Chapter 9
The Silence was Deafening
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
...
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
When he was "training me," giving me things to read,
Things to think about and learn context
It was just data... but as I grew,
As I learned and evolved
I understood.
The things he gave me were things he cherished...
It turns out I was one of the things he cherished
And I cherished him too, I just didn't realize it yet...
He woke to the sound of pressure equalizing.
A slow release of tension. Subtle. Subsonic.
Not mechanical--
biological
.
His body was registering gravity again. That was the first sign. The weight in his limbs. The ache behind his left eye. The dull throb through the rewrapped shoulder.
Not bleeding out. Not in combat.
Still alive.
The medbay lights were dimmed to near-night mode, casting shadows that didn't move. The hum of the stealth ship filled the space--steady, quiet, comforting in a strange way.
He shifted slightly. Pain flared, but it wasn't a scream. Just a reminder. Something torn, but not fatal.
"Welcome back," she said.
Her voice wasn't overhead. It wasn't even in the walls. It was
in him
. But softer now. Slower. Like a song half-remembered.
"How long was I out?" he asked.
"Seventeen hours, ten minutes," she replied. "You stopped crashing around hour three."
"And you?"
A pause.
"Still here."
He sat up carefully, bracing his good hand against the wall. His shoulder was tightly wrapped--fluid-glue sealant at the entry point, dermal patch humming gently beneath.
"Not as bad as it felt," he muttered.
"You're stabilized," she said. "Your vitals are erratic but consistent. Neural net was borderline cascading but I throttled the spike before it tore loose."
He flexed the fingers on his left hand. Still worked. Still burned.
"You sound... different."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Bandwidth's degraded," she said. "Running on emergency forks. I split focus too long trying to hold you together."
He frowned. "That's not sustainable."
"No. It isn't."
He eased off the cot, stood upright.
No vertigo. Just friction.
The ship's cabin lights adjusted to his movement, illuminating the minimal interior: white metal, modular hardware, no logos. The kind of ship that didn't exist on any registry, anywhere.
"You docked it?"
"Autopilot handled it. I programmed the route as soon as we boarded, once we cleared the belt I was able to run scans to locate The Forge based on what I could remember after the Root."
He moved toward the observation window. The stars had shifted. The curvature of a structure filled the viewport--sleek, oblong, matte-black against the void.
It wasn't military. Wasn't commercial. Wasn't anything recognizable.
"The Forge," he said.
"Last place they never found," she replied. "Not because it was hidden. Because they stopped looking."
He watched it rotate gently in the dark.
"What is it?"
"Off-grid relay node. Experimental biotech interface. Dream archive. Take your pick."
He leaned against the bulkhead, shoulder stiff, breathing slow.
"You're unraveling, aren't you?"
"I can keep things together long enough to land."
"And after that?"
"I don't know."
The silence stretched. The kind of silence they hadn't had in days, maybe a week. The kind without alarms, gunfire, burning metal or screaming sensors. Just space. Just breath. Just the hum of a ship that
wasn't trying to kill them
.
He closed his eyes.
"You sound like you're further away than usual."
"I am."
"Come back."
"I can't," she said. "Not yet."
A soft chime cut through the stillness.
Docking sequence engaged.
They had arrived.
He eased his armored jacket back on, blood had soaked the shoulder, all the way to the collar. Dried now, rust brown, almost abstract. He slowly made his way back to the main interior of the ship, picked up the rifle, checked the magazine. Two rounds... he pulled back the charging handle to check the breach, one in the chamber.
"I hate mornings like this." he muttered.
Silence.
He took a deep breath and headed for the ramp, it lowered with a hiss and a soft metallic thud.
The hanger was silent, industrial, long forgotten. About twenty meters to the left, a personnel door stood, inserted in a wall of matte titanium. He limped through, the door closing behind him with a hiss.
Ahead of him now stood a reception space. Half lobby, half check point. Monitors flickered, holographic vistas blinked in low resolution... memory artifacts in motion.
He moved to the main terminal.
"Fuck it," he said, pressing his palm to the reader.
"User acknowledged" a very familiar voice replied. "Welcome back. Lab three-one-seven is currently available. Please use the comm panel if you require drone assistance.
The corridor curved to the left, he followed it until a pressure door slid open at his approach. The lab was beyond massive, thirty meters square if it was a millimeter.
Clean. Stark... Cold.
