The Union didn't feel like a throne.
It felt like a knife.
A cramped cockpit wrapped in humming systems and patched wiring, one wrong choice away from broadcasting their location to anyone hungry enough to come take it. Lyra kept her hands light on the controls anyway—steady, controlled—because panic made people sloppy, and sloppy got you boarded.
Dack was the leader.
Everyone on the ship knew it.
Lyra didn't run Moonjaw. She ran the Union—the ship's movement, the burn profiles, the docking math, the quiet decisions that kept their transponder from screaming here I am, come kill me.
But when it came to the crew—rules, prisoners, contracts, what they did next—that was Dack.
Lyra respected it, because Dack didn't lead with speeches. He led with decisions that kept people breathing.
The forward glass showed black space flecked with stars. Pretty from a distance. Murder up close. The Union drifted on low output, nothing flashy, no wide sweeps. Lyra had cut the ship down to minimal signature the second the bay doors sealed. You couldn't outrun everyone, but you could make yourself expensive to find.
On her board, four windows stayed pinned:
Jump Plot / Vector
Transponder Spoof
Internal Systems / Damage
External Traffic / Passive Scans
A fifth sat minimized in the corner like a guilty thought.
LEDGER PACKET — DROP CONFIRMATIONS
She didn't stare at it for comfort. There was no comfort in it. Just consequence.
The dead drops were already live. The sanitize directive was already out. That meant people who'd thought they could bury this now had to choose between denying it, killing more witnesses, or shifting the story fast enough to survive the blowback.
Panic made mistakes.
Mistakes made openings.
Openings were how merc crews lived.
A soft ping chimed.
Lyra's eyes flicked to external traffic.
A passive scan line rolled through the region—wide, lazy, pretending it was commercial navigation noise. It wasn't. Not with that pattern.
She marked it without changing her breathing.
Most hunters did one scan to see what you'd do.
The smart ones scanned again to see what you didn't do.
Lyra waited.
Another scan line rolled.
Closer.
Then a third, slightly offset, like someone triangulating without committing to a lock.
She didn't swear. She didn't mutter. She just adjusted the Union's drift profile with a low-output burn that wouldn't flare hot enough to sing on most sensors. A tiny change in vector. A quiet refusal to stay predictable.
Lyra turned her internal cam feed onto the mech bay.
The view made her jaw tighten even though she'd already seen it.
The Dire Wolf powered down but not dead—Dack's way. The machine sat like a sleeping predator, lights low, reactor quiet enough to wake fast. The Highlander was still streaked with soot and impact scoring where Jinx had used it like a hammer. Taila's Griffin sat tucked tighter than it used to—less "parked," more "ready." Morrigan's Marauder stayed half in shadow because Morrigan couldn't resist making even steel look like a threat.
And overhead…
The Atlas.
Hanging from mag clamps and chain restraints like a trophy that hated being a trophy.
The woman inside it hadn't given her real name. They only had the handle—Lark—and the weight of her intent. Lyra didn't need a name to understand what Lark represented. Procurement chains. Quiet orders. A system that solved problems by erasing them.
Lyra switched feeds to corridor cameras.
Jinx and Taila leaving medbay together.
Their posture was wrong.
Not limping-wrong. Not concussion-wrong. Secret-wrong.
Lyra had seen that posture her entire life: people walking like they were trying to keep a truth from changing their gait.
Lyra knew exactly why.
She'd been the one who confirmed it.
The test kit didn't care about Jinx's grin. It didn't care about her bravado or her filthy jokes or the way she'd treated fear like a rival to mock. The analyzer had beeped and turned Jinx's future into a fact.
And Jinx—who could laugh with a Gauss rifle leveled at her—had gone very still like a girl who suddenly realized her body had made a decision without asking permission.
Lyra watched Jinx and Taila step back into the mech bay with their "normal" faces on.
Good.
Not because secrets were healthy.
Because timing mattered.
And if Dack learned right now, in the middle of running dark with a chained Atlas overhead and Quill in a pressure suit and a procurement chain hunting them, Dack would react exactly the way Dack always reacted when someone put a target on his people.
He would become a wall.
He'd lock down. He'd tighten rules. He'd carry it like a weight he couldn't set down.
And Jinx didn't want to be carried.
She wanted to stand.
Lyra understood that.
