The unpressurized auxiliary launch slip of the Ghost Dock was a cavern of absolute, freezing silence. Sealed off from the main pressurized hangar by a pair of ten-inch-thick steel blast doors, the slip was exposed directly to the void. The only illumination came from the portable, battery-powered halogen work lights Mark had clamped to the structural ribs of the asteroid wall. Their harsh, white glare cut through the pitch-black shadows, casting long, skeletal outlines of sleeping crane arms and ancient military scaffolding across the scarred nickel-iron floor.

Mark Kelly adjusted the magnetic soles of his boots, locking himself to a maintenance platform. Inside his yellow-and-gray EVA suit, his breathing was a dry, raspy whistle—the permanent, metallic-tasting wheeze left behind by the toxic ammonia coolant vapors he had inhaled during his frantic repairs in Sector 4. Every breath felt like inhaling fine sand, a constant reminder of the physical price he was paying for every hour he remained in orbit.

He flexed his right hand inside his glove, and a sharp, white-hot needle of pain shot straight up his forearm. The blisters that had ruptured during his high-velocity leap from Razor’s rig had turned his palm into a raw, sticky mess, the fluid adhering his torn skin directly to the coarse fabric of his inner suit liner. His left hand was even worse. The thumb, swollen to twice its size and a waxy, deadened white from severe frostbite, hung uselessly inside his glove like a piece of frozen meat. He had to use his elbow and the crook of his wrist to steady himself against the workbench.

"Keep your head down, Bobby," Mark rasped, his voice sounding flat and muffled inside his sealed helmet. "We don't know what kind of residual charge is left in this thing's capacitors. If it discharges, it’ll blow a hole straight through your visor."

Beside him, Bobby Chen was a blur of hyperactive motion. The young circuit salvager was weightless, his safety tether floating in a lazy, silver arc behind him. He wore a heavily customized EVA suit caked in solder flux and grease, his face hidden behind a modified helmet visor fitted with a rotating array of three magnifying lenses over his left eye. He was constantly shifting his weight, his fingers tapping a rapid, impatient rhythm against his handheld diagnostic terminal.

"I know, I know, Mark! Quiet vacuum, cold solder, high risk—my absolute favorite combination," Bobby said, his voice coming through the suit comms in a rapid-fire, high-pitched chatter that grated on Mark’s throbbing head. "But look at this beauty! An Apex-manufactured tactical scout probe, early military-spec, completely unmapped. It’s been drifting in the outer Graveyard since the first orbit war. The corporate salvage teams missed it because it’s wrapped in a passive radar-absorbing composite hull. But the electromagnetic core inside? Oh, it’s pristine. It’s exactly the high-grade military core we need to rebuild your Modified Magnetic Grapple Claw. If we can harvest it, your new winch will have twice the tensile pull of your old one."

Mark leaned over the workbench, his eyes scanning the dead probe. It was an ugly, angular cylinder caked in space dust and pitted with microscopic meteorite impacts. It was secured to the metal bench by three heavy, manual docking clamps that Mark had tightened using his elbows and the flat edge of his wrench.

Before they could even think about mounting the new core, Mark had to address the structural damage to their scrap-ship. He looked over at the vessel’s forward frame, which was visible through the open launch slip. The structural frame where the old winch had sheared off during their confrontation with Lieutenant Briggs was a mess of jagged metal. He had detected deep micro-fractures running along the main triangular hull braces—the Winch Mounting Fractures. If they didn't weld reinforcing titanium plates over those fractures, the extreme kinetic tension of their next high-G grapple maneuver would tear the entire forward nose section clean off the ship.

"The fractures on the forward frame are deep, Bobby," Mark said, his voice tight. "We have to reinforce the mounting plate before we install the new core. But we can't do that until we get the core out of this probe. Scrappy is still offline, undergoing a deep defragmentation cycle after the data dump from the Sovereign Gate. We’re flying blind without his trajectory math. We have to do this manually."

"Manually? Oh, I love manual! Manual means no corporate firewalls can lock us out from five thousand miles away," Bobby chirped, his visor lenses clicking as he rotated a high-magnification lens into place. He hovered over the probe's primary access panel, holding a high-precision manual soldering rig. "Alright, Mark. I'm going to tap into the secondary diagnostic bus. I just need to read the firmware registers to ensure the security lockout doesn't trigger when we pull the core."

"Methodical, Bobby," Mark warned, his brow furrowing. "No shortcuts. If you trigger the security firewall, the probe’s automated defenses will activate."

"Trust me, Mark! I’ve cracked a hundred of these dead military sensors. They’re old-world tech. Analog registers, simple logic gates—"

Bobby connected his diagnostic terminal to the probe’s exposed circuit board using a set of fine, copper-tipped test leads. His fingers flew across the terminal’s keypad, uploading a basic decryption script.

On the terminal screen, a series of green diagnostic lines began to scroll. Then, suddenly, the green lines turned a violent, pulsing amber.

*BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.*

A sharp, rhythmic alarm echoed through their suit headsets.

"Oh, slide-rules and static," Bobby muttered, his hyperactive energy instantly freezing into panic. "That’s... that’s not an analog gate. They’ve upgraded the firmware. It’s an active corporate security firewall! It’s a hardware-level trap!"

Inside the probe’s unpressurized chassis, a low, ominous hum began to vibrate through the metal workbench. Mark felt the vibration directly through the magnetic soles of his boots. Through the gaps in the probe’s scarred hull plating, a row of heavy, high-capacity capacitors began to glow with a faint, pulsing blue light.

