Xanthe's Dream was unraveling.
What was once a floating monument of excess and status had collapsed into a labyrinth of flickering emergency lights, echoing alarms, and the distant clatter of security drones moving too fast to sound human. Smoke trailed like ink through the upper walkways.
Half the holo-advertisements still tried to peddle exclusive fusion cigars or auction previews, their recordings warped by signal interference.
Ethan didn't run.
He moved like smoke, silent, reactive, precise. The Gryllex shard pressed cold against his side, sealed in the containment vault strapped beneath his cloak. He didn't dare draw attention. Not with dozens of buyers, mercenaries, and syndicate ghosts also trapped in this storm of fire and ambition.
"Iris. Route scan?"
"Processing. Emergency systems are sporadically active. Security drones have sealed off the main central lifts. Multiple breaches in Deck C through F. One auxiliary maintenance shaft remains open. Eight minutes to route end. Seven if you move without combat."
He nodded, turning into a service corridor lined with exposed plasma conduits and residual coolant vapor. The temperature here dropped instantly, brushing his face with artificial cold. Lights flickered. The floor buzzed underfoot. Somewhere above, an explosion shuddered through the bulkhead.
The ceiling groaned like a wounded animal.
"Explosion near engineering control. Tertiary coolant line destroyed. Structural integrity compromised at sub-level three."
"How long before the hull gives?"
"Seventy-one minutes. Less if sabotage continues."
Ethan kept moving. He stayed off the primary escape routes, where panicked guests in gold-threaded suits and high-tech dresses shoved their way past half-functional drones and auto-locking blast doors.
His cloak wrapped tight around his silhouette, the micro-weave helping him blend against shifting light. But stealth wasn't just about what he wore.
It was how he walked, how his weight vanished before each step touched down. How his psionic field slightly extended outward from time to time like a sonar net, pinging ahead in microbursts of intuition.
He felt the nerves of the people one floor above, jittery and chaotic. He sensed the hardened calm of truly elite guests and trained guards posted at the luxury launch platforms. And deeper, closer to his route, movement without fear. Without hesitation.
The attackers.
He rounded a bend into another corridor and paused.
Down the left, an escape pod bay blared crimson denial screens, corporate override. Locked tight, overridden by higher-tier protocols. The dozen guests there, probably titans of industries on this sector or heirs to them, now looked like frightened children. Their private guards barked at security terminals, waving access chips that didn't matter anymore.
One woman sobbed quietly into her gloves.
Ethan slipped past them without a sound, blending into the shadows beside a flickering status panel. He took the right fork instead, deeper into the ship's underdeck. The walls here were exposed, raw durasteel and scorched conduit runs.
Explosions rumbled again.
This time, they weren't distant.
Screams followed, short, brutal, cut off by static bursts and the unmistakable sound of energy discharge.
He ducked under a collapsed girder, slid down a narrow utility slope, and landed in the darkness of a backup power conduit trench. From here, he could access the map Iris was feeding him more flexibly, staying under the major decks.
The air smelled like burnt circuits and formaldehyde.
He caught movement overhead, two Silica Arc combat drones rushing toward the east access hall. One had its cannon out. The other bore scorch marks across its chassis, but it wasn't hesitating. Protocol overrides had been issued. Deadly force authorized.
"Iris, give me audio from their command channel."
"Linked."
The drone AI voice was low and filtered:
"Directive Theta: intercept and contain all unauthorized personnel. Confirm target priority: breach teams near Vault Sector Theta-Seven."
Vaults. Not guests. Not reactors.
They were after something.
Ethan crouched against the wall of the trench as he crept forward. Pipes hissed beside him, venting excess pressure as the ship tried to stabilize.
"Iris. Do we know what was in Theta-Seven?"
"That sector held priority auction items in temporary stasis. The broken molecular blade was secured there post-sale."
Of course.
He paused at the junction hatch.