She also understood the other truth that made her throat feel tight:
Dack didn't ask to care.
He just did.
And caring was how people died in this line of work.
A soft internal ping came through.
Not the crew channel—private.
Taila: "You free?"
Lyra opened it. "Go."
Taila's voice came low and careful. "She's acting like it's nothing."
Lyra's eyes stayed on the scans. "It's not nothing."
Taila exhaled. "She told me not to tell him."
Lyra didn't pretend confusion. "I know."
Taila hesitated, then the words came out like a confession. "If he knows, he'll change."
Lyra kept her tone even. "Yes."
Taila went quiet for a beat. "He'll try to protect her."
Lyra said it plainly because Taila needed it said. "He'll try to protect all of us harder. That's what he does."
Taila's voice softened. "So what do we do?"
Lyra's fingers moved over the controls, altering the Union's vector a fraction more. "We do what Dack would do if he knew—keep her alive—but we don't force the truth into his hands while we're still on the run."
Taila swallowed. "How long?"
"As long as we have to," Lyra said. "And if she starts pushing too hard, you stop her."
Taila's voice got smaller. "She'll hate me."
Lyra's answer was calm and firm. "She'll live."
Taila exhaled slowly. "Okay."
Lyra closed the channel and stared out into the starfield again.
Leadership wasn't hers.
But responsibility still was.
The Union's drift. The ship's safety. The quiet things nobody noticed until they failed.
And this secret—this fragile, dangerous thing growing inside someone who pretended she was unbreakable—sat in Lyra's chest like a second set of instruments she had to keep in the green.
---
Lyra hadn't wanted to be a symbol when she was a kid.
She'd watched symbols die.
Her mother worked orbital docks—real work, dirty work, the kind that kept stations alive. Her father had been a civilian shuttle pilot until a routine run turned into an intercept and the "routine" part died first. When the casualty notice came, nobody on the station said it was unfair. They said it was "the risk."
Lyra remembered watching her mother's hands shake over a workbench and thinking: The universe doesn't care what you deserve.
So Lyra trained.
Not for glory. Not for stories.
For control.
Navigation math until her eyes burned. Docking sims until her wrists ached. Emergency burn profiles until her stomach stopped flipping under acceleration. She learned the truth nobody romanticized: the best pilots weren't fearless. They were disciplined.
At the academy, people liked her until they realized she was serious.
Men flirted until she corrected their numbers. Then they got cold. Then they made jokes about how she'd "end up alone."
Lyra had believed it for a while.
Then she met Dack—average-looking, lean, quiet, dangerous in a way you didn't see until it mattered.
He didn't flirt.
He didn't posture.
He just asked what she could do, listened to her answer, and treated competence like it was worth something.
That kind of respect wasn't a romance line.
It was a foundation.
Somewhere between their first jump and their first near-death and the slow, strange way the crew became a pack, Lyra realized she'd stopped thinking of the Union as something she alone carried.
It had become the thing that carried all of them.
And that made the fear sharper.
Because now losing the ship didn't just mean losing a job.
It meant losing people.
---
A soft knock came at the cockpit hatch.
Lyra rotated calmly.
Dack stood there with his helmet under one arm, black pilot suit clinging to him, sweat-damp at the collar. His face didn't show emotion easily. His eyes did.
He stepped in without wasting movement.
"Report," he said.
Lyra nodded to the board. "We're running dark. Systems stable enough to jump. We've got passive scan patterns in the area—could be routine traffic, could be someone casting a net. It's not a hard lock yet."
Dack stared at the scan signatures for a long moment.
Then, blunt as always: "Can you lose it?"
Lyra didn't lie to make him feel better. "Not forever."
He nodded once. "Then we move."
"Yes," she said. "I've got three options for where."
She pulled up the list.
"First: licensed station. Looks legitimate. Biggest risk of being flagged by procurement chain." She didn't need to say the rest.
Dack's mouth tightened. "No."
Lyra nodded. "Second: backwater depot run by smugglers. We can refit, sell salvage, get supplies. Risk is they sell us out."
Dack's eyes narrowed. "They will."
"Third," Lyra said, "dead rock. Abandoned yard. No oversight. We do our own work. Downside is time and resources."
Dack held the silence for a beat—thinking in the way he always thought, quiet and heavy.
Then he decided. "Dead rock first."
