She killed the nav computer. Its frantic beeping was a lie here. She closed her eyes for half a second, feeling the subtle hum of the star’s gravity waves through the hull. Most pilots saw chaos. Talia saw patterns.
The docking clamps on her hull extended. She had one chance.
“You. You’re going.”
“Sir,” Sharpe said, “her gyros are miscalibrated by twelve degrees. She flies by instinct.”
She killed all thrust. For a terrifying second, the Skipper was silent, floating in the star’s terrible light. Then the gravity wave hit—a rolling punch that slammed her ship into the Odyssey ’s side. Metal screamed. Sparks flew. The docking clamps bit down with a sound like a wolf’s jaw snapping shut. the rookie talia
“Exactly,” Voss said, not looking up from his console. “In a gravity well that chaotic, your precious instruments are useless. Instinct is all that’s left. Move, Rookie.”
So when the distress call crackled through—a civilian research vessel, the Odyssey , losing orbit around a collapsing neutron star—everyone expected Talia to be sidelined. Instead, Voss pointed a thick finger at her. She killed the nav computer
When she dropped out of FTL, the neutron star filled her view—a monstrous, spinning eye of pure violence. Its magnetic fields were visible as shimmering curtains of blue and violet, twisting like living whips. And there, a tiny speck caught in the deadly dance, was the Odyssey .
