Serak
The Ghost’s engines ran hot. Maris had rebuilt the modified Kestrel for exactly that. She’d stripped the safety governors and rerouted the thermal overflow into a secondary thrust system, adding twelve percent to the output.
The nav display showed Nexus Station’s coordinates in deep void, and I watched the distance close.
Ten hours.
Tal was in the copilot’s seat. He hadn’t let go of the armrests since we’d cleared Meridian Station’s sensor range.
His knuckles were white. His breathing was too fast.
“How fast is this ship?” he asked.
“Fast enough.”
“Fast enough for what?”
“To get there before they hurt her.”
He didn’t answer right away. His breathing didn’t slow. The Ghost’s cockpit was small enough that I heard every inhale, every controlled exhale, the effort of a man trying not to fall apart in a space the size of a storage closet.
“I’m not a soldier,” he said.
“I know.”
“I’ve never been on a ship this small. Or this fast. Or heading toward a facility run by a man who will kill me if he finds out what I gave your partner.” He paused. “My family thinks I’m still at the conference.”
“Do they know?”
“They don’t know anything. That was the point.” He looked at the viewport. “Twelve years of making sure they never had to.”
He stared out at deep void. Nothing. The kind of empty that made people from populated systems uncomfortable, the absence of stars and stations and traffic, black in every direction except the one we were heading.
“The transport left Meridian ten minutes ahead of us,” I said. “Doesn’t sound like much. But it has bigger engines, and over a ten-hour run those minutes open into a real gap. We won’t catch them in transit. We’ll set down a few hours after them.”
“And then what?”
“Your codes get the Ghost through the perimeter and into a cargo berth.”
Tal waited.
“After we dock, we both get off.”
His grip tightened on the armrest. “That sounds worse than the part where my codes get us through the perimeter.”
“You walk into cargo processing and become a problem they can’t ignore. Senior diplomatic liaison. Your authorization will have just been accepted by a classified facility that won’t identify itself. Demand a supervisor. Demand names. Demand to know who accepted the authorization.”
“And while everyone is looking at me?”
“I disappear.”
He stared at me. “They’ll detain me.”
“Probably.”
“They may kill me.”
“Yes.”
That landed. I let it. He deserved the truth.
“Vain has reasons to keep you alive,” I said. “He needs to know what you gave Jessa, who else has copies, and whether you warned anyone outside his operation. You’re also a senior Consortium diplomat who vanished from a conference. A body creates questions he doesn’t need.”
“That isn’t the same as safe.”
“No.”
He looked out at deep void for a long time. “And the Raptor?”
“They can reach the Nexus area in about a day. That doesn’t mean they attack in a day. Deyric gets one clean shot at the station’s defenses. Until he has it, they stay dark.”
“So I get arrested, you crawl into the walls, and we wait for the man building an impossible key.”
“That’s the plan.”
Then he reached inside his jacket and pulled out his diplomatic credential.
“The last communications certification I handled included an emergency offline routing cache,” he said. “If the network went down, senior liaisons were supposed to know which physical nodes could be reached manually.”
He keyed the credential into the Ghost’s secondary display.
A schematic opened.
Not architectural plans. Infrastructure. Routing trunks, emergency access, service connections, docking interfaces. Detailed enough to move through.
“Three sections,” Tal said. He highlighted them as he spoke. “Cargo and processing on the lower ring. Holding through the middle. Command and research on the upper section. Cargo docking here. Military docking here. Central service spine connects all three.”
“Where would they bring a new prisoner?”
“Intake cells. Eastern side of the holding section.”
I memorized the layout.
Service spine. Access points. Three routes between cargo and command: main spine corridor, ventilation, lateral maintenance shaft.
“How current?”
“Eight months.” Tal looked at the timestamp. “That was the last certification. Anything they changed after that won’t be here.”
“What kind of modifications?”
“Expansion. The holding area was at capacity six months ago. They were adding cells. The manifests your crew recovered showed three thousand subjects. Current estimates based on the communication traffic I was managing suggested significantly more.”
More than three thousand. People in metal boxes in deep void, their bonds broken and rewritten by a man who thought he was solving evolution’s design flaws.
Tal breathed out through his nose. “I liked you better when you were just threatening me.”
He didn’t argue further. He sat in the copilot’s seat, gripped the armrests, and breathed. I flew the Ghost toward deep void and tried not to think about the last time I’d been in this cabin.
The blanket was still on the bunk. I didn’t look at it. I didn’t need to look at it to know it was there, the same way I didn’t need to look at my hands to know they were dark.
Some things stayed.
Four hours in, the proto-bond shifted.
I’d been feeling Jessa since the docking bay at Meridian. A constant pull, directional, warm, the connection finally given permission to operate at full capacity.
For the first four hours, what came through was muffled. Sleep-silence. The sedative holding her under, her consciousness pressed flat, her emotional state unreadable except as a baseline hum of alive.
Then she woke up.
The shift was sudden. The muffled hum became a spike. Confusion first, sharp and disorienting, the feeling of a mind coming online in a place it didn’t recognize.
