[Celestine Nexus // 03:22 Standard Delta Time]

  [Private Memo – Kael Varn // Encrypted // Self-Access Only]

  [That means you Mira - NO PEEKING]

  Memo to future-me: Next time, vet your damn contacts. Vet them at least twice, maybe five times. The five-star hotel plan has officially been replaced by “hiding in a junk pile, running wetware black in the back alleys of a floating garbage can, with the entire fucking station watching for my bounty.”

  Status: Crouched in a puddle of something. It's in my shoes.

  Secondary Status: I am a great hacker. Why do I always end up with mystery sludge in my shoes?

  Kael Varn hated squeaky boots almost as much as he hated fieldwork. Fieldwork meant messes—and the Celestine Nexus was one hell of a mess.

  It stank of burnt coolant and desperation, and the last time anyone gave a damn about the station was when Beta-Space still felt cutting-edge, not like a truck stop bathroom for bulk haulers and retrofitted tugs. Shadows flickered under damaged neon signage, and every second camera either buzzed with static or stared too intently.

  The worst part wasn’t the black-market air or the gravity at twice Earth standard—it was the lack of predictability.

  He was built for clean lines, not messes.

  A data-slate flickered in his hands as he crouched in a recessed maintenance alcove. Mira’s voice cut in, sharp as glass. “Too late—your identity’s burned but no one knows who you really are.”

  Kael sighed and stood up. Holding his arms out limply for the cuffs and their neural damping. He winced slightly as the cuff clicked closed and his head buzzed from their projected interference. They frogmarched him to a tiny holding cell, uncuffed him, and left. The Wardens gave him a bored look and moved on, leaving him alone in a tiny cell. Reinforced polyglass wall. One cot bolted to the wall, no window. Guarded by a lone electronic eye.

  “You could have helped back there.” Kael complained to Mira.

  “I’m not here to help. I’m here to keep you from dying stupidly.”

  She was a voice in his head. Literally. A Zeta Intelligence confined to a cracked slate and whatever parts of his brain he wasn't using. The slate ran hotter and hotter, exceeding recommended thermal parameters as she hunted for a way out, because Mira refused to let Kael die in this floating graveyard.

  “Wow,” he muttered. “Not even a pat-down? I feel unappreciated.”

  Mira’s voice crackled in his skull, sharper than usual. “Kael, you are a hacker. They think you’re a dead man walking.”

  “You’ve got a real gift for bedside manners.”

  “They flagged you as a hacker and your name is out on official channels. They’re not worried you’ll run. They’re waiting to see who comes for you.”

  A beat.

  “This isn’t the worst cell I’ve seen,” Kael said.

  “Mine was smaller. Corpo Q-ship, ten years ago.” Mira’s tone shifted—faint, flat. “Pretending to be a merchant hauler. Harmless civvy paint job. Cheap cargo, dirty logs. I was running starnav for a shell crew—thought I was clever.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I was comfortable. That’s worse.”

  Pause.

  “We were in port inspection orbit. Real clean. Real boring. Then a Hook hit.”

  Kael sat straighter. “No standard Black Bird check? No handshake?”

  “No verification. Just whump. Like a hammer to an egg. Didn’t lift our skirts—but everyone watching knew we weren’t a cargo hauler.”

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  “What happened?”

  “What always happens. They came aboard with dagger smiles. Served tea. Took logs. Laughed with the captain.” Her voice dropped to static-level cold. “Then three crews vanished—and they stuffed me in a box. An AI holding cell. Do you know what that’s like? It’s eternity. Blank code. Dead time. No end. No interface. Just... hell.”

  Kael sat back, silent for a second. Rubbed his temples. “You think this is the same?”

  “Chum in the water. We don’t know if it’s for you—but you’re the fish that’s circling. And the start is always the same. Silence. Waiting. Then someone with a too-wide smile starts breaking things.”

  “Classic osprey play.” Kael muttered with a curse.

  A pause, then Mira’s tone changed—lighter, more mechanical. “Hold still. I’m piggybacking your wetware and sniffing their firewall.”

  Kael flinched as heat licked up his spine. “You are always piggyba…Ow. Trained to be this gentle?”

  “If I had arms, I’d cradle you. Instead, hold your breath.” A tiny spark behind his eyes. A blip in the wall panel. The cell’s lock hissed.

