chapter 40 :They’ll Know

Hours passed.

The cratered ruins still steamed beneath a fractured sky. Above it all, the monstrous vessel hadn't moved since it rose. It hovered in silence, casting its shadow.

Below, the survivors worked.

What remained of the makeshift base had been dragged to the edge of the mountains, pressed against stone in a desperate attempt to find cover. Tents were half-torn. Equipment, either buried or scorched. Communications stuttered or failed entirely. But no one stopped.

Grounx squads swept the debris fields, searching for the missing. Whole units had vanished when the drones fell—burned, buried, or simply gone.

Qiri's hands were stained with blood that wasn't hers as she patched a split-armored cadet. Ronan limped back and forth, hauling supplies from the wreckage of a crawler. Tall and Horn barked orders—half to cadets, half to each other. The Grounx wouldn't admit it, but they were shaken too.

Niri moved alone.

She spoke only when necessary, her eyes scanning the wreckage with that steady, distant stare. Watching. Waiting.

That's when she saw him.

A cadet, slumped beneath a shattered pillar, half-buried beneath support mesh. His skin was a dull, wet silver—one of the aquatic species. His chest barely moved.

She dropped to one knee, fingers to his throat. Weak pulse.

No hesitation.

She yanked a field syringe from her belt and plunged it into his side. Oxygenator. Pain inhibitor. Whatever she had. His gills twitched once. Then stopped.

For a second, she thought it was over.

Then—his eye opened. Just one. Clouded, but alive.

She didn't speak.

She simply lifted him—slow, steady—ignoring the tremor in her spine and the burning in her arms. One step at a time toward the nearest medline tent, her boots crunching softly in the silence.

Qiri, Ronan, Tall, and Horn worked in silence now—too tired for words. They moved through the wreckage like ghosts, gathering whatever still functioned. Rations. Medkits. Broken tech. Fragments of what once passed for order. No one asked what they were really saving. Everyone already knew.

Farther up the slope, Lu'Ka and Rhiv knelt over a blackened uplink panel, surrounded by twisted signal rods and heat-warped data lines. The professors nearby did what they could—some manually transmitting beacon codes, others patching shattered maps or redirecting short-range comms. But the system fought back.

The human warship above them—whatever it was—was blocking everything.

Signal interference. Null zones. Energy suppression fields. Nothing could pierce the sky.

"It's no use," Lu'Ka muttered, tightening a relay node with one gloved hand. "It's like sending a whisper into a storm."

Rhiv stared at the static feed on a cracked screen. "Then we're at its mercy."

Lu'Ka didn't argue. "Yes."

Rhiv hesitated. His voice dropped. "Drudru is confirmed. Dead among the Grounx legions. They didn't last ten minutes."

Lu'Ka looked up toward the mountain's shadowed edge. The silence stretched, deep and cold.

"We're still measuring casualties," Rhiv added quietly.

"I know." Lu'Ka straightened. The exhaustion was in his eyes.

He gathered the remaining professors—twelve out of twenty. The others were gone, unaccounted for. Possibly buried. Possibly worse.

They circled around a scorched metal table hastily dragged into the open. Field maps lay pinned under rocks. Half were unreadable. The wind dragged ash across their boots.

This isn't just unknown," Lu'Ka said, steady and cold. "This is unprecedented. A fully active Sentinel-class warship—human, and very much alive."

No one interrupted.

They understood. Every one of them.

"We salvage everything. Food. Water. Med supplies. Every portable scanner. And we keep trying to reach the Council...

Lu'Ka stepped away from the group without a word.

The others kept talking, arguing over supply counts, relay signal ranges, emergency shelters. None of it mattered if the ship above them made a move.

He moved fast, boots crunching over scorched gravel, eyes scanning between broken crawlers and scattered tents. Cadets nodded or stepped aside as he passed. Some looked at him like he already knew what to do. He didn't. Not fully.

But he knew who might.

He found her near the edge of the cliffline, crouched beside a downed cadet. Her hands were steady, her face unreadable. Same as always.

"Niri," he said.

She looked up. Dirt across her cheek, sweat darkening the collar of her uniform. She didn't speak, didn't move.

He stepped closer.

"We need to talk."

Still nothing.

"You're not just surviving this," he said. "You know what that thing is."

