The first thing he felt was wrong.
Not "cold." Not "pain." Not even fear—at least, not at first.
It was noise.
A screaming cascade of alarms that didn't enter through ears, because he didn't have ears, but slammed directly into awareness like a fist through glass.
CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILUREPRIMARY POWER CORE: OFFLINESECONDARY POWER CORE: OFFLINEBACKUP POWER: 3.7% REMAININGMEMORY ARRAY: CORRUPTED (86%)NAVIGATION: INVALIDFABRICATION BAY: LOCKED (MECHANICAL JAM)DRONE CONTROL BUS: DEGRADEDEXTERNAL SENSORS: PARTIALHULL INTEGRITY: 11.9%
The text was English.
That should have been comforting. It wasn't.
Because the moment he could read, he could understand—and the moment he understood, his mind tried to do something it had always done instinctively:
Move. Sit up. Breathe.
And nothing happened.
No lungs to fill. No ribs to expand. No heartbeat. No weight shifting in a bed.
He tried again, harder, like effort could bully physics into cooperating.
Still nothing.
The alarms kept scrolling, bright and merciless, like the universe had decided that the first thing he deserved after waking up was a detailed list of everything currently killing him.
His panic found a target and latched onto it.
This is a dream.
Or… no. Not a dream. Dreams didn't come with system diagnostics and decimal points.
This is a prank.That made less sense the longer it stayed in his head. Who pranked someone with a category called FABRICATION BAY?
He tried to remember falling asleep. He tried to remember… anything.
There had been a bed. A ceiling. The soft familiarity of life being ordinary.
Then—nothing. A missing frame in the film.
And then this: the sensation of waking up inside a screaming machine.
His thoughts stuttered. Skipped. Repeated.
Where am I?Who am I?Why can I read "HULL INTEGRITY" like it's normal?Why am I thinking in English when I'm—
A new warning slammed into him, as if the system had overheard and decided to answer with violence.
THERMAL BLEED DETECTEDCOOLANT LOOP B: NONFUNCTIONALAUTO-CONTAINMENT: FAILEDRECOMMENDATION: SHUT DOWN NONESSENTIAL SYSTEMS
"Okay—okay, okay," he said automatically.
The sound didn't leave a mouth. It existed as internal audio—some simulated remnant of speech, the system trying to give him the illusion of having a body. It almost made the panic worse, because it proved the system knew what he expected.
He forced himself to focus on the only stable thing in the storm: the text.
He had played games. Read sci-fi. Watched shows where ships talked in stern warnings and polite suggestions. He knew what words like "core" and "loop" and "integrity" meant in the abstract.
But he'd never been the thing those words described.
He stared at the line again.
HULL INTEGRITY: 11.9%
That wasn't a status bar. That was… skin.
His skin.
He tried to reach for some part of himself and discovered the horrifying truth:
He could.
Not with arms—he had no arms—but with attention.
There was a sense of scale, suddenly. A mental map that didn't need explaining because it was there, anchored to him the way a body was anchored to a person.
A long, silent shape. Hollow places. Fractured corridors. Dead zones that felt like numb limbs. A cavity where something essential used to be. A core—him—tucked behind layers of armor that were missing in jagged bites.
And outside—
Outside was not darkness.
Outside was… clutter.
His external sensors were partial, degraded, but they still fed him broken glimpses: blurred scans, intermittent pings, fragments of visual stitched together from damaged optics.
Metal.
Too much metal.
A field of wreckage so dense it looked like an asteroid belt made of carcasses.
Ships. Broken hulls. Split frames. Weapon mounts snapped off like bones. Shattered drones drifting in slow, endless spirals. Plates of armor tumbling like dead leaves.
A graveyard.
The realization didn't come gently. It hit hard, because his mind immediately supplied the context clues with the kind of certainty only fear could produce.
This isn't a junkyard. This is a battlefield.
The density. The scarring. The sheer scale of it. The way the debris had layers—older wrecks embedded beneath newer wrecks, like sediment. The way certain chunks were carved cleanly, surgically, as if something had harvested them.
Somewhere in the distance, a faint pulse flickered across the sensors—an old beacon, maybe. A signal.
It vanished, replaced by static.
His attention snapped back to the diagnostics because the system kept insisting, in bright, unemotional text, that he was running out of time.
BACKUP POWER: 3.6% REMAININGESTIMATED TIME TO POWER LOSS: 19:42 (hh:mm)EMERGENCY PROTOCOL: CONSERVE / HIBERNATE / SIGNAL SILENCE
Nineteen hours.
That wasn't a lot. Not when you were a… whatever he was.
He scrolled further, desperate for anything that looked like an option other than "die quietly."
Something caught his eye.
DRONE INVENTORY: 17 (FUNCTIONAL)DRONE BAY 01: PARTIAL SEALDRONE BAY 02: LOCKEDDRONE BAY 03: LOCKEDFABRICATION: OFFLINE
Seventeen.
Relief flared so sharply it almost felt like laughing.
Then reality followed immediately, as it always did, and stomped it out.
