"AGSS injection, Soup loaded. Deep-space beacon X1 locked. Five-second countdown—3, 2, 1. HAYABUSA, WARP-12, jump."
A light jolt—acceleration, then a hard stop. Li Pan opened his eyes.
"Arrived at beacon. Autopilot disengaged. Safety restraints released. Engineering crew, prepare for EVA."
Fresh oxygen flushed into his helmet; his head cleared. He waited while the gel lines unplugged from his suit one by one, popped the harness, and crawled out of the seat. On the forearm console he flipped his SBS to on-ship EVA mode; the suit automatically re-tuned pressure, gravity bias, and mag-lock.
A moment ago his iron boots were clanging, glued to the deck; now he felt light. A little tiptoe and he floated across the bay—finally, that low-G feel.
Wangshan: "Test, test—hey boss, you sure you wanna go out? Let us handle the EVA."
Broomhead: "Engineering net live. Keep the channel clean, no clipping."
Li Pan ignored them. He strapped on the yellow-striped engineering exo and popped the hatch—then stared into the stars.
Stars, my ass. Pitch black. God knows where they'd jumped.
The X1 beacon wasn't the cargo point—it was a 20-kilometer acceleration rail. Like a mass-driver barrel: it would sling their ship up to a velocity where you could jump at will. Then Nana could burn spice and pilot the hop to the cargo coordinates.
Normally, rails like this are in the traffic database, pointing to registered stations or bodies—activated and flown by system UI.
But X1 was the Queen's private job—illegal, rented to pirates, runners, and mercs. A hidden route, unlogged.
If your identity can't touch the public grid—or you don't want anyone tracking you—you pay a local snakehead for a rail like this.
Of course, nobody maintains outlaw rails. Most of the time they're folded up; you manually punch in vectors, and before firing you do a basic checks pass to keep the launch error from yeeting your ship into nowhere. Anything broken? You fix it on your dime. No reimbursements.
And sure, you could do this with drones. But the market's on fire; LEO-PORT is out of stock on engineering drones, Orange's batch is weeks out, and you'd still have to flash pirate firmware. No time.
"Can supply really not keep up for drones?" people ask.
Supply exists. Lift doesn't.
Last month's corporate rampage knocked out tens of thousands of Takama-Ga-Hara freighters.
LEO-PORT has no factories—just a jammed ring. There's cargo, no ships. Warehouses and fab yards are choking on backlogged pallets.
Sure, the market adjusts. But in free trade, new hulls go to the highest bidders—big corps. Civil grade gear? Wait for the grid to unclog.
In the end, the cheapest, most reliable resource is still people.
Li Pan spun up a team channel with the four-man engineering squad. They bolted yellow mech-arms onto their SBS like big crabs, clipped to slim EVA boards, and pushed off toward the rail twenty, thirty kilometers out.
Side note: with fresh payslips in hand, Wangshan had sweet-talked more Cerberus vets aboard. Panlong Construction's security stood at eight squads, thirty-two men: half planetside guarding depots and seabed salvage, half crewing the ship.
They aren't academy-trained officers and lack the fancy brain-implants—but they've lived in foxholes and berths for years. When drops go hot, the "gentlefolk" remote in—one EMP and comms die—so the grunts fly and fix their own boats. Backing up Nana on the cruiser? No problem.
Three teams stayed aboard; one heavy EVA team followed Li Pan to service the rail.
Li Pan drifted to the control pylon, punched in the Queen's key, unlocked ops, and linked the controller.
"PONY, you're up."
Yeah—PONY-18 had come along, buckled into the fire-control couch.
PONY-18: "Got it, boss. Server linked. No malware. Passing nav control."
Nana: "Coords fed. Manual rail alignment… correcting error… Vector's good. Fifty milligrams of spice should do."
The engineering team took the parameters, hand-tuned the alignment modules, and dry-cycled the rail.
If the accelerator checked out, they could hop back aboard and jump the crate.
PONY: "Boss, your heart rate is spiking. Deep-space jitters? Maybe head back in?"
"I'm fine. Bump error margins up fifteen points."
Same old problem—the VR pod yank had left him with an enclosed-space trigger. In deep space it presented as arrhythmia, adrenaline misfires; in bad cases, seizures. The SBS watches vitals in vacuum: if your metrics scream danger, it barks.
