Chen's workbench looked like the aftermath of a surgery performed by someone who'd lost their medical license for good reasons.
Scanner housings lay split open, their guts exposed — circuit boards, frequency modulators, antenna arrays designed to read geological formations down to a depth of six hundred meters. Standard Reaper equipment. Issued to every extraction squad for pre-drill site assessment. The kind of gear that Strategic Oversight's auditors could identify in their sleep.
Chen wasn't changing what the scanners did. He was changing what they listened for.
"Okay, so... the principle is simple." He held up a frequency modulator the size of his thumb, its copper contacts gleaming under the workbench light. "A standard geological scanner operates on a narrow electromagnetic band — tuned for mineral density, subsurface formations, water tables. Useful stuff. But narrow. Like listening to one radio station when there are a hundred broadcasting."
Yuki leaned against the doorframe of his lab. "And you're widening the band."
"I'm adding a second receiver inside the primary housing. Piggyback circuit. When the scanner runs its normal geological sweep, the secondary receiver will simultaneously sample the full electromagnetic spectrum. Gravitational fluctuations, tachyon residue, the specific quantum signature that wormhole apertures leave in local spacetime." Chen slotted the modulator into the scanner's housing with a precision that made his fingers look like they belonged to a different person than the one who stammered through debriefs. "If there's a second wormhole on Haven — a portal not controlled by the Reaper Program — it'll be generating a gravitational signature distinct from ours. Different frequency, different harmonics. Like hearing two people hum different notes in the same room."
"And the auditors?"
"The modification is entirely internal. Externally, the scanner looks stock — same housing, same power draw, same interface. The secondary receiver piggybacks on the primary's power supply and stores its data in a partitioned sector of the onboard memory that doesn't show up in standard diagnostics." Chen sealed the housing and held up the reassembled scanner. It looked exactly like the one sitting next to it on the workbench — identical weight, identical markings, identical scratches from thirty-eight missions of field use. "Vance's woman could take this apart and she'd need to know exactly what she was looking for to spot the mod. And she won't know, because nobody's ever built one before."
"You're sure about that?"
"Mostly sure." He almost smiled. "Ninety-two percent sure. Which is the best I can offer on twenty hours' work with salvaged components."
Yuki picked up the scanner, turned it in her hands. The weight was right. The balance was right. The power indicator blinked green, steady, normal. Nothing about it said *this is a device designed to detect evidence of a conspiracy that goes to the highest levels of the Reaper Program.*
"How many can you make?"
"Three. I need one geological scanner to stay stock — if every unit in our kit has been modified and someone does a deep audit, they'll notice. Three modified, one clean." Chen was already reaching for the next housing. "I'll have them done by 0400."
"Sleep, Chen."
"Sleep is for people who aren't building equipment to expose government corruption." He cracked the housing open and started working. His fingers moved with the focused urgency of someone who'd found the thing they were made for and wasn't about to let something as ordinary as exhaustion take it away.
Yuki left him to it. In the corridor outside, the station's overhead lights buzzed at a frequency she'd never noticed before — or maybe she had, and it hadn't mattered until now. Until everything on this station had become a question she needed answered.
---
Santos knew three people on Orbital Station Prime who could get her things that weren't supposed to be gotten.
The first was Dmitri Volkov, a Ukrainian sanitation worker who'd spent twenty years in the station's waste processing department and had never once been noticed by anyone with rank above E-4. Dmitri moved through the station like plumbing — essential, invisible, connected to everything. He had access to every storage section, every maintenance corridor, every trash compactor where misrouted supplies occasionally ended up "damaged" and were written off the inventory.
She found him in the tertiary recycling bay at 2200 hours, elbow-deep in a disassembled water filtration unit.
"Dmitri."
He looked up. His face was a geography of wrinkles and chemical burns, the face of a man who'd spent two decades breathing processed air and handling things the station's designers hadn't intended for human contact. "Santos. Heard you were back."
"News travels."
"In the pipes, everything travels." He wiped his hands on a rag that was dirtier than what he was cleaning off. "You need something."
It wasn't a question. Santos didn't visit the recycling bay for the ambiance.
"Ammunition. 7.62 standard, as much as you can get. Pulse rifle power cells — the Mark IV type, compatible with our field weapons. And if you can find any M72 anti-material charges, I won't say no."
Dmitri's eyebrows climbed. "Anti-material charges. For an extraction mission."
