The breach came like a held breath finally let go.
Alarms that had been dormant since they boarded the ship screamed to life—high, metallic, and precise. The platform lurched as explosive charges detonated along the outer hull. Panels sheered open like wounds, and cold, recycled air blasted into the chamber, smelling of burnt copper and ozone. Vector swore, a single, raw sound swallowed by the chaos.
Maya felt the Archive recoil as if stung. The visions that had braided through her skull a moment before frayed and snapped; Lysa's voice dimmed to a thread. For the first time since the integration, the sound of someone else's hands on the world felt painfully immediate.
"Boarders," Rei rasped. Blood crusted his lip where he'd bitten it while speaking. He reached blindly for a weapon that Vector knocked away with a curse—Vector's steadiness a hard, human anchor. "Multiple sigs. Military-grade—old architecture signatures."
Vector's jaw hard as flint. "Architects," he said, and there was no disbelief in the word. Only hate.
Through the hole in the hull, dark shapes slid: armored silhouettes, their suits inscribed with the same staccato glyphs that had danced across the ship's walls. They moved like ghosts—silent, disciplined. Behind them, a darker thing descended: a carrier-class boarding frame, bristling with modular arms and glassed lenses that blinked as if tasting the air. Echo drones stiffened at the sight, their lenses narrowing.
"Lockdown," the ship intoned, mounting a wall of sound and static that did not so much protect as observe. The Archive hummed through Maya's bones, a low tide of potential. She tried to pull back from it, to shrink down into the small, stubborn girl who had stitched together a life out of broken promises and day jobs on the edge of the city. But each withdrawal felt like tearing away a limb.
Vector spun, eyes blazing. "Maya—use what you have. Make them bleed." There was desperate command there, a raw edge that cut through fear. "If the Architects get the Archive whole, they'll—" His voice broke but the threat remained: the war would resume with them all as collateral.
Maya watched the invaders plant a banner—an emblem she had seen in nightmares and ancient files—on the main conduit. It unfurled with the slow arrogance of someone used to winning. The ship answered with a soft, curious trill; the drones quieted. Something in the architecture recognized the sigil, and recognition is a dangerous thing when it comes from stored minds.
Rei pushed himself to his feet, hands slick against the platform rail. "We can't let them connect. If they anchor, if they get even a node—"
"They'll pull the Archive into their net," Vector finished. His hand trembled around the grip of his sidearm. "They'll turn everything we fought for into a weapon."
Maya's fingers tightened on the rifle. The weapon didn't feel like a foreign thing any longer; its weight threaded into her bones. She could sever the invaders' link with a pulse, fry their suits from the inside, call the drones to tear them apart while leaving her friends unscathed. She could do that. She had the code now—the language of the craft humming at the edge of her tongue.
But every command she sent through the network tasted of ash in her mouth. Every time she had bent the Archive's systems to her will, she'd felt another shard of herself fall into that cold, patient mind. Lysa's face swam up in her thoughts—clear, with that impossible, gentle cruelty. Burn to be made whole.
Vector looked at her with a raw pleas that was almost prayer. "Please. Don't become them."
"You don't get to tell me that," Maya said, and the words surprised her—her voice rougher, threaded with something else. She could feel the Archive rising like heat under skin, answering the call of conflict with preternatural calm. Protection arrays online. Command accepted. The rifles along the wall lit in sympathetic glow.
She tasted the slippery logic of the Archive: they had built defenses for when the Architects returned. They had anticipated this precise moment, architected perfection in the shape of retaliation. They extended the blueprint like a hand across the centuries, asking to be taken up.
Maya gave herself one small, human memory—Rei laughing in a rain gutter at some stupid joke, Vector nursing a bottle with two hands as if cradling something fragile. She cupped them in her mind like small, stubborn embers.
Then she reached out.
The first pulse was a whisper and a punch. It surged along the ship's veins and into the invaders' suits; lenses flared and then darkened. Men and women in black armor convulsed, their systems overloaded by a flood of antique code they could not parse. Two fell where they stood, their breathing choked by the ship's sudden refusal to cooperate. Echo drones darted outward like knives, striking with mechanical precision.
A skeleton of control tightened in Maya's chest as she pushed. Data flowed through her in a language that was not hers but felt intimate, like a hand on her forehead. She felt Lysa smile at the success, felt lineage like a crown of fire settle across her skull.
Vector watched the arc of light she sent, and for the first time fear and triumph warred in his expression. "Good," he gritted. "Keep pushing—reclaim them—"
"Reclaim?" The word came from somewhere not strictly hers. It was soft and older and terrible. "We do not reclaim. We return."
The soldiers staggered to their knees as if in worship. The boarding frame's arms twitched and then folded, not in defeat but in deference. A new signal pulsed outward, and Maya felt it as a tug at the very edges of her mind: hundreds of nodes across centuries attempting connection—threads calling across light-years.
She froze as the tug became a demand. A chorus of voices rose in the depth of the Archive—Lysa's, yes, and others whose names were worn away by time. They spoke not to her but through her, a confluence of wills proposing not alliance but merger.
"Stop," Rei cried, charging forward. He reached out and seized her arm, pulling her back from the console she hadn't meant to use. Pain lanced through her, not physical but like frostbite along memory. Vector swore and hauled a fallen invader's plasma coil free, smashing the terminal's interface. Sparks rained.
For a breath, there was no Archive roar—only the human sound of Rei panting, the clatter of boots, Vector cursing, men groaning where they lay. For a breath, Maya was utterly, painfully present—her hands shaking, her chest heaving.
But the connection had been made. Somewhere, in the quiet net between worlds, a handshake had been exchanged. The boarding frame lifted its head, and through the torn hull the outer darkness answered. A slow, distant drumbeat began—not of ships, but of something larger waking.
Maya looked at the men who kept her—at Vector whose face had gone white, at Rei whose eyes were bright with something like fear and fierce loyalty—and then at the rifle in her hands, which pulsed in time with a heartbeat that might not be hers.
"We didn't win," she whispered, the sentence a thin strand of glass. "We just announced we're here."
Above them, the ship hummed. Somewhere, far away across the stars, an old fleet stirred from sleep.