10. Saren
SAREN
Word reaches me at third bell that a scavenger post three jumps behind us has gone dark, and dark stations only mean one thing out here.
Korrah brings the intercept — a distress burst, cut off mid-word, then nothing. I have the chart pulled up before the recording ends. The post sat squarely on the route we ran four days ago. Someone is walking our backtrail, and walking it methodically, the way professionals do.
"Hunters," Vasha says, reading it over my shoulder. "Not pirates. Pirates take the station and stay to strip it. This one took it and moved on. They're looking for something specific."
They're looking for her. I don't say it. I don't have to; Vasha's face has already arrived there.
I change our heading without logging the reason, and I tell the helm to run quiet, drives banked, and I go down to the relay room to check our own transmissions — and that is where the second thing finds me.
The relay shows an outbound handshake. Short. Encrypted past our own keys. Routed through a maintenance node that should not have outbound access at all.
Someone aboard my ship has been talking to someone outside it.
I stand in the relay room with the cold certainty settling into me like water finding its level, and I run the timestamps, and they line up with the dark station, and the betrayal is so neat and so quiet that I almost admire it.
Almost. I have eighty-one people aboard this ship and one of them has decided the math I refused to do, and is doing it for me, in secret, in the dark.
I don't yet know who. I am careful not to want it to be Theryn, because wanting makes a man see what isn't there.
When I come up to the bridge, Althea is at the chart table with Caelis, and she has the stolen core open and humming, and a partial string of coordinates floats above it, half-decoded, pointing into a dead region of the Badlands no sane captain flies.
"He cracked part of it," she says, nodding at Caelis, who looks caught. "It's not cargo data. It's a map. Somebody on Armstrong didn't hire me to carry scrap. They hired me to carry that, and they didn't tell me, because the box doesn't need to know what's inside it."
"Seal it," I say. "Now. No one decodes the rest."
"Why." She's already reading my face. She reads me better than my own crew, which is its own quiet alarm. "What's at the end of those numbers that's got you looking like that?"
I don't answer, because the proximity alarm answers for me — a hard tone climbing through the bridge — and the screen swings to aft, and a warship slides out of the black behind us, lean and armored and built for one purpose, close enough already that running was never going to be the plan.
"That's the end of those numbers," I tell her. "Or the start of it."