Borrowed Time
The air in the lower salvage bays tasted of ozone and oxidized copper. Kaelen wiped a smear of hydraulic fluid from his forehead, his fingers trembling. His frame, a matte-black silhouette of jagged plating and exposed wiring, sat slumped in the bay like a dying beast. Its integrity display flickered a nauseating, rhythmic red: 12%.
He had forty-eight minutes before the Outer Sector team trial. If he didn't stabilize the structural chassis, the first kinetic impact would fold the frame like paper.
Kaelen stepped into the black-market sector, a labyrinth of rusted shipping containers and flickering neon. He approached the dealer, a man named Vax whose eyes were perpetually fixed on the security feeds above his counter.
"Reinforced plating. Grade-four or better," Kaelen said, sliding his remaining credit chip across the scarred metal surface. It was his food stipend for the next two weeks.
Vax didn't look at the credits. He looked at the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling—the one with the Aethelgard Academy seal. "You're a popular pilot, Kaelen. Director Vane’s office has been asking about your salvage logs all morning. They want to know why a bottom-tier frame is outputting top-tier heat signatures."
Kaelen’s pulse spiked. The dealer wasn't just a fence; he was a snitch. "I'm just a pilot trying to keep my frame from falling apart. Do you have the plating or not?"
Vax smirked, sliding a box of cheap, brittle scrap toward him. "This is what you get. It’s all the Academy allows for your rank."
Kaelen didn't touch the scrap. He leaned in, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous register. "You’re selling me out for a few extra credits from Vane? When my frame collapses in the trial, Vane won't care about your little reports. He’ll just scrap the whole bay, you included."
He didn't wait for a response. As Vax reached for his comms-link, Kaelen lunged, not for the dealer, but for the high-grade plating stacked behind the counter—the restricted stock. He grabbed a heavy, reinforced alloy plate and shoved it into his pack, leaving the worthless scrap on the counter.
"Consider this a down payment on my survival," Kaelen spat, turning and sprinting into the shadows of the bay before the security drones could lock onto his signature.
He was halfway back to his bay when Lyra stepped out from behind a support pillar. She looked pristine, a sharp contrast to the grime of the lower levels.
"You’re flagged, Kaelen," she said, her voice devoid of its usual mockery. "Vane has the entire Outer Sector trial rigged. He’s pairing you with two 'dead-weight' pilots whose frames are programmed to dump their heat signatures into yours. You’ll hit sync-failure within the first three minutes."
Kaelen stopped, his breath hitching. "Why tell me?"
"Because if you fail, Vane wins, and the hierarchy stays exactly as he wants it," she replied, pressing a keycard into his hand. "This is an override for the Sector’s environmental dampeners. It won't stop the heat dump, but it might give you enough cooling capacity to survive the initial spike. Don't waste it."
She vanished into the corridor, leaving Kaelen alone with the weight of the stolen plating and the cold, pulsing hum of his frame waiting in the dark.
Back in the bay, he slammed the plating into the frame’s chassis. The moment the metal touched the frame, the prototype’s data-log roared to life. It didn't just accept the repair; it demanded it.
Kaelen initiated the sync. The world tilted. The familiar interface of his HUD dissolved, replaced by a cold, clinical stream of tactical data. He wasn't just seeing the bay; he was seeing the structural stress points of every object in the room.
Data Siphoned: 42%
The frame was feeding. It was pulling combat memories from the data he’d collected during his duel with Jax—the way Jax shifted his weight, the micro-hesitations in his firing pattern. Kaelen felt his own consciousness receding, pushed into the corner of his mind by the frame’s inhuman, tactical logic.
He stood up, his vision flickering with violet heat. He wasn't just a pilot anymore. He was a processor. And as he looked at the clock counting down to the trial, he realized the frame wasn't just hungry for data—it was preparing to use his own memories as fuel.