Chapter 12
Dana
The emergency lighting cast everything in shades of red and shadow, turning Mothership's corridors into something from a nightmare. I ran behind Er'dox, my shorter legs struggling to match his pace, my heart hammering against my ribs like it was trying to escape my chest entirely.
Deck nineteen. The secured equipment bay where they'd moved the communication array. Where someone had just triggered every alarm in the security system.
"Stay behind me," Er'dox said without slowing. Not a suggestion. A command delivered with the absolute authority of someone who expected to be obeyed.
I wanted to argue—wanted to point out that I'd been on a field mission yesterday, that I'd proven I could handle dangerous situations, that treating me like fragile cargo was both insulting and impractical.
But arguing while running through corridors at near-sprinting speed seemed like poor resource allocation.
Save the feminist objections for when we weren't racing toward an active security breach.
We hit the junction to deck nineteen and nearly collided with Vaxon's security team moving in tactical formation. The security chief looked like violence barely contained, all predatory grace and controlled fury.
"Situation," Er'dox demanded.
"Someone breached the secured bay three minutes ago," Vaxon said, his cobalt-blue eyes tracking movement I couldn't see. "Used authorization codes that should have been impossible to obtain. By the time our systems registered the breach, they'd already accessed the communication equipment."
"What did they take?"
"Nothing. That's the problem." Vaxon gestured toward the bay entrance, where two security officers stood guard with weapons drawn. "They didn't take anything. They activated it."
The implication hit me like cold water. "They're transmitting. Right now. They came back to finish what we interrupted."
"We sealed the power supply," Er'dox said. "How—"
"They had backup power cells. Portable units, probably smuggled in piece by piece over weeks." Vaxon's expression was grim. "The transmission started ninety seconds ago. We've got maybe four minutes before it completes, based on the file size Dana identified."
Four minutes. Four minutes to stop classified Mothership specifications from reaching hostile forces in the Contested Reaches. Four minutes to catch a saboteur who'd proven they were willing to cause casualties to protect their operation.
Four minutes that suddenly felt like four seconds.
"Breach protocol," Vaxon ordered his team. "Hard entry, secure the equipment, subdue anyone inside. Non-lethal force if possible, but mission priority is stopping that transmission. Understood?"
Affirmatives from six security officers who moved like they'd done this a hundred times before. Probably had, given Mothership's rescue operations in dangerous sectors.
"Dana, you stay here," Er'dox said, moving toward the breach team.
"The hell I do." I grabbed his arm—or tried to, my hand barely wrapping around his forearm. "That encryption is based on human protocols. If there are system controls I can understand faster than your team—"
"Then I'll call you in after we've secured the area."
"Er'dox—"
"This isn't negotiable." His amber eyes were hard, uncompromising. "You're a brilliant engineer. You're not tactical personnel. Vaxon's team needs to move fast without worrying about protecting civilians."
The word 'civilian' stung more than it should have. But he was right. I'd slow them down. Get in the way. Possibly get myself killed by someone desperate enough to assault crew members.
"Fine. But the second it's secure—"
"You'll be the first one I call."
The breach team moved into position. Vaxon counted down with hand signals I'd never learned, military efficiency reducing complex operations to simple gestures.
Three. Two. One.
The bay door exploded inward—shaped charge, controlled detonation that turned security barriers into shrapnel and smoke. The team flowed through the breach like water, weapons raised, moving in coordinated patterns that spoke to years of training.
I couldn't see inside from my position, but I heard everything. Shouted commands. The sharp report of energy weapons discharging. Someone screaming, pain or fury, impossible to tell through the chaos.
Then Er'dox's voice, cutting through the noise: "Dana! Now! I need you on the transmission system!"
I was moving before conscious thought caught up, racing through the breached entrance into smoke and emergency lighting and controlled chaos. Security team had someone pinned against the far wall and couldn't see details through the smoke, just the basic geometry of capture and restraint.
Er'dox was at the communication equipment, his hands moving across controls with impressive speed despite the unfamiliar human-derived design. "The transmission is still active. Forty-three percent complete. I can't shut it down without the encryption keys."
