Nobody spoke for eleven seconds after the radio went silent.
Yuki counted them. Eleven seconds. The static hiss filled the cargo bay and nobody moved. She watched the faces of the people she'd led through thirty-nine missions — the same calculation behind every pair of eyes, and none of it landing anywhere good.
Santos broke first. Not with words — with motion. She stood up from the cargo bay floor, her machine gun swinging on its sling, and drove her fist into the shuttle's bulkhead. The impact rang through the hull like a bell. She hit it again. The third time, Doc caught her wrist.
"You're going to break your hand."
"Good." Santos pulled free. But she didn't hit the wall again. She stood with her back to the squad, her shoulders rising and falling with the controlled breathing of a woman who was choosing between discipline and destruction and making the choice one breath at a time. "*Permanently reassigned.* She said it like she was transferring files. Moving us to a different folder. We're not people to her — we're line items."
"We've always been line items," Ghost said. His voice came through the hull from the rock rise — distant, tinny, stripped of everything except consonants and truth. "The only thing that changed is now we know which ledger we're in."
"So what?" Santos spun. "We go back? Walk onto the station, sit in her office, let her debrief us into a grave?" She pointed south, toward the treeline, toward the facility that sat beyond the forest like a tumor wrapped in corporate architecture. "We should hit the facility. Take it apart. Burn their records, destroy the wormhole, make sure what they built here dies on this planet."
"And then what?" Park's voice. Quiet. She was still in the pilot's seat, the borrowed rifle across her knees, her eyes on Santos with the flat attention of a woman who'd spent eight years flying shuttles into wormholes and understood the physics of no-return decisions. "We destroy the facility. We're stuck on Haven. No wormhole, no extraction, no resupply. How long do we last? A week? Two? The stalkers don't stop, Santos. They don't get tired. They don't run out of ammunition."
"We make them pay for every—"
"They won't pay. They'll wait. They'll surround us and wait until we're out of rounds and out of food and then they'll walk in and collect whatever's left. That's not a fight. That's a siege with a guaranteed outcome."
Santos's jaw worked. The tendons in her neck stood taut as bridge cables. She wanted to argue — Yuki could see it, the physical need to push back against the logic that was dismantling her anger — but Park was right, and Santos was too honest to pretend otherwise.
"Ghost," Yuki said.
"We go back." No hesitation. The words arrived fully formed, delivered with the certainty of a man who had already run every scenario and discarded everything except the one that left a possibility — however thin — of something beyond survival. "The evidence goes back. The certificate data, the photographs, the logistics codes. All of it. If we die on Haven, the evidence dies with us. Vance wins. The Collective wins. Every soldier who comes after us walks into the same lie we walked into, and they never know."
"And if we go back to the station, Vance kills us anyway."
"Probably. But probably isn't certainly. On Haven, the math is certain. On the station, there are variables."
"Variables." Santos said the word like it tasted of ash.
"People," Ghost said. "The station has twelve hundred personnel. Maintenance crews, pilots, medical staff, other squads. Vance can't kill us publicly — she needs the debrief to appear routine. That means a window. Small, but real. A window where we're on the station, alive, with evidence, surrounded by potential witnesses."
Viktor coughed. The sound was wet and short and he controlled it with the compression of his chest that had become as automatic as breathing. He was still on the ramp, rifle across his knees, his body positioned between Osei and the southern treeline with the stubborn geometry of a man who had decided where he was standing and would not be moved by arguments or artillery.
"The beacon," he said.
Everyone looked at him.
"Director Vance said the distress beacon has been flagged and archived. In her command queue." Viktor's bloodshot eyes moved across the cargo bay, finding each face. "She did not say destroyed. She said archived. Flagged. These are bureaucratic words. Administrative words. The words of a person who operates within a system."
"So?"
