Page 5 of Big Bad Red Protector

It's not a question. He already knows. Whatever access Kheltor has to this station's systems, it apparently includes customs incident flags.

"My supervisor closed it," I say.

"Your supervisor is afraid of political consequences." He says it without contempt, as a simple calculation. "The records you found are not the only irregularity tied to Sareth's transport. I need the docking log terminal in sublevel seven verified in person. The system access request has been held for two days by people who do not want it answered." His gaze is steady and entirely without warmth. "Your clearance covers docking log review. Mine covers security access to the sublevel."

The wordscome with meare nowhere in that statement. The instruction is inside all of it.

"You could use another customs officer."

"I could." He turns toward the junction corridor. "You already have the copied records."

He knows about the copy. Of course he does.

I follow him.

The lower sectors of Orpheus Station are a different environment entirely. The main corridors are maintained for diplomatic traffic—climate controlled, well-lit, policed. The sublevels were built for cargo movement and maintenance access and have been accumulating everything else in the years since. The lighting is functional and ugly. The air carries metal, coolant, and something organic I choose not to identify. Workers from six different species move through the wider passages with the practiced economy of people who have memorized every blind spot.

Twice in the first corridor, Kheltor shifts his position without comment. Once when a knot of Odex surges through too fast and too close, moving the way the horde always moves—en masse, churning, indifferent to anything in its path, and once when a human man in unmarked station gear lingers at a junction with no legitimate reason. Kheltor's body simply occupies more space in those moments—between the threat and me—without acknowledgment or announcement. He doesn't check whether I noticed.

I notice.

I tell myself it's tactical. A trained security officer managing his environment. I would do the same with a civilian asset I was responsible for not losing in a hostile sector.

The sublevel seven log terminal is in a narrow alcove behind a cargo routing hub. Kheltor keys us past the security barrier and I pull up the docking records for bay twelve on the night of Sareth's listed departure.

The maintenance lockdown record is still there, intact.

But beneath it, slotted into the docking sequence with the precision of someone who understood exactly how the archive layers work, is a second entry. A ghost record—logged under a ship registration that matches no vessel currently in Orpheus Station's traffic database, cleared through a customs code that belongs to a transport company I recognize.

The same company from bay nine's false manifest.

The same company whose vessels haven't operated in three years.

Whatever moved through this station in the hours Sareth disappeared, it wasn't just one diplomat and one cleaned container. The routes connect. The timing connects. Someone has been running the same operation through this station's blind spots for longer than anyone reported, using shell identities that should have collapsed under the first serious review.

“This was never only about Sareth,” I say quietly.

Kheltor is already copying the record. "No," he says. "It is not."

CHAPTER 4

KHELTOR

The criminal underlevels of Orpheus Station have their own logic.

It is not the logic of law or order or the careful diplomatic language that governs the upper corridors. It is the logic of corners—who controls them, who watches from them, who disappears around them and does not come back. I learned this logic years before I learned how to read a treaty. The lower sectors of every station in the Alliance operate by the same principles: movement means intention, stillness means surveillance, and every transaction is a debt until one party decides it isn't.

Nina Torres keeps pace behind me without being told to. I can hear her processing the environment—the particular quality of silence from someone cataloguing threats rather than simply experiencing fear. The corridor we're moving through branches off the main sublevel seven artery into unmaintained maintenance access routes the station's official schematics labelnon-operational. They are not non-operational. They are simply not the station's responsibility anymore, which suits the people who use them perfectly.

She steps over a broken coolant conduit without looking down. She is watching the alcoves.

"Stay close," I say. "Don't make eye contact with anyone at the stalls unless I address them first."

"Is that Vakutan custom or actual tactical advice?"

"Both," I say, and move forward before she can respond.

Zevra's current operation is located in a chamber that was probably a relay station three infrastructure generations ago. Now it is a pocket market for information, sliced data, and items that don't survive customs review—lit by salvaged bioluminescent strips that cast everything in green and cold white, staffed by two guards the size of cargo containers, and anchored by one Pi'rell woman who has made more credits selling other people's secrets than most merchants make selling legitimate goods.