Serak
The first five minutes were quiet.
Deyric’s voice in my ear marked the first threshold. “Five minutes. GalacNet authenticated. Broadcasting. Military frequencies opening.”
I held the doorway. The corridor outside the comm hub was thirty meters of straight passage ending at a T-junction. Anyone coming for us had to come down that corridor.
One direction, one approach, one killing ground.
Jessa was behind me at the console, monitoring the upload. The bond told me her pulse was elevated but steady. Her attention was on the displays, tracking the data flow and the authentication progress.
Focused. Working. The way she always was when things were at their worst.
I put my back to the door frame and waited. The shadow-meld sat under my skin, ready.
Not sustained. Resting.
I’d need it soon and I couldn’t afford to burn it before the fighting started.
The crew was fighting through the station. Their voices on the comms were the only sound besides the equipment’s low drone and Jessa’s steady breathing.
Zevik, breathless: “Their external array has a blind spot on the lower quadrant. I’ve been running them through it since we broke cover and they still haven’t figured it out.”
“That’s not flying,” Maris said. “That’s a controlled crash.”
“All my crashes are controlled.”
“Ressh and I are through the docking ring,” Alix said. “Corridor is contested. Six hostiles, falling back.” A pause.
The sound of weapons fire. The hostile comm chatter spiked with confused shouting as Ressh’s pheromonal warning hit them. “Five hostiles.”
“Four,” Ressh said. “The last two can’t decide if they’re more scared of the woman with the gun or the man who smells like their worst nightmare.”
“Three,” Alix said. “They decided wrong.”
Deyric came back on. “Eight minutes. Military frequencies authenticated. Broadcasting. Diplomatic handshake opening now. This is the slow one—twelve more minutes if the spoof holds.”
Eight minutes in, the first wave hit us.
Station security. Six of them, coming down the corridor at a run, weapons up, boots hammering the deck plating.
They knew where we were. The comm hub was the only target that mattered, and they were coming to retake the room.
The hub was hardened to keep transmitting through an assault, and Deyric’s fail-operational lock had frozen remote shutdown.
Command did have one other option: sever the privileged routes and isolate protected systems locally. Palm-keyed. As long as we held the hub and kept those routes open, Jessa’s worm would still have a path to the research.
I pulled the shadow-meld up. Not full. Not the deep state I’d been rationing through the last two weeks.
Controlled bursts. The way I’d used it at the relay raid. Enough to make their targeting drift, enough to close the distance between their shots and my hands.
The first two went down fast. Their weapons fired into shadow that wasn’t where I was anymore.
The third got a shot off that scorched the wall behind me. The fourth tried to retreat and hit the one behind him. The fifth raised his weapon and I was already inside his guard before his finger closed on the trigger. He went down.
The sixth turned and ran. Smart. Not smart enough.
I caught him at the junction.
I knew Jessa’s position behind me without looking.
She was at the console, twelve steps back, left of center. Safe. In position.
“Twelve minutes,” she said. “Diplomatic at thirty-five percent.”
Ressh on comms: “Military wing is clear. Alix and I are moving toward the holding levels.” His voice had changed. Not the charming, sarcastic scout from the briefing room.
Something older. The voice of a Tsekai who’d seen what Vain did to his own people strapped to examination tables.
“They fight well together. The bonded pairs in the cells. If anyone can get them free, they’ll help.”
“Solren’s on his way to the holding levels,” Maris said. “Thoryn and I have the hangar. They sent fifteen at us. Thoryn went through the first eight before I finished reloading. The other seven reconsidered their career choices.”
“Some of them could still walk,” Thoryn said. His first words on comms all day. The deep resonance of a Tamzari who knew what it was to be caged and was done watching it happen to anyone else.
Solren came over the channel from the holding levels.
“I’m at the prisoner cells. Starting triage.
” A pause. The sound of cell doors opening, one after another, the locks releasing in sequence as Deyric cracked them through the channel Jessa had opened.
“There’s a Tsekai woman standing at her door. She says Jessa sent her.”
Narev. Standing at the door with her shoulders squared, looking less like a prisoner than a builder who had finally been handed an open shipyard.
Jessa had given her that.
“Fourteen minutes,” Jessa said. “Diplomatic at fifty percent.”
The second wave came at fourteen minutes. Heavier. Twelve guards with heavier weapons, moving in formation, covering each other’s angles.
Vain was committing his reserves. He’d held them back during the first wave, testing our strength, measuring the response. Now he knew what he was dealing with and he’d sent the real fighters.
I fought them in the corridor. Shadow-meld in bursts, striking from angles they couldn’t track, retreating into darkness, hitting from behind.
The bond kept Jessa’s position anchored in my awareness. I knew where she was without looking the way I knew where my own hands were.
The guards fell. Not all of them easily.
Two of them had trained for close-quarters combat and they adapted fast, firing not where I was but ahead of where I was moving, anticipating the movement patterns. I had to change the rhythm, go deeper into the meld, burn more.
One of them got close enough to score a plasma burn across my ribs. The bolt seared through my shirt and into skin. It landed in my body at the same instant Jessa’s fear hit my chest.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re not fine. You’re bleeding.”
“I’m functional.”
“Serak.”
“Functional.”
I put down the last of the twelve. The corridor was quiet.
Scorch marks on the walls. Bodies on the floor.
Ressh, on comms, breathing hard. “That’s the garrison spending itself.
