7. Nina
NINA
The witness's name was Corren Dast. Station janitor. Access to three sublevel maintenance corridors, two cargo routing hubs, and one docking log terminal in sublevel seven. He was thirty-four years old and his station ID photo shows a man who smiled at the camera like he was doing it a favor.
Someone burned the wiring panel above him to kill the corridor sensors before they killed him.
The scorch marks are clean, targeted, and not the work of someone improvising.
This was planned before we identified Dast as a connection point, which means whoever is cleaning up loose ends had a list before we started pulling threads.
Kheltor crouches over the body with the stillness of a man cataloguing a crime scene he has seen too many versions of. I stay back because crowding him helps nothing and because I need a moment to look at the access panel beside the corridor junction.
The door log has been wiped. But the wipe carries a clearance signature—a command-level authorization code that should require senior station personnel to generate.
Not a smuggler. Not a black-market cleaner.
Someone with official access to Orpheus Station's security architecture reached into this corridor and removed the evidence of their own presence, and they were not careful enough to strip the authorization layer before they left.
"The clearance code on the panel wipe," I say. "That's not criminal-sector access."
Kheltor stands and moves to look at the panel without responding immediately. Then: "No. It is not."
"Dast accessed the sublevel seven docking terminal two days before I found the falsified records. He was there. He saw something."
"And someone knew he saw it." Kheltor photographs the panel and the corridor in three directions, systematic and silent. "We are leaving. Now."
He does not say before whoever did this realizes we found him. He does not have to.
Sister Calyra finds me four hours later inside the station's public atrium, which is the kind of space designed to feel neutral while being watched from seventeen angles.
She materializes beside me at the viewport like she was always standing there, pale gold skin and shaved white hair and ceremonial robes that belong to a different, quieter galaxy than the one currently fracturing around us.
"You've been asking questions," she says softly. Her voice belongs to someone accustomed to speaking in places with bad acoustics and worse intentions. "About the Bridge. About the diplomats."
"I'm customs. It's related to missing transport records."
"It is related to considerably more than that." She keeps her gaze on the viewport, not on me. "I need to tell you something, and then I need to ask you to stop. Not because I want to protect the truth. Because I want to protect you."
Something in my chest pulls tight.
"Humans are not accidental," she says, still soft.
"Your presence in this galaxy—your biology—is not coincidence.
There are records older than either of our governments that suggest your species carries something.
A signature. A compatibility with structures like the Bridge that no other race demonstrates.
" Her eyes finally move to mine. "The people suppressing that knowledge are not doing so out of ignorance.
They know exactly what it means. And they have already killed to keep it buried. "
"What does it mean?"
"I cannot tell you safely here." Her composure does not waver, but something beneath it does—a pressure, held carefully behind her calm.
"Stop pulling the records. Stop going near the Bridge.
Whatever reaction you experienced in transit sector L-7 will have been logged somewhere, and the people watching for exactly that signal are not people you want to find you first."
She moves away before I can ask the next question, and the atrium swallows her the way it swallows everything: smoothly, without a trace.
I notice the shadow on my third transit between customs and the residential corridor.
A Vakutan officer, too large to be inconspicuous, maintaining exactly forty feet of separation through three different route changes. I double back through a maintenance junction, and a different officer—human this time—picks up the interval without missing a step. The handoff is clean. Practiced.
Kheltor is in his security command office when I arrive, and I do not knock.
"Call them off," I say.
He looks up from his console without visible surprise. "They are there for your protection."
"They are there because you don't trust me to move through this station without supervision."
"Those are not mutually exclusive." He sets down the data chip in his hand with the patience of someone managing a tactical problem.
"Someone with command-level access killed a witness today.
Someone else warned you personally in a public atrium.
You have experienced two documented Bridge reactions.
You are a target, Torres, whether or not that suits your preference for independence. "
"I am a member of this investigation. Not an asset you move around the board."
"The distinction is a luxury neither of us has right now."
The argument is still forming when the corridor shudders.
Not structural damage—the sound is wrong for that, too low, too resonant, more frequency than force. The light panels flicker in a specific sequence I recognize from the Bridge transit sector catwalk, and my knees threaten to soften beneath me before I can brace.
Kheltor crosses the space between us in two strides and his hand locks around my arm, steadying.
The tremor passes in four seconds.
We are closer than the argument required. His grip does not ease immediately, and I do not move away, and the charged silence that fills the space where our words were is worse than the tremor itself.
On the wall sensor panel behind him, three indicators blink the same anomalous frequency they logged on the catwalk.
The Bridge is not reacting to proximity this time.
I'm nowhere near it.