Something was off. Not a sound, not a shape, just a subtle wrongness in the way the corridor ahead breathed. A tension in the air that didn't match the surrounding chaos.
No hissing pipes. No flickering lights. No alarms.
Just stillness.
The kind of stillness that waited for something.
A trap waiting to close.
"Iris…" he breathed.
"Multiple lifeforms ahead. Four. Stationary. Breathing patterns shallow. No movement for thirty-seven seconds."
"Armed?"
"Three of four carry mid-weight energy profiles. One has short-range disruptor frequency spiking. High probability: sidearms or implants."
Ethan retreated a half-step, turning sideways to flatten his silhouette and blend into the hard shadows of the wall. His boot brushed against a shattered coolant pipe.
He followed it with his eyes, found the nearest cover, a half-torn auxiliary cooling unit, warped from a previous blast and slid behind it, movement silent and deliberate.
From this new vantage, he heard the footsteps.
Light. Measured. Two pairs, pacing just slightly apart. The other two weren't moving, watching the intersection, likely.
He slowed his breathing. Narrowed his focus.
He could feel their presence now. Not with sight or sound, but with that subtle psionic sixth sense. A ripple in the environment like the surface of still water disrupted by unseen motion. His awareness extended forward, just enough to catch the nervous flex of a hand, the shift of weight from one heel to another. The suppressed aggression beneath a composed façade.
Then the voices came.
Low. Tight. Whispered through rebreathers or cloaks.
Not panicked. Not disorganized. Not like the fleeing guests.
These were operators.
"They've locked down Pod Bay 2B," someone said in hushed Standard, just audible through the grated corridor ahead. "We'll have to reroute through the maintenance loop and breach from outside."
"Forget it," another snapped, voice sharp but contained. "We need the vault artifact. That's the priority. The client paid for results, not excuses."
A third voice cut in, deeper and older. "You think they'll make it out with the sword?"
"They'd better," the second speaker hissed. "Or this entire op becomes a write-off."
The voices began to fade, steps moving again, this time with intent. No wasted motion. No side chatter.
Professionals. Not opportunists. And they were leaving.
Ethan stayed low, still as frost beneath shadow.
He didn't follow.
Not yet.
His hand remained steady on the containment case at his side. The Gryllex shard pulsed faintly inside, an almost imperceptible thrum that only someone attuned to its frequency would notice.
It didn't tremble. Neither did he.
But something crawled up his spine, not fear, but a chill of confirmation.
They weren't here for mayhem.
They weren't trying to destroy the auction.
They weren't another syndicate or pirate group flexing muscle or an inside job turned chaotic.
No.
They were here for one thing.
And someone was already walking out with it.
A broken molecular blade… now being treated like a holy relic in a high-priority exfil.
It all lined up now: the precision of the attacks, the careful timing, the focused sabotage near vault sectors rather than escape paths. The creatures released during the chaos weren't accidents. They were distractions. Designed to scatter both guests and response teams.
And Ethan, despite being in the middle of it, wasn't the target.
Yet.
"Iris," he said, barely a whisper.
"Yes."
"New objective."
"Proceed."
"Get me to my ferry. Quietly."
"Adjusting route. Accounting for live proximity feeds. Minimal contact path plotted via maintenance gantry D-6. Estimated transit: seven minutes, risk window twenty-nine percent. Updating now."
Ethan nodded once.
"Then let's vanish."
He moved again, lower, even slower. His stride was silent, honed by years of infiltration drills and real-world survival. Each step was placed with intention. Each pause lined up with the flicker of a failing light or the distant pulse of an explosion overhead.
His breathing synced to the rhythm of the ship's internal hum. His body became a shadow,part of the broken metal, smoke-veiled and near invisible against the bulkheads.
There was no adrenaline spike. No panic.
Only calibration.
And calm.
Not prey. Not yet.
But not a predator either. Not here.
Here, in the bowels of a luxury liner turned battlefield, Ethan chose to be something else entirely:
A ghost.