They got forty minutes.
The passage back up took twelve. The root-fiber channel that Haven had built toward the formation entrance was steep in places and slick where the root surface met the manufactured material at angles that didn't favor traction. Okoro navigated it with the careful precision of someone who had been told not to fall down and was treating that as a mission parameter. Santos went behind her with both hands ready but not hovering, close enough to catch, far enough to let Okoro maintain the dignity of doing it herself.
Above ground, the corridor was unchanged. The escort fauna still paralleled them. The light had shifted to Haven's mid-afternoon amber.
"We need above canopy," Chen said, immediately. "Canopy breaks, ridgelines, elevated terrain in this grid."
"There's a ridgeline two kilometers east," Ghost said. "I ran elevation mapping when we inserted."
"Two kilometers is thirty minutes fast."
Ghost looked at Yuki.
Forty minutes to sweep team response. Thirty minutes to the ridgeline. Ten minutes of margin.
"Move," Yuki said.
They moved fast. No tactical caution about flanks or sight lines. They moved like people who understood that the geography of time was the primary threat, and every minute spent managing secondary threats was a minute they didn't have. Santos ran point at a pace that said her dislocated shoulder was now on a payment plan. Doc kept Okoro's rhythm from behind without appearing to. Chen managed his array with one arm while his other stayed pressed to his side.
Cole kept up.
He'd put his comms unit away after handing it to Chen, and he hadn't asked for it back. He moved in formation like he'd been in formation before this mission, which Yuki had suspected since the cavity. His observer cover was thin enough to see through if you looked for it. She hadn't decided yet if that mattered.
They made the ridgeline in twenty-eight minutes.
The canopy broke here where a geological uplift had sheared the treeline and left exposed stone above the root systems. Enough sky. Chen was out of formation before they reached the top, running signal tests on the comms unit while he climbed.
Yuki and Ghost reached the ridge crest and immediately went prone, because ridgelines were silhouettes and silhouettes were targets.
Below them, the Node Corridor stretched back south. The burn zone from the orbital strike was a pale stripe in the canopy, visible even at this distance. The formation's entrance was hidden under four kilometers of root canopy. Invisible from above.
"Signal?" Yuki said.
"Carrier wave is live," Chen said. He adjusted something. "I have three civilian relays within burst range. Two orbital, one Haven-surface outpost that's not under Continuity lockdown." He looked up. "It's Warden-operated. They've got a relay?"
"Surface outpost is a monitoring station," Okoro said, from where she'd made it to the ridge and was now sitting with her back against stone, breathing controlled. "They set it up three years ago. Piggybacked on our equipment frequencies without asking."
"I never knew about that," Santos said.
"Nobody asked the Wardens," Okoro said. "So they didn't tell."
Chen was already configuring the burst. He had the comms unit open, his own array piggybacked on it, the full data package queued: pulse recordings, wall pattern video, electromagnetic profile, the response event timestamps, Cole's mission log entries that Cole had provided access codes for thirty minutes ago.
"Burst time is seventy seconds," Chen said. "I need the signal to hold."
"Then you have sixty-nine seconds of margin," Ghost said.
Chen initiated.
---
The sweep team arrived at fifty-three seconds.
Not from the south. Yuki had been watching south, where the orbital burn zone was. They came from the east, from a direction that didn't exist in Parr's filed mission parameters, from the treeline at the ridge's lower slope in formation that said they'd been moving in parallel with Specter's route for at least the last kilometer.
Kowalski had given them more than a position report.
Six in the forward element, full Haven-operation gear, rifles up and moving in a fire-and-advance pattern that said they'd been briefed on exactly who they were approaching. Another four visible in the treeline behind them. The lead figure's tactical comm lit up as she broke the ridgeline tree cover.
"Specter Squad, you are ordered to secure your position and await recovery personnel. Sergeant Tanaka, lay down your weapon and step away from the communications equipment."
Not Meridian. These were Continuity security, the legal force, the ones with arrest authority and body camera documentation. Different from the Meridian tactical team entirely.
