“A spirit of iron will not serve the one who simply asks. It must be coaxed, bargained with, or reminded. It respects lineage, but worships intention. Treat it like a god and it will use you. Treat it like a partner, and it might just answer.” - Excerpt from Ironbone Rites: A Practical Guide to Piloting the Divine, banned volume recovered from Embercoil archives

  The sensor room weighed on my mind as I left. The glyphs had scorched themselves into my memory, same as the smell, half-melted console casing, copper and something else. Probably the burnt blood on the floor. Even with the door sealed behind me, I still felt like I could feel the glyphs in the back of my mind.

  I turned toward the medbay. The sting from my ribs was sharper now, less a dull throb and more a bone-deep complaint with every step. My shoulder didn’t feel great either, and the scalp wound had gone mostly numb, which I figured meant either healing or worse. My coat was sticking to all of it, half-dried with blood and other stuff I didn’t want to think about.

  Last time I passed by it I was following someone else's blood. Now it was mine I needed to deal with. The door didn’t give me trouble. The lock panel blinked once, then opened with a faint hiss, and I stepped inside. The room was too clean, and very white. Kind of sterile in the industrial sense. The entire room, though still dusty like the rest of the ship, didn't seem to have been disturbed anywhere near as recently.

  The walls were smooth-paneled composite. The kind of stuff I’d seen once or twice on some junked Crown archival vessels, but sleeker. Sharper edges. Brighter readouts. The central console was dark. When I got closer it lit up as well, more illegible language appearing, a small chime, and then silence.

  A half-circle of drawers lined the back wall, each sealed by biometric tabs and some outdated input ports. I didn’t bother trying to crack them. The stuff I needed currently would be in the emergency caddies. Sure enough, on the far wall, a standard tri-compartment caddy sat recessed in a shallow niche. I keyed it open. Inside were bandages, gauze spools, a few chemical vials I didn't recognize, and a single stitched cloth marked with a faded red cross.

  Some of the contents had obviously spoiled, chemicals discolored, labels peeled. But a handful of injectors looked stable. A sealed pack of alcohol swabs too. Good enough.

  I shrugged off my coat. It came off like tearing paper, fibers sticking to the half-dried wounds on my ribs and bicep. I hissed through my teeth and dropped the coat to the floor, then unlatched the buckle harness underneath and stripped that too. A mirror angled itself open along the far wall, smooth glass with that same sensor ring framing the edges. I stepped in front of it and let the light ring of light it produced wash over me.

  This was the first time I’d gotten a real look at myself since waking. My shirt was soaked through with sweat and half-dried blood, plastered to my frame. Beneath it, my skin was pale and drawn tight, lean muscle mapped by old scars and fresh ones, burns, cuts, a chemical blotch from a work lamp explosion a few years back.

  The wound on my ribs was shallow but angry, whatever grazed me had scored flesh just deep enough to bleed stupidly. The one on my arm was worse. Torn jacket fabric had ground into the cut and stained the skin beneath. My scalp had clotted, at least, but the swelling around it pulsed with every heartbeat.

  I cleaned the worst of it. Alcohol on gauze with a little gritting of the teeth and short breaths with steady hands. I’d done this before. You don’t spend a decade freelancing without learning to patch yourself up between contracts. I’d done worse trying to treat a fellow scrapper after a botched rig detonation on a drifting hulk near the Scarline.

  I pressed the soaked cloth against my ribs and thought of Thessel again. I muttered to myself, “Bet you’d say this is what I get for rushing in.”

  I grabbed the needle and thread. Probably sterilized once, long ago. I used the lighter on my belt on the needle just in case. Three knots later, the rib gash was sealed. Not very pretty, but better than leaving it open. I rewrapped my shoulder, patched the arm, left the scalp alone. It wasn’t deep enough to warrant stitching. By the time I finished, I was sore, exhausted, and clear-headed enough to start thinking of what I'd do next.

  I looked around the medbay one last time. Whoever stocked it hadn’t used it. Supplies were intact, untouched. The emergency beacon wasn’t lit. No signs of trauma or struggle. No blood. No movement. Whoever bled through the halls didn’t stop here. Which meant they either didn't have the time... or they fixed themselves up elsewhere.

  I pulled my coat back on with a wince and cinched the straps across my chest. The worst of the blood was crusted into the seams. Wouldn’t pass any guild inspections, but I wasn’t aiming for style points, besides Portem needed me and there was things to do.

