Santos heard the gunfire through the hull and was off the cargo bay floor before the echo died.
Three shots. Distant, muffled by the station's bones and the shuttle's skin, but unmistakable — the flat crack of a carbine firing in an enclosed space, a sound she'd heard a thousand times in training and combat and the nightmares that lived between them. Then silence. Then more shots, spaced, deliberate, the rhythm of a shooter conserving ammunition against something that kept coming.
"That's Ghost," she said. She was already moving — machine gun off her lap, sling over her shoulder, the weapon settling against her body with the familiarity of something she'd carried longer than she'd carried hope. "They're in contact."
Doc was at the coupling hatch. He'd heard it too. His hands were on the wheel, not turning it, holding it — the posture of a man whose training said *go toward the wounded* and whose orders said *hold the shuttle*.
"Sarge said hold," Park said from the pilot's seat. Her voice was flat. The voice of a woman stating facts, not arguing positions.
"Sarge said hold before she knew there were stalkers in the station." Santos reached the hatch. Doc's hands were still on the wheel. Their eyes met. Doc's were steady — the professional calm that never broke, that held through triage and amputation and the dying sounds of soldiers who deserved better than a cargo bay floor. But beneath the calm, something else. The thing that happened to medics when patients were beyond reach and the distance between help and harm was measured in meters they weren't crossing.
"I need you here," Santos said. "With the shuttle. With the civilians."
"Santos—"
"If we don't come back, Park flies out. Takes the evidence. Takes Osei. Gets it somewhere that matters." Santos put her hand on the hatch wheel. "I'm not asking, Doc."
Viktor appeared behind her. He'd been at the coupling, sitting against the bulkhead with his rifle across his knees, and now he was standing — the motion accomplished with the careful, deliberate mechanics of a man who bargained with his body for every vertical inch. His breathing was audible. Not the controlled rhythm of the engineering bay floor — rougher now, the wet texture more pronounced, each inhale a negotiation with lungs that were drowning on dry land.
"Viktor, you stay too," Santos said.
"Nyet."
"Your lungs are—"
"My lungs are my problem. The stalkers are our problem." He checked his rifle. The magazine seated with a click. His hands — large, scarred, the hands of a man who'd been breaking and building things for thirty years — moved through the weapons check with the automatic precision of deep muscle memory. "You have the machine gun. I have the rifle. Together we have suppressive fire and aimed fire. Alone you have one."
Santos opened her mouth. Closed it. Viktor's logic was Viktor's armor — the cold tactical calculus that he wore over whatever was rotting inside him, the professional assessment that turned personal sacrifice into operational necessity.
"*Porra.*" Santos spun the hatch wheel. The coupling opened. The station's air hit them — cold, stale, the taste of recycled nothing that had been sitting in sealed corridors for eight months. She stepped through. The machine gun came up. The flashlight mounted on the weapon's rail threw a hard beam into the corridor beyond.
Viktor followed. His boots hit the station's grating and the sound was solid, deliberate, the footfalls of a man who refused to let his body whisper when his boots could speak.
Behind them, Doc closed the hatch. The wheel turned. The lock engaged. And Doc stood on the shuttle side of the door with codeine in his pocket and empty hands and said nothing, because there was nothing to say about watching two of his patients walk into a building full of things that ate people.
---
Santos moved fast. The corridor was familiar from the approach — Residential Section B, the main concourse, then the junction to Section C's engineering access. She'd memorized the route when Yuki's team went in. Santos always memorized routes. In the favela, knowing exits was the difference between living through a raid and dying in one.
Viktor kept pace. His breathing was louder in the station's dead air — each inhale a rattle, each exhale a whistle, the orchestral collapse of respiratory tissue that the dexamethasone was holding together with chemical bailing wire. He moved in Santos's wake, rifle up, the weapon steady even as his body underneath it degraded. The disconnect between the man and his condition was the kind of thing that Doc had a clinical term for and Santos had a different word for entirely.
Stubborn. The word was stubborn.
They crossed the concourse in ninety seconds. Tables and chairs bolted to the floor. The kitchen units sealed. The viewport showing stars — cold, indifferent, the universe's wallpaper hung behind glass that separated oxygen from vacuum.
The junction.
Santos stopped. Four corridors. The emergency lighting was on — the amber glow of minimal power, the reactor's first breaths feeding the station's grid just enough to turn the dark into dim. She could see thirty meters down each corridor. Not well. Well enough.