"The capacitors are charging!" Bobby yelled, his visor lenses clicking wildly as he backed away. "They’re drawing power from the residual nuclear battery! It’s an automated defensive purge protocol! If those capacitors reach full charge, they’re going to release a sixty-kilovolt high-voltage discharge directly through the chassis! It’ll fry my terminal, melt our suit electronics, and cook our hearts!"

"Cut the link, Bobby!" Mark ordered, his voice cracking as he forced his battered body forward.

"I can't!" Bobby panicked, his fingers scrambling over his terminal. "The digital firewall has lock-looped my terminal! The software is frozen! If I pull the leads manually, the inductive kickback will trigger the discharge instantly! We have less than twenty seconds!"

Mark’s mind raced, his *Systems Engineer* instincts stripping away the panic and replacing it with pure, cold mechanical calculations. He looked at the glowing blue capacitors. Digital bypasses were useless against active corporate encryption once the loop was locked. The software was a closed circle. To stop the discharge, he had to break the physical path of the power before the software could execute the command.

He had to use *Avionics Hotwiring*.

Reaching into his suit’s utility pouch with his clumsy, injured hands, Mark pulled out a manual copper wire pin—a simple, uninsulated metal pin he used for physical circuit jumping.

Every nerve in his hands screamed in agony as he forced his raw, bleeding right palm to grip the pin. His left thumb, swollen and numb, could offer no support. He had to lean his entire body weight over the probe, using his chest to steady his arm as he aligned the pin with the primary power relay located between the charging capacitors and the central processor.

"Mark, what are you doing?" Bobby screamed. "If you touch that relay with an uninsulated pin, you’re going to catch the feedback!"

"Better my glove than our lifesupport, Bobby," Mark rasped, his teeth grinding together so hard his jaw ached. "Get your soldering iron ready. The moment I short the relay, you have exactly five seconds to desolder the security chip before the secondary capacitor cycles."

Mark watched the capacitor indicators on his HUD.

*Ninety percent charge. Ninety-five.*

With a silent prayer to his father's memory, Mark shoved the copper pin directly into the primary power relay.

*ZAP-SPARK!*

A brilliant, blinding blue electrical arc erupted from the relay, illuminating the dark launch slip in a violent, flickering flash. The physical shock of the high-voltage feedback slammed into Mark’s right arm, throwing him backward against his safety tether. A smell of burnt silicone and scorched synthetic fabric filled his helmet. Inside his glove, the raw flesh of his palm blistered further as the electrical current arced through the damp, blood-soaked fabric of his inner liner. His visor display flickered wildly, the static-choked HUD warning him of a localized power surge.

But the hum died.

The glowing blue capacitors instantly went dark, their charge redirected safely into the workbench's grounding block.

"Now, Bobby!" Mark roared, his voice a ragged gasp as he hung weightless against his tether, his right arm completely numb.

Bobby Chen didn't waste a millisecond. His hyperactive panic vanished, replaced by the clinical precision of a master circuit salvager. He drifted forward, his custom soldering rig emitting a sharp, localized thermal arc. With surgical accuracy, he touched the tip to the security chip’s lead-tin alloy solder joints.

*HISS.*

A tiny cloud of vaporized flux drifted into the vacuum, freezing instantly into microscopic white crystals. Bobby’s manual tweezers snipped the copper traces.

"Got it! Security chip is clear!" Bobby yelled, holding up a tiny, green silicon square in his tweezers.

Mark dragged himself back to the workbench, his breath coming in shallow, painful gasps. He checked his suit diagnostics. The emergency capacitor bypass had held, but his right glove was heavily scorched, the outer thermal layer caked in black carbon soot. His hand was trembling violently, the physical pain of the electrical burn mixing with the deep, throbbing ache of his radiation sickness.

"Let's get the core out," Mark said, refusing to let the pain stop him.

Together, they worked to unbolt the probe’s primary housing. Using his manual tools and the shipyard’s overhead crane, Mark carefully extracted the military-grade electromagnetic core. It was a heavy, cylindrical block of dark-grey alloy, wound in dense, shimmering coils of high-purity copper. It was beautiful, heavy, and completely stable.

"We did it, Mark!" Bobby cheered, his visor lenses clicking as he inspected the core. "The core is secure. We have the muscle. Now we just need to align the winch gears and mount it to your forward frame. Your new claw is going to be a monster!"

Mark allowed himself a brief, silent nod of satisfaction. They had secured the core, and they had the tools to reinforce the ship's fractures.

To verify the core's integrity before mounting it, Bobby connected the core to the shipyard's auxiliary power bus to run a basic magnetic field test.

"Powering up the core for calibration, Mark. Just a low-frequency pulse to align the magnetic domains," Bobby said, tapping his terminal.

*HUMMM.*

The electromagnetic core vibrated, a deep, powerful hum that resonated through the metal workbench and the deck plates. A localized magnetic field expanded around the core, bending the floating dust particles into neat, curved lines.

But on the main terminal console behind them, a silent, low-frequency signal indicator began to pulse.

Mark’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the screen. The temporary power-up of the military-grade core had triggered an automated, low-frequency telemetry beacon—a silent, digital trace that was currently escaping through the asteroid's ventilation shafts and out into the open void.

"Bobby... shut it down," Mark whispered, his heart freezing. "Shut it down now."

But it was too late. In the dark expanse of Sector 9, miles away from the Ghost Dock, a silent corporate tracking node flickered to life, capturing the unique, low-frequency signal spike and routing it directly to the terminal of a dedicated corporate hacker.