Page 22 of Big Bad Red Protector

"I know," I say. "I can feel it."

The terminal housing at the chamber's end is a curved console integrated directly into the wall, its surface covered in the same geometric patterning as everything else, with a central contact point that is either a handprint or coincidentally that shape. Orrik's light catches it. The contact surface is not dark like the rest of the console.

It is faintly, consistently warm.

I press my palm against it.

The chamber wakes up.

Not gradually. All at once, as though it has been waiting for exactly this and sees no reason for patience. The dormant panels along both walls illuminate in sequence—not electric light, but something that has no equivalent in any power system I studied in academy. The geometric patterns on every surface begin moving, rotating, resolving into a structured display I cannot read but can almost understand.

Then the star maps appear.

They fill the chamber's upper space in three dimensions, a galaxy rendered in light with individual systems marked and named in a script I do not recognize. Lines of connection run between marked worlds in patterns that look like routes, or relationships, or histories. The mapped worlds number in the hundreds.

And among them, moving through the projected space, are figures.

Human figures, identifiable by proportion and posture, standing beside tall Vakutan forms, beside the slender silhouettes I associate with Pi'rell, beside elongated Shorcu shapes, beside unknown races. Not fighting. Not separated. Together, in the same projected spaces, around the same structures.

In an era the map's timestamp markers suggest predates every civilization currently claiming this galaxy.

"Torres." Zevra's voice is stripped of its usual sarcasm. She is reading her data surface with her worldview visibly restructuring in real time. "The system just ran a biological scan. The console you're touching transmitted a signal—I'm reading it in the chamber's frequency output. It cross-referenced against an internal database and returned a confirmed match."She pauses. "The phrase that came back isoperator lineage recognized."

The floor vibrates harder.

Above us, through the station's layers of construction and metal and history, something answers. The Bridge—distant, enormous, ancient—sends a pulse through the chamber that I feel against my sternum like a second heartbeat. The lights in the projected star maps brighten.

Kheltor moves between me and the chamber entrance in the same instant that I hear boots.

Many boots. Organized movement, surrounding the chamber's access points in the systematic pattern of a coordinated tactical approach. The echo carries the weight of armored personnel, more than I can count quickly, filling the tunnel we came through and the secondary access Orrik used.

Orrik's light goes to the walls. He is already calculating exits that are not there.

Zevra closes her data surface with a soft, final click.

The figure who steps through the main entrance is not a junior security officer. He is tall, broad-shouldered, with darker red skin than Kheltor and cranial ridges shaved to stubs above a face that has been rebuilt once and probably should have been rebuilt twice. His mechanical left arm catches the star map projections in reflective bands as he moves into the chamber with unhurried authority, exactly on his own timetable.

Drekar Malv surveys the chamber. He surveys the star maps. He surveys the console still active beneath my hand.

His gaze settles on me.

"Lower your weapons," he says to the personnel behind him, in Standard, which tells me he wants me to understand every word. "All of them." A pause. "She is not to be harmed."

He looks at Kheltor with the steady attention of a man reading the damage he expected to find.

"The woman comes with me," Drekar says. "She will not be injured. That is the only offer I intend to make."

My palm is still against the console.

The system that just called meoperator lineage recognizedis still running beneath my hand, still projecting its impossible history across the chamber walls.

Whatever I am to this technology, Drekar already knows it.

And he has been planning for it far longer than I have.

CHAPTER 16

KHELTOR