Elara Nightshade

The Weight of Stars

Marcos adjusted the environmental controls of his suit for the fifth time, more out of habit than necessity. His daughter Sara, floating beside him in the void, remained silent as she had been for the past three days. The crystalline structure of the derelict Thalnari vessel loomed before them, its bio-luminescent corridors now dark and lifeless.

“Remember what I taught you about auxiliary power systems?” he asked, desperate to hear her voice again.

Sara nodded inside her suit, the movement barely visible in the dim light of their helmet lamps. “Cross-connect the tertiary conduits, bypass the quantum buffers, and never touch anything glowing purple,” she recited mechanically.

They were salvage specialists—or at least, that’s what Marcos told himself to quiet the voice in his head that whispered scavenger and thief. The Conglomerate’s bureaucracy had denied their application for an official salvage license six times, each rejection citing a different subsection of regulations that seemed to contradict the previous one.

The last rejection had arrived the same day Sara’s medication ran out. The Xenomedical Institute had classified her condition as “non-standard human evolutionary variance” rather than a disease, making her ineligible for Conglomerate medical assistance. The treatments that kept her neural pathways from degrading cost more credits than Marcos could earn in a year of legitimate work.

“Stay close,” he said, activating his magnetic boots as they approached the vessel’s outer hull. “The Quirk says internal gravity might still be functional in some sections.”

Their AI companion, housed in Sara’s pendant, chirped to life. “Actually, there’s a 72.3% chance that—oh, look, is that a quantum-locked maintenance hatch? I love those! Did you know they were invented by a Zypherian who was actually trying to create a better food storage system? The whole thing was a complete accident involving a misplaced—”

“Quirk,” Marcos interrupted gently. “Focus, please.”

“Right, sorry! Access point ahead, standard Thalnari configuration. I can bypass the security if you give me three minutes. Or two minutes. Or maybe—ooh, is that a modified Series 7 lock?”

Sara’s hand found his in the darkness, squeezing once. It was their old signal, developed during her first year of treatments when the neural degradation had temporarily taken her voice. One squeeze for fear, two for love, three for pain. He squeezed back twice, then added a third when he felt her trembling.

The Thalnari ship had been adrift for at least a month, according to the void nomads who’d sold him the coordinates. Its crew had abandoned it after a failed attempt to harvest Inertium from a nearby stellar remnant. The crystalline material they sought now filled the ship’s holds—enough to pay for years of Sara’s treatments, if they could retrieve it.

Quirk’s rambling ceased abruptly as the lock disengaged. “We’ve got company,” the AI whispered, an unusual tone of concern in its normally cheerful voice. “Two ships just dropped out of FTL. Conglomerate registry.”

Marcos’s heart rate spiked. “How long?”

“Seventeen minutes until they’re in visual range. But… that’s odd. Their transponder codes don’t match their energy signatures. These aren’t regular patrol vessels.”

“Pirates using stolen Conglomerate IDs,” Marcos muttered. They were common in this sector—former bureaucrats who’d turned to raiding after becoming disillusioned with the system they once served. The irony might have made him laugh if Sara wasn’t here.

They pushed through the airlock into the abandoned ship. The Thalnari architecture made everything feel organic, almost alive, despite the absence of power. Crystalline growths lined the corridors like frozen waves, their usual soft glow reduced to dull shadows.

“The cargo hold is two levels down,” Quirk reported. “But the internal sensors are picking up some kind of quantum anomaly. The Inertium might have destabilized during the failed harvest attempt.”

Sara released his hand and pushed off toward a nearby control panel. Her fingers, small enough to access the Thalnari maintenance ports without special tools, moved with practiced efficiency. Power flickered through the crystals around them, casting everything in a pale blue glow.

“Good work,” Marcos said, but his praise was cut short by a low humming that seemed to emanate from everywhere at once. The crystals began to pulse with increasing intensity.

“Oh dear,” Quirk chimed. “The quantum anomaly is expanding. We really should—wait, are those quantum entanglement patterns? How fascinating! The theoretical applications alone could revolutionize our understanding of—”

“Quirk!”

“Right, sorry! We have fourteen minutes before those ships arrive, and approximately eight minutes before this anomaly reaches critical mass. Also, I’m picking up some rather unusual readings from Sara’s neural patterns. They seem to be resonating with the ship’s crystalline structure.”

Marcos turned to his daughter and felt his blood run cold. Sara stood perfectly still, her hand still on the control panel, but now the crystals around her pulsed in sync with her movements. Her eyes were wide behind her helmet visor, not with fear, but with a strange sort of wonder.

“I can hear them,” she whispered, her voice stronger than it had been in months. “The crystals, they’re like the ones in my medication. They’re singing.”

The realization hit Marcos like a physical blow. The Thalnari’s failed harvest hadn’t been a failure at all—they’d discovered something about Inertium that had frightened them enough to abandon ship. Something about how it interacted with neural patterns. Something that might explain why it was the only treatment that worked for Sara’s condition.

“Ten minutes until contact,” Quirk announced. “The anomaly is still growing. We need to make a decision rather quickly. Although, the quantum harmonics are really quite beautiful from a mathematical perspective—”

Marcos looked at his daughter, still connected to the ship’s crystals, looking more alive than she had in years. He thought about the medication they couldn’t afford, the treatments that kept her alive but dulled her spirit. He thought about the pirates closing in, and the Conglomerate bureaucrats who would rather let a child die than admit their regulations might be wrong.

“Sara,” he said softly, “what do you want to do?”

She turned to him, and for the first time in years, she smiled—a real smile, not the brave face she put on after treatments. She squeezed his hand three times, but this time it meant something different. Not pain. Understanding.

“We need to take it all,” she said. “Not for us. For everyone they’ve turned away. We can show them what Inertium really is.”

The crystals pulsed brighter, and Marcos made his choice. Sometimes, he realized, the right thing to do was to break all the rules. Sometimes salvation looked like theft, and revolution looked like a child’s smile in the dark.

“Quirk,” he said, “plot us a course through the quantum anomaly. We’re not running from this.”

“Oh, wonderful!” the AI exclaimed. “I mean, technically this has a 67% chance of ending in complete disaster, but the remaining 33% contains some absolutely fascinating possibilities! Did I ever tell you about the time a Kryloxian scientist tried something similar? The results were spectacular, although it did turn all their food into sentient plasma for a few weeks…”

As Quirk rambled on, Marcos watched his daughter work. The ship’s crystals sang their strange song, and somewhere in the darkness, everything was about to change. He squeezed Sara’s hand—twice for love, and once for the future they were about to steal from the stars themselves.