Chapter 237

Alexander followed Carmen up the boarding tube and onto the Sleipnir.

Augustus, Annie, and Talia filed in behind him. The airlock cycled and sealed, the familiar hiss of pressure equalization filling the silence.

Ryan waited in the receiving area. He straightened as they entered. “Captain.” A crisp salute. “Mr. Rooke.” A nod to the others.

Carmen returned the salute. “Status?”

“Cold-start completed twenty minutes ago. Chief’s finishing the last round of diagnostics, but everything so far is green. Crew’s at stations.”

“Good.” Carmen glanced at the group. “Let’s head to the bridge.”

She and Ryan headed further into the ship, already talking in low voices, and the others followed. Alexander watched them go, then let his awareness expand.

His powers spread throughout the ship. Technopathy traced data pathways and control systems. Metallokinesis felt the structural framework, the hull plating, every rivet and weld. Electrokinesis followed power conduits from the reactor outward. Animachina wove through it all, searching.

The Sleipnir responded to his presence immediately. Systems adjusted. Lighting shifted to his preferences. The reactor output smoothed as if the ship was settling into a more comfortable state.

But that was all it was. Responsiveness. Obedience. The ship bent to his Will the way every machine did, eager to serve. There was no spark behind it. No awareness looking back at him. No sense of a presence stirring beneath the systems.

Not like Droney.

He sighed. Maybe Sleipnir was never going to awaken. Whether that was because he’d done something wrong, or a ship was simply too large, or the process required something he didn’t understand yet, there was no way to know.

He pulled his awareness back and headed for the bridge.

Carmen was already in the captain’s chair when he arrived. Ryan stood at her shoulder. The crew worked at their stations with the quiet efficiency he’d come to expect of them, despite their love of casual barbs and snarky retorts directed at each other.

He needed to find time to sit down and discuss their powers with them. Maybe on the return trip.

Carmen turned to face him. “We’re ready to depart, Alex.”

Alexander pushed the coordinates from Droney to the nav console.

“That’s where we’re going.”

Vikram pulled it up. The holo above the main viewscreen flickered to life, displaying the Sol system in miniature. The image zoomed, sweeping past Mars, past the asteroid belt, and settled on Jupiter. A single marker pulsed on one of the gas giant’s smaller moons.

“Santiago’s primary serum production facility,” Alexander said. “Built into the moon itself. ONI provided the coordinates.”

Yuki glanced over. “Why we headed there, boss? Do we need more serum?”

“We’re hunting Gabriel Santiago.”

The bridge fell quiet. He sensed the spike in heart rates caused by the momentary shock. Then Davis laughed, and the tension broke.

Alexander looked up at the display. “So, how do we get there? Can we jump directly to the station from here?”

Vikram shook his head. “No, Mr. Rooke. We’re too far into the solar system, and Sol’s gravitational interference would almost certainly cause us to end up inside Jupiter.” He hesitated. “Which would be very bad in case you were wondering.”

Alexander looked around the bridge. “So how do we get there without being spotted?”

Petra spoke first. “Running dark. Kill the transponder, minimal power output, coast on momentum. Passive sensors only. We’ve done it before.”

Davis shook his head. “Won’t work. Not at this range and not with a facility like this. We’d still be a kinetic mass on a non-standard trajectory. Any half-decent sensor suite will flag an unidentified object on approach and track it. Doesn’t matter how quiet we are. If it’s heading toward the station, they’ll look harder.”

Annie gasped. “Augustus can cast an invisibility spell on the ship!”

Augustus stroked his beard. “That would be an excellent solution.” He paused. “If I had an invisibility spell.”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Annie deflated. “Lame.”

Ryan crossed his arms. “What if we perform a gravity dive into Jupiter’s well?”

Carmen glanced at him. “Go on.”

“We jump out of Sol. Short hop, nothing fancy. Then we jump back in on the far side of Jupiter.” He stepped forward and pointed at the holo, tracing a line. “Jumping into a gravity well still carries risks, but it’s much safer than jumping while deep inside one. We’d need to drop out further from the planet than ideal, but if we plot it right, Jupiter itself sits between us and the station. They never see us arrive.”

Vikram was already running numbers. “It’s doable, Captain. The margin for error is tight, but with my recent enhancements...” He shrugged. “I’m confident I can manage it.”

Carmen nodded slowly. “That gets us to Jupiter. Then what?”

Talia answered. “The station is on one of its moons. We’d still need to close the distance from wherever we emerge to the target. Same problem, smaller scope.”

Silence settled over the bridge. Heads turned. Glances exchanged.

“Running dark is still the only real option for the approach,” Petra said. “Once we’re in the Jovian system, there’s enough orbital clutter to mask a random object floating around.”

