"I need to know what he is," Val said, her voice tight. The mess hall was quiet, save for the hum of the ship's reactor. "The telemetry from the last fight... that wasn't programming. Algorithms don't hesitate. They don't protect."

  "It's a mech, Val," Zero said, nursing a bulb of synthetic whiskey. "It's hardware."

  "My father worked on the Ghost Protocol," Val countered, staring at the **Ghost-Cast** of the Titan's core. "He told me about the theory. Mapping a human consciousness to a neural network. If that thing has a human consciousness, it's not a weapon. It's a prisoner."

  Zero looked at Cas. The hacker was curled up in her chair, hugging a plushie, her face pale.

  "You're right," Cas whispered, her usual manic energy gone. "I cracked the encryption. His name is Orion. He was seven years old when they... uploaded him. A 'Gent' child, probably. Sold by his parents to cover a Tier-3 debt. They stripped his body for parts and put his mind in the jar."

  Val sank into her chair, the color draining from her face. "We have to get him out."

  "We can't," Cas said, shaking her head. "He *is* the core. His connectome is mapped to the fusion core's lattice. If we try to extract him, the data degrades. He dies."

  "So we keep him," Zero said, his voice hard. "We don't sell him to Silas. We don't return him to Cognis. We become pirates."

  "Piracy implies we have a choice," Jax rumbled from the corner, cleaning his bayonet. "We're already fugitives."

  Suddenly, the ship's proximity alarm screamed. Red light washed over the mess hall.

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  "Contacts!" Val yelled, sprinting for the cockpit. "Multiple signatures. Corporate Blockade class."

  Zero followed her, sliding into the co-pilot seat. The **Viewport** showed a wall of steel—three Cognis cruisers and a swarm of interceptors blocking their vector.

  A hail opened. Silas's face appeared on the HUD, calm, collected, and terrifyingly polite.

  "Zero," Silas said. "You're off course. Bring the prototype to the designated coordinates. I have a team ready to strip it down for analysis."

  "Analysis?" Zero spat. "You mean dissection."

  "It's a machine, Zero," Silas said, adjusting his cuff. "Don't anthropomorphize the inventory. Surrender the Asset, and I'll wipe your debt. I'll even upgrade you all to **Gold Status**. Private islands on the terraformed belt. Diplomatic immunity. The kind of life where you watch the wars on a screen, not from a trench."

  "No," Zero said. "The Asset has a name. And he's not for sale."

  Silas sighed, looking disappointed. "Then I'm afraid the audit is over. All units... liquidate the debt."

  The cruisers' **emitter arrays** glowed blue.

  "Val," Zero said, looking at the pilot. "Can you fly through that?"

  Val’s hands danced over the controls, her eyes locked on the wall of death ahead. A grim smile touched her lips.

  "I can fly through hell," she said. "Hold on."