Page 25 of Big Bad Red Protector

"I'm not doing anything."

"You are calculating blame." His voice is low enough that Zevra and Orrik don't look up. "Assign it correctly. The people who killed Dast, the people who attacked Calyra's sanctuary, the people building amplification hardware in Precursor ruins to trigger a war—they made choices. Those choices have consequences. You are one of the consequences." He pauses. "You are not the cause."

"That's a fine distinction when the station is in lockdown."

"It is the accurate distinction." He holds my gaze with the direct precision of someone who does not offer comfort carelessly and means it exactly as stated. "We stop them. That is what is possible right now."

I breathe out.

He's right, and I hate that he's right, and I also hold onto it like it's something structural.

"The negotiation session is three days," I say, turning back to the tablet. "The fleets are already in approach range. If we can't get evidence to both governments before the session?—"

"The lower access route to the station's outer communication array is still unmonitored," Orrik says, pulling up hismaintenance map. "There's a patrol gap between oh-two-hundred and oh-three-hundred because the section is listed as structurally compromised. It's not structurally compromised. I compromised it in the paperwork two years ago so maintenance could run diagnostic sweeps without security oversight." He looks up. "It's a six-hour walk through the worst part of the lower sectors. But it gets us to a transmitter that doesn't route through station command."

A transmitter outside Drekar's reach.

"If we can send the chamber recordings, the archive fragments, the payment routes, and Zevra's signal analysis directly to both fleet commanders," Zevra says, reading ahead of me, "before the negotiations begin?—"

"The fleets stop because they have a target that isn't each other," I finish.

The maintenance district settles around us, cold and red-lit and unhelpfully patient. Somewhere above, Orpheus Station continues fracturing along lines that were always there, waiting for exactly this kind of pressure to find them.

"How compromised is the route?" Kheltor asks Orrik.

"Significantly." Orrik considers. "Also: definitely passable. I know every junction."

Kheltor looks at me.

I'm already checking the charge on my data chip.

"Then we leave at oh-two-hundred," I say.

CHAPTER 18

KHELTOR

The lower sectors at oh-two-hundred are not empty. They are simply running a different population.

Maintenance workers on split shifts. Off-duty security personnel moving between faction quarters through routes that avoid the main corridor lockdowns. Black-market traders who understand better than most that political crises create supply gaps worth exploiting. We move through all of them the way you move through a crowd that is not looking for you yet—steadily, without stopping, without drawing the particular attention that stillness creates.

Zevra is navigating from three paces ahead. Orrik carries his maintenance tablet like a guide and a shield simultaneously, rerouting us through unlisted conduit access points that the station's official patrol maps don't acknowledge. Nina stays at my left shoulder. I have spent enough hours tracking her position that I no longer think about doing it. She is simply part of my threat assessment now, integrated into the perimeter I am continuously calculating without deciding to.

This, I recognize, is a problem.

A Vakutan commander running an extraction operation through hostile territory should not have a singular human asthe fixed point his tactical awareness orbits around. I have not reorganized my priorities. They reorganized themselves, gradually, over days of arguing and danger and Precursor ruins and one night in an abandoned safehouse, until Nina Torres became the variable my calculations most reliably protect.

I am aware of this. I cannot correct it. I have stopped believing correction is the right objective.

"Patrol rotation ahead," Zevra murmurs, pulling us into an alcove without slowing perceptibly. Three security officers pass the junction thirty feet ahead, moving in the crisp formation of people following Drekar's expanded perimeter orders. They do not look into the alcove because the alcove is behind a conduit housing that Orrik is currently gripping as if he knew it would serve this purpose.

They pass.

We continue.

The access point Orrik maps leads us through a structural layer I would not have found without him—a maintenance crawlway running parallel to the sublevel fourteen corridor system, offset by three feet and three decades of undocumented renovation. The signal hardware deliveries terminated in the Precursor chamber below, but the control infrastructure feeding those systems runs through the crawlway above them. Orrik identified this from the construction overlay two hours ago, which means he has been solving this problem longer than he mentioned.

"The weapon site's entrance should be here," Zevra says, pulling up the frequency map she assembled from the chamber recordings. "The signal amplification hardware is drawing power from a secondary grid that doesn't route through station command. Whoever installed it was careful." She pauses at a junction where two maintenance conduits intersect around asealed access door carrying a military authorization panel. "Not careful enough."