Chapter 21 Jordan
JORDAN
Gur looks different when you come back with blood under your nails and a galaxy-wide panic in your wake.
From orbit, the planet is still that familiar smear of bruised blues and dirty golds, storm bands swirling over industrial continents like they’re trying to scrub the place clean and failing.
But when the Nun’s Tooth drops through atmosphere and the windows haze with heat, I can feel the city’s mood through the ship—like static on skin, like the air itself is bracing for impact.
The Defrocked Nun glows before we even dock, neon bleeding into haze, the casino’s external signage flickering like it’s trying to wink at the universe and say nothing’s wrong here, while streets around it pulse with checkpoint lights and the hard, tight movement of crews who’ve stopped pretending this is just “business.”
My side aches in a steady throb that’s become its own annoying soundtrack. The med wrap pulls when I shift, and the pain is sharp enough to keep me honest. I taste antiseptic still, like it got into my teeth and decided to squat.
Lonari insists on walking me off the ship like I’m a fragile artifact.
I hate it.
I also don’t entirely hate it.
“Don’t hover,” I mutter as we move down the docking ramp. The air in the bay is warmer than the ship, thick with fuel and dust, and it carries Gur’s familiar cocktail: spice from street stalls, exhaust, stale smoke, and the faint sweet rot of too many bodies packed too close to too much industry.
Lonari’s gaze doesn’t leave the perimeter. “I’m not hovering.”
“You’re hovering,” I insist.
He finally looks at me, eyes dark and flat. “You got shot.”
“Grazed,” I correct.
He bares his teeth. “If I hear you say ‘grazed’ again, I’m going to toss you back into the medbay and lock the door.”
I roll my eyes carefully. “Love that for me. Imprisoned by a mobster because I’m inconveniently alive.”
Renn walks ahead of us, clearing a path. He keeps glancing back like he’s expecting me to collapse any second just to spite him.
The moment we hit the casino’s internal corridor, the noise changes. The Defrocked Nun is trying to be itself—music swelling, lights pulsing, gamblers shouting, chips clacking, bartenders moving like they’re choreographed—but underneath the performance is tension so thick it makes my skin prickle.
People see me.
They recognize me.
Some stare like I’m a saint.
Some glare like I’m a bomb.
Both reactions make me want to crawl out of my skin.
We round the corner into the main lobby and it’s chaos.
Merchants—actual merchants, not just low-level hustlers—have flooded the place. They’re dressed in expensive coats and layered fabrics meant to signal status, but their eyes are wide and frantic, their voices sharp, their hands gesturing too fast. They look like a stampede that learned to speak.
A Kaijen captain is trying to hold them back near the central fountain, palms up in a calming gesture that isn’t working.
“—my shipments are frozen! Do you have any idea what your little broadcast did?” one man yells, face red.
A woman in jeweled ear cuffs snaps, “My lenders are calling in notes like it’s the end of days! I need protection, not an apology!”
Another voice—older, trembling—cuts through: “Nine crews are already probing the east docks. If you can’t guarantee safe passage, we’re dead.”
Lonari steps into view and the whole lobby shifts like the crowd is suddenly aware of gravity again. Voices falter. Heads turn. The air tightens.
He doesn’t shout.
He doesn’t need to.
“What’s the problem,” he says, voice low and carrying.
A merchant near the front—broad shoulders, thin smile—takes a brave step forward. “Boss Kaijen, with respect, your… guest—” he glances at me like I’m radioactive “—just put a target on all of us. Markets are panicking. Cred lines are freezing. Rival syndicates are moving. We need protection.”
Lonari’s eyes narrow slightly. “You’re in my house.”
The merchant swallows. “Yes.”
“Then you’re protected,” Lonari says simply.
A murmur ripples—half relief, half disbelief.
“And if your creditors are panicking,” Lonari continues, “then they should’ve considered not building their empires on Baragon scaffolding.”
A few people flinch at the name. Some glance around like saying it too loud summons bullets.
The jeweled woman snaps, “That doesn’t fix my ships getting seized!”
Lonari’s jaw flexes. “Renn.”
Renn steps forward, voice crisp. “All Kaijen checkpoints are active. Medical stations secured. Dock corridors are under patrol rotation. Any rival crew moving in without clearance gets detained or dropped.”
The merchant’s expression tightens. “Detained? Not executed?”
Lonari’s gaze turns icy. “We’re not the Nine.”
The words land like a slap.
Some merchants look startled. Some look offended, like mercy is bad business.
I open my mouth, then shut it, because as much as I love calling out hypocrisy, this isn’t about my ego. This is about keeping civilians from getting chewed up while everyone decides whether the truth is worth the chaos it causes.
A merchant’s eyes flick to me. “She started this.”
