Chapter 8 #2
Kirr closed the last step of distance until Kellat had to tilt his head up to meet his gaze. "Tell me."
The healer thumbed the dataflex he held.
"Cascading failure in sector power management. The backups kicked in, but something’s wrong with the switching algorithms. They keep cycling on and off.
Engineering are working on the problem, but that’s not enough.
The critical care beds need consistent power. "
Harper gripped Kirr's arm. "Tell me Delilah’s stable."
Kellat's gaze held hers. "The beds require a constant, regulated flow to maintain the neural suppression that keeps her in the coma. If the power spikes or drops too low, she wakes up. And in her current state, waking up could cause a massive cerebral hemorrhage."
Her stomach dropped. "So, if she wakes… we lose her."
"We're triaging and transferring critical cases off-grid," Kellat said. "She and the other humans we have here are the top priority."
"Use the Ra'Tervas," Kirr said without hesitation, already inputting something into his wrist computer. "My medical bay is fully powered and prepped."
Kellat nodded. "I was hoping you’d say that, but I still need a clear route to docking and security on the corridor. One more power dip and we lose monitoring mid-transfer."
"You'll have it," Kirr said.
Harper pushed past them. She didn't think. She just needed to see. She scrambled around the corner into Delilah's room and stopped dead.
Three healers surrounded the bed. The calm blue light of the stasis field was gone, replaced by an angry, pulsing orange. They were disconnecting tubes, unhooking monitors. Delilah looked small and pale in the flurry of activity, her chest rising and falling in a jerky, uneven rhythm.
"Careful with the links!" one medic shouted.
"Power fluctuating," another warned. "We have twenty seconds before the backup cycles again."
"Delilah—" Harper lunged forward. She had no idea what she tought she would do to help, hold the wires together maybe? Breathe for her cousin? But she didn’t care. She just had to get to her. Her fingers brushed the edge of Delilah's blanket—
A hand clamped around her upper arm. Hard. She was jerked back, her feet skidding on the smooth floor. She spun, ready to claw at whoever was stopping her, and slammed into Kirr's chest.
"Let me go!" She struggled, hitting his shoulder. "They're moving her! I have to—"
"No! You have to stay out of the way," Kirr said.
His voice wasn't gentle. It was iron. He held her easily, pinning her arms to her sides, trapping her against him.
"Look at them, Harper. They are professionals.
You are not. Move wrong and you cost her minutes.
" His hold tightened. "Minutes she doesn't have. "
The words were a slap in the face. Brutal but true.
She went limp, a sob escaping her throat. She watched through a blur of tears as the medics transferred Delilah to a hovering transport gurney. They rushed her out the other door, toward the docking ring.
Gone. Just like that.
A chime sounded. Sharp, insistent, and demanding.
Kirr stiffened against her. His hold on her tightened for a heartbeat, then he released one arm to flip back the leather cover on his wrist. It flashed red, matching the emergency lights in the hall.
"M'Aab," he answered.
"Commander, we have sector-wide cascades," someone bellowed from the device. "Life support in residential is showing strain. We need authorization for sector lockdown and power rerouting. The engineers are chasing their tails up here. Comms are down, and we can’t raise the Station Commander. You’re the highest ranking warrior we can reach. "
Kirr's jaw clenched. "I'm coming."
He dropped his arm and looked down at her. "I have to go to the Command Center."
Harper scrubbed at her face with her sleeve, eyes fixed on the empty bed and then to the the corridor they’d taken her cousin through. Kirr’s ship. They were taking Delilah there, and she remembered the way. "I need to follow Delilah.”
"No."
Her head snapped up. "What?"
"You're coming with me."
"My cousin is in a coma that might break at any moment and you want an audience—are you insane?" Her voice cracked. "I'm going with Deliah!”
"You are under my supervision," Kirr said.
He slid his hand into her hair, holding her head steady so she had to meet his gaze.
"That is non-negotiable. Especially now.
The station is unstable. I am not leaving you alone in a sector with failing power.
Kellat is with your cousin, he will keep her safe. Believe me."
"Kirr, please—"
"No." He pulled her toward the exit. "Trust me.”
He didn't wait for her reply.
Instead, he towed her out of the medical bay, his strides eating up the corridor. She had to half-jog to keep up, fury knotted with the terror in her gut.
He was an arrogant, controlling, overbearing ass of an alien.
They navigated the station's labyrinthine halls. Every sector they passed seemed to be in a different state of panic. Some lights flickered. Some doors were jammed open. Security teams rushed past, nodding sharply to Kirr as he stormed by.
If Medical had been organized chaos, the Command Center was a war zone. The room was massive. A central holographic tank dominated the space, displaying the station's schematic. Dozens of Latharian warriors manned consoles in concentric rings.
A console sparked somewhere to their left, making her flinch. The warrior standing in front of it slammed his palm down on an override, bellowing, "Reroute the tertiary conduits!"
"Denied! The coupling can't take the load!" another roared back.
"We're losing atmospheric scrubbers in Sector Four!"
Deep, booming voices bounced off metal walls, pressing against her chest. Kirr didn't even flinch. He strode into the center of the room, dragging her along in his wake.
"Report!" he ordered, his voice slicing through the chaos.
A harried-looking warrior hurried over, followed by three men with different colored sashes over their leather uniforms—technicians or engineers, judging by the grime on their uniforms and the diagnostic dataflexes in their hands.
The engineers barely spared Harper a glance as they crowded around a holo-display.
Sweat beaded on the lead engineer's temple as he dragged two holo-windows into alignment. "It's a virus. Has to be. Or sabotage. Failures in sequences we can't predict."