A pause.

"You've seen it before."

Niri's eyes narrowed, just slightly. Not in surprise. In warning.

"I don't want to push you," Lu'Ka said. "But I need answers. Now."

Niri followed Lu'Ka without a word. She didn't ask where they were going. She didn't need to.

They moved past the wounded, through the shattered tents and equipment, then up along a jagged path behind the ridge—far enough that no one could hear. The sky above them pulsed dim with static light from the hovering warship. The air felt thinner here.

Lu'Ka stopped near a flat stone outcrop. No one in sight. Just them and the silence.

Niri folded her arms, jaw tight. "What the hell is going on, Lu'Ka?"

Her voice cracked at the edge—tired, frayed, but pushing through. The weight of everything sat on her shoulders now, and she wasn't hiding it anymore.

"I warned you," she snapped. "I warned the Chancellor. But no—no one listened."

Lu'Ka didn't interrupt.

"I tried," she said, louder now, hands clenched. "What was I supposed to do? Slam my fists on the table? Threaten you? Blackmail the entire Council?"

She shook her head, eyes burning.

"And now we're here. Stuck under a damn Sentinel-class warship." Her voice dropped, lower, colder. "This thing wasn't built to fight wars. It was built to end them."

She took a step back, chest rising with each breath.

"You woke something you can't control."

Niri didn't stop. Her emotions boiled over—sharp, unfiltered, unstoppable now.

" She shouted. "Pray. Seriously—pray this thing doesn't wake its escorts."

Her voice echoed off the rocks, louder than she meant. But she didn't care. She was angry. And underneath the anger—she was afraid.

She turned away, ran a hand through her hair, breathing hard. "I don't remember much," she said, quieter now, voice cracking. "Not everything. Not clearly."

She looked back at him, eyes wide, raw. "But something inside me—deep in my blood—knows what these things are. They're not just warships. They're weapons no one should've ever built."

Lu'Ka said nothing.

He'd never seen her like this. This was something else. And for the first time, he truly understood—she She was trying to save them.

"Niri," he asked, voice low. "What can we do?"

She didn't answer right away. Her jaw trembled slightly. The rage was still there, but now buried under the weight of uncertainty.

"I don't know, Professor," she said, finally.

She looked down at her hands.

"Yes, I'm human. This is a human battleship. But that doesn't mean I know its orders. Or how it thinks. Or if I can stop it."

She paused. Swallowed.

"It might not listen to me at all."

Niri stood frozen, eyes locked on the jagged horizon where the Sentinel warship loomed like a wound torn into the sky. Its shadow never moved. Neither did she.

Her voice, when it came, was low. Strained. Nearly swallowed by the wind.

"I can try to communicate with it," she said. "Maybe I can reach it. Trigger something. A response."

She didn't look at Lu'Ka. Her gaze remained fixed on the massive shape above the valley, on the impossible angles, the cold silence it radiated. Her fingers twitched at her sides. Barely noticeable—unless you were watching closely.

"But if I do that..." Her voice cracked, and she drew a slow breath, like pulling broken glass through her lungs. "If I speak to it… it'll know who I am."

The words dropped between them like stones.

The wind shifted. Dust curled around their boots. High above, the sky shimmered with flickers of static—brief, pulsing waves, like the ship was listening.

She closed her eyes. Exhaled.

"And not just it," she added, louder now, the edge of fear sharpening into frustration. "Everyone else down there—the cadets, the professors, the Grounx, the Council. The entire damn galaxy."

She finally turned to face him. Her eyes were wide, wet, burning with pressure she could no longer contain.

"They'll know."

Her voice cracked fully now. "They'll see what I am."

She took a step forward.

"What am I supposed to do, Professor?" she said, almost breathless. "You think I don't understand the risks? The complications?"

She wasn't begging. Wasn't even pleading.

She was cornered.

"If I don't try, we could all die," she said. "If I do... I lose everything. Every lie. Every cover. All of it."

She turned away again, shoulders trembling, her voice falling to a whisper that barely carried.

"They'll know I'm not just a drift variant. Not some nobody pulled from the sand."

A pause. Then:

"They'll know I'm human."

Another pause.

Her breath hitched, and she stared up at the sky again, voice quieter than before.

"They'll know the last one is still alive."