The door came off its hinges in a sheet of hot gas and bent steel.
Yuki was flat before the frame stopped moving.
Ghost had already gone flat. He'd read the pre-breach signature, the half-second of silence before pressure equalized on the charge, and moved one step back behind the heavy steel prosthetics bench. He dropped the first trooper through the smoke with a round to the visor mount. Dropped the second before the breach team had spread to flanks. Clean. Ruthless. Ghost operating at the thin edge of necessity.
Santos went the other direction. Not back. Forward, into the entry stack where the breach team expected her least. She hit the lead trooper shoulder-first and drove him into the door frame, using his body as cover while she stripped the shock lance off his belt and reversed it.
Shock lances fired from either end.
She used the near end on the man behind him.
Yuki put three rounds into the ceiling-fan housing above the door and brought it down on the third entry wave: grating, old wiring, months of accumulated dust in a choking sheet. Not lethal. Just seconds.
"Workshop Two," Harrison said in her earpiece. "Northwest conduit, service hatch, twenty meters. Blind window: forty seconds."
Doc turned from Okoro's bench. "She can't run twenty meters."
"Santos."
Santos had already read it. She slung her rifle over one shoulder and lifted Okoro off the bench in a fireman's carry, moving with the efficiency of someone who'd carried bodies through worse spaces than this. Okoro made a sound. Pain, not complaint.
"You weigh nothing, mano," Santos said, and stepped over the downed trooper without looking down.
Chen rose from his chair under his own power. Barely. His hand pressed his side like he was trying to hold himself together through willpower alone. He looked at the hatch Harrison had indicated, then at the small dark pool under the chair where he'd been sitting.
"Twenty meters is fine," he said.
Ghost covered rear, moving backward at the same pace as the group, firing controlled bursts into the corridor whenever he heard boots on grating. Not to hit. To slow.
They made the hatch in thirty-one seconds.
Yuki cranked the wheel. Her prosthetic caught and she felt the elbow lock grinding, still damaged from the hit on the ring platform, but it held long enough to break the seal. The hatch swung inward. Cool recycled air hit them from the conduit beyond.
Santos went through sideways with Okoro. Doc followed. Chen last before Ghost, who backed through and pulled the wheel shut as precisely as if he was logging a field report.
The wheel locked.
Darkness. Emergency strips only. Blue-white, cold.
Okoro said from Santos's shoulder, "Put me down."
"You'll fall."
"I'll lean." A pause. "Please."
Santos set her against the conduit wall and Okoro leaned there, one palm flat against the pipe housing, breathing like she was counting every breath individually. Doc was at her in seconds, penlight in teeth, two fingers on the pulse point in her neck.
"She's compensating," Doc said. To herself more than anyone. "Compensation has a budget."
"How long?" Yuki asked.
"Real surgery? An hour ago."
Yuki filed that and turned to Chen. "Sit."
"I can—"
"Sit."
He sat against the opposite wall with the careful lowering of someone who'd decided to obey before his body forced the issue. Doc crossed to him in two steps, pulled his hand away from his side, and used the penlight on the emergency seal she'd applied in the gate bay. She peeled the corner back, looked at what was underneath, and replaced it without speaking for three full seconds.
"He needs blood," she said. "Not in an hour. Now."
Ghost looked at Santos.
Santos looked at the ceiling of the conduit. "What type?"
Doc checked Chen's dog tags. "O positive."
Santos pulled her sleeve back. "Get a line."
Doc stared at her. "You're running a dislocated shoulder, shock dart bruising across your sternum, and you just lost blood from the Haven contacts—"
"And I'm sitting down while I do it." Santos met her eyes without blinking. "Get the line."
Doc got the line.
She had a field transfusion kit in her med bag that she'd trained on seventeen times and used twice in genuine emergencies. No hesitation on the third. The needle went in clean. She ran the line, checked the rate, and set Chen's arm at the angle that would move gravity in their favor.