"Explain," Kirr ordered, arms folded over his broad chest. She stood at his side, trying to make herself look small. She might be pissed at him for dragging her here, but these people had a job to do. She wasn’t going to make that harder by being a brat.
"All our containment attempts keep failing," the lead tech said, gesturing wildly.
"We patch to try and get ahead of the failures, but new faults appear within a cycle of every patch. We had a spike in Sector Seven, isolated it, but then the suppression field in Sector Two dropped. It’s like the station systems are fighting each other. "
"Fighting?" Kirr asked.
"Priority contention," a second engineer chimed in. "Multiple subroutines seize the bus, collide, and the grid browns out in waves. We can't find the source because the source keeps moving."
"Draanthing B'Kaar," the first engineer muttered, wiping his forehead. "Don't fix trall, just stick a warrior in there and hope for the best. No thought to what happens when they draanth off and leave!"
Harper peered around Kirr's bicep at the holographic display hovering over the table. It showed the station as a web of light. Red blotches bloomed and faded in an erratic dance.
She watched it for a moment. Part of her brain noted it was almost pretty—the blooming red, the fading pulse. The rest of her wanted to scream. Then her eyes narrowed.
It wasn't erratic.
“I know that pattern.” She’d seen it before. Not on a space station, but on a server farm in New Stambridge three years ago, when a botched update caused the cooling systems to war with the processing load balancers.
She leaned in toward the hologram. Yeah, it was definitely a similar pattern. "It’s not a virus."
The engineers kept talking, their voices rising as they debated shutting down the main power core… a move that would leave them on emergency batteries with minutes of air.
"It's repeating," she said, louder. "That jump—Seven to four—then Six—same interval."
No one listened
"Force a cold restart on the routing protocols," one engineer yelled.
"Do that and it draanths up life support!"
She grabbed Kirr’s sleeve. He looked down, his eyebrows drawing together.
"It’s a cascading feedback loop," she said. "The algorithms aren't fighting. They're echoing and the echoes are confusing the system."
Kirr didn't blink. He didn't pat her head. He didn't tell her to hush. He turned back to the room, and bellowed, "Silence!"
The room went quiet. One engineer opened his mouth to continue. Kirr's gaze snapped to him, and the words died unspoken. Every gaze in the room swiveled to Kirr, then tracked down to her standing at his elbow.
"Go on, Harper," Kirr said.
She swallowed hard.
"The pattern," she said, gesturing to the display. "It only looks scattered. See how the red hits Sector Seven, then jumps to Four, then Six? And then to different sectors next time? Watch it. It’s the same timing each cycle."
The lead tech scoffed. "She's misreading correlation as causation. None of those sectors handshake."
"Not physically," she said. She knew what she was on about, dammit.
She just had to make them see. "Not logically.
But look, they share the same power bus for non-critical updates.
You have a cascade echo. One system sends a 'power up' signal, another reads it as a surge and sends a 'power down,' and the first system reads that as a failure and tries harder. It's bouncing through the nodes."
"Impossible." He looked at Kirr. "My lord, with respect… what could a human possibly know about Latharian architecture?"
She cut off Kirr before he could answer. "I worked in data analysis," she snapped. "I tracked systemic failures in networks bigger than this fucking station."
"Our technology is far more advanced than anything you may have monitored," the second engineer argued, crossing his massive arms as he glared at her. "You are female to boot. You are wasting time we do not have."
Harper bristled. Soft? She'd kept a roof over two heads on a salary that barely covered one, managed panic attacks, and navigated a city that wanted to chew her up and spit her out. She wasn't soft. She was exhausted, yes. Traumatized, maybe. But she knew data.
"Give me a window into the command log," she ordered Kirr, looking straight at the engineer. "Read-only if you need to… just let me trace the origin."
"Absolutely not," the lead engineer said. "Security protocols forbid—"
"Overridden," Kirr said. “Give her access.”
The room froze again.
"Commander?" the engineer sputtered. "Give a human access to the core architecture? If she makes a mistake, she could… do anything! Overload the power core, vent the atmosphere even!"
"She saw the pattern. You did not," Kirr said. He stepped back, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Give her access. Now."
"But protocol—"
"My authorization stands," Kirr snarled.
He leaned in, looming over the table. "The station is dying.
My—" He stopped hard. "—the female under my protection is in danger.
If she says she can fix it, she fixes it.
Give her the access she needs. Now. Or face me in trial combat if you wish to challenge my authority. "
The engineer turned a shade of gray she’d never seen before. He glanced from Kirr's furious face to Harper's determined one.
"Read-only," the engineer hissed. "She doesn't touch actuator commands."
"She gets what she needs," Kirr replied. "You can watch every keystroke."
The engineer's jaw worked. "If this goes wrong, it is on your head, War-Commander."
Kirr bared his teeth—no humor, all threat. "Everything is on my head. Move."
He gestured to the terminal seat the engineer had vacated.
She didn't hesitate. She stepped forward, her pulse jumping, fast and hard.
Shit. This wasn't the monitoring station back home.
It was nothing like it. The keyboard was holographic, the language was alien, and the stakes weren't a server crash…
it was Delilah's life on the line. If it carried on, ate up all the resources like it had in New Stambridge, it would shut the station down.
Which meant everyone's life was on the line.
"Show me the command log," she ordered, her hands hovering over the interface. "And filter for recursive timestamps."
The engineer grunted, tapping a few commands on his own pad to transfer control. The display in front of her lit up. The panic sharpened into focus, and she reached for the interface.
She narrowed her eyes.
Streams of data scrolled down the screen—alien symbols she couldn't read, but it didn’t matter.
Data was data. Logic was logic. Patterns were patterns.
All she had to do was find the source of the pattern.