16. Gnash #2
Ursa’s voice softens, which somehow makes things worse. “I know you’re scared.”
The command spine goes silent.
I look away from my officers because I can tolerate many things, but not their faces while this human woman names the thing beneath my anger like she is placing a hand on a wound.
“I am not scared,” I say.
“Fine. You are strategically furious about my possible injury.”
Vakka makes a strangled sound.
I turn my glare on everyone in the room. They all suddenly remember duties elsewhere without moving a muscle.
Ursa continues, “I’ll accept the guards. Close enough to annoy me. I’ll stand away from the delegate line. I won’t touch food, walls, vents, decorative objects, suspicious plants, or anyone’s ceremonial knife collection. But I am attending.”
“You bargain badly.”
“I bargain honestly.”
I look at Skahar.
He lifts both brows in the expression he uses when I have already lost and everyone but me knows it.
“Fine,” I say.
“Thank you.”
“You will wear a shield tag.”
“I will wear a shield tag.”
“You will not argue with the guards.”
“I will argue only if they deserve it.”
“Ursa.”
“That was my best offer.”
I growl. “Accepted.”
The channel closes, and the command spine exhales.
Vakka folds her arms. “For what it is worth, lord, you handled that with great dignity.”
“I will throw you into the coolant junction.”
“She would follow you there and ask whether the throw was authorized,” Skahar says.
I leave before I make good on any threats.
The negotiation chamber smells faintly of artificial citrus and panic when I arrive, which means Vakka’s sanitation lie was delivered with skill.
The refreshment alcove has been sealed behind temporary maintenance screens.
Two workers in gray coveralls kneel beside a vent panel, looking appropriately embarrassed while carrying enough hidden weaponry to start a respectable border skirmish.
The seating has shifted away from the compromised service entrance, and Theryki stands beside her new chair with golden eyes cold enough to cut glass.
“Lord Gnash,” she says. “Your station appears to be having difficulties.”
“My station dislikes guests who hide things in her walls.”
Her expression does not change. “How poetic.”
“How practical.”
Gobold arrives a moment later, broader than the doorway and twice as loud. “What in the hells happened in here? It smells like a hotel lobby pretending no one died in the drain.”
Wilcox enters behind him and gives the maintenance screens one sharp glance. She knows. Maybe not the specifics, but she knows enough to mistrust the room in a new direction.
Ursa arrives last.
She wears a dark jacket, her press badge, and the small shield tag Vakka must have clipped near her collarbone because it sits slightly crooked.
Two guards follow at her back, close enough to satisfy my orders and far enough to satisfy her pride.
Her hair is pulled into a loose knot, and there is a fresh stubbornness in her eyes that makes me want to shake her and kiss her and lock the entire station down until the universe learns manners.
She catches my gaze.
I hear her voice in my memory: I know you’re scared.
I look away first, which I will deny under torture.
The session begins badly and worsens with talent.
Theryki presents a formal objection to my revised demands, calling them “onerous,” “asymmetrical,” and “inconsistent with cooperative recognition frameworks.” I tell her cooperation that cannot survive reciprocal transparency is a leash with perfume on it.
Gobold argues that the only way to guarantee security is immediate military deterrence.
Wilcox asks whether deterrence is Alliance policy or his personal hobby.
Ursa stands behind the press rail taking notes, and every few minutes, I feel her attention like a hand at my back.
Then the room shifts.
It is small at first. A scent beneath the citrus. Sharp. Bitter. Burnt almonds and hot glass.
Vakka’s left hand moves toward her hidden comm.
One of the maintenance workers near the sealed alcove tilts his head, listening.
Skahar’s cane stops tapping.
My body understands before thought finishes forming.
“Down,” I snarl.
The service panel behind Theryki’s original seat bursts outward in a silent flash of white-blue light.
Not an explosion meant to scatter shrapnel.
A focused pulse. Clean. Directional. Built to punch through shield tags, flesh, and whatever unlucky body stood in the path.
The pulse carves across the space where Theryki would have sat before our seating shift and burns through the chair, the table edge, and the press rail beyond it.
Ursa stands three steps from that rail.
The shield tag at her collar flares violently, throwing a translucent field around her as the tail of the pulse catches the edge of its range. The force knocks her sideways. She hits the floor hard, compad skidding across the deck in a spray of sparks.
The world becomes red.
