Chapter 7 Zane
Zane
The docking clamps engage with a sound like bones locking into a joint, and I feel my brother before I see him.
His emotional signature hits me from the other side of the airlock seal.
Controlled rage compressed into something dense and portable, the way military men learn to carry their damage.
Grief underneath, but buried deep, packed tight under layers of discipline and pragmatism like ordnance stored in a hull cavity where nobody looks.
Six years on the outer rim did that to him, turned Dexter's feelings into ammunition he keeps inventoried but never spends.
The inner airlock cycles. Pressurization hisses through the seals. I stand at the edge of the docking bay with my hands clasped behind my back because that's what Father would have done.
Astra stands four paces to my left. Protocol.
The head of security greets all arriving family vessels, scans for threats, verifies identity, logs the arrival in three separate encrypted systems. She's in full tactical kit, sidearm on her hip, her dark hair pulled back so tight it looks painted on. Her face gives away nothing.
But her heartbeat does.
It kicks up twelve beats per minute the moment the airlock seal breaks.
I don't have to try to feel it. It just arrives in my awareness like sound through water, impossible to ignore.
Twelve beats. For Astra Venn, who maintained a resting pulse of fifty-eight while being shot at last week, twelve beats is practically screaming.
I have the sense however, to say nothing.
The airlock opens, and Dexter Torrence walks onto my station like he's taking a beachhead.
He's taller than I remember. Or maybe he just carries himself like the extra inches are owed to him.
Same turquoise skin as mine, but his has a weathered quality, years of outer-rim UV bombardment leaving it slightly rougher, less luminous.
His bioluminescent markings run in sharper patterns than mine, concentrated along his jaw and the backs of his hands, and they pulse with a low, steady light that says nothing.
Controlled. Everything about him is controlled. His electric blue eyes sweep the docking bay in a combat scan I recognize from our father's training drills, checking sight lines, exits, positions of personnel, threats. He catalogues me last.
"Brother." His voice has dropped half an octave since I last heard it. Six years of barking orders into comms over weapons fire will do that.
"Dexter."
He closes the distance in four strides and grips my forearm in the old way, the Torrence greeting, wrist to wrist, where you can feel the other person's pulse.
His is slow and even. His emotions are anything but.
Up close, the grief is sharper. Loss like a blade he's been carrying point-inward, letting it cut him in private where no one can see the blood.
He loved Father. He just doesn't believe love obligates him to pretend the man is alive.
His gaze shifts past my shoulder. Finds Astra.
Something moves through his emotional field so fast I almost miss it. Recognition, yes, but more than that. A pull, magnetic and vicious, immediately strangled. He kills it so fast it's like watching someone snap a bone back into place before anyone notices the break.
"Venn." His mouth barely moves around her name. "Still standing."
Astra's expression doesn't change. Not a flicker. But those twelve extra heartbeats become fifteen.
"No thanks to you," she says.
Five words. Delivered flat, surgical, with the kind of precision that only comes from having rehearsed something a thousand times and still meaning every syllable.
She turns on her heel and walks toward the security checkpoint, her boots striking the deck plates in a rhythm that sounds like punctuation at the end of a sentence she'll never finish.
Dexter watches her go. Three seconds. Then he pulls his attention back to me with the mechanical efficiency of a man rotating a gun turret.
"She's still running security." It's not a question.
"She's the best I have."
"She's the best anyone has." He says it like a fact, like reporting the tensile strength of hull plating. Nothing personal in his voice at all, which tells me everything personal about what just happened.
I file that away too. Deeper this time.
"Your quarters are prepped," I tell him. "But we need to talk first."
"Obviously." He shoulders his kit bag, one strap, military style, the weight of it nothing to him. "Who else is in the room?"
"Ethan."
Something flickers across Dexter's face. Not quite contempt. Evaluation. He's measuring Ethan's usefulness the way he'd assess a weapons system, by capability, reliability, and the odds it turns on you when you need it most.
"Fine," he says. "Lead on."
The conference room sits at the core of the station's command level, windowless by design.