Section D's corridor had bodies.
Two stalkers. One folded against the wall, the chitin plates cracked, dark fluid pooling under its thorax. The other on the deck, face down — or what served as face down for something with a skull plate and mandibles instead of a jaw. Both dead. Both riddled with wounds that the carbine's rounds had opened in the chitin.
Twenty-seven rounds for two kills. The walls around the bodies were marked — bullet impacts, the bright silver of exposed metal where rounds had missed or ricocheted. Ghost had fought here. In this junction. In the amber dark with a carbine and the two-meter chokepoint and the discipline that was the only thing between him and the math.
"Section C," Viktor said. He pointed with the rifle barrel. The corridor on the left. The access tunnel that led to the secondary engineering bay.
Santos nodded. Moved. The machine gun swept the corridor ahead — empty, the amber emergency lighting painting the walls in the color of a warning that nobody was alive to heed. Forty meters. Thirty. Twenty.
The engineering bay's entrance was open. Light inside — brighter than the emergency strips, the blue-white glow of an active console, the electronic illumination of someone working.
"Sarge!" Santos called.
Yuki appeared in the doorway. Sidearm up. Her face was the color of the station's walls — gray, drawn, the face of a woman who'd been fighting in the dark for too long and had found the experience exactly as bad as expected.
"Santos. Viktor." She looked past them. "Doc?"
"Shuttle. With Park and the civilians." Santos moved into the engineering bay. Took in the scene — Chen at the console, hands moving, his face lit from below by the screen. Ghost against the wall. One arm. Blood on the dressing. The carbine propped beside him, barrel up.
"You look like shit, mano," Santos said to Ghost.
"Copy."
"The stalkers?"
"Two dead at the junction. One dead in the primary engineering bay. One wounded, location unknown. Two more unaccounted for." Yuki checked the corridor behind Santos and Viktor. Clear. She pulled the door — not closed, the hinges didn't allow full closure — but narrowed, reducing the opening to a gap that a human could squeeze through and a stalker would have to force.
"That's five accounted for out of six," Santos said. "Plus the wounded. So one out there, maybe two."
"They respond to signals," Chen said from the console. He didn't look up. His hands kept moving. "The breeding logs said they were conditioned to electromagnetic commands. The surveillance system in Section D is transmitting to Station Prime — to Vance. If she has a way to trigger the conditioning protocols remotely..."
He didn't finish. He didn't need to. The stalkers weren't just predators loose in the dark. They were assets that someone could direct.
"The wormhole node?" Yuki asked.
"Reactor's at forty-two percent. The node needs sixty to begin handshake with the orbital network. I'm running the fusion sequence as fast as the system allows, but the cold-start protocol has built-in safety delays that I can't override without—" He stopped typing. Stared at the screen. Started typing again, faster. "Okay, so — I can bypass the third-stage thermal check by spoofing the sensor readout. The reactor doesn't actually need to be at thermal equilibrium to hit sixty percent power output. It just thinks it does because the safety protocol is conservative."
"Do it."
"Already doing it." His fingers moved. The screen changed. Numbers climbed. "Fifty-one percent. Fifty-four. The bypass is holding. Fifty-eight—"
The clicking started.
Not from the corridor. From above. From the ceiling of the engineering bay, where the conduit runs created a lattice of pipes and cable trays that an adult stalker could navigate if it was willing to compress its body between the conduit and the overhead panels. The sound was directly above Chen. Directly above the console.
Santos saw it first. The machine gun came up. The barrel tracked the ceiling, her eyes following the sound, her finger finding the trigger with the reflexive speed of a woman who'd been shooting things since she was old enough to hold a weapon and angry enough to want to.
The ceiling panel buckled.
The stalker came through it like a fist through drywall — two hundred kilos of mature adult crashing through the overhead, bringing conduit and cable and ceiling material with it in a shower of debris that buried the forward section of the engineering bay in dust and metal fragments. It landed on the deck three meters from Chen. Its blade-arms deployed before it finished falling.
Santos fired.
The machine gun's voice was a physical thing in the enclosed space. Not like the carbine — the machine gun was louder, deeper, the sustained roar of a weapon designed to suppress infantry formations and that didn't know how to be quiet even when quiet was the only thing between life and deafness. The muzzle flash turned the engineering bay into a strobe — light, dark, light, dark, the stalker frozen in each flash like a series of photographs documenting its charge.
