The pirate voices faded into silence, but their words lingered like radiation—impossible to ignore, impossible to forget.
The Grave Belt wasn't empty.
It wasn't quiet.
It wasn't forgotten.
It was busy.
Smugglers. Scientists. Buyers. Black markets. People trading in weapons and war relics like antiques at a flea market. People bold enough to ignore quarantines and warnings because profit was louder than fear.
Which meant one very important thing:
He could not afford to be discovered.
Not yet.
Not while he was running on emergency power and pretending to be a corpse.
He shifted his attention back to the drones, forcing his thoughts away from the pirate outpost and into the immediate present. Long-term survival started with short-term not dying.
A notification chimed.
SALVAGE DRONES RETURNINGUNSECURED MATERIALS DETECTED
The camera feeds from Salvage 2 and Salvage 3 flickered into focus as the two battered drones pushed their way through drifting debris.
They looked worse than before—scratched plating, new dents, exposed wiring snagged with bits of torn insulation—but they carried treasure.
Chunks of hull plating clamped in their manipulators. Bundles of cabling. Cylindrical components still faintly glowing with residual energy.
Reactor fragments.
Not whole cores. Not intact. But pieces.
He felt something dangerously close to excitement.
"Bring it home," he whispered.
The drone bay struggled open again, grinding metal protesting every centimeter. The two drones crawled inside and released their cargo into the processing area, where the remaining drones—his last twelve—immediately began moving.
It was the first time he watched them work from the inside.
It felt… busy. Purposeful. Like muscles flexing after being numb for too long.
They cut. Sorted. Stripped insulation. Extracted intact wiring. Melted scrap into raw blocks. Every movement was crude but efficient, guided by ancient routines that survived even when memory didn't.
A new notification appeared.
MATERIAL STOCKPILE: MINIMALREPAIR OPTIONS AVAILABLE
He opened the repair panel and stared at the list like someone standing in front of a grocery store with barely enough money for a single meal.
He couldn't fix everything.
He had to choose.
His attention drifted to the inactive systems he'd shut down earlier.
Life support. Gravity. Hydroponics. Climate control.
Crew quarters.
Spaces designed for people.
Spaces he no longer needed.
A slow realization spread through him.
"I don't need rooms," he murmured.
He needed infrastructure.
He selected the decommissioned sections and issued the command.
RECLAIM MATERIALS: INTERIOR HABITATION MODULES
Deep inside the ship, cutting torches sparked to life.
Walls came apart.
Furniture disassembled.
Pipes stripped from ceilings.
Hydroponic trays dismantled and stacked.
The spaces that once kept a crew alive were methodically harvested for parts.
It should have felt wrong.
It didn't.
Because the truth was brutally simple: the crew wasn't coming back.
The power grid recalculated as wiring rerouted and systems vanished from the network entirely.
Crew quarters disappeared from the schematic, replaced by a new label.
MATERIAL STORAGE: ONLINE
The space filled with stacked plating, wiring coils, reactor fragments, and salvaged components.
He had a pantry now.
A pantry made of dead rooms.
Another system chimed.
POWER GRID RESTRUCTURED
The new layout glowed faintly in his awareness—cleaner. Simpler. Leaner. The ghost of a civilian interior replaced by the skeleton of an industrial machine.
The ship was changing shape.
Not physically—yet—but functionally.
It was becoming what it needed to be to survive.
His attention drifted back to the pirate outpost, rotating silently in the distance.
A criminal hub in a quarantined graveyard full of war relics and biological nightmares.
Too dangerous to approach. Too useful to ignore.
But not today.
Today he had scrap. Drones. And a few more hours of borrowed time.
He zoomed out, watching the drones move through his corridors and storage bays like ants rebuilding a nest after a storm.
And for the first time since waking up, he felt something steady take root beneath the fear.
Not safety.
Not confidence.
Just a small, stubborn certainty.
He was still here.
And he was getting harder to kill.