20. Kheltor
KHELTOR
Eighteen hours is not enough time to be careful.
We move through the lower sectors fast enough to accept certain risks in exchange for others, and I spend the distance calculating which ones are recoverable.
Zevra has the activation sequence data running on her surface, tracking the power draw from the secondary grid through the signal hardware.
The draw is increasing. Whatever Drekar's people are doing inside the weapon site, they are not waiting for optimal conditions.
They are moving because they believe they have already won.
That belief is an asset. Overconfident people leave evidence behind.
Nina is two steps ahead of me, reading the corridor junction markers as if she has memorized Orrik's maintenance map. She found the discrepancy in Sareth's records from a single mismatched prefix. She will find what we need here.
"Zevra," I say into the comm. "The signal relay for the extremist command node. Where does it terminate?"
A pause. "Level nine. Diplomatic administrative block.
The one evacuated three days ago when Drekar's people requested it for 'security consolidation.
'" Her markings must be cycling judgment colors, even through the audio.
"They evacuated a wing of the station to run their command operation out of it. "
"Access?"
"Orrik is already in the maintenance overlay. Give him four minutes."
It takes three.
The command node is three rooms—two outer administrative spaces, stripped of personnel and repurposed for equipment and communication, and one inner room where the walls are covered in a display array showing every element of the conspiracy assembled in one place.
Payment trails. I recognize the routing architecture from the ghost transport records in sublevel seven.
Missing diplomat movement logs, each one connected by timeline and clearance code to patrol redirect orders that trace to my own command channel.
Communication transcripts between extremist representatives on both sides—Alliance and Coalition names I know, some of them senior, arranged in a correspondence network that has been operating under false routing codes for two years.
Drekar's recorded instructions run twelve minutes. He speaks with measured authority, the justification rehearsed so often he now believes it.
"The Precursor legacy is not humanity's to claim," he says in the recording.
"Every civilization in this galaxy has built its identity on specific truths about its origins.
If the data hidden beneath the Bridge reaches public record, those truths become negotiable.
Governments fall on negotiable truth. Wars do not end on it—they start on it.
" His voice carries no cruelty. Only certainty.
"We are preventing a collapse. The cost is acceptable. "
The cost is missing diplomats, murdered witnesses, and a weapon site pointed at the Bridge.
Nina copies the full display archive onto her data chip while I pull the evidence into a transmission package. Zevra intercepts a live extremist comm channel from the outer room and patches a burst-scramble through it—enough noise to cover a sixty-second transmission window.
Sixty seconds is what I have.
I send everything to Vos through the encrypted private channel he opened for me after the Precursor chamber. The transmission completes in fifty-three seconds. Vos's acknowledgment comes back in four characters: a code that means received—proceed with caution.
Caution is no longer available.
The first shot comes through the outer room's northern access panel, which tells me they were already inside the administrative block's perimeter when we arrived. The ambush positions were selected before we reached this room.
Drekar anticipated the evidence run.
I take cover behind the equipment array and return fire across the outer room while calculating the entry points—three active, one covered by Orrik from his maintenance access, one that has not fired yet.
The unfired position is the problem. An experienced team holds one angle silent until it matters.
Nina is at the inner room's secondary door with the data chip secured in her jacket. I see her read the room the way she reads everything—exits, angles, the geometry of what happens next.
"The north corridor," she says. "The patrol from the outer block won't reach it for another forty seconds. If we?—"
The unfired position fires.
The shot takes me in the left side and I understand immediately that it has done significant damage. I stay upright because the alternative is Nina without cover, and I move her toward the north corridor with the force of full acceptance that this is going to cost more than I have already paid.
Zevra's voice cuts through the comm. "Orrik's route is compromised. East access only. Go east."
We go east.
The route holds for sixty meters and then it does not hold.
A second team, positioned at the corridor junction, cuts the passage.
I count eight. My left side is making the kind of demands I cannot fully answer, and the world is narrowing in the way that significant injury narrows it—not to darkness, but to priorities, the few things that matter when everything else becomes static.
Nina is the priority.
I take two officers down and reach her, and we are eight meters from the east access when the charge goes off behind the junction—a controlled structural blast, not weapons fire, designed to collapse the route without killing anyone. They want her alive. They do not need me.
The corridor drops between us.
Not completely. There is a gap. I try for it.
My left side does not cooperate in the way I require.
I see Nina's face through the settling debris—amber eyes, dark curls, her expression set for a fight rather than surrender. She is fighting when they take her. She is still fighting when the gap closes.
Orrik gets to me thirty seconds later, pulling me away from the collapsed route with the grim efficiency of someone who knows the difference between a battle and a recovery.
I do not move.
"Kheltor." Orrik's voice. "They need you alive to get her back. You can't get her back like this."
The evidence is transmitted. Vos has it. The conspiracy is documented.
Nina is in the hands of the man who built the weapon pointed at the Bridge, and she is the only person the Bridge responds to, and the activation window is now under seventeen hours.
I let Orrik pull me back.
Not because I am finished.
Because the calculation requires me to survive long enough for what comes next.