Jake found the cargo bay at 0300, when the ship ran on skeleton crew and the corridors were empty enough to guarantee privacy.
The space was vast by shipboard standards—a long, open chamber lined with secured crates and equipment racks, the ceiling high enough to accommodate the loading mechs that normally operated during supply transfers. Everything was bolted down or magnetized to the deck, leaving a clearing in the center that gave him roughly fifteen meters of open space in every direction.
Enough room to work.
He sealed the bay door behind him and stood in the center of the clearing for a long moment, breathing slowly, letting his awareness settle.
The ship hummed around him. Crew members slept on the decks above and below—faint, warm impressions that registered against his senses without requiring effort. He catalogued them automatically, the same way his eyes adjusted to light. It was just there.
That passive awareness had been growing steadily since they left Mar Sara. Three days ago, he could feel people within the same room. Now he could map the general positions of everyone within two decks of his location. Not thoughts. Not emotions. Just presence—the simple fact of conscious minds occupying space.
He hadn't told anyone about that yet.
Jake exhaled slowly and raised one hand, palm open, toward a supply crate roughly four meters away. Standard military crate—metal construction, probably eighty kilos loaded.
He reached out.
The crate didn't move.
He held the connection, feeling the weight of it through a sense that didn't have a name. Dense. Resistant. Like trying to grip wet metal with bare hands—the force was there, but the purchase wasn't.
Jake adjusted. Instead of broad force across the crate's surface, he narrowed his focus to a single point on the bottom edge. Precise. Concentrated.
The crate shifted. Half a centimeter. The deck plating groaned softly beneath it.
Jake let go and dropped his hand. His breathing hadn't changed. No nosebleed. No vision problems. Just a faint tightness behind his temples that faded within seconds.
Three days ago, that would have cost him.
Now it barely registered.
He raised his hand again.
For the next hour, he worked through a progression he'd designed himself. Single-target displacement at increasing distances. Sustained holds at various weights. Precision work—moving small objects to specific locations with minimal force expenditure. He used the crates, the equipment racks, a loose bolt he found on the floor.
The bolt was the most informative test.
He could move it across the room with barely a thought. Spin it in place. Suspend it in the air for nearly thirty seconds before the effort became noticeable. Small objects were easy—almost trivially so now. The force-to-mass ratio was favorable enough that precision became the only real challenge.
Larger objects remained difficult. He managed to slide a loaded crate roughly a meter across the deck before the strain forced him to release. A heavier equipment rack—maybe two hundred kilos—he couldn't budge at all. He tried three times, each attempt from a different angle of approach, and each time the resistance was the same: a wall of inertia his abilities couldn't breach.
So there were limits. Clear ones. He mapped them carefully.
Weight tolerance: somewhere around a hundred kilos for meaningful displacement. Above that, diminishing returns that escalated into physical strain quickly.
Range: effective focus dropped off sharply past twenty meters. He could detect at much greater distances, but fine manipulation required proximity.
Duration: sustained holds drained him faster than short bursts. A single shove could be near-instantaneous. Holding something in place for more than ten seconds introduced compounding fatigue.
Multi-target: still impossible at any meaningful level. He'd tried splitting his focus between two objects earlier in the session and immediately lost control of both. The neural pathways—or whatever they were—didn't branch. Not yet.
He wrote it all down in a small notebook he'd taken from the supply room. Not a datapad—those could be accessed remotely, and he didn't want a digital record of his capabilities floating around the ship's systems. Physical pages. Pencil markings. The kind of record that could be burned if it needed to be.
Analog. Private. His.
Halfway through the session, he tried something different.
Instead of manipulating objects, he turned his attention to the air itself. Not trying to move it—that wasn't how his abilities worked—but trying to sense through it. To extend his awareness into the empty space of the cargo bay and map it the way he mapped the positions of minds aboard the ship.
The result was unexpected.
He couldn't feel the air. But he could feel the boundaries of the room—the walls, the floor, the ceiling—as surfaces his awareness pressed against. Like standing in a dark room and knowing the dimensions by echo alone. The resolution was poor. Vague shapes at best. But it was new, and it hadn't been there a week ago.
