Page 42 of Big Bad Red Protector

I stand between a Coalition liaison officer and an Alliance administrative representative who have spent the last two days disagreeing about the format of this presentation with the particular energy of people redirecting grief and fear into procedural argument. Neither of them fully trusts me. Both of them need what I have, which is the only reason we are here together.

I keep it direct because direct is what I know and because anything else would not survive contact with the room.

The Bridge was built for connection, not separation. The archived records now transmitted across nearby systems show that the Precursor technology beneath this station was designed to find and reunite populations that share an origin, not to serve as a weapon or a monument to any single faction's authority. The conspiracy used it as leverage because the truth it contains threatens every narrative that has justified this war. Thatthreat does not disappear because the conspiracy was exposed. The records will need to be managed carefully, accessed transparently, and protected from people who will continue trying to bury or weaponize them.

No government gets to own this. That is the condition under which the investigative division will operate.

The room does not love this. The room accepts it, which is a different thing and more durable.

Afterward, when the representatives have dispersed into their separate anxious conversations, I find Kheltor at the edge of the chamber where the temporary scaffolding meets the undamaged wall. He is not in uniform. He is not in armor. He is standing with his arms crossed in the posture I have learned to read asI am paying attention and also prepared for any situation that might develop,which for Kheltor is apparently indistinguishable from relaxed.

He studies me for a moment.

"You didn't apologize for any of it," he says.

"Was I supposed to?"

"Several people in that room expected you to." He uncrosses his arms. "You didn't."

"The truth doesn't require an apology," I say. "Calyra told me that. Indirectly."

"She tells most things indirectly." He moves to stand beside me, and we look out through the scaffolding gap at the corridor beyond, where repair crews are still working, where mixed factions are still choosing cooperation over collapse, where Orpheus Station is rebuilding itself into something it has not been before. "You did well."

From Kheltor, that is the equivalent of a standing ovation.

"We're not done," I say.

"No." He is quiet in the comfortable way, the way that does not require filling. "We are not."

The station hums around us with the sound of work being done. Somewhere below, Orrik is probably still inside the terminal housing. Somewhere above, Zevra is establishing contact with a data broker who does not know they are about to become an asset of an official investigative division. The Bridge glows through every outer viewport, patient and enormous and finally, at last, doing the thing it was designed for.

The woman who arrived here afraid of being invisible stepped off a transport and into a political catastrophe and stayed anyway.

She is not who I am anymore.

I am what happened after.

And Orpheus Station—damaged, suspicious, cautiously and stubbornly trying—is where that happened.

It is, I find, exactly where I want to be.

CHAPTER 30

KHELTOR

Months after the Bridge crisis, Orpheus Station smells like food stalls and construction and the particular tension of people learning to share space with people they once considered enemies.

The main corridor on the residential level has been rebuilt with new plating over the damage from the lower-sector collapse, and someone has installed market stalls along the widened section—Coalition textile merchants beside an Alliance-aligned equipment dealer beside a Pi'rell food vendor whose stall draws a mixed crowd every morning. The crowd argues about prices in three languages and leaves having purchased things from each other, which is not peace exactly, but is the infrastructure peace is built from.

I walk through it on my morning security assessment and nobody moves out of my way the way they once did.

Some of them nod. A few speak. A Shorcu researcher I recognize from the Bridge archive team gives me a formal gesture of acknowledgment that, Zevra has since informed me, means something closer tohonored colleaguethan the station personnel directory translation suggests.

I have adapted to this.

It took longer than I expected.

My office is not a military command center. It is a station security operations room that reports to Commander Vos and to the new cross-faction oversight council rather than to Alliance command. My authority comes from the station's trust rather than from a rank structure, which is a different kind of authority entirely and requires different maintenance.