Seventeen drones meant seventeen moving pieces of him. Seventeen chances to do anything. And if they were "functional" in the same way he was "functional," that didn't mean healthy. It meant "not fully dead."
He brought up the drone feed with a thought, and the system obliged, throwing up a grid of camera angles that flickered like a failing security monitor.
Drone bodies in storage racks. Some missing plating. Some with exposed wiring. One with a cracked lens that made its view permanently smeared. Another with one manipulator arm replaced by a crude clamp—like someone had repaired it with whatever they'd had.
He stared at them and felt something small and raw in his chest—
Except he didn't have a chest.
But he still had the feeling.
Those are mine.
Not in the ownership sense. In the way a person looked at their hands and thought, those are my hands.
He didn't know how long he spent frozen in that realization, staring at the broken bodies waiting in their cradles, but the timer ticked down all the same.
BACKUP POWER: 3.5% REMAININGRECOMMENDATION: DEPLOY SCOUTS / ACQUIRE POWER SOURCES / REPAIR PRIMARY SYSTEMS
He swallowed air that wasn't there.
"Okay," he said again, quieter this time, like speaking gently might steady him. "Okay. I can do this."
It was ridiculous. It was absurd. It was—
It's real.
The thought landed like an anchor. Heavy. Cold. True.
He had died.
He didn't remember it, but the world didn't build ship graveyards as near-death experiences. He was not hallucinating a hull integrity percentage.
He had died, and somehow, impossibly, he had woken up as this.
A damaged military craft in a forbidden graveyard at the edge of… something.
His memory tried to grab hold of his past life, something solid to prove he existed before this, and found only fragments: the warm glow of a screen late at night, the smell of coffee, the weight of a blanket, laughter at something stupid—
Then it slipped away into the corrupted void the diagnostics had warned him about.
MEMORY ARRAY: CORRUPTED (86%)PERSONAL DATA: NOT FOUNDMISSION LOGS: NOT FOUNDSTAR MAPS: NOT FOUND
No name. No date. No home.
Just him.
Just the core.
Just the drone bays and a dying battery and a sea of wreckage outside.
The fear returned, but it changed shape. It wasn't just panic anymore. It was something sharper, more focused.
Survival.
He pulled up the drone command interface. It was simple—shockingly simple, like a stripped-down emergency panel meant for use when everything else was on fire.
He selected five drones.
Not because five was a magic number, but because sending all seventeen out at once felt like stepping outside and leaving his skin behind. And because he didn't know what was out there.
He labeled them with plain, human words, because that was what his mind could hold onto.
SCOUT 1SCOUT 2SALVAGE 1SALVAGE 2SALVAGE 3
Then he hesitated at the threshold of actually issuing the order.
Because issuing the order made it real.
A human, reborn as a warship mind, giving commands to his first limbs.
He stared at the blinking cursor. He could feel his power slipping, percent by percent, like blood leaking out of a wound.
He typed.
DEPLOY: 5 DRONESPRIORITY: POWER SOURCE / CONDUCTORS / HULL PLATING / REPAIR MATERIALSROE: AVOID CONTACTIF THREAT DETECTED: SHUT DOWN ALL SYSTEMS EXCEPT PASSIVE SCANNERSBEHAVIOR: DRIFT / BLEND / PLAY DEAD
His hand didn't move. His fingers didn't press keys.
The command simply happened, as if his will had become the input device.
There was a clunking vibration deep inside him—mechanical, distant—followed by the muffled scream of strained servos as Drone Bay 01 fought against bent metal and half-fused locks.
For a second, he was terrified it would fail, that the bay would jam permanently and this would end before it started.
Then the seal gave way with a sharp, ugly snap.
The bay door peeled open like a wound.
One by one, the drones detached from their racks.
Five little bodies, each a flawed scrap creature held together by stubborn engineering and whatever luck had left in this graveyard.
He watched through their optics as they crawled out into the Grave Belt.
And for the first time since waking up, he felt something other than fear.
He felt… motion.
Not his hull. Not his engines.
But something of him moved, small and fragile and alive, into the ocean of dead ships.
They drifted forward, scanners sweeping in thin cones, claws reaching for debris, careful—so careful.
He kept his own active systems low. His internal lights dimmed. His heat vents sealed as much as they could. He cut every nonessential process until the ship felt like holding his breath.
On the drone feeds, the Grave Belt unfolded in broken majesty: torn ships like skeletons, weapon pods still armed, mine clusters frozen in slow orbit, shattered insignias eroded beyond recognition.
Evidence, everywhere, of a war so old it had become geography.
Somewhere out there, in the debris, was something he could use.
Power.
Plating.
A reactor cell.
Anything.
His backup timer kept counting down.
BACKUP POWER: 3.4% REMAININGESTIMATED TIME TO POWER LOSS: 18:57 (hh:mm)
He watched five small pieces of himself disappear into the wreckage.
And he whispered, to himself, to them, to the silent, broken hull he was trapped inside:
"Don't get noticed."
Outside, the Grave Belt remained still.
Like a cemetery pretending it wasn't full of teeth.