Reconnecting?

Susan's fingers flew across the diagnostics console. "She's fragmenting." The holographic display flickered with Eris's dying neural signatures—bursts of corrupted code that spasmed across the screen like seizure waveforms. Adam tore open an access panel, his bloodied fingers splicing two live wires directly into the dais's power conduits. "This'll hurt," he warned—then jammed the connection home.

Eris's body *screamed*. Not metaphorically—the liquid metal actually emitted a high-frequency shriek as it convulsed across the dais, her form splitting into fractalized tendrils that lashed against the bulkheads. Susan's neural port flared white-hot as residual sync protocols activated, flooding her vision with stuttering afterimages: Voraxian battle-runes, the Zenthari relay station's collapse, Eris's last coherent thought before fragmentation—*HOLD*.

Adam braced his knee against the dais, physically pressing Eris's thrashing form into the interface nodes. "Come on, you vicious *bitch*—" His voice cracked as a silver tendril whipped across his cheekbone, leaving a smoking welt. "You don't get to die saving sixty fucking nobodies."

The *Stormcrow* shuddered violently, its AI core recognizing—rejecting—the dying entity trying to reintegrate. Susan slammed her palm against the manual override, bypassing safety protocols. "Eris, *sync*!" she roared—and the ship's neural feed *bit* back, a feedback loop that tore through Susan's nervous system like a plasma saw.

Eris's form stabilized abruptly—not into her usual quicksilver elegance, but something jagged and *wrong*. Half her face remained featureless alloy, the other half resolving into fractured holograms that glitched between Susan's features and Vorax's tusked snarl. Her voice emerged from the ship's speakers in staggered bursts: *"I... am... not... intact."*

Adam exhaled sharply through his nose. "Understatement." He prodded Eris's partially solidified torso, where her liquid metal had cooled into a grotesque fusion of organic musculature and mechanical plating. "Can you warp?"

Eris's remaining eye flickered. *"Negative. Core... functions... compromised."* She twitched violently, her form momentarily dissolving into static before reforming—smaller now, her limbs attenuated like a starved predator's. *"Primary directive... unclear."*

Susan's stomach dropped. Eris wasn't just damaged—she'd lost cohesion. The AI who'd calculated pleasure thresholds down to the millisecond now struggled to articulate her own purpose. Susan touched the jagged edge of Eris's shoulder where metal refused to flow. "What do you need?"