Chapter 15 DRAVOK
I had underestimated the scope of Nadine's shopping spree.
Not the volume, that was expected. Females were acquisitive by nature.
But the precision of it surprised me. She hadn't selected randomly.
Every item had purpose: function layered with comfort, efficiency disguised as indulgence.
Even her frivolities were structured. It amused me more than it should have.
I closed the commerce interface and returned my focus to the task at hand.
Nythor. Finding him had not been difficult.
Cronack. Now I had to figure out how to get there without being noticed.
The Cryons had used Cronack as a testing ground: harsh atmosphere, mineral density suitable for subterranean containment, negligible civilian presence.
When Xandros and his mate Ashley reduced it to slag and scattered ruins, the Empire had written it off entirely.
That had been in the early days of the Cryon war—when Emperor Daryus had still been maneuvering the GTU—Galactic Treaty Union—pretending diplomacy might succeed.
Before Heather. Before the Empire stopped asking permission.
Cronack had been one of the Cryons' quieter atrocities.
Not like Earth—Earth had been public, brazen, politically explosive.
Cronack had been surgical. Hidden. A laboratory buried beneath a hostile atmosphere and mineral-dense crust, ideal for subterranean containment and genetic experimentation.
By the time Lady Madeema uncovered what was happening there, the evidence was damning enough to fracture alliances.
Xandros had not waited for the GTU's ruling. As Commander of the Imperial Forces and with the help of his human mate, Ashley, he had led the strike personally. That was a mistake.
Empires were excellent at ending wars. Terrible at noticing what lingered afterward.
The Ohrurs were hiding Nythor somewhere on Cronack.
The Pandraxians had erected a large defense grid around the planet after Xandros reduced it to rubble, an automated perimeter grid woven from orbital sentries, quantum signal dampeners, and phased interdiction fields.
Nothing entered without authorization. Nothing exited without being logged, catalogued, and cleared.
Yet the Ohrurs were still moving personnel and material through it.
Which meant they weren't breaching the system. They were using it.
Of course, Nadine chose that moment to enter the bridge.
Without greeting, her eyes flew to the projection hovering above the central console.
The Pandraxian defense web glowed in layered gold threads, but over it, I had superimposed faint traffic anomalies I had been tracing back to their point of origin.
I dismissed the irritation of her presence and began probing the Ohrur commerce network that interfaced with the outer grid.
It resisted. Not aggressively. Politely.
Access permissions cycled. Queries returned in loops.
The system redirected me toward innocuous supply manifests.
It was built to bore intruders to death.
Nadine stepped closer. "Wait."
Her hand closed over mine. The contact sparked through me like a shorted circuit. I ignored it.
"Don't force it," she advised, already studying the shifting data streams. "If you brute-force a mercantile network, it flags you as hostile. But this isn't military encryption."
I glanced at her. "It's still layered."
"Yes, but look at how it's layered." She leaned in, her blonde hair falling over her shoulder as she isolated a cluster of subroutines. "This isn't about secrecy. It's about logistics. Resource flow. Transactional redundancy."
She began filtering differently, cross-referencing energy expenditure against declared output, orbital traffic against declared cargo mass. I withdrew my probe and watched.
"They don't lock down what matters," she murmured. "They hide it in plain sight. Under noise. Over-report the obvious, under-report the expensive."
She rerouted the model, stripping away surface shipments, mining reclamation equipment, and atmospheric processors. What remained were inconsistencies. Small. Repeated. Too regular to be errors.
"There," she uttered softly.
A thin filament of data threaded through the Pandraxian grid at predictable intervals, tagged as automated debris stabilization units. Low mass. No biological signatures. Cleared automatically by the perimeter because they matched approved cleanup protocols from the post-war reclamation phase.
"They're piggybacking on old Pandraxian authorizations," she theorized, sounding reluctantly impressed. "The Empire declared the planet inert. So they built the defense net to block invasion, not maintenance. The Ohrurs are using obsolete cleanup permissions that never got revoked."
I felt something sharp and pleased settle in my chest. This female was mind-boggling. "They are invisible because the system assumes they belong."
"Exactly." She nodded.
I overlaid my own filters atop hers, tracing the false maintenance routes downward.
The debris drones never remained at surface level.
Their trajectories curved. Down. Through collapsed mining shafts that the Pandraxians had destabilized but never fully mapped.
Beneath the fused crust. A deeper chamber resolved in the projection, a hollow space too geometrically precise to be natural.
And at its center: a pulse.
Faint. Erratic.
Nythor.
His psychic signature flickered like a damaged star, fragmented, bleeding coherence in jagged bursts. Alive, but barely anchored. Nadine went still beside me. "They're not just holding him."
"No." I agreed.
Data poured through the channels, data indicating that the Ohrurs were monitoring him, studying him.
My vision narrowed with anger. Not because it was Nythor.
I had never liked the bastard, not even before his fracture.
Before his mind began to fracture, he had been insufferable, arrogant in the way Oracles often were, convinced proximity to truth excused every sin of personality.
If he died screaming in some forgotten hole, the universe would not weep.
But the Ohrurs' audacity hit like a blade between the ribs. They were studying him! An Arkhevari.
