Chapter 4 #2
She exhales slowly, then nods. “Lead.”
We descend.
The approach is a dance with invisible lines.
We move from shadow to shadow, keeping the station’s structural supports between us and the turret housings, the rock cold beneath our palms when we crouch, the air vibrating faintly with energy discharge and distant alarms. Every few seconds the wind shifts and the smell of smoke thickens, bringing with it that copper tang that makes Jordan’s breathing hitch.
We reach a service hatch embedded in the station’s lower plating—a rectangular panel half buried in dust, disguised by grime and neglect.
“This,” I say.
Jordan crouches, examining it like it might bite. “How do you even know this is here?”
I tilt my head. “Because I’ve had five years with nothing to do but stare at this place and imagine tearing it apart.”
Jordan’s eyes flick up to mine at that—something in them softening for a heartbeat—then she clears her throat and focuses on the latch.
“It’s sealed,” she whispers.
“It’s always sealed,” I reply. “Open it.”
She pulls a slim tool from her pocket—of course she has one—and wedges it into the seam, twisting with careful pressure. The metal groans. Dust shakes loose. The latch gives.
Jordan’s face tightens with effort as she tugs. The panel swings inward with a reluctant squeal.
Cold air rushes out, smelling of oil, old coolant, and stale recycled breath.
I push the drugged inmate forward. “In.”
He stumbles inside, whining.
Jordan hesitates, then slips in after him.
I follow, ducking hard, shoulders scraping the frame because whoever designed this hatch hated large bodies.
Inside, the corridor is narrow and dim, lit by intermittent emergency strips that pulse red, then white, then red again. The soundscape changes—the station’s hum is louder here, layered with distant gunfire reverberating through metal bones.
Jordan leans close. “If they find us—”
“They won’t,” I say, but I don’t fully believe it.
We move fast, guided by memory and the drugged inmate’s halting nods when I shove him and growl questions. He leads us to a vertical shaft with a ladder descending into deeper maintenance space.
Jordan peers down. “That’s a long drop.”
“Welcome to the glamorous life,” I mutter.
We climb down.
Halfway, the station shudders with a force that makes the ladder vibrate. Dust rains down. Jordan gasps, knuckles whitening on the rung.
“What was that?” she whispers.
I don’t answer immediately because my body recognizes it before my mind puts words to it.
A deep, rolling concussion that travels through every piece of metal like the station is being struck by something larger than itself.
Orbital bombardment.
“They’re hitting the station,” I say grimly.
Jordan’s face goes pale in the pulsing red light. “They’re blowing it up.”
“Yeah,” I say. “They’re cleaning the crime scene.”
Jordan swallows hard and continues downward, faster now.
We drop into a wider maintenance bay where the air is warmer and tastes faintly of burning insulation. The emergency lights flicker. Somewhere above us, something collapses with a grinding scream.
“Shuttle bay?” Jordan asks, breath tight.
I point toward a sealed door marked with faded maintenance symbols. “That.”
She rushes it, presses her ear to the panel, then looks at me. “How do we open it?”
I gesture toward a narrow access crawlspace to the right—barely wide enough for a human to squeeze through, lined with cables and sharp edges.
“Through there,” I say. “Manual override controls sit behind the interior panel. I can’t fit. You can.”
Jordan stares at the crawlspace like it’s a coffin.
Then she looks back at me, eyes blazing with stubborn life. “If I get stuck—”
“You won’t,” I cut in. “You’re too mean to die in a hole.”
That earns a sharp huff of laughter from her, quick and disbelieving, and then she drops to her knees and starts crawling in.
I stay at the entrance, listening.
I can hear her breath inside the shaft, hear the scrape of her jacket against metal, hear the soft curse she mutters when she bumps an elbow.
“Okay,” she says, voice muffled. “This is… disgusting.”
“Yeah,” I reply. “It’s a prison. Lower your expectations.”
“I wasn’t expecting dead skin flakes in the vents, Lonari.”
