Chapter 15
Astra
The strike ship shuddered through the void like a bullet already fired, and I checked the charge on my sidearm for the fourth time because my hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking.
Twelve of us. Twelve bodies crammed into a vessel built for speed, not comfort, the air already thick with the chemical tang of weapon primer and the sour edge of pre-combat sweat.
The overhead lights flickered every time the pilot adjusted course, casting the interior in stuttering blue, and I watched the shadows jump across the faces of people I was trusting to keep me alive in the next hour.
Zane stood at the forward console, his jaw set in a way I'd come to recognize as the expression he wore when the stakes were high enough to terrify him and he refused to let anyone see it.
Talia was beside him, running tactical overlays on a display that painted her face in shifting green, her fingers moving with the kind of calm precision that comes from having done this too many times. Dexter sat across from me.
He hadn't said a word in twenty minutes.
His eyes were on the holographic layout of the Vex flagship rotating between us, but I could feel the heat of his focus pulling toward me like a gravitational anomaly, checking, measuring, doing that thing he did where he catalogued my state of being without asking a single question.
I didn't look at him. If I looked at him, I'd feel something softer than what I needed to feel right now, and soft was going to get me killed.
"Breach point alpha." Zane's voice cut through the engine hum, all command, no warmth.
"We punch through their maintenance bay here.
" His finger stabbed at the ship's underbelly on the display.
"Minimal crew, maximum structural weakness.
Talia's team takes the bridge. Dexter, you and your squad handle the engine core.
Kill their ability to flee or self-destruct. "
"And me?" I already knew. I'd requested it.
"You take the interior corridors with Reeves and Kaito. Flush out command staff. Secure intel." Zane's eyes met mine, and something passed between us that was almost fraternal in its directness. "Webb's on this ship, Astra. If you find him, I trust your judgment."
My judgment. What a thing to trust.
Dexter's head turned then, just slightly, and I felt the weight of his attention sharpen to a fine, focused point.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
I could read the question in the angle of his body: are you going to be okay with this?
And the answer underneath: I'll burn this ship to the bulkheads if you're not.
I gave him the barest nod. An acknowledgment, not a promise. Because I didn't know what I was going to do when I found Webb, and lying to Dexter felt worse than any truth I could offer.
"Three minutes to breach," the pilot called.
I slotted the charge pack home and felt it click into place, a small, mechanical certainty in a moment with none.
Around me, the team moved through their final checks with the practiced efficiency of people who'd accepted that the next few minutes might be their last and decided to be useful about it.
Talia caught my eye from across the hold. She gave me a look that, on anyone else, I would have called gentle. On Talia St. Laurent, it was more like a blade wrapped in silk, something that cut but held you together while it did it.
"Stay tight," she said. Not to the team. To me. "Come back."
I nodded once. The ship lurched as the pilot banked hard, and the lights went red.
The breach blew inward with a sound like a god coughing, and then we were moving.
I'd forgotten what this felt like. Not the violence itself, but the specific quality of shipboard combat, the way the corridors compressed everything into close range, the way sound bounced off metal walls until every gunshot was a percussion instrument and every scream came from everywhere at once.
The Vex flagship was enormous, a sprawling command vessel that had clearly been designed by someone who believed intimidation was a valid architectural philosophy.
Vaulted ceilings in the main corridors, brushed dark alloy, lighting strips embedded in the floor that cast everything in a sickly amber glow from below, making every face look hollowed and corpse-like.
We poured through the maintenance bay breach and split.
Talia's team peeled left toward the central lift systems, moving in the tight, coordinated formation she ran like a machine.
Dexter's squad went right, deeper into the ship's guts, heading for the engine core.
His hand brushed mine as he passed, a touch so brief it might have been accidental if I didn't know him.
"I'll find you after," he said, low enough that only I heard it. Not a request. A statement of fact, like gravity.
Then he was gone, and I was moving the opposite direction with Reeves and Kaito flanking me, my sidearm up, every nerve in my body singing a song I'd first learned on Sigma-9.
