Chapter 9 #2
Security patrol data acquired, Fred announced. The checkpoint guard walks around every forty-five minutes. Duration: twelve minutes. The station is unmanned during that window.
“Twelve minutes.” She pulled up the archive layout and displayed it in front of them. “That’s not a lot of time to find specific records in a system we don’t know.”
“It’s enough if we know exactly what we’re looking for.” Raaze tapped the screen, turning the schematic so he could see it from all angles. “And we do… V’Teth’s patient files. My diagnosis. That’s it.”
“Narrowing down the search parameters,” Fred said, and for a moment, Raaze had to fight for control of the plans on the screen as Fred turned them around, highlighting a section of the records room.
“Here. The files you need should be in this data cluster. The problem is, there’s a secondary security door here to protect the mainframe. ”
“So we go in hard.” Raaze pushed back from the console, energy building in his muscles. “Fast entry, minimal time on target, out before they know what hit them. Don’t give them time to react.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Absolutely not. We go in quiet. No trace. Get the records and get out before anyone knows we were there.”
He looked at her. “Quiet falls apart the second something goes wrong.”
“Fast falls apart the second someone sees us.” She stood, facing him. “This isn’t a warball match. We can’t just charge through the defense and hope we’re faster than they are.”
“And we can’t tiptoe around hoping no one notices us either.” He was on his feet now, too, the space between them shrinking. “The moment one thing goes sideways… one guard out of position, one door that doesn’t open… your quiet approach turns into a draanthing disaster.”
“At least my approach gives us a chance to abort,” she threw back, chin lifted in challenge and fire in her eyes. “Yours commits us the second we breach the door.”
“Commitment is the point.” He stepped closer, close enough to see the flush rising in her cheeks. “Hesitation gets you killed. You go in decisive, or you don’t go in at all.”
“Decisive isn’t the same as reckless—”
“If the two of you are finished posturing,” Fred interrupted, “I would like to point out that neither plan survives if you are still arguing about it when we reach the station. Pick one, and we run with it.”
They both stopped, and the words hung in the air between them. Her breath came faster than normal, her eyes bright with frustration, and—
She keeps looking at your mouth. Draanth, she’s pretty when she’s furious.
He stepped back first. He didn’t want to. Instead, every instinct was screaming at him to close the distance and finish what they’d started in that corridor. But Fred was right. They didn’t have time for this.
“Compromise,” he said, his voice rougher than he’d intended. “Your route. My timing.”
She blinked, the anger fading into something more calculating. “Meaning?”
“We’ll use your plan for getting in. The quiet approach, the shift-change window, and the ventilation shaft entry. But my plan for getting out if it goes sideways. Fast exfil, no hesitation, we move the second something feels wrong.”
She considered it, arms folded over her chest. The flush was still there, pink across her cheekbones.
“Fine,” she said finally. “But I call the abort. If I say we’re done, then we’re done. No heroics.”
“Deal.”
She turned back to the console, pulling up the floor plans again. Her movements were slightly jerky, less fluid than before.
Good. You’re not the only one affected.
He watched her work for a long minute.
“If this works and your name is cleared,” she said, not looking up, “what happens then?”
He leaned his forearms on the top of the co-pilot’s chair, considering the question.
“My contracts weren’t terminated,” he said. “They were suspended. League rules… they can’t void a player’s contract based on a diagnosis that’s under appeal. And mine was under appeal the moment I filed the paperwork.”
She turned to look at him. “So if the diagnosis is overturned…”
“Automatic reinstatement. The contracts come back online the day the medical flag gets cleared. Then, back pay for every game I was forced to miss. Compensation for…” He paused, searching for the right words.
“Emotional damage. Damage to reputation. The League takes that seriously. They have to… players are their product. And that’s before sponsorships. ”
“How much?”
He told her.
She went very still, her hand paused over the console. She didn’t look at him, but she wasn’t looking at the screen either. She was looking at the middle distance, doing the maths.
“Say that number again.”
He said it again.
“That’s…” She swallowed. “And that’s the number before sponsorships?”
“Yeah.”
He held her gaze. “That’s the number before sponsorships.”
“What’s the number with sponsorships?”
