Chapter 13
Astra
The war room smelled like burnt circuitry and fear, and I couldn't tell which was worse.
Webb's broadcast still played on loop across three of the remaining screens, his face frozen mid-sentence on the fourth where the display had taken shrapnel.
The words scrolled beneath him in Universal Standard, Vex trade-script, and two languages I didn't recognize, because Webb hadn't just told the station.
He'd told everyone. Every faction with a ship, a gun, and a hunger for power now knew what sat at the heart of Requiem Station: a hole in reality itself, and whatever waited on the other side of it.
The anomaly wasn't a secret anymore. It was an invitation.
Zane stood at the tactical display, his hands flat on the surface, the light from the holographic map painting his jaw in cold blue.
He hadn't spoken in four minutes. I'd been counting.
When Zane Torrence went quiet, it meant he was reshaping the world inside his head, and everyone in the room knew enough to let him finish.
Dexter leaned against the far wall with his arms crossed and his eyes on his brother.
He'd washed the blood off his hands but not his forearms, and the dried rust color disappeared into the rolled cuffs of his sleeves like it belonged there.
He caught me looking. Held my gaze for a beat that said I know and later and pay attention all at once, then shifted his focus back to Zane.
I paid attention.
"The Vex aren't siege-holding anymore," Zane said finally, and his voice carried the particular flatness that meant he'd already accepted something terrible.
"They're racing. Webb's broadcast put a clock on everything.
Every independent fleet within jump range heard that signal.
The Kessari trade consortium, the Hollow Saints, the remnants of the Ninth Column.
Three days, maybe four, before the first of them arrive.
The Vex know that. They'll push for the anomaly core within hours, not days. "
He looked up from the map. His eyes moved across the room, touching each face, calculating what he could spend and what he couldn't afford to lose. When they landed on me, they stayed.
"We move first," he said. "We secure the anomaly before they can breach the inner ring."
The room shifted. I felt it in the way shoulders tightened, in the way hands drifted toward weapons that weren't drawn. Splitting forces during a siege was a gamble that could gut them from both sides at once, and everyone standing in this room understood the math.
"Half our people hold the defensive perimeter," Zane continued, pulling the holographic map apart with his fingers, sectoring the station into zones that glowed red, amber, and a thin sliver of green.
"The other half pushes inward toward the anomaly core.
We take it. We hold it. We control the only thing that makes this station worth dying for, and then we negotiate from strength when the vultures arrive. "
"Or we get cut in half and die in pieces," said one of the lieutenants from the back. Morrow, I thought. Stocky, competent, bad at keeping his mouth shut.
"Morrow." Zane didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. "If you'd like to present an alternative that doesn't end with every faction in known space fighting over our corpse, I'll hear it."
Silence. The hum of the station's failing ventilation system filled the gap, a low vibration that I could feel in my back teeth, like the station itself was grinding its jaw.
"Good." Zane turned to the display. "Team assignments in ten. Dexter, you're leading the inner push."
Dexter straightened off the wall. "Already packed."
I was already running the angles, mapping corridors in my head, calculating choke points and fallback positions, when Talia's voice cut through the comms channel like a blade through silk.
"Zane. We have a problem that isn't the Vex."
Talia's face appeared on the one functional secondary screen, her expression carrying the particular stillness she wore when the information was bad enough to be useful. Behind her, I could see the dim glow of her intelligence alcove, screens reflecting off surfaces I couldn't identify.
"My debtor networks inside the station are flagging movement," she said.
"Coordinated. Internal. Someone is using the siege chaos as cover, and they've been at it for hours.
Encrypted bursts on frequencies we don't monitor.
Supply movements that don't match any of our logistics chains.
Whoever it is, they're not working with the Vex.
They're working alongside them, using the same openings, the same blind spots our patrols leave when they rotate. "
"Working toward what?" Zane asked.
"That's what I can't pin yet. Three of my sources went dark in the last hour. The fourth says whoever this is, they've been communicating with something outside the station. Not Vex command channels. Something else."