"A flag in a military system creates a record. The record has a timestamp. The timestamp has a log entry. The log entry exists on a server that Director Vance controls — but servers have backups, and backups have administrators, and administrators are people who may not be loyal to the Director." Viktor's voice was steady. Patient. The cadence of a man explaining something he'd understood for thirty years and was only now finding the words for. "She archived the beacon because destroying it would create a different record — a deletion log, an audit trail, the kind of evidence that military inspectors look for when they suspect corruption. She chose the smaller crime. The lesser visibility. But the record exists."
Chen sat forward. His ribs objected and he ignored them. "He's right. Military distress systems are designed with redundancy specifically to prevent command-level suppression. The flag would have propagated to at least three backup nodes before Vance could intercept it. She can suppress the response, but she can't erase the fact that the signal existed."
"Can she erase the backups?"
"Not without the system administrators noticing. And if she goes after the backups, she creates more evidence of tampering. It's a cascade problem — every suppression action generates new data that needs suppressing." Chen was animated now, the pain in his ribs subordinated to the architecture of the problem. "The record is there. Buried, flagged, archived — but there. If we get back to the station with the evidence and find the right person—"
"If," Santos said.
"If," Chen agreed. "But Viktor's right. The bureaucracy is a weapon. Vance operates inside it because she has to — the Reaper Program is military infrastructure, not a private company. She can bend the system. She can't break it without leaving marks."
The cargo bay was silent again. Not the eleven-second silence of shock — a different quiet, the thinking silence of people weighing risks that all ended in the same place but arrived by different roads.
Yuki looked at the faces. Santos, whose anger needed somewhere to go or it would turn inward. Ghost, already running scenarios. Viktor, who'd just handed them their first real advantage in three days. Chen with his hands sketching invisible diagrams in the air. Doc standing still. Park watching Santos.
And Osei. Standing at the cargo bay's edge, her dead arm in its sling, her good hand gripping the shuttle's frame. The woman whose honest conversation with a doctor had cracked open the lie they'd all been living inside. The woman Vance wanted recovered before the shuttle left Haven.
"We go back," Yuki said. "But not to Station Prime."
---
Chen's head came up. The motion was sharp enough to cost him — his ribs sent a spike of pain through his right side that made his breath catch — but the idea behind Yuki's words was bigger than the pain.
"Explain."
"The shuttle's navigation system. It's pre-programmed to return to Orbital Station Prime through the wormhole. That's standard — every extraction shuttle has a locked return trajectory." Yuki looked at Chen. "Can you change it?"
Chen stared at her. Then at the shuttle's cockpit, visible through the cargo bay's forward bulkhead. Then back at her.
"Okay, so — the nav system is military hardened. MIL-SPEC 7742 encryption on the trajectory files, hardware-locked firmware, tamper detection on the flight computer's primary bus." He was talking fast now, his hands moving in the air, sketching invisible architectures. "It's not like the facility's comm system. This is purpose-built for exactly this scenario — preventing unauthorized trajectory modification."
"Can you do it?"
"I didn't say I couldn't do it. I said it's hardened." Chen looked at the cockpit again. His eyes were doing the thing they did when he was mapping a problem — darting, tracking, his pupils dilating slightly as his brain consumed information faster than his mouth could process it. "The trajectory files are encrypted, but the encryption key is derived from the shuttle's hardware ID. I have the hardware ID — it's printed on the maintenance panel inside the cockpit. If I can extract the key derivation parameters from the firmware, I can generate a valid encryption key and modify the trajectory file directly."
"How long?"
"If the firmware gives me the parameters cleanly? Two hours. If there's additional obfuscation?" He paused. Did the math. "I need the full three hours. Maybe more."
"You have two and a half. The wormhole window opens in three hours. We need thirty minutes for pre-flight and ascent."
"Then I start now." Chen stood. The motion pulled a sound from his chest that was part gasp, part grunt, the involuntary vocalization of cracked ribs being asked to participate in standing. Doc moved toward him and Chen waved him off. "I'm fine."
"You have two cracked ribs and you're about to spend three hours hunched over a flight computer."