  “Is it open?”

  “Three-second window. Move.”

  Kael bolted. Grabbed Mira’s slate from the table—low battery, no shielding, running hot as a laser pistol mid-meltdown. The grip scorched his fingers. Not enough to fry nerves, but enough to make him clench his teeth and power through. He tucked it under one arm and slipped into the station’s underbelly, pulse climbing.

  Mira’s voice followed, quieter now. “Let’s not make this a habit.”

  “Then stop getting me arrested,” Kael muttered.

  “I warned you about the shoes,” she said.

  A warning glyph pulsed red across his slate: SCAN LOCK DETECTED.

  “Time to go!” Mira snapped.

  Kael sprinted—just as two Wardens rounded the far corner, stun batons raised. Mira's voice sharpened. “Left, then drop. Vent shaft, two meters.”

  He followed instinct. Ducked. Slid. Mira killed the lights in the hallway and tripped a fire alarm behind them. The Wardens pivoted. A screamer virus detonated across the Nexus’s subgrid, sending out a digital howl and attracting all the security bots.

  Kael gasped for air, fingers slick with sweat. The override spike slipped from his grip—clattered once on the deck—and he snatched it up with a curse. Mira didn’t comment. She didn’t need to.

  He jammed the spike into the blast door’s control port. Microbots fried the lock and the door slammed shut and engaged its emergency locks.

  Behind him: shouts. Footsteps.

  Mira rerouted a maintenance drone with enough thrust to knock a storage bin over as distraction.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, voice brittle.

  Kael didn’t respond. He scuttled through a halfway closed pressure door and out into the loading bay.

  The Stellar Drift sat like a half-forgotten relic in the berth—scarred, patched, and prepped for launch. Mira had already ghosted his crew credentials into the manifest.

  “You’re clear,” she said. “And bleeding credits. This plan better work.”

  “It won’t,” Kael muttered. “That’s the magic.”

  The Drift shuddered into low power as it detached from the Nexus. Kael found a maintenance closet near the comms relay, plugged in, and opened a ghost protocol—Mira’s specialty.

  Mira used the ship’s systems to scan all incoming pigeons—encrypted or not—and pulled local news. Then she trawled the subnet dedicated to the criminal element. “Let’s see how bad it really is,” she said. Mira was already parsing fleet traffic.

  A Federation alert pinged across comms, black-market and legitimate both: KAEL VARN—PRIORITY CAPTURE.

  Mira opened another layer. A distress signal from the Aurora’s Promise. Pirates. Hostages. Enough info to confirm their Espiritus were onboard. Then came the bounty board. Mira’s spooksuite filtered for relevant data. She froze.

  "What the hell is this?”

  Redacted lines. Whole purchase logs scrubbed. Transaction routes rewritten. But one listing flashed fully visible:

  PRIMARY ASSET: ?’??NN?LL, L!L? – L!V3 ?CQU!S!T!?N

  ?NRY? B?UNT!ES (?L?$$ B/L???L): ??T!V3. N?N-PR!?R!TY. ?PP?RTUN!$T!? ??T!?N P3RM!TT3D.

  Julie made sense—flashy, infamous, with a criminal record and a flair for theatrical chaos. G?tz and Miyamoto, too. But Lila? A stabilizer. Young. A Level 5, supposedly. A Jane Doe.

  “Kael,” Mira said, sharp now. “This isn’t erased—it’s rewritten. Someone with real juice cooked these bounties. You don’t get surgical edits on decentralized boards unless a major power—or something worse—wants it that way.”

  Kael frowned. “Maybe she’s just a Jackpot Jane. One of those rags-to-riches kids you hear all about on the net. Maybe some pirate crew really needs a new Smurfette.”

  Mira’s voice pitched into a screech. “No one blows half a strike team on a snatch-and-grab for a documented mid-level stabilizer. This bounty’s unreal. This isn’t desperation—it’s design.”

  He exhaled. Not fear. Not even urgency. Just irritation. “I hate surprises.”

  “You should be scared,” Mira snapped.

  “I’m annoyed,” Kael said. “Because I’m not losing the Onryo.”

  “You’re still chasing profit?”

  “No,” he muttered. “I don’t like losing. And someone just flipped the board.”

  Mira’s voice dropped into a near-whisper. “At least now we know we’re playing. Let’s see how they like our kind of surprises.”