Li Pan wasn't that bad—nowhere near "paralyzed and soiled." He was just… afraid.
Afraid of the dark, of the void, of being alone out here.
Maybe fear of the dark is fear of solitude. Maybe. Every time he pictured himself as a tiny speck in infinite black, terror gnawed at him.
But now he had Wangshan squawking in channel, Nana and Eighteen on the link—
He wasn't alone.
PONY: "Boss, inbound jump!"
"Huh?" Li Pan snapped alert. "What is it?"
On his HUD, PONY painted a glowing arc—an incoming jump vector.
"Unknown ship inbound to the rail. Pirates, maybe. Or undercover cops."
Li Pan frowned. X1 was supposed to be secret—only the Queen's regulars had it. And polite users pinged the owner before use.
She knew he'd booked this lane; she had others. She shouldn't double-book.
Security? Another company? Random pirates? Or did the Queen sell him out?
Whoever it was—legit traffic wouldn't drop to dead vacuum like this.
"How long for the fix?"
Wangshan: "Fifteen minutes. One module needs a rebuild."
"Navigator?"
Nana: "Don't sit here like a bull's-eye. HAYABUSA will micro-jump and cloak."
Li Pan checked his SBS—eight hours EVA time left—then nodded.
"Ship's conn to Nana. Weapons to PONY."
PONY-18: "Roger. We only have civilian PTP railguns and a mining beam."
"We'll make do…"
The plan had been: grab cargo, dump this dirty boat. In the rush, LEO-PORT had nothing in stock; there was no time to weaponize.
So—mining beam to crack rocks. Short range, slow cycle, dumb as a brick. Military deflectors shrug it off.
PTP P2P defense—tracking exists, but range and punch are garbage. Good for space junk. Against people? Might as well ram.
…Was his fortune really this cursed? A 2.3-billion-credit ship and pirates on day one?
HAYABUSA spat a pale arc of plasma and blinked away.
In his ear, Wangshan yammered:
"Boss, if they hail you, do not answer."
"Don't answer?"
"Cloaked scouts can hide. We can't. This rail ain't worth nuking, and if they want to use it too, they won't risk sweeping it with a coilgun.
But if we open comms, they can lob a couple dolls at us, hack our life-loop, and cut our O2. Ten minutes and we're corpses."
…Right. The vets had a point. Li Pan hadn't even considered it.
In modern space war, fire isn't the only danger—hackers and homunculi kill you just as dead.
With HAYABUSA cloaked, they couldn't transmit anyway. Without PONY-18's firewall, five hardcases in vacuum were just meat on a board if a worm got in.
They swapped to light codes, killed comms, and tucked themselves under the rail's solar wings, clamping on with grapples.
The unknown ship dropped out and immediately pinged life on the rail.
Far off, a blue exhaust line traced its PPE orbit—one hundred klicks out—circling X1 and broadcasting hails.
No one answered.
It didn't rage and spray fire. Instead, it spat two big, one small bright points, streaking in like meteors.
Wangshan flashed a few hand signs. Li Pan nodded.
Two shuttles. One mid-size SMS or drone.
If it carries two shuttles, it's a cruiser—and with SMS on board, either military or a pirate conversion.
The vets moved fast—shedding heavy exo modules, keeping just SBS, a coil rifle, and one hour of solid-oxygen pack.
A brick-sized power-O2 block: plugs into the SBS, recharges kit or electrolyzes O2, and doubles as demo or solid propellant. One brick, one hour. The rest stayed on the exo frame for hot-swap.
So—void pit-fight it was.
Li Pan did the same—ditched the exo, clipped the packs to the rail, took his rifle, and hopped into the truss shadows.
He'd done simulator runs in school, but this was his first zero-G gunfight. He had four vets—but still, nerves.
Groundside, a superhuman punch ended most fights before they began. Out here, one hard kick and you'd pinball off into the abyss.
Armor was different too. On the ground he could eat bursts with his face. In space, a torn suit meant leak; maybe you patch it, but if a round hits your power or O2 brick—boom. How long can you hold your breath?
He stayed near the heavy gear, and he moved slow: military drills had been in a mortal body, in safety. Now he was overly cautious.
