13. Nina
NINA
Kheltor is already at the terminal when I wake up.
He doesn't comment on the hour or on the fact that I slept at all.
He hands me a sealed ration pack without looking away from the display, and the mundane practicality of it—this enormous, battle-scarred Vakutan commander handing me breakfast in an abandoned safehouse at oh-six-hundred—is somehow more disorienting than the night itself.
I eat standing up. He lets me.
We don't discuss what happened. Not because it needs hiding—the awareness between us has changed texture in a way that is obvious to anyone paying attention, and Kheltor pays attention to everything—but because there is nothing to negotiate.
We both know what we chose. The station outside is still a conspiracy and a crisis and a political catastrophe in progress, and we are both, at our cores, people who work the problem in front of them.
The problem in front of us is large and getting larger.
Orrik meets us at the secondary access junction with three data chips, a maintenance overlay of the station's lower-sector ventilation routing, and a sleepless, cheerful look that suggests he considers exhaustion a fair price for interesting information.
"You look terrible," he tells me cheerfully. "Both of you, actually. Very coordinated."
"The chips," Kheltor says.
Orrik hands them over.
Zevra is already inside the secured analysis room, settled into the cool, narrow focus I've started to recognize as her working mode.
She has Calyra's warning cross-referenced against the partial recordings from the abandoned sector meeting and the archive fragments from the restricted Bridge partition, laid out across the display in a structure that makes connections I had not yet seen.
"You found something," I say.
"Several somethings." She pulls the first file forward. "Start here."
The fragment is from the deepest layer of the classified Bridge archive—the section below the redacted research records, below the partial notes on human genetic markers.
Someone filed it under a maintenance routing log, which is either a filing error or the most obvious hiding place imaginable.
The text is partial and the encoding is old enough to require Orrik's decryption overlay to read.
Two words surface clearly in the recovered text: bridgeborn descendants.
No definition. No context. No explanation of what the designation means or who assigned it. Just the phrase, embedded in a research notation that cross-references human genetic sequencing data with Precursor field emission responses and then cuts off mid-sentence where the redaction begins.
"That phrase appears in four separate archive layers," Zevra says. "Oldest record is pre-war. Someone has been sitting on this classification for a very long time."
"And somebody else," Orrik adds, pulling up the maintenance overlay, "has been using the ventilation routing in sublevel fourteen to move equipment toward the Bridge's outer structural access.
Heavy equipment. The kind of weight signature you get from power generation or signal amplification hardware.
" He traces the route on the overlay. "It's been running for eleven days.
The deliveries line up with the diplomatic negotiation schedule. "
I look at the schedule he pulls up beside the overlay.
The joint Alliance-Coalition negotiation session is in six days.
Every remaining diplomat aboard Orpheus Station will be in the same secured chamber after the crisis began.
Every faction representative, every military liaison, every political target the conspiracy has been managing one by one will be concentrated in a single location with a single security perimeter.
"They've been waiting for the negotiations," I say. "They didn't need to eliminate everyone individually. They needed to wait until everyone was in the same room."
"With whatever they've been building in sublevel fourteen," Zevra confirms.
The silence that follows has weight.
Orrik breaks it carefully. "Whatever they're planning to do—it's tied to the Bridge systems. The signal amplification hardware doesn't make sense otherwise. They're not just targeting the diplomats."
They are targeting the Bridge. And whatever the Bridge does when it activates around my genetic signature, the extremists understand it better than I do.
Everyone in this room is in danger because of me.
Calyra was almost killed because she told me the truth.
Orrik is bypassing security systems in a station that has already murdered one witness.
Zevra is selling information to both sides of a conspiracy that sends shooters to sanctuaries.
Kheltor has been branded an unofficial liability by his own command structure.
"I need a minute," I say, and no one argues.
I make it three steps toward the corridor before Kheltor falls into step beside me, and his hand closes briefly on my arm—not a restraint. A stop.
"Whatever you're about to say to yourself," he says quietly, "you are wrong."
"You don't know what I'm about to say."
"You were looking at the list of people this investigation has put in danger and calculating how much of that is your responsibility.
" His voice carries no softness, but it carries precision, which from Kheltor is the same thing.
"People who pursue truth and find it inconvenient to powerful institutions are not responsible for the violence those institutions use to protect themselves.
That is a calculation designed to make you stop. " His grip releases. "Do not stop."
I hold that for a moment.
"Eloquent," I say.
"Accurate," he corrects.
When we return to the analysis room, two of Kheltor's officers at the door step aside with the particular efficiency of people who have revised their assessment of a situation.
One of them—the large officer who challenged me in the corridor two days ago—gives me a single nod.
Not warmth. Acknowledgment. The kind that costs something.
Inside, Zevra has pulled the sublevel fourteen equipment list onto the main display.
"The hardware configuration," she says, "matches the field resonance specifications in the Bridge's classified research files. Whatever they're building down there—" She looks at me. "It's designed to interface with the same systems that respond to you."
The negotiations are in six days.
Whatever the extremists are planning, they don't need it finished before then.
They need it finished before I learn enough to stop them.