Parr had sent the second kind. The kind that would put them in cuffs and call it lawful detention and build a paper record that said Specter had been apprehended while conducting unauthorized communications from Haven following contamination exposure.
That was the play. Not kill them on Haven, but detain them, confiscate the equipment, classify the data. The Meridian contact had been pressure. This was the trap's teeth.
"Seventeen seconds," Chen said.
Ghost was already moving, not toward the sweep team but lateral, toward an angle that covered the left flank of the sweep team's advance.
Santos looked at Yuki. "We going?"
"Not yet."
The lead Continuity officer stopped at twenty meters.
"Sergeant Tanaka. My orders authorize lethal force if you continue unauthorized transmission on classified frequencies."
"He gave you Cole's frequency," Yuki said.
A beat. "Sergeant—"
"You're broadcasting that lethal-force warning on Cole's mission log frequency." Yuki didn't move. "Which means Cole's mission log is now capturing your orders as mission context. Which means every instruction you just gave me is part of Cole's official record."
The officer's comm light flickered.
She understood. Yuki watched her understand.
"Eight seconds," Chen said.
"Whatever you do in the next eight seconds is in Cole's record," Yuki said. "And Cole's record is part of the burst package that's been transmitting for sixty-two seconds."
The officer held her position.
"Complete," Chen said.
Yuki looked at the officer across twenty meters of Haven stone.
"The formation is real. Chen has six hours of data from direct contact. The pulse response to my presence is documented and timestamped." She kept her voice flat and factual, the voice she used for mission reports. "Parr told you we were contaminated and dangerous. The data shows something found us and responded to us. That's different from contamination. Ask him to explain the difference."
The officer looked at her sweep team. At Cole, who was standing at the ridge crest with his hands visible and his expression doing nothing at all.
"Cole," the officer said. "Mission status."
Cole said, "Mission objective reached. Full documentation secured and transmitted per observer protocol." A pause. "Specter Squad performed within acceptable mission parameters throughout."
The officer stared at him.
"Sergeant Cole—"
"My mission log is filed," Cole said. "Continuity records retention protocol means it's now part of permanent archive. You can review it. You cannot modify it."
Ghost, from his angle, said quietly: "Four more in the lower tree line. Different gear. Not Continuity security."
Yuki looked.
He was right. Different posture, different equipment configuration. Not the arrest team. The other kind, the kind that didn't need arrest authority because they weren't planning arrests.
Parr's backup for if the backup failed.
"Officer," Yuki said. "You're standing between us and your Director's kill team. I'd recommend moving."
The officer looked at where Ghost was indicating. She read the gear configuration.
She said something short and profane.
Then she turned to her sweep team and made a gesture that wasn't in any manual Yuki recognized, a hand sign that said something in the private language of a unit that had worked together long enough to develop shortcuts.
Her team pulled back to the tree line. Not retreat. Reposition. Specifically to a position between Specter and the four figures in the lower treeline.
The four figures in the lower treeline did not advance.
A standoff.
Yuki looked at the Continuity officer across the repositioned line.
"Copy," she said.
The officer said nothing. She stood in her new position and watched the lower treeline with the expression of a professional who'd just made a decision that would require a great deal of explanation later.
---
The standoff lasted until Haven's sun touched the western canopy.
Parr's secondary team made two feints and both times the Continuity officer held the line between them and the ridge. They didn't force it. Forcing it meant engaging the arrest team on record, which created exactly the paper trail Parr had sent the secondary team to avoid.
Yuki held the ridge with her squad and let the standoff run.
Chen used the time to verify the burst had reached all three relays. It had. He then spent forty minutes reverse-engineering Kowalski's missing data from the readings he'd taken in the chamber, not perfectly, but enough that the significant gaps were filled with high-confidence estimates that he'd flagged as estimates.
Okoro spent the time making entries in her xenobiology manual. Methodical, in the careful handwriting she used for the manual specifically. The Wardens at the ridge edge watched her work with their slow patient attention.
Doc checked everