Chapter 13
JORDAN
Sterile space smells like nothing and somehow that’s the worst part.
No spice. No exhaust. No Gur-smog or casino perfume trying to seduce you into forgetting you’re being watched.
Just filtered air and disinfectant so sharp it feels like it scrapes the inside of my nose clean.
The covert corridor hub looks like every medical transit junction I’ve ever seen in IHC space—smooth white panels, soft lighting calibrated to keep people calm, floor strips marking lanes for cargo drones and stretchers and the occasional bored medic who hates their life.
Low traffic. On purpose.
The kind of place where the silence is loud enough you can hear your own blood moving.
My maintenance shuttle docks with a gentle thump that rattles through the seat into my ribs. I don’t move right away. I let my eyes track the bay cameras—three obvious, maybe two hidden—then the crew, then the exit.
Nobody’s looking at me.
Which is either good…
Or very bad.
I force myself to breathe slowly, tasting the thin recycled air, and I do a quick internal inventory like I’m counting limbs after an accident.
Evidence kit: strapped under my jacket, heat-resistant strips sealed tight.
Two drives: one in my bag, one taped inside the lining of my boot.
Dead-man release: timer running.
Emergency beacon: offline, pocketed, only Lonari can decode it if I ping.
I swing my legs out of the seat and step onto the docking deck. My boots make a soft sound on the polished floor—too clean, too neat. The lighting reflects off the deck like it’s proud of itself.
I keep walking.
Clint told me the beacon pattern: three short pulses, one long. Repeat. Medical freight band. Boring enough to hide in.
I don’t broadcast. Not yet. I listen.
And then I catch it—a faint, almost subliminal signal fluttering across a maintenance console near a wall panel. Three short. One long. Again.
My throat tightens.
I follow the signal to a dull gray door labeled MEDICAL ROUTING — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, which is a fancy way of saying everybody ignores this unless someone’s dying.
The door doesn’t open when I palm it. Of course it doesn’t.
I wait anyway, because waiting is sometimes the smartest violence you can do.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
My skin prickles with that old instinct, the orphanage instinct: if you’re left alone in a clean hallway long enough, somebody’s about to decide what you are.
Then the door cracks open from the inside.
A hand appears first—gloved, rough, not medical. Then Clint’s face, half-shadowed, eyes scanning the corridor like he expects a squad to appear out of the walls.
“Jordan,” he says, voice low.
Relief hits me like a weak-kneed punch. My eyes sting and I hate it, so I cover it with irritation.
“Took you long enough,” I whisper.
Clint’s mouth twitches. “Yeah, well, I was busy not getting arrested.”
He opens the door wider, and I slip through. The air changes immediately—cooler, more metallic, smelling faintly of antiseptic and rubber seals. The passage is narrow, lined with stacked medical cargo containers stamped with bland inventory codes and tiny warning labels.
Clint shuts the door behind me and locks it with a physical latch.
No keypad.
No digital convenience.
My shoulders loosen a fraction without my permission.
He turns and studies me like he’s verifying I’m real, not a projection wearing my face.
“You look like hell,” he says.
“I feel like hell,” I reply.
“Good,” he mutters. “Means you’re alive.”
I take a step closer, and he raises a hand, stopping me without touching me.
“Token,” he says.
I blink. “What?”
Clint reaches into his pocket and pulls out something small and matte—an old IHC work-study token, the kind they used to issue to kids who cleaned server bays and ran errands for administrators who wouldn’t look us in the eye. It’s scratched. Worn. Real.
My chest aches so sharply I almost swear.
“Jesus,” I whisper. “You still have that?”
“Yeah,” Clint says, voice flat like he’s pretending it doesn’t matter. “Show me yours.”
I swallow and dig into the inner seam of my bag, fingers shaking as they find the token I kept for reasons I never fully explained to myself—spite, nostalgia, proof that I existed. I pull it out and hold it up under the harsh utility light.
Clint compares them, flips them, checks the engraved microcode pattern along the rim.
Then he exhales like he’s been holding his breath for years.
“It’s you,” he says quietly.
I hate the way that sentence lands in my ribs. Like the universe has been trying to erase me and Clint just stamped VALID on my forehead.
“It’s me,” I whisper back.
Clint steps aside and gestures down the passage. “Move. No loitering. This corridor’s clean but it ain’t safe.”
I follow him through a back passage disguised as medical cargo routing, slipping between stacked containers and overhead piping. My boots scuff on grated flooring. The air hums with ventilation fans. Somewhere above us, a cargo drone whirs past like a lazy insect.
Clint keeps glancing at me like he wants to ask a hundred questions but doesn’t have the time.
