29. Nina
NINA
The station smells like welding compound and effort.
Repair drones move through the damaged corridor sectors in coordinated sweeps, patching bulkhead tears and rerouting power conduits through temporary housing while the permanent repairs queue behind them.
Scaffolding has gone up along two of the main residential arteries where the Precursor sector collapse sent structural stress through the station's older frame.
The lights in sublevel nine are still running on emergency backup, which gives everyone working down there a slightly haunted look that the situation probably warrants anyway.
What is different from the day I arrived, overwhelmed and certain I had been assigned here to fail quietly, is the crews doing the work.
A Coalition structural engineer is directing an Alliance maintenance team through the rerouting of a power junction, and neither party looks happy about the arrangement, and neither party stops working.
Two Pi'rell med technicians are running triage in a temporary shelter beside a Vakutan security officer who is helping them move supply containers without being asked.
On sublevel seven, a human repair crew and a Shorcu engineering team are sharing tools across a corridor junction with the specific efficiency of people who have decided that efficiency matters more than their feelings about each other.
It is not warm. It is not healed. It is people who nearly died together choosing, reluctantly and practically, to build something instead of continuing to destroy it.
I find it more hopeful than any diplomatic statement I have ever read.
Zevra's operational office for the new investigative division is, characteristically, not listed in any official station directory.
It is in a reclaimed maintenance sector on sublevel six, which Orrik has spent four days converting from a legitimate eyesore into a functional archive and communication hub.
The walls carry new terminal housings alongside old conduit work, and the surveillance access Zevra has already established covers seventeen more angles than the station's official security grid.
"I prefer working in spaces no one knows exist," she says, when I point this out.
"That's extremely reassuring for an investigative division."
"It should be." Her markings shift toward the blue-white of focused work.
"Anyone trying to interfere with our operations will have to find us first." She pulls up the division's current mandate on the main display: Bridge archive protection, Precursor technology investigation, cross-faction evidence review, extremist network monitoring.
"I've already established contact with three independent data brokers outside station jurisdiction.
Information doesn't stop moving because a conspiracy got exposed. It reroutes."
Orrik is beneath the main terminal housing with a panel open and his mismatched cybernetic fingers moving through wiring with the enthusiasm of an engineer handed an interesting problem and no supervision.
"The Bridge archive access system is almost fully secured," he says, from somewhere inside the wall.
"I've also added a secondary alert layer that will flag any access attempt carrying command-level authentication without a corresponding investigative authorization.
Nobody is running patrol redirects through this infrastructure without us knowing. "
"When it's finished," I say, "it'll be the most carefully monitored thing on the station."
"Second most," Zevra says. She nods toward the viewport, where the Bridge is visible at its familiar distance, still transmitting. "That still wins."
The public presentation is held in the temporary council chamber on the administrative level, which is the largest intact meeting space the station currently has after the main diplomatic hall took structural damage during the Precursor sector collapse.
It is not a large room. That probably helps.
I stand between a Coalition liaison officer and an Alliance administrative representative who have spent the last two days disagreeing about the format of this presentation with the particular energy of people redirecting grief and fear into procedural argument.
Neither of them fully trusts me. Both of them need what I have, which is the only reason we are here together.
I keep it direct because direct is what I know and because anything else would not survive contact with the room.
The Bridge was built for connection, not separation.
The archived records now transmitted across nearby systems show that the Precursor technology beneath this station was designed to find and reunite populations that share an origin, not to serve as a weapon or a monument to any single faction's authority.
The conspiracy used it as leverage because the truth it contains threatens every narrative that has justified this war.
That threat does not disappear because the conspiracy was exposed.
The records will need to be managed carefully, accessed transparently, and protected from people who will continue trying to bury or weaponize them.
No government gets to own this. That is the condition under which the investigative division will operate.
The room does not love this. The room accepts it, which is a different thing and more durable.
Afterward, when the representatives have dispersed into their separate anxious conversations, I find Kheltor at the edge of the chamber where the temporary scaffolding meets the undamaged wall.
He is not in uniform. He is not in armor.
He is standing with his arms crossed in the posture I have learned to read as I am paying attention and also prepared for any situation that might develop, which for Kheltor is apparently indistinguishable from relaxed.
He studies me for a moment.
"You didn't apologize for any of it," he says.
"Was I supposed to?"
"Several people in that room expected you to." He uncrosses his arms. "You didn't."
"The truth doesn't require an apology," I say. "Calyra told me that. Indirectly."
"She tells most things indirectly." He moves to stand beside me, and we look out through the scaffolding gap at the corridor beyond, where repair crews are still working, where mixed factions are still choosing cooperation over collapse, where Orpheus Station is rebuilding itself into something it has not been before. "You did well."
From Kheltor, that is the equivalent of a standing ovation.
"We're not done," I say.
"No." He is quiet in the comfortable way, the way that does not require filling. "We are not."
The station hums around us with the sound of work being done.
Somewhere below, Orrik is probably still inside the terminal housing.
Somewhere above, Zevra is establishing contact with a data broker who does not know they are about to become an asset of an official investigative division.
The Bridge glows through every outer viewport, patient and enormous and finally, at last, doing the thing it was designed for.
The woman who arrived here afraid of being invisible stepped off a transport and into a political catastrophe and stayed anyway.
She is not who I am anymore.
I am what happened after.
And Orpheus Station—damaged, suspicious, cautiously and stubbornly trying—is where that happened.
It is, I find, exactly where I want to be.