They’ve got two hundred and they’re bleeding them across three rings; docking, hangar, holding.
And the holding’s turning on them. Deyric’s popping cells faster than they can cover, and the ones we free don’t run. They pick up whatever the guards drop.”
“Sixteen minutes,” Deyric said. “Diplomatic at seventy percent.”
“Eighteen minutes,” Deyric said in my ear. “Diplomatic at eighty-seven percent.”
Then Vain came.
Not with an army. With six of his personal guards, the ones he’d kept closest while station security fought and died across the rings.
They moved differently. Faster. More controlled.
Spread formation. Overlapping fields of fire. Weapons sweeping not for a body but for the gaps where a body might disappear.
They’d studied the shadow-meld. Or something close enough to be dangerous.
Vain stood behind them in civilian clothes. No weapon.
He looked at me across the corridor and I recognized the expression.
Not anger.
Interest.
Even now, he was looking at a result.
“You bonded with her,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“You’re proving my point, Commander. Look at yourself. Burning alive for one woman.”
The first guard fired.
I dropped the blaster and the rigid tools back across the hub threshold. None of it could follow where I was going.
I went dark.
Not the controlled bursts I’d used on the first two waves.
Deeper.
The corridor lost its edges. Light bent and broke. The places between one shadow and the next stopped being separate places.
They were good.
One fired ahead of my movement instead of at it. Another swept low while the third covered the retreat angle. They forced me farther into the dark with every pass.
I spent what I had left.
Nearly two weeks of short crossings and bad sleep sat inside my muscles like accumulated damage. My hands had already started forgetting their boundaries before the assault began.
I pushed anyway.
The first guard went down.
Then the second.
Plasma cut through the dark where my ribs had been half a second earlier. I changed rhythm. Came out behind the third. Went under the fourth shot instead of around it.
The fifth saw me.
Actually saw me.
For one frozen second his eyes locked on mine inside the shadow.
Then I was past him.
The sixth fell near the wall.
My vision blanked and came back with Vain already moving.
“The evidence is out,” he said. “The research isn’t.”
He reached for the recessed command panel beside the corridor junction.
I understood it then.
Not a purge.
Isolation.
The hub was hardened against an external shutdown, but command could still cut privileged routes, throw the protected research enclave local-only, and strand every database behind a wall Jessa’s worm could no longer cross.
What we’d already broadcast would survive.
What Vain had built would survive too.
His palm touched the reader.
I reached him first.
It was fast.
Two seconds. Clean.
The kind of kill a soldier makes when there is no reason to make it anything else.
Vain hit the floor.
The panel flashed once above him.
AUTHORIZATION INTERRUPTED.
For half a second, nothing moved.
This was the man who had turned Ebon Gate into a trap and made criminals out of the people who survived it. The man behind eight years of tables and collars and forced bonds and cells full of people whose names he’d reduced to subject numbers.
On the floor, he looked smaller than the damage.
There was no balance in it. No satisfaction large enough to answer what he’d done.
Just a body against a wall and a problem that had stopped moving.
“Nineteen minutes,” Deyric said.
Jessa.
The live objective snapped back into place.
The shadow-meld surged before I could pull it down.
My legs went.
Not because of one fight.
Because I’d spent nearly two weeks taking pieces out of myself a few minutes at a time: dark crossings, deep compressions, sleep cut into fragments, food when I remembered it, the little blank spaces that had started appearing between one moment and the next.
Then I’d spent whatever remained on six men trained to hunt the dark.
The corridor tilted.
My hands stopped belonging to me.
The silver under my skin flickered at the edges of my vision.
Who.
Where.
Jessa.
Her name stayed.
“Diplomatic at ninety-six,” Deyric said.
I heard Jessa behind me. Not the words first. Her voice.
I held onto that.
“Serak.”
Closer.
“Ninety-eight.”
The dark wanted everything without edges. My name. My hands. The difference between the floor and my knees on it.
Jessa stayed specific.
“Twenty minutes,” Deyric said.
“One hundred percent,” she said. “Upload complete.”
A breath. Then: “Triggering the worm.”
A pause. The console behind me hummed. A different sound, deeper, the worm propagating through the facility’s network, finding the research databases, the backup systems, the archived files.
Everything Vain had built. Everything his researchers had developed. The redirected bonding protocols, the neurochemical priming techniques, the success cases.
All of it burning from the inside out.
“Worm is active,” Jessa said. “Propagating through the facility network. Research databases corrupting. It’s in the connected backups. It’s still spreading.”
“The feeder stations?” I asked.
“Deyric built the worm to follow the network connections outward. If the feeder stations are still linked, it’ll reach them. If someone copied data offline...” She paused. “Then we deal with fragments later. The primary datasets are burning now.”
Another pause. Longer.
“Deyric,” she said. “Confirm.”
Deyric’s voice, from the Raptor. Quiet.
“It’s everywhere it can reach. Every connected channel. Every connected network.”
Silence.
“It’s done.”
Maris came over comms. “Main hangar secure.” Zevik followed: “External array is dark.” Ressh said the remaining security posts were surrendering or breaking.
The fighting stopped. Not all at once. In pieces.
Weapons going silent across the station. Voices going quiet. The klaxons cutting out, one by one, until the only sound was the hum of the transmission equipment and Jessa’s breathing behind me and the slow dissolution of everything I was.
I was on the floor. The corridor was dark and I was in it and the edges of me were gone.