Chapter 7
Astra
The logistics handler's name is Petrov, and he's bleeding from a cut above his left eye where Lieutenant Kesh got a little enthusiastic during the grab.
He knows where Webb went. I can see it in the way his eyes flick to the door every few seconds, calculating escape routes he'll never reach. He's got information locked behind his teeth like a cyanide capsule, and he thinks if he holds out long enough, someone will come for him.
Nobody's coming.
"Let me handle this." Dexter's voice comes from behind me. Low, professional. The voice of a man offering a service. "I can feel his pressure points. Emotional ones. I can have what we need in fifteen minutes without anyone getting their hands dirty."
I watch Petrov's face when Dexter speaks. The man's pupils dilate. He doesn't know what Dexter is, not specifically, but he can feel it. Everyone can. That low hum of wrongness that Dexter carries like cologne.
"My prisoner." I don't look at Dexter. I'm already pulling a chair to face Petrov, its legs scraping against the grated floor. "My methods."
Silence from behind me. Then the soft sound of Dexter stepping back, finding the far wall, leaning against it. Giving me the room.
Torres hovers near the door. I catch her eye and jerk my chin.
She leaves. Kesh follows without being asked.
The door seals behind them with a pressurized hiss that sounds like an airlock, and maybe that's intentional.
Maybe whoever designed these cells wanted the occupant to feel like they were being locked into vacuum.
Now it's three of us. Me. Petrov. And Dexter, silent against the wall, his bioluminescent marks casting faint blue-white light across the stained metal behind him.
I sit down across from Petrov. Close enough that our knees almost touch.
"You ran supply lines for a man named Webb," I say. "Cargo manifests, docking schedules, fuel allocations. You're his logistics backbone in this sector."
Petrov stares at a point above my head. Classic resistance posture. "I want a lawyer."
"We're in contested space aboard an unregistered station with no judicial oversight within three parsecs. What you want is irrelevant." I let that settle. "What matters is what I want, and what I'm willing to do to get it."
"I don't know anyone named Webb."
I nod like that's a reasonable position. Then I reach forward and press my thumb into the cut above his eye. Not hard. Not yet. Just enough to remind him it's there, that the skin is split, that nerve endings are exposed and raw.
He flinches but doesn't make a sound.
"That's your one lie," I tell him. "I'm not a patient person, Petrov.
I used to be. Used to believe in process, in building rapport, in all that elegant psychological maneuvering they teach you at the Academy.
" I increase the pressure. A thin line of blood runs down the bridge of his nose. "I'm not that person anymore."
Behind me, against the wall, I can feel Dexter watching. Not just watching. Reading. Tasting the emotional weather of the room the way other people taste air. He can feel Petrov's fear, I know that. Can feel it spike and dip and spike again.
I wonder what he feels from me.
Nothing good.
Twenty minutes in, Petrov is still holding.
He's better than I expected, which means Webb trains his people, or at least selects for a certain breed of stubbornness.
I've worked the cut, found two other tender spots, applied pressure that sits in the grey space between interrogation and something uglier.
His breathing is ragged. Sweat darkens the collar of his jumpsuit.
But he hasn't talked.
I stand up and pace. Slow. Deliberate. The kind of movement that tells a restrained man you're considering options, and none of them are good for him.
"You have family?" I ask.
His jaw tightens. There it is.
"I'm not threatening them." I come back to the chair, sit down again, lean forward until my face is close to his.
Close enough that he can see exactly who I am, and more importantly, what I am.
Whatever's in my eyes these days, it does the work that words can't. "I'm asking because I want you to think about whether they'd recognize the thing I'm going to send back to them if you keep wasting my time. "
Petrov's composure cracks at the edges. A tremor in his lip. The rapid blink of a man recalculating.
"He'll kill me," Petrov says. First real words he's spoken that aren't denial.
"Webb isn't here. I am."
"You don't understand what he is."
"I understand exactly what he is." I pull back slightly.
Give him the illusion of space. "I've been tracking him for three years.
I know about the bioweapons shipments. I know about the dead informants.
I know about the colony on Retha-4 that he let burn because the insurance payout was higher than the rescue cost. Forty-seven children, Petrov.
