"Your suit lagged for a reason. Something inside your chest tried to eat the lithium battery."
Caleb kept his jaw tight while the secondary monitor on Tali's workbench replayed the heat bloom. "Eat it."
"Figure of speech, Mercer." Tali tapped her grease-stained wrench against the discarded battery pack. "I'm talking about a localized power draw. Massive voltage drop right over your central chest node. The sync-mesh fired, hit a biological heat spike, and drained the core trying to compensate. Random wire damage is ugly. This is clean. Something is pulling power."
A hollow cramp twisted his stomach. Starvation scraped against his ribs, searching for fuel to finish mending the torn artery in his neck.
"Bad connections," Caleb said, keeping his tone flat. "Sweat in the chest plate. Surplus gear rusts fast."
A pink gum bubble snapped over the screech of a distant arc welder.
