Claimed By the Wraiths (Rift Wraiths #3)

Serak

“Thirty seconds,” Deyric said in my ear.

I pressed flat against the corridor wall, Ressh at my six, Thoryn holding the junction behind us. The data relay hummed on the other side of the access door, rows of storage cores packed into a room the size of the Raptor’s mess hall. The corridor smelled like machine oil and cold metal.

Standard Consortium station. Standard security. Standard everything, except what we were here to steal.

Routine extraction. Fourth one in three weeks. Hit the relay, pull the communications data, get out before Consortium security responded.

“Twenty,” Deyric said.

Jessa was already inside. She’d gone in with the first team, Alix on point. Someone had to triage the data on-site.

The first two raids had netted us terabytes of shipping logs we didn’t need.

Jessa could tell the difference between intelligence and garbage faster than Deyric’s sorting algorithms. She’d proved that going through that haul afterward, so on the last raid she started going in with the team.

I’d stopped arguing about it after that.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like her in a room I couldn’t see into on a station we didn’t control. I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t like it, because a captain shouldn’t care more about one crew member’s position than any other’s.

I cared anyway.

“Fifteen. Patrol change is clean. You’re clear.”

I keyed the door. It slid open and I moved through, Ressh behind me.

The relay room was cold, the kind of cold that meant industrial cooling for the storage cores. Blue indicator lights in long rows, floor to ceiling, casting everything in a flat sterile glow. Jessa was at the central terminal, pulling data, Alix watching the far corridor.

“How much?” I asked.

“Enough to keep Deyric busy for a week.” Jessa didn’t look up. Her fingers moved across the interface, fast, certain. “Communications logs, routing data, and more of that encrypted layer he can’t crack. Pulling it all.”

“Two minutes,” I said. “Then we move.”

“I need four.”

“You have two.”

She glanced up. “I have three, or we leave without the encrypted files, which are the only thing in here we don’t already have.”

“Three.” I turned to check the corridor behind us, one hand on the blaster at my hip. “Ressh.”

“Clear.”

Alix crossed the relay room from the far doorway, voice low. “Movement. Two levels down. Could be the patrol cycling early.”

“Or not,” Ressh said.

“Jessa.”

“Working.”

The first blast door came down without warning. A thick slab of reinforced alloy dropping from the ceiling, sealing the far corridor Alix had just walked away from. The door hit the deck hard enough to vibrate through my boots.

“That wasn’t a patrol,” Alix said.

The second blast door dropped between us and the terminal where Jessa was working. A containment field flashed around the frame, sealing every seam.

She was on the other side. Alone.

“Jessa.” I hit the door. Solid. My fist against the alloy didn’t even echo.

“Jessa, respond.”

“I’m here.” Her voice through the comm, steady. “Door came down between me and the corridor. I can see another one sealing the far end. They’re boxing me in.”

I heard the click of her grabbing the blaster from the console. Good.

“Deyric, get that door open.”

“Already on it. The security system is local, not networked. I need to...”

“Get it open.”

Ressh grabbed my arm. “Serak. We’ve got incoming.”

I heard them. Boots on deck plating, coming from the direction we’d entered. The security response was faster than our intel had predicted.

“Thoryn,” I said.

“Holding.” Thoryn’s voice was calm. A calm that meant he was about to hurt someone.

“Jessa, how long to finish the pull?”

“Ninety seconds.”

“You don’t have ninety seconds.”

“Then I’ll go faster.”

She was behind a sealed door with hostiles closing in, and the heat was already in my hands. I looked down. Dark to the wrists.

Not because she was close. Because she was in danger and I couldn’t reach her.

“Ressh, hold this corridor. Alix, with me.”

Three Consortium security came around the junction at a run. I stepped into the corridor ahead of them.

I let the dark come. Not the heat in my hands, not the involuntary response I couldn’t control.

The other thing. The thing my people don’t talk about.

My skin went dark. All of it, not just the hands. The corridor shadows bent toward me, pooled around my feet, climbed up my legs, wrapped me from boot to shoulder.

For a moment I wasn’t standing in the corridor so much as the corridor was standing around me.

The lead soldier stopped. The second ran into him. The third raised her weapon but didn’t fire.

Her eyes were tracking me, but not finding me, not quite. Her aim drifted left, then right. The target kept sliding out of focus.

