Chapter 8 #2
It was a magnetic seal and a basic security interface.
There was a small panel set on the side of the door at about chest height, its indicator light glowing a steady red.
She’d seen something like this before on a Terran freighter three years back.
A cargo master who’d thought he could skim credits off her father’s shipments and hide the evidence behind a locked door.
He’d been wrong.
The mechanism on this door was functionally the same: different manufacturer, different species, but the same design flaw. The magnetic pins responded to a specific frequency pattern, and if you knew where to apply pressure—physical or electronic—the whole thing folded like wet paper.
Child’s play, really.
“What are you—” Raaze started, returning with the axe in his hands.
She was already crouching, pulling a thin tool from her belt. The lock gave up its secrets in under thirty seconds, and the door slid open.
Oh no.
The quarters beyond weren’t empty. They were destroyed. Furniture was overturned, storage units ripped open, and the contents scattered across the floor. A medical case lay smashed against the far wall, vials and instruments scattered through the wreckage.
Professional, Fred murmured in her head. They were searching for something. This wasn’t vandalism.
No. It wasn’t.
A boot scuffed against the floor behind her. She spun, hand going to her blade—
An older Latharian male stood in the corridor, grey threading through his dark hair, and his expression caught somewhere between suspicion and alarm. He was shorter than Raaze and softer around the middle. The kind of man who’d spent decades pushing data instead of weights.
“What are you doing in the healer’s quarters?” He demanded. “This section is restricted.”
Raaze stepped forward, positioning himself between Cait and the newcomer. His whole demeanor shifted—shoulders back, chin up, that lazy arrogance hardening into something official.
“Investigation team from Lathar Prime.” His voice had gone clipped. Formal. “We’re following up on irregularities in the healer’s case files.”
The neighbor’s eyes narrowed, sliding past Raaze to Cait.
“Why is there a human here?”
Raaze didn’t miss a beat. “She is a specialist consultant secondment from the human home planet. Her credentials are classified.”
The neighbor studied her for a long moment. She held his gaze, keeping her expression neutral, and tried to look like someone whose credentials might be classified. Finally, something in his posture eased.
“I didn’t realize the investigation was still active.”
“It’s ongoing.” Raaze’s tone brooked no argument. “What happened to the healer? In your own words, please.”
“Shuttle malfunction.” The neighbor shook his head. “Three weeks ago. Terrible thing. The craft depressurized before anyone could respond.”
She watched Raaze’s jaw tighten, just a fraction, and he nodded. “Was there an inquiry into events leading to his death?”
“Standard procedure. Mechanical failure, they said.” The neighbor shrugged. “Healer V’Teth was old. His shuttle was older.”
Raaze nodded slowly. “Thank you for your cooperation.”
The neighbor lingered another moment, curiosity warring with the instinct not to involve himself further. Self-preservation won out in the end, and he retreated down the corridor without another word, the door sliding shut behind him.
Raaze stood motionless, staring at the wreckage of the room.
“He’s dead,” he murmured, his expression blank.
The words hung in the air between them. She watched his face, searching for some crack in that careful mask. There wasn’t one. Just… nothing. Like someone had reached inside and switched off the lights.
“We need to leave.” His voice was flat. “Now.”
“Raaze—”
“Now.” He grabbed her arm, not roughly but with an urgency that made her stomach drop. “Think about it. The healer who diagnosed me is dead. His quarters are ransacked. If someone killed him to cover the trail—”
“Then whoever did it is still active.”
“Yeah, and they’ll have eyes on this place.” His jaw was tight. “Coming here was the obvious move for anyone trying to prove the diagnosis was wrong. Which means we just walked into exactly the place someone might be watching.”
Oh, fudge.
He’s right, Fred murmured through her implant. You two need to get out of there, now!
She scanned the wrecked room one more time, her gaze catching on a desk shoved against the far wall. Something was wedged beneath it. A rectangular shape, half-buried under scattered debris.
“Wait.”
She crossed the room before he could stop her, crouching to pull the object free. It was a storage unit of some kind. Latharian design, compact, with a cracked casing and exposed circuitry. A data drive, maybe. Or what was left of one.
