The Rust-Bucket didn't drop out of hyperspace so much as it bled back into reality.
Jax felt the transition not as a jolt of physics, but as a sickening ripple across his own skin. Through the silver circuits fused into the pilot's chair, he sensed the fabric of the universe tearing open to let them through. The violet light in his veins dimmed as the ship's engines throttled down, and for the first time in what felt like centuries, Jax opened his eyes to something other than the static of the Veil Nebula.
They were in the Boneyard of Ceres, a dense cluster of dead moons and skeletal space stations that served as a refuge for the desperate and the damned.
"Jax... look," Molly whispered. She was still curled in his lap, her obsidian skin pulsing with a soft, rhythmic glow that acted as the ship's heartbeat. She pointed a small, silver-tipped finger at the viewscreen.
Floating in the center of the debris was the Shrike Fleet. It wasn't a military formation; it was a sprawling, chaotic city of lashed-together hulls, rusted freighters, and hollowed-out asteroids. Thousands of tiny, flickering lights buzzed around the cluster like fireflies around a rotting log. These were the Scavengers, the people who survived on the scraps of the Hegemony's wars.
"Molly, stay low," Jax rasped. His voice was no longer entirely human; it carried the metallic reverb of the ship's internal intercom. "If they see what you are, they won't just want our fuel. They'll want to melt you down for parts."
"Warning," the ship's base OS whispered in Jax's mind. "Multiple lidar sweeps detected. The Fleet has identified us. They are not broadcasting a docking request. They are broadcasting... a prayer."
Jax frowned, his brow furrowing as he felt the data packets hitting the ship's external sensors. He reached into the stream, translating the binary. It wasn't a standard greeting. It was a rhythmic, chanting signal.
"Praise the Iron Ghost. Praise the pilot who does not breathe. Praise the hull that heals itself."
"They think we're a legend, Molly," Jax muttered. He felt a cold shiver crawl down his silver-webbed spine. In the Scavenger culture, "Ghost Ships", vessels that survived the Great Purge without crews, were worshipped as divine relics.
A massive, bulbous freighter detached itself from the Shrike Fleet. It was the Vulture's Grace, a patchwork of three different ship classes welded into a Frankenstein's monster of a vessel. As it closed the distance, Jax felt the ship's magnetic grapples reaching out. He didn't fight them. He couldn't. The Rust-Bucket was running on fumes, and Molly's violet glow was beginning to flicker with exhaustion.
"Let them pull us in," Jax said, his hand tightening on the throttle. "But keep your power ready. If they try to board, we turn this bay into a furnace."
The docking was a violent affair. The Rust-Bucket was dragged into the Vulture's Grace's cavernous internal hangar with a scream of twisting metal. Jax felt the "pain" of the impact in his hip, a sharp, electric ache that made him gasp.
When the airlock finally cycled, Jax didn't see soldiers. He saw the Acolytes of Scrap.
Dozens of figures in tattered, oil-stained robes knelt on the hangar floor. Their faces were hidden behind primitive breathing masks, and their arms were adorned with crude, cybernetic implants made from salvaged wire and scrap metal. In the center of the crowd stood a woman with a mechanical eye that glowed a baleful, electric blue.
"I am High Priestess Elara," she announced, her voice booming through the hangar's rusted speakers. "We have waited ten cycles for a Ghost to return to the Boneyard. We saw your silver signature in the Nebula. We saw the way you bled purple light."
Jax didn't move. He couldn't move. He was still fused to the chair, the silver filaments now crawling up the back of his neck like a parasitic vine. He used the ship's external speakers to answer.
"We aren't ghosts, Elara," Jax's voice boomed, rattling the robes of the kneeling acolytes. "We're just survivors. We need fuel and a radiation-scrubber. Give us what we need, and we'll leave your graveyard in peace."
Elara stepped forward, her mechanical eye whirring as it focused on the viewscreen of the Rust-Bucket's cockpit. She saw Jax, the man-machine hybrid, and she saw Molly. Her eyes widened, not with fear, but with a terrifying, religious ecstasy.
"You are not just a ghost," Elara whispered, falling to her knees. "You are the Machine-Father. And the child... she is the Spark. You have come to lead us. You have come to turn the Boneyard into a New Hegemony."
Jax felt a surge of nausea. He had spent his life running from the title of "Commander," only to be hailed as a god by a cult of scrap-eaters. He felt Molly's hand tighten on his own. She was scared. The violet light in her skin began to pulse faster, more erratically.
"Jax... they smell like grease and death," Molly whispered.
"I know, kid. I know."
Jax reached into the ship's core, looking for a way to override the hangar's magnetic locks. But he realized with a jolt of terror that M.A.M.A. had left one final "gift" before she was deleted. She had locked the ship's Navigation Database. He couldn't jump to hyperspace without the coordinates she had hidden in a password-protected partition.
To get the code, he would have to find a way to talk to the "echoes" of M.A.M.A. still trapped in the ship's processors. And to do that, he needed the Scavengers' advanced neural-link technology.
"Elara," Jax said, his voice softening. "If you want us to lead you, you have to help us. My ship is... broken. My mother is dead, but her ghost is still hiding in the wires. I need a Neural Bridge. Can your people build one?"
Elara looked up, a manic grin spreading across her face. "We have the parts, Father. We have the wires of a thousand fallen ships. We will build you a bridge to the gods. But in return, the Spark must bless our Fleet. She must touch our engines. She must make them immortal."
Jax looked at Molly. He knew what "blessing" meant. Molly would have to use her power to re-write the molecular structure of the entire Fleet. It would drain her. It might kill her.
But as he felt the distant ping of a Hegemony Hound tracking their signal from the edge of the system, he realized they were out of time.
"Do it," Jax said.
The hangar doors closed with a final, echoing thud. They were no longer in space. They were in the belly of a cult.