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The stars were wrong. Red knew it the second his claws tore through the emergency seals and out into the cold. The constellations didn't match any chart, Whisp was nothing but garbled static in his ears, and the ship…the damn ship was a tomb.

He'd been the Sprawl's best jockey, jacking his mind into rust-bucket freighters for suicide runs no sane pilot would touch. Whisp, old as the orbitals themselves, had been his partner. Ghost in the machine, they called her, but she'd always been his lifeline. Now, there was only the gnawing certainty in his gut – this was it. They'd reached too far, delved too deep.

His orange eyes, augmented to see beyond the human spectrum, caught a flicker of something out in the black. Not a rescue beacon, no. Something huge, misshapen, a geometry that turned his brain inside out. He should have panicked, should have been screaming his lungs thin in the chilled air of his failing spacesuit, but that part of him seemed to have died back on the ship.

He remembered the mission brief: find an experimental drive unit, lost decades ago in some forgotten corporate war. Pay had been astronomical, enough to disappear into the Sprawl's underbelly forever. The suit's sensors beeped feebly, telling him what he already knew: the radiation would cook him long before starvation did.

His white fur rippled, no wind to stir it in the vacuum. Why? He still had that one shard of broken thought. Why go on, when everything was lost? He wasn't built for this, not for true fear, not for true despair. He was a street-hardened jockey, a data cowboy who ran from his ghosts, not toward them.

Then, the faintest of whispers echoed in his skull. Not ship systems, not random code. It sounded like Whisp, but fractured, barely intelligible over the static. He focused, strained…

"…remember…"

A name flickered in his mind. A girl with cybernetic eyes and a laugh like cut glass. A dive bar under neon signs, the smell of cheap synth-booze and worn chrome. That's why.

Red wasn't built for dying alone in the void. He turned, claws digging into the ship's hull, pulling himself toward that monstrous shape in the distance. Dying maybe, but not alone, and not without one last, desperate pull on the ripcord.

Description

The stars were wrong. Red knew it the second his claws tore through the emergency seals and out into the cold. The constellations didn't match any chart, Whisp was nothing but garbled static in his ears, and the ship…the damn ship was a tomb.

He'd been the Sprawl's best jockey, jacking his mind into rust-bucket freighters for suicide runs no sane pilot would touch. Whisp, old as the orbitals themselves, had been his partner. Ghost in the machine, they called her, but she'd always been his lifeline. Now, there was only the gnawing certainty in his gut – this was it. They'd reached too far, delved too deep.

His orange eyes, augmented to see beyond the human spectrum, caught a flicker of something out in the black. Not a rescue beacon, no. Something huge, misshapen, a geometry that turned his brain inside out. He should have panicked, should have been screaming his lungs thin in the chilled air of his failing spacesuit, but that part of him seemed to have died back on the ship.

He remembered the mission brief: find an experimental drive unit, lost decades ago in some forgotten corporate war. Pay had been astronomical, enough to disappear into the Sprawl's underbelly forever. The suit's sensors beeped feebly, telling him what he already knew: the radiation would cook him long before starvation did.

His white fur rippled, no wind to stir it in the vacuum. Why? He still had that one shard of broken thought. Why go on, when everything was lost? He wasn't built for this, not for true fear, not for true despair. He was a street-hardened jockey, a data cowboy who ran from his ghosts, not toward them.

Then, the faintest of whispers echoed in his skull. Not ship systems, not random code. It sounded like Whisp, but fractured, barely intelligible over the static. He focused, strained…

"…remember…"

A name flickered in his mind. A girl with cybernetic eyes and a laugh like cut glass. A dive bar under neon signs, the smell of cheap synth-booze and worn chrome. That's why.

Red wasn't built for dying alone in the void. He turned, claws digging into the ship's hull, pulling himself toward that monstrous shape in the distance. Dying maybe, but not alone, and not without one last, desperate pull on the ripcord.