The first burst hit the thorax. Five rounds. Two bounced off chitin. Three found the gaps — the joint lines, the seams where evolution had traded armor for flexibility. The stalker's forward momentum checked. Not stopped. Checked. The way a truck checks when it clips a guardrail — damaged, deflected, still moving.
Viktor fired beside her. Single shots. The rifle cracked — sharper than the machine gun, more precise, each round placed with the cold accuracy of a man who had been putting bullets into targets since before Santos was born. His first round hit the stalker's front right leg at the joint. The leg buckled. His second round hit the same joint again. The leg folded, crumpling under the creature's weight, dropping its right side to the deck.
The stalker turned. Not toward Santos and her machine gun. Toward Viktor and his rifle. The creature's threat assessment was immediate — the accurate fire was more dangerous than the volume, and the conditioning in its nervous system told it to eliminate the precision threat first.
It charged him.
Viktor stood his ground. His third round went into the skull plate. Didn't penetrate — the chitin was too thick, the angle wrong, the bullet glancing off and sparking against the far wall. The stalker covered the distance between them in two strides on five legs, the damaged sixth dragging behind it, blade-arms rising into the killing configuration.
Santos shifted fire. The machine gun tracked right, following the stalker's path, and she held the trigger down. A sustained burst — ten rounds, twelve, the weapon's recoil hammering against her shoulder, the barrel climbing despite the bipod grip she'd locked against her forearm. Rounds walked across the stalker's flank. Most hit chitin and bounced or cracked. Two found the abdomen. One went through.
The stalker's charge faltered. One stride short of Viktor. Its body twisted — the involuntary spasm of something whose internal systems had just been disrupted by a round that had entered through the abdomen and was doing damage to whatever served as organs inside the chitin shell.
Viktor stepped sideways. The motion cost him everything. His lungs seized — not coughed, seized, the wet tissue inside his chest locking like a door slamming shut. His breath stopped. His face went the color of old brick. His hands stayed on the rifle because his hands had forgotten how to do anything else, and they put the muzzle against the stalker's neck joint — the gap between skull plate and thorax, the killing spot that Ghost had used in the primary bay — and pulled the trigger.
The round went through. The stalker's body locked rigid. The blade-arms froze at full extension, one of them close enough to Viktor's face that the chitin edge caught the console's light and threw a sliver of reflection across his cheek.
The creature fell. The impact shook the deck. The engineering bay filled with the copper-and-chemical smell of stalker fluid mixing with gun smoke, creating an atmosphere that tasted like a factory floor after an industrial accident.
Viktor coughed. The sound was wet and deep and went on too long — five seconds, ten, his body folding at the waist as his lungs tried to clear fluid that wasn't clearing, that had nowhere to go because the tissue that should have absorbed it was degraded and saturated. He braced against the wall. His rifle slipped from his hands. Hit the grating. The sound was small and final.
"Viktor—" Santos moved toward him.
He held up a hand. The universal gesture — *stop, I'm handling it, give me a moment.* His other hand pressed against the wall and his body stayed bent and the coughing continued, each spasm producing a sound that Santos had heard once before, in the favela, from an old man whose lungs had filled with the shit that the factories pumped into the air and who had drowned standing up on a Tuesday afternoon while the sun shone and the children played and nobody stopped what they were doing because in the favela people died and you kept moving.
The coughing stopped. Viktor straightened. The motion was the hardest thing Santos had ever watched a human body do. Every vertebra participated. Every muscle negotiated. He reached down and picked up the rifle and his hands were shaking but his grip was not.
"I am fine," he said.
"You're not fine. You're dying."
"Da. But not yet." He checked the rifle. Chambered a fresh round. Positioned himself at the engineering bay's entrance, between the corridor and Chen, between whatever was coming next and the man whose hands were the only thing between all of them and permanent residence in a dead station.
Blood on his lips. A thin line. He wiped it with his sleeve. The stain disappeared into the dark fabric of his uniform the way his condition disappeared into his composure — hidden, absorbed, present but not visible unless you knew where to look.
Santos stared at him. Then she turned to the entrance and put the machine gun's barrel through the gap in the door and aimed it down the corridor.
"*Mãe de deus,*" she said quietly. Not a prayer. A statement of fact directed at a deity she wasn't sure existed about a man she was sure shouldn't be standing.
---
Chen worked.
The console's screen was a cascade of data — reactor status, node handshake protocols, network authentication sequences. His fingers moved through it with a speed that had nothing to do with skill and everything to do with the understanding that every second he spent at the keyboard was a second his squad spent bleeding.
