Chapter 7
JORDAN
The room they put me in is the kind of luxury that tries too hard.
Everything is soft in the wrong places—thick carpeting that swallows footsteps, a bed that looks like it’s never been slept in without permission, drapes that shimmer faintly with embedded holo-thread.
The air smells expensive, like warm amber and citrus and something floral that makes my throat itch, and beneath it I can still taste Gur’s grime—oil, metal, human sweat baked into a planet that doesn’t believe in clean.
There’s a window, but it’s not really a window. It’s a panoramic display set to “night skyline,” showing the Defrocked Nun’s neon heart pulsing outside: drifting holo-ads, bright signage, a constant glittering stream of traffic. Even the sky looks curated here, like the stars are props.
I sit at the desk anyway, because sitting on the bed feels like surrender, and I plug my compad into a Kaijen terminal dock that looks like a piece of art until you realize it’s also a weapon.
The screen blooms with a sleek interface—Kaijen servers, security partitions, bandwidth allocations that make my old IHC contracts look like children’s toys.
My archive drive sits beside my elbow like a loaded gun.
I stare at it for a second, then press my palm flat over it, grounding myself in the texture of the casing—warm, slightly scratched, real.
“Okay,” I whisper. “We’re not doing feelings. We’re doing data.”
A soft chime sounds near the door.
I freeze.
The door doesn’t open. A voice comes through a discreet speaker, polite and mildly threatening in the way polite threats always are.
“Miss James. Refreshments have been provided.”
I glance toward the side table. I hadn’t even noticed it when I walked in, but now there’s a tray: a glass of water that looks too perfect to drink, and a plate of something that might be food if you squint hard enough.
“I’m good,” I call back.
A pause. Then, “The Godfather requests you remain available.”
I close my eyes, inhaling slowly. The air tastes like perfume and control.
“Tell the Godfather I’m not a houseplant,” I say evenly. “I don’t just sit here and look pretty.”
Another pause. Then, as if the speaker itself is smiling, “Understood.”
The line goes dead.
I exhale through my nose, jaw tight.
Available. Watched. Contained.
Lonari’s word was right. Contained. Just… with better carpeting.
I yank my compad free, open my comm suite, and begin cycling through every IHC contact protocol I’ve ever used. Old contractor channels. Emergency reporting pathways. Even the grim orphanage-era handshake key I kept out of spite and nostalgia.
The terminal pings.
OUTBOUND ROUTE AVAILABLE — RESTRICTED
Of course. Gur may be a “protectorate,” but the Nun is a fortress, and fortresses decide which messages get out.
I initiate a call anyway, masking it through a general maintenance ticket system the way Clint taught me back when I was sixteen and desperate to get a help request past an administrator who didn’t want paperwork on their desk. The interface spins, encrypts, tunnels.
For a heartbeat, hope flares.
Then the call connects.
A holo blooms above the desk—an IHC emblem, crisp and sterile, followed by the face of a woman in a uniform that looks like it’s never had dust on it. Her hair is perfect. Her eyes are tired in the way bureaucrats are tired: not from danger, but from having to care.
“This is IHC Intake,” she says. “State your identification.”
“Jordan James,” I say quickly. “Contractor. Holo-net diagnostics. Assigned temporary rotation on Yatori Operations Station. There’s been an attack. I have—”
“Location,” she cuts in.
I blink. “I’m sorry?”
“Your current location,” she repeats, voice flat.
My stomach clenches. “I— I’m off Yatori. I escaped. I have evidence. The station was—”
“Your location,” she says again, more sharply, like I’m the problem in her day.
I grip the edge of the desk hard enough to make my nails bite.
“I’m in League-protected space,” I say carefully.
“Specify.”
“Gur,” I force out.
Her gaze narrows immediately. “Gur is a Coalition-adjacent criminal world.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I snap. “Can we focus on the massacre now?”
She ignores that. “Who facilitated your presence on Gur?”
I stare at her. “Are you serious right now?”
“Answer the question.”
I feel heat rise up my neck, anger and fear tangling until I can’t tell which is which.
“I have archived security data from Yatori,” I say, forcing my voice into something that won’t break. “Docking logs overwritten in real time, biometric mismatch on supposed Vakutan troops, transmission header inconsistencies, and—”
“Miss James,” she interrupts, “your presence in Gur indicates possible Coalition influence. You are instructed to remain where you are. A containment team—”
“Containment?” My voice rises before I can stop it. “A containment team for me?”
