The launcher round and the orbital beam hit at the same time.
The round detonated at ring edge, throwing shrapnel through the transit membrane. The Asterion beam punched through the chamber ceiling like a white spear and carved a line across the platform, vaporizing stone, steel, and anything that stood in that path.
Ghost tackled Santos into the center of the ring.
Doc shoved Okoro’s litter over the threshold.
Chen hit transit execute with blood-slick hands.
Yuki reached for Rusk.
Rusk was still at the console, one hand on the matrix lock, the other pressing backup routing so the membrane would hold one second longer. Her sleeve was on fire.
“Jump!” Yuki shouted.
Rusk looked at her, eyes clear for the first time since Haven.
“Go,” she said. “I already missed my ride.”
The beam cut between them.
Yuki leaped through white light while the chamber split apart behind her.
Transit was not smooth.
It felt like being dragged through wire mesh at speed. The ring screamed in her bones, then everything flipped cold and hard.
They hit the staging deck on CENTCOM Station in a pile of armor, blood, and broken gear.
Silver light collapsed behind them.
No second jump.
The ring was dead.
Yuki rolled up with rifle ready and found three things at once.
First: They were back on Deck Three.
Second: Emergency bulkheads had sealed half the staging bay.
Third: Forty continuity security troops were waiting behind portable barriers with shock shields and magnetic restraints instead of live rounds.
They wanted captures, not bodies. At least at first.
A command voice boomed over deck speakers.
“Sergeant Yuki Tanaka and associated personnel, lay down weapons and submit to continuity detention under Executive Order Seven.”
Santos laughed, raw and mean. “That’s a hard no.”
Yuki tried the aggressive play first.
“Control booth is twenty meters right,” she said. “We take it, lock bay doors, and force negotiating space. Ghost with me. Santos anchor center. Doc, keep Chen moving.”
They pushed hard through smoke and restraint fire. Ghost cleared the first barrier. Yuki vaulted the second and reached the booth ramp.
Then continuity heavy teams dropped from ceiling hatches she had not seen on the old deck schematic.
Three squads, full shock armor, stun lances charged.
They hit Specter’s flank at close range and cut the push in half.
A staging technician who had stepped out of cover to wave them toward a side lane took a restraint round to the chest and went down convulsing. Another deck worker trying to drag him clear caught a second round and did not get back up.
Ghost grabbed Yuki by shoulder straps and hauled her behind a loader arm before the heavy line could close.
“Booth push failed,” he said, voice clipped and calm. “We stay and we get bagged.”
Ghost fired the first shot anyway, taking out the barrier projector that anchored the left shield wall.
The bay turned into chaos.
Shock rounds cracked blue across cover plates. Restraint darts hissed through air. Continuity troops advanced in disciplined wedges, trying to box Specter against the dead ring.
Yuki dragged Chen behind a loader cart and checked him.
Flank wound worse than he admitted, blood soaking through compression wrap.
“Can you move?”
“Can type,” Chen said through clenched teeth. “Moving is a secondary feature.”
Doc slid in, slapped a fresh seal over his side, then moved to Okoro.
Okoro was conscious but barely, eyes glassy, blood pressure low.
“She needs surgery in twenty minutes,” Doc said. “Not field patching. Real surgery.”
Yuki scanned for routes.
Main exits blocked.
Overhead catwalk held snipers with restraint launchers.
Maintenance hatch behind ring gantry was still closed but not guarded.
“Ghost, smoke right. Santos, suppress left catwalk. We punch maintenance and regroup in conduit.”
Santos fired until the catwalk snipers ducked. Ghost threw a smoke canister that turned half the bay into opaque gray.
Yuki sprinted to the hatch and ripped the manual wheel with her prosthetic.
It jammed.
She hit it again.
Wheel broke loose.
The hatch opened just enough.
A continuity squad rushed through smoke to cut them off. Their lead trooper carried a stun lance and lunged for Doc.