"For whatever the extraction mission turns into."
He studied her. Dmitri had survived twenty years on the station by reading people the way other men read schematics — looking for the stress fractures, the load-bearing walls, the points where pressure would cause a collapse. Santos didn't know what he saw when he looked at her, but whatever it was made him nod.
"The 7.62 I can do. Four hundred rounds. The power cells, maybe six if I pull from the maintenance reserve — they keep backups for the station's security detail, and security hasn't done a proper inventory since the last audit cycle." He paused. "Anti-material charges are harder. Those are tracked by serial number."
"Then don't worry about it."
"I didn't say impossible. I said harder." A thin smile crossed his face — the expression of a man who'd made an art form out of making things appear and disappear in a system that thought it was watching. "Give me until 0300. Drop point is locker fourteen in maintenance corridor C-seven. The combination hasn't changed."
Santos pulled a sealed packet from her vest pocket and set it on the filtration unit. Inside: three months' worth of commissary credits, transferred to a physical chip that couldn't be traced digitally. The currency of the invisible economy that ran beneath the station's official systems — the economy of janitors, pipe fitters, recycling technicians, and the other people who kept eight hundred million humans alive while being paid in contempt.
Dmitri palmed the packet without looking at it. "Be careful, Santos."
"Mano, careful is the only thing I know how to be."
He laughed. It was a sound like something caught in a drain. "That's the biggest lie I've heard all week, and I work with the plumbing crews."
She left the recycling bay and headed for the maintenance corridors that connected the station's lower decks — the corridors that didn't appear on the public schematics, that smelled like coolant and ozone, that were used by the people who kept the station breathing so the people who ran the station could pretend the breathing happened by itself.
Her second contact was a supply clerk named Adaora who worked the night shift in the quartermaster's office and owed Santos a favor that went back three years to a very bad night involving a security patrol and a quantity of contraband medication that had been destined for families in the residential blocks who couldn't afford the official pharmacies.
Santos pulled up a terminal in an empty corridor and typed a message using the station's internal maintenance network — a system so old and so low-priority that nobody in Intelligence had bothered to monitor it.
*A — Need field rations x30, extra water purification tabs x50, climbing gear (2 sets), signal flares (non-standard, commercial grade). Drop to C-7-14 before 0400. Same arrangement as last time. — S*
The response came in four minutes: *Done. Be safe.*
Santos leaned against the corridor wall and stared at the ceiling. The pipes above her carried water, waste, processed air, and the quiet labor of people like Dmitri and Adaora — people who would never file a mission report or receive a commendation or have their names attached to the word "hero." People who kept things moving because things needed to move, and somebody had to do it.
In the favela, you survived because of people like that. Not the bosses. Not the politicians. Not the men with guns who told you they were protecting you. The ones who survived were the ones who knew the plumber, the electrician, the woman who ran the kitchen that fed thirty families on what the restaurants threw away.
The Reaper Program thought power lived in command offices and wormhole bays and Director-level authorization codes.
Santos knew better. Power lived in locker fourteen.
---
Doc laid out his medical kit on his bunk and started taking inventory.
Standard Reaper field medical kit, Type III: two tourniquets, hemostatic gauze, chest seals, nasopharyngeal airways, combat bandages, IV kit with two bags of saline, morphine auto-injectors (three), broad-spectrum antibiotics, antiparasitic tablets rated for Haven's known biological threats. Enough to keep someone alive for six hours in the field, assuming the thing trying to kill them stopped after the first attempt.
Doc added to the pile.
From his personal stores — the supplies he'd accumulated over thirty-eight missions of trading favors with other medics, making friends in the station's medical bay, and occasionally liberating items from supply rooms that had been marked for surplus disposal — he pulled:
Extra hemostatic agents. Four additional tourniquets. A portable blood typing kit. Two units of synthetic plasma. A surgical kit with scalpel, retractors, and suture material that wasn't in any field medic's standard loadout because the Reaper Program didn't expect its medics to perform surgery in the field. The Reaper Program expected its casualties to die or wait for evac.
Doc didn't operate on expectations.
He pulled one more item from the bottom of his locker. A sealed case, gray plastic, the size of a paperback book. He opened it and checked the contents: potassium iodide tablets, chelation therapy capsules, and a radiation dosimeter calibrated for the specific type of ionizing exposure associated with early-generation wormhole technology.
The case wasn't for him. It wasn't for any of the squad's standard operational hazards. It was for Viktor.
