CHAPTER 10 JUSTICE & FREEDOM
The tower extended above the moon’s surface in a sealed dome, pressurized against the toxic atmosphere, the transmitter array rising from its center like a spine.
The access corridor was narrow and steep, angled hard enough to burn my calves, the air thin in my lungs.
Red emergency light pulsed on the walls, and the alarms I’d triggered were muffled by rock but present, a vibration climbing through the soles of my boots.
Raeth moved ahead of me, his body filling the corridor, his scales throwing red and violet light against the stone.
The bond pulsed between us, a constant stream of awareness that told me his pain levels were high, his adrenaline was higher, and underneath both, a focused determination that had the weight of three years behind it.
Two guards waited at the tower entrance. They saw Raeth coming and raised their Prods. He didn’t slow.
He closed the distance in three strides, caught the first guard’s weapon arm and twisted, and the Prod clattered to the floor.
The second guard fired. The charge caught Raeth in the ribs, the same ribs that had taken two Prods already in the last three days, and through the bond, I felt the pain lance through him like a blade.
He didn’t stop. His free hand closed on the second guard’s chest plate and shoved, and the guard hit the wall hard enough to leave an impression in the stone. Both guards were down in four seconds.
I stepped over them and hit the tower door’s manual release. The door unsealed with a hiss of pressurized air, and the dome opened before us.
The transmitter array filled the space, antennae and relay dishes aimed skyward through the dome’s transparent ceiling.
Above us, the gas giant that Vexar-6 orbited dominated the view, a swirl of ochre and rust-colored bands that filled half the sky.
Stars beyond it. The first stars I’d seen in twenty-one days, and they were cold and distant and the most beautiful thing I’d ever looked at.
I didn’t have time for beautiful.
The main transmitter console sat at the base of the array.
I pulled the diagnostic tablet from inside my suit and connected it to the console’s data port.
The interface was military-grade, encrypted, and locked behind Corsine’s access protocols.
I’d spent five days mapping the backup transmitter’s power grid through the maintenance tunnels.
I knew every junction, every relay, every bypass point in the system.
My fingers moved across the console. Bypassed the primary encryption using the maintenance codes I’d memorized from the Hub’s shared infrastructure.
Routed the signal through the backup transmitter, the one Corsine’s monitoring protocols didn’t cover because it was designated for emergency use only.
Loaded the evidence package. Every file from the hidden server node. The catalyst formula. The triggered pairs registry. The scanner protocols. The names of forty-seven people who had been sold.
“Kira.”
Raeth’s voice. Low. Warning.
I turned. Corsine stood in the tower doorway.
Of course. Her cameras were dead, and her guards were drowning in a riot three levels down, but the tower was the one room on Vexar-6 she would have wired to wake her personally. You do not run a trafficking empire through a transmitter and leave the transmitter unwatched.
She was not composed. For the first time since I’d met her, the clinical composure was fractured.
Her white coat was stained with something dark along the hem.
Her gray hair had come loose from its surgical bun.
She held a pulse-blaster in one hand, standard issue, aimed at my chest, and her pale eyes were wide with something I recognized from my own reflection in the Processing Room mirror twenty-one days ago.
Fear. Dr. Sabel Corsine was afraid.
“Step away from the console.” Her voice held, but the modulation was gone. “That data belongs to the Consortium. You have no idea what you are interfering with.”
“I know exactly what I’m interfering with.” I kept my hands on the console. The transmission upload was at forty-two percent. “Forty-seven people. Sold. And us. Entry forty-eight. Pending.”
“You are a research subject. You do not get to decide what happens to the research.”
Raeth moved. Seven feet of bonded Zethrani male positioned as a wall between the blaster and the console, and the scales along his back flared red in the dome’s emergency light.
“You will not touch her.” His voice carried a subharmonic register that resonated within the dome’s metal structure. “You will not speak to her. You are finished.”
