[POV: Nardia]

  —Out here, nothing is less trustworthy than the word training.

  The hangar lights were always too white.

  So white that the shadows cast by tools looked sharp enough to cut, and every speck of metal dust stood out like it was trying to be seen. That kind of light only chose certain things to reveal—reality, stripped and sterile.

  It highlighted the grit. It hardened the silhouettes. And most of all, it kept insisting, over and over, This is not a place where people live.

  But I already knew that.

  Because deep in this hangar, even under light that white, there was something that looked black.

  One of Ahmad’s ships—his “mothership.”

  Al-Safar.

  I’d seen it before, back when Ahmad came to my planet. I’d caught a glimpse of it from Shiratori. And unlike Shiratori, which had a sleek, narrow kind of menace, this thing was… bigger. Older. Meaner.

  It wasn’t my first time laying eyes on it, either.

  I’d already put my hands on this ship. I’d touched it, sweated on it, gotten soaked in oil, learned the quirks of its wiring. So I knew it. I knew it—I should've known it.

  And yet, standing in front of it now, the pressure was different.

  If Shiratori was a long, thin shadow, Al-Safar was a black boulder.

  Less “ship,” more “warship.”

  Just sitting there, it made the surrounding noise feel quieter—like something enormous was silently insisting on its own weight.

  And even though it looked bad in the way old weapons look bad, it wasn’t just bad. The curves of the hull had a strange elegance to them. Like someone, at some point, had wanted it to be beautiful, even while it was made for war—and that intention had left a trace that refused to die.

  When you stood under Al-Safar’s belly, the air felt heavier.

  Not imagination.

  The ship’s magnetic field, the aftertaste of artificial gravity, the edge of inertia control—something pressed back against the inside of my skin. It felt alive enough that I couldn’t bring myself to hate it.

  I’d heard the story: it used to be a rich man’s luxury vessel.

  Honestly… I believed it. When I’d gone inside for maintenance, the living quarters had been too nice. Not the “bare minimum to survive” you expect from a military hull. Quiet ventilation. Real beds. Rounded corridor corners. Decorative wall panels that had somehow survived the refits.

  The luxury hadn’t been erased. It had been… preserved, almost deliberately.

  And that made it worse.

  A comfortable warship is a warship that can keep fighting for a long time.

  Luxury vessels get dragged into wars and rebuilt into monsters.

  Al-Safar had been turned into a torpedo depot ship.

  All the empty space inside—the indulgent “extra”—had been replaced with racks, launch mechanisms, and resupply systems. And if anyone wanted proof that it was still hungry for war, they didn’t need the story. They just needed to listen.

  A loader drone rolled by, towing a sealed canister marked with hazard stripes and a label that didn’t match any Human Federation standard. The escort tech kept his body between it and everyone else, like the canister might decide to bite.

  The drone’s wheels clicked over a seam in the floor.

  The canister thunked once—heavy, controlled, deliberate.

  “That’s for recon?” I muttered.

  Genichiro didn’t look at me. “That’s for not dying.”

  All the empty space inside—the indulgent “extra”—had been replaced with racks, launch mechanisms, and resupply systems. The gaps meant for comfort had become carrying capacity.

  It had been marked as scrap at some point, too… but it was still too strong to throw away.

  I knew all that.

  I knew it—and still, staring at it in person, I found myself thinking it again:

  This is really a warship.

  The pressure I felt wasn’t just from its size.

  Part of the outer plating—one section of armor—had a texture that was obviously different.

  The first time I’d seen that plate up close, the hangar had been quiet.

  Now, as I stood beneath it, the quiet broke.

  A thin ripple ran across the armor—so subtle it could’ve been a trick of the lights—then the air in my mouth tasted like pennies. My harness straps tightened as the local gravity field corrected by a fraction, like the ship had just taken a shallow breath.

  Somewhere inside the hull, a status chime rang once. Not loud. Not meant for me.

  Thomas, who’d been jogging past with a tablet, froze mid-step. His eyes flicked up, and his hand drifted—pure reflex—toward the wrong place.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  “Don’t,” Genichiro snapped.