I step forward, pain flaring in my side, and I ignore it because the alternative is letting them frame me as a problem they can bargain away.
“Yeah,” I say, voice rough. “I did.”
The lobby hushes.
I meet their eyes one by one. “I exposed Morazin’s false-flag infrastructure and the money routing that funded it. If your profits depended on that staying quiet, then your profits were always a hostage situation.”
The merchant bristles. “Easy for you to say.”
“No,” I reply flatly. “It’s not easy for me to say. I got shot and kidnapped and nearly executed on a death-world. I’m saying it because it’s true.”
A few people look away. Guilt. Fear. Anger. Pick your poison.
Lonari’s voice cuts in, controlled. “Enough. You want protection, you follow the rules. No private militias. No shooting in civilian lanes. No ‘examples.’ If you want to settle disputes, you bring them to me.”
A man snarls, “And if you can’t hold against the Nine?”
Lonari steps closer, and the air shifts like a predator entering a pen. “Then you die anyway. So choose: die disciplined, or die stupid.”
Silence.
The merchants swallow their panic and, one by one, nod.
Renn starts moving them back, organizing them into something that looks less like a stampede and more like a line. The casino music swells again, trying desperately to sell the lie that this is normal.
Lonari turns slightly toward me. “You’re coming with me.”
“I was already going to,” I mutter.
“Good,” he replies. “Because you’re about to earn your keep.”
“Excuse me?” I snap.
Lonari’s eyes flick to mine, dry humor flashing. “That’s a joke.”
I glare. “Bad joke.”
He bares his teeth. “Still a joke.”
I mutter, “Mobsters are terrible at comedy,” and follow him through a staff corridor before the lobby can swallow me again.
The server spine smells like home and trauma.
Cold air. Ozone. Warm dust baked into circuitry. Fans roaring softly like a tired animal breathing. Blue indicator lights blinking in patterns that feel smug. The place is a skeleton, and I love it because skeletons don’t lie—bones are honest about what holds you up.
I ignore the ache in my side and set my portable kit on a maintenance table. My fingers still shake sometimes when I’m alone, but I don’t let anyone see that part.
Renn stands by the door with two guards, arms crossed, watching the hall.
Lonari hovers behind me like a mountain trying to pretend it’s not hovering.
“Stop that,” I mutter without looking up.
“What,” Lonari says.
“The looming.”
“I’m not looming,” he lies.
I snort and plug into the Nun’s backbone through a rerouted maintenance relay, the same boring node I used before. I spin up a temporary comm hub—isolated VLAN, air-gapped except for the one narrow pipe I control, and even that pipe is wrapped in encryption that would make an IHC auditor cry.
Screens bloom around me—network topology, signal logs, intrusion attempts, relay pings.
And immediately I see it.
Ghost pings.
Not full handshake attempts, not loud probes. Polite little taps on obscure ports, like someone knocking gently on a door they know they don’t technically own.
Nine-linked signatures have a smell. A rhythm. A particular kind of arrogance that thinks it’s invisible because it’s rich.
I isolate one ping and run a trace.
The origin bounces—shell nodes, civilian relays, a Baragon clearinghouse stub that’s supposedly frozen—then loops back into a dead-end address that’s only “dead” if you believe what you’re told.
“Yep,” I whisper.
Lonari’s voice is low behind me. “What.”
“Ghost pings,” I say, fingers flying. “Nine-linked probes are testing our infrastructure. They’re not attacking yet. They’re mapping. Seeing what we changed. Looking for Morazin or for me.”
Renn swears softly. “They’ll try to take the server spine?”
“They’ll try to take anything with leverage,” I reply. “Right now, we’re leverage.”
Lonari’s jaw tightens. “Can you mask us?”
“I can make it annoying,” I say, because honesty matters. “But if the Nine wants inside, they get inside eventually. We’re buying time, not invincibility.”
Lonari’s eyes narrow. “Time is enough.”
I keep working, setting decoy ports, honey nodes, fake ledgers—little traps that make a snoop think they found something juicy while I watch them from behind a mirror.
Then my comm hub flashes.
External arrival.
IHC? Alliance? Rival? I tense automatically.
Renn’s comm crackles. “Boss. Coalition patrol at the front. They’re here ‘for questioning.’”
The words make my stomach go cold.
Coalition patrol. On Gur. In the Nun.
That’s not a casual visit. That’s a message.
Lonari’s posture shifts. “How many.”
“Eight. Armored,” Renn replies. “They’re polite. Which is worse.”
Lonari turns to me. “Stay here.”
I push my chair back hard enough that it squeaks. Pain flares in my side and I hiss, but I stand anyway.
“No,” I say.
Lonari’s eyes sharpen. “Jordan—”