“Could be worse,” I say. “Could be alive.”
“Do not—” she starts, then cuts herself off with a shaky exhale. “Okay. I see the panel. Give me… give me a second.”
Another explosion hits the station. The lights flicker wildly. Somewhere close, a conduit pops and sprays sparks that hiss against the floor.
“Jordan,” I say, voice hard. “Now.”
“I’m trying,” she snaps back, and I can hear the tremble under the anger. “Manual override is old-school. It’s got a physical lock and a circuit bridge and—oh my god—someone wired this like they hated technicians.”
“Join the club,” I mutter.
There’s a metallic click.
Then a deeper thunk, like a heavy latch disengaging.
The sealed door in front of me shudders and begins to slide open.
Cold air pours out—hangar air—smelling of fuel and dust and sealed compartments.
“Got it!” Jordan calls, voice bright with adrenaline. “Door’s opening!”
I shove it wider with my shoulder and step into the hidden shuttle bay.
It’s smaller than the main hangar, tucked beneath it like a secret pocket—one maintenance shuttle sitting dormant on a pad, its hull dull with years of neglect, but intact. The bay lights flicker overhead. Dust coats everything in a fine layer, disturbed only by the tremors.
Jordan crawls out of the access shaft, hair wild, cheeks smudged with grime, eyes shining like she just wrestled a god and won. She looks at the shuttle and exhales a laugh that sounds half hysterical.
“That’s real,” she whispers.
“That’s real,” I confirm. “That’s our way out.”
She runs to the shuttle hatch, hands moving over the manual seals. “It’s locked.”
“Of course it’s locked,” I say, and I reach past her, gripping the emergency lever with one hand and yanking hard enough to make the metal shriek.
The hatch pops.
Jordan stares. “You could do that but you couldn’t reach the keypad?”
I glare at her.
She holds up her hands. “No, no, sorry. Not the time. We’re good. We’re team.”
“Get in,” I say.
We climb inside.
The shuttle smells like old plastic, stale air, and the faint ghost of fuel. The cockpit is cramped for me, but workable. I drop into the pilot seat, scales scraping against the harness, and slap the startup panel. The systems whine in protest like they’re offended to be asked to function again.
Jordan squeezes into the co-pilot space, already pulling open access panels with the ease of someone who belongs inside machines.
“Power’s low,” she says immediately. “Aux battery’s weak.”
“We don’t need comfort,” I say. “We need ignition.”
“I know,” she snaps, then takes a breath. “Okay. Routing auxiliary through—through the maintenance bus. If I can bypass the safety limiters—”
“You can,” I say, because doubt is useless right now.
She shoots me a look. “That’s a lot of faith.”
“It’s not faith,” I tell her. “It’s observation.”
The shuttle’s engines cough. The lights flicker. Somewhere behind us, another orbital hit slams into the station and the entire bay shakes; dust falls from the ceiling like ash.
Jordan’s fingers fly, connecting cables, bridging a circuit with a stripped wire she pulls from her kit like she planned for apocalypse maintenance.
“Okay,” she mutters. “Okay. Come on, you junk drawer of a ship. Give me something.”
The power indicator jumps.
The nav console sputters to life.
I grab the controls and feel the shuttle respond under my hands—sluggish, but alive.
“Hang on,” I say, and I punch the launch sequence.
The bay doors begin to open—slow, reluctant—revealing the outside light and the chaos beyond.
Gunfire flashes in the distance. The air outside is hazy with smoke. The cruiser still hangs in orbit like a bad decision.
We lift.
The shuttle rises out of the hidden bay just as a chunk of debris—twisted metal from the main hangar—breaks loose and tumbles through the air in front of us.
I jerk the controls, narrowly missing it.
Jordan yelps. “Jesus—!”
“Seatbelt,” I bark.
She slaps the harness down, still clutching a cable. “I’m kind of busy!”
“Be busy strapped in.”