"I've debugged kernel code with a hundred-and-three fever. Ribs are just hardware." Chen moved toward the cockpit. Stopped. Turned back. "But I need coordinates. Alternative destinations. The shuttle's nav system might have them stored as contingency waypoints, but if it doesn't—"
"Check the system first," Yuki said. "If there are stored alternatives, use them. If not, we figure it out."
Chen disappeared into the cockpit. Thirty seconds later, Yuki heard the sound of maintenance panels being removed — the click of fasteners, the scrape of metal on metal, the working sounds of a man disassembling military hardware with the confidence of someone who understood that machines, unlike people, always told the truth if you asked them the right questions.
---
Yuki found Ghost on the rock rise.
He was where he always was — prone, rifle in the groove, body aligned with the stone. She climbed the formation and lay beside him. The clearing spread below them, the shuttle silver in Haven's blue-white light, the forest ringing the LZ like a wall that breathed.
"Santos will come around," Ghost said. He hadn't looked at her. His eyes were on the southern treeline, where the bodies of two security men lay beside a vehicle with four flat tires. "She argues to think. When she stops arguing, she's decided."
"I know."
"You're worried about something else."
Yuki didn't answer immediately. She watched the treeline. The forest was still — no movement, no sound, the preternatural quiet of an ecosystem being managed. The stalkers weren't hunting — they were being held.
"The facility's wormhole," she said. "Vance told Garrett to recover Osei before our extraction window opens. That means Garrett has a deadline. And Garrett's been managing this operation like a man who doesn't miss deadlines."
"He'll push. Before the window."
"He has to. If we board the shuttle and leave, Osei goes with us. Vance loses her priority asset." Yuki paused. "And the film."
Ghost's hand moved to his vest pocket. The motion was unconscious — a check, the way soldiers checked ammunition, the way parents checked sleeping children. Making sure the thing was still there.
"Give it to me," Yuki said.
He looked at her.
"If we don't make it, the certificate data is on Chen's receiver and the logistics codes are in Osei's head. The film is the only physical evidence that doesn't require a living person to carry it. Give it to me. I'll put it somewhere it can be found."
Ghost was quiet. His hand stayed on his vest pocket. His eyes — gray, steady, the eyes she'd been reading for fifteen years across firing positions and briefing rooms and the silent spaces between missions where the things you didn't say accumulated like sediment — moved across her face.
He reached into his pocket. Withdrew the film canister. Small. Metal. The analog record of everything Morrison had photographed in the facility — equipment, documents, the physical proof of the Collective's presence on Haven, captured on silver halide emulsion that no EMP could erase and no encryption could suppress.
He placed it in her palm. His fingers touched hers. Not accidentally — deliberately, with the careful intention of a man who measured every action and wasted nothing. His fingertips against her knuckles. Two seconds. The warmth of his skin against the cold of the canister.
"Yuki."
She waited.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. The words — whatever they were, the words that fifteen years of shared combat and shared silence had built and neither of them had ever spoken — stayed behind his teeth. His jaw tightened. His hand withdrew.
"Don't lose it," he said.
She closed her fingers around the canister. The metal was warm from his body heat. She put it in her cargo pocket, the one with the buttoned flap, the one closest to her body.
"I won't."
Ghost turned back to his rifle. Settled into the stone. Became geography again — a shape that was part of the rock, indistinguishable from the formation, his breathing slowed to the rhythm of a man who could wait for hours without moving because waiting was what he was built for.
Yuki climbed down from the rise. Her hand went to her cargo pocket. Pressed against the canister through the fabric. The metal was already cooling.
---
Doc cornered Viktor behind the shuttle.
Not cornered — positioned. Doc didn't corner people. He simply appeared where they were and stayed there with the patient persistence of a man whose entire career was built on being present when people didn't want him to be.
Viktor was sitting on a boulder. His rifle leaned against the rock beside him. His hands were in his lap, palms up, and he was looking at them with the detached attention of a man examining tools that were wearing out.
