Chapter 17
Zane
The ship logs play on a loop, and I watch Marcus St. Laurent dies for the third time.
Well, not die. Disappear. Which is worse, because dying has the decency to be final.
The command center is quiet at this hour, the overnight skeleton crew running systems checks at the far terminals while I occupy the central holo-display like a man sitting vigil at a grave.
The blue-white projection casts everything in that flat, clinical light that strips away pretense.
Good. I need clarity more than comfort right now.
Marcus St. Laurent's courier vessel left Sector 14 docking authority forty-three days ago with a cargo manifest that reads clean on the surface.
Medical supplies. Ration supplements. Water purification cells.
Standard humanitarian freight for the outer colonies.
The kind of cargo nobody looks at twice, which is precisely the point.
Underneath the clean manifest, buried in an encrypted partition that took Astra's best slicer six hours to crack, the real cargo: three sealed containment units, contents unlisted, origin tagged to a shell company that traces back through seven intermediaries to one name.
Malachar.
My father's ghost reaches from beyond that anomaly and touches everything.
Even now.
Even here.
I scrub through the navigation logs again.
St. Laurent's route was indirect, evasive, the path of a man who knew he was being watched and didn't want to lead anyone home.
He jumped through six relay points, doubled back twice, spent eighteen hours drifting cold in a debris field near the Kessler Belt to shake whatever tail he suspected.
Careful man. Methodical. The kind of courier who survives decades in this business because he respects the work.
But the final coordinates match the anomaly. That fold in space where instruments go soft and signals turn to noise. The place my father went six years ago and never returned from.
St. Laurent's final transmission plays, his voice steady with the particular calm of a man who has made peace with the thing he's about to do. "Contact made. Proceeding."
Three words. Then static. Then nothing.
No return signal. No distress beacon. No emergency transponder activation. No further logs of any kind.
The ship's automated systems recorded another four minutes of telemetry before the data simply stops, as if the vessel crossed a threshold and ceased to exist in any way the instruments could comprehend.
He went through. Just like Malachar. Neither of them came back.
I close my eyes and let the implications settle into the architecture of what I know.
Two men, separated by years, both drawn to the same impossible point in space.
Both choosing to cross. Both vanishing completely.
My father was running from something. St. Laurent was carrying something for him.
The cargo, whatever was in those sealed units, was important enough that a man left his daughter as collateral to fund the journey.
The door behind me opens. I don't need to turn around. The bond tells me before her footsteps do, a warmth at the base of my skull like sunlight through frosted glass.
"You've been in here for hours." Talia's voice carries the particular rough edge of someone who woke up alone and didn't like it. "Your side of the bed was cold."
"Couldn't sleep."
She comes to stand beside me, close enough that I can smell the station soap on her skin, the faintest trace of the tea she drinks before bed. Her eyes find the holo-display, and I watch her face as the information registers. The ship name. The logs. The coordinates.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't cry. Six weeks ago, when I told her that her father's debt transferred to her, she'd stared at me with eyes like a cornered animal, all terror and defiance.
Now she looks at the evidence of his likely death with a grief that runs deep and still, a river that has found its course and settled into it.
I pull up the final telemetry data, the readings that dissolve into noise. "He made it to the anomaly. He transmitted once. Then he went through."
"Like your father."
"Like my father."
She's quiet for a long time. The holo-display cycles through the data, patient and indifferent, casting blue shadows across her face.
I feel her grief through the bond, not the sharp, lacerating kind that demands immediate attention, but something older and more honest. She suspected this.
She's been carrying the weight of this suspicion for weeks, letting it settle into her bones gradually so that the confirmation wouldn't shatter her.
She's learning to hold pain without breaking. I don't know if that makes me proud or sorry.
"He left me as collateral for this." Her voice is even, almost academic. "Signed the debt contract knowing he might not come back. Knowing what would happen to me."
"Yes."
"And whatever he was carrying for Malachar was worth that."
