CHAPTER 7: THE REFORMATTED

  The Logic-Hounds didn't move like men. They moved like faulty code—stuttering forward in short, violent bursts of speed that defied inertia. Their fused rifles began to whine, a high-pitched electrical build-up that made the hair on Jax’s arms stand at attention.

  "Koda, get behind the pylon!" Vex shouted. She didn't wait for a reply. She slid into a low crouch, her pulse-cutter barking as she sent a glowing blue bolt into the lead Hound’s chest.

  The bolt hit with a shower of sparks, but the Hound didn't fall. It didn't even flinch. The violet light in its chest-cavity flared, absorbing the kinetic energy and re-routing it into its arm-cannon.

  "They’re feeding on the 'Rust'!" Barnaby yelled, his spider-legs clattering as he scrambled up the wall to avoid a return shot. "Traditional ballistics are useless, Vex! They are part of the station’s immune system now. You're trying to shoot a virus with a pebble!"

  "Then what am I supposed to do?!" Vex ducked behind a crystalline pillar as a red ion-bolt melted the air where her head had been a second before.

  Jax stood in the center of the hallway. He wasn't breathing. To his eyes, the world had slowed to a crawl. He didn't see the Hounds as enemies; he saw them as corrupted directories. He saw the "Strings" of violet light connecting their nervous systems to the station’s central core.

  “COMMANDER,” the Aurora whispered in his mind, its voice vibrating through his marrow. “THEY ARE OUTDATED FIRMWARE. DELETE THEM.”

  Jax reached out, his hand open. The star-brand on his wrist pulsed with a blinding, rhythmic heat. He didn't fire a weapon. He made a "Grab" gesture in the empty air and twisted his wrist.

  "Force-Quit," Jax croaked.

  The lead Hound froze. Its violet lens flickered frantically, turning red, then white, then dark. A sound like a screaming modem tore through the hallway as Jax’s "Logic" flooded the creature's processors, overwriting its combat subroutines with a single command: Null.

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  The Hound collapsed, not as a corpse, but as a heap of unformatted metal and grey ash.

  "One down!" Jax gasped, blood beginning to trickle from his nose. The strain of the hack felt like a hot iron being pressed against his brain.

  "Two more coming hot!" Vex yelled. She saw her opening. If she couldn't kill them with bolts, she’d kill them with gravity. She lunged forward, swinging her pulse-cutter like a club, smashing the second Hound’s knee-joint.

  As the creature stumbled, Jax didn't try to delete it. He did something worse. He "Synced" with it.

  For a heartbeat, Jax was the Hound. He felt the cold, empty hunger of the machine. He reached through its connection back into the station's grid and pulled. He dragged the power from the third Hound and dumped it into the station’s lighting system.

  The hallway erupted in a flash of gold light so bright it blinded everyone but Jax. The third Hound simply winked out of existence, its energy signature scattered into the nebula.

  Silence returned to the pylon, broken only by the heavy, ragged breathing of the crew.

  "Jax?" Koda peered out from behind the pylon, his eyes wide behind his cracked glasses. "Your... your skin. It’s glowing."

  Jax looked at his arms. Faint, violet geometric patterns were etched into his flesh, fading slowly as the adrenaline receded. He felt taller. He felt colder.

  In the center of the room, the command pylon hissed. A pedestal rose from the floor, and resting upon it was a device that looked like a compass made of shifting liquid light.

  The Logic-Bridge.

  "We got it," Jax said, his voice sounding hollow, like an echo in a canyon. He reached out and took the Key.

  The moment his fingers closed around it, the station stopped "breathing." The ghostly violet lights dimmed, and the weight of the nebula outside seemed to press even harder against the glass.

  "We need to go," Barnaby said, his lens twitching toward the airlock. "The Authority fleet just dropped out of the Fold. They aren't here for the station, Jax. They’re here because they felt you 'Sync' with it. You just rang a dinner bell in a room full of wolves."

  Vex grabbed Jax’s arm, her grip firm and human. "Can we Blink? A real one this time? Without the memory loss?"

  Jax looked at the Logic-Bridge in his hand. He could feel the calculations already running in his mind—the coordinates, the vector, the safe-passage through the Void.

  "We don't just Blink anymore, Vex," Jax said, a small, dangerous smile touching his lips. "Now, we jump."