Page 40 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
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’sthrumming. 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 goddamninstinct.