We clear the station’s immediate structure—and then the bombardment intensifies.
Chunks of plating shear away above us. A fireball blooms along the tower’s side. The shockwave hits the shuttle like a slap, and alarms scream in the cockpit.
I grit my teeth and pull hard, angling into open air while debris rains down like metallic hail. The shuttle shudders as something strikes the hull.
Jordan curses, fingers still working. “We’re losing power on the left thruster!”
“I can feel it,” I growl.
“Then stop flying like you’re mad at the universe!”
“I am mad at the universe!”
She makes a sound that might be laughter if it weren’t edged with panic. “Okay. Okay. I’m rerouting power from life support to thrusters.”
“You do that and we’ll suffocate.”
“We won’t suffocate before we get out of atmosphere, relax.”
“Relax,” I repeat, incredulous, as another chunk of debris spins past the viewport close enough to make my scales prickle.
Jordan’s hands are steady despite everything. The way she moves—focused, sharp—does something strange to my chest. I hate noticing it. I hate anything that feels like admiration when I’m supposed to be surviving.
But there it is.
She saves our lives with wires and stubbornness.
The shuttle clears the worst of the debris field, and the station falls away beneath us, still burning, still being carved apart by ordinance like someone erasing a mistake.
Jordan exhales, face pale, then taps her compad against the nav console. “Set course for IHC space. Now. We have to get to an IHC node—any node—and dump this archive.”
I keep my hands on the controls, eyes on the nav.
“No.”
She turns sharply. “What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no,” I say, voice flat.
“Lonari—” she starts, and her voice has that edge of disbelief people get when they think the world should obey common sense.
“IHC space is where this gets buried,” I tell her. “Or where you get buried.”
Her eyes flash. “You don’t know that.”
“I know institutions,” I say, and I punch the nav override, shifting our trajectory. “And I know politics. Whoever staged this wants a war. If you run home with evidence, you don’t get a medal. You get contained.”
Jordan lunges toward the nav panel like she might physically stop me. “Contained by who? The IHC is—”
“Is an empire with paperwork,” I cut in. “And you’re a contractor with inconvenient truth.”
Her breathing is fast, her hands shaking now not from fear but rage.
“Where are you taking us?” she demands.
I input the coordinates I’ve kept memorized like a prayer I never wanted to say out loud, a place I haven’t seen in five years, a place that smells like money and blood and family.
“Gur,” I say.
Jordan stares at me like I just told her I’m flying us into a sun. “Gur? That’s Coalition-adjacent.”
“It’s League-protected,” I correct. “And it’s not IHC. And it’s not Alliance.”
“It’s a criminal world,” she snaps.
I glance at her. “So? You already met a criminal today. I saved your ass. Try not to faint.”
She looks like she might actually hit me.
Instead she grips the edge of the console until her knuckles whiten, then forces out, “You’re kidnapping me.”
I snort. “Kidnapping implies you had options.”
“I had IHC space!”
“You had a fantasy,” I say, and my voice comes out sharper than I mean it to, because her stubbornness is going to get her killed and I can’t decide whether that bothers me because it’s inefficient or because it’s her.
Jordan’s gaze flicks to my mouth, then away, like she hates that she noticed anything about me besides threat.
“This is insane,” she whispers.
“Yeah,” I agree, steadying the shuttle as we punch toward open space. “Welcome to my week.”
Behind us, the Ops station burns and fractures, a dying monument to somebody else’s plan.
In front of us, the stars spread wide and cold, and the nav line points toward Gur like a knife aimed at my own past.
Jordan swallows hard, voice raw. “If you’re wrong…”
I keep my eyes on the void, hands firm on the controls. “If I’m wrong, we die.”
She stares at me, and in the dim cockpit light her fear looks a lot like fury, and her fury looks a lot like life.
“Great,” she says hoarsely. “Love that for us.”
I can’t help it—something like a laugh rumbles out of my chest, low and brief.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Me too.”