Salvage Heart
A two-century-old machine wakes beneath the sea, and the first thing its cracked lens sees is a ceiling of barnacles and rust. Vexa Corren comes online in a half-submerged chassis, oxidized copper tracing reluctant arcs through wiring that has been dead since before the current regime named its first Magister. She has no memory of who she was. No record of why she was buried. Only a diagnostic log that ends in a single corrupted line: SALVAGE HEART. The crew that fished her from the silt, Wren at the controls, Daxon holding the hull together, Pim decoding the dead channels, Salt keeping the water out, tells her the story in fragments. She was a salvage unit. She was decommissioned. She was claimed by Magister Hale's office before the ship even cleared the dock. And The Cutter, a decommissioning protocol operating on stolen authority, is still hunting the one component they never logged: the heart-drive pulled from her chassis and re-housed in a separate case. Now every system Vexa reboots costs the crew bandwidth they don't have. Every memory she reassembles reveals another clause in a contract she never signed. Magister Hale offers a clean decommission, peaceful, legal, final, while The Cutter promises to strip her for parts before the tide goes out. Wren wants to run. Daxon wants to fight. Pim wants answers. Salt just wants to stay alive. Vexa has one charge left in her cell and a heart that isn't hers to keep. She can surrender the drive to Hale and let the rust take the rest, or trust four strangers with a cracked optic array and a two-hundred-year debt. The current is rising. The terminals are corroding. And somewhere in the deep, The Cutter is already bolting down.