“What is that?”
“I don’t know.” She turned it over in her hands. The housing was split along one seam, internal components visible through the gap. It was definitely broken and probably useless.
She took it anyway.
“Cait—”
“If there’s anything left on here, Fred might be able to pull it.” She shoved the drive into her jacket. “It’s better than leaving empty-handed.”
He stared at her for a beat. His eyes widened a fraction, the hard line of his mouth softening for half a second before the mask slammed back into place.
“Fine. But we move. Now.”
They moved fast through the station corridors, Raaze keeping Cait close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. Not running—running drew attention—but not strolling either. They moved with the purposeful stride of people who had somewhere to be and no interest in conversation whatsoever.
Nothing to see here, people, don’t draanthing talk to us.
His mind kept circling back to the ransacked room and the convenient shuttle malfunction that had killed the one male who could have cleared his name.
Three weeks. V’Teth had been dead for three weeks. Which meant someone had moved fast after Raaze’s diagnosis.
Way too fast for coincidence, don’t you think?
The docking ring came into view through the observation window, and he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. The H4-RPY sat in her berth beyond the reinforced glass, airlock sealed and running lights dim exactly as they’d left her.
They took the stairs down to the docking level two at a time. The corridor at the bottom was quieter than the concourse above, lined with numbered berths and the low hum of life support.
Berth seventeen sat halfway down on the left. He scanned the walkway in both directions as they approached. Empty. A single maintenance drone rolled past them on its magnetic track without slowing.
Cait keyed the access code. The outer door cycled open with a hiss that set his teeth on edge. Too loud. Too slow.
They were through it the second the gap was wide enough, Cait slapping the close sequence the moment they were through. The inner door sealed behind them with a soft clunk.
“Fred.” Her voice was tight. “Tell me we’re clear.”
“Scanning.” There was a pause that stretched too long.
“No active surveillance detected on the ship or the immediate approach. However, I should note that station bulkheads play merry hell with my sensors. I can tell you nothing is wired to our hull. I cannot tell you who might be sitting three berths down with a receiver.”
“So someone could be watching, and you’d miss it.”
“Correct. I am an AI, not a god. My capabilities have limits.”
Raaze moved back to the airlock and checked the viewport. The docking ring looked normal. Other ships in their berths. The maintenance drone making its return journey. But no one seemed to be loitering or watching.
That he could see anyway.
“We need to leave,” he said. “Now. Before whoever did over that room figures out we were there.”
She was already heading for the cockpit. “Fred, prep for departure. Emergency clearance if you can get it.”
Raaze caught up with her in the cockpit doorway, close enough to hear the tail end of Cait’s conversation with station control.
“—yeah, we have a confirmed case of yellow spotted rhino-hedgehogitis on board,” she was saying, her voice pitched somewhere between professional concern and barely contained panic.
“It’s highly contagious and potentially fatal to non-human species.
We need immediate departure clearance for quarantine purposes. ”
Static crackled through the comm.
“Understood, H4-RPY. Emergency clearance granted. Proceed to departure vector seven. Do not—repeat, do not—open any external hatches until you are clear of station proximity.”
“Copy that, control. Sealing all external access now.” She killed the comm, and her fingers were already dancing across the console, bringing systems online. “Fred, get us out of here.”
“With pleasure. Engaging departure sequence.”
The ship shuddered as the docking clamps released. Through the viewport, Raaze watched the station begin to slide away.
He dropped into the co-pilot’s seat. “Yellow spotted rhino-hedgehogitis?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Is that… a real thing we have on board?”
Her lips quirked at the corners. “No.”
“So you just—”
“Made it up.” She didn’t look at him, too busy monitoring their departure trajectory, but the grin spread wider. “Latharians have no idea what dangerous diseases humans carry, do they? For all they know, we’re walking biological weapons. One sneeze and their whole station could be compromised.”
He stared at her profile. Her red hair was coming loose from its tie. The grease smudge on her jaw she hadn’t noticed yet, and nowhere on her face was there a flicker of guilt about any of it.