“—will be dispatched to secure you and your materials,” she finishes, like she’s telling me my package delivery window.
I laugh, one sharp bark that tastes like bitterness.
“You’re not even asking what happened,” I say. “You’re not asking how many civilians were executed. You’re not asking why an Alliance-marked cruiser docked without authorization. You’re asking where I am like I’m a misplaced asset.”
Her eyes harden. “Your safety and the security of IHC interests are the priority.”
“My safety?” I repeat, incredulous. “You mean your optics. You mean your control.”
“Miss James—”
“No,” I cut in, voice shaking now. “No. I’m done being a number on a form. I have evidence that can stop a war, and you’re treating me like I stole office supplies.”
The woman’s expression doesn’t change, but her tone drops into something colder.
“You are advised not to disseminate unverified materials. Doing so may be considered—”
“Considered what?” I hiss. “Treason? Terrorism? Inconvenient?”
Silence.
That silence says everything.
I stare at her through the holo, feeling that old orphanage rage crawl up my spine—the memory of administrators smiling while they signed off on “necessary relocations,” the way institutions always protect themselves first and call it morality.
“IHC Intake,” I say, voice low and steady now, “you have a witness to a war trigger event on record, and you’re choosing to interrogate her instead of listening. That’s your choice. Don’t expect me to die politely for it.”
Her mouth tightens. “Your call is being logged.”
“Good,” I say. “Log this: you are failing.”
I cut the connection.
The holo collapses.
My hands shake in the silence that follows, and the room’s fake luxury suddenly feels like a joke someone told at my expense.
I sit there for a second, breathing hard, and my eyes sting.
“Okay,” I whisper, pressing my palm to my forehead. “So that’s how it is.”
I glance at the archive drive.
The truth feels heavier now, not lighter.
IHC isn’t a lifeline.
It’s a cage with paperwork.
Outside, the Nun’s neon glows bright and indifferent, and somewhere down below, people are gambling away their future while the galaxy spins toward another war.
A soft chime sounds again—this time from the wall display.
A news feed auto-activates, like the room itself wants to keep me informed.
A sleek anchor appears, Vakutan features softened for broad appeal, speaking with the kind of practiced calm that always precedes panic.
“—diplomatic tensions continue to escalate following reports of violence at the Yatori penal installation,” the anchor says.
“The Alliance has denied involvement, calling the incident an ‘IHC fabrication designed to inflame interstellar distrust.’ The IHC has issued a formal demand for reparations and immediate Alliance cooperation—”
The feed cuts to footage: Alliance council chambers, IHC press briefings, fleet images—ships in formation, thrusters flaring, the kind of visuals designed to remind everyone how easily peace can be punctured.
My stomach sinks.
“They’re already spinning it,” I mutter.
The anchor continues. “—Vakutan military representatives insist Alliance vessels were not present. However, leaked imagery circulating on the holonet appears to show an Alliance-marked cruiser in orbit above Yatori—”
I freeze.
Leaked imagery.
So somebody got footage out.
Or somebody wants people to think it got out.
Either way, the narrative is moving without me.
I slam my compad onto the desk a little harder than necessary, then pull up the Kaijen server interface again. If the IHC won’t listen, I’ll build my case so airtight it can’t be ignored.
And if that fails…
I don’t let myself finish that thought.
I slot the archive drive into the Kaijen terminal and begin decrypting.
The Kaijen servers hum under my fingertips like a living thing—fast, powerful, arrogant. The holo projections sharpen, the data streams smoothing out as the system chews through encryption layers with the ease of a predator cracking bone.
Lonari wasn’t kidding. This place has infrastructure.
Criminal infrastructure, sure, but infrastructure nonetheless.
I pull up the biometric packets first, because those are clean, technical, difficult to argue with if you know what you’re looking at. I run them through a comparative model—Vakutan baseline, Alzhon baseline, human baseline, and a few others I can access in the Kaijen database.
The results bloom across the holo in hard, cold charts.
Not Vakutan.
Not even close.
The signatures cluster around something like human physiology with augmentations—cybernetic assistance, maybe, or chemical enhancements. Mercenary kit.
I tag the file with an internal note: False flag — Alliance armor used as costume.
Then I move to the financial chains.
This is where things get ugly, because money is always uglier than blood. Blood is honest. Money lies.
I trace the shell corporation layers again, this time with Kaijen computational power slicing through obfuscation like a knife through fabric. The shells unravel, revealing transfer dates, routing nodes, ledger fingerprints.
And there.