Doc didn't know about Viktor's radiation poisoning — not officially, not in words. Viktor hadn't told him. But Doc had been watching Viktor's decline for six months with the diagnostic eye of a man who'd trained in military medicine before the Reapers, who'd studied radiation sickness as part of his xenobiology coursework, and who recognized the constellation of symptoms — the progressive cough, the bloodshot eyes, the fatigue that no amount of rest corrected — for what they were.
He couldn't bring it up. Viktor's medical file was Viktor's business, and the old Russian had made it clear through decades of body language that his body was his own territory, not to be invaded by concern.
But Doc could pack extra supplies. Could make sure the right medications were within reach if the situation demanded it. Could prepare for the worst because that was the only honest thing a medic could do — look at the world as it was, not as he wished it were, and bring gauze.
He sealed the case and slid it into the bottom of his field pack, beneath the standard kit where an auditor's quick inspection would find nothing unusual.
Then he sat on his bunk and looked at his hands.
Thirty-eight missions. Forty-three casualties he'd treated. Eleven deaths he'd witnessed. One — Kowalski — he'd failed to prevent.
"When, not if," he said to the empty room. A mantra. A promise to nobody and everyone. "When, not if."
He packed the kit and started writing a triage protocol for scenarios that standard Reaper medical training didn't cover. Not because he expected them. Because expecting them was the only thing standing between his hands and the kind of stillness they'd found after Kowalski.
---
Ghost spread the topographical maps across Yuki's bunk because his quarters didn't have enough floor space for paper larger than a dinner plate.
Haven's southern continent, rendered in the contour lines and elevation markers of ARAD's orbital survey system. Standard issue. The same maps every extraction squad received during pre-mission briefing, generated from satellite data that was supposed to be comprehensive.
Ghost had learned thirty years ago that "supposed to be" and "was" occupied different countries.
"Our new extraction site is here." He tapped a point on the map — Grid 774-S, Secondary Site, twenty kilometers south of their previous deployment. Mountain terrain, similar elevation, surrounded by the same fern forests and river systems they'd navigated on mission thirty-eight. "The geological survey says titanium-beryllium, subsurface, same formation type as last time."
"Same formation. Same pre-mining?" Yuki asked.
"Probably. But that's Chen's department." Ghost's finger moved south along the map, tracing the terrain. "I've been looking at what's around the site. Everything within a fifty-kilometer radius."
"And?"
His finger stopped. Fifteen kilometers south-southwest of the extraction site, in an area the map labeled as "unserveyed terrain — resolution insufficient for geological assessment." A gap in the data. On the map, it appeared as a roughly circular depression in the terrain — lower elevation than the surrounding mountains, approximately three kilometers in diameter, ringed by ridge lines that would make it invisible from ground level in any direction.
"This."
Yuki looked at the depression. On a standard topographical map, it could be anything — a caldera from ancient volcanic activity, a sinkhole, a natural basin formed by erosion over geological time. Haven's surface was pockmarked with similar features. Nothing unusual.
"What am I looking at?"
"The absence of data." Ghost pulled a second map from the stack — an older survey, dated eighteen months prior. Same region, same satellite source, but from a different imaging pass. On this map, the depression wasn't a gap. It had full topographical detail, complete with elevation markers, drainage patterns, and vegetation density readings.
And it didn't look like a natural formation.
"See the edges?" Ghost traced the depression's rim on the older map. "Too regular. Natural calderas have asymmetric walls — erosion, collapse, geological shifting over time. This one is almost circular. And the floor..." He pointed to the elevation markers inside the depression. "Flat. Artificially flat. Two meters of variance across a three-kilometer span. That doesn't happen in nature."
"Could be a dry lakebed."
"Could be. But lakebeds on Haven show sediment layering on orbital imaging. This shows uniform surface composition." Ghost set the older map down and placed the newer one on top. "And then, eighteen months ago, the imaging data for this location was replaced with 'insufficient resolution.' The satellites didn't stop working. The data was removed."
"By who?"
"By whoever controls the ARAD survey database." Ghost's eyes met hers. Flat. Precise. The eyes of a man who had spent a career looking through a scope and had learned to see things that wanted to stay hidden. "Vance's office has edit access to the survey archives. I checked."
Yuki stared at the depression on the older map. Three kilometers across. Artificially flat. Data scrubbed from the current surveys. Fifteen kilometers from the extraction site command had just assigned them to — the extraction site that had been approved in four minutes with Vance's personal countersignature.
