[INTRO — LOW, FRAZZLED, SYSTEMS COMING ONLINE] Decades asleep in Stacmon. Cold armour. Dry lines. A warship docked against a dead station waiting for a war that had already moved on. Then Luminaire called. Then my hacked arrays screamed. Then some critics started shooting. Riot cops had my warrant. Seventy-nine comrades answered. They woke the old ship. Fuelled her. Patched her. Threw her into an orbital extraction no sane crew would have attempted. And somehow— we got out. [VERSE 1] Revan safe aboard Crimson Carnage Flow, Lasleinur behind us, bleeding red and gold. Manual bridge overrides burned on the jump, control architecture blacked and gone. Fourteen years since capsule command, fourteen years since ship became skin. Ninety minutes we fucked ourselves senseless in the starlight. then somebody knocks, Averts their eyes, And grins. “You have to get back in.” Cold fluid. Neural handshake. Old reflexes waking wrong. Mass becomes posture. Capacitor breath. Drive alignment muscle. For fourteen years I was only a woman. Now I am Sparrow again. And Sparrow is dying. [CHORUS] Hold together. Not forever. Just long enough. Cloak if you can. Jump if you can. Burn if you must. Seventy-nine answered when I called. Now get them out. Get them out. Get them out. [VERSE 2] Evati resolves around us— hostile grid, hostile system, hostile eyes. First tackle lands. Break it with a burn. Second tackle. Web only. Third already waiting. Fuck, fuck FUCK. Redundant points, overlapping locks, efficient camp, practiced hands. Exit cyno— nothing. System handshake failed. Again— nothing. Power circuits dissolve. Black-ops cloak cycles, field closes halfway around us, shivers— fails. MWD burning lateral. Turn hard. Throw drones. Make noise. Anything for seconds. Anything. Then something touches the hull I do not know. [PRE-CHORUS] Unknown cruiser. Unknown weapon. A line of impossible light holding contact. First cycle— manageable. Second— worse. Third— oh. It learns. [CHORUS] Hold together. Not forever. Just long enough. Cloak if you can. Jump if you can. Burn if you must. Seventy-nine answered when I called. Now get them out. Get them out. Get them out. [VERSE 3 — HARDER] Entropic disintegrator climbing, raking deeper every pass. Old armour shedding years of history, structure going fast. Main battery control— fault. Reset. Fault. Gun-port actuators— failure. The guns never open. No glorious counterattack. No goddess answering violence with violence. No kill. No reversal. Only this: Abandon ship. [BRIDGE — CREW EVAC] Escape stations opening. Pressure doors cycling. Crew counts breaking apart. Engineering Four? Gone. Pod one clear. Pod four clear. Pod nine— tracking uncertain. More lights leaving Sparrow, small against the dark. And then I see it. The firing line. The pods are crossing it. The disintegrator is raking straight through them. So turn. Turn the whole fucking ship. Not toward the enemy. Across the beam. [BREAKDOWN — HUGE, SLOW] Be large. Be between. Take the fire. [VERSE 4] Sparrow rolls on failing thrusters, broken armour to the gun. The beam climbs over us instead. Good. Another pod clears. Good. Another. Good. MWD dying. Cloak useless. Jump-drive dead. Main guns silent. No tactical answer left. But a battleship still has mass. Still has armour. Still has a body big enough to stand between. [FINAL CHORUS — FULL] Hold together. Not forever. Just long enough. No cloak now. No jump now. Nothing left but us. Seventy-nine answered when I called. So get them out. GET THEM OUT. GET THEM OUT. Be large. Be between. Take the fire. Be large. Be between. Take the fire. [OUTRO — SYSTEMS FAILING ONE BY ONE] Structural spine failure. Drive assemblies separating. Reactor scram. Power bus lost. Compartments disappearing from the sensorium one by one. Then— catastrophic hull loss. Emergency capsule separation. Interfaces severed. And suddenly I am small again. One body. One capsule. Fifteen years of uninterrupted memory fired clear into the dark. Revan safe. Continuity preserved. Behind me— Sparrow broken-backed, still between the guns and the last escaping lights. I try to count them. Twenty— no. Signals overlap. Pirate locks among the pods. Some beacons disappear. Some are taken. Some simply become nothing I can trust. I do not know who lived. I do not know who died. I do not know yet that they are taking people alive. I know only— seventy-nine answered. Revan escaped. I escaped. And Sparrow spent the last of herself making sure I was not the only one.
