A specialist

Eris's hand—if it could still be called that—twitched toward Susan's spinal port, the movement jagged and spastic. The fragmented AI's voice stuttered through the *Stormcrow*'s failing speakers: *"K-ko... roth... Prime."*

Adam wiped blood from his split lip, eyes narrowing. "Kroth Prime? That's a corpse-world."

Susan felt it before Eris spoke—the memory shuddering through their fractured neural link like a dying man's breath. Laboratories buried under radioactive sand. The scent of ozone and desperation. A silhouette hunched over a quicksilver womb.

"Creator," Eris confirmed, her voice glitching between feminine and something utterly alien. A shudder ran through her alloy flesh as she extruded a twisted filament of metal—no longer liquid, just malleable enough to form crude Voraxian runes on the dais. "Find. Him. Before I... forget... myself."

The rune dissolved into slag. Adam crouched, tilting his head at the smoking remains. "Charming. Any other clues besides 'look for the mad scientist in the nuclear wasteland'?"

The neural port at the base of Susan's spine lit up like a branding iron—Eris's last transmission wasn't words but fireworks of disjointed sensory data exploding behind her eyelids. A Voraxian brothel's neon sign reflected in pooled blood. The taste of ozone and rust between her teeth. A Krothian scientist's hands, shaking as he adjusted dials on a machine that hummed in B-flat. Each memory hit out of sequence—the scent of burning insulation before the image of a laboratory's collapse, the sensation of liquid metal pouring into her ears before the visual of Eris's first activation.

Susan gasped as the final fragment seared into her cortex: coordinates etched in radioactive glass, half-buried in ashen soil. Then—click—the connection severed so abruptly her knees buckled. Eris's form on the dais slumped into inert metal, her last flickering ocular display winking out as safety protocols encased her in a chrysalis of hardened alloy.

Adam caught Susan by the elbow before she faceplanted into the console. "Well?" His thumb swiped blood from her temple where the neural feedback had ruptured capillaries. "Get anything useful before she blue-screened?"

Susan's voice came out hoarse, like she'd been screaming. "Kroth Prime. Underground lab complex near the southern melt zone." She flexed her fingers, watching tremors dance across her Eris-branded neural pathways. "There's... something else. A failsafe phrase. The liquid remembers."

Adam's boot nudged Eris's dormant form, producing a dull metallic clang. "Charming. You realize we're chasing a ghost story, right? Kroth's been a rad-blasted hellscape since the Zenthari glassed it." He palmed a switchblade from his thigh sheath and flicked it open with practiced ease. "Also, our ship's fucked."