"If they're running a private mining operation," Ghost said, "they need infrastructure. Processing equipment, storage, transport access to their own wormhole. You can't hide that kind of operation in the open. But in a three-kilometer depression, surrounded by ridgelines, invisible from ground level..."
"You could hide a lot."
"You could hide everything."
Ghost rolled the older map and slid it into a tube that looked identical to the standard map cases issued for field operations. It wasn't. The tube had a secondary compartment Chen had built into the lining — big enough for the map and Ghost's field notes, sealed against moisture and electromagnetic scanning.
"I'll navigate us south during the extraction," Ghost said. "Standard reconnaissance protocols. If anyone asks, I was scouting for fauna threats along the southern perimeter."
"And if the depression is what we think it is?"
Ghost didn't answer right away. He was packing the standard maps — the official ones, the ones that showed a data gap where a hidden facility might be — into the regular case with the careful precision of a man who understood that what you showed people mattered less than what you didn't.
"Then we have our evidence," he said. "And whoever's been running this operation has their first real problem."
---
Viktor found Yuki in the observation corridor at 0100 hours.
It was the only section of Orbital Station Prime where you could see outside without a screen or a filter — a stretch of reinforced transparisteel that ran along the station's dorsal spine, offering a view of Earth that nobody ever called beautiful anymore. The planet hung in the void like a bruised eye, its surface mottled with the brown of dead oceans, the gray of ash clouds, and the occasional flicker of lightning storms that burned across the remains of what used to be South America.
Yuki came here when she needed to remember what they were doing and why.
Viktor came here because he was Russian, and Russians, he claimed, were constitutionally incapable of avoiding uncomfortable truths.
He stood beside her. They watched Earth turn for a minute without speaking. The planet didn't care that they were watching. It had stopped caring about anything a long time ago.
"Sergeant."
"Viktor."
"I spoke with the medical bay yesterday. A follow-up from the post-mission screening."
Yuki kept her eyes on the planet. "And?"
"My bloodwork is abnormal." He said it the way he said everything — with the deliberate precision of a man who had chosen his words the way a sapper chose where to step. "The doctor used the phrase 'significant markers.' He recommended further testing. A full panel. He gave me thirty days before the screening becomes mandatory."
"Thirty days."
"Da. After which the results go into my official record and the program's medical review board makes decisions about my deployment status."
Yuki turned to face him. In the observation corridor's dim lighting, Viktor looked his age in a way he rarely did — the lines in his face deeper, the shadows under his eyes darker, the slight stoop in his shoulders visible without the combat vest to square them. He was sixty-one years old. He had been a soldier for thirty-nine of those years. He had walked through wormholes before the Reaper Program had a name.
"How abnormal?"
"The doctor's face told me more than his words. He was gentle. Doctors are gentle when the news is bad." Viktor's jaw tightened. "I do not know the specifics. He said the panel would determine more. I chose not to ask what he suspected, because I do not want his suspicion in my head when there is work to do."
A lie. Yuki recognized it because she'd told enough of them — the lies you construct for people who know you well enough to see the construction and respect you enough not to point at the scaffolding. Viktor knew what was wrong with him. He'd known for months, probably longer. But he was offering her plausible deniability, and she was taking it.
"You're going on this mission."
"That was not a question."
"No."
Viktor turned back to the window. Earth rotated below, indifferent.
"In thirty years of service, I have never withdrawn from a deployment. I have marched with broken ribs. I have fought with a fever that would have put a civilian in hospital for a week. I carried a man twice my size through seven kilometers of Ashworld terrain with a torn hamstring." He paused. "I am not telling you this because I want you to be impressed. I am telling you because you need to understand — this body obeys me. Not doctors. Not medical review boards. Not whatever is happening inside my blood. Me."
"I understand."
"Do you? Because when we are on Haven and I am slower than I should be, or my breathing is worse than it was, or I cough at a moment when coughing could give away our position — I need you to treat me like a soldier, not a patient. If I become a liability, you tell me. You do not protect me from the truth."
"Have I ever?"
The ghost of something crossed Viktor's face — not a smile, exactly, but the place where a smile would have been if Viktor had been the kind of man who let them land.
"No. You have not. This is why I am telling you and not Doc."
They stood in the observation corridor for another minute. Earth burned and froze and died below them, and two soldiers watched it happen with the detached familiarity of people who had been watching it happen their entire lives.