You ran the fuel manifests for the ship that didn't arrive. "
The color drains from his face. Not all the way. Enough.
"You're already dead," I continue. "The moment we pulled you off that supply run, your expiration date got stamped. Webb doesn't leave loose ends. You know that better than I do. So the question isn't whether you survive this. It's how much pain happens between now and whatever comes after."
He's shaking. Fine tremors that run through his bound arms and into the chair, making it rattle softly against the grate.
I reach out and grip his chin. Force his eyes to mine.
"Where did he go?"
"I can't."
I twist. Not far. Enough. The cartilage in his jaw pops, and he sucks air through his teeth.
"Where."
"He'll find me, he always finds—"
I release his chin and hit the cut above his eye with the heel of my palm.
Quick, precise. His head snaps back and blood sprays across my knuckles, hot and immediate.
He gasps, and for a second his composure shatters entirely, and I can see the man behind the training: scared, cornered, weighing options that all end badly.
I lean in again. My voice drops to something quiet, something almost gentle, which makes it worse.
"I will sit in this room with you for as long as it takes.
I will find every soft place you have, and I will make each one scream.
Not because I have to. Because I'm good at it, and I stopped pretending that bothers me a long time ago.
" I pause. Let the fluorescent hum fill the space.
"Haven's End. That's where he went. I already know the name, Petrov.
I need the berth, the schedule, and the contact he's using for resupply.
Give me those three things, and you live through the hour. "
His mouth opens. Closes.
I wait. Time stretches like a wire under tension, and the fluorescents keep humming their mindless hymn, and the blood on my hand starts to cool and tighten against my skin.
"Berth seventeen." His voice breaks open like a hull under stress. "Docking rotation changes every forty hours. His resupply contact goes by Maren, runs a fuel depot on the station's lower ring. He's expecting a shipment in three days."
I sit back.
"Thank you."
The whole thing takes forty-three minutes.
I stand up and turn toward the door, and that's when Petrov lurches.
The zip-ties must have been wearing against the chair bolt, because his right hand comes free and he swings, desperate and clumsy, catching nothing but air because I'm already moving.
I step inside his reach, close the distance to zero, and drive my forehead into the bridge of his nose.
The crunch is satisfying in a way I don't examine.
He drops. Not unconscious but close to it, slumped in the chair with blood sheeting down his face and his broken nose already swelling. I flex my hands. My knuckles are split where his teeth caught them during the chin grab, and his blood is mixed with mine now, drying to rust on my fingers.
Kesh and Torres come in when I open the door. I give them the information, the berth number, the rotation schedule, Maren's name. They take Petrov to the medical bay. I stand in the empty interrogation room and breathe.
The blood is under my nails.
The fluorescents keep humming.
Dexter hasn't moved from his wall. I'd almost forgotten he was there, which is a lie I tell myself. I was aware of him the entire time. Aware of his silence, his stillness, the way his marks shifted through shades of blue and white as the interrogation progressed. Like a mood ring for the damned.
"You've changed," he says.
The words land on me like rain on metal. I don't look at him.
"You changed me."
The ship is small enough that avoiding someone is a matter of will rather than architecture.
For two hours after we leave Gamma-7, I manage it.
I check the nav charts Torres plotted for Haven's End, three days through contested space with no relay coverage.
I clean my weapons. I eat a ration bar that tastes like compressed sawdust and obligation.
Then I run out of tasks, and he's in the galley when I get there, and the ship is too small for pretense.
He's sitting at the narrow table with his hands wrapped around a mug of something that steams. The galley lights are dimmed for the sleep cycle, and in the low light his marks glow with soft persistence, mapping constellations across his forearms and up the sides of his neck.
He looks up when I come in and doesn't speak, just watches me with those eyes that see too much and that faint luminescence that turns the shadows around him into something almost alive.
I go to the sink. Turn on the water. Start scrubbing.
Petrov's blood comes off in flakes, rust-colored, circling the drain in the grey station water. Underneath, my knuckles are raw. I scrub harder than I need to, and the pain is clarifying, a small bright point of focus in the murk of everything else.