『Kulvir Unleashed』のカバーアート

Kulvir Unleashed

Kulvir Unleashed

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KULVIR SAKATA COUNTED his breaths the way he always did before a breach and board. Four in, four hold, four out. He’d learned it somewhere that no longer existed, in a life he no longer claimed. He did it now on principle, because the alternative was to stop counting and let something else take over.The boarding tunnel pressurized with a sound like a chest cavity being opened.“Thirty seconds,” Captain Sela said over comms. Her voice was flat the way a blade was flat. Precise. Clean. Not the absence of feeling, just the containment of it. Kulvir had worked under seven different crew leads in eleven years. None of them talked like Sela. None of them made him feel like the work was worth finishing.“Copy,” Bando said, at Kulvir’s left shoulder. She was twenty-three, hair pulled back tight, and her face did something every time a breach was imminent, a kind of brightening, like combat switched on a light behind her eyes that nothing else reached. She went toward it the way some people went toward music.“Copy,” Herrick said, at Kulvir’s right. He was broad enough across the shoulders that he blocked the corridor light when he moved up, a big rough-framed man who had learned to hate this work and kept doing it anyway.Three more behind them. Six total, under contract to a farming colony called Relicos, three systems out from anything that mattered. The clients had called it a contract dispute. Kulvir called it what it was.The Stygian Duster ship had tried to run when Sela’s privateer cut across its vector, a converted ore hauler called Greymantle, slow and heavy with the wrong cargo. The privateer’s gunner put two rail slugs into its drives before it could build speed, a precision shot, economical and final, the kind that came from someone who had stopped needing to think about it. Greymantle coasted now, venting atmo from a secondary port, guns still live but the crew already knowing how this ended.The tunnel clacked. The hatch unsealed.“Move,” Sela said.Kulvir moved.The first corridor was dark, lit red by Greymantle’s emergency strips. Smoke from the drive damage hung in a low ceiling above them, and the deck vibrated underfoot in a way that meant the atmo scrubbers were losing ground. The smell was recycled air gone stale, charred insulation, and underneath both of those the thin copper bite of blood, recent enough to still be warm.Kulvir went left at the first junction, Bando on his flank. Two Stygian Dusters came around the corner with weapons raised and Kulvir put them down, two blaster bolts each, center mass. He was already moving past them before they hit the deck.Not fast. Not slow. Just efficient.That was the thing people misread about him. They saw the outcome and assumed there had been violence. What there had been was geometry. Angles and timing and the knowledge that hesitation was its own kind of cruelty.“Three hostiles, forward bay,” Sela said. She was running a parallel corridor, feeding the crew positioning from Greymantle’s own sensor net. She’d pulled the access codes from the Relicos colony records. The Dusters had used the same codes for two years. Nobody had bothered to change them.“I see them,” Herrick said.The forward bay was a staging area, crates of extracted ore stacked along the walls, some still marked with colonial lot numbers that had no business on a Duster ship. The Stygian Dusters had bled Relicos dry, collecting protection money and delivering nothing, not protection, not peace, just the slow drain of people who had no other options. The ore was the proof. Evidence nobody would ever process, because there was no authority out here to process it.That was why people like Kulvir existed.The three hostiles broke cover before the team was fully through the door. Kulvir took the first with a bayonet strike to the throat and used the man’s momentum to put him into the second. The third raised a scatter pistol and Kulvir stepped inside the barrel’s arc, close enough to feel the heat when it discharged past his shoulder and broke the man’s wrist with a short downward strike. Sidearm. Disarm. Step. Fire.Three seconds. Maybe four.“Clear,” he said.“Crew quarters next,” Sela said. “Sakata, on me.”Kulvir fell in beside her at the corridor junction. For a moment, before they moved, she glanced at him sideways. Not an assessment. She didn’t need to assess him. It was something else, something closer to acknowledgment, the way two people who have worked in the dark together for long enough learn to see each other without needing light.Kulvir said nothing. He was good at saying nothing.The crew quarters were three compartments off a central passage. Sela took point on the first. Kulvir had the second. Herrick and Bando took the third.The Duster in Kulvir’s compartment was already on his feet, holding a colonist boy, maybe ten years old, against his chest with a blade at the kid’s throat. The boy was rigid with the terror of ...
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