13. Kalev
KALEV
The moment the signal stabilizes, I know what I’m looking at.
Not hope. Not luck. Not some long-shot proximity pattern that can be explained away with supply fluctuations or atmospheric bounce.
This is a route.
A real one.
Built on timing, repetition, footprint deviation.
And it’s feeding something big.
The feed is grainy—infrared overlay on a multi-spectrum scan Leah calibrated two nights ago while I pretended to be checking conduit joints.
She’s the one who suggested it. Said the shifts were too regular, that the hovertrail ghosts didn’t match any of the known League or Coalition ops in the sector.
I’d grunted, like I wasn’t listening.
But I was.
Gods, I was.
The convoy’s route loops tight through the South Quadrant perimeter, hugging a line of derelict mining silos that haven’t seen legit use in twenty years. No lights, no transponder pings. Nothing overt.
But every twelve hours, on the dot, a shimmer. A shift in heat dispersion. And sometimes, if you catch the angle just right, a shadow moves too fast for anything but machine-precision.
Drones.
Not recon. Transport.
Whatever the Ataxians are building out here, they’re feeding it slow, regular, and silent. Not flashy. Just consistent.
Like an infection you don’t notice until the organ’s dead.
I pull the feed, encrypt the filechain, and run a double-blind mask across our packet trail. Then I fire the full briefing to Alliance Command under Ghost Protocol 47, flagged with strategic rec priority.
Kalev Thorne. Operative Class IV. Verified live mission, planetary threat.
Time delay on uplink: eleven minutes.
That’s enough time to burn three new paranoia pathways in my skull before Command chirps back.
TEXT ONLY. PRIORITY CODE.
Observe. Do not engage. Confirm full structure parameters before intervention.
I stare at the message.
Read it again.
Then again.
The heat in my chest spikes.
They’re not wrong. Protocol’s protocol. But every instinct I’ve got says we’re already past the safe margin. This thing under Spuel isn’t sleeping—it’s thrumming. Waiting. And if we sit on our hands too long, we’re going to lose the element of surprise right along with our window.
But I don’t reply.
Not yet.
Because I need a second to breathe.
Need a second to look at her.
Leah’s cross-legged on the floor, calibrating a motion sensor module like it’s a delicate piece of art. She’s quiet when she works—hyperfocused, but not tense. Like her hands know something her brain’s only just catching up to.
She doesn’t notice me staring.
She’s the reason we found this.
The route, the timing, the gaps—it was her.
Her eyes. Her gut.
Her goddamn instinct.
She lifts the sensor, aligns the housing, and tilts it for better angle diffraction. Just enough to counter the distortion field from the sewer grid above.
It’s a good adjustment.
No—it’s perfect.
I step over. “That the S-12 variant?”
She nods without looking up. “Has a lower signal footprint. Won’t trip the ion dampeners.”
“Angle’s tight.”
“I know.”
She closes the panel, seals the latch, and finally looks at me.
“You saw it,” she says.
It’s not a question.
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Command says we wait.”
Her jaw flexes, but she doesn’t say I told you so. Doesn’t throw it back in my face that her gut flagged it days before my sensors confirmed it.
She just nods.
That hurts more.
I set the relay module aside and sit beside her, knees brushing. I don’t pull back. Not yet.
“You were right,” I say.
Leah arches a brow. “That a confession?”
“Call it an operational reclassification.”
She smirks. “That’s romantic.”
I huff. “I’m adjusting your access.”
That gets her attention.
“To what?”
“Full base feeds. Tactical overlays. Encryption queues. You’re seeing everything I see from now on.”
There’s a beat.
“Why?” she asks.
I look at her.
Really look.
“Because I trust you more than I trust Command.”
That lands. Heavy. Real.
She doesn’t joke.
Doesn’t look away.
Just nods once, slow.
“Alright,” she says. “Then let’s not waste time.”
The transition’s smooth.
Smoother than I expect.
I thought she’d hesitate—trip on the weight of it. But she steps into the role like it was tailored for her. The first time she routes the comm buffer through the decoy channel and loops it back to our private net, I almost forget to breathe.
She works like she belongs in the ops chair.
Because she does.
That should make this easier.
It doesn’t.
Because every second I watch her at that console, something in me knots a little tighter.
It’s not just the competence. It’s the way she carries it. Unapologetic. Unpolished. Sharp.
Dangerous.
To me.
I start adjusting protocols. Redoubling professional structure. No more shared meals. No more casual touches. I reroute our bunk cycles to stagger by two hours. Less overlap. Less proximity.
I stop telling her the personal stuff. The offhand comments, the war stories that thread between sleep shifts. I kill them mid-thought now. Bite down before they make it out.
She notices.
Of course she notices.
But she doesn’t say anything.
Which somehow makes it worse.
Two days later, she hands me a folded schematic with the same tension I use when I handle mines.
“South tunnel ingress,” she says. “I flagged a potential leak in the coolant line. Might be how they’re masking their thermal trace.”
I take it. Our fingers brush.
Static.
Real.
She pulls back like I burned her.
I pretend not to feel it.
“You want me to vet it?” I ask.
“I already did,” she says. “Twice.”
“Right.”
I turn, head toward the back hatch.
But her voice stops me.
“You’re avoiding me.”
I freeze.
Half-step from the ladder.
“No I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
I don’t turn around.
“If you’ve got a problem,” I say quietly, “say it now.”
There’s a pause.
Then: “I don’t have a problem, Kalev. I just think maybe you’re scared to admit you do.”
My grip tightens on the ladder rung.
I hear her sigh behind me. Not dramatic. Just tired.
“I’m still here,” she says. “Still working the same mission. Still giving everything I’ve got. You think you’re protecting me by pulling back, but all you’re doing is making the walls louder.”
That one hits.
Because it’s true.
And I don’t have an answer for it.
So I climb the hatch.
And don’t look back.
But even as I adjust the thermal trace alignments and prep the dampeners for a deeper scan run, I feel her voice in my chest like it never left.
You’re scared to admit you have a problem.
She’s right.
Because the problem is this:
I can’t tell the difference anymore between what I want and what I shouldn’t want.
She’s in my head.
She’s in my strategy.
And worse—she’s in my blind spots.
Because every second I let myself want her is a second I’m not watching the perimeter close enough.
And we can’t afford that.
Not now.
Not with the Ataxians moving closer.
Not with this mission on the edge of going hot.
Not with her sitting ten feet away from me, rewiring the gravity of my focus without saying a damn word.
So I clamp down.
Hard.
And pray it holds.