“No,” I say again.
This time, I don’t soften it.
This time, I don’t leave space around it.
Vihl stares at me, and I can see the exact moment he understands that I’m not going to change my mind.
“Then we’re doing this,” he says, quieter now, something shifting in his tone from argument to acceptance. “We’re actually doing this.”
“We are,” I reply.
He nods once, sharp and decisive, the hesitation gone now, replaced by something more familiar.
“Alright,” he says, turning toward the rest of the bridge. “Then we stop pretending this is contained.”
He looks back at me one last time.
“You’re choosing her,” he says.
I don’t hesitate.
“Yes.”
He studies me for a fraction longer, then exhales.
“Then we prepare for war.”
CHAPTER 23
STACY
The first thing I notice isn’t the alert.
It’s the way people stop pretending not to look at me.
That’s how I know something has shifted beyond rumor, beyond internal tension, into something that has weight outside this ship. Conversations don’t stop when I enter a space, not abruptly, not obviously, but they bend, redirect, tighten in a way that tells me I’ve moved from background variable to active problem.
And problems get solved.
I keep my pace steady as I move through the corridor, letting my shoulder brush lightly against the curved wall as I pass, grounding myself in the physical sensation while I track everything else. The air smells faintly sharper today—overcycled, like the filtration systems are compensating for higher activity—and beneath it there’s the metallic tang of charged systems running hotter than usual.
War prep.
They haven’t said it outright yet, not in the open, but the ship already knows.
So do I.
I turn into the lower operations tier instead of the main bridge, because this is where people talk when they think they aren’t being monitored closely. Not careless—never careless—but looser, more human, more likely to let something slip.
Two crew members stand near a secondary console, their voices low, shoulders angled inward, the posture of people trying to contain a conversation that shouldn’t spread.
“—they got our jump pattern from somewhere,” one of them is saying, rubbing a hand across his jaw, tension pulling at the corners of his mouth. “That wasn’t guesswork.”
The other shakes his head, arms crossed tight. “It couldn’t have been external. We haven’t broadcast anything outside closed channels.”
“Then how did they vector that clean?” the first presses, voice dropping further as he leans in. “They came in aligned with our drift. That’s not coincidence.”
I don’t slow.