He told her that, too. It was an obscene number, he knew that. But he was the best at what he did.
She breathed out slowly and set her hands flat on the armrests of her chair.
“So the bet money,” she said. “That was real?”
“That was real.”
“You weren’t bluffing.”
“I don’t bluff about money. I bluff about everything else, but I don’t bluff about money.” He turned his head and gave her a lazy grin. “If this works, Cait, that bet money is less than a rounding error on my accounts.”
The numbers kept circling in her head like debris caught in a gravity well.
She’d known he was famous. Fred had pulled his stats, his accolades, the whole glittering trajectory of his career before it crashed. But knowing someone was a celebrity and understanding what that meant in actual, spendable credits were entirely different things.
The number he’d quoted her was more than her father’s firm made in a decade. Definitely more than the H4-RPY was worth, for sure.
And he’d been sent to a prison planet, forced into exile. Desperate enough to knock out a storage guard and stuff his jacket with scavenged parts on a prison planet. A man who’d probably never had to steal anything in his life.
If the diagnosis was fake.
If they could prove it.
If they didn’t get caught breaking into the most secure medical facility in three sectors.
That was a lot of ifs.
She stared at the star field through the viewport. Fred had the ship on autopilot, running calculations she didn’t need to supervise. There was nothing to do but wait.
Normally, she would hole up in her quarters and read a book or sleep, wrapped in a comfortable blanket with hours between her and anything she needed to do. But she couldn’t sleep, and when she’d tried to read, she’d ended up reading the same page four times before giving up.
The cockpit door hissed open behind her, and she didn’t turn around. She knew who it was. There were only two other people on the ship, and Fred didn’t have feet.
Raaze settled into the co-pilot’s chair without asking. The leather creaked under his weight. She could see him in her peripheral vision… a dark shape, too large for the space, radiating heat like a reactor core.
“Can’t sleep either?” she asked.
“Nope.”
The silence stretched. But it wasn’t the wary silence they’d had between them when he’d first come aboard… the kind that set her teeth on edge, making her jumpy. This was different. Companionable, almost.
And that was way more dangerous.
“Tell me about warball.” She turned to him, the question surprising her. “Not the fame part. The actual game.”
He turned his head to look at her. In the dim light of the cockpit, his eyes caught the glow from the console displays—red and orange, almost luminous.
“Why?”
“Because I can’t sleep and you can’t sleep and we’ve got hours until we reach the station.” She shrugged. “And because you love it. I can tell from when you were coaching those men on the pitch.”
Something shifted in his expression. The lazy arrogance that he wore like armor cracked, just a little, and he smiled. It turned him from merely handsome to absolutely devastating.
“It’s…” He stopped, frowned, then started again. “Have you ever been part of something that actually worked? Not just functioned, but worked? Every piece in the right place at the right moment, moving together like one organism?”
She hadn’t, but he didn’t need to know that. “Once or twice.”
“That’s what a good play feels like.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and his hands moving as he talked.
The boredom and swagger disappeared like smoke.
He was animated, alive in a way she hadn’t seen him before.
“When it comes together, when you’ve read the opposition’s formation, and you know exactly what they’re going to do before they do it.
It’s like…” He shook his head. “There’s no feeling like it. Nothing else even comes close.”
“What about the play?” she asked. “The one that made you famous. The signature move.”
His lips curved. Not a smirk, but an actual smile. It made him look younger. Less like a predator and more like a man who loved something with everything he had. Her breath caught.
“The Raaz-or,” he said. “That’s what the commentators called it. Took me seasons to perfect it.”
“How does it work?”
“There are phases. And the first two people do not see. They’re like… I dunno, nebulae? You only see what’s right in front of you, but then when you’re in the middle, you can see how complicated it really is?”
Oh my. The charm was gone. Just… gone. And the male left behind was quick as hell.
She hadn’t seen that coming.
He held up one finger. “First, you read the opposition’s defensive formation.
Every team has patterns… ways they like to set things up based on where they think the attack is coming from.
You need to learn those patterns, and they all change depending on who the opposition field on the day.
So different sets for different possible team configurations.
And then you memorize them until you can see them in your sleep. ”