[DEAD MAN'S SWITCH: 720:00:00 ... 719:59:30]
Kael was falling at terminal velocity through the freezing mist of the Upper Stratos. The Chronos-Drive in his arms was a cold, pulsing weight, but it felt light compared to the crushing realization that his life was now an expiring asset.
"Kael, stop falling like a stone! You're moving too fast for the tractor beams!" Lyra's voice was a jagged edge in his ear.
"Gravity is a constant, Lyra! I'm just... following the rules!" Kael shouted back, the wind stripping the words from his lips. Below him, the twinkling lights of the Aries Sector looked like a web of predatory eyes.
Above him, the clouds erupted. A silver intercept-skiff, sleek as a needle and jagged as a shark, dived through the vapor. It didn't have a cockpit; it had a "Gemini-Glass" hull that allowed the pilot to see in 360 degrees.
"I'm opening the ventral hatch!" Lyra screamed. "But I can't match your descent speed without burning out the thrusters. You have to decelerate now!"
"Decelerate? With what?" Kael looked at his hands. The platinum light of the Sovereign Star Protocol was flickering, reacting to his rising adrenaline.
[SYSTEM ANALYSIS: KINETIC ENERGY OVERLOAD]
[SUGGESTION: DISTRIBUTE MOMENTUM TO ATMOSPHERIC GASES]
Kael didn't have a parachute, but he had a brain that understood Fluid Dynamics. He splayed his arms and legs, not to catch the wind, but to anchor to it. He focused on the air molecules beneath him, using the Protocol to momentarily increase their Viscosity.
The air didn't just resist him; it became like thick honey. His descent jerked, his joints popping from the sudden change in G-force. He slowed just enough for the silver skiff to slide beneath him.
CLANG.
Kael slammed onto the metal deck of the open hatch, the Chronos-Drive sliding across the floor. He scrambled inside, gasping for air that wasn't being shoved down his throat by the wind. The hatch hissed shut, sealing out the roar of the abyss.
"You're late," Kael wheezed, lying flat on his back.
"And you're glowing," Lyra snapped. She was strapped into the pilot's rig, her hair a silver halo of static electricity. "Kael, we have three Aries Star-Hunters on our tail. They're using 'Vector-Lock' missiles. If they lock onto our heat signature, we're vapor."
"Then don't be hot," Kael said, pulling himself up.
"This isn't a joke! The Skiff's engine is a fusion-core. It's the hottest thing in the sky!"
Lyra banked the ship hard, the inertial dampeners groaning. Through the rear viewport, Kael saw three streaks of golden fire. The Star-Hunters. They weren't just ships; they were "Gravity-Darts," capable of folding space to close the gap.
"We can't outrun them," Lyra whispered, her eyes darting across a dozen holographic displays. "Their computers are faster than my hands. I can't calculate the evasion vectors in time."
Kael looked at the red timer on his chest. 719:58:45. He looked at the Chronos-Drive. Then he looked at Lyra.
"Sync with me," Kael said.
Lyra froze. "What? No. A Neural Sync between an Unlinked and a High-Born is... it's a 'Cognitive Collapse' waiting to happen. Your mind is a mess of slum-trash and survival instincts. You'll fry my brain."
"And those missiles will fry our bodies," Kael countered, stepping toward her. He reached for the "Synapse-Cables" hanging from the ceiling. "You have the processing power to fly this ship, but you don't have the 'Gut' to predict the chaos. I have the chaos. I can feel the gravity before it hits. If we link, we become a Closed-Loop System."
The missiles were three seconds away.
"Fine!" Lyra snarled, grabbing the other cable. "But if I end up thinking about how much you like cheap street-noodles for the rest of my life, I'm killing you myself."
They slammed the cables into their neck-ports simultaneously.
The Sync.
The world didn't just change; it exploded.
Kael felt a cold, sharp needle of pure logic pierce his mind. He saw the world through Lyra's eyes—not as shapes and colors, but as a grid of probabilities, heat-maps, and digital signatures. He felt her fear, a cold blue stone in the center of her chest, and her memory of a garden in the Gemini Sector that smelled of rain.
Lyra gasped, her body arching in the pilot's seat. She was suddenly flooded with Kael's "Weight." She felt the hunger of the slums, the gritty texture of the Sump-mines, and the raw, unpolished power of the Protocol burning like a sun in his spine.
But most of all, she felt his Intuition.
They're going to fire... now, Kael's thought echoed in her mind, not as a voice, but as a shared instinct.
Lyra didn't wait for the computer to beep. Guided by Kael's "feel" for the gravity-shift, she pulled the yoke in a maneuver that should have been physically impossible.
The Skiff didn't turn; it pivoted on its own center of mass.
The three missiles hissed past, missing the hull by centimeters. Kael felt the heat of them through Lyra's skin.
Again, Kael thought. Twist left. Delete the friction on the port-side wing.
Lyra executed the command before he finished thinking it. Using the Protocol, Kael stripped the air resistance from one side of the ship. The Skiff spun like a top, spiraling through a gap between two massive cloud-harvesters.
"We're too fast!" Lyra shouted, her voice and Kael's voice syncing into a strange, harmonic chord. "We're going to hit the canyon wall!"
No, Kael's mind surged. Look at the wall. It isn't solid. It's a density-gradient. Hit it at the 12-degree mark.
Through the Sync, Lyra saw what Kael saw: a flaw in the structural integrity of the floating building ahead. She didn't brake. She accelerated.
"Brace!" they said in unison.
The Skiff slammed into the building—not by crashing, but by "Phasing" through a pressurized ventilation shaft that Kael had sensed. They burst through the other side, the Star-Hunters slamming into the solid masonry behind them in a fireball of golden debris.
The Skiff leveled out, soaring into the dark, quiet space between the Aries and Taurus sectors.
Slowly, painfully, they pulled the cables from their necks.
The silence that followed was heavy. Kael and Lyra sat in the dim glow of the cockpit, breathing in unison. The Sync was broken, but the "Residual Echo" remained. Kael knew that Lyra was secretly terrified of her father; Lyra knew that Kael's "Sovereign Protocol" was slowly eating him alive.
"Your mind..." Lyra whispered, not looking at him. "It's... loud."
"Yours is too quiet," Kael replied, rubbing his neck. "It's like living in a library."
He looked at the red timer on his chest.
[719:55:00]
"We survived," Lyra said, finally turning to look at him. Her eyes were different now—the professional distance was gone, replaced by a haunting, shared intimacy. "But Kael, I saw it. During the Sync. I saw the 'Logic' of that switch."
"And?"
"It's not just a timer," Lyra said, her voice trembling. "It's a Download Progress Bar. By the time it hits zero, the Protocol will have completely overwritten your DNA. You won't be a man anymore. You'll be a living Array."
Kael looked at his hands, which were still humming with platinum light. "Then I guess we better make the next twenty-nine days count."