Corsine’s blaster wavered. She looked at Raeth, at the broken manacle marks on his wrists, at the Prod burns visible through his torn uniform, at the red glow of scales that belonged to a species she had studied for three years and still fundamentally did not understand.
“I made you,” she said. “I triggered the bond. Without me, you would still be an empty, unbonded warden running a prison on a dead moon.”
“You triggered a weapon you could not control.” Raeth stepped forward. One step. The dome floor groaned under his weight. “The bond is not yours. It was never yours.”
Sixty-eight percent.
Corsine’s finger tightened on the trigger. Through the bond, I felt Raeth’s muscles coil, preparing to absorb the blast. He would take it. He would take every charge she had to keep her from reaching me and the console behind me.
I was not going to let him.
“Raeth. Don’t move.”
I reached under the console and pulled the manual relay switch. The one I’d identified during my tunnel mapping. The one where the backup transmitter and the dome’s atmospheric vents ran through the same manual relay. The sloppy design choice I’d filed away, waiting for the moment it became useful.
The dome’s emergency vents opened. Vexar-6’s toxic atmosphere screamed through the seals, a rush of sulfuric air that hit the pressurized interior like a wall.
The temperature dropped. The air turned acrid.
Corsine gasped, choked, staggered backward toward the door where the corridor’s atmosphere was still sealed.
I held my breath. Raeth held his. Zethrani’s lungs could manage short-duration toxic exposure. My human lungs could not, but I needed thirty seconds. Thirty seconds for the upload to complete while Corsine fought for air in the doorway, blaster forgotten, hands clutching her throat.
Eighty-nine percent. Ninety-four. Ninety-eight.
One hundred.
The console beeped. Transmission complete. The evidence was en route to the Galactic Authority on an encrypted burst signal routed through the backup transmitter, and no one on this station could recall it.
I sealed the vents. Pressurized air flooded the dome.
I breathed. The air tasted of acid, my eyes would not stop streaming, and the skin of my hands stung where the sulfur had kissed it, and none of it mattered, because it was air.
Raeth breathed. The toxic atmosphere vented, and the clean recycled air returned, and Corsine was on her knees in the doorway, coughing, the blaster on the floor beside her.
Raeth picked up the blaster. Held it at his side. Looked down at the woman who had held his sister hostage for three years and sold forty-seven people like cargo.
“The Galactic Authority will receive that transmission within the hour,” he said. “Your operation is finished. Your buyers are compromised. Every name, every formula, every transaction is in their hands.”
Corsine looked up. Her watery blue eyes were streaming from the toxic exposure, her face red, her composure shattered. She looked old. Small. A woman whose empire had been dismantled by an engineer with a wrench and a warden who had learned to love.
“Sera,” Raeth said. “Where is she?”
Corsine said nothing. Raeth crouched. Brought his silver eyes level with hers. His scales pulsed red, and the sub-harmonics in his voice dropped to the frequency that made the dome hum.
“Where. Is. My. Sister.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. I watched the calculation happen behind her streaming eyes, the realization that her operation was already transmitted to the GA, that her buyers were already compromised, that withholding Sera’s location bought her nothing except the undivided attention of a Zethrani male whose scales were glowing red and whose claws had left gouges in her lab floor.
Cooperation was the only currency she had left, and Corsine had never been sentimental about spending currency that still held value.
She gave up the facility name. The sector coordinates. The holding unit number.
Raeth stood. Looked at me. Through the bond, I felt his relief collide with his grief, the coordinates of his sister’s prison settling into his memory alongside the weight of the years he’d spent unable to reach her.
“We need to go,” I said. “Tessara’s waiting.”
We left Corsine on the floor of the Communication Tower. The guards would find her. The GA would find them all.
We ran.
***
The hidden docking bay held two ships, and only one of them was whole.
Corsine’s transport sat in the primary cradle, long-hauled, sleek, and broken, an access panel hanging open above the cracked fuel coupling that somebody had abandoned mid-repair.
