Page 15 of Big Bad Red Protector

The patrol passes and does not return.

We wait three minutes by instinct before I press the panel and confirm the corridor empty. Nina exits first this time, because the space requires it, and I follow and do not think about the brief moment when my arm crossed above her to brace the panel and her hair was against my jaw.

I focus on the recording device she identified.

"The device above the door," she says quietly, pulling up her tablet. "Same manufacturer as the cleaned cargo containers in bay nine. The same procurement chain."

She caught that during the meeting. While listening to people discuss her as a variable to be eliminated.

"The recording they made tonight goes somewhere," she says. "A storage location or a live transmission. If we find the relay?—"

"We find the rest of the network." I pull the partial audio capture from my own device. The meeting recorded four minutes before the patrol forced our exit. It is enough.

Enough to confirm that both governments have people in this conspiracy. Enough to confirm that the Bridge's response to Nina is documented, understood, and feared. Enough to confirm that when the voice in that room used the wordpriority, they were not discussing a timetable.

They were discussing her.

CHAPTER 11

NINA

The Coalition sanctuary is the quietest place I have found on Orpheus Station, which makes it either the safest or the most dangerous, depending on who you ask.

I slip through the secondary entrance Calyra's message specified—a maintenance door behind a ceremonial alcove that the station schematics list as a ventilation access point and that someone converted into a discreet entrance approximately never, judging by the quality of the hinges. The interior is lit by prayer lamps, low and amber, mounted in curved wall niches between carved Coalition religious symbols I can recognize without being able to read. The ceiling arcs above me in pale stone. Incense and old metal hang in the air, which is probably not the intended combination but suits the station perfectly.

Calyra is already there.

She sits in the innermost alcove with her ceremonial robes arranged precisely and her hands folded in a way that looks like prayer and functions, I suspect, as cover for the two different exits she has already identified.

"You came alone," she says.

"You said alone."

"I expected you to bring the Vakutan commander anyway." Her pale gold skin catches the lamp light, making her seem genuinely serene, which I no longer trust. "You are more disciplined than I assumed."

"I need to know what you couldn't tell me in the atrium."

She studies me for a moment, measuring how much truth a container can hold before it cracks.

"The records I have access to are very old," she begins. "Older than the current war. Older than most of what either government considers authoritative history." She does not lower her voice. The sanctuary is, technically, her territory. "They describe a relationship between humanity and the Precursors that neither the Alliance nor the Coalition has any interest in making public."

"What kind of relationship?"

"A biological one." She pauses, choosing her words with the care of someone defusing something. "Certain genetic markers appear in a subset of humans—sequences outside every natural evolutionary pathway our researchers have been able to document. They are not mutations. They are not anomalies. And they are not random." She meets my eyes. "Those markers appear to interact with Precursor technology in ways no other known species demonstrates. The Bridge—the structure, its dormant systems—has been observed to respond to human presence in ways that our researchers flagged and then buried in classified archives decades ago."

The prayer lamps do not flicker. The incense continues burning.

"Why buried?" I ask.

"Because the implications are not comfortable ones." Her composure holds, but something beneath it tightens. "If certain humans carry sequences that Precursor technology was designed to recognize, then the question ofwhybecomesunavoidable. Both governments have built their authority on specific understandings of history—of origin, of divine right, of who belongs where in this galaxy. A truth that places humanity in a different relationship to the Precursors than anyone currently accepts—the oldest fragments imply humanity and the Precursors were never two separate peoples at all, that the ones who seeded these worlds and built the Bridge were human, carried back to the beginning of things, which is the only reason the technology reads our markers as its own— would not simply cause political instability." She folds her hands again, deliberate and final. "It would hollow out the ideological foundations of every major civilization in this quadrant. That is why it has been suppressed. That is why people have been killed to keep it suppressed." She pauses. "And that is why I am telling you to stop pulling on this thread before?—"

The door behind me explodes inward.

Not a malfunction. The charge is shaped and deliberate, and the two figures who clear the debris are wearing no insignia and moving with the specific economy of people who expect to finish quickly.

Calyra is already moving.

She pulls a section of the carved wall inward—a door disguised as devotional architecture, hinged at the base—and I don't spend time being impressed by it because one of the attackers is already crossing the sanctuary floor and I am between him and Calyra.