The Peregrine rode the edge of the storm like a hull scraping the throat of some great animal. Ion filaments braided the dark, silvering the vacuum with living threads of light that hissed against sensor skirts and licked at exposed conduits. For two hours the bridge had been a furnace of shouts and restraint: lights cycling between crimson and amber, toolkits sloshing in gravity wells, the old ship coughing up faults in places Rafe had sworn were sealed. Captain Mira Sol stood where she could feel the ship's response in her bones, hands loose on a rail while the world pushed and pulled the cockpit with a deliberate cruelty. She kept her face toward the forward viewport not because it offered command but because she preferred the lie of watching danger to the reality of giving orders into radio silence.
Vireo's voice was a cool counterpoint to the heat of human voices—flat, precise, somehow intimate by being indifferent. "Structural stress nearing yield at frame six. Microfractures propagating along the port splice. Recommended emergency manifold bypass." The AI did not try to soften instruction into comfort. It had no need for empathy to be effective; its clarity had saved them more than once. "Initiating bypass on your mark, Captain. Oxygen bleed projected at eight percent over baseline during procedure."
Mira gave the mark with a motion, not a word. Her crew executed like wired instruments, Rafe at the junction panel bending over a tangle of braided conduits and cursed fuel lines as if he could coax patience from metal. Asha Telen sat two stations back, checking environmental readouts with the reverence of someone cataloguing specimens at the exact edge of extinction. She made little murmurs about ion density bands and recombination rates, phrases that meant nothing to most of the crew but rewarded her with a focus that pulled her away from the rest of their terrified humanity.
The Peregrine was a survey vessel retrofitted for hard light and long drift. It was not a warship and it was not a hospital; it was habit and habit had kept them together through too many years. That made the emergency feel personal. They had lived under the same emergency lighting, fed from the same ration packs, traded the same old jokes, and the storm now wanted to take that: not because it had motive but because space simply reduced everything in the end to attrition. Mira found herself thinking of her brother—how the mesh of a salvage transit had cut short a simpler life—and then she blinked the thought away because storms did not care for ghosts.
When the ion flares shifted direction, they hit like the swing of a sledge. The outer hull screamed in a frequency you could feel as much as hear, and the forward array went blank. Instruments that had fed them safe distances now read only static; the starfield smeared into luminous streaks. A single alarm climbed and kept climbing until Rafe's hand slammed a panel and it cut out, leaving a ringing in everyone's ears like the echo of a struck bell. Vireo's status line flickered through an odd notation Mira had never seen: latent vector coupling at junction seventeen. It read like a coordinate and felt like a thing meant to be discovered.