Page 41 of Big Bad Red Protector

She is worth more than the control.

Afterward, the repair drones continue their work overhead, and the Bridge continues its glow beyond the viewport, and Nina is against my side with her head on my shoulder and her arm across my chest in the careful geometry she has developed for navigating my anatomy.

"Stay," I say.

She tilts her face up to look at me.

"Not the station," I clarify, though the station is also what I mean. "Beside me. However this arranges itself—the inquiry, the Bridge, whatever the political situation requires—stay beside it with me."

She is quiet for long enough that I begin constructing the alternate response, the one where I accept whatever she says without adjustment.

"I'm not going anywhere," she says.

Simple. Certain. The way she says the things that are most true.

The old life—rank, command, the military framework that told me precisely what my hands were for—is finished. I sat with that through four hours in a med bay chair and reached the same conclusion every time: I do not want it back.

What I want is here, breathing slowly against my shoulder, already half-asleep with the enthusiasm of an engineer handed an interesting problem and no supervision.

It is, I find, exactly enough.

It is considerably more than I expected a life to contain.

CHAPTER 29

NINA

The station smells like welding compound and effort.

Repair drones move through the damaged corridor sectors in coordinated sweeps, patching bulkhead tears and rerouting power conduits through temporary housing while the permanent repairs queue behind them. Scaffolding has gone up along two of the main residential arteries where the Precursor sector collapse sent structural stress through the station's older frame. The lights in sublevel nine are still running on emergency backup, which gives everyone working down there a slightly haunted look that the situation probably warrants anyway.

What is different from the day I arrived, overwhelmed and certain I had been assigned here to fail quietly, is the crews doing the work.

A Coalition structural engineer is directing an Alliance maintenance team through the rerouting of a power junction, and neither party looks happy about the arrangement, and neither party stops working. Two Pi'rell med technicians are running triage in a temporary shelter beside a Vakutan security officer who is helping them move supply containers without being asked. On sublevel seven, a human repair crew and aShorcu engineering team are sharing tools across a corridor junction with the specific efficiency of people who have decided that efficiency matters more than their feelings about each other.

It is not warm. It is not healed. It is people who nearly died together choosing, reluctantly and practically, to build something instead of continuing to destroy it.

I find it more hopeful than any diplomatic statement I have ever read.

Zevra's operational office for the new investigative division is, characteristically, not listed in any official station directory.

It is in a reclaimed maintenance sector on sublevel six, which Orrik has spent four days converting from a legitimate eyesore into a functional archive and communication hub. The walls carry new terminal housings alongside old conduit work, and the surveillance access Zevra has already established covers seventeen more angles than the station's official security grid.

"I prefer working in spaces no one knows exist," she says, when I point this out.

"That's extremely reassuring for an investigative division."

"It should be." Her markings shift toward the blue-white of focused work. "Anyone trying to interfere with our operations will have to find us first." She pulls up the division's current mandate on the main display: Bridge archive protection, Precursor technology investigation, cross-faction evidence review, extremist network monitoring. "I've already established contact with three independent data brokers outside station jurisdiction. Information doesn't stop moving because a conspiracy got exposed. It reroutes."

Orrik is beneath the main terminal housing with a panel open and his mismatched cybernetic fingers moving through wiring with the enthusiasm of an engineer handed an interesting problem and no supervision. "The Bridge archive access systemis almost fully secured," he says, from somewhere inside the wall. "I've also added a secondary alert layer that will flag any access attempt carrying command-level authentication without a corresponding investigative authorization. Nobody is running patrol redirects through this infrastructure without us knowing."

"When it's finished," I say, "it'll be the most carefully monitored thing on the station."

"Second most," Zevra says. She nods toward the viewport, where the Bridge is visible at its familiar distance, still transmitting. "That still wins."

The public presentation is held in the temporary council chamber on the administrative level, which is the largest intact meeting space the station currently has after the main diplomatic hall took structural damage during the Precursor sector collapse.

It is not a large room. That probably helps.