“You alone?” he asks finally.
“Yes,” I say. “By design.”
He grunts. “Smart.”
I hesitate, then add, “Lonari wanted to send a tail. I refused anything traceable.”
Clint’s eyes flick toward me, sharp. “Lonari.”
“Don’t,” I say immediately, because my brain doesn’t need to go there right now. “We can unpack my terrible taste in allies later.”
Clint snorts, then winces slightly—headache, that familiar tightness around his eyes. He rubs his temple once and keeps moving.
“You ready?” he asks as we approach another door—thicker, reinforced, with a faint shimmer in the air around it that makes my teeth feel weird.
Jammer field.
“Ready as I’m ever gonna be,” I say.
Clint palms the panel. This one opens.
Inside is a controlled safe room with no windows, matte gray walls, a table bolted to the floor, two guards standing like statues—Alliance uniforms, hard eyes, hands near weapons. The air feels heavier, like sound itself gets swallowed.
General Dowron stands at the far end of the table.
He’s taller than Clint, broader, older. His hair is cropped close, his face cut with lines that look earned, not decorative. His expression isn’t cruel, but it isn’t kind either. It’s the expression of a man who has learned compassion makes you sloppy.
He doesn’t offer a hand.
He doesn’t say “welcome.”
He just looks me up and down like I’m a threat assessment.
“Jordan James,” he says.
“Yes,” I answer, keeping my voice steady.
Dowron’s gaze flicks to Clint. “Confirmed?”
Clint nods once. “Physical token verification. Work-study code match.”
Dowron’s eyes return to me. “You have evidence.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Then we don’t waste time,” he replies. “Tell me specifics only a witness would know.”
My pulse kicks harder, but my brain slides into technical mode because fear is useless right now.
“The comm relays lagged before the attack,” I say. “Not normal lag—irregular packet loss like someone was injecting jitter to mask overwrite processes. Foreman Morazin snapped when I ran deep scans.”
Dowron’s face remains still. “Morazin.”
“Yes,” I continue, forcing myself not to spiral at the name.
“Docking clearance logs were being overwritten in real time. I saw the overwrite delta—continuous write cycles, not batch edits. Then an Alliance-marked cruiser docked without proper authorization. Immediately after, holonet, entanglement relays, and emergency transponders jammed across all channels.”
Dowron’s eyes narrow slightly. “Describe the jam signature.”
“It wasn’t brute-force,” I say. “It was selective suppression with signal masking—like the station’s own outbound requests were being swallowed and replaced with false ‘failed handshake’ responses. Clean. Military-grade.”
One of the guards shifts almost imperceptibly. Dowron notices. So do I.
He leans forward slightly. “Go on.”
“Armored troops entered,” I say, voice tightening despite myself. “They executed the tech crew with precision. No shouting. No Vakutan boasting. Their HUD biometric displays glitched—brief overlay artifacts, like the armor systems were misreading internal physiology.”
Dowron’s gaze locks onto mine. “What kind of artifacts?”
“Pulse rhythm mismatch,” I say. “The overlays flickered between redundant and single-track indicators like the software was expecting Vakutan redundancies but wasn’t getting them. It stuttered. Like a lie catching.”
Dowron’s jaw tightens. “You have captures.”
I nod and place my evidence packet on the table.
It’s not much visually—sealed strips, a drive, a printed digest of key logs—but it feels like setting a live grenade down and hoping the right person recognizes the pin.
Clint steps forward and adds his own verification stamps—time-synced hashes, chain-of-custody markers he generated on his ship.
Dowron sits. He doesn’t touch the packet at first. He studies it like it’s trying to trick him.
Then he opens it.
He reviews in silence for a long minute, eyes moving fast, fingers precise. He doesn’t ask questions while he reads. He doesn’t perform outrage. He just absorbs.
When he finally looks up, his voice is flat.
“Mercenary impersonation,” he says.
My chest tightens with relief and fury at once. “Yes.”
Dowron nods slightly. “Those units moved like hired professionals, not Alliance shock troops.”
Clint’s mouth tightens. “We verified the encryption header too. Spoof chain. Not Alliance military.”
Dowron leans back and steeples his fingers. The jammer field makes the air feel thick, like it’s pressing on my ears.
“The cruiser,” I say carefully. “Alliance-marked. How—?”
Dowron’s eyes cut to mine. “Captured or repurposed.”
My heart pounds. “How do you know?”
He holds my gaze, and something cold flickers there.
“I’m not answering that,” he says.
Of course he’s not.
Because institutions don’t give you the truth. They ration it.
I lean forward anyway, hands flat on the table. “Then do something.”