Yuki shot him in the knee joint and sent him spinning into his own line. Ghost dropped two more.
Santos took a shock dart in the neck seam, ripped it out, and kept firing one-handed.
“Still ugly?” she shouted.
“Still loud,” Yuki answered.
They got through the hatch and sealed it behind them with a dropped mag jammed in the latch track.
Dark conduit. Cool air. Temporary safety.
ATLAS was gone. Rusk was gone. Haven was a wound behind them.
Ahead was station steel and human enemies.
They moved through maintenance crawlspace by emergency strip lights, carrying Okoro and half-carrying Chen while Doc patched both in motion.
Ghost took point with Santos at rear. Yuki in center, counting turns from memory of deck schematics she had run in training years ago.
“Medical wing route?” Yuki asked.
Doc shook her head. “Medical is lockdown under continuity control if Parr flipped command. We walk in there, they sedate us and call it humane detention.”
“Then where?”
“Workshop Seven. Old prosthetics lab. I can stabilize there if we get power and sterile water.”
Yuki nodded. “Take us.”
They crossed a ladder shaft and heard shouting through the grate below.
Continuity teams were sweeping deck by deck.
One voice carried clear enough to freeze Yuki’s blood.
“Priority target: Tanaka alive. Secondary targets expendable.”
Parr’s words again, now station doctrine.
Ghost tapped Yuki’s shoulder and pointed up.
A camera pod at the tunnel corner tracked them with red status light.
Before Yuki could shoot it, the pod winked green and rotated away.
A hidden speaker crackled.
“Hatch C-12. Forty meters. Move now if you want to avoid the next sweep.”
Harrison.
Yuki keyed low-band whisper. “You alive?”
“Unfortunately,” Harrison said. “General Webb is confined to command quarters under armed watch. Parr’s office controls station security net. I can open blind spots for ninety seconds at a time. Use them well.”
“Viktor?” Doc asked before Yuki could.
Harrison paused half a beat.
“Respiratory arrest at 21:03. Temporary recovery at 21:11. Final arrest at 21:29. Time of death recorded at 21:32 station time.”
Doc stopped walking.
No tears. No noise. Just stillness.
Yuki felt the conduit narrow around her.
He had waited as long as he could.
Yuki reached back and squeezed Doc’s wrist once.
“Keep moving,” Doc said, voice flat and clean and broken somewhere below hearing. “I’ll mourn when you’re not bleeding.”
They reached Hatch C-12 and dropped into Workshop Seven.
The room smelled of machine oil and disinfectant. Old prosthetics benches, unused for months, sat under dust covers. Harrison had already unlocked power and water remotely. Surgical lights came on as Doc rolled Okoro onto a bench and started cutting armor away.
Chen collapsed into a chair and kept typing despite blood loss.
“What are you doing?” Yuki asked.
“Verifying the burst made it off Haven. If Parr scrubbed it at station ingress we did all that for theater.”
He ran hash checks against civilian mirror feeds.
He smiled weakly.
“It’s out. Full directive package replicated across public nets, legal archives, and pirate relays. They can dispute authenticity, but they can’t un-leak it.”
Santos slumped against a tool chest and finally let her rifle drop to the floor. “Tell me we at least won one thing.”
Chen looked up. “We won truth distribution. We did not win control.”
Ghost stood near the door, listening to corridor noise and reloading from scavenged mags.
“Contacts in three minutes, maybe less,” he said.
Harrison patched into the wall terminal on low brightness.
His face appeared, pale and tired.
“You have a narrow strategic window,” he said. “Parr is framing you as compromised by alien influence and responsible for station casualties. Continuity media channels are already pushing it.”
Yuki leaned on the bench beside Doc, blood from Haven and station mixed on her gloves.
“Counter?”
“Limited. Solberg’s publication triggered independent verification teams. Civilian courts in two regions issued injunctions against full blackout. Parr still has force, but not uncontested narrative.”
