Page 31 of Big Bad Red Protector

"Around a bridgeborn descendant," he says, which is the first time I have heard someone other than an archive record use that phrase aloud. "Yes."

He leaves without explaining further, because he does not believe I have options that require explaining away.

The visions come when I press my hand against the wall, and I do it deliberately this time, because I am looking for what the room knows.

They arrive in layers, not sequence. Ancient cities built on star-map geometry. Races I can name and races Icannot, moving through the same spaces without separation. Connections between worlds—not violent ones, not territorial ones—something that looks, for a span of human history that the current galaxy has no record of, like a functioning civilization shared across species.

Then collapse. Not conquest. Something structural and sudden and catastrophic. The connections fracture. The cities scatter. The people who remain cannot understand what they have lost because the records go with the collapse.

And then: silence. And then: something patient, waiting. Designed for a specific future moment, built by people who understood that the scattered populations would need a way back.

Humanity’s connection to the Precursors is not a footnote. It is part of the reason this room exists.

Drekar is afraid of exactly that truth, which means the truth is more powerful than his weapon.

I take my hand off the wall and sit for a moment with what the room just showed me.

The containment field runs its steady shimmer. The pulse in the console surfaces maintains its pattern: three short, one long, two short, repeating. I have watched it for twenty minutes. It has not varied once.

Except when I move close to the emitter points. Then the pattern shifts by one interval.

The field is not simply containing me. It is calibrated around my genetic response—running at a frequency tuned to suppress the marker activation the Bridge uses to recognize me. If I can change that frequency, or introduce enough variance into the pulse pattern to disrupt the calibration cycle?—

The room is not just holding me.

It is also, in the way that all Precursor technology behaves, waiting for me to understand how to use it.

I press my palm against the console surface, and this time I don't wait for a vision.

I start looking for the pattern's flaw.

CHAPTER 22

KHELTOR

The medical seal Orrik applies to my left side is not sufficient for what I am about to do.

I know this. He knows this. He applies it anyway because the alternative is leaving me on the maintenance floor, and Orrik Dane is many things but not someone who leaves people on floors when there is work remaining.

"The shot cracked two ribs and scored the intercostal tissue," he says, with the clinical detachment of someone who learned field medicine from necessity rather than training. "You move wrong, you'll puncture something important."

"Define wrong."

"Anything faster than a careful walk." He looks at me. "You're going to do everything faster than a careful walk, aren't you."

"Yes."

He hands me a secondary seal and a stabilizer brace and steps back, his position clearly stated and already ignored.

Zevra is at the corner terminal, tracking Drekar's command signals through the maintenance surveillance network. Her markings are cycling the cold, dim blue of sustained concentration. "They've moved her deeper into the Precursor facility," she says, without turning. "Level three below thechamber we entered. The containment signatures are running at Bridge-adjacent frequencies, which means the field is calibrated to suppress her activation response." A pause. "She's alive. The systems would register differently if she weren't."

I hold that for two seconds and let it do what it needs to do. Then I move on.

The station-wide broadcast reaches the maintenance terminal nine minutes later. My name, my rank, my service number—read in the flat official register of a command-level security alert, labeling me a compromised officer operating in direct violation of Alliance authority and Vakutan military code. The alert orders my immediate detainment and requests that all personnel report my location.

Zevra turns from the terminal to watch me listen to it.

"How does it feel?" she asks.