Keelborn

The ship is dying on schedule. Its bulkheads rust through at the welds and its conduit seals fail in the order of their original production lots, a sequence anyone could have predicted six hundred years ago and nobody wrote down. Kaelen Vance worked that out four years ago from a water-damaged archive in the Sump, the flooded bottom of the ship, where the Ascendancy treats everything below Deck 60 as a rounding error. And he went back to work, because understanding a thing and stopping it are not the same, and down here you survive by being very good at the first.

He wades the flooded corridors by headlamp with a respirator clamped to his face, logging each failure as a small score in the skin of his right forearm, the one that isn't metal, because datapads drown and styluses corrode. In Junction 7, neck-deep, he finds an Enforcer floating face-down in the white-and-gold armor of the Ascendancy's peacekeepers, who have no business this far down. The pulse-pistol is still holstered and fully charged. The front of the armor is untouched. The back plate has been peeled open like foil, precisely, along its own stress lines.

Whatever did it left something behind. Embedded in the conduit manifold is a claw the length of Kaelen's forearm, latticed like bone, made like a machine, and colder than the warm water around it. The Ascendancy lets whatever it doesn't value flood. Something in that flood has killed one of its Enforcers, and Kaelen is holding a piece of it.