12. The Fight #3
“The order didn’t originate from Trell.” His voice is flat. The tactical brain running hot. “The clearance code was spoofed. Someone injected the kill order into SRS channels using Trell’s authentication.”
“Someone with access to SRS encryption.”
“Someone with access to SRS encryption, knowledge of the operational chain, and a specific interest in having you eliminated by your own protection.”
The elegant brutality of it hits me. Someone wanted me dead and they didn’t send their own people.
They hacked SRS comms and sent Xor. Used the organization’s own architecture to turn the male protecting me into the weapon aimed at me.
If he’d been the agent SRS built—the 98% compliance rate, the weapon they wheel out—I would be dead and the container would be gone and Xor would be filing a mission report that no one would question.
“Sprout, can you trace the originating server?”
“Working. The spoofing is sophisticated—multiple relay bounces, encrypted proxy layers. But the encryption style has a signature.” A pause. The orb cycling rapid gold. “Varren Drask. The encryption matches known Drask Acquisitions methodology.”
Drask. I don’t know the name. I look at Xor.
“Varren Drask.” He says the name the way you’d say the name of a disease.
“Independent broker. High-value acquisitions. He operates in the space between legal and criminal and his client list is—extensive.” A breath.
“He has the resources to spoof SRS communications. He has done it before, on a smaller scale. I dismissed it as a rumor.”
“So Drask wants the container badly enough to hack SRS to get it. And he wanted me dead—specifically me. Why?”
“Witnesses,” Xor says. “Drask eliminates witnesses. It is an operational signature.”
“Sprout. Secondary file.”
“Already found it. Encrypted separately. A transaction reference—a buyer code and a value that is—“ The orb pulses. “Ten times the container’s listed value.”
I pull my notebook from the cardigan pocket.
The pen from behind my ear. I write the transaction code in my round, quick handwriting.
I don’t know what it opens yet. I don’t know who the buyer is.
But I write it down because that is what I do—I write down the things nobody else is tracking, the patterns nobody else is filing, the evidence that falls through the gaps.
Xor watches me write. His expression shifts—the tactical brain stepping back, the man stepping forward.
“The kill order was never from Trell,” he says. Quietly.
“No.”
“I tore myself apart over an order that was never real.”
“The hiding was real.” I close the notebook. Slide it into the cardigan pocket next to the pen. Look at him. “The hiding was real and it was wrong and the reason it was wrong doesn’t change because someone else wrote the words.”
He nods. Once. The acceptance complete—no argument, no deflection. He hid something from me and the hiding was wrong regardless of the source. He takes this and holds it and does not try to make it smaller.
“However,” I say, and my voice softens—not performance-soft, the real thing underneath, the warmth that has been banking since the kill order conversation and is now finding its way back like blood returning to a limb, “it does mean nobody has actually ordered you to kill me. Which I think we can agree is an improvement.”
The corner of his mouth moves. The architecture of a smile. Closer than it has ever been to the real thing.
The adrenaline drops like a temperature change.
One moment I’m running on combat chemistry and tactical clarity, and the next my hands are shaking and the corridor smells like ozone and blood—dark crimson Xarthian, fainter blue-tinged Yulx—and the specific burnt-metal scent of Betsy’s discharge.
The blood on my cheek has dried. The cut above my eye is closed—I haven’t dealt with it properly yet and I am not going to now, because what I need right now is one minute to stand here and know that we are both alive.
Varren Drask. The name sits in my chest like a stone.
A broker with SRS encryption access, a buyer willing to pay ten times the listed value of a container I’ve been hauling across half the Outer Rim, and an operational signature that eliminates witnesses.
He wanted the container. He wanted me dead.
He sent a Tier 1 using Xor’s own organization’s channels so that if it worked, no one would look at Drask.
Clean. Untraceable. A ghost operation buried inside a legitimate SRS deployment.
He didn’t know about Xor. He didn’t know what the dark of a mineral corridor would build. He didn’t know that a name said in a corridor at a normal volume could stop a Tier 1 kill stroke.
He’s going to find out we’re still breathing. He will send more.
In my notebook, the transaction reference sits in my round quick handwriting, next to the pen crease at the top right corner of the page. I don’t know what it opens yet. Somewhere in the galaxy, Varren Drask doesn’t know we have it.
“Drask will send more,” I say.
“Yes.”
“He has the resources.”
“Yes.” Xor’s voice is flat. Operational. The tactical brain already running contingencies. “Junction One gives us options. SRS contacts I trust, infrastructure to trace the transaction reference. And Saar—if he cooperates—has details about how the contract was built from inside SRS channels.”
I look at the notebook. Look at him.
“Then we’d better get there first.”
Somewhere behind the sealed cargo door, Saar is quiet. Somewhere in the pursuit craft’s locked comms buffer, a transaction code sits waiting. Somewhere in the galaxy, Varren Drask thinks his problem is solved.
I’m still standing.
Drask didn’t plan for that.