I am moving before anyone screams.
Security erupts around the room. My guards tackle Theryki behind a shield wall.
Gobold draws a sidearm from somewhere inside formal dress that should not have hidden anything larger than arrogance.
Wilcox drags one of her aides down by the collar.
Vakka’s maintenance team returns fire into the exposed panel as something small and insectile unfolds from the wall cavity, a mechanical assassin no larger than a child’s torso, all polished limbs, sensor glass, and a focused emitter still glowing at its center.
I cross the chamber in three strides.
A second pulse builds in the machine.
I slam my body between it and Ursa.
The shot hits my shoulder with enough force to drive me back half a step.
Pain burns through bone spur and skin, white-hot and familiar, but my body swallows most of it the way Reaper flesh was cursed or blessed to do.
I tear the chair from the floor and hurl it.
The metal mass crushes the assassin against the exposed wall with a shriek of breaking parts.
It twitches.
I reach it before it can die politely.
My claws dig through casing, wiring, and hot metal. The machine struggles in my grip, emitter sparking against my palm. I rip it free from the wall and smash it onto the table once, twice, then drive my fist through its core until the glow goes black.
Ursa is on her hands and knees, coughing, hair half-fallen from its knot, one cheek reddened where she struck the floor. Her shield tag smokes at her collar. A thin line of blood marks her temple.
Everything in me narrows to that blood.
I am beside her before I decide to move. “Ursa.”
“I’m fine,” she says, which is the first proof that she is not.
I kneel, carefully because my hands want to close around the world and break it for touching her. “Look at me.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“You are bleeding.”
“It’s a scratch.”
“It is on your head.”
“Most scratches happen on places, Gnash.”
Her voice shakes on my name. I hear it. She hears it too and presses her mouth shut as if stubbornness can hold the tremor in.
The bond between us surges, fierce and frightened, and I have to breathe through my mouth to keep the protective rage from becoming something that will make the room more dangerous.
Behind me, Vakka barks orders. “Seal all exits. Nobody leaves. I want that wall cavity isolated, every device tagged, and every delegate searched down to their decorative underclothes.”
Gobold roars, “You will not search Alliance personnel like criminals.”
Vakka roars back, “Someone just fired a murder bug through my wall, General. Everyone is a criminal until I am bored.”
Wilcox’s voice cuts through, tight but controlled. “My delegation will submit to station security.”
Gobold turns on her. “Ambassador!”
“Shut up, General. That pulse crossed the human press rail.”
Theryki rises from behind her shield wall with one aide supporting her elbow.
Her perfect composure is cracked at the edges, but not broken.
A small scale near her jaw has split, leaking green-black blood.
Her golden eyes move from the destroyed chair to the hole in the wall to Ursa on the floor beside me.
“Lord Gnash,” she says. “I presume you understand the implications.”
I understand someone tried to kill you.”
“Or frame someone for trying.”
“Both interest me.”
Ursa grips my forearm. “Gnash.”
Her fingers are small against my skin, warm despite the chill spreading through the chamber after the environmental system failed. I look down at her.
“Don’t,” she says.
The word is quiet. It still reaches the place inside me where violence is already standing up.
“Do not tell me to be calm.”
“I wasn’t. I was telling you not to give them what they want.”
My teeth ache from how hard my jaw closes. “They nearly killed you.”
“They aimed at Theryki’s original seat.”
“You were in the line.”
“Because I insisted on being here.”
That makes it worse, not better. I lift one hand toward the blood at her temple, then stop before touching without thinking. She sees the hesitation and leans into my hand herself, just enough for my thumb to steady near the wound.
“It’s small,” she says.
“The wound or your sense?”
She huffs a pained little laugh. “Both, apparently.”
A medical team rushes in, and I nearly snarl them back before Ursa tightens her grip on my arm.
“Let them do their job,” she says.
“I am allowing it.”
“You look like you’re about to eat the medic.”
“He smells afraid.”
“He has survival instincts.”
The medic, a lean Alzhon with silver tendrils trembling beside his jaw, approaches with a scanner held carefully where I can see it. “Lord, I only need to check her head and shield exposure.”
Ursa looks up at me. “See? Very reasonable.”
I move half a step back because she needs the medic more than she needs my rage. It costs me something I do not have a name for. The medic scans her temple, eyes flicking nervously toward me every few seconds.