Serak
The trap made sense now.
Tal must already have been under watch. Jessa Corren’s reappearance beside him raised the flag. The authenticated handshake told them what she had come for.
Her last words through the comm had been, “They’re here.”
I was already moving.
Side room 14-B was directly above me. I hit the service stairs and took them three at a time.
I let the dark come.
Not the surface version. Deeper.
My skin went black. Corridor lights dimmed as the shadows pulled toward me, the edges of my body blurring into the spaces between them.
Two of the covert security team held the junction ahead.
They looked directly at me.
Their eyes slid past.
I was through before either one understood there was something to see.
The door to 14-B stood open.
Two operatives in conference-staff uniforms were still inside with Tal.
The room told me the rest.
Table shoved out of position. One chair on its side. A used sedative patch on the floor.
Her left shoe trapped under the chair.
No Jessa.
I came out of the dark between the two operatives.
The first hit the floor before the second finished turning. He got one hand up. It didn’t matter.
Two seconds.
Tal was pressed against the wall, breathing hard.
I grabbed the front of his jacket.
“Where?”
“Two took her.” His voice shook. “Military ring.”
“How long ago?”
“Three minutes. Maybe four.”
“Which direction?”
He pointed toward the station’s interior docking ring. Not the commercial level where the Ghost was berthed. The interior ring, where the military transport had docked forty minutes ago.
I moved. Full shadow-meld, burning through reserves I’d been saving.
The corridors bent around me. Security cameras tracked nothing. Staff members stepped aside without knowing why.
I reached the interior docking ring in ninety seconds. The transport’s loading ramp was cycling closed. Through the narrowing gap I saw her.
Jessa, unconscious, carried between two operatives. Her hair was loose. One of her shoes was missing.
She’d fought. She’d fought hard and they’d taken her anyway.
The gap narrowed. I ran.
Ten meters. Five.
The ramp sealed.
I hit the hull with my open palm. The metal rang and the sound echoed through the docking bay and nobody heard it because there was nobody there.
The transport’s engines came online. The docking clamps released. The ship pulled away from the station.
I stood in the docking bay and watched it go. The woman I’d kissed in the Ghost’s cabin, the woman I’d been refusing to need, the woman who made two mugs at the late watch.
On a transport heading for deep void.
The shadow-meld was still on me, thick and heavy.
I should have let it go. Locked it down. Pulled back.
Instead, I reached.
Not with my hands. With the connection my conscious mind had denied and my biology had mapped anyway. The proto-bond, wired into me one late watch at a time without my permission.
The transport was gone. But she was there, faint, moving, pulling away from me toward deep void.
I held onto that thread until I knew the direction. Then I let the shadow-meld drop.
My knees hit the deck. My hands were shaking. The corridor lights came back in a rush that hurt my eyes.
Solren’s medkit was still in my jacket pocket. Nothing in it for what was wrong with me.
Tal came through the main corridor less than a minute later, breathing hard. He’d taken the direct route instead of trying to follow me through the dark.
“Where are they taking her?” I asked.
“Nexus Station. It’s the only place they’d go.”
I already knew that. I’d felt the direction.
Deep void. The same coordinates Maris’s data had pinpointed weeks ago.
I braced against the wall and pulled myself up. My legs shook. My vision was wrong at the edges, too bright, too sharp, the aftereffect of pushing the meld past anything I’d tried in years.
“Can you walk?” I asked Tal.
“Can you?”
Fair question.
I took a breath. Then another.
The shaking settled. Not gone, but manageable.
“We’re going to the commercial docking level. Service corridors. I mapped the route.”
Eighteen hours of crawling through the station’s infrastructure was paying for itself.
I led Tal down through the maintenance levels, through the routes I’d mapped that avoided the second security layer.
Two junctions, a vertical shaft with a maintenance ladder, and a lateral corridor that came out behind the commercial berthing offices.
Nobody stopped us. A tired-looking man and a scared diplomat in the service corridors were invisible. The station’s security was focused on the conference levels, searching for the woman they’d already taken.
The Ghost was still at the commercial docking port.
“You’re coming with me,” I told Tal. “Your codes get the Ghost through Nexus. After that, I need them looking at you instead of me.”
He went pale but didn’t argue. Smart man.
I keyed the comm to the Raptor’s frequency.
“Maris.”
“I’m here.” No delay. She’d been monitoring.
“Jessa’s been taken. Military transport. Heading for Nexus Station.”
“How long?”
“Left six minutes ago.”
Silence. Then Maris said, “We’re already closer than when you left. The Raptor can be at Meridian in eleven hours at maximum burn. Nexus Station is another fourteen from there. We move now.”
Deyric’s voice came over the comm, close and flat.
“Assume they took everything she was carrying. Her datapad. Her comm. The drive I gave her. The upload package, the worm, the authentication handshake. Everything on it is compromised. I have to rebuild it from nothing and re-key all of it before we broadcast a single byte.”
“How long?”
“Two days for the package itself if nobody speaks to me and Zevik stops asking whether I’m done.”
Somewhere behind him, Zevik said, “I asked once.”
“You asked four times.” Deyric’s voice flattened another degree. “And the package is the easy part.”
“What’s the hard part?” I asked.
“Nexus. If I probe their defenses from here, they see the probe and know we’re coming. So I have to reconstruct enough of their authentication and defense architecture from the mirrored diplomatic traffic and every Consortium system we’ve already cracked to build a one-shot entry spoof offline.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know yet. Longer than two days. I get one clean attempt. I’m not spending it early because you want a clock.”
I did want a clock. Something with numbers I could hold onto.
Maris said, “We can reach the outer Nexus area in about twenty-five hours. Then we go cold outside their sensor envelope and stay there until Deyric has the door open and the boarding plan is locked. We do not announce ourselves twice.”
The Ghost was faster than the Raptor. Smaller, lighter, with engines Maris had rebuilt to run hot.
“I’m going now,” I said. “I take the Ghost, I follow the transport, and once it docks the bond gets me to Jessa inside the station. You rebuild the package and come when it’s ready. Rendezvous at Nexus.”
“Serak.” Maris’s voice was careful. “One ship. One person. Against a fortified station.”
“I’m not assaulting the station. We know where Nexus is. I’m finding where they put her.”
“How?”
I looked at my hands. They were dark. Still dark.
The proto-bond was still open, still tracking, still pulling me toward deep void.
“I can find her inside it,” I said. “Get the crew moving.”
I cut the comm, strapped Tal into the copilot’s seat, and keyed in Maris’s transponder codes. The physical chip had gone with Jessa’s gear, but she’d loaded the sequences into the Ghost before we ever docked. On undock the ship’s registration rolled over.
We would leave Meridian as a different vessel than the one Jessa Corren had arrived on. Then I brought the engines online.
The direction was clear. Deep void.
My hands hadn’t faded. I didn’t try to make them.