Page 43 of Big Bad Red Protector

I find I am suited to it in ways the Alliance never used.

Rennek runs the morning briefing with the efficiency of an officer who has been doing this long enough to know which details I need and which I will find myself. The briefing covers overnight patrol incidents—three, none serious—an incoming diplomatic transport from the outer Coalition systems, and a flagged access attempt on the Bridge archive perimeter that Zevra's monitoring system caught and traced before it completed.

"Zevra's note on the access attempt says, and I am quoting directly," Rennek says, with the neutral discipline of someone trained to deliver Zevra's messages without editorializing, "'traced, documented, and the party responsible now owes me a favor they don't know about yet.'"

"Tell her to file the documentation through official channels and keep the favor."

"She anticipated that response and says the favor is more valuable."

"She is correct," I say. "File it anyway."

Nina is presenting to the joint archive commission when I find her at midmorning—a mixed gathering of Alliance scientists, Coalition religious scholars, and three independent researchers whose institutional affiliations are complicated and whose interest in Precursor technology is genuine. She is standing at the front of the room with a data display behind her and the expression she gets when she is explaining somethingimportant to people who need to understand it correctly and are not making that easy.

She is not polished. She is never polished. She interrupts herself when she notices a flaw in her own framing and corrects it without apology, and when one of the Coalition scholars asks a challenging question she saysthat's a good point, let me reviserather than defending the original position.

The room trusts her because she does not perform certainty she does not have.

Across six months, the station has learned what I understood early: Nina Torres is more competent than she looks, more determined than she announces, and considerably more dangerous to comfortable assumptions than anyone expects from someone her size.

I stay at the door until the session ends.

She finds me afterward with quiet efficiency, as if she had known I was there all along.

"How long?" she asks.

"The last twenty minutes."

"The Coalition scholar's question was legitimate. I should have addressed the archive access stratification earlier in the presentation."

"You addressed it when it was raised," I say. "That is sufficient."

She considers this with the expression that means she is filing my assessment alongside other data and will reach her own conclusion in her own time, which is the most Nina Torres response available.

Our quarters are on the station's outer ring, chosen because the viewport faces the Bridge.

Six months of shared occupancy has produced an environment that reflects two people who are nothing alike and have decided this is acceptable: Nina's archive files on onesurface beside my patrol schematics on another, her collection of recovered Precursor notation fragments pinned above the work terminal beside the station defense maps I update weekly, the sleeping platform reconfigured from its original Vakutan specifications into something neither of us can fully claim credit for designing.

It is the most functional space I have occupied since academy training.

It is also, I have concluded, home.

Nina makes tea using the small preparation unit Orrik installed three months ago as a gift that was allegedly not a gift, and she brings two cups to the viewport and hands me one without asking whether I want it, because in six months she has correctly identified that I always want it and will not say so unprompted.

"Zevra flagged another access attempt on the archive perimeter," I say.

"I heard. She's thrilled."

"She is using it as professional currency."

"That's basically how Zevra shows affection." Nina stands beside me at the viewport, both hands around her cup. "Orrik wants to expand the maintenance access to the lower Bridge research levels. He says the current routing is inefficient and also he would like to see what else is down there."

"The answer to both concerns is the same," I say.

"Supervised access with full documentation," she says, at the same moment I say it. She smiles, which she does more often now and which I have stopped trying to manage my reaction to.

The Bridge fills the viewport before us—the same structure that has hung beyond this station for as long as the station has existed, the same ancient geometry that the extremists tried to weaponize and Nina redirected into something it was actuallybuilt for. Its glow carries a different quality now than it did when I first arrived on Orpheus Station. Less ominous. More present.

The old Vakutan settlers who first mapped this region called nine-heart formations in deep space—those rare clusters where nine distinct systems share gravitational relationship—the places that hold.The name caught in the station's early records and never left. Nine Hearts, where things stay because the pull between them is strong enough.