“Move,” I said.

They moved. Backward, fast, weapons still raised but pointed at nothing they could identify.

I pulled it back. Locked it down. The shadows settled.

The corridor was just a corridor again.

My hands were still dark. That was the other thing, the thing that didn’t lock down, didn’t respond to discipline. That one was about Jessa, and it wasn’t going anywhere.

Alix was staring at me. “What the hell was that?”

“Nothing we talk about. Come on.”

“Where are you going?” she asked, already keeping pace.

I was moving back toward the junction, looking for another way around the blast doors. There was a service conduit on the station schematic.

Narrow. Meant for maintenance access, not people.

“You won’t fit through that,” Alix said.

“I’ll fit.”

“You won’t fit through that and fight on the other side.”

“Watch me.”

The conduit access was behind a panel that took three seconds to rip off the wall. The space inside was barely wide enough for my shoulders. I went in, feet first, pulling myself through on my back, equipment scraping against the walls.

“Serak.” Jessa’s voice in my ear. “I can hear them on the other side of the far door. They’re cutting through.”

I moved faster. The conduit turned, dropped and opened into a ceiling space above the relay room. Through the grating, Jessa was at the terminal below, still working, blaster in her free hand.

The far door was glowing along one edge. They were coming through.

I kicked the grating out and dropped into the room.

Jessa spun and nearly shot me.

“It’s me.”

“I know it’s you. Don’t do that.” She turned back to the terminal. “Forty seconds.”

The far door’s edge was cherry-red now. I put myself between her and it, pulled the blaster, and waited.

“Twenty seconds.”

The door buckled.

“Ten.”

Metal screamed as the cut section fell inward.

“Done.” She yanked the data core and shoved it inside her jacket. “Go.”

I grabbed her arm and hauled her toward the conduit access. “You first. Up and to the right.”

“I know. I memorized the schematic too.” She jumped, caught the edge, and pulled herself up. I followed, boosting her feet when she slowed.

Behind us, voices. Boots. They were in the relay room.

We moved through the conduit faster than should have been possible. Alix waited at the other end, covering the corridor.

“Thoryn, we’re clear. Fall back to extraction.”

“Already moving.”

Zevik had the Raptor at the docking port with the engines hot. Maris was running the gun arrays from the secondary console.

We made the ship in ninety seconds. The outer hatch sealed, and Zevik had us undocked and burning before the airlock finished repressurizing.

I stood in the airlock as the pressure equalized, breathing hard.

Jessa was next to me, her hair falling out of whatever she’d tied it back in. A scrape along her forearm from the conduit. She pulled the data core from inside her jacket and turned it over, checking for damage.

“You came through the ceiling,” she said.

“The door was blocked.”

She looked at me. I looked at the data core.

“Your hands are dark,” she said.

I shoved them in my pockets. “Let’s get this to Deyric.”

In the briefing room, Deyric plugged the core into his console and started pulling it apart. The crew filtered in.

Ressh leaned against the wall, checking a scorch mark on his sleeve. Thoryn stood behind Maris’s chair, not a scratch on him. Solren was already scanning Jessa’s forearm, which she kept pulling away from him.

“Stop that,” he said.

“It’s a scrape.”

“It’s my scrape to assess. Hold still.”

“Communications logs, routing data, standard Consortium military encryption on most of it,” Deyric said, cycling through the files. “This will fill in some gaps.”

“Most of it?” Maris caught it before I did.

“There’s a second layer I can’t touch. Same wall we keep hitting.” He shook his head. “I need more time with it.”

“How long to crack it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Deyric didn’t say that often. “Could be days. Could be longer. I need to study the architecture.”

I looked at the data on the screen. Four raids in three weeks. The last two had turned up useful intelligence.

Every one of them had also turned up fragments of this same encryption, and every time Deyric had hit the same wall.

Whatever the Consortium was hiding behind that protocol, it was the thing we couldn’t reach.

“Keep working on it,” I said. “We’ll reconvene in the morning.”

The crew filed out. Jessa was the last to stand, same as always. She had the look of someone running calculations, mouth set, eyes focused somewhere past the display.

She stopped next to my chair. Didn’t touch my shoulder this time. Just stood there.

My hands were on the table. Still dark.

“Get some sleep,” she said, and left.

I didn’t.