Page 26 of Big Bad Red Protector

The panel is current-generation Vakutan security hardware. The authorization architecture is one I built.

Someone used my command codes to install a weapons platform in Precursor ruins beneath Orpheus Station.

I run the override before I allow myself to sit with what that means.

The door opens onto a descending stairway, and at the bottom of it, two security officers who were not in Drekar's public deployment roster turn to face us with weapons already raised.

The fight takes eleven seconds.

The first officer is fast; the second is better positioned. Nina, standing at the stairway entrance, sees the second officer's angle before I do and kicks a loose wall bracket down the stairs in the half-second before he fires. The shot goes wide. I close the distance in four steps and the confrontation ends with both officers against the floor, restrained and breathing, which is the version I prefer when the alternative is Drekar adding more names to whatever he is building against us.

Nina looks at the bracket on the floor, then at me.

"Useful instinct," I say.

"I've been paying attention," she says.

Orrik is already past us, moving toward the base of the stairway with his tablet raised. Zevra follows, pulling data from the security panel with the focused speed of someone who learned her skills in environments where slow work got people killed.

The chamber below is not the hidden Precursor ruin we entered earlier. It is newer—station-built, carved into the space adjacent to the Precursor foundation rather than inside it—and it is filled with hardware that I recognize by type even thoughI have never seen it assembled this way. Signal amplification arrays. Resonance calibration systems. Power generation equipment rated for sustained high-frequency output.

All of it oriented toward the Precursor wall at the far side of the chamber, where the geometric patterns are visible through a cleared section of station plating that someone removed to create direct structural contact.

The Bridge is forty meters beyond that wall.

The hardware is not dormant. It is cycling through a pre-activation sequence that Zevra identifies in under thirty seconds as a timed initialization—something set to trigger automatically, not requiring manual activation.

"When?" Nina asks.

Zevra checks the sequence counter.

"Seventy-two hours," she says. "The negotiation session begins in seventy-one."

The diplomatic session, every remaining station representative, both governments assembled in a single location while this equipment forces the Bridge into an uncontrolled resonance event. The chaos that follows will be immense, immediate, and perfectly positioned to ignite the fleets already moving toward the station from opposite sides.

Drekar did not build this to hide the truth. He built it to weaponize what happens when the truth surfaces wrong.

I am still calculating the hardware configuration when the door behind us opens.

Not from the stairway we descended. From the second entrance I noted at the chamber's eastern wall and did not have time to clear before the fight above required attention.

Three figures. Armed. Wearing no insignia, which is worse than wearing the wrong one, because it means they were not part of Drekar's official operation.

It means he has a layer beneath the layer I already found.

Nina moves to my left side. Orrik and Zevra take positions behind the nearest hardware array.

"We cannot fight our way out of this room," I say quietly, assessing angles and counting seconds and running the tactical calculation that gives me options I do not like, "and we cannot leave the equipment running."

"So we do both at once," Nina says.

She is already looking at the control panel on the nearest array with the expression she gets when she has identified something the room does not know she has seen yet.

I cannot read her plan. I know her well enough to know there is one.

Whatever comes next will not be simple, and when it is finished, whoever I was before this station will not be waiting on the other side.

I find I am not trying to preserve him.