I felt the cold settle into my spine before the name formed in my mouth. Not a premonition. Something worse. Pattern recognition.
Ethan.
I'd been watching him. Not because anyone had asked me to, not because there was a specific reason to distrust him beyond the general principle that trusting anyone fully during a siege was a good way to die.
I'd been watching him because something about the way he moved through the crisis made my skin prickle in a way I'd learned not to ignore.
He was helpful. That was the thing. During every engagement, every tactical shift, every moment of pressure, Ethan Eames appeared exactly where he was needed with exactly the information that mattered.
He'd flagged the Vex flanking attempt on Level Seven before our sensors caught it.
He'd identified the compromised airlock on the port side before it blew.
He'd been calm, competent, and invaluable, and every single piece of it felt wrong in a way I couldn't articulate until right now, listening to Talia describe coordinated internal movement that didn't serve any faction I could name.
He wasn't working against the Torrences.
That was what had thrown me. Every instinct I had was calibrated for betrayal, for the obvious shapes of treachery, information sold, positions revealed, backs turned at critical moments.
Ethan hadn't done any of that. He'd been genuinely helpful, genuinely present, genuinely fighting alongside Dexter during every corridor engagement.
But helpful toward what? Present where? Fighting for access to what?
I pulled up my personal log on the tactical pad, scrolling through the timestamps I'd been quietly noting for the last three days.
Ethan's positions during each major event.
Where he'd been, what he'd done, who he'd spoken to.
Viewed individually, each entry was unremarkable.
Viewed together, they formed a line. A trajectory.
Every useful thing he'd done, every bit of intelligence he'd provided, every position he'd taken had moved him closer to one section of the station.
The anomaly research labs.
"Talia," I said, and my voice came out steadier than the cold in my chest warranted. "The internal movement your networks are flagging. Can you map it?"
A pause. Then the screen populated with a cluster of data points, movement tracked through security systems and debtor-network surveillance, overlaid on the station schematic.
I stared at it. The pattern was unmistakable once you saw it, once you stopped looking for sabotage and started looking for someone building something.
Supplies rerouted. Equipment accessed after hours.
Power diverted in small increments from systems that nobody would miss during a siege.
All of it flowing toward the anomaly research section like tributaries feeding a river.
"That's not Vex activity," Dexter said from beside me. I hadn't heard him move. He was looking at the same data, and the line of his jaw was tight enough that I could see the muscle jumping beneath the skin. "That's someone who knows our systems."
"Someone with access," I confirmed. "Someone we trust enough to let move freely."
Our eyes met. I watched the calculation happen behind his gaze, watched him arrive at the same name I had, watched the anger settle into his features not like an explosion but like ice forming, silent and total.
"Ethan," he said.
"There's more." I hated saying it. "Where's Elissa?"
The temperature in the room dropped. Not literally, though the failing environmental systems had been running cold for hours.
The drop was in Dexter's face, in the sudden stillness of his body, in the way his hands went from resting at his sides to fists in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
"She's in protective custody," Zane said from the tactical display, already pulling up the feed. "Section Nine, secured wing. I put two guards on her door when the siege started."
The feed loaded. Section Nine's corridor camera showed an empty hallway. The door to Elissa's quarters stood open.
Zane cycled back through the footage. Thirty minutes ago.
An hour. Two hours. And there it was, timestamped ninety-four minutes before present: Elissa Torrence stepping out of her quarters, her dark hair pulled back, her expression not frightened but focused, following a figure down the corridor toward the junction that led, through three turns and a maintenance shaft, to the anomaly research section.
Ethan walked ahead of her. He didn't look back. He didn't need to. She followed like she knew exactly where they were going and wanted to be there.
"The guards?" Dexter's voice was quiet. The dangerous kind of quiet.
Zane checked. "Relieved of duty by a command code. Ethan's clearance. He told them Elissa was being transferred to a more secure location by my order."
"He forged your authorization."