I don't answer, because we both know the answer, and saying it out loud would be a cruelty she doesn't need from me right now.
Her hand finds mine in the blue light. Her fingers are cool, steady. The mark at her throat pulses once, a soft flare that echoes through the bond and settles in my chest like a second heartbeat.
"Show me everything," she says. "All of it. Don't protect me from it."
So I do.
Ethan Eames sits across the briefing table like a man who knows exactly how many weapons are pointed at him and has decided not to care.
Two of Dexter's best flank the door. Astra stands at the far wall with her arms crossed and her expression communicating, in its efficient way, that she would very much like to break something.
Dexter himself occupies the chair to my left, lounging with that deceptive casualness that means he's already mapped three ways to kill everyone in the room and is working on a fourth.
Ethan looks at none of them. He looks at me.
"The 7 Protocol," he says, as if the words are a gift he's choosing to give rather than intelligence being extracted. "That's what you need to understand."
"Then help me understand." I keep my voice level. The bond is quiet. I left Talia in the command center reviewing the rest of her father's logs, giving her the privacy to grieve without my empathic awareness pressing against her like unwanted hands. Some grief needs to be carried alone.
Ethan leans forward. The overhead lights catch the faint luminescent tracery along his forearms, his Empri heritage visible in those pale lines that shift and pulse with bioluminescent subtlety. Half-Empri.
A foot in two worlds, belonging fully to neither.
"They've been studying the anomaly for decades," he says. "Long before Malachar discovered it, long before the Veridian drift became contested territory. The 7 Protocol is a shadow faction. Not government, not syndicate. Something older. Something patient."
"What do they want with it?"
"They believe something is on the other side.
Something valuable enough to justify any cost." His mouth curves, but there's nothing amused in it.
"Your father found out about them. That's why he ran.
Not from the Consortium, not from his enemies here.
From the Protocol. They wanted what he knew, and he decided he'd rather go through the anomaly himself than let them have it. "
The room absorbs this. Dexter's fingers tap a slow rhythm against the table surface, the only tell he ever offers.
"And St. Laurent?" I ask.
"A courier. One of several that Malachar used to move assets and information.
St. Laurent was carrying research data. Readings.
Analysis of the anomaly's behavior over a six-year observation period.
And something else." Ethan pauses, choosing his words with the precision of a man who knows that information is the only currency keeping him alive.
"Biological samples. From the anomaly's edge.
Material that doesn't match anything in known databases. "
"You're very well informed for someone who claims to have left their employment."
"I didn't claim to have left. I said I'm willing to share what I know. Those aren't the same thing."
Dexter stops tapping. The silence that follows has a particular quality, like the moment between a trigger pull and a muzzle flash.
"So you're still working for them," Dexter says.
"I'm surviving. Same as everyone at this table.
" Ethan meets Dexter's gaze with the calm of someone who has already accepted the worst possible outcome and found it tolerable.
"The Protocol sent me to assess Veridian-7's vulnerabilities.
The Vex attack was a test, partly. To see how the station responded.
To see if Torrence control was as solid as it appears. "
"And your assessment?"
"That the Torrence syndicate is more resilient than the 7 Protocol anticipated.
That the anomaly is better guarded than they expected.
And that this station has assets they didn't account for.
" His eyes flicker toward the door, briefly, in the direction Talia went.
Then back to me. "I'm willing to provide what I know about their operations, their infrastructure, their timeline.
In exchange for protection and a position here. "
"A truce."
"An arrangement."
I study him across the table. The bond pulses at the edges of my awareness, and even at this distance I can feel Talia in the command center, her grief a low steady ache that I carry in my own chest like a bruise against my ribs.
Ethan is dangerous. His Empri abilities make him a weapon in ways that are difficult to fully quantify.
And his loyalties are a question I may never fully answer.
But he has information I need. And the thing that's coming, the thing Dexter has been warning about, is bigger than the grudges in this room.