“Vacuum Tango ” - new Vamps chapter

“Organic pilot behavior continues to diverge from optimal execution.
Unpredictable movements detected.
Free motion will now be restricted.”

Awesome, now it’s reviewing my steps like some passive-aggressive dance instructor.

I didn’t even get to roll my eyes before the floor stopped being the floor.
My feet left the ground, my arms lifted slightly without my permission, and just like that, all sense of balance and grounding vanished... Artificial gravity? Off.

Great. Picture an annoyed cat. Inside a bathtub. In slow motion.

“Your coordination and efficiency is compromised.
Suggested outcome: surrender.”

Suggested outcome: have you tried defragmenting your ego?

I pushed off the chair, body twisting midair, and drifted toward the nearest wall panels, cutting through the remaining layers of floating, glitching holographic controls. They didn’t respond to my touch, like I wasn’t even there. Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t just muting me out of the system, it was rewriting me out of it entirely. And with every core process it claimed, I could feel it growing stronger.

This corruption wasn’t breaking the ship. It was rebuilding it. If I wanted to move forward, I’d have to go manual.

I crawled upward through the air, toward the darker ceiling struts, pushing off loose handholds: coiled cables, the edges of service ports, exposed junctions… where my old ship’s conduits still weaved between panels like exposed veins. Less monitored, more vulnerable. Then I did what any good pilot would do in a crisis: I started pulling cables.

If I couldn’t fly the ship, I could at least piss off whatever was flying it now.
No engineering grace, just instinct.

I hotwired two conduits into a feedback loop; the section sparked, screamed, died. Good.
I killed another section completely. The lights in that connection blinked once, then dimmed.

A low mechanical growl rolled through the walls again.
It was still watching. Still adapting.
But the more systems I threw into my own chaos, the more it had to split its attention...

“Unauthorized manipulation escalating.
New countermeasure deployed.”

Of course. Because, clearly, a single murder attempt from my own ship, before I’ve even had coffee, would’ve just been too dull.

To be continued...