of energy looked like the main guns I’d only ever seen in Earth-navy sims—the kind mounted on hulls that were basically flying fortresses.

  Thomas, too, couldn’t help himself.

  “W-Wow… I’ve never seen a real fight before…”

  “Eyes on the radar,” Genichiro snapped. “If you stare, you die.”

  He was rude as always.

  And annoyingly right.

  “Enemy heat spike! Counterattack!” Thomas yelped, hands flying.

  Particle beams.

  They spread mid-flight, blooming into something like buckshot.

  It looked sloppy—until you realized the sloppiness was theater. The actual pattern was fencing us in, crushing escape lanes shut.

  “An encirclement…?” Thomas’s voice cracked.

  “It’s fine,” Ahmad said.

  He rolled the stick and slid Al-Safar into the rock belt.

  From what I’d studied for this mission, the “Ship graveyard” wasn’t a neat field of wrecks. It was a battlefield’s aftermath: debris everywhere, and asteroids drifting through it like a Kuiper belt packed too tight.

  Inside that clutter, heavy guns struggled. Fire, and you’d fill your own sensor picture with chaos and fragments. Fighters couldn’t turn as freely, either.

  —That was why we were going in.

  Al-Safar ducked behind a boulder, hiding her bulk in its shadow. For a ship this big, she moved with predator grace. She didn’t look like she was running so much as she was stalking.

  One of the cruiser-class contacts closed the distance.

  On the external feed it looked like a pirate ship—graffiti-like markings across the hull, extra antennae welded on, armor patched in messy layers like someone had dressed a warship in scraps.

  But the spacing between ships stayed perfect. Heat signatures were too uniform.

  Pirates fought each other as much as they hunted you. They crowded in, greedy, jostling for position.

  These ships held formation.

  “…Not pirates,” Genichiro said before I could.

  “Just pirate paint.” He bared his teeth in something that wasn’t quite a grin. “Warships inside. Nasty hobby.”

  “How can you tell?” I shot back.

  “Look at the sensor logs. Their waste-heat cycle is regular. Maintenance is clean. You think pirates keep their engines that tidy?”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  He was right. Even the thruster plumes were too disciplined.

  He always explained when it mattered, too—like kindness was something he delivered with a brick.

  “A disguised cruiser,” Ahmad said.

  The moment the term hit the air, cold crawled down my spine.

  A disguised cruiser: a state ship wearing a pirate mask, so responsibility stayed blurred. If it shot you, it could say, Pirates did it. If you shot back, it could say, Tragic accident.

  Politics made a weapon out of plausible deniability.

  Dirty killing, with paperwork afterward.

  “Gra… Grabhul?” I asked, throat tight.

  Ahmad nodded once.

  “Most likely. This is inside Human Federation influence—but borders out here are fog. Fog is where ships like that operate.”

  The enemy cruiser moved like it could read our shadow—calculating asteroid cover, cutting angles, circling with textbook precision.

  Not pirate instinct.

  Military doctrine.

  I’d trained on those manuals too, even if GDC wasn’t a “regular army.” The difference between a brawl and a drill was something you could feel in your teeth.

  Then the comm ping hit.

  Genichiro frowned at the console. “Got their band. The cipher standard is… not a pirate patchwork. Unified spec.”

  “Confirmed,” Ahmad spat, and in that single word there was more disgust than in any curse.

  The enemy fired in unison.

  The “buckshot” beams hammered into the rock belt and shattered stone into mist.

  Mist was worse than boulders.

  Debris became blades at kilometers per second. Even pebbles punched holes if your gravity-magnetic barrier hiccupped.

  An invisible storm bloomed.

  “—Whoa!”

  The barrier display flared and a rapid chain of impact warnings chattered across the bridge.

  Not rain.

  Hail made of death.

  “Armor squeal’s showing,” Genichiro said.

  “Armor… squeal?” I choked.

  “It means the ship’s screaming.” His eyes didn’t leave the data. “Shut up. Sound is information right now.”

  Ahmad threw Al-Safar into a hard weave—shadow to shadow, rock to rock. Each slide made the G-cancelers lag; gravity yanked sideways and my organs tried to keep going in the old direction.

  Nausea surged up my throat.

  I swallowed it down.

  Even while my body begged to quit, part of me was stunned—this ship was huge, and she was doing this.

  Two cruisers moved to pincer us: one taking the front, one sliding for our flank.

  They weren’t leaving an exit.

  Pirates would shout “Surrender!” here. Ransom was the point.

  Disguised cruisers didn’t bother.

  —They came to kill you quietly.

  “…Ugh,” Thomas breathed.