  I exited the medbay and followed the corridor back toward the maintenance storage. I’d seen enough spare parts and wiring to put together at least a temporary brace. I could get Portem upright with a little luck and a lot of improvisation.

  I kept Portem-Beta in hand, muzzle low but ready. I hadn’t unsuppressed his personality thread yet. That would burn through charge, and I needed him stable. But a partial sync was enough for communication.

  “Beta,” I said, tapping the port switch on the grip. “Update me. Any change in system status on Alpha?”

  There was a pause, half a beat too long. I started to panic until his voice filtered in through the wrist-link, flat and clinical. “Portem-Alpha remains in cradle. Power levels holding at sixteen percent, expected to rise to 17% shortly. Mobility grid nonfunctional. Memory lattice still fragmented. External feeds minimal. Awaiting directives.”

  “Figures.” I stepped through the storage room door and let it seal behind me. “Anything else? Movement? Signal drift?”

  “None detected. Ship remains sealed and it appears that the security aboard the ship is offline.”

  “Offline, huh,” I muttered. “That’s comforting.”

  I took a breath, let my shoulders roll back, and scanned the room with a mechanic’s eye instead of a scavenger’s. One shelf at a time, I started building a mental layout, what I had, what I could rig. The room was organized enough that it made sense to someone. Mostly maintenance-grade gear: patch plating, pressure tubing, bracers, old weld spools. Some of it had rusted in the seals, but most was intact.

  I started pulling what I needed. Magnetic seal clamps, coupling wires, a thermal bonding torch, and a pair of conductive braces that could substitute for internal pistons in a pinch. Not ideal. But I needed him to be able to move in case things got dicey.

  As I worked, Beta’s voice came through again. “You are injured.”

  “Thanks for the keen observation.” I set the bonding torch on a crate and bent to retrieve a hinge mount. My ribs flared, and I tried to ignored it, followed by a few muttered curses. “Already patched up.”

  “I would have advised against physical strain. You are not at combat readiness.”

  “Lucky for both of us, I’m not planning on getting into a fight with the wrench rack.”

  He didn't respond for a few moments, probably processing.

  “Humor detected. Relevance: unknown.”

  I snorted. Beta was the part of Portem without the attitude. Just cold, minimal logic. He could process some data faster, aim better, calculate shot curves that even some navigation vox anima struggled with. But subtlety wasn’t his thing.

  “You’ll get there,” I said. “Maybe when your other half wakes up.”

  “Unlikely. Alpha’s personality core currently operating at degraded sync. Interpolation of emotional data: sixty-four percent incomplete.”

  “So he’s moody.”

  “He is currently unavailable.”

  I sighed and clipped the tool pack to my belt harness. “Then it’s on me.” With a full load strapped to my hip and shoulder, I pushed out of the storage room and headed back toward the mechbay. The halls still held the same stagnant silence, broken only by the clinking of my boots.

  The mechbay door opened without resistance. Portem’s frame was still hunched in the cradle, locked into low-power idle. The tracer lines along his limbs were slightly brighter now, nothing dramatic, but enough to show that the rerouted energy was helping.

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  He looked like hell. With my mind a little clearer and a second look at him I realized just how badly he was damaged. Gouges along the torso plating. A cratered shoulder joint. The leg actuator I’d already planned on bypassing had warped so badly I’d need to cut around the entire servo housing. I dumped the gear beside his foot and looked up at him.

  “I’ve seen you in worse shape,” I said. “Not by much. But worse.”

  No answer from the metal giant. He was still offline, for all practical purposes. Conscious, maybe, but quiet.

  First came the diagnostics tap, basic, just to confirm there were no active discharges waiting to fry me if I poked the wrong wire. Then the manual override port. A flick of the gauntlet jack into the sub-core readout and I had partial schematics popping up on the nearby display terminal.

  Hotfixes first. I braced the leg, pulling the damaged piston and replaced it with one of the mag-clamped braces, rerouted the servo line around the sheared housing and bonded the outer layer with thermal paste and a quick weld. It was a bit sloppy, but a decent start given the scraps I was using. The shoulder looked even worse. I stripped the plating, mounted a pair of coupling rods to keep the arm from locking under strain, then sealed the fracture points with a wrapped cable sling and a support truss built from two shelf struts.

  It took a full hour of work, punctuated only by the sound of the torch, the scrape of metal, and the mechanical pings of the gauntlet readout. Eventually, I stepped back, the last weld still smoked faintly behind me. He wouldn’t be sprinting or fighting, but with a proper balance shift, Portem could walk.