"Dexamethasone," Doc said. He held out a foil packet — two tablets, military-issue, the anti-inflammatory that would reduce the swelling in Viktor's lungs and buy his breathing another twelve hours of efficiency. "And codeine for the pain. You sound like you're breathing through wet cloth."
"Because I am breathing through wet cloth. My lungs are filling. We both know this." Viktor looked at the tablets. At Doc's hand. At the face of the medic who had been treating his slow deterioration for months with the steadfast refusal to accept that some patients couldn't be saved. "If I take the codeine, my reaction time drops by point-three seconds. If my reaction time drops by point-three seconds, I am not fast enough to cover the south approach."
"Viktor—"
"If I take the dexamethasone, the swelling decreases but the underlying tissue continues to degrade. I gain breathing capacity now and lose it faster later. The drug borrows from tomorrow to pay for today." His bloodshot eyes found Doc's. "I do not need tomorrow, little one. I need three hours."
Doc's hands didn't shake. They never shook — it was the thing about Doc that everyone in the squad relied on, the absolute stillness of hands that had performed surgery in transport vehicles and field hospitals and the cargo bays of shuttles while alien predators hammered the hull. But his fingers tightened on the foil packet. The crinkling sound was very small in the quiet behind the shuttle.
"Three hours of what? Deteriorating lung function, compromised oxygen exchange, progressive—"
"Three hours of being useful." Viktor said it without self-pity. Without drama. The flat statement of a man who had done the arithmetic on his own body and accepted the result. "I can give you three hours. After that—" He shrugged. The motion moved his shoulders and his shoulders moved his ribs and his ribs moved his lungs and his lungs informed him, with the wet rattle that had become his constant companion, that movement was no longer free.
"Take the dexamethasone. Refuse the codeine. Give me that much."
"It won't—"
"It will help enough." Viktor took the foil packet. Popped the dexamethasone. Left the codeine in Doc's hand. He dry-swallowed the tablet with the practiced ease of a man who'd been medicating himself in field conditions for three decades.
Doc looked at the codeine in his palm. Closed his fist around it. Put it back in his vest.
"You're a stubborn old bastard."
"This is the first accurate diagnosis you have given me." Viktor picked up his rifle. Stood. The standing cost him — a tightening around his mouth, a brief pause where his body negotiated with gravity — but he stood, and he walked to the south edge of the clearing, and he positioned himself where he could see the treeline, and he waited.
Doc watched him go. Then he turned and went back to the shuttle, because there were other patients who would accept treatment and the medic's triage protocol said you helped the ones you could help and made peace with the ones you couldn't.
He did not make peace. He went to work anyway.
---
Two hours and fourteen minutes.
Chen's voice came from the cockpit at intervals — muttering, cursing, the verbal byproducts of a mind that processed at speeds his mouth couldn't match. Yuki heard fragments through the bulkhead: "firmware key derivation is... no, that's a red herring, the actual parameters are stored in the... okay, okay, so the hardware ID feeds into a SHA-512 hash chain that..."
She stopped listening to the words. The words were Chen's language, the code-speak that meant his brain was engaged and the problem was yielding. What mattered was the tone. The tone was focused. Not panicked. Not defeated. Focused.
Santos had taken the roof again. The machine gun pointed south, the bipod locked, her body compressed behind the weapon with the coiled stillness that preceded violence. She hadn't spoken since the debate. Her silence was its own communication — Santos thinking, Santos processing, Santos converting anger into the controlled energy that made her the most dangerous person in the squad when the trigger got pulled.
The radios crackled. Channel 4 — the subsidiary frequency that had been quiet when they first acquired the units. Chen's assessment from two hours ago was playing out in real time: new callsigns, new positions, the expanding perimeter of a facility that was tightening its grip.
"Unit Five in position at junction south. Channel Four is primary. Over."
"Unit Seven holding mountain approach east. No visual on subjects. Over."