Father had it built that way. No view ports means no vulnerabilities, no exterior access points, no distractions.
The walls are layered with signal dampening that turns the space into a dead zone for surveillance.
Inside this room, the only things that exist are the people at the table and whatever truths they're willing to put on it.
Ethan is already seated when we arrive. He's pulled up holographic displays across the table surface, financial projections and territory maps and the forensic analysis of the Zalt assassination attempt that nearly took my head off three days ago.
He looks up when the door opens, nods to me, then sees Dexter.
"Welcome back." Ethan's voice carries the careful neutrality of a man who's spent years being useful to people who could destroy him. He respects Dexter. He also knows exactly what Dexter thinks of him, and he doesn't waste energy pretending otherwise.
Dexter drops his kit bag by the wall and takes the chair across from Ethan. His eyes move across the holographic displays with the speed of someone trained to absorb tactical data under fire.
"Walk me through it," he says.
I take the head of the table because someone has to, and because if I don't, Dexter will, not out of ambition but out of instinct. He leads the way other people breathe.
"Three months ago, Father disappeared." I keep my voice level. The facts first. "His last known location was the research station at Kael-7. He was investigating an anomaly in the Drift. Gravitational signatures that didn't match any known phenomena."
"Investigating." Dexter rolls the word over like checking a round for defects. "Personally."
"Personally."
"That should have been your first sign something was wrong. Malachar Torrence doesn't do anything personally unless the stakes are existential."
He's right. I knew that then. I know it sharper now.
"Since his disappearance, we've had four targeted incursions into our supply lines, a coordinated data breach in the financial networks, and eight days ago, a Zalt operative put a molecularly tipped round in the view port of my office."
Ethan pulls up the ballistics report. The hologram shows the trajectory, the entry point, the round's composition. Military grade. Outer-rim manufacture.
Dexter studies it for six seconds. "Zalt doesn't have the resources for this alone."
"No."
"So who's backing them?"
"That's what we're trying to determine." Ethan taps through to the financial traces.
"The money moves through seventeen shell entities before it goes dark.
Someone with significant infrastructure is funding this.
I've followed the threads as far as the Meridian Exchange, but they dead-end at a holding company registered to a station that was decommissioned nine years ago. "
Dexter doesn't look at the financial data. He looks at me. "Father's dead, Zane. Accept it and consolidate."
The words land in the room like a body hitting the floor. Ethan goes still. I feel my own jaw tighten, the muscles bunching along the hinge, and I breathe through it because if I don't, my bioluminescence will flare and everyone in this room will see me bleed.
"I'm not sure he is."
Dexter leans back. His chair creaks under his weight. He's broader than me, thicker through the shoulders and arms, built by six years of combat in environments where gravity fluctuates and the only constant is the need to hit harder than whatever is hitting you.
"Based on what? Hope?" The word sounds clinical in his mouth.
A diagnosis, not a feeling. "Three months with no contact.
No encrypted signal. No dead drop. No body, sure, but Malachar Torrence doesn't go silent unless he can't speak.
And the list of things that could shut him up is very, very short. "
"The anomaly he was researching." I pull up the files, what's left of them. Most were purged from the system within hours of his disappearance. "Whatever he found out there, it was significant enough that someone erased his research."
"Or he erased it himself."
"Why would he do that?"
"Because he found something worth hiding." Dexter's blue eyes hold mine. "Even from us."
The silence that follows has weight. I can feel Ethan's discomfort in my peripheral awareness, the low hum of a man sitting between two forces that might collide. He's calculating his position, the way he always does. Useful. Ethan is always, relentlessly useful.
"Regardless," I say, and the word is a door I'm closing on a conversation I'm not ready to have, "we need to address the immediate threats.
The Zalt are escalating. The assassination attempt was a message, and if we don't respond with something louder, every minor syndicate in this sector will read it as weakness. "
"Agreed." Dexter leans forward again. Tactical mode. This is where he lives, where his mind moves like a weapon finding its groove. "Response options."