"Node is responding," he said. "Power at sixty-three percent. The wormhole node's main processor is initializing — it's running a self-diagnostic, checking hardware integrity, verifying the magnetic containment arrays." His voice cracked on the last word. He cleared his throat. Kept going. "The diagnostic will take four minutes. I can't skip it — it's a hardware-level check, not software. The processor won't accept network commands until the diagnostic completes."
"Four minutes," Yuki said.
Four minutes. In a station with at least one stalker still unaccounted for, possibly two. With a surveillance system feeding their position to Vance. With ammunition that could be counted on fingers — Santos's machine gun belt was three-quarters empty, Viktor's rifle had an unknown number of rounds, Ghost's carbine sat at thirty-one, and Yuki's sidearm held four.
Ghost pushed himself off the wall. The motion was controlled — one arm doing the work of two, his wounded left hanging at his side, the blood-soaked dressing dark against his sleeve. He picked up the carbine. Settled it against his right shoulder. One-handed shooting was possible with a carbine at close range. Not ideal. Not accurate. But possible, and possible was the only currency they had.
"I'll take the junction," Ghost said. "If there are more coming from the other sections, they funnel through the same crossroads."
"You can barely hold the weapon."
"I can hold it enough." He moved toward the door. Paused. Looked at Viktor, standing at the entrance with the rifle and the blood on his lips and the composure that refused to die before the man did. "Kozlov. The junction. With me."
Viktor looked at Ghost. At the arm. At the one-handed grip on the carbine that would cost accuracy and speed and everything a shooter needed to survive an engagement with a creature that could cross ten meters in two seconds.
"Da," he said.
They left. Two men — one bleeding, one drowning — moving into the amber dark of the station's corridors toward a junction where the dead stalkers lay in their fluids and the living ones moved in the spaces between the walls.
Santos watched them go. Then she repositioned at the engineering bay's entrance, the machine gun braced against the doorframe, her body compressed behind the weapon with the dense, coiled energy that preceded everything she did well.
"How many rounds do you have?" Yuki asked her.
Santos checked the belt. Counted the brass. "Sixty-eight. Give or take."
"Give or take?"
"I wasn't counting when I was shooting the thing off the ceiling, mano. Sixty-ish. Maybe seventy. Enough for one more fight. Maybe two if they're short."
Yuki pulled the sidearm's magazine. Checked it. Put it back. Four rounds. The same four she'd been carrying since the shuttle. The same four that had been cycling through magazines and chambers and the geometry of survival since Haven.
"Chen. The destination. Where are we going when the node comes online?"
Chen didn't stop typing. "The node will connect to the orbital wormhole network. From there, we can open a bridge to any active station in the system. The question is which station. Station Prime is Vance's territory. Station Three is the nearest logistics hub — but if Vance has been watching us through the surveillance system, she knows we're activating the node. She'll have people waiting."
"What about Webb?"
Chen paused. Not his hands — they kept moving. His mind paused, the kind of stutter that happened when a new variable entered an equation that was already running. "General Webb. He's at CENTCOM. The military command node — separate from the orbital station network, but connected through a dedicated wormhole link." His eyes moved across the screen. "If I can route the bridge to the CENTCOM link instead of a standard station, we bypass the orbital network entirely. Vance's reach doesn't extend to CENTCOM's wormhole infrastructure — that's under Webb's authority."
"Can you do it?"
"Okay, so — the routing protocol is standardized. Military wormhole network, star topology, each node connects to a central hub. The hub routes to destinations based on authentication codes. If I have the right authentication..." He trailed off. His hand went to his vest pocket. The receiver. The device that held the certificate data, the evidence of the Collective's presence on Haven, the digital proof that everything they'd fought for was real.
"The certificate data includes authentication tokens," he said. "Military-grade network credentials that Meridian was using to access the wormhole system. If those tokens are valid for the central hub, I can route us to CENTCOM."
"If."
"If." Chen's jaw tightened. "The tokens might be revoked. They might be facility-specific. They might be Vance's personal credentials that she'll kill the moment she sees them being used. I won't know until I try."
The console beeped. Diagnostic at sixty percent.
Two minutes.
From the junction, fifty meters away, the sharp crack of a rifle. Then another. Viktor, putting rounds into something.
Then the carbine. Three shots. Controlled, but tighter together than Ghost's usual rhythm. The rhythm of a man shooting one-handed and compensating with speed because he couldn't compensate with accuracy.
