CHAPTER 9 THE BREAKOUT #2
I entered the override sequence I’d designed during three days of enforced stillness, building the cascade logic in my head the way I’d built circuit diagrams since I was sixteen, component by component, junction by junction, until the whole system lived behind my eyes like a blueprint I could walk through.
A cascading failure simulation that would trick the Hub’s automated diagnostics into registering a critical atmospheric breach. The system would respond by executing its emergency protocol: a full station lockdown, rerouting power to the emergency grid, and activating the backup atmospheric system.
The emergency protocol would kill the primary power grid. Every light, every lock, every surveillance camera, and every Dampener emitter on the station ran on primary power.
When primary power died, the Dampeners would die with it.
I looked at Tessara. “When the lights go out, get to the Forgotten Corridors. Two ships in the hidden bay. A broken transport and the supply hauler behind it. Get the hauler warm. Can you fly them?”
Her amber eyes widened. “I’m a smuggler-pilot whose own captain sold her to the Consortium. They wrote the charge up as star-chart theft. The question is whether anything in that bay flies without proper fuel pressure.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“You’ll take that as ‘I can fly anything with an engine and half a prayer.’”
I entered the final command. My finger hovered over the confirmation key.
On the other side of the station, in a sterile white lab behind a transparent cell wall, Raeth was waiting.
The bond was dark, but the plan was lit.
Kill the power, kill the Dampeners, open every door on Vexar-6.
The Hub was where you killed a station, and I had told him so with one word through a pane of glass.
“Lights out in ten seconds,” I said.
Tessara’s claws extended. Her tail went rigid. Her eyes were bright.
I pressed the key.
The Hub’s diagnostics registered the simulated atmospheric breach. The emergency protocol was engaged. The cascade rippled through the station’s power grid with the speed of a signal traveling through copper, and one by one, the systems that held Vexar-6 together went dark.
The lights died first. The amber glow that had colored every moment of my twenty-one days on this station vanished, replaced by absolute darkness for three seconds before the emergency grid kicked in, bathing everything in deep red.
Then the alarms began.
The sound was massive. A station-wide klaxon that reverberated through the stone walls and metal corridors and the bones of every living thing on Vexar-6.
Red emergency lights strobed in the Hub, casting the machinery in pulsing scarlet.
The air processor stuttered and shifted to its backup mode with a groan that shook the floor grating.
Every cell lock on the station disengaged. Emergency protocol. Atmospheric breach required evacuation routes, and evacuation routes required unlocked doors. Two hundred and thirty prisoners, give or take, found their cell doors open.
The riot started in Block A. I heard it through the walls.
Shouting, impacts, the whine of Thermal-Prods discharging.
It spread to Block C within thirty seconds, and its sound was the sound of a system coming apart at the seams, the same sound the station had been making since the day I arrived, only now it was the people breaking instead of the machines.
“Go,” I told Tessara.
She went. A blur of spotted skin and silent feet, vanishing into the red-lit corridor toward the Forgotten Corridors and the docking bay, and the ships she would have warm by the time we reached them.
I went the other direction. Toward the lab. Toward Raeth.
The corridors were in chaos. Prisoners stumbling through red-lit passages, guards scrambling to restore order with weapons designed for controlled environments, not open riots.
A human prisoner ran past me going the opposite direction, his face wild, his cell jumpsuit torn at the shoulder.
Two alien prisoners, species I couldn’t identify in the strobing light, were working together to pin a guard against the wall and strip him of his Prod.
I ran through it. The Hub corridors led to the main artery. The main artery toward the Warden’s wing and Corsine’s lab beyond it.
My boots hammered the grating, and the red emergency lights threw my shadow in long, stuttering shapes against the walls, and the alarms screamed overhead, and the bond was still dark, still silent, and the absence was a wound I was running toward instead of away from because on the other side of the silence was him.
I passed the Warden’s quarters. Stopped.
The door was open. Emergency protocol had unlocked it.
I ducked inside. Raeth’s office. Terminals dark, monitors dead.
I dropped to my knees beside his desk and found the false panel.
The diagnostic tablet was there. I pulled it out and tucked it inside my work suit.
On the ledge by the sleeping chamber door, the stone from Zethara sat pale in the red light, and I grabbed that too, because some things you do not leave behind for an evidence manifest. Then I kept running.
Corsine’s lab was ninety meters past the Warden’s wing. The corridor narrowed. The red emergency lights were dimmer here, the backup grid was weaker in this section, and the shadows were deep.
The lab door was open.
Inside, the sterile white room was painted crimson by the emergency lights. The monitoring equipment was dead. The ancient technology’s shelving units cast long shadows. The holding cells were open, their doors released by the same emergency protocol that had freed every prisoner on the station.
Raeth’s cell was empty.
The manacles were on the floor. The chain connecting the wrist cuffs had snapped, the alloy links deformed and separated, and the magnetic seals on the cuffs themselves had been forced apart with enough pressure to crack the housing.
Some of those deformations had patina. Days old.
He’d broken the chain that first night, then, and sat in a sealed cell with the Dampener screaming in his skull, holding the pieces aligned across his lap where the cameras would read them as whole.
Waiting for a door he could not force and a moment he could not predict.
The patience of that. The discipline. My eyes burned, and the emergency lights had nothing to do with it.
The Dampener emitters in the cell walls were dark. Dead. Primary power gone.
And the bond flooded back.
The golden thread snapped into place with a force that buckled my knees and tore a sound from my chest that was half sob, half laugh.
The silence became a roar of warmth and presence and location data that told me he was alive, he was close, he was moving through the station at a speed that made his signal blur, and he was looking for me.
I could feel his rage. His relief. His love. The three signals tangled together in a frequency that lit up every neural pathway the Dampener had starved, and the sensation was so overwhelming that I had to brace myself against the lab wall and breathe through it before I could move.
He was coming. Through the bond, his location pulsed. Forty meters. Thirty. Twenty.
Ten.
He came through the lab door at a speed that cracked the frame.
Seven feet of slate-gray mass, scales blazing red and violet in the emergency light, bone plating catching the crimson strobe.
His manacles were gone, but the skin of his wrists was raw, bruised dark where the alloy had bitten before he broke it.
His uniform was torn at the shoulder where the Prod burns had split the fabric.
His silver eyes found me across the sterile white room, and the pupils dilated so wide the silver disappeared.
The bond between us detonated. A full-spectrum reconnection that slammed through both our nervous systems and synced our heartbeats in the space between one breath and the next.
I felt his relief pour through me like hot water.
He felt mine. The signals merged and amplified, and what came back through the Link was something that had no name in either of our languages.
He crossed the room in three strides and his arms closed around me, and he lifted me off the floor and held me against his chest with a force that would have cracked a lesser frame, and the heat of him poured into the cold places the Dampener had carved, and I buried my face against his collarbone where the Claiming mark still lived and breathed him in.
Sandalwood and rain and mineral and home.