Chapter 5
JORDAN
Space always looks clean from the inside of a cockpit.
No smell. No grit in your teeth. No blood on the floor you can’t stop seeing when you blink. Just a smooth black expanse threaded with starlight, the kind of quiet that feels almost insulting after a place like Yatori—like the universe is pretending nothing happened because it didn’t happen to it.
The shuttle vibrates beneath me in a steady, irritated way, as if it’s personally offended Lonari woke it up after years of neglect.
The air inside smells like old plastic and scorched dust from the station, and the faint tang of overheated circuitry keeps bleeding out of the vent seams. Every time the hull creaks, my shoulders tense like I’m expecting another orbital strike to punch through.
Lonari sits in the pilot seat like he was born there, hands on the controls with a casual steadiness that makes me want to both throttle him and cling to him, which is a completely unacceptable emotional pairing and I refuse to unpack it.
The dim cockpit light catches along the ridges of his scales and turns the scarlet striping on his arms into something almost luminous, like embers under ash.
I sit in the co-pilot chair with my external drive hooked into the console via a jury-rigged cable, my compad projecting holo panels that jitter slightly with the shuttle’s imperfect stabilization.
The stolen archive hangs in the air between us like a ghost—timestamps, docking clearances, biometric packets, encrypted header strings—proof that people died for a lie.
I keep expecting the drive to be empty, like the universe will pull the rug out at the last second just to be consistent.
It isn’t.
It’s heavy with data.
Heavy with truth.
And Lonari is flying away from IHC space like truth is a liability.
“Just so we’re clear,” I say, voice too sharp because if I soften even a little, I might start shaking, “if you’re wrong about this, I am personally haunting you.”
Lonari doesn’t look at me. “You already are.”
“Wow. Charming.”
“Thank you.”
I make a sound that is half laugh, half strangled scream, and go back to the archive because the alternative is thinking about the station’s atrium and the way that tech’s body hit the floor with that awful wet finality.
The nav display flashes a boundary line.
COALITION TERRITORY — ENTERING CONTROLLED SPACE
My stomach tightens.
The stars don’t change, obviously. Space doesn’t care about borders. But the shuttle’s systems do; the comm panel begins to flicker with passive pings—external network probes, identity challenges, the kind of quiet digital sniffing that says who are you and why are you here?
Lonari taps a sequence on the console without looking.
The pings stop.
I stare at him. “Did you just… tell the Coalition to mind their business?”
“I told them we’re maintenance,” he says casually. “And boring.”
“That worked?”
“It usually does.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I’m going to need you to start explaining things like you’re talking to a civilian who is not, in fact, a syndicate crime dinosaur.”
He glances at me, one eye catching the cockpit light so it flashes a darker red. “Crime dinosaur?”
“You’re seven feet tall and you kill people with the efficiency of a spreadsheet,” I say. “Let me cope.”
He huffs—actual amusement, I think—and returns his gaze to the nav.
Fine. If he won’t explain, I’ll do what I always do when people refuse to give me clarity: I’ll make my own.
I expand the biometric feed.
The armor HUD glitch captures I pulled—scrappy, incomplete, but enough. The archive includes raw packets from the station’s security system: helmet telemetry, local scan captures, and the spoofed Alliance signature handshake that tried to convince Yatori the cruiser belonged there.
I run a correlation.
The system projects a grid of biometric markers—heart rate signatures, neural conduction patterns, metabolic heat maps.
Vakutan signatures should show redundant organ rhythms—two-heart pulse patterns, four-lung oxygenation cycles. Even a forged tag has trouble mimicking that kind of internal redundancy unless you have actual Vakutan bodies inside the armor.
This feed doesn’t.
The heart rhythms are single-track.
The oxygenation profiles are… human-like? Not fully human, but closer to human than Vakutan.
And the neural conduction markers are blank in places, as if someone scrubbed them.
My skin prickles.
“Lonari,” I say, keeping my voice tight so it doesn’t wobble, “they weren’t Vakutan. Like, not even close.”
“I know,” he says, still not looking at me.
“No, I mean—look.” I angle the holo toward him. “Vakutans have redundant organs. The signatures don’t match. Whoever was in those suits had one heart rhythm. One lung cycle. These are mercs in stolen armor.”
He finally leans slightly, glancing at the projection. His expression barely changes, but his jaw tightens.
“Mercs,” he repeats.
“Yeah.” My fingers fly, pulling up the transmission header. “And their declaration broadcast? The encryption chain is stitched. It’s like a counterfeit bill: looks right if you’re not staring at it, but the fibers are wrong.”
