35. Althea
ALTHEA
Ihave one weapon Daxira can't armor against, and it isn't a gun. It's a finger on a transmit key and a galaxy full of people who've been lied to.
The trouble is getting the signal out. The dead zone chews up transmissions, and Daxira's fleet is jamming everything wide, and the Hollow Wake is shaking so hard around me I can barely keep the console in focus.
Caelis is beside me rerouting power from anything we don't need to breathe, and we don't need much, apparently, when the alternative is this.
"Window's going to be tiny," he shouts. "When the captain pulls them off our flank, there'll be maybe four seconds of clear line to the relay buoys at the zone's edge. Four seconds to push a whole civilization through a straw."
"Then we compress it and we aim it everywhere.
" I'm already cutting the archive down to its spine — the historian's last words, the manipulation records, the sabotage data, the proof, stripped to the bone and flagged for every faction channel, every newsfeed, every listening post in range.
Not to one buyer. To all of them at once, so it can't be bought back.
"She spent her whole life keeping this in the dark by controlling who got to see it.
So we don't sell it. We give it away. You can't put a fire out by buying it. "
The transmitter has other ideas. We've chained more power through it than it was ever built to hold, and halfway through staging the compressed archive the coupling arcs over — a white crack of light that throws Caelis backward and fills the compartment with the stink of burned insulation.
For one cold heartbeat the staging board goes dark, the whole archive hanging unsent, three hundred years one short circuit from staying buried forever.
"No," I hear myself say, very calmly, the way I only get when a wreck is actively trying to kill me.
"No, you don't." I go in barehanded past where I should, past the safeties, and I bridge the dead coupling with a length of salvaged line and the heel of my glove, and the burn climbs my arm bright as a brand, and I hold it there anyway, because Tomas taught me you can fix almost anything if you're willing to be the part that holds it together.
The board comes back. Caelis scrambles up, sees what I'm doing, and jams a proper shunt into place so I can let go before my hand cooks through the glove.
"You're insane," he breathes.
"I'm a scavenger," I tell him, shaking, cradling the arm. "Same thing, better stories."
The ship lurches. Saren's voice comes over the comm, tight: "Flank's clearing. Now, Thea. Whatever you have, now."
I hit transmit.
For four seconds the Hollow Wake pours three hundred years into the dark — a dead historian's cracked voice, a murdered world's last testimony, the names of mechanisms if not the names of the men, all of it screaming outward at the speed of light toward every world close enough to hear.
Four seconds. Then the jamming slams back down and the window's gone.
But four seconds is enough, because light doesn't stop once you let it go.
The proof of it comes fast. Daxira's fleet, which has been pressing in for the kill, hesitates — and on the open channels, suddenly, there's traffic.
A Coalition listening post acknowledging receipt.
A Trident relay flagging the broadcast for command.
Independent stations, pirate nets, a dozen voices all at once asking the same question across the static: is this real?
The truth is loose, and it's loose everywhere, and there is no longer any version of today where killing us puts it back.
Daxira's voice cuts onto our channel one last time, and the elegance has gone out of it at last. "You stupid, sentimental animals," she says, and there's real fear in it now, naked.
"Do you have any idea what you've just done?
Who you've just exposed? They'll burn this whole region to bury that signal.
You haven't saved anyone. You've signed every death warrant in the quadrant, starting with your own. "
"Maybe," I tell her. "But they'll have to do it in the light now. With everyone watching. That's all I ever needed — to make them do it where it can be seen." I lean into the pickup. "You made me a fuse once, Daxira. Turns out you should've checked which way I was pointed."
She doesn't answer with words. She answers with everything she has left — her flagship swinging its full armament onto the Hollow Wake, no longer trying to capture, only to erase, to kill the messenger even though the message is already gone, because some people would rather be right about the dark than admit the light got out.