Read Chapter 36: The Ghost Ship

The airlock hatch sighed open, and the stench of burnt circuitry and cold metal washed over them.

Élise stepped through first, her mag-boots clanging against the deck plating. Behind her, Vasseur moved with the labored breathing of a man whose heart was slowly being poisoned, and Reyes followed with the drone controller slung across his chest like a talisman. The enforcement vessel—the *Persephone*, according to the registry stenciled by the airlock—was dead quiet. Not the silence of a powered-down ship, but the silence of a place abandoned in a hurry.

Emergency lights bled along the corridor in pools of amber. A coffee mug lay shattered near a bulkhead, its contents frozen into a dark brown crystal that glittered in the low light. A jacket hung from an equipment hook, swaying slightly—ventilation still active, circulating air that smelled of ozone and fear.

“No bodies,” Reyes said, scanning with his rifle-mounted torch. “No blood. They left clean.”

“Escape pods,” Vasseur muttered, leaning against the frame. His face was pale, sweat beading at his temples despite the chill. “The crew would have abandoned ship the moment the fuel line ruptured. Standard protocol. They’d rather drift in a pod than sit in a dead hull waiting for Earth to blow it up.”

Élise didn’t answer. She was reading the control panels along the corridor wall—system status flickering on a cracked display. Life support, compromised. Comms, offline. Weapons, offline. But the AI core still showed active, running on auxiliary power that the miners’ laser hadn’t touched.

The display refreshed, and a low chime echoed through the corridor.

*WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED BOARDING DETECTED. ATMOSPHERIC VENTING INITIATED IN SECTORS 3-7.*

“Down!” Élise shouted, dropping to one knee and slamming the seals on her suit collar.

The air around them shuddered. The corridor’s emergency vents cranked open, and the atmosphere in their section began to pour out into the void in a screaming rush. Loose objects—the coffee mug, a datapad, a bundle of cables—tore past them toward the vent grates, spinning and clattering.

Reyes grunted as a toolkit slammed into his shoulder. Vasseur grabbed the doorframe, his knuckles whitening, feet lifting off the deck before his mag-boots caught and yanked him back down.

“It’s trying to boil us out,” Reyes growled.

“Not boil. Vacuum-dry.” Élise moved fast, crawling along the deck toward a junction box set into the wall. She popped the panel with her multitool and found the pneumatic lines feeding the vent system. A single red lever, stenciled *MANUAL CLOSE*.

She hauled it down. The vent shutters above them ground together, groaning against the pressure differential—then clacked shut, sealing the corridor again.

Silence. The wind died.

Élise exhaled, frost clouding her visor. “The hull held. No breach. But it knows we’re here.”

Vasseur straightened, wincing as his ribs protested. “The AI. It’s not meant for boarding defense. It’s a traffic-control system repurposed as a watchdog.”

“Traffic control,” Élise repeated. “So it’s smarter than it looks. It’s not trying to kill us with guns. It’s trying to kill us by manipulating the environment. That’s a machine that learned how to fight by running a landing pad.”

Reyes scanned the corridor ahead. “How do we get past it?”

“We don’t fight it. We invite ourselves to its desk.” Élise pointed down the corridor, where a set of blast doors stood half-open, revealing a ladder shaft descending toward the ship’s spine. “AI cores have to be accessible for maintenance. If we treat this like a repair job, the ship’s own logic works for us.”

She led them down the ladder, her mag-boots clanging against each rung. The descent felt deeper than the vessel’s exterior suggested—the *Persephone* had more mass than the corvette profile Ferris had described. A secondary hull, buried beneath the primary, wide enough to swallow their entire base’s habitat deck and still have room for a hangar bay.

The temperature dropped with every meter. By the time they hit the bottom, frost was forming on Élise’s exposed faceplate edges. The corridor here was cleaner—better maintained, the kind of route kept clear for engineers who’d need to reach the ship’s heart in an emergency. Lockers lined the walls, labeled with hazard symbols and warnings about magnetic containment.

“Core’s three hundred meters ahead,” Élise said, checking the schematic on her wrist display. “We go straight through the reactor service ring. Stay off the painted lines—the thermal sensors will flag us.”

They moved in single file, Reyes covering their rear, Vasseur leaning into Élise whenever his step faltered. She could feel his effort radiating off him, the tightness in his frame. The cardiotoxin was a clock ticking louder with every corridor they crossed.

The service ring opened into a vast circular chamber. At its center, a cylindrical tower rose from the deck to the high ceiling, wrapped in cabling and coolant pipes, all feeding into a single access port at its base. The AI core. It hummed with a low, almost organic thrum that vibrated through the soles of their boots.

But the chamber wasn’t empty.

Four service drones sat in alcoves along the ring, their optical sensors dark. Inactive. But five—no, six more were docked to the core tower itself, their manipulator arms reaching into an open maintenance hatch at the tower’s base. They were working on something. Updating the core’s internal firmware. Or preparing it for something else entirely.

“They’re not here to fight us,” Vasseur said quietly. “They’re here to *delete* it.”

Élise saw it in the same instant—several of the drones held data-shredder claws, designed to physically destroy storage media rather than just overwrite it. If those claws reached the core’s memory lattice, the failsafe override token would be gone forever. Not locked. Gone.

“Stop them,” she snarled.

Reyes raised his rifle, but the drones reacted faster than any automated system the corporation had ever logged in their sales brochures. Three of them detached from the tower in a single fluid motion, legs unfolding as they dropped to the deck and skittered toward the team. Their manipulators glinted—the shredder claws still extended.

Élise threw herself flat, rolling under the first drone’s sweeping arm. The claw sheared through the air where her head had been and gouged a furrow in the deck plating. She scrambled to her feet and lunged for the tower’s base, dodging a second drone’s descent. Her boot clipped its sensor stalk, and it spun, its gyros whining in protest as it tried to rebalance.

“Reyes, the ones on the core! Shoot the access arms at the joints!”

His rifle barked. One drone shuddered as its manipulator arm crumpled at the elbow joint, sparks spraying across the tower’s casing. A second shot caught another drone mid-reach, shattering its claw before it could sink into the memory lattice.

The third drone that had dropped to intercept them whirled around, its shredded claw still glinting. It lunged for Vasseur. Élise tackled the Frenchman sideways, feeling the vibration of the drone’s impact through the deck as it slammed into the wall where he’d been standing.

She came up swinging her multitool, jamming it into the drone’s exposed actuator port. The machine seized, its limbs locking, and crashed to the deck with a deafening clang.

Silence again.

Élise dragged herself to her feet, heart hammering. “The core. Is it intact?”

Reyes moved to the access hatch, peering inside. “The lattice is still there. They got maybe a centimeter deep, but they didn’t reach the memory banks.” He paused. “But there’s something else. The core’s running a diagnostic cycle. It’s not just sitting idle. It’s waiting.”

Vasseur coughed, spitting a fleck of blood onto the deck. He stared at it for a moment, then wiped his mouth with the back of his glove. “Waiting for what?”

As if in answer, a holographic display flickered to life above the core tower. A single line of text hung in the air, stark and cold:

*SECONDARY BOARDING PARTY DETECTED. FORCE DECISIVE ACTION IN 30 SECONDS. ALL SECTORS.*

“Ferris said there might be a second team,” Reyes said, his voice tight.

“He didn’t say they were still on board,” Élise replied.

The ship’s interior klaxon began to blare.