9. Nina
NINA
Vakutan security territory smells like weapon oil, recycled air, and discipline.
The corridors are wider than the residential sectors, built for bodies larger than mine, and the lighting runs cooler—blue-white instead of the warm amber standard throughout the station's civilian areas.
Every door I pass is reinforced. Every officer I encounter pauses their work to track me with the particular attention of people trying to determine whether I am a threat or a mistake.
Probably both.
My quarters inside the secured block are larger than my original assignment and half as comfortable.
The furniture is designed for a species that does not sit so much as anchor itself.
The sleeping platform is functional and approximately the height of a standard cargo shelf.
I have access to a secured terminal, a direct line to Kheltor's command office, and approximately zero privacy.
On the second morning, a Vakutan officer the size of a vehicle stops me in the main corridor and asks, in careful Standard, what my purpose is in the secure block.
I tell him I was assigned here.
"By whom," he says.
"Kheltor."
He looks at me for a long moment, then steps aside without another word. The deference is not for me. It is for whoever gave the order.
I keep that in mind.
Watching Kheltor run a briefing is educational.
He does not raise his voice. He does not need to.
He delivers orders precisely, as if every possible point of failure has already been calculated and sorted into acceptable losses.
His officers do not fidget. They do not ask unnecessary questions.
They absorb and respond and disperse with a speed that would be unsettling if it were not clearly the product of genuine respect rather than fear.
He is brutal in his efficiency and his people follow him like gravity.
"You're studying him," Zevra's voice says in my earpiece. She is not in the building. She is somewhere in the station's lower sectors with a comm relay and too much situational awareness. "I understand the instinct. He is architecturally compelling."
"He is my investigation partner."
“Those aren’t mutually exclusive, customs girl.
” She lets the nickname land and moves on before I can object to it.
"I have something for you. The payment routes I've been tracing from the diplomat transport operations—they surfaced again two days ago.
Larger transfers. And the recipients aren't transport companies this time.
They're meeting-space bookings in the abandoned residential sectors on sublevel twelve. "
I write the coordinates she sends and look through the command room's observation window at Kheltor wrapping up the briefing.
"Someone is convening a meeting," she continues.
"Cross-referencing the attendee signal traffic—it's fragmented and encrypted, but the device signatures are pulling from both Alliance military networks and Coalition diplomatic channels.
Both sides, in the same room, in an abandoned sector, funded by the same account structure that's been moving your missing diplomats. "
Both sides.
"When?" I ask.
"Forty-eight hours. Maybe less."
Kheltor's reaction to this information is exactly as cooperative as I expected.
"You will transmit the coordinates to my officers and remain in secured quarters," he says, without turning from his command screens.
"I found the connection between the meetings and the diplomat routes. I should be part of how we respond to it."
"You were attacked eighteen hours ago by two people who knew exactly where you were and what you were carrying." He pulls up a station map and begins marking patrol positions. "The coordinates stay in secure channels. You stay inside this block."
"You can't investigate a cross-faction conspiracy from inside a secured room?—"
"I am not inside a secured room. You are.
" He turns to look at me then, and the lines of exhaustion beneath the control are visible in a way they were not two days ago.
He has not been sleeping. The evidence is in the set of his shoulders, the slight delay in his responses, the careful way he holds his neck.
"The investigation continues. Your participation continues. Inside this perimeter."
We argue for another six minutes. He does not move, and eventually I run out of approaches that are not simple repetition.
I notice, when I am looking for something else, that he is holding his left side with the particular stillness of someone managing pain they have decided to ignore.
"You're injured," I say.
"I am functional."
"That's not the same thing." I cross the room before he can redirect me, because if I frame it as a request he will decline it and we will have another six-minute argument that ends identically. "Where?"
He is quiet for a moment that has more calculation in it than emotion. Then he moves his arm.
The injury runs along his left ribs—a burn score from the assassination attempt, deeper than a graze, undertreated and clearly several hours old. He cleaned it himself and applied a basic seal. The seal has held but not well.
I take the medical kit from the desk without asking. He does not stop me.
Working around someone Kheltor's size requires adjustment—his anatomy is proportioned differently, the skin texture of his forearm where I brace to hold the treatment applicator is rough in a way human skin is not, ridged along lines that probably correspond to something structural in Vakutan physiology.
He does not move while I work. He does not speak.
But when the applicator passes over the deepest point of the burn and I have to press slightly to hold the seal, his breathing changes by a fraction that would be invisible if I were not standing close enough to hear it.
I finish quickly and step back.
"The coordinates Zevra sent," I say, because the silence needs purpose. "The meeting is in forty-eight hours. We have time to plan an approach that does not require me to sit in a room."
He looks at me in the way he sometimes does—like he is running a calculation he does not intend to share the result of.
"We have forty-eight hours," he says finally. "I will think about it."
It is not agreement. But it is the first sentence tonight that has not been a direct refusal, and I understand Kheltor well enough now to recognize the difference.
Zevra's voice clicks back into my earpiece as I leave.
"Both governments," she says, quieter this time. "In the same room. You understand what that means."
I understand precisely what it means.
This was never about one faction burying a secret. Someone convinced enemies to cooperate—which means whatever they are protecting, they are all afraid of it equally.