Page 8 of Big Bad Red Protector

The catwalk disappears.

In its place: a city made of light and curved stone, impossibly tall, filled with people who are not entirely human but almost—walking beside Vakutans, beside nameless creatures, in a sky lit by two stars instead of one. Then the stars begin to collapse inward, slow and terrible and certain, and the city fractures at its base, and thousands of figures scatter outward in beams of light across a blackness so deep I feel the scale of it in my chest like a physical weight?—

The railing catches me because my hands grab it on instinct before my legs finish failing.

Then I'm on my knees on the catwalk with my face against the cold metal barrier and the transit corridor is below me again and my skull is splitting behind my eyes.

"Torres." Not Orrik's voice. Lower. Kheltor's hand closes around my arm before I understand he is there, pulling me back from the edge with a grip that is controlled and completely inflexible. "Don't move."

"I'm not—I'm fine?—"

"You are not fine." He doesn't release me. He doesn't look at me, either; his attention is on the panel mounted to the catwalk support strut, where three indicator lights that should read green are reading a frequency I have never seen on a standard station sensor display.

Orrik is two steps behind Kheltor, silent for possibly the first time since I met him.

"The sensors—" I start.

"I see them." Kheltor's voice is stripped of expression. He is reading the frequency readout with the focused attention of someone encountering a threat they don't have a category for. "What did you feel?"

"I don't know how to describe it."

"Try."

"A city. Stars collapsing. People moving outward—humans and others together. It felt—" I stop, because the word that wants to come out isancient,and that is not a sensation. "It felt like a memory that doesn't belong to me."

The sensor panel pulses again. Same anomalous frequency. Same timing as whatever just happened behind my eyes.

Kheltor goes quiet long enough that the sensor hum becomes the loudest thing on the catwalk. Then he stands and does not tell me he is leaving.

He tells Orrik, in a tone that closes the subject permanently, that he will be escorting me back to my quarters personally and that Orrik should file a maintenance fault report for the sensor panel before anyone else comes to investigate the reading.

"What are you going to do with the sensor data?" I ask.

"Analyze it." He does not offer anything further.

We move back along the catwalk in silence, and I watch the Bridge through the viewport panels as we go—lit from within, massive, impossibly patient.

The sensor frequency pulsed in exact alignment with my vision. Not before. Not after.

The Bridge did not simply affect me.

It answered me.

CHAPTER 6

KHELTOR

Vos delivers the assignment with his decision already made before I enter the room.

"She has customs clearance, active access to copied records security cannot officially hold, and a documented Bridge reaction your own sensor logs confirm." He does not look up from his desk. "The investigation needs her."

"The investigation needs someone trained to survive it," I say. "Torres has been aboard this station for less than two days. She has no combat experience, no clearance for restricted security operations, and a documented tendency to challenge authority at the worst possible moment."

"Yes." Vos folds his hands. "She also found the seal discrepancy in bay nine before your officers did, traced the ghost routing through sublevel seven archives while your division was still processing the manifest anomalies, and walked out of an ambush in the criminal underlevels with evidence in her hands." He finally looks up. "I'm not asking you to like her. I'm telling you she is assigned to this investigation, and you will work with her or I will find a security commander who will."

The silence that follows is not agreement. It is the space between knowing an argument is already lost and deciding not to waste further resources on it.

The morning's new incident report is waiting on my console when I return to security command. Diplomat Renn Ovar, Alliance trade liaison, has not reported for his scheduled 0600 meeting. His personal communicator is offline. His quarters show no signs of occupation since the previous night. The Coalition representative assigned to the same trade committee has already filed a formal complaint accusing Alliance security of deliberate obstruction, and the Alliance attaché has responded by demanding Coalition personnel records for the past two weeks.