Chapter 13 #2
"It's thin." Dexter's jaw tightens, the muscles flexing beneath skin that carries the same olive tone as mine but none of the patience.
"Too thin. Too clean. His file before he joined us reads like someone wrote a character sheet for a role-playing game.
Born on Selos IV, parents deceased, educated at the Kessler Technical Institute.
Every box checked, every detail plausible, and not one piece of it verified beyond a surface-level query that should have been flagged a decade ago. "
"Should have been."
"Should have been." He lets the repetition carry the weight. "Father brought him in. Fast-tracked his clearance. Personally vouched for him, which meant nobody looked twice because nobody questioned the old man."
We turn a corner, passing a pair of station guards who stiffen at the sight of us. I nod. They relax fractionally, then don't, because Dexter's presence has never relaxed anyone in his life. He radiates controlled threat the way some people radiate body heat, constantly and without effort.
"I want a private room," I tell him. "Not the hub. Astra's running too many feeds in there."
He leads me to a conference chamber two levels up, a space we use for operational briefings that require need-to-know clearance.
The door seals behind us with a pressurized hiss, and the room's countermeasures activate automatically, scrambling any signal that tries to enter or exit.
The air goes dead and close, the hum of the station dropping to a subsonic pulse I feel more in my teeth than my ears.
Dexter doesn't sit. He stands with his back to the wall, arms crossed, which is both a tactical habit and a statement of position. He's not going to be comfortable with whatever I'm about to say, and he's letting me know that in advance.
"If he's a traitor," Dexter says before I can open my mouth, "kill him quietly. Tonight. Stage an accident, space him, whatever feels clean. If he's not, we've already shown our hand by investigating, and the damage to the alliance is done either way."
"We haven't shown anything. Astra's surveillance is passive. The data audit is running under a routine security protocol. Nothing points back to a targeted investigation."
"Yet."
"Yet." I concede the point because he's earned it.
"But I'm not killing him on suspicion. If he's connected to whoever's been feeding intelligence to our competitors, if he's the breach we've been bleeding from, then he knows things.
Names, methods, the scope of the compromise.
Killing him solves the immediate problem and leaves us blind to everything else. "
Dexter's expression doesn't change. It rarely does. "Then let me ask him. My way."
I know what his way looks like. I've seen the aftermath in the rooms Dexter works in, the ones with drains in the floor and sound dampening.
He's effective. I've never questioned that.
What I question is whether effectiveness is worth becoming the thing our father was, and I know Dexter hates when I frame it that way because it implies our father was something to be avoided rather than surpassed.
"No."
"Zane."
"No." I let the finality settle between us. "We need to be smarter than he was. If Ethan is compromised, I want to know by whom, and I want to know the full architecture of whatever network he's feeding. That means surveillance, not interrogation. That means patience."
Dexter's mouth thins. "Patience is what people with time can afford."
"Then we'd better hope we have time."
He uncrosses his arms. Not a concession, but a pause. "Your military contacts," I continue, because this is the other half of the conversation and the half that scares me more. "What's the latest on the Vex perimeter build-up?"
The shift in his posture is subtle, but I catch it.
The loosening of his jaw means he's about to deliver something he's been carrying alone.
"They're not testing anymore. The probes we've been intercepting at the outer boundary markers for the past six weeks were reconnaissance, not provocation. They've been mapping our defense grid."
"Successfully?"
"Enough. My contacts at the garrison fleet say the Vex Collective has consolidated three separate raiding fleets into a unified strike force.
They've pulled warships from the Keth Expanse and the Sable Corridor.
Force projection suggests they can field enough firepower to challenge our station defenses and hold a blockade while they do it. "
The room feels smaller. The countermeasures hum against my skin like a warning.
"Timeline?"
"Days. Maybe less." Dexter meets my eyes and holds them.
"We're running out of time to solve the Ethan problem, Zane.
If the Vex hit us while we've got a compromised operative with access to our security architecture, it won't matter how smart we were about the investigation.