"Unit Nine — this is a new one," Ghost said from the rise. He'd been monitoring Channel 2 — the security band — while Chen worked. "Three additional units deployed in the last forty minutes. They're filling gaps in the perimeter."
"How many total?"
"Six vehicles minimum. Two-man crews. Twelve armed personnel plus whatever's still at the facility." Ghost paused. "And the stalkers. I've counted four separate movements in the southern treeline in the last hour. They're positioning, not hunting. Holding lines."
Twelve security personnel. An unknown number of directed stalkers. Electromagnetic control systems coordinating biological and human assets into a unified containment operation. The noose was drawing tight — not with the dramatic speed of an ambush but with the patient, methodical compression of an organization that had been disappearing problems for years and understood that time was an ally when you controlled the clock.
But they didn't control the wormhole.
The extraction window was physics, not policy. The Einstein-Rosen bridge between Haven and the orbital network formed on a schedule dictated by gravitational mechanics and quantum field alignments — forces that no corporation could bribe and no director could archive. The window would open when the math said it opened, and it would stay open for exactly as long as the equations allowed, and neither Vance nor Garrett nor the entire Collective could change the numbers.
Forty-seven minutes.
"Sarge." Chen's voice from the cockpit. Different now. The muttering had stopped. The tone was clear — the clarity of a man who had found what he was looking for.
Yuki moved to the cockpit. Chen was surrounded by removed panels — the shuttle's navigation console partially disassembled, cables exposed, his hands resting on a portable interface he'd rigged from the tablet they'd taken from the dead security man. The tablet's screen showed lines of hexadecimal code that meant nothing to Yuki and everything to Chen.
"I'm in," he said. "The trajectory file is decrypted. I can modify the exit coordinates."
"Alternative destinations?"
"Three stored contingency waypoints. Standard military protocol — primary return plus three alternates in case the primary is compromised." His fingers moved across the tablet, scrolling through data. "Waypoint Alpha is Station Prime. That's our current trajectory. Waypoint Beta is..." He read the coordinates. Cross-referenced something. His eyebrows moved.
"What?"
"Orbital Station Seven. Logistics hub in the Kepler sector. Small installation — resupply depot, maintenance facility, minimal military presence. It's a backwater. The kind of station that exists because the supply chain needs a node in that sector, not because anyone important is stationed there."
"Under Vance's command?"
"Every orbital station is technically under CENTCOM authority, which means Vance has administrative reach. But Station Seven is three wormhole jumps from Prime. Her direct operational control would be..." Chen calculated. "Limited. She'd need to send orders through channels, and channels create records, and records create the audit trail that Viktor was talking about."
"What about the other waypoints?"
"Waypoint Gamma is a deep-space relay station. Automated. No personnel. Useless. Waypoint Delta is..." Chen's face changed. "Decommissioned. The coordinates point to a station that was taken offline eight months ago. Budget cuts — the Reaper Program consolidated its orbital network and closed the smaller installations."
"So Station Seven."
"Station Seven. But Sarge — the contingency waypoints haven't been updated since the shuttle was last serviced. That was four months ago. Station Seven was operational four months ago. I can't guarantee it's still operational now."
"What happens if we exit the wormhole and the station isn't there?"
Chen's silence answered the question before his words did. "The wormhole exits at specific spatial coordinates. If the station is there, we dock. If the station isn't there, we exit into open space. The shuttle has enough fuel for orbital maneuvering, not interstellar travel. We'd need to be picked up. By someone."
A gamble. Wormhole to Station Seven — a backwater logistics hub that might still be operational, staffed by people who might not be under Vance's direct thumb, where the evidence might reach ears that weren't already owned. Or the station was dark, and they exited into vacuum, and the shuttle became a coffin drifting between stars.
"Versus Station Prime," Yuki said. "Where Vance is waiting."
"Where Vance is waiting," Chen confirmed.
Known trap versus unknown gamble. The mathematics of desperation, where every option ended in *might* and the only certainty was that doing nothing meant dying on Haven.
