Page 35 of Big Bad Red Protector

"The galaxy is already torn." I meet his advance. "You helped tear it."

"I kept it from tearing further." The conviction in his voice is absolute. He believes this. I understand that the belief is what makes him the most dangerous thing in this room. "Everything those people share—" he means the races in the archive projections, the lost civilization, the ancient history Nina spent her imprisonment uncovering— "everything that connects them is exactly what every power structure in this galaxy was built to bury. Unity does not preserve civilization. It destabilizes it."

"Or," I say, "it destabilizes the people who need everyone else to stay separate."

He hits me.

It is a good strike—Drekar has thirty years of combat experience and a mechanical arm rated for structural demolition—and it takes me in the injured left side with deliberate accuracy because he trained me to target injuries. I stay upright because I trained under him and know his follow-through. We are not evenly matched in my current condition. I do not need even. I need to end it.

He comes for the second strike. I don't give him the angle he expects.

The mechanical arm is stronger. My right side is functional. The fight takes forty seconds and costs me blood I cannot afford, and when it is finished Drekar is on the facility floor, conscious enough to hate me and broken enough to stop mattering for the next ten minutes.

Nina is beside me. I let her be.

Drekar looks up at the fracturing star maps above him with an expression I have not seen from him before: something defeated that is trying to remain certain.

"The Bridge," he says, quieter now. "You think it is a weapon. The Coalition thought it was a monument. The Alliance thought it was a strategic asset." He pauses, watching the projections fail and reform. "It is none of those things. It was built to find them—all of them, the scattered populations, every species that came from the catastrophe. To reconnect what was separated." His voice drops further. "That reconnection would end every government currently operating in this galaxy. Every justification for authority. Every reason for the borders we defend." He closes his eyes. "I chose war because war can be controlled. Unity cannot."

The facility pulses again, deeper this time.

Outside the station—I know this from Zevra's running comm feed in my earpiece, which has not stopped transmitting—the Alliance fleet has begun a targeting approach on the Coalition formation. The Coalition fleet is responding. The diplomatic window is measured in minutes, not hours.

Nina is no longer beside me.

She is at the chamber's inner access point, looking through it toward the stairway that leads to the levels below, where the Precursor core is running an autonomous activation sequence toward an event that will reshape hyperspace routes across starsystems and give two armed fleets the chaos they need to start a war.

Her face carries the expression I first saw in the sublevel seven archive room: recognition of an answer she does not entirely want.

"The core responds to operator lineage," she says. "The hardware can force a partial activation, but it can't direct one. It can't choose what the Bridge does when it opens." She looks at me. "I can."

Below us, the Bridge fully wakes.

The sound it makes is not sound exactly—it is the absence of the frequency that has been running beneath everything on this station since the day it was built, replaced by something wider and older and no longer dormant. The star map projections stabilize suddenly, completely, into a coherence they have not held for ten minutes, showing every scattered world, every separated population, every route that once connected them.

Waiting for a direction.

Waiting for her.

"No evacuation order will reach the fleets in time," she says. "But the Bridge can transmit across every fleet communication channel simultaneously. If I can direct the activation—not force it, direct it—I can push the evidence, the archive truth, the conspiracy proof, across every receiver in range before the fleets engage."

She is describing entering the Precursor core while it is running an autonomous activation sequence in an unstable facility that is actively collapsing around us.

She meets my gaze with complete steadiness.

"I know," she says, before I can speak.

I look at her for one moment—amber eyes, dark curls, the scar beneath her jaw from a training accident she will not discuss, the data chip in her jacket that has survived threeassassination attempts and a Bridge activation and forty-eight hours of being hunted through a station in crisis.

The doctrine I was raised on says attachment is the origin of every tactical failure.

The doctrine is wrong.

"I will be behind you," I say.

She goes.

CHAPTER 25