27. Nina
NINA
The station smells different after a crisis.
Not worse, exactly. Just honest. The recycled air carries repair compound and coolant and the particular metallic edge of systems that have been working too hard for too long.
Emergency lighting still runs in three of the residential corridors I walk through because the standard grid has not been fully restored.
Repair drones move overhead in steady patterns, methodical and indifferent to the scale of what they are fixing.
I am cleared from the med bay because my baseline markers have stabilized, not because I feel like someone who recently redirected a Precursor activation event through her nervous system. The distinction matters only to me. To the station, I am ambulatory and therefore useful.
The public screens in the main atrium are cycling news feeds from outside Orpheus Station since the lockdowns began, and the feeds are not calm.
Human colony worlds demanding formal inquiries.
Coalition religious councils convening emergency sessions in three systems simultaneously—I watch a thirty-second excerpt of a High Speaker calling the Bridge transmission an act of theological warfare before the feed cycles to something else.
Alliance command issuing statements distancing themselves from Drekar's operation with the particular speed of institutions whose credibility depends on how quickly they can redirect blame.
Scientists from six different academic bodies filing access requests to the Bridge archives before the transmission has finished spreading.
On one small station feed near the bottom of the display, a group of humans and Vakutans standing together in a public square, holding nothing, saying nothing, just standing in the same space like they are trying to decide what shared origin means when you are standing inside it.
I watch that one the longest.
Vos finds me in the atrium, calm, deliberate, and clearly moving between disasters.
"The inquiry commission will need a Bridge liaison," he says, which is his version of easing into it.
"Someone with direct interface experience and access to the archive transmissions.
Someone both governments will accept as a credible witness rather than a political instrument.
" He looks at me with the steady patience of someone who already knows the answer and is giving me the space to arrive at it myself.
"The work will be watched, contested, and dangerous. I will not pretend otherwise."
"I'm a junior customs officer," I say.
"You were," he says. "When you arrived." He lets that sit. "Consider it."
Calyra is waiting near the observation corridor outside the sanctuary, which is still sealed for structural assessment after the attack.
She looks exactly as she always looks—pale gold skin, ceremonial robes, a composed serenity sharpened by decades of learning that gentleness is a more precise weapon than force.
"The truth is out," she says, when I reach her. "That is not the same as the truth being safe."
"I know."
"Some factions will deny it. The denial will be organized, well-funded, and politically necessary for governments whose authority depends on specific histories remaining intact.
" Her hands fold in the way they do when she is measuring words.
"Some will worship it in ways that create new hierarchies instead of dissolving old ones.
Some will use it as justification for exactly the kind of conflict Drekar was trying to start.
" She meets my eyes with the particular directness she reserves for things she needs me to actually hear.
"You did not end the fight. You changed what the fight is about. "
"That's either better or worse than ending it," I say.
"Both," she says. "Simultaneously. As most things are."
Kheltor is in the corridor outside my temporary quarters when I return, standing with his arms crossed in a stance that says he has chosen this position and will not entertain alternatives.
He is no longer in full armor. The stabilizer brace is visible.
He looks recently battered and held together by continued forward motion.
His attention shifts to me when I stop beside him.
"Vos asked me to help run the Bridge inquiry," I say.
"I know. He told me."
"Calyra says some factions will keep fighting over the truth regardless of what the transmission proved."
"She is correct."
"So we stopped one disaster and created the conditions for several smaller ones that will probably last years."
"Yes." He is quiet for a moment. "We will deal with them."
The word we sits in the corridor between us with the specific weight of a commitment made without formality or ceremony, which is exactly how Kheltor makes the commitments that matter most.
"Okay," I say.
I turn toward the outer viewport at the corridor's end.
The Bridge is visible from here—steady, ancient, still transmitting through nearby systems with everything it was built to carry.
The station around it is damaged and uncertain and more honest than it has ever been, and somewhere in the political noise spreading across the galaxy, people are standing in public squares trying to understand what shared origin means when the evidence is sitting in their comm feeds.
The woman who arrived here afraid of being invisible is gone now.
Orpheus Station has cured me of that particular fear.
The Bridge glows, and the galaxy turns, and I am exactly where I am supposed to be.