I slid into position beside him, my eyes scanning the interface with desperate focus. The system was more sophisticated than what we'd seen in Bail's shelter, professional grade, built by someone who really understood communication theory.
"The encryption keys," I muttered, pulling up the system architecture. "They're probably hardware-locked. Physical token or biometric authorization. We can't decrypt without—"
"Then we don't decrypt," Er'dox said. "Can we corrupt the transmission? Make it useless garbage instead of functional data?"
Could we? I ran through the possibilities, my engineer brain cycling through options at speed that surprised me. The transmission was fifty-eight percent complete now, streaming encrypted specifications toward coordinates in the Contested Reaches.
"Data injection," I said, the solution crystallizing. "We can't stop the transmission, but we can inject corrupted data into the stream. Overwrite the actual specifications with random noise patterns that look legitimate but are functionally useless."
"Will they detect the corruption?"
"Not immediately. Not if we're clever about it.
Human encryption protocols include integrity checks, but they're designed to catch random transmission errors, not deliberate data poisoning.
" My fingers were already moving across the interface, pulling up the transmission stream and identifying injection points. "Give me ninety seconds."
"You have sixty. After that, too much real data will have transmitted."
Sixty seconds. Sixty seconds to build a data poisoning routine that would fool military-grade integrity checks while operating on equipment I'd been using for approximately ninety seconds.
No pressure. Just the security of an entire city-sized vessel depending on me not screwing this up.
I built the routine fast, no elegance, no optimization, just functional code that would inject garbage data masquerading as legitimate specifications. The integrity checks were the hard part. Had to make the corruption look like intentional content, not transmission errors.
Forty seconds. The transmission was seventy-two percent complete. My code was sixty percent ready.
"Dana—" Er'dox's voice carried warning.
"Almost there. Just need to… got it!" I deployed the injection routine, watching it propagate through the transmission stream with aggressive efficiency. Corrupted data began flowing, overwriting technical specifications with elaborate garbage that would take weeks to identify as useless.
The transmission completed. One hundred percent. But now maybe seventy percent of that data was poisoned beyond use.
"Did it work?" Vaxon appeared beside us, his armor scorched from energy weapon discharge.
"Won't know for certain until someone tries to use the data," I admitted. "But if I did this right, anyone attempting to exploit those specifications will find themselves with detailed plans for systems that don't actually exist."
"Good enough for now." Vaxon gestured toward the captured saboteur. "We've got our traitor. And Dana, you're going to want to see this."
Something in his tone made my stomach drop. That wasn't the voice of someone announcing victory. That was the voice of someone delivering bad news they wished they didn't have to share.
I followed Er'dox and Vaxon to where the security team had their prisoner secured, face-down on the deck, hands restrained, surrounded by officers who looked ready to shoot at the slightest provocation.
The saboteur was small. Roughly my height. Moving with pain that suggested injuries from the breach entry or subsequent capture.
Vaxon nodded to one of his officers, who carefully rolled the prisoner over.
Human. Female. Maybe early thirties. Dark hair matted with blood from a scalp wound. Brown eyes that tracked us with calculation despite obvious pain.
And completely unfamiliar. Not one of the sixteen survivors from the burning planet. Not Bail from his lonely shelter. Someone else. Someone who'd been aboard Mothership long enough to gain high-level clearances and technical expertise.
A Liberty survivor we'd never known existed.
"You," the woman said, her voice rough but steady. She was looking directly at me. "You're Dana. From the rescue group."
"Who are you?" I managed.
"Dr. Sarah Kim. Chief Engineer aboard Liberty." She coughed, winced. "Or I was, before the wormhole tore everything apart. Before I spent eleven months fighting for survival. Before I finally made it to Mothership and discovered I wasn't the only one who'd survived."
Dr. Sarah Kim. I knew that name. Every Liberty crew member knew that name. She'd designed half the ship's systems, recruited most of the engineering team, been legendary for her technical brilliance and uncompromising standards.
And she'd been in escape pod cluster seven when the wormhole hit. The pods we'd lost track of immediately. The ones we'd assumed were destroyed or scattered so far that rescue was impossible.
"You survived," I said, the words inadequate but all I could manage.