No images. No thoughts. Just disorientation, discomfort, and a sharp sense of wrongness.
Then recognition. She knew where she was. Not the specific facility, not the specific cell, but the situation.
Captured. Held. Alone.
Then fury.
I gripped the flight controls. The fury wasn’t mine but I felt it in my chest, in my jaw, in the heat that climbed my forearms.
Not a diffuse anger. Focused. Sharp.
The fury of a woman who’d been knocked down and was already calculating how to get back up.
“She’s awake,” I said.
Tal looked at me. “How do you know?”
“She’s angry.”
“Is that good?”
“For Jessa, yes.”
The fury settled into something colder. Controlled.
The quality of her attention shifted from raw emotion to work. She was taking stock.
I couldn’t feel the details. I knew what that shift meant.
I’d watched her do it a thousand times, walking into a supply shortage, a mechanical failure, a crew argument.
Assess. Inventory. Solve.
She was doing it now somewhere ahead of me in deep void. And the fact that her first response to captivity was logistics told me everything I needed to know about whether she’d survive.
“Can you actually feel her?” Tal asked. “Or are you guessing?”
“I can feel her.”
“Feel what? Her location? Her thoughts?”
“Her emotional state. Direction. Intensity.” I paused. “Right now she’s steady.”
“That’s...” He trailed off. “The bonding research I managed communications for. The clinical descriptions. Neurochemical synchronization. Biological dependency. Exploitable attachment.” He looked at his hands. “Is that what this feels like?”
The nav display showed six hours remaining. I looked at it, looked away, and realized I couldn’t remember what I’d just read. I checked again. Six hours.
“No,” I said. “That’s not what it feels like.”
“What does it feel like?”
I thought about the mess hall at 0300. The mug she pushed toward me without asking if I wanted it. The silence that was more comfortable than any conversation I’d ever had with anyone else.
The way the ship felt different when she was aboard versus when she wasn’t, and how I’d never admitted that to myself until she was gone.
“It feels like the ship is quieter when she’s not on it,” I said. “And louder when she is. And both of those things are better than silence.”
Tal stared at me. “That’s the least clinical description of a biological bond I’ve ever heard.”
“Good.”
At the four-hour mark, the Raptor checked in. Maris on comms, professional as always.
Behind her voice, the crew. Deyric’s console chiming. Zevik saying something that made someone throw something at him.
“Ghost, what’s your ETA?”
“Six hours.”
“We’re still burning. Roughly a day before we reach the outer Nexus area. Deyric’s rebuild is moving.”
“Re-key is clean,” Deyric said. “The Nexus spoof is not. That’s the part that can’t be rushed.”
Maris continued. “Once we’re inside their likely sensor range, we go cold. No routine check-ins. No active probing. You should expect one low-power burst when Deyric has the exploit frozen and we have an attack window.”
After that, silence until it mattered.
“I can feel her,” I said.
“Then don’t lose that signal. We’re coming.”
“Maris.”
“Yes?”
“She woke up angry. She’s steady now. Whatever they’re doing, they haven’t broken her.”
“That sounds about right.” Her voice softened, not much, only the edges. “Bring her home, Serak.”
The comms clicked off. The Ghost hummed.
Tal had fallen asleep in the copilot’s seat, chin on his chest, hands still gripping the armrests. His body had given up on consciousness even if his fingers hadn’t gotten the message.
I should have slept. I couldn’t.
The proto-bond was a constant presence now, more than direction and emotion, something physical, a warmth in my chest that shifted when Jessa’s emotional state did.
She was calm now. The fury had burned off, leaving a steady warmth in my chest.
I held onto the fact that she was awake and steady and kept flying.
The nav display showed two hours.
I looked at it. Looked again. Two hours.
The last number I remembered was six. The check-in with Maris, the display reading six, and then I was looking at two and the space between was gone.
Four hours. I’d lost four hours.
Not asleep. Not unconscious. Just missing.
I didn’t feel the hours leave; I looked down and they were gone.
My hands were on the controls. I didn’t remember putting them there.
I looked at my forearms. The dark wasn’t uniform anymore. Deeper around my wrists, climbing past my elbows.
The shadow-meld residue from Meridian, still in my system, reacting to the sustained connection I was holding across deep void. The proto-bond and the shadow-meld used the same biology, and running both at once was...
Was.
I lost the thought. I’d been thinking about the biology and then I wasn’t.
Tal stirred. Opened his eyes. Looked at me, bleary, a man who’d fallen asleep in a situation he wished were a dream.
“How long was I out?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I lost track.”
He sat up straighter. Looked at my arms. At the skin on my neck and jaw that I felt shifting but couldn’t see.
“Your skin,” he said. “It’s worse.”
“I’m aware.”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
“Not for you.”
Tal studied me for a long moment.
Two hours left on the display. The proto-bond pulled. Steady and warm and directional.
She was still there. Still herself.
I put my hands on the controls and flew toward her.