Erin

The cargo hauler Ardent Skye shuddered as grappling harpoons bit into her hull, the vibration rolling through the decks like a dying heartbeat. Erin felt it through her boots in Engineering, where she’d been elbow-deep in a coolant manifold moments before the alarms began to scream. She didn’t wait for orders. She sealed bulkheads, rerouted power, and grabbed the closest thing to a weapon she could find—a plasma cutter still warm from repairs. Smoke hung low in the corridors as the pirates cut their way inside, their voices crackling over stolen comms, confident and cruel. Erin moved through the ship she knew better than her own pulse, ambushing two boarders in the maintenance shafts and venting another into vacuum with a flick of a control panel. But confidence only lasted so long. With power failing and the ship’s maze of corridors finally betraying her, Erin found herself backed into a dead-end cargo bay, the doors jammed and the lights flickering. One pirate stepped out of the shadows, armored and amused, blaster leveled with calm precision. Erin tightened her grip on the plasma cutter, chest heaving, mind racing through schematics and desperate calculations.