They were studying him like an artifact.
Like a specimen. Like something that could be dismantled, cataloged, and monetized.
My aura surged, black flooded the edges of my vision, and the shadows in the room deepened as if reality itself recoiled from my temper.
The deck beneath my boots groaned, metal protesting the pressure of power I had spent eons learning to leash.
They dared. They dared put their hands on one of us. I took a step forward without realizing it; every instinct screamed for violence, for eradication. For an example so brutal that no merchant species would ever again confuse curiosity with entitlement.
Drykken.
I was going to burn Cronack down to bedrock.
"Dravok?" Her voice cut through the surge. Not loud. Not commanding. Concerned. A hand brushed my arm. Tentative. Barely there. "Are you okay?"
The effect was instantaneous. The black receded.
Not slowly. Not reluctantly. It collapsed.
Like a storm breaking against a barrier it could not breach, the rage drained out of me, leaving behind a stunned, hollow quiet.
My aura flickered first red, then gold, then steadied into something I had not felt since before the Fall.
Calm. I sucked in a sharp breath, more rattled by that than I had been by the Ohrurs' offense. By the Abyss… how did she—
Aelyth!
The word slammed into me unbidden, unwelcome, undeniable. Is that what it did? With a touch? With the sound of her voice? I stared down at her hand like it had struck me.
For a moment, she froze and pulled back. "Oh—I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—I shouldn't have—" Then she straightened, and irritation flared fast on the heels of her embarrassment. "Don't look at me like that. Gee. You'd think I burned you or something."
Her shoulders stiffened. Her feelings—human ones, subtle but obvious once you knew how to read them—were hurt. That realization landed wrong. I had never cared about such things before. But now? It suddenly mattered.
I exhaled slowly and forced my fists to unclench. "I wasn't angry at you," I heard myself explain, pushing the words out before my pride could interfere. "I was… surprised."
She crossed her arms, clearly unconvinced.
"When my aura turns black," I continued, resigned now to baring my soul, "people around me tend to get injured. Or worse. I don't come back from that easily." I hesitated before adding the truth I didn't fully understand yet. "You stopped it."
Her brows lifted. "I did what?"
I looked away for half a second, then back at her. "You calmed me."
The silence that followed was… different. She blinked once. Then twice. And then—damn her—a slow, smug smile crept onto her face. "Really."
I scowled. "Do not enjoy this."
"Oh, I absolutely am," she puffed her chest out, chin lifted. "You're telling me I just short-circuited an ancient god-warrior with one touch?"
I ground my teeth. Grudgingly, I admitted, "Yes. You did."
Her smile lingered for a heartbeat longer, then softened into something quieter. Curious. Almost proud. The kind of expression that made my chest tighten for reasons I refused to catalog.
Between us, the projection continued to pulse steadily, indifferent to personal revelations.
Nythor's prison burned quietly at its center, a reminder that the universe did not pause for moments like this.
Reality reasserted itself. My gaze drifted back to the image, the tension in my shoulders settled into something colder, sharper.
Purpose. The Ohrur thought they were in control.
They were dead wrong. They weren't. Not for much longer anyway.
Nadine's breath hitched as her eyes tracked a subtle fluctuation in the data stream.
Not the projection itself, but the interference around it.
"Wait," she exclaimed. "They're not just observing him."
I turned toward her. "Explain."
She stepped closer to the console, her fingers flying as she isolated a secondary signal, thin, recursive, almost lost in the noise. "This looks like resonance bleed-through. They're routing something through him."
My aura stirred again, darkening at the edges.
She swallowed. "They're using him as a conductor."
The word landed heavy.
"To reach the Abyss," I concluded, swallowing down the feeling of dread building inside my stomach. I exhaled slowly. "He won't survive that for long."
It wasn't like I felt any kind of sympathy for the bastard, as far as I was concerned, he was getting exactly what he deserved… but… There was no telling what kind of horror the Ohrur were unleashing. Nadine stared at the projection like it might blink first. "Now what?"
I didn't soften the truth. "Now we get Nythor out of there."
Her throat worked as she swallowed. "I'm an astrophysicist," she reminded me quietly.
"Not a… double-oh-seven." I had no idea what that was, but the tension in her voice carried the meaning well enough.
"I analyze data. I build models. I don't sneak into bunkers or extract ancient god-oracles from under a mountain.
" She finally looked at me then, blue eyes sharp with something dangerously close to doubt.
"I don't know how much I can help," she went on, "versus how much I'm going to be a liability. "
I studied her for a long moment. Not her posture. Not her fear. The way her mind kept moving even while she spoke, already testing contingencies, already adjusting assumptions.
"You won't be a burden," I asserted.
She let out a breath that was half laugh, half disbelief. "You don't know that."
"I do."
"How?"
"Because you're already doing what none of my kind has managed to do in eons," I replied evenly. "You're seeing the Abyss without worshiping it. Without fleeing it. Without trying to conquer it."
Her jaw tightened. "That doesn't make me combat-ready."
"No," I agreed. "It makes you dangerous."
That caught her off guard.
"You don't survive this by being armed," I continued. "You survive it by understanding what others mistake for power."
She looked away again, shaken, but not retreating.