5. Nina
NINA
Authorized research only means a clearance level three grades above mine.
It also means that when Orrik Dane slides into the maintenance alcove beside me, plugs a device about the size of my thumb into the terminal's secondary port, and says "try it now," the partition opens like it was never locked at all.
"Orrik."
"Hm?"
"If we get caught, I'm telling them you did this alone."
"Nobody's going to catch us." He leans over my shoulder, mismatched cybernetic fingers tapping a quick rhythm against his knee.
Two of the fingers are different metals—left hand salvage, from the look of it, repaired in stages across years of hazardous work.
"That partition hasn't been audited in four months.
Nobody checks archives they don't want people reading. "
I met Orrik six hours ago when I followed a maintenance access junction into the wrong corridor and nearly knocked him off a ladder.
He'd found the situation funny. Then I'd explained what I was looking for, and he'd stopped laughing and started thinking, which turned out to be more useful than I expected from a man who introduces himself as Scrapjack.
"How do you know it hasn't been audited?"
"Because I would've gotten a security flag when I last ran a bypass through it, and I didn't." He says this with complete comfort. "I've been routing maintenance diagnostics through these partitions for two years. I know which ones are watched and which ones are furniture."
I stop asking questions and start reading.
The records are fragmented. Whatever was here originally, it has been trimmed—not deleted, but pruned. Specific passages cut. Researcher notes redacted to single lines. What remains reads like a conversation with half the responses removed.
But enough is there.
The phrase Homo sapiens bridgeborn lineage markers appears in three separate fragments from three separate research periods.
The oldest is dated well before the current war.
A secondary reference describes anomalous genetic resonance in human subjects when exposed to sustained Precursor field emissions.
A third, more recently redacted, refers to activation potential in subjects carrying complete marker sequences and then dissolves into a block of removed text.
Activation potential.
I sit with that until the words stop looking like research and start looking like a warning.
"You've gone quiet," Orrik says. "That either means you found nothing or you found something you hate."
"I found something that doesn't make sense yet."
"That's most of what I find down here." He leans closer to read the fragment on the screen. His expression changes. "Huh. That's not maintenance history."
"No." I copy everything I can reach to my chip and close the partition. "I need to check the Bridge transit sector. There were two of the missing diplomats last logged in that vicinity before their records disappeared."
Orrik's easy energy shifts by a degree. "The transit sector is close to the structure's field emission perimeter. Station regs say civilians need an escort past junction L-six."
"Good thing I'm not a civilian." I close the terminal. "I'm customs."
He considers this. "I know the maintenance catwalks that run parallel to the transit corridors. Better sight lines. And nobody asks maintenance what it's doing on the catwalks."
The catwalk is narrow and industrial, running twenty feet above the transit corridor floor through a lattice of old support struts and relay housings.
The Bridge is visible from here through the outer viewport panels—distant but present, massive in the way that geological formations are massive, scaled for time rather than for people.
I am looking at the transit sector below, noting the checkpoint placements and thinking about routing gaps, when it happens.
It is not like going unconscious. It is like something behind my eyes opens.
The catwalk disappears.
In its place: a city made of light and curved stone, impossibly tall, filled with people who are not entirely human but almost—walking beside Vakutans, beside nameless creatures, in a sky lit by two stars instead of one.
Then the stars begin to collapse inward, slow and terrible and certain, and the city fractures at its base, and thousands of figures scatter outward in beams of light across a blackness so deep I feel the scale of it in my chest like a physical weight?—
The railing catches me because my hands grab it on instinct before my legs finish failing.
Then I'm on my knees on the catwalk with my face against the cold metal barrier and the transit corridor is below me again and my skull is splitting behind my eyes.
"Torres." Not Orrik's voice. Lower. Kheltor's hand closes around my arm before I understand he is there, pulling me back from the edge with a grip that is controlled and completely inflexible. "Don't move."
"I'm not—I'm fine?—"
"You are not fine." He doesn't release me. He doesn't look at me, either; his attention is on the panel mounted to the catwalk support strut, where three indicator lights that should read green are reading a frequency I have never seen on a standard station sensor display.
Orrik is two steps behind Kheltor, silent for possibly the first time since I met him.
"The sensors—" I start.
"I see them." Kheltor's voice is stripped of expression. He is reading the frequency readout with the focused attention of someone encountering a threat they don't have a category for. "What did you feel?"
"I don't know how to describe it."
"Try."
"A city. Stars collapsing. People moving outward—humans and others together. It felt—" I stop, because the word that wants to come out is ancient, and that is not a sensation. "It felt like a memory that doesn't belong to me."
The sensor panel pulses again. Same anomalous frequency. Same timing as whatever just happened behind my eyes.
Kheltor goes quiet long enough that the sensor hum becomes the loudest thing on the catwalk. Then he stands and does not tell me he is leaving.
He tells Orrik, in a tone that closes the subject permanently, that he will be escorting me back to my quarters personally and that Orrik should file a maintenance fault report for the sensor panel before anyone else comes to investigate the reading.
"What are you going to do with the sensor data?" I ask.
"Analyze it." He does not offer anything further.
We move back along the catwalk in silence, and I watch the Bridge through the viewport panels as we go—lit from within, massive, impossibly patient.
The sensor frequency pulsed in exact alignment with my vision. Not before. Not after.
The Bridge did not simply affect me.
It answered me.