CHAPTER 9 THE BREAKOUT #3
“Kira.” My name, spoken in a voice wrecked by three days of Dampener exposure and sub-harmonic suppression. No other words. He did not need them. The bond said everything.
“I have the evidence.” I pulled back enough to meet his eyes. The tablet pressed between us inside my suit. “And Tessara’s getting us a ship.”
Through the bond, I felt it: the moment the Warden returned. The moment strategy reassembled itself inside a mind that had spent three days in a cage.
“The Communication Tower,” he said. “If we transmit from the tower before we leave, the GA will have the evidence regardless of whether we escape.”
“Then we go to the tower. Now.”
He set me down. Kept one hand on my back, his palm flat between my shoulder blades, the heat of him anchoring the bond in place.
Through the Link, I felt his strength returning.
The Dampener damage was receding. His nervous system was recalibrating to the restored signal, and every second the bond was back, his body got stronger.
I pulled Corsine’s data core from the lab shelving as we passed. The primary server, the one connected to the station’s network, was dead due to the power grid. But the physical data core was a standalone unit containing the original research files that backed up everything on the tablet.
Belt and suspenders. An engineer’s habit. If the tablet were lost, the core would survive. If the core was lost, the tablet would survive. Redundancy was not paranoia. It was design.
We moved through the station together. The corridors were a war scene painted in red.
Emergency lights pulsed against stone walls slick with condensation, and the alarms created a wall of sound that compressed the air into something you had to push through.
A guard stumbled from a side corridor, Thermal-Prod raised, and Raeth put him into the wall with one arm without breaking stride.
The guard hit the metal sheeting and slid to the floor, and Raeth’s hand never left my back.
Through the bond, the violence in his system arrived as clean signal.
The tactical processing of a warrior species operating in a combat environment, assessing threats and neutralizing them with a biomechanical accuracy that bypassed emotion entirely.
He was not angry. He was operational. And the difference between those two states was the difference between a weapon swinging blind and one firing with a targeting system locked on.
A cluster of prisoners had overwhelmed two guards near the Block B junction, and the corridor was blocked by bodies and the acrid smell of discharged Prods.
Raeth shouldered through, lifting one dazed prisoner off the pile and setting him on his feet with a grip that was firm but not damaging.
The prisoner looked up, registered who was moving him, and his face cycled through fear, confusion, and something that looked like hope.
The Warden was fighting on their side. The prisoners were beginning to understand that.
Nia found us at the Block C junction. She had a Thermal-Prod in one hand and a medical kit slung over her shoulder, and three prisoners followed behind her.
Her braided hair was loose on one side, and there was blood on her knuckles that wasn’t hers.
Her warm brown eyes were sharp and focused, the combat medic surfacing through the two years of prison patience.
“The transport corridor is clear,” she said. “Tessara commed me on the guard’s stolen frequency. The hauler is powering up, and she says the broken transport’s coupling will hold for one jump if nobody sneezes on it.”
“We need the tower first,” I said. “One transmission. Then we run.”
Nia looked at Raeth. Looked at me. Looked at the riot consuming the station around us. Her gaze dropped to the data core under my arm, and the shape of the tablet inside my suit, and whatever she saw in my face was enough.
“I’ll hold the junction,” she said. She hefted the Thermal-Prod. “You’ve got maybe ten minutes before Corsine’s backup security activates. The woman’s got contingency protocols for her contingency protocols.”
“Nia.” I caught her arm. “When we transmit, the GA will have everything. Names, formulas, buyer lists. Every prisoner who disappeared. If we get out of here, that evidence will reach the people who can act on it.”
Something moved behind her eyes. The cellmate who had disappeared six months ago. The reason she’d been gathering information in the first place.
“Then make sure you get out of here,” she said. Her voice was steady. The combat medic, the woman who’d triaged wounded soldiers under fire and kept her hands still while the world exploded around her, was back. “Both of you.”
She turned toward the junction. “Now move. Before Corsine locks down what’s left of the security grid.”
We moved. Through the corridors, toward the tower, toward the transmission that would end everything Corsine had built. The alarms screamed. The red lights pulsed. The station shook around us.
And for the first time in twenty-one days, I was not surviving.
I was fighting.