  “Alright,” I said, flexing my sore arm as I pulled the cable jack from the diagnostics port. "That’s your left leg, shoulder, and chest stabilizer. You’re technically upright. You can thank me later for the repairs."

  “Noted. I will endeavor... to do so should I remain conscious.” Portem’s voice filtered in, low and gravelled, even in its weakened state.

  I smirked. “Thought that might get you talking. Now then, when you're done connect with Beta.”

  He didn’t answer, but I caught the faint flicker in his optics, the blue lenses narrowing and widening as he calibrated himself. Just enough to tell me he was still here and dousing his own fires. He didn’t move for a few moments, but the smallest twitch of actuators along the knee, the gentle shift of his back plating as the brace settled under new load. His optics narrowed once, then again, steadier now before locking onto me.

  “Alpha integration re-established.” Beta said over the wrist-link, voice unchanged. Then came the shift, so subtle only I would’ve caught it because of our long history. A half-second delay trimmed followed by a sharper inflection at the end of the next sentence.

  “Systems stabilized. Charge rate nominal. Diagnostics clear. Congratulations, Riven. You still have those ironwright skills in you.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Is that supposed to be gratitude, or just your usual post-reboot sass?”

  “If I had access to full emotion emulation, I’d include applause. Instead, I offer functional commentary and mild concern for your physical and mental state.”

  I gave a tired smirk. “That’s more like it.”

  I tapped the last panel on his cradle console and locked the harness into place. “You’re staying put for now,” I said, picking up Beta from a nearby crate and reattaching him to my gauntlet’s interface brace. “Your leg’s functional but it won't last for more than a day or two. If something’s lurking on this ship, I’d rather you be charging than collapsing.”

  “Understood. I’ll try not to dream of combat while you stumble through the dark, narrow, and oh so mysterious ship.”

  Beta pulsed as the sync finalized. “Alpha relay complete. I am your voice and arm once more.”

  “Terrifying,” I muttered, and turned toward the exit.

  The walk back to the helm felt longer than before. Quieter, too. I guess once you knew your godshell wasn’t going to crack under its own weight and your wounds weren’t leaking, the adrenaline faded fast. Beta rode silent for most of it, cradled in my palm as a sidearm but radiating warmth, like Portem was watching through him. When we reached the midpoint corridor, I spoke. “So, weird ship, mystery blood, no crew, and a breadcrumb from a man who’s supposed to be dead.”

  He chirped back. “Efficient summary.”

  I glanced at him. “You think he’s alive?”

  “Statistical likelihood of Thessel Holt surviving ten years in hostile territory while remaining untraceable: Near zero.”

  “But not zero.”

  “It is a 0.000078% chance from my predictions. But not zero,” Portem admitted. Then, after a beat: “I believe in unlikely outcomes more than most. I’m currently wearing a metal brace and talking through a gun.”

  I let it sit in the air a second. “I don’t know what I’m hoping for,” I said. “That he’s alive. That he left me something. That it all means… something.”

  “Hope is inefficient. But occasionally… necessary.” Beta’s voice shifted just slightly there. The cadence of Alpha bleeding through.

  I cracked a dry grin. “Did you just try to be comforting?”

  “No. That was sarcasm.”

  I let out a sigh of exasperation. “Right. Of course.”

  “…Did it help?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Weirdly, yeah.”

  The helm door hissed open at my approach, unlocking with a voice-prompted override keyed to my ID. That was new. Maybe Alpha had opened the access remotely, or maybe the ship was just warming up to me. The fog outside hadn’t moved. Still grey and thick. But the panels were on now. The room wasn’t a husk anymore.

  I crossed the floor and dropped into the captain’s chair, letting some of the stress leak out of me. I put my hand on some of the controls, though unfortunately it still required a spinejack. I connected the gauntlet to one of the jacks and tapped the interface, then looked at Beta. “Alright, bridge the uplink. I want access to everything.”

  “Initiating neural assist overlay.” There was a slight shiver in the gauntlet, like static crawling under the skin, then a flicker of new windows across the helm console. Not full access, not quite a spinejack but pretty damn close. My vision crossfed telemetry from Portem’s internal systems into the display. The ship responded.

  “Ship,” I said. “Initiate lockdown protocol and reroute more power to the mechbay. Authorization: Holt, Riven. Captain override.”

