Serak
She should have slept. Instead, she’d been at the workstation since before daycycle, and by the time I found her in the briefing room, she’d broken through the third encryption layer and was deep in the data underneath.
“I need Deyric,” she said without looking up.
I sent for him. He arrived with his own mug, took one look at her screen, and pulled a chair next to hers.
They worked side by side for an hour, her reading the communications, him running the analysis. I sat at the table and let them work.
They were good together.
Deyric’s speed with data structures and Jessa’s knowledge of the diplomatic system. He’d highlight a pattern, she’d identify the protocol. She’d find a routing code, he’d trace it through the network.
Jessa stopped first. She leaned back and pressed her hands against her eyes.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“The conspiracy isn’t just Vain’s operation,” Deyric said. “There’s a political layer above it. Someone in the Consortium’s diplomatic corps has been providing cover. Shipping authorizations that make the trafficking look like sanctioned cargo. Diplomatic immunity tags for certain vessels.”
“That’s why we can’t make the evidence stick,” Jessa said. “Every time we try to expose the operational side, the political layer shuts it down.”
“Three weeks of raids and all I needed was someone who grew up reading diplomatic mail,” Deyric said, without looking up from his console. “I’m not bitter.”
“You sound bitter,” Jessa said.
“I’m professionally humbled. There’s a difference.”
Deyric was already pulling the data apart, running traces on the communication chains. He’d be at it for hours. I left him to it.
I found Jessa in the mess hall that evening, eating with one hand and scrolling through files with the other. She’d changed out of the clothes she’d been wearing since the raid.
Clean shirt, hair down, the scrape on her forearm covered with a neat bandage. Solren’s work. She had a plate of whatever Maris had left in the galley.
I sat across from her.
“Deyric mapped the communication patterns,” she said, eyes still on the data.
“I recognized a name.” She turned the datapad toward me.
“Devan Tal. Senior diplomatic liaison. I met him at embassy functions when I was a teenager. He’s not the architect.
He’s the go-between, connecting Vain’s operation with the political protection. ”
“How well did you know him?”
She pushed her plate aside and stretched her legs out under the table. One of her boots bumped mine. Neither of us moved.
“I met him when I was thirteen. Embassy reception on Larian Prime. He was handling security protocols for a trade delegation. Remembered my name six months later at a different function on a different station.”
“And?”
“And he was at every function after that. Everyone trusted him. He was the kind of man who kept the machinery running without anyone noticing he was there.”
“Sounds familiar,” I said.
I stared at the data scrolling on the screen.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “About your family. Not today. Before.”
“Because you hate the Consortium.”
“I hate the parts of it that tried to kill my crew and experimented on three thousand people.”
“That’s most of it.”
“Not the part you came from.”
Her boot pressed against mine under the table.
I was aware of the contact. Completely. Against my will.
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “And every year I didn’t say something made it harder to start.”
“The crew doesn’t care where you came from,” I said. “They care that you fed them and watched their backs for seven years.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. Her fingers had stopped scrolling. She looked at the table between us.
“How long have you been at this?” she asked. “The Consortium. The work.”
“Years. The operation that started it was called Ebon Gate—”
“I know what Vain did to the Rift Wraiths,” she said. “I’m not asking for the mission report.”
I looked at her.
“Then what are you asking for?”
“Something useless.”
“Useless.”
“Completely. Something that has never once helped you survive a firefight.”
I had no category for that.
She waited.
“When I was six, I had a saorik.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “A what?”
“A burrow-glider. Small.” I held my hands apart. “Charcoal-gray fur. Ears too large for its head. Four climbing feet. A membrane along the sides.”
“So it flew.”
“It glided.”
“That’s flying with less commitment.”
“It was not flying.”
Her mouth pulled sideways. “And this terrifying not-flying creature belonged to you?”
“It slept inside my shirt.”
She stared at me.
“It preferred body heat.”
“Of course it did.”
“It would crawl in at night and settle against my ribs. If I moved it, it came back.” I could still remember the low trill against my chest, more vibration than sound.
Jessa’s expression changed. Not teasing now. Softer, which was worse.
“What was its name?”
“No.”
“Serak.”
“No.”
“You brought this on yourself.”
I should have stopped.
“Mairuke.”
She repeated it carefully. “Mairuke.”
Hearing it in her voice did something I didn’t examine.
“What does it mean?”
“Nothing relevant.”
“That means it absolutely means something.”
“It means we were discussing Tal.”
Her hand came down over mine on the table. Warm. Light.
“You are impossible.”
“I’ve been told.”
I had given her a useless fact from before the Raptor, before Vain, before anyone called me captain, and somehow it felt more exposing than a mission report.
“The plan,” I said, pulling us back. “Tal. Where is he now?”
“Attending a diplomatic conference at Meridian Station. Nine days total. Tal chairs the trade subcommittee on day three.”
“And you want to go.”
Her chin lifted. “I can get in. Clean credentials, no connection to the Raptor, and I know Tal’s face. Nobody else on this ship can say all three.”
“Jessa.”
She turned back to me. A strand of hair fell along the side of her face. I wanted to push it back.
I shut that down so hard the skin across my knuckles went black.
The bond comes once, my mother told me, young enough that I thought it was romantic. I’d spent the years since learning it was a warning.
Mine had chosen a woman with loose hair and a plan to walk into the enemy’s den. And I couldn’t stop it.
“We’ll brief the crew,” I said. “Full plan. Tomorrow.”
She glanced at my fists on the table. I hadn’t realized they were fists.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed.
She stood, collected her datapad and her plate, and left. Her boots faded down the corridor.
I looked down at my hands. The dark was fading back to the pale I’d worn since childhood, the low-level meld that lived in my pores, the resting surface most Khavai carried without thinking about it. I didn’t remember the color underneath.
That was a lie.
I’d seen it once, when I was five or six, before the meld had settled in. My mother’s hands had been deep brown. Mine had been the same.
I sat there for a while longer in the empty mess hall. Then I made two mugs. Left one at my usual spot and one across from it, where she’d sit in the morning.
Hers would be cold by then. She’d drink it anyway. She’d know who left it and she wouldn’t say anything, the same way I never said anything about the ones she left for me.