Page 34 of Big Bad Red Protector

Not from the activation sequence. From something above, moving through the structural maintenance layer with a speed and force that has a specific tactical signature I recognize even through station bulkhead and old Precursor stone.

The secondary door does not open.

It detonates inward.

And through the debris and the amber light and the alarms, Kheltor is there—blood at his side, stabilizer brace visible beneath torn armor, four officers behind him and Orrik at his shoulder—and he takes in the amber field and Drekar's forces and me in approximately one second and his expression does what it always does under threat: it becomes very still and very certain.

The field is still between us.

Drekar's lethal override is still running.

And whatever happens in the next thirty seconds will determine which one of those facts matters more.

CHAPTER 24

KHELTOR

The amber field is between me and Nina, and Orrik has thirty seconds before the lethal override completes its charge cycle.

I know this because Nina is shouting it through the containment field with sharp urgency, after studying the system from inside and finding the one piece of information I need above everything else.

"The secondary emitter—left wall panel—the override routes through it. If Orrik cuts the power relay behind the housing?—"

Orrik is already moving.

I cover him. Drekar's remaining forces number four inside the facility—two at the far access, one behind the console bank, one positioned where the secondary door used to be before we removed it. My four officers are managing three of those positions. The fourth is mine.

Eleven seconds to the charge cycle's completion.

The emitter housing is recessed into the wall behind a Precursor panel that was not designed for the override equipment bolted onto its surface. Orrik gets the housing open in eight seconds using a tool I have never seen him producebefore and probably do not want to know the origin of. He finds the relay.

He cuts it.

The amber field drops.

Nina is through the containment perimeter before the emitter fully powers down, and I am in front of her before she can go anywhere that is not directly behind my body, and the facility takes the opportunity of that half-second to demonstrate that the Bridge activation is no longer partially disrupted.

The floor moves.

Not a tremor—a pulse, deep and fundamental, originating below the facility's foundation and radiating outward through the Precursor material in waves that the station above us was not built to absorb. The star map projections shatter and reform and shatter again, the route lines between systems flickering in and out of coherence. The alarms do not fail exactly. They multiply, layering over one another until the sound becomes a frequency rather than a warning.

"The core is accelerating," Nina says against my shoulder. "My delay bought maybe twenty minutes. Whatever Drekar's people built down here, it's running autonomously now."

"Then we need to shut it down at the source."

"The source is the Precursor core three levels below this room." She looks at me with the expression I have come to understand as her calculating odds she does not intend to share until she has to. "I know."

I hold her gaze for one moment. Then I turn back toward the chamber.

Drekar is waiting.

He has dismissed his remaining personnel—a decision that tells me everything about what he intends this confrontation to be. He stands at the center of the failing chamber with the fractured star maps moving through him in projection light,mechanical arm at his side, uniform still immaculate despite everything that has been destroyed around him in the last twelve hours.

"You could not stop it," he says. "The sequence is autonomous. Whatever the girl disrupted, the hardware compensates."

"Then we find another way," I say.

"There is no other way." He moves toward me with the deliberate economy of someone who trained me and knows my patterns as well as I know his. "You have destroyed your career, your rank, your reputation, and your military identity for a human woman and a truth that will tear this galaxy apart."