  Ahmad’s voice dropped, calm as a guillotine.

  “Main gun, reload. Torpedoes—ready.”

  “Roger.”

  “Torpedoes? Here?” I blurted.

  “Here,” Genichiro answered instantly. “Rock belt is torpedo territory. Cover everywhere—guidance thrives.”

  “You mean those Ancients field-generator missiles?” I remembered the cylindrical monsters we’d checked before departure—steel coffins that made my skin itch.

  “C++—C-plus-plus—torpedoes,” Genichiro said. “Lightweight casing, but they bank energy with near?lightspeed mass effect. That’s why they’re terrifying.”

  “I hate that the scary one is the one you’re excited about!”

  Deep in Al-Safar’s belly, the reactor climbed toward a charge. Cooling systems began to howl before the heat could pool. The bridge air felt drier, like the ship was sweating through the walls.

  This wasn’t a casual skirmish.

  This was a fight where you pushed the ship to the edge and asked her not to break.

  “Reactor’s flirting with overheat,” Genichiro reported.

  “‘Flirting’—as in, about to explode?” I snapped.

  “We cool it before it goes. If we can’t cool it…” His jaw tightened. “We end it by shooting.”

  “I don’t like the way ‘end it’ has options!”

  The enemy cruisers closed again—so near the external feed could almost pick out seam lines between armor plates.

  They weren’t just reading our position.

  They were predicting—like they’d started mapping our evasion habits.

  That was when Ahmad said, very quietly:

  “Up.”

  Al-Safar jumped “up.”

  Space doesn’t have up or down, but my body swore we’d vaulted. Gravity vanished for a blink. My guts went light.

  Then the whole ship twisted sideways.

  “Ngh—!”

  We slipped out of their firing line.

  Not only that—Al-Safar dove inside the arc, into the moment after their blades had swung through empty space. It was a brawler’s move—getting into the pocket against a larger opponent and punching from too close to answer cleanly.

  “Main gun,” Ahmad ordered. “Fire.”

  His voice was cold.

  And that cold was a gift. It burned the fear out of my hands.

  Genichiro slammed the control.

  The FL Strange Plasma Cannon spat its second shot.

  The beam missed the cruiser’s core, but it erased the escort fighters again—only this time the kill pattern was different. It wasn’t just a sweep.

  It was a deliberate burn that cooked debris into place… sealing off where we’d have fled.

  “…Yeah,” I whispered. “Definitely not pirates.”

  Genichiro’s answer was pure poison. “Told you. Military fights so even dying helps their side.”

  “That’s the worst way to describe it!”

  Al-Safar slid deeper into shadow.

  And from that darkness, she launched a torpedo.

  For an instant, the C++ torpedo looked like nothing more than a metal coffin tumbling into the void.

  Then it thought.

  It tasted the drift of debris. It read gravity distortions like scent. It projected the cruiser’s evasion patterns like a hunter imagining its prey’s panic.

  It wasn’t guidance.

  It was a stalk.

  The torpedo used asteroid cover, rose from a blind angle, and—

  “Ah…” Thomas let out a sound like he didn’t mean to have a voice anymore.

  The cruiser noticed. Thrusters flared—military-grade evasion, fast and clean.

  But the torpedo had already predicted that escape.

  It slammed into the belly.

  The cruiser split open.

  The explosion wasn’t “loud.” It was shaped.

  The hull bulged from the inside, tore open, and fragments blossomed outward—petals of twisted plating and shrapnel. Fuel mist, twisted metal ribs, lines of heat. A flower so ugly it made my stomach turn for a different reason.

  “…Destroyed,” Thomas whispered, shaking.

  But we hadn’t “won.”

  The remaining enemy ship pulled back.

  Pirates would rage and charge.

  Warships fell back to sort the situation—reset the board.

  Thomas grabbed the comm log again and went pale. “They’re… they’re sending a retreat signal. Coordinated retreat.”

  “…So they really aren’t pirates,” Ahmad said.

  Genichiro exhaled. I couldn’t tell if it was relief or frustration.

  “Annoying opponent.”

  “Don’t call that ‘annoying’…” I said, voice thin.

  Genichiro snapped back, almost offended. “Annoying is the worst kind!”

  The enemy withdrew, leaving only debris—more bodies added to the graveyard’s gate.

  For a few seconds, the impact warnings eased. The bridge didn’t feel safe—just less immediately lethal.

  And in my chest, a colder thought remained.

  —Inside Human Federation influence, Grabhul’s proper warships were coming and going wearing pirate masks.

  Which meant this place held something they wanted hidden.

  Something worth killing for.

  Something worth lying about.