This kind of violence was mine. I'd been built for it, first by training and then by survival, and there was a part of me that settled into it the way other people settle into hot water.
The muscles remembered before the mind did.
The first Vex soldiers we encountered were half-suited, scrambling out of a side corridor with the wild-eyed look of people who'd been woken by an explosion and hadn't caught up yet.
Reeves dropped two before they could raise their weapons.
Kaito took the third. I took the fourth, center mass, watched him fold, and stepped over him without breaking stride.
Six years ago, that would have cost me something. A flinch, a flicker of guilt, a moment where the person I used to be would have surfaced to remind me that bodies were people. Now the cost was so low it barely registered, just a small tally mark on a ledger I'd stopped auditing.
We pushed deeper. The ship's internal comms were screaming, fragmented orders overlapping in Vex command dialect, and I parsed what I could from the chaos.
Bridge under attack. Engine section compromised.
Command staff retreating to the secondary CIC.
Webb's name, once, in a burst of static that made my blood go hot and thin.
"Reeves. Kaito." I pointed down a branching corridor, narrower, darker, the amber floor lights flickering like a dying pulse. "Secondary CIC is that direction. Sweep and secure."
Reeves frowned. "And you?"
"He went this way." I didn't elaborate. I didn't need to. Reeves had read my file. He knew about Sigma-9. He knew what Webb was to me.
"Copy." He didn't argue. He took Kaito and disappeared down the left fork, and then I was alone in a corridor that smelled like ozone and recycled air and the specific metallic sweetness of a ship that was bleeding from places it shouldn't be.
I moved fast. Every intersection I cleared with my weapon up and my back to the wall, muscle memory so deep it lived in my spine.
The ship groaned around me, stressed hull plates protesting the damage Talia's team was dealing to the bridge, and the floor vibrated in a way I felt in my teeth, a low, persistent hum that said the engine core was being made to suffer too.
Good. Dexter worked fast.
Three more corridors. A sealed door I bypassed with a code Zane's intel had provided, watching the lock cycle from red to green with a clunk that echoed in the empty hallway like a judge's gavel.
Beyond it, the ship opened into a wider passage, some kind of officer's deck, and the amber light here was steadier, calmer, as if this part of the vessel hadn't accepted yet that it was dying.
I smelled blood before I saw him.
Not the sharp, bright copper of a fresh wound.
Something darker, more settled. Blood that had been cooling for minutes, pooling, thickening.
I followed it around a corner and there he was, slumped against the corridor wall with his legs sprawled in front of him and one hand pressed to his side where something had opened him up badly enough that the fabric of his uniform was black with it.
Webb.
He looked nothing like what I'd expected and exactly like what I should have.
Older. Greyer. Diminished in every way that mattered, a man who had been something once and had been ground down to this.
His eyes found me when I came around the corner, and he didn't flinch, didn't reach for the sidearm that lay on the floor a meter from his hand.
He just watched me with an expression I couldn't immediately name.
Then he smiled, and I wanted to put every round I had into that smile.
"Venn." His voice was thinner than I remembered, rattling at the edges. "I knew you'd come. I've been waiting."
My weapon was already up, the sight picture centered on his forehead. Steady. Not a tremor. Six years I'd imagined this, and my hands were as calm as water in a glass.
"You look terrible," I said.
He laughed, and it cost him. I watched pain contract across his face, watched his hand press tighter against the wound in his side, and I felt nothing resembling sympathy.
What I felt was a vast, cold clarity, the kind that comes after a fever breaks, when the world stops wavering and every edge goes sharp.
"Got hit in the first wave," he said. "One of your people has good aim."
"Not good enough, apparently."
"No." He coughed, and something wet moved in his chest. "Not good enough."
I stepped closer. Three meters. Two. Close enough to see the individual threads where his uniform had been torn, close enough to smell his blood and the sweat underneath it and something else, something bitter, like the chemical tang of a combat stim that was losing its war against the damage. My sidearm never wavered.