Lonari’s hands flex on the controls. “So you can prove it.”
“I can prove it technically,” I say. “Politically, I don’t know if it matters. But yes. I have proof.”
The word proof tastes bitter in my mouth because proof didn’t save the techs on the floor. Proof didn’t keep the station from getting bombarded into scrap. Proof is a thing you carry after the fact and hope someone cares enough to read.
I switch panels, pulling up the financial logs I managed to snag—partial, but better than nothing.
There’s a chain of payment authorizations buried under “maintenance contracts,” “equipment procurement,” “security consultation.” The kind of euphemistic paperwork that makes murder look like logistics.
I start tracing.
A payment node transfers out of a corporate shell.
That shell routes through a second shell.
Then a third.
Then it hits a League bank interface.
And there—right there—an identifier string that makes my stomach drop again.
Baragon intermediary tag.
Not a name, not a logo. Just a trace marker baked into the transaction format. Like a signature someone forgot to scrub, because even conspirators get lazy when they think they’re untouchable.
I exhale slowly, tasting recycled cockpit air.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay. That’s… that’s big.”
Lonari glances at me. “Big how?”
“Big like ‘this wasn’t a random merc job,’” I say, pulling up the flow chart so it hangs in the air between us, a spiderweb of financial lines.
“This is structured. Routed. Shielded. Somebody paid a lot of money to stage that massacre. And they didn’t pay directly—they used shells. This looks like—”
“A syndicate,” Lonari finishes.
I flick my gaze to him. “Don’t act like you’re surprised.”
He shrugs, the movement making his harness creak. “I’m not.”
I drill deeper, cross-referencing shell corporation IDs against known registries in the archive. Some are too new. Some are registered to dead addresses. Some are “charities,” which is always the funniest lie criminals tell.
I flag one with a repeating pattern in its encryption salt—a little algorithmic fingerprint that matches something in another file: the docking clearance overwrite.
Same coder?
Same toolkit?
Same sponsor?
My throat tightens.
“You knew,” I say, the accusation slipping out before I can stop it. “You knew this was bigger than Yatori.”
Lonari’s gaze stays on the stars. “I knew it wasn’t honest.”
“That’s not—” I cut myself off, forcing breath into my lungs. “Okay. Fine. Maybe you didn’t know the details. But you’re not reacting like someone who’s shocked.”
He exhales through his nose. “Shock is a luxury.”
“You keep saying things like that,” I snap, “like it’s wisdom and not just trauma dressed up in a leather jacket.”
His head turns slightly, slow, and when his eyes meet mine in the dim cockpit light I feel that same physical awareness I felt in the wash—heat under my skin, pulse tightening, my body reacting to him even as my brain insists that reacting is stupid.
“Careful,” he says softly.
“Why?” I shoot back. “You gonna kill me for having opinions?”
He looks at me for a beat longer than necessary, then returns his gaze to the nav. “No.”
“Then talk,” I demand. “Because right now you’re flying me into Coalition-adjacent territory, refusing to go to IHC space, and acting like you’ve done this a hundred times, which makes me think you’re not just some random inmate who got lucky surviving in the wilderness.”
His mouth twitches faintly. “I got lucky.”
“Sure,” I say flatly. “And I’m the Supreme Admiral of Earth.”
He makes a low sound that might be laughter if it weren’t so brief.
I press. “What is Gur?”
“A world,” he says.
“I got that part.”
“A protectorate,” he adds, like I’m supposed to be satisfied. “Mined-out. Ugly. Useful. Neutral enough that people do business there without pretending they’re saints.”
“And you have connections there,” I say.
He pauses, which is basically a confession.
“I have family there,” he says finally.
My heart stutters. “Family.”
“Yeah,” he says, tone unreadable. “Family.”
I stare at him, trying to reconcile the word with the way he kills, the way he moves, the way he carries himself like he expects people to obey.
“Are you…,” I start, then stop because the sentence has too many directions it could go and none of them are safe.
Lonari’s eyes flick to me again. “Say it.”
“You were in Yatori,” I say slowly, “because you’re a convict.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re… clearly trained,” I continue, “and not drugged, and you have knowledge of hidden shuttle bays, and you talk like someone who’s used to giving orders.”
He says nothing.
My hands curl around the edge of my seat.
“And I heard the way you said your last name,” I add. “Kaijen. Like it’s supposed to mean something.”
His jaw tightens.