"Set the coordinates for Station Seven."
Chen nodded. His hands moved across the tablet. The trajectory file accepted the new parameters — Waypoint Beta, Orbital Station Seven, a point in space that might hold salvation or might hold nothing at all. The navigation console hummed as the modified file uploaded to the flight computer. New numbers. New destination. New odds.
"Done," Chen said. "The nav system will execute the modified trajectory when we enter the wormhole. The exit point is Station Seven. If it's there."
"It'll be there." Yuki said it because someone had to, and because the alternative — admitting that they were about to fly into a wormhole aimed at a maybe — was the kind of truth that helped no one.
Chen looked at her. He didn't believe her. She didn't believe herself. But the coordinates were set, and the wormhole was opening in thirty-one minutes, and belief was a luxury that soldiers on a deadline couldn't afford.
---
Twenty minutes.
Yuki stood in the clearing and looked at the sky.
Haven's atmosphere was doing something she'd never seen in thirty-nine missions on alien worlds. The blue-white light was shifting — deepening, the color moving toward violet at the horizon's edge, the electromagnetic signature of a planet's magnetosphere responding to forces that operated on scales too large for human perception. The wormhole was coming. The fabric of local spacetime was already bending, stretching, the invisible architecture of an Einstein-Rosen bridge assembling itself from mathematics and gravity — equations becoming geometry, geometry becoming passage.
The squad was ready. Santos on the roof — last position, last watch, the machine gun covering the southern approach until the moment the ramp closed. Ghost moving from the rock rise to the shuttle, his rifle cradled, his steps measured, the controlled pace of a man who never hurried because hurrying was wasted motion. Viktor at the ramp, standing where he'd stood for hours, his body between Osei and the treeline, the dexamethasone buying him breaths that his lungs no longer wanted to provide.
Doc was inside, securing the cargo bay. Park was in the pilot's seat, her hands on the controls, running pre-flight sequences that she'd performed a thousand times. The shuttle's systems were coming online — navigation, propulsion, life support, the mechanical heartbeat of a vehicle preparing to tear a hole in spacetime and fly through it.
"Ten minutes," Park said over the internal comm.
The sky deepened. The violet at the horizon spread, climbing, the color of a bruise forming on the atmosphere's skin. Above the clearing — directly above, at an altitude that instruments could measure but eyes could only estimate — the first shimmer appeared.
Light bending around something that wasn't there yet. The precursor distortion of a wormhole forming, spacetime curving in on itself like a page being folded, the edges of reality softening before the puncture. Yuki had seen it thirty-nine times. It never stopped looking like the sky was breaking.
Chen's radio crackled. Not Channel 2. Not Channel 4. Channel 15 — the Reaper tactical frequency.
Garrett's voice: "All units, this is Station Manager. Operation Recall is green. Portal activation in eight minutes. Secure the perimeter — nothing leaves the LZ. Repeat, nothing leaves the LZ."
Chen was in the cargo bay. He pressed the radio to his ear, then looked at Yuki. His face was the color of the cave walls where she'd left him three hours ago.
"The facility's wormhole," he said. "Garrett's activating it."
"Reinforcements?"
"He said Operation Recall. That's a Reaper Program designation, Sarge. Not corporate security. Not Meridian. Reaper." Chen swallowed. "He's bringing soldiers through the facility's portal. Reaper soldiers. Our people."
The words landed in the cargo bay like a grenade with the pin pulled. Reaper soldiers. Not corporate security men with carbines and Kevlar — soldiers, trained the same way Squad Specter was trained, equipped with the same weapons, hardened by the same missions on the same alien worlds. Soldiers who would follow orders from a Director they trusted, because they didn't know what Squad Specter knew. Because they'd never heard the radio transmission. Because they were still inside the lie.
"How many?" Santos's voice from the roof.
"Unknown. A standard Reaper response team is eight to twelve operators."