Chen watched the drip with an expression that was half embarrassment, half relief.
"This is inefficient," he said.
"Being dead is less efficient," Santos told him.
Harrison's voice returned in Yuki's earpiece. Low and careful.
"You have four hours nineteen minutes before Mission 40 launch window. If Parr learns you're loose in the conduit network, he'll accelerate. I've bought a twelve-minute gap in corridor camera coverage on this level. After that, I'm blind again."
"What's in Workshop Two?"
"Nothing directly useful. The conduit beyond it connects to engineering sublevel. Parr's teams aren't sweeping there yet, it's rated non-essential infrastructure." A pause. "There's a tertiary communications node in the sublevel maintenance office. I can get you outside-channel access."
"And a surgical suite?"
"Not in the conduit network. However." Harrison's voice dropped further. "Medical wing is locked under continuity security. Standard entry means immediate detention. But the wing has an emergency overflow corridor to research deck eight. Dr. Amin's xenobiology lab has surgical-grade equipment, calibrated, sterilized. It's never been reclassified as critical infrastructure. There's a gap."
Doc looked up. "Amin's lab has a surgical table?"
"He's been performing xenobiology dissection work for three years."
Doc was already calculating something in her eyes. "Tell me the route."
They moved.
Twelve minutes of Harrison's blind spot moved them from the conduit through three ladder shafts and into the research deck overflow corridor. The research wing was mostly empty. Most staff had evacuated when Parr declared emergency protocols, leaving labs dark and humming with idle life-support equipment. Amin's door required a twelve-digit code that Doc didn't have.
Harrison provided it in two seconds.
Inside: bright overheads, sterile smell, a surgical bed calibrated for organisms larger than standard human but workable for a human who'd lost too much blood and had too many things held together with field dressings and optimism. Okoro looked at it with an expression that might have been relief or might have been the drugs from the gate bay finally wearing off.
"This is undignified," she said.
"Be undignified later," Doc told her. "Right now be still."
She got Okoro prepped in seven minutes. Yuki stood at the lab door with Ghost, watching the corridor through the small reinforced window while Doc worked inside. Through the glass, Doc's hands were steady. She'd been waiting three hours to do the one thing she was actually trained to do.
Ghost positioned two meters away, angled to cover the deck junction, and said quietly to the corridor, "Viktor would have complained the whole time."
Yuki said, "He would have told us this was easier than Minsk in 2071."
"He never stopped talking about Minsk."
"Never stopped."
Ghost's voice was flat and deliberate. Underneath the deliberateness was the texture of someone holding something in a clenched fist because letting go mid-mission cost you.
They stood in silence for a moment.
"When it's done," Yuki said.
"Yeah."
He turned back to the corridor. She turned back to the corridor. Neither of them said anything else and neither of them had to.
Forty-three minutes later, Doc opened the lab door. She looked tired in the particular way that sat in the shoulders and the back of the eyes, the kind sleep didn't fix. Her hands had three different types of blood on them and she didn't seem to notice.
"She'll live," Doc said. "She needs two days horizontal. She won't get them. So instead she needs the worst two days of physical activity she's ever had." A beat. "Tell her I said that. She'll argue less if it comes from me."
"How are you?" Yuki asked.
Doc looked at her. Not the assessment look. The other one, the one that appeared when the professional stepped aside for a moment. Her expression didn't have a military word attached to it.
"Viktor died while I was trying to get his patients home," she said.
Yuki didn't tell her he'd been proud. Didn't tell her he'd have understood. Didn't say anything that was technically true but emotionally convenient. She put one hand on Doc's shoulder and left it there until Doc straightened up and squared herself and put the professional back on.
"How long before Parr accelerates launch?" Doc asked.
"Three hours now."
"Then I need food, power, and a charge on my equipment. Okoro can sit up in fifteen minutes. She'll want to walk in thirty and shouldn't until forty-five."