We'll be fighting a siege while the enemy is already inside the walls. "
He's right. I hate that he's right because it means patience is a luxury I'm spending currency I may not have.
"Double Astra's resources," I tell him. "Pull what she needs from the secondary security teams. If Ethan's sending burst transmissions, I want them captured and cracked before the Vex arrive.
And Dexter." I wait until his attention is fully locked.
"Keep this between us. No one outside this room and the hub knows what we're looking at. "
"And Elissa?"
The question lands in the center of my chest like a fist. "What about her?"
"She's spending a lot of time with him. If he's what we think he is, she's exposed."
"I know."
"So pull her back."
"And tip him that we're watching." I hear the excuse even as I say it, hear how neatly it lets me avoid the harder conversation, which is that pulling Elissa back means explaining to her why, and explaining means watching her face when she realizes the one person on this station who made her feel like she belonged might have been engineering that feeling through her skin.
I'm not ready to do that to her. I tell myself it's strategy.
It's not. It's cowardice wearing a better suit.
Dexter reads it in my face. He doesn't call me on it, which is worse.
I go back to the hub in the dead hours between second and third shift, when the corridors are dim and the station's population thins to the night crews and the insomniacs and the people whose business prefers the dark.
Astra has been replaced at the main console by one of her subordinates, a quiet woman named Pell who tracks data the way a predator tracks movement, with total stillness and occasional bursts of lethal precision.
"Anything new?" I drop into the chair Astra vacated. It's still warm.
"Eames is in his quarters. No outgoing comms for the past four hours.
" Pell's voice carries the flat cadence of someone reporting weather.
"I flagged a sixty-three-second dead zone in his node activity at 0217.
Could be a system hiccup. Could be a compressed burst. I've captured the window for analysis. "
"Good." I stare at the feeds. Ethan's door is closed, his quarters dark on the thermal overlay. Just a body in a bed, generating the standard heat signature of sleep. Peaceful. Unremarkable. A man resting after a long day of being exactly what everyone expects him to be.
I cycle through the other feeds. Level six, where the debtor housing gives way to the market stalls and the cramped offices of people who owe me enough to work for free.
Level four, the training bays, empty now except for a maintenance bot buffing scuff marks off the sparring mat.
Level two, officers' quarters, where Dexter's light is still on because Dexter's light is always still on.
I find her on level five.
Talia isn't in her quarters. She's in the small briefing room adjacent to Astra's secondary office, seated at a table with a portable data terminal and three separate information feeds scrolling across its surface.
Her hair is pulled back, and she's wearing one of the station-issue shirts that's too big for her, the collar slipping off one shoulder in a way that sends a specific kind of heat through my blood that I don't have time for.
She's reading. Making notes. Cross-referencing something on the terminal with a handwritten list I can't make out from the camera angle.
I pull up the metadata on her feeds. Debtor network communications.
Population movement data for the lower levels.
Resource allocation reports. She's building a map of the station's social architecture, the informal power structures that live beneath the organizational charts, the alliances and grudges and dependencies that actually determine how this place functions.
Nobody told her to do this.
I sit there, watching her work, and something in my chest recalibrates.
It's not the wanting, though the wanting is always there, a gravitational constant that I've stopped trying to resist and started learning to use.
This is something different. This is the recognition that the woman on that screen is not the woman I brought here.
The cargo has become something else entirely.
She's learning my world not because I forced her to, but because she's decided to survive in it on her own terms, and her version of survival involves understanding every system well enough to turn it into a weapon or a tool.
She is becoming a partner. The word settles into me with a weight that's half comfort and half terror, because partners are leverage, and leverage in my world is just another word for a vulnerability someone can use to put you on your knees.
I watch her for too long. I know I'm watching too long because Pell's silence behind me has shifted from professional to pointed, and because the clock on the secondary monitor tells me I've been sitting here for nine minutes without blinking at anything else.