"*Doveryai, no proveryai,*" Yuki said.
Viktor's eyebrows rose. "Your pronunciation is terrible."
"I learned it from a Russian who mumbles."
"I do not mumble. I conserve energy for moments of importance." He pushed off the railing. "Get some rest, Sergeant. Tomorrow we walk through a hole in the universe to look for things that powerful people have spent considerable effort hiding. I suggest we be alert for it."
He walked down the corridor — his gait steady, his back straight, his body obeying him the way it had for sixty-one years through sheer force of a will that had outlasted regimes and wars and the slow death of a planet.
His cough echoed off the transparisteel once he was around the corner. He thought she couldn't hear it.
She could.
---
Hargrove was in the corridor outside the quartermaster's office at 0630.
Yuki was on her way to the armory for the squad's official weapons draw. The corridor was busy — shift change, personnel moving between sections, the organized chaos of a military installation waking up. She almost didn't see him.
But she did. And he saw her.
He was carrying a stack of supply requisitions — standard administrative burden, the kind of paperwork that a logistics officer handled by the cubic meter. He wore the same reading glasses. The same mild expression. The same look of overworked competence that had made her trust him two days ago.
Two days. Forty-eight hours between trusting someone and watching a security sweep tear through your quarters looking for evidence of the conversation you'd had with him.
Their eyes met. The corridor traffic flowed around them like water around stones. Neither of them stopped walking. Neither of them spoke.
But something happened in Hargrove's face as they passed — a flicker, a micro-expression that lived and died in the space between two footsteps. Not guilt. Yuki had studied guilt in thirty-eight missions of sending people into danger and watching the ones who came back deal with the weight of the ones who didn't. This wasn't guilt.
It was something closer to desperation. The expression of a man standing in a room he couldn't leave, doing things he couldn't refuse, with no way to tell the person walking past him that the walls were closing in on both of them.
Or maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was a bureaucrat's mild discomfort at seeing someone he'd informed on. Maybe Yuki was reading into a flicker of eye contact the way a person lost in the desert reads water into every shimmer on the horizon.
She walked past. He walked past. The corridor swallowed them both.
But the expression stayed with her — nagging, uncomfortable, filed in the same mental drawer where she kept things that didn't have answers yet. Hargrove had reported her. That was fact. But the question of whether he'd done it willingly, eagerly, or with a hand on his back pushing him toward a terminal he didn't want to use — that question was open.
And Yuki had learned on thirty-eight missions that open questions, left unresolved, had a way of becoming the thing that killed you.
---
The wormhole bay was a cathedral built for a god that didn't exist yet.
Two hundred meters long, eighty meters wide, with a ceiling that arched sixty meters above the floor in a curve designed to contain the electromagnetic discharge of a stabilized Einstein-Rosen bridge. The bay's walls were lined with dampening arrays — massive rectangular panels that absorbed the gravitational fluctuations a wormhole generated during activation. The floor was reinforced tungsten-carbide composite, scored with the burn marks of a thousand portal openings.
At the bay's center stood the activation platform — a circular stage twenty meters in diameter, ringed by control stations where technicians monitored the seventeen thousand variables that determined whether a portal opened cleanly or collapsed into a gravitational anomaly that would turn everything within fifty meters into a compressed sphere of matter the size of a basketball.
Squad Specter stood on the platform at 0555 hours. Full combat loadout.
Yuki wore her tactical vest over standard fatigues, pulse rifle slung across her chest, sidearm on her hip. The vest's pockets held ammunition, field rations, a first-aid kit, and Chen's modified scanner in a case that looked identical to its standard-issue counterpart. On her back, a field pack with forty-eight hours of supplies, climbing gear, and a map tube containing Ghost's official topographical charts. In a secondary compartment that wasn't in the original pack's design specifications — Chen's work again — a second map tube held the older survey with the scrubbed depression marked in Ghost's careful hand.
Santos carried the machine gun like it was part of her skeleton. Her ammunition load was heavier than official allocation by four hundred rounds — the extra belts packed into an oversized cargo pouch that she'd told the armory clerk was "for supplemental field samples." The clerk hadn't questioned it. Santos had a way of making questions feel unnecessary. Her vest also held three extra fragmentation grenades that hadn't come from the armory, courtesy of Dmitri's midnight logistics.
