Page 106 of Journey to the Forbidden Zone

“Captain,Star Shrikeis hit! Massive damage! Engines gone! Hull breach on decks three through seven! We’re losing power! Who the HELL?—?”

The static cleared for a split second. The viewscreen showed his magnificent pirate vessel listing violently, trailing a comet’s tail of debris and escaping atmosphere. Where the starboard engine had been was a gaping, ragged wound glowing white-hot.

And emerging from the nebula’s dust clouds, sleek, dark, and utterly silent, came a vessel shaped like a stingray. No running lights. No energy signature beyond the fading ripple of its devastating weapon.

The government assassins. They hadn’t just come for the Xena. They’d come to erase every witness. Every loose end.

Including him.

The cold void inside Nick ignited. Fury, pure and incandescent, flooded his veins, hotter than the plasma that had vaporized his engine. It wasn’t directed at the killer ship.

Her.

This washerfault. Her bleeding-heart defiance. Her refusal to just hand over the fucking alien. If she’d just rolled over like the insignificant gutter trash she was, the Xena would be delivered, the contract fulfilled, and theStar Shrikewould be light-years away, counting credits. Not bleeding out in the shadow of some fucking automated sentry.

His fist slammed down on the console beside him. Plastic cracked under the impact.

“DÍAZ!” he roared, screaming at the stars for the injustice of it all.

CHAPTER 40

Zed initiated the hack-code package.The briefcase dissolved in his hand, not physically, but conceptually within the dataspace, releasing the intricate weave of Norvik’s programming. It flowed like liquid silver along the interface probes, merging with the pulsing lattice before him.

Status:Implementation sequence initiated.

The core processor flared. Its colors fluctuated, dimming to murky tones of brick-red, sepia-brown, rust-yellow.

Conflict resolution analysis:Hack-code adaptability exceeding defensive evolution by12.7%.Projected success probability:83.4%.Duration:1.7seconds.

The lattice flared once, a brilliant, blinding white. Then the swirling vortices on the walls smoothed back into flowing rivers. The core processor pulsed with a steady, calm rhythm. The intricate light patterns shifted, resolving into a new, stable configuration.

Hack-code implementation:Successful.Recognition protocols targetingAntillesembedded chip:Disabled.

The path was clear. The satellite would ignore theAntilles.

Zed retracted his interface probes. His humanoid hand reformed. The immediate threat neutralized, secondary protocols activated. Status update. He needed to inform Captain Díaz.

He triggered the comms override subroutine, a specific code sequence designed to temporarily lower the satellite’s powerful anti-communication jamming field that shielded this sector. It was a risk, potentially alerting residual security protocols, but necessary.

The omnipresent hum of the core chamber shifted slightly. A new channel opened in his perception, a thin line back to theAntilles’s comm frequency.

Simultaneously, his external sensor feeds, previously muted to conserve processing power during the hack, reactivated. Data flooded in from the cameras embedded in his now-distant physical chassis clamped to the satellite’s hull.

The feed resolved.

Empty space. Stars. The looming dark wedge of the satellite’s structure.

And floating debris.

Molten fragments of composite alloy, still glowing faintly red. Shattered segments of his own chassis’s armored casing. Severed cables, sparking intermittently in the vacuum. The distinctive tread of his locomotion unit, twisted and mangled.

Chassis status:Destroyed. Irreparable.

The data point landed with cold, absolute finality. There was no emotion attached, only a stark recalibration of existence. His consciousness resided here, within the satellite’s mainframe, in a temporary avatar construct. Without a physical anchor, termination was inevitable. The avatar would degrade.

Survival probability without physical host:0%.Duration estimate:7minutes,42seconds.

He processed the variables. TheAntilleswas nearby. Its core systems, while antiquated, possessed sufficient processing architecture to host his consciousness. But the distance was significant. The void between the satellite and the freighter was littered with background radiation, sensor ghosts from the nebula, and the residual energy wash from the recent weapon discharge he’d just detected – a massive plasma impact signature.