Chapter 13

# Chapter 13

Yuki woke before the alarm.

She lay in the dark of her quarters and listened to the ship. The Kusanagi's familiar sounds arrived in their familiar order: the bass note of the fusion drive, transmitted through the hull as a vibration she felt in the bones of her spine more than she heard with her ears. The rhythmic cycling of the atmospheric processor, inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen with the patient respiration of a mechanism that did not need to breathe but breathed anyway, because seven human metabolisms required it. The thermal management system, ticking and sighing as it moved heat from where it accumulated to where it could be radiated into the void.