Her hands pause for the smallest fraction before she forces them back into motion.
The signal pulses ahead of us, still bright, still close, still sitting there like a cruel little promise while death wears armor behind us. Roma sees it too. I know she does because her gaze keeps snapping toward it between damage reports.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I did not say anything.”
“You looked at the signal.”
“I am aware of its position.”
“You’re thinking we can still make it.”
Her jaw tightens. “If I can draw them through the debris field and break their lock, we may reach the outer edge of the convergence zone.”
“And if they clip us again?”
“I am working on preventing that.”
The Reaper vessel fires a narrow burst that slices past our starboard side and detonates against a drifting hull fragment ahead. The explosion blooms across the viewport in a violent sheet of light, and debris scatters into our path like shrapnel from a giant’s fist.
Roma reacts instantly. She cuts thrust, angles our nose down, and drags us through a gap that barely exists. Fragments hammer across the shields, each impact kicking flashes of light across the cockpit. The deck bucks under us, and the damaged airlock warning screams again from somewhere aft.
“Roma,” I say, gripping the console as smoke curls from a ruptured panel near my knee. “They’re not herding us away from the signal.”
She looks at the tactical display, and the realization moves across her face like cold water.
“They are herding us into a capture vector.”
The next blast confirms it.
It hits beneath us, not to destroy, but to lift. The ship jolts upward into a distorted pocket where maneuvering thrusters fight against gravitational drag and lose. Roma slams three commands in sequence, rerouting power from life-support redundancy into stabilizers.
The ship steadies for half a breath.
Then the Reaper vessel launches something.
Not a missile. Not a shot.
A cluster of black, angular devices streaks toward us, each one burning with a tight blue corona. They fan out, curve around a field of debris, and attach to our hull with a series of heavy impacts that echo through the ship like fists on a coffin lid.
“What the hell was that?” I ask.
“Magnetic grapples,” Roma says. “No, something more advanced. They are interfacing with the hull.”
“Can you cut them loose?”
“I am trying.”
Her fingers blur across the console. Systems lock and unlock under her hands, the displays shifting so fast I can barely follow them. She isolates the contact points, reverses polarity, vents charge through the outer plating, and for a second the attached devices flicker.
Then the Reaper ship sends a pulse through them.
Every screen in the cockpit flashes white.
Roma cries out as the control column shocks under her hands. She jerks back, and I move before thinking, catching her shoulders as the ship drops hard beneath us. The main display fractures into static, then rebuilds itself in ragged chunks.
“Roma.”