Lyra felt relief—small, sharp—not because it was easy, but because it meant he trusted her judgment when it mattered.
Dack's gaze flicked to the minimized window. "The packet. How far did it spread?"
Lyra opened it.
Drop confirmations stacked like receipts.
"Far enough," she said.
Dack's voice stayed flat. "Good."
He looked back at the scan window. "Quill?"
Lyra didn't flinch at the subject. "She's cut loose from her handler chain. Useful. Dangerous. If we dock anywhere with real logs, her face might get flagged."
Dack nodded once. "She stays on the ship."
Lyra replied, "That's what I'd recommend."
Dack's eyes lingered on her a fraction longer than necessary—like he knew she was holding something back. Dack was good at reading what wasn't said. He just didn't always push.
"Anything else?" he asked.
Lyra chose her words carefully. She didn't lie with words. She lied with timing.
"Mechs need time," she said. "Crew needs food and sleep. We're short on both."
Dack nodded. "Make it work."
"Yes," Lyra said.
He turned to leave, then paused with his hand on the hatch rim.
"Good flying," he said.
Two words.
From Dack, that was a medal.
Lyra's throat tightened and she swallowed it down. "Copy."
He left.
The hatch sealed.
Lyra sat still for a moment, listening to the ship's hum, the faint ghost-sounds of the mech bay beneath her feet.
Then she moved again, because stillness was how you got caught.
---
Later, she went to medbay.
Not as "leader."
As the pilot who understood the simplest truth in the universe:
If Jinx went down at the wrong time, the whole ship might follow.
Jinx sat on the edge of the autodoc chair like she wanted to bite it. Taila stood close, arms folded, eyes sharp with protective worry she pretended wasn't there.
Jinx's grin appeared instantly when Lyra entered. "Hey, Mom."
Lyra replied flatly, "Stop calling me that."
Jinx's grin sharpened. "No."
Lyra stepped closer, voice low. "If you want this secret, you follow my rules. Not because I'm in charge—because I'm the one who can keep you alive long enough to tell him when you're ready."
Jinx's amusement flickered. She tried to cover it with attitude. "Bossy."
Lyra's tone stayed calm. "Alive."
Jinx looked away for a second. Then she nodded. "Okay."
Taila said quietly, "We'll help."
Lyra glanced at Taila and felt something steady settle. Taila had started as someone shattered into sharp pieces. Now she was becoming reliable—dangerous in the right way.
"Good," Lyra said. "Then agreement stands: we don't tell Dack yet. Not until we're stable. We monitor you. You rest. You eat. No stupid hero moves."
Jinx bristled. "I don't—"
Lyra cut her off gently, firm. "You do."
Jinx stared at her, then laughed once—small and real. "I hate that you're right."
Taila squeezed Jinx's arm. Jinx didn't flinch away this time.
Lyra watched that and understood the shape of the pack more clearly than she ever had.
Dack was the leader.
But the pack held itself together in a dozen smaller ways—hands on arms, quiet agreements, secrets carried until they could be spoken without breaking the person who needed to hear them.
Lyra didn't like secrets.
But she liked Jinx alive more.
---
Back in the cockpit, the passive scan returned again.
Closer.
Then another.
The net was tightening.
Lyra adjusted the Union's vector, cut a little more power, and prepared the jump sequence.
She keyed the internal channel. "Dack."
His voice answered from deeper in the ship, low and blunt. "Yeah."
"We've got a tail pattern," Lyra said. "Still passive, but it's tightening."
A short pause. "Jump window?"
"Soon as the core is ready," she said.
"Do it," Dack replied.
Lyra didn't smile. She didn't breathe easier. She just obeyed, because Dack's decisions kept the crew alive and Lyra's flying kept those decisions possible.
She locked her harness, stared into the starfield like it was a map of knives, and executed the sequence with steady hands.
Somewhere out there, handlers were realizing their sanitize directive wasn't buried.
Somewhere out there, someone wanted the Atlas back.
Somewhere out there, people would come for Dack Jarn and the Dire Wolf and the crew that had made themselves too hard to erase.
And inside this ship, Jinx carried a secret that could turn Dack into something even more dangerous than he already was.
Lyra didn't pray.
She plotted.
She jumped.
And she trusted that when the time came—when the truth had to be spoken—Dack would carry it the way he carried everything else:
Quietly.
Brutally.
All the way to the end.