  The vox anima of the ship emerged, crisp and clipped. “Confirmed. Lockdown initiated. Non-essential hatches sealed. Access restricted to manual or voice-verified inputs.” The console dimmed, flickered, then re-stabilized.

  I let out a breath and leaned back in the chair, the last of the stress in my body leaking out. If someone *was* on this ship, they weren’t getting far without me knowing. I started scanning for logs again. Alpha helped, parsing corrupted sectors and threading old data blocks through his more sophisticated interpreter. Several files showed up immediately, all buried behind Crown encryption tags. One stood out. Unreadable, but familiar.

  “This one’s got Thessel’s signature,” Portem said. “Voiceprint attached. Partial decay. Estimated time to decrypt… two to three days.”

  I stared at the file. My chest felt hollow and heavy all at once. It was real. Not just a name, a message meant for me. “I’ll wait,” I managed to squeeze out. Then I brought up the engine interface. Auxiliary systems were still running, but the primary core was shut off. From the looks of it the ship had a main power supply that was untapped oddly enough. I tapped the engine prompts. Portem synced without needing instruction.

  “Engine awakening protocol initialized,” he said. “You’re going to light this ship up?”

  “Let’s see what she’s got.”

  I keyed in the ignition override. The helm vibrated under me. In fact, the entire Wakesong hummed. Lights flickered a bit until they straightened out, brighter this time. For a second, I swore I heard something deeper in the ship groan, and then the power core came online. On the console, new lights flicked on. Thruster feeds. Gyro-stabilizers. Navigation overlays. The ship was fully awake now.

  I sat forward in the captain’s chair, fingers brushing across the command panel, eyes scanning the output feeds. “Alright,” I said under my breath. “Let’s see where exactly we are” Portem responded through Beta, voice low and close. “Stabilizers are online. Navigation coming into focus. Exterior fog thinning. You should brace.”

  I gripped the controls embedded into the armrests of the ship. The ship was fluid, surprisingly smooth given how old everything else looked. Rather, I was greeted with the soft tension of long-dormant machinery coming back under guidance.

  Slowly I pushed forward and upward, the fog outside shifting, first in tendrils, then in waves, parting with a hiss that reminded me of hydraulic pressure bleeding out after a weld line split. And then the clouds broke, my breath caught in my throat. We passed out of the cloudbank into open sky, and I saw a place I wished I'd never have to visit. The Ashen Crown. Or at least, the back edge of it.

  Far to the north, beyond the thinning cloud shelf and just beyond the curve of atmospheric haze, a massive stretch of floating territory hung in layers, tiers of stone and fortress-isles bound by chainships and anchors. Gargantuan black banners fluttered above some of them, ship-lights pulsed across others. I could make out the shapes of fortified platforms, old baroque towers, and a handful of air patrols drifting lazily through the high thermals like carrion birds.

  “By the Machine God's cabled beard,” I muttered. “We’re in deep.”

  “Sector mapping complete,” Portem said. “We are positioned at the far southern boundary of Ashen Crown control. No active patrols within immediate range. This area… is neglected.”

  “Neglected is good. I’ll take neglected. Better than shot on sight.”

  “An unregistered ship presence will still trigger responses if we are identified.”

  I flicked through the nav feed. The Wakesong’s systems were old, but surprisingly detailed. She still had mapping protocols, atmospheric readings, topographic scans, most of them years out of date, but I could cross-reference some of it by memory and Portem's database.

  A nearby isle popped on the readout. Small, without any recorded fortresses, and mainly civilian architecture. “Nearest town?” I asked. “Designated: Farsmoke Post. Southern supply node. Crown-flagged, low-security. Estimated time to reach at current rate of movement: three hours.”

  “Any flight restrictions?”

  “None recorded. No broadcast beacons either, likely isolated.”

  I stared out the viewing glass. The fog still lingered behind us like a wall. The Churn, dark and vast and eternal, just below the horizon line. I was pinned between a ravenous storm and an empire that would love to tear me to shreds. And this ship, somehow, had sailed me straight into the lion’s den. I leaned back and stared at the console, watching the map solidify as new data was taken in.

  “Plot course to Farsmoke. Minimal power signature. Keep us ghosting as long as possible.”

  An amalgamation of Wakesong's and Portem's voices blended together. “Confirmed. Course locked. Stealth priority engaged.”

  Outside, the Wakesong started to shuffle forward, the predicted path stretching through the clear skies under the gaze of the afternoon sun.