Not wanting to embarrass himself, he waved the vets ahead and tweaked SBS parameters—
—and when he looked up, Wangshan's four had already split into pairs, leapfrogging toward each end of the rail, grapples flicking, carving Z-paths—nimble as fleas on scrap. How long had they lived in vacuum?
Damn.
He himself couldn't flea-hop. The exo let you tune mechanical force; he, if he pushed, would pry the rail apart. He hugged the spine and inched, a larva learning to slither—until core and hips found a rhythm and he graduated from grub-crawl to serpent glide, sliding toward the head of the launcher.
The incoming lights braked. The mid-size unit held a 30-km circle; the two shuttles took station over the rail ends and popped their ramps—
—and Wangshan's pairs opened fire.
Li Pan almost missed it; then he saw the four "fleas" bloom into motion—criss-cross leap patterns, no rhythm at all, rifles flashing silver threads.
Silent. He watched a breath, then realized: they hadn't waited for orders. They'd started the party.
The hell? No callout, just go?
And they were disgusting shots. The shuttles barely stabilized; the moment the ramps cracked, the men inside were scythed by intersecting bursts—
Who parks in front of Cerberus and opens a door?
The mid-size unit was a Type-30 SMS. One glance at the carnage and it panicked, dumping speed to turn and run.
But thirty klicks was too close. One flea stopped, stabilized, and snapped a few long shots. The SMS lurched, veered on a straight, and drifted past the rail—then tumbled off into the dark like a meteor.
…Li Pan hadn't even crawled five hundred meters and it was over?
Speechless, he kept crawling—finally rolled onto the rail's face. One shuttle and about twenty suits tumbled like trash.
He snagged a body. Clean center punch—a face-shot through the visor, coil round turning skull to pulp. Pearls of red gel drifted, sticking in amber constellations across the suit.
No strays. All headshots. A gallery shoot. To be fair, the targets were armed and armored—this wasn't a meet-and-greet.
The shuttle steadied its tumble, thrusters trimming. Through the canopy, Wangshan waved.
Li Pan dove into the cockpit.
Pilots: double-tapped. Internal cams: shot out. Console: intact. Ship: flyable.
Ridiculous.
Wangshan flicked switches, yanked a handset, tossed it to Li Pan, and made a quacking hand sign.
Li Pan pressed it to his visor. A man was screaming on the open band:
"Sam! Jack! Respond! What happened? Report!"
"Yo—which one's Sam? Yellow hair or green?"
"…Yellow—no, who are you?"
"Oh—then your Sam's head popped. Like a rotten melon. Other melon too."
"Who the hell are you!?"
"Hang on, what was that phrase…"
He glanced at Wangshan, who was meantime opening the comm gate and blasting an open invite. Then Li Pan said,
"I'm your dad."
"You—! FIRE! Open fire! Target the shuttle!"
PONY joined the call.
Li Pan: "Hey, kid—your dad's offering mercy. Stand down, hand over your keys, disarm, and maybe you live."
"FIRE! Blow them to—"
Li Pan: "Run his plate."
PONY-18: "Roger."
"Who's that? Who—"
Mute. Net cut.
PONY-18: "Oil-Saw-class cruiser. War-era industrial hull converted to 'warship.' De-commissioned fifty years at least. No ICE. They just dragged it out of a junkyard. I've killed main bus and engines.
Registry: Kalmar Interstellar Industrial Co. Line of business: salvage. With the freight crunch, they tried smuggling. Cargo hold is stuffed."
"Great. Then it's our cargo now."
Li Pan pushed the intel to the team.
"This shuttle flies. Wangshan and I will board and take the hull. Engineering, keep working—get the rail online."
Wangshan eyed him.
"You up for this? First real fight, yeah? Don't slow me down."
Li Pan shrugged; in the service, rookies had no rights.
"Time to learn. I'll take point and soak rounds."
"Hmph. Smugglers. Moving targets."
He didn't press it. They burned the shuttle toward the Oil-Saw, latched, and went in to take the ship.
.
.
.
⚠️ 30 CHAPTERS AHEAD — I'm Not a Cyberpsycho ⚠️
The system says: Kill.Mercs obey. Corporates obey. Monsters obey.One man didn't.
🧠💀 "I'm not a cyberpsycho. I just think... differently."
💥 High-voltage cyberpunk. Urban warfare. AI paranoia.Read 30 chapters ahead, only on Patreon.
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