The Rookie Talia »

And Talia smiled, fired up her dented little ship, and danced among the stars one more time.

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.

The room went silent. Senior pilots Sharpe and Mendez looked at her with a mix of pity and horror. the rookie talia

When she dropped out of FTL, the neutron star filled her view—a monstrous, spinning eye of pure violence. Its magnetic fields were visible as shimmering curtains of blue and violet, twisting like living whips. And there, a tiny speck caught in the deadly dance, was the Odyssey .

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.” And Talia smiled, fired up her dented little

“ Odyssey , this is Fleet Auxiliary Skipper . I’m coming in,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt.

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. She closed her eyes for half a second,

They didn’t promote her that week. But they did stop laughing. And when the next distress call came—a freighter stuck in a methane storm over Saturn—Admiral Voss didn’t point his finger.