“That’s…” Holy trall. She was devious, brilliant, and terrifying. “Not what I expected from you.”
“What did you expect?”
Back on Parac’Norr, he’d clocked her as the easy mark.
Nervous and isolated. The kind of soft target who’d fold under pressure because she didn’t know how to push back.
He’d watched her struggle with equipment, seen the way she’d flinched at the other pilots’ dismissal, and filed her away as manageable.
Draanth, he was an idiot.
The woman who’d just lied her way past station control without breaking a sweat wasn’t soft. She wasn’t manageable. She was something else entirely… something he hadn’t expected or accounted for.
“So.” She swiveled her chair to face him, and the grin was gone. Back to business. “The healer’s dead. His room’s been ransacked, and it seems that someone wanted whatever records he had badly enough to kill him for it.”
“That’s about the shape of it.” He nodded, lounging in his chair and watching her.
You’ve spent your whole career reading people in under three seconds. Took one look at her on the tarmac and filed her under easy. Your instincts have apparently retired without telling you.
“Which means the records aren’t in that room anymore.
Either whoever killed him took them, or he hid them somewhere else before they got to him.
” She leaned her elbows on the armrests, hands folded over her stomach.
“Where would a healer hide sensitive medical files? Failing that, do Latharian healers have some kind of universal records system? Somewhere records get sent automatically as a backup?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“I’m a warball player,” he shrugged, the words dragged out of him. “I can read a defensive line. I can put a ball through a gap smaller than my fist at forty meters, and I know which reporters can be bought and which ones can’t. Ask me about locker room politics, and I can talk for a week.”
He spread his hands. “Ask me where a dead healer might have stashed evidence of medical fraud, and you’re talking to the wrong male.”
“I had one lead,” he said finally, the words bitter on his tongue. “V’Teth diagnosed me, and he could have testified that the results were faked. That was my whole plan. Find him, get him to recant, clear the warrant.”
“And now he’s dead.”
He sighed, running his hands through his hair. “Yeah, now he’s dead. Sucks to be me, huh?”
She watched him for a long moment. Her expression was unreadable—not hostile, but not sympathetic either. Calculating.
She’s deciding if you’re still worth the trouble.
The thought shouldn’t have stung. This was a business arrangement. She’d agreed to help him because clearing his name was the only way to clear hers. If that path was closed…
Cait swiveled back to her console. Her fingers moved across the interface, pulling up screens he didn’t recognize.
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking.” She didn’t look at him, her lips pursed for a moment. “I run a shipping firm. Or I did, before you dragged me into your mess. You know what most shipping is? It’s tracking where things go when they leave a place.”
He watched her work… the set of her jaw and the way her eyes moved across data like he would read a defensive formation.
“Medical records for humans have a chain of custody,” she continued.
“When a doctor retires or dies, his files don’t just evaporate.
They get transferred. Either to official medical archives or…
” She trailed off, fingers flying faster.
“There. The Healers’ Hall on Ithaan’Dor .
It’s the central repository for all practitioner records in this sector.
When V’Teth died, his patient files would have been automatically uploaded to their system. ”
He just stared at her.
He’d spent weeks on Parac’Norr planning this. Running scenarios in his head during training sessions and lying awake at night working through contingencies. His whole strategy had been built around confrontation. Find V’Teth and make the draanthic admit the diagnosis was faked.
Muscle and intimidation. The tools he knew.
Not once had he thought about the paper trail.
Well, aren’t you an absolute draanthing idiot? Are you sure you weren’t dropped on your head one too many times as a baby?
“The Healers’ Hall,” he repeated slowly. “On Ithaan’Dor .”
“Mm-hmm.” She was still scanning data. “Heavily secured, obviously. Medical privacy laws. But the records exist. They have to.”
“So how do we get to them?”
She frowned at the screen, chewing her lower lip. “No idea. I’m thinking about it.”
We.
The word had come out of his own mouth without him noticing. And she hadn’t flinched or reminded him this was a transaction with an exit clause either. Somewhere between the ransacked room and the emergency departure, she’d stopped being his reluctant chauffeur and started being… something else.
And he didn’t know what to do with that.