He filed that under "developing" and moved on.
The session ended when the fatigue reached a level he'd marked as his stopping point. Not pain—not the splitting headaches or the bleeding that had accompanied his earlier efforts. This was closer to muscle exhaustion after sustained physical exercise. A deep, structural tiredness that told him the system needed rest to consolidate whatever had been worked.
He'd noticed that pattern. Push, rest, recover. Each recovery left him slightly more capable than before. Like training a muscle—except the muscle was somewhere inside his brain, and he had no medical literature to tell him when he was overtraining.
The Overmind's presence had been absent since they entered orbit. Not gone—Jake could still feel the ghost of it if he reached deep enough, a thread so thin it might have been imagination. But it wasn't pressing anymore. Wasn't probing or testing or watching.
He didn't trust that.
Absence of attention didn't mean absence of interest. The Overmind had let him escape the hive. Let him fight alongside the Raiders. Let him evacuate an entire planet without interference. That kind of patience didn't come from something that had lost track of him.
It came from something that was waiting for a specific moment.
Jake stowed the notebook in his quarters, cleaned up the cargo bay to hide any evidence of his session, and headed for the mess hall before the morning shift started.
He ate alone.
That had become routine over the past three days. Not by design—he didn't avoid people, and he responded when spoken to. But the crew gave him space in the way people gave space to things they didn't understand. Conversations thinned when he sat down. Tables filled up around him rather than beside him.
He didn't blame them. He'd have done the same.
The food was better than he expected. Someone aboard the Hyperion took the mess hall seriously enough to turn military rations into something that tasted like it had been cooked by a person rather than assembled by a machine. Jake ate slowly, appreciating each bite in a way he hadn't done since before the hive. Small pleasures. The kind of thing you stopped noticing until you'd spent days eating nothing at all.
Raynor dropped into the seat across from him halfway through his meal, carrying a tray loaded with something the kitchen optimistically called scrambled eggs.
"You're up early," Raynor said.
"Light sleeper."
Raynor ate in silence for a minute, which was unusual for him. The man filled quiet spaces the way water filled cracks—naturally, without effort. The fact that he wasn't talking meant he was working up to something.
Jake waited.
"We picked up a signal last night," Raynor said finally. "Dominion frequency. Encrypted, but Matt cracked it."
Jake set down his fork. "And?"
"Research station. Terran. On a moon about two jumps from here. The Dominion's been running operations there—not military, something else. Science division."
The way Raynor said "science division" carried weight. Not the neutral kind. The kind that came from years of watching the Dominion dress up ugly work in clean language.
"What kind of research?" Jake asked.
"That's what I want to find out." Raynor pushed his tray aside, leaning forward slightly. "The signal mentioned something called Project Thorn. Ring any bells?"
Jake turned the name over in his mind. Thorn. He'd heard it—or something like it—somewhere in the fog of Dominion briefings and classified headers that blurred together after enough years of service.
Nothing solid. But the recognition was there, buried deep enough that he couldn't pull it to the surface.
"Maybe," he said. "I can't place it."
Raynor studied him. "The transmission mentioned Ghost operatives."
Jake's expression didn't change. But something behind it did.
"You want to hit it," Jake said. Not a question.
"I want to know what they're doing," Raynor corrected. "And if it's what I think it is, I want to shut it down."
Jake picked up his fork again. Ate another bite. Let the silence carry the decision he'd already made.
"When do we move?"
Raynor allowed himself a small nod. "Tomorrow. Briefing at 1400."
He stood, collected his tray, and paused.
"You doing okay, Jake?"
The question was simple. The concern behind it wasn't.
"Still here," Jake said.
Raynor looked at him for a beat longer than necessary, then walked away.
Jake finished his meal alone, his thoughts already circling around a name he couldn't quite remember and a feeling he couldn't quite ignore.
Project Thorn.
Whatever it was—
It had something to do with people like him.