Then silence.
Santos's hands tightened on the machine gun. Her body leaned forward — the instinct to advance, to join, to add her fire to the fight. She held position. The engineering bay was the objective. Chen was the objective. Everything else was perimeter, and perimeter was where soldiers held even when the holding was worse than the fighting.
"Come on," she said. To the console. To the diagnostic. To the universe that was taking its time while people she cared about spent ammunition they couldn't afford on creatures that shouldn't exist in a station that shouldn't have been a weapon.
The console beeped again. Diagnostic at eighty percent.
One minute.
The corridor was quiet. The silence spread from the junction back through Section C's access tunnel, filling the space between the engineering bay and the crossroads with the kind of empty that might mean safety or might mean something was moving too quietly to hear.
Then Ghost's voice. Distant. Through the station's corridors, stripped of everything except the consonants.
"Clear. Two more. Thirty meters out and retreating."
Retreating. Stalkers that retreated. On Haven, they never retreated — they pressed, they circled, they probed until they found the opening or died trying. But these stalkers had been conditioned. Trained. Given behavioral protocols that included retreat, because whoever bred them understood that a weapon you couldn't recall was a weapon that was useless for anything except a single engagement.
The question was what they were retreating to. And what signal would bring them back.
The console chimed. Not a beep — a chime, musical, the notification sound of a system that had completed its task and was reporting success.
"Diagnostic complete," Chen said. "Wormhole node is online. I have network access." His hands moved. The screen changed — from reactor management to the wormhole network interface, the military's proprietary system for routing bridges between points in space that physics said shouldn't be connected. "Inputting authentication tokens now. If this works, I'll have a routing table in thirty seconds. If it doesn't..."
He entered the tokens. The screen processed. A loading indicator appeared — the spinning icon of a system talking to something far away, sending authentication data through the orbital network to a central hub that would either accept the credentials or reject them and flag the attempt.
Twenty seconds.
Ten.
The screen changed. Green text on black background. A routing table — destination nodes, connection status, bridge availability. The military's wormhole network, spread across a star chart, dozens of stations and facilities and command nodes connected by the invisible architecture of folded spacetime.
"I'm in," Chen breathed. "The tokens are valid. I have full routing access." His eyes scanned the table. His finger found a line. "CENTCOM. Hub designation Alpha-One. Bridge availability — open. I can route a wormhole from this node to General Webb's doorstep."
"Do it."
"I need to input coordinates and initiate the bridge sequence. The sequence takes—" He checked the parameters. "Seven minutes. The node hasn't been used in eight months. The magnetic containment arrays need to cycle to full power before they can sustain a stable bridge."
Seven minutes. The longest seven minutes of their lives, in a station full of stalkers that were being directed by a woman who knew exactly where they were and exactly what they were trying to do.
Yuki keyed the radio — the stolen security unit, Channel 15, the Reaper tactical frequency that connected them to a communication network they weren't supposed to be part of.
"Ghost. Viktor. Fall back to the engineering bay. We're going to have to hold here for seven minutes."
Ghost's response was immediate. "Copy. Moving."
Viktor said nothing. But thirty seconds later, two sets of footsteps — one measured, one careful — came down the Section C corridor. Ghost appeared first, the carbine in his right hand, his left arm pressed against his chest. Viktor behind him, rifle up, his breathing the soundtrack of a body that was spending reserves it didn't have.
They entered the engineering bay. Four soldiers. One console. One door. Seven minutes.
Santos repositioned the machine gun. Ghost took the right side of the entrance, bracing the carbine against the doorframe to compensate for his missing hand. Viktor took the left, his rifle steady, his breathing a wet metronome that counted time in units of decay.
Yuki stood behind them. Four rounds. The last line. The part of the defense that existed only if everything in front of it had already failed.
Chen's fingers moved across the console. Wormhole bridge sequence: initiating. Magnetic containment: cycling. Estimated time to stable bridge: six minutes, forty-two seconds.
The clicking started again. Distant. Coming from the junction. Coming from all four corridors at once.
Santos settled behind the machine gun. Her thumb found the belt. Sixty-something rounds. She pressed her cheek against the stock and aimed down the corridor at the amber dark.
"Come on then," she said quietly. "I've been wanting to fight since we left Haven."
Viktor coughed once. Controlled it. His bloodshot eyes fixed on the corridor.
Six minutes, thirty seconds.
