22. Kheltor
KHELTOR
The medical seal Orrik applies to my left side is not sufficient for what I am about to do.
I know this. He knows this. He applies it anyway because the alternative is leaving me on the maintenance floor, and Orrik Dane is many things but not someone who leaves people on floors when there is work remaining.
"The shot cracked two ribs and scored the intercostal tissue," he says, with the clinical detachment of someone who learned field medicine from necessity rather than training. "You move wrong, you'll puncture something important."
"Define wrong."
"Anything faster than a careful walk." He looks at me. "You're going to do everything faster than a careful walk, aren't you."
"Yes."
He hands me a secondary seal and a stabilizer brace and steps back, his position clearly stated and already ignored.
Zevra is at the corner terminal, tracking Drekar's command signals through the maintenance surveillance network.
Her markings are cycling the cold, dim blue of sustained concentration.
"They've moved her deeper into the Precursor facility," she says, without turning.
"Level three below the chamber we entered.
The containment signatures are running at Bridge-adjacent frequencies, which means the field is calibrated to suppress her activation response.
" A pause. "She's alive. The systems would register differently if she weren't."
I hold that for two seconds and let it do what it needs to do. Then I move on.
The station-wide broadcast reaches the maintenance terminal nine minutes later.
My name, my rank, my service number—read in the flat official register of a command-level security alert, labeling me a compromised officer operating in direct violation of Alliance authority and Vakutan military code.
The alert orders my immediate detainment and requests that all personnel report my location.
Zevra turns from the terminal to watch me listen to it.
"How does it feel?" she asks.
"Like a confirmation," I say. "I did not need the broadcast to know I had left their authority. The broadcast tells me they are afraid of what I know."
Vos reaches me through a channel so encrypted it takes Zevra three minutes to verify it is genuinely him.
He does not use many words. He transmits an access package: six restricted system codes, a surveillance blackout window for the Precursor sector's outer perimeter running for forty minutes beginning at oh-one-hundred, a route map through the station's structural maintenance layer that bypasses every active security checkpoint between our position and the facility entrance, and a corrupted pursuit log that will delay any tracking attempt by approximately twenty minutes.
At the bottom of the package, one line of unencrypted text: The evidence you sent has reached the right people. Finish this.
I close the channel and begin preparing.
The team that assembles in the maintenance room over the following hour is not large.
Orrik, who has made his position clear through continued presence.
Zevra, whose self-interest has apparently expanded to include the survival of the station she operates in.
Four Vakutan security officers—my officers, specifically—who received Drekar's earlier patrol redirect orders, recognized the authorization anomaly at the time, and said nothing because they trusted my command structure to resolve it.
They are here because they stopped trusting it.
One of them, Rennek, who has served under me for four years, says only: "The orders that cleared sublevel fourteen.
They came through Drekar's access. We matched the code last night.
" He holds my gaze with the steady directness of a Vakutan officer delivering a tactical assessment.
"We should have brought it to you sooner. "
"You are here now," I say.
The broadcast goes out at oh-zero-forty through every station-wide communication channel simultaneously, routed through Vos's corrupted surveillance blackout so that it cannot be traced and killed before it completes.
I keep it short because short is harder to dismiss.
The patrol redirects that cleared surveillance from sublevel fourteen during equipment deliveries.
The authorization codes that match Drekar's command access.
The ghost transport company used across multiple diplomatic disappearances.
The weapon site in the Precursor sector, running signal amplification hardware designed to force a Bridge activation during the diplomatic session.
The attack on the Coalition sanctuary. The station-issued weapons recovered from the criminal underlevels.
The containment of a customs officer whose only crime was noticing that departure records were falsified.
I do not mention the Precursor truth. I do not mention what Nina is. I mention what Drekar did.
Twelve seconds after the broadcast ends, Rennek's comm receives a query from a Vakutan patrol officer in the residential sector asking for command confirmation on Drekar's current orders.
Then two more queries. Then a notification that the patrol team assigned to the Precursor sector perimeter has requested a command verification before executing their current assignment.
They are not refusing. They are asking. That is enough.
"The blackout window opens in eleven minutes," Zevra says. "The facility entrance is twenty-three minutes from here through Vos's route."
My left side is sending information I am choosing not to process in full. The stabilizer brace holds the cracked ribs from doing their worst if I do not make sudden lateral movements, which is an optimistic constraint for a rescue operation through active hostile territory.
I check the weapon on my right side and the secondary on my left and make sure Orrik has what he needs and Zevra has her data surface and my four officers understand the entry formation.
Nina is in a Precursor facility three levels below the chamber that recognized her genetic signature and called her operator lineage.
She has been in there long enough for Drekar to have explained his plan and long enough, I know with complete certainty, to have started looking for a way to break it from the inside.
She will find something. I need to be there when she does.
"Move," I say.
We move.