Chapter 46
NOVA
The hum of the debrief room is too sterile.
Cold white light slices down from the ceiling like surgical blades, sterile and over-bright, bouncing off chrome and datapads and the polished boots of the brass sitting across from me.
There’s a stale smell of recycled air and sour sweat, the kind of scent that clings to adrenaline and bureaucracy.
Stark sits in restraints at the far end of the table, wrists cuffed with high-frequency magnetic locks that could melt bone if he tried anything cute. Not that it matters. His face is a masterclass in smug indifference. Leaning back in the chair like we’re all just delaying his lunch break.
“You think this is over?” he says. Voice calm. Almost bored. But there’s something under it—like the low vibration before a quake. “You don’t even know what you turned on.”
I don’t blink. “We shut down your array. Your override’s been scrubbed. You’re done.”
Stark chuckles. A deep, slow, shit-eating sound that makes my molars grind.
“You shut down a node,” he says. “Not the system. The real show’s still spinning.”
Vice Admiral Linx, perched two seats to my right, cuts in. “We’re conducting a full system sweep now. The Alliance will contain this.”
Stark tilts his head, and the grin that crawls across his face makes me want to knock it clean off.
“You can’t contain physics,” he purrs. “You can only dance to it. And you, Captain Starling—”
I flinch. He shouldn’t know I’ve been reinstated.
“—you danced first.”
Guards drag him out before I can respond, boots scraping against the tile. But the smirk stays behind. Like a ghost in the room.
I exhale hard, running both hands through my hair, pressing my palms to my eyes until spots bloom behind my lids. The silence after his exit is heavier than his presence. No one says anything for a long beat.
Then Linx stands. “We’ll issue a full sweep protocol. Thank you for your cooperation, Captain.”
I want to scream. “You’re not listening.”
He pauses. “Excuse me?”
“There’s something in the system. I saw the data. Stark uploaded one last set of commands after we secured the mainframe. That wasn’t sabotage—it was a delayed sequence. Timed. Hidden.”
Linx’s jaw tightens. “We’ll review the logs.”
“You don’t have time to review! That sequence is buried in the wormhole core. It’s live.”
“Captain Starling,” he says, voice that special brand of condescension reserved for women who know more than their male superiors, “we’ve initiated a controlled shutdown. The situation is under control.”
“No,” I say, standing. My chair scrapes the floor like a weapon unsheathed. “You don’t understand. Stark didn’t care about sabotage. He wanted to open the wormhole, not collapse it. And now that door’s still cracked—just enough. He left a tether inside. Something quantum-level.”
Linx blinks. Once. Slowly.
“We’ll monitor the array.”
My blood is boiling.
“By the time your monitors catch the fluctuations, this whole planet could fold in on itself.”
He opens his mouth—probably to remind me of protocol—but I’m already moving.
Out the door. Down the corridor. The walls blur, faces become streaks of uniforms and flickering status screens. The back of my throat tastes like copper. Rage and fear and the hollow punch of knowing you’re right but nobody’s listening.
The doors to my quarters hiss open and I head straight for the console, bypassing all the security prompts with a series of authorization overrides that should probably get me court-martialed.
The wormhole logs pull up in a cascade of blue and red text, scrolling like a fever dream. I narrow it to the last ten minutes before the mainframe went dark.
There it is.
Buried under sixteen layers of obfuscation code. Masked as a routine calibration ping. The data signature is Stark’s. Time-stamped post-containment. I isolate the string and expand it.
My heart stops.
Sequence: INIT.
Execution: 22:00 system time.
Effect: Quantum Cascade Initiation.
Target: Wormhole Singularity Node ALPHA-DAV.
I backtrack. Fast. Trace it into the command spine.
There’s a nested loop.
A goddamn chain reaction.
Self-replicating code—fractal algorithms designed to bypass every safety protocol the Alliance baked into the system. The moment the “controlled shutdown” begins, it’ll trigger the cascade.
Stark didn’t want to escape. He wanted a stage. A statement. A legacy.
And unless I stop it, it’s going to tear Daveros open like a tin can under a gravity hammer.
I slam my fist down on the console and the display flickers. “Shit!”
The starscape lamp above Dar’s bed starts spinning again, slow and lazy. It always resets when the room AI detects elevated heart rates.
I’m halfway through rerouting the sequence to a sandbox server when I feel it.
Kaz.
I don’t hear him come in. He doesn’t knock. He just stands there—silhouetted in the doorframe, jaw tight, eyes already scanning the screen.
“What happened?” he says, voice low, sharp.
I don’t turn around. “Stark left a worm in the code. Something’s coming. I don’t know what—but it’s coming.”
He crosses the room in two strides, leaning over my shoulder, heat radiating off him like engine wash.
“Explain.”
I do. Fast. Clipped. No time for fluff.
When I finish, he exhales hard. “And the Alliance?”
“Dragging their feet.”
Kaz’s hand finds the back of his neck. A familiar tic. He’s doing calculations in his head. Flight paths. Burn rates. Escape vectors.
“Nova,” he says finally, “we’re not waiting for permission, are we?”
I look up.
“No,” I whisper. “We have to fix what he started.”
He nods once, sharp and certain. “Then we’re going back to the gate.”
I rise to my feet. “We don’t have clearance. We’ll be violating five major fleet protocols just by entering the relay chamber.”
Kaz grins without humor. “I’m Vakutan. Breaking rules is a genetic impulse.”
I grab the drive chip from the console and shove it into my belt pocket. “You realize this might kill us.”
He shrugs, stepping closer. “What, again?”
His hand brushes mine. Brief. Charged. Like lightning bottled between skin.
We move as one.
Out of the room.
Down the corridor.
No words now. Just footsteps, breath, urgency.
The lights flicker once overhead.
The storm’s coming.
And we’re the only ones with a map.