On the Odyssey , Captain Elara stared at her screen. The Skipper wasn’t docked. It was fused . The rookie had used the impact itself as a braking mechanism, welding her own ship to theirs. It was the ugliest, most brilliant maneuver Elara had ever seen.
He just looked at the rookie, nodded once, and said, “The sky’s yours.” the rookie talia
She nudged the throttle. The Skipper slid sideways, not forward. The gyros whined in protest, but Talia ignored them. She rode the shockwaves like a surfer on a tsunami, using the star’s own fury to slingshot her closer. Every instinct screamed to pull away, but she leaned into the madness. On the Odyssey , Captain Elara stared at her screen
She leaned back in her cracked cockpit, wiping a trickle of blood from her lip where she’d bitten it. “I stopped trying to fly, sir. I just… listened.” The rookie had used the impact itself as
She killed the nav computer. Its frantic beeping was a lie here. She closed her eyes for half a second, feeling the subtle hum of the star’s gravity waves through the hull. Most pilots saw chaos. Talia saw patterns.
So when the distress call crackled through—a civilian research vessel, the Odyssey , losing orbit around a collapsing neutron star—everyone expected Talia to be sidelined. Instead, Voss pointed a thick finger at her.
“Exactly,” Voss said, not looking up from his console. “In a gravity well that chaotic, your precious instruments are useless. Instinct is all that’s left. Move, Rookie.”