“Where’s Webb?”
“Alive. Isolated. I cannot extract him yet.”
Yuki checked her squad.
Okoro under Doc’s hands, fighting to stay conscious.
Chen pale but working.
Santos bruised and burning.
Ghost steady as iron and running on fumes.
Viktor gone.
Rusk gone.
Wardens likely dead in the strike zone.
Vale left on Haven with a beam falling from orbit.
She had told herself for years that discipline and planning and being better than everyone else could keep people alive.
Chapter 100 of that belief ended in a mortuary report and a burned chamber under an alien sunrise.
The intercom in Workshop Seven clicked alive without warning.
Parr’s voice again.
“Sergeant Tanaka. You are ordered to surrender and submit for decontamination screening. Refusal will be interpreted as hostile alien contamination event.”
Santos made a face. “He really likes that phrase.”
Yuki keyed reply on external speakers.
“You sent a strike beam at your own soldiers.”
Parr answered immediately. “I prevented a biologically compromised team from importing unknown vectors into Earth infrastructure. History will understand.”
Harrison cut into Yuki’s earpiece, private line.
“History understands whoever controls the next six hours.”
Yuki killed the speaker channel and looked at Doc.
“How long for Okoro and Chen to move?”
“Okoro needs thirty minutes to not die. Chen needs a transfusion but can walk with support.”
“Then we hold thirty.”
Ghost checked his watch. “Continuity teams in corridor now.”
Santos picked her rifle back up and cracked the bolt. “Thirty minutes is plenty if you hate your neighbors.”
Chen spun his screen toward Yuki.
A new file had appeared in the recovered Haven package while his verification scripts ran.
`MISSION SCHEDULE REVISION // REAPER PROGRAM`
`AUTHORITY: CONTINUITY EMERGENCY OFFICE`
`SPECTER SQUAD STATUS: REINSTATED FOR IMMEDIATE EXTRACTION`
Yuki frowned. “Why would Parr reinstate us?”
Harrison answered before Chen could.
“Because public leak pressure now requires visible compliance with law. He can’t shoot you all in a maintenance room without escalating suspicion. But he can send you on a ‘routine extraction’ under emergency orders and solve the problem off-world.”
Chen opened the attached timetable.
Launch window in five hours.
Target world: Haven.
Objective line read:
`Recover residual biological assets and sanitize remaining unauthorized witnesses.`
Unauthorized witnesses.
That meant Wardens. Any surviving personnel. Maybe anyone who had touched the truth.
Yuki felt the old machine of soldier reflex and the new machine of refusal grind against each other.
She looked at her squad and understood the shape of the trap.
If they refused, Parr called them traitors and finished them in custody.
If they accepted, he sent them back into a kill box where command owned extraction and orbital fire.
Either way he expected them dead and silent.
Yuki checked her rifle, then handed Doc a fresh mag without being asked.
“Stabilize Okoro,” she said. “We hold this room, then we pick our battlefield.”
Outside, stun rounds hit the workshop door in testing bursts.
Ghost and Santos took positions on either side of the frame.
Harrison’s image flickered on the terminal as he routed one more blind spot through the station net.
“Parr’s launch order includes one final note,” he said. “It was not meant for broad distribution, but I found it in the metadata.”
Yuki met the camera.
“What note?”
Harrison read it verbatim.
“‘Ensure Specter enters through Haven Node Corridor exactly. Do not permit alternative insertion.’”
The same corridor. The same road the Wardens had built for Yuki.
Parr needed them on it.
Which meant whatever was at the far end was still something he feared.
Yuki looked at the closed workshop door, at the blood on her hands, at the squad that was still here and the names that were not.
She had failed to protect everyone.
She was done failing for free.
— End of Arc 1: The Best of the Best —
Harrison’s voice came through the earpiece one second before the workshop door blew inward.
“Your fortieth mission leaves at 0600, and this time they don’t intend to bring you back.”