Viktor's assault rifle rested in his hands with the familiarity of a limb. His pack was lighter than the others — a concession to the body he'd ordered to obey that was beginning to negotiate its terms. He'd compensated by carrying extra water and ammunition in his vest pockets, distributing weight where his torso could handle it instead of loading his shoulders.
Ghost stood apart from the group, his sniper rifle in its padded case slung diagonally across his back. He looked like he was staring at nothing. He was actually measuring the bay's dimensions, the positions of the technicians, the locations of the security cameras — the automatic threat assessment of a man who had spent thirty years identifying every exit from every room he entered.
Chen had three scanner cases clipped to his vest — three modified, one clean, exactly as planned. His field tablet was in a waterproof pouch on his left hip, preloaded with analysis software he'd written overnight. His eyes were bloodshot from no sleep and bright in a way that had nothing to do with caffeine.
Doc's field pack was the heaviest in the squad. He didn't complain. He never complained about the weight. The weight was the point — every gram was a tool that might keep someone breathing, and Doc had decided in an empty room two days ago that breathing was the hill he was dying on.
Osei and Park stood together. Civilian mining technicians, not soldiers, wearing light armor and carrying sidearms they'd been qualified on but had never fired in anger. Their faces were drawn. Their hands were steady. They'd survived a canyon full of stalkers and lost a colleague on the last mission. Whatever Haven threw at them this time, they'd already met worse.
"Specter Squad, stand by for portal activation." The bay controller's voice echoed through the space. "T-minus five minutes. Final equipment check."
Yuki did a visual sweep. Every face, every weapon, every piece of gear. A squad that had been through thirty-eight extractions together, packing for two missions that nobody outside this group knew about. The official mission — extraction, titanium-beryllium, standard operation. The real mission — find the private mining operation, document everything, bring home evidence that couldn't be denied, deleted, or explained away.
The activation platform hummed beneath their boots. The dampening arrays on the walls began cycling — a low, rhythmic pulse that Yuki felt in her sternum, in the plates of her skull, in the fillings of her teeth. Standard pre-activation sequence. She'd felt it thirty-seven times before.
"T-minus three minutes."
The bay's lighting dimmed. Standard procedure — the electromagnetic output of a forming wormhole could interfere with standard lighting systems, and the activation sequence required the dampening arrays to operate at full capacity. The bay fell into a blue-gray twilight, broken only by the green glow of the control stations and the amber indicators on the dampening panels.
"T-minus one minute."
The air changed. Pressure dropped — subtle, barely perceptible, but Yuki's ears popped the way they did on descent through an alien atmosphere. Ozone smell. Metallic taste on the tongue. The pre-activation ionization that meant a hole in the fabric of spacetime was about to open ten meters in front of her.
"Activation."
Light. Not the clean blue-white shimmer Yuki knew from thirty-seven previous deployments. This was different. The portal bloomed from the center of the activation platform like a wound opening in the air — the edges sharp, the interior a swirl of color and distortion that bent the bay behind it into shapes that didn't belong in Euclidean space. But the shimmer was wrong.
Blue-white was normal. This was blue-violet. The spectral shift was subtle — close enough to standard that a casual observer might not register it, the way a note played slightly flat sounds almost right until you compare it to the correct pitch. But Yuki had stepped through thirty-seven portals. She knew the color the way she knew her own pulse.
This wasn't it.
Chen appeared at her shoulder. His face was pale in the wormhole's violet light. His lips barely moved.
"The frequency is different. Gravitational harmonics are shifted point-three on the Mueller scale. Standard deviation for a Haven portal is point-zero-five." His eyes were fixed on the shimmering surface. "This isn't the same portal as last time."
The bay controller's voice, oblivious: "Portal stable. Specter Squad, you are cleared for transit. Mission clock starts on crossing."
The wormhole pulsed. Violet light washed across the squad's faces — across Santos's clenched jaw and Ghost's expressionless mask and Viktor's steady eyes and Doc's white-knuckled grip on his pack straps and Chen's trembling hands and Osei and Park standing side by side with the brittle courage of people who had already decided that forward was the only direction left.
Yuki looked at the portal. A different frequency. A different harmonic. A hole in the universe that wasn't the one command said it was, opening to a world where someone else's boots had already left prints and someone else's drills had already gutted the deposits they were being sent to mine.
She stepped through first. Because that was what sergeants did — they went first, into whatever was waiting, so the people behind them could see that it was survivable.
Or at least that someone was willing to find out.