Yuki turned back to where Ghost, Santos, and Chen had regrouped outside the lab. Santos was leaning against the corridor wall doing a mag count with her good hand. Chen had his equipment array out and was running some kind of hash verification, cables running to a portable junction box Harrison had remotely unlocked.
He looked up when Yuki approached. Almost himself again, still pale, still holding carefully, but the gray had left his skin and his hands were steady.
"I found something in the Mission 40 parameters," he said.
"Tell me."
He turned his screen. "The Node Corridor insertion point Parr specified isn't the standard entry. It's eight hundred meters north of the usual approach. There's a topographic anomaly at that position that doesn't appear on any public Haven survey data."
"Define anomaly."
"Subterranean void." He said the last two words carefully, the way you say something you've checked three times because it keeps coming back wrong. "Regular geometry. Haven doesn't have regular geometry underground. It has root systems and animal burrows and organic cavity formations. Regular geometry is—"
"Not organic."
"Not naturally occurring." He took a breath. "Someone either missed it in survey or buried it in the data. Given everything else, I know which option I think is more likely."
Ghost said from down the corridor, still watching the junction, "So Parr wants us in that specific corridor because something's there. And he wants us dead before we figure out what."
"That's the shape of it," Chen said.
Santos, without looking up from her mag count, said, "So we find it first and make sure the data gets out before he can burn it."
"That's the plan."
"Great." She slapped a mag home. "I'm going to need more ammunition."
Harrison broke into the earpiece again, and this time his voice carried something it hadn't before. Not quite urgency but adjacent to it.
"Parr has issued revised orders to launch prep. Mission window has moved forward by ninety minutes. He's accelerating."
Yuki let that sit for exactly one second.
She looked at her squad. Viktor gone. Rusk gone. Okoro stabilized but not mobile. Chen mended but not whole. Santos running on will and borrowed time. Ghost steady and running on something that looked like will but was really something quieter and more durable than will.
She looked at the mission parameters on Chen's screen, at the geometry of the trap Parr had built.
He had two kill modes: hold them on station until he had legal cover to shoot them, or send them through a wormhole with orders to find and die at something he was afraid of.
The leverage was in the second option. Something at the end of that corridor scared him enough that he needed Specter to reach it and then disappear. Whatever it was, it had to be worth dying to find.
Yuki had been a Reaper for twelve years. She was very good at deciding what was worth dying to find.
"When Okoro is ambulatory, we move to launch prep," she said. "We accept Mission 40. We negotiate our own equipment manifest, our own comms protocol, and I personally review every mission parameter before we step through that ring. Parr gets the optics of willing compliance."
"And he gets us on Haven," Santos said.
"He gets us on Haven. We get the Node Corridor." She looked at each of them. "He needs us dead before we reach the far end. We need to reach it before his backup team does. That's the race."
Ghost finally turned from the junction. He looked at Yuki for three full seconds, reading something or confirming something, and then he nodded.
"Clear shot," he said.
Santos said something in Portuguese that probably wasn't polite.
Chen closed his equipment array and tucked it against his side carefully. "For what it's worth, the data burst is replicating. Parr can dispute authenticity but he can't un-release it. Every hour we stay alive and vocal is an hour his narrative loses ground."
"Then we stay alive," Yuki said. "And we get loud."
She turned back toward Amin's lab to check on Okoro.
Harrison's last transmission for the next twenty minutes came in quiet.
"Specter. For whatever it's worth from where I'm sitting: he knew the odds when he gave you that tag. Webb knew. Viktor knew." A pause. "Make it count for something."
Yuki kept walking.
The corridor hummed around her. Station steel and recycled air and someone else's grief still in her chest. She pressed one hand against the receiver still tucked in her vest. Viktor's voice on a packet signal, now static.
She had told herself for twelve years that being better than everyone else could keep people alive.
She was done believing that.
She wasn't done fighting.