Davis wasn’t convinced. “Some. Not enough. We’re still a ship-sized mass on a predictable heading.”

Alexander used his other mental thread to have Droney search for ‘Jovian System.’ He blinked as the results streamed into his mind. Jupiter, along with its rings and moons, apparently had a special name.

“That’s only a problem if they see a ship,” Alexander said.

Everyone looked at him. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

“The area is full of asteroids, right?” He met Carmen’s gaze. “What if we weren’t a ship? What if we were just another rock?”

Davis frowned. “How?”

“We find a metal-rich asteroid, and I use Metallokinesis to push it. Sleipnir tucks in behind it, engines cold, matching its trajectory.” He shrugged. “Their sensors see a rock. We ride it in until we’re close enough that it doesn’t matter.”

Annie grinned. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. I love it.”

Carmen looked at Vikram. “Can you find a suitable candidate? Right composition, right trajectory?”

Vikram’s fingers were already moving. “Give me ten minutes, Captain.”

Carmen turned back to Alexander. “And are you sure you can push an asteroid? You almost passed out last time, and that was just the Sleipnir.”

Alexander shrugged. “I’m a lot more powerful now, but there’s only one way to find out.” He leaned closer to Vikram and pitched his voice lower. “Hey Vik, do me a favor and find a small one, yeah?”

Carmen sat back in her chair. “Then we have a plan.” She looked at Yuki. “Plot a departure course. Something boring. Make it look like we’re heading for the gateway network.”

“Aye, Captain,” Yuki said.

***

Alexander sat in the workshop, the OACS standing upright in its gantry across from him.

Five hundred pounds of military-grade metal, sealed joints, and engineering designed to keep a person alive in the most hostile of environments. He’d been staring at it for the past ten minutes.

He picked up a hand scanner from the workbench and stood. The device hummed as he ran it along the suit’s left arm, checking the hermetic seals at the wrist where the gauntlet met the forearm plating. Perfect. He moved to the elbow, where overlapping scales allowed the joint to flex. Perfect again.

Simultaneously, he pulsed Metallokinesis into the metal itself. Listening. Feeling the grain of the alloy, the density of each plate, the way the layers bonded at the molecular level. Searching for hairline fractures, stress points, manufacturing defects. Anything that might fail when failure meant meeting vacuum.

Nothing. The craftsmanship was flawless. Whoever had built this suit was meticulous in their efforts. Or maybe it was the quality assurance team that was responsible.

He worked his way across the torso, the shoulders, down the right arm. Scanner in one hand, Metallokinesis probing with the other. Each seal checked twice. Each plate mapped against its neighbors. The overlapping scales at the neck received extra attention. That was where the helmet locked into the gorget. If that seal failed, everything else was irrelevant.

Perfect. All of it. Which meant he’d run out of reasons to avoid what came next.

Alexander set the scanner down and stared at the featureless helmet. The single inch-wide visor band stared back at him like a slit eye.

He still hadn’t turned it on.

He reached out with Technopathy and touched the suit’s operating system.

It woke up instantly. Not the slow boot sequence of standard military hardware. The OACS came alive the way every machine did in his presence, systems snapping to attention, diagnostics running themselves without being asked. Status screens populated across his awareness. Internal atmosphere controls. Thruster alignment. Power distribution. Weapons integration ports. Communications arrays. A heads-up display waiting for a face to project onto.

And beneath all of it, the pull.

The suit worshipped him. He could feel it, the same eager obedience that every machine offered, but concentrated into something far more intense. Not because the suit was doing anything different, but because he felt it through the lens of what it would feel like wrapped around his body. It didn’t just want to serve. It wanted to protect. To carry him. To become an extension of his will in the most literal sense possible.

He hadn’t even put it on yet, and the weight of its attention was almost uncomfortable.

Alexander withdrew from the connection and sat back down on the workbench stool.

He thought about Droney. About the little drone that had started as a tool and become something else entirely. Something with a spark behind its systems. A presence that looked back at him with more than just obedience and servility. It was becoming a being in its own right, slowly perhaps, but beyond any shadow of a doubt.

He’d felt hints of Droney’s humor. Seen it take actions he didn’t order or ask or even subconsciously direct it to.

The OACS didn’t have that. It had worship without awareness. Devotion without understanding. Just a singular purpose which was to do whatever he commanded. And the thought of climbing inside it, sealing himself in, letting that blind adoration press against his senses from every direction, made his jaw tighten.

But Santiago wasn’t going to wait while he sorted out his feelings about being a god inside the machine.

He stood, reached for the helmet, and began figuring out how to put the damn thing on.

There was no way he was going to try it for the first time while Annie was watching.

He’d never live it down.