Eight to twelve. Against seven — two of whom were injured, one of whom was a civilian, and all of whom were running on three days without sleep and the fumes of ammunition they'd stolen from dead men.
"Board," Yuki said. "Everyone. Now."
Santos came off the roof. She moved fast — boots on hull, slide down the fuselage, drop to ground — the machine gun swinging on its sling, her body covering the southern treeline as she backed toward the ramp. Ghost was already inside. Viktor turned and walked up the ramp with the careful, measured steps of a man who refused to let his body's collapse dictate his pace.
Osei was inside. Doc was inside. Chen was in the cockpit, his hands on the modified navigation console, his cracked ribs forgotten in the adrenaline flood of a countdown that had just become a race.
Santos hit the ramp. Yuki hit the ramp. The hydraulics hissed — the ramp rising, closing, the shuttle sealing itself against Haven's atmosphere and everything Haven contained.
"Park."
"Pre-flight complete. Engines hot. Wormhole formation at..." Park checked the instruments. "Six minutes, fourteen seconds. It'll be fully stable for approximately two minutes before decay begins."
Six minutes. Garrett's portal was activating in eight. Two minutes of overlap where both wormholes would be open — the squad's exit and the Collective's entrance, two doors in the same room, one leading out and one letting something in.
The sky above the clearing tore.
Not gradually. Not with the slow shimmer that had been building for the last ten minutes. The wormhole punctured through Haven's atmosphere like a fist through paper — a circle of distorted light, edges rippling, the visible boundary of an Einstein-Rosen bridge that connected this clearing on this alien planet to a point in space where a station might or might not be waiting.
Through the cockpit windshield, Yuki watched the wormhole stabilize. The edges hardened. The interior cleared — not transparent, not opaque, but something between. A window into compressed spacetime, showing colors that didn't exist in normal physics, the visual noise of a universe being folded.
"Window is open," Park said. "Climbing."
The engines fired. The shuttle shuddered — the vibration traveling through the hull, through the floor, through the boots of seven soldiers and two civilians who were betting their lives on coordinates that might point at nothing. The vehicle lifted. Haven's gravity protested and lost. The fern canopy dropped away below them, the clearing shrinking, the forest becoming texture, the planet becoming a surface instead of a world.
Chen's radio screamed.
Not static. Not a voice. A tone — high, piercing, the electromagnetic signature of a wormhole activation so close that the radio's receiver couldn't filter it from the background noise. The facility's portal. Opening.
"Sarge — the facility's wormhole is active. I'm reading transit signatures. Multiple. Eight... ten..." Chen's voice cracked. "Twelve contacts transiting the facility's portal. Reaper-pattern electromagnetic profiles."
Twelve Reaper operators stepping through the Collective's private door onto Haven's surface, armed and briefed and pointed at a clearing where a shuttle was climbing toward a hole in the sky.
"They'll have anti-air," Ghost said. He was at the cargo bay's viewport, watching the ground shrink. "Standard Reaper loadout includes shoulder-launched—"
"Park, altitude. Now."
Park didn't answer. She pushed the throttle. The engines screamed — a sound that filled the shuttle's hull and vibrated in Yuki's chest and drowned out the radio and the voices and the counting of contacts on the ground. The shuttle climbed. Fast. Haven's surface fell away — the clearing, the forest, the facility hidden in the valley, all of it compressing into a map, then a texture, then a color.
The wormhole filled the cockpit windshield. Massive. A circle of bent light and impossible geometry, the doorway that led to Station Seven or to nothing, to survival or to vacuum, to a future that might exist on the other side.
"Entering the window," Park said. "Navigation locked. Coordinates confirmed. Three... two..."
The shuttle crossed the threshold.
Haven disappeared. The wormhole swallowed them — light, sound, sensation, all of it compressed into the transit that lasted either an instant or an eternity depending on which physicist you asked, the unmeasurable moment of passage through folded spacetime where the laws of the universe took a breath and the ship existed everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.
Then they were through.
And the thing on the other side wasn't Station Seven.