  Thomas jerked his hand back like he’d been slapped. “I wasn’t going to touch it!”

  “You were thinking about it. That’s enough,” Genichiro said, already moving, tapping his own wrist terminal. “Diagnostics. Now.”

  A pale block of text flashed on his screen, reflected in his glasses.

  FOREIGN FIELD INTERFERENCE: 0.7%

  INERTIA EDGE INSTABILITY: MINOR

  SOURCE: UNKNOWN (PLATING SEGMENT 3B)

  Ahmad didn’t say anything. He just watched the plate the way you watch a dog that’s normally calm—when it shows teeth for half a second and then pretends it didn’t.

  The ripple faded. The air tasted normal again.

  No one laughed.

  And suddenly, the ship’s “weight” wasn’t metaphor. It was policy.

  —Ancients technology.

  The part Genichiro had told me not to touch during maintenance.

  If you touched it, your skin remembered a nasty kind of cold. Not the cold of metal, but the cold of something that pushed back, like a living thing refusing you. I hadn’t touched it.

  And still, I remembered.

  Because it scared me.

  “Can go toe-to-toe with Earth battleship-class,” Genichiro had said during maintenance.

  Back then I’d assumed it was half exaggeration. Engineers loved to talk big.

  Genichiro didn’t.

  Now?

  Standing under the hull, with the air pressing and the fields whispering against my nerves, I couldn’t keep that distance anymore.

  It was like standing under the belly of a massive beast. Something instinctive in me went on alert.

  I was staring up when Genichiro spoke behind me.

  “Usually, Shiratori’s enough. But if we’re going far, or doing salvage, we move this one. It’s… a pain.”

  He wore work clothes that pretended to be a lab coat—scorched sleeves, oil smell clinging to him. Maybe from all-nighters. His eyes still had that faint shadow underneath.

  Honestly, ever since I met him, he’d had a face that looked like it hadn’t slept. Maybe that was just his default setting.

  “For something you call a pain,” I said, “you look kind of happy.”

  “It’s your imagination. Don’t read my mind.”

  “I’m not reading your mind. I’m observing. Tech guys are usually easy to read.”

  “Shut up. Put the cargo there. Don’t block the walkway.”

  He was blunt, as always.

  But I didn’t hate this kind of bluntness. Especially from Genichiro—his wasn’t the smell of anger. It was the smell of procedure.

  Not that he didn’t have the energy to be kind—more like he didn’t think kindness was necessary.

  “Hey, though…” I pressed, because not asking would’ve made my skin itch.

  “The armament… I saw it when we were doing maintenance. When did you load that stuff?”

  Genichiro’s footsteps stopped.

  “That’s a sloppy question.”

  “Sloppy’s fine. I want the story.”

  “…When we got her, it was already half installed.”

  “Half?”

  “There were leftovers from the original refit. Whoever turned it into a torpedo depot ship mixed in parts with unknown origins. It’s not pure Ancients tech. But the core is.”

  I hated the phrase.

  “Unknown origins.”

  One of the scariest combinations of words in space.

  “…And the other half?” I asked.

  Genichiro answered like he was spitting nails.

  “We added it.”

  “Who did?”

  “Me and Ahmad. …More accurately, Ahmad picked it up. I wired it in.”

  “Picked it up where?”

  “Ship graveyard.”

  My stomach clenched in an ugly way.

  Graveyard.

  Our destination.

  Dots connected into a line, and the moment the line existed, the fear stopped being vague and started being real.

  “So… we’re going back to the graveyard to ‘repair’ the weapons?” I muttered, half to myself.

  A voice replied from behind me.

  “This time it’s a reconnaissance mission,” Ahmad said, calm as always. “But we’ll salvage while we’re there.”

  “That’s still a yes!”

  Genichiro snorted. “The field lives between yes and no.”

  “Stop worshipping the field!”

  But… I was glad I’d asked.

  Asking made me more scared.

  Still better than being scared of something I couldn’t name.

  From the center of the hangar, Ahmad’s voice carried again.

  “Nardia. Over here.”