Behind it, squat in the secondary cradle, sat the supply hauler that serviced the trafficking runs.
Mid-range. Built for cargo, not people. The registry plate beside the ramp read STAR-SEEKER, a name some Consortium clerk had wasted on a mule.
Tessara stood on the hauler’s ramp with her claws out and her tail lashing. “Good news. The hauler flies. I pre-burned the engines, and the cells read full.”
“And the bad news?”
“The transport’s nav-lock is live. It’s been pinging the patrol grid every ninety seconds since the power died. The second anything lifts out of this bay, every picket ship in the sector converges on the signal.”
Raeth’s scales banked to a flat, hard red. “Then we disable it.”
“It’s hardwired into the drive core, big male.
You’d need a day. You have minutes.” Tessara’s amber eyes moved from the broken transport to the hauler and back, and I watched her run the same math I was running.
Somebody had to fly the loud ship. Somebody had to wear that signal and pull the pickets off the lane while the hauler went out dark.
“The coupling blows inside two jumps,” I said.
“One jump, if I baby it.” She was already moving toward the transport. “And I fly anything with an engine and half a prayer. You said you’d take that as a yes.”
“Tessara.”
“Decoy work is threading work, and nobody on this rock threads a picket line except me.” She flashed her teeth.
On a Felarii, the expression involved more teeth than a human smile and twice the confidence.
“Kelas Drift. Third refueling shadow. Smugglers use it, and Consortium maps pretend it doesn’t exist. Burst it to your nav core and get your people on that hauler. ”
I coded the coordinates with hands that were steady while my chest was not. “We’ll wait for you.”
“Don’t wait past six days. And don’t come looking. I find routes.” Her tail flicked once, the nearest thing to a salute her species owned. “It’s what the blood is for.”
The last I saw of Tessara was her tail disappearing through the hatch of a broken ship she had chosen on purpose, so the rest of us could fly out quietly.
The Star-Seeker’s engines were warm when we boarded.
Nia strapped the three prisoners who had followed her into the cargo webbing, her braids half-undone, a bruise darkening her jaw, and when I passed her, she gave me a single nod that held two years of waiting.
Raeth folded himself into a pilot cradle built for a smaller species, knees against the console, and brought the drive up with the grim competence of a male who had flown station craft for three years and hated every minute of it.
I took the engineering bench because the hauler was a wreck with a pretty registry name, and somebody had to keep it breathing.
The transport lifted first. Loud, blazing, its nav-lock shrieking its position to every Consortium picket in the sector, and through the bay doors I watched her drive flare cut across the dark, and the pickets turned after it like sharks after blood.
The docking clamps released. The Star-Seeker lifted from the bay, cleared the station’s outer shell, and punched into open space.
Tessara’s voice crackled across the stolen guard frequency, bright with adrenaline.
“Four pickets on my tail and not one of them can fly. Kelas Drift, six days. Tell the big male he owes me a ship.” A pause, and under it a tone I knew from failing systems. “Coupling’s running hot.
Punching out early. See you on the other side. ”
Static.
No wreckage signature on the scope. No debris bloom.
She had jumped. That was what I told myself, in the voice I used for systems I could not reach to fix.
She jumped, and a jump can land short and still land.
Through the viewport, Vexar-6 fell away below us, a scarred gray sphere orbiting a gas giant, its surface pocked with industrial vents and the sealed dome of the Communication Tower, where a woman in a white coat sat on the floor, her empire in ruins.
I watched it shrink. Twenty-one days. That was all it had taken for a prison on a dead moon to become the place where everything changed.
Raeth’s hand found mine. His fingers engulfed my hand, his skin furnace-hot against my cooler palm, and the bond hummed between us with the steady resonance of a system running at optimal capacity.
The stars spread before us. Cold. Infinite. Full of people we hadn’t found yet.
I held his hand, and we flew.