Page 34 of Alien Devil’s Crown

“Gallery clear,” Brevan. “The delegation legend has roughly two minutes left and I intend to use them.”

“Route’s live,” Kallum reported from the next service landing.

Above us, through three levels of stone and blast plating, the building changed state. You could feel it more than hear it, a series of distant concussions descending floor by floor, blast doors finding their frames after decades of standing open, the Spire sealing section by section.

Every closed door put another barrier between us and the landing bay.

“Varrick. Report.”

“Working.” Three seconds of keys. “It’s not the vault. Nothing in there tripped. It’s us, it’s the credentials.” Another burst of keys, and then Varrick said a word Sabine presumably made him apologize for later.

“Biometric re-verification sweep. Routine, randomized. It hit a deep node that took the emergency baseline yesterday and re-read one of our forged sets against it. Checksum mismatch. That node is isolated from the mezzanine hub; I can’t rewrite it from here, and suppressing its query would alarm on silence.”

“The rollout,” Lika said. She was already packing cores, no wasted motion. “Day one.” Her voice held no apology and I’d have discarded one anyway. “I told you there’d be surprises. I’d hoped for a smaller one.”

“Could anyone have caught it?”

“Not from outside.”

“Varrick. Confirm.”

“Confirmed.” Keys, fast. “The node took yesterday’s maintenance package.”

“Can you kill it?”

“I can argue with it.” Varrick’s voice ran flat and fast, the register he saves for real trouble.

“I’m feeding it reconciliation errors, telling it the mismatch is its own corruption. It half believes me. That buys minutes, not hours. Lockdown’s already cascading, blast doors sealing by level, garrison board just went from all quiet to full mobilization.”

The lockdown was advancing while we talked. I needed the transfer figures.

“Transfer status.”

“Thirty-eight percent,” Lika said.

“Time to complete?”

“Fourteen minutes.”

“Time before the main reinforcement reaches this level?”

“Six,” Varrick said. “Eight if the freight lift lies for you one more time. Local security is already coming down on Zarek.”

Zarek’s rifle fired in short, exact bursts at the vault entrance. Over it came Bronwen’s laughter, getting closer. Trouble was coming down the corridor.

“Numbers,” I said to the corridor.

“First squad’s down,” Zarek reported, flat, between bursts. “Second’s learning from their example. They’re not trying hard yet. They don’t know what’s in here. When somebody upstairs tells them, they’ll try hard.”

“They’ll try beautifully,” Bronwen said, and her laugh came again, closer still.

“Hold the door, don’t get yourselves killed holding it. We’re leaving inside four minutes.”

“Then we’re leaving inside four minutes,” Zarek said, and there was a sound down the corridor that I have learned not to inquire into. The rifle fire stopped for eleven seconds and resumed farther away.

“Talon, begin the extraction approach. Status.”

“Burning in. We’re clear of the drift. Air defense is waking up in layers. Ninety-second windows at the bay, no more.” A pause, and then Talon’s voice did the thing it does when he’s already forgiven me for something.