  He raised a hand, same steady tone, same straight-backed posture.

  And yet today the air around him felt different.

  When the mothership moved, the whole team got a little tighter. Like the ship pulled their nerves into alignment.

  Behind him, someone was moving around like a pinball.

  “Ahmad! Navigation logs updated!” Thomas came running, breathless.

  He was the kid who did errands, piloting, messages—and sometimes acted like a cushion between people who were about to bite each other.

  He always insisted, “I’m not an errand boy, okay?” but anyone who was that good at keeping the small stuff moving usually had the talent for it.

  “This time it’s under the name of ‘special training,’ so I get to come with you!” he whispered excitedly.

  The fact he said under the name of meant it was already just a name.

  “Wasn’t ‘training’ supposed to be a short-range survey on Shiratori?” I asked.

  Ahmad answered without blinking.

  “It is. Two days.”

  “Two days is short-range? Space distance sense is broken!”

  Two days on a ship this big—fast enough that we might cover absurd distances. Hundreds of light-years, if you believed the numbers.

  “Get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to!”

  From the side, Genichiro tossed something at me. A harness.

  “If you’ve got time to complain, tighten it.”

  “It’s the way you said it that’s scary!”

  “Don’t get scared. If you get scared, your hands shake. If your hands shake—”

  “It gets dangerous,” I cut in. “Yes. I know.”

  Genichiro let out a little laugh through his nose.

  “If you know, shut up and do it.”

  This man’s mouth was poison.

  But the poison dragged me into field mode.

  He didn’t treat me like some “pitiful trainee.” It was a rough kind of kindness, and I was starting to understand it.

  Ahmad laid out the mission in clean, minimal words.

  “We’re heading to the Ship graveyard in the Almmina Sector. This isn’t a typical salvage run. We’ve gotten strange reports. Despite being inside Human Federation influence space, another faction appears to be coming and going.”

  Something hot and unpleasant bloomed in my chest.

  Federation space… and a different faction operating openly?

  Even within the sphere of influence, borders are not strictly defined, so incursions occur frequently. Even now, humanity is “fighting” with various other aliens. That’s why there are adventurers who appear to be civilians.

  Thus, it means politics.

  And politics on the field usually meant lives were cheap.

  “So you’re moving the mothership with this kind of firepower,” I said, “which means… it’s a real headache, right?”

  “It is,” Ahmad agreed.

  He looked up at Al-Safar.

  His eyes were on a ship, but the way he looked made it feel like he was looking at a comrade.

  I held my breath without meaning to.

  The boarding ramp rang with a lower tone than usual as it settled into place. Metal-on-metal, but somehow… bony.

  This ship wasn’t a corpse.

  It was a survivor that had stood on top of corpses.

  The hangar robotics moved like they’d rehearsed this in their sleep.

  Latches clacked. Magnetic locks engaged in a staggered rhythm. A tech called out numbers—fuel pressure, seal integrity, inertial dampener tolerance—and every reply came back clipped and certain, like uncertainty was a luxury we couldn’t afford.

  Genichiro checked my harness one more time with a brutal tug. “If you puke, aim away from the consoles.”

  “Wow. Encouraging.”

  “Practical.”

  “Get aboard. We’re leaving,” Ahmad said, and the air snapped tight.

  A warship with a good bed is the worst kind.

  Because it means it can fight for a long time.

  “Hey, Ahmad,” I said, one last question I couldn’t swallow.

  Because I was scared.

  Because I needed to know.

  Because I needed to confirm.

  “Al-Safar… can it really go head-to-head with Earth battleship-class?”

  Ahmad looked at me for a brief instant.

  His eyes were quiet.

  And that quiet was what made it terrifying.

  “It can,” he said.

  No extra explanation. No bragging.

  Like he’d just stated the weather.

  That way of speaking was the scariest of all.

  I inhaled, checked my harness, and put my foot on the ramp.

  —The Black Snow Princess crosses an ocean of ice.

  This time, the ocean was space.

  And the sea we were sailing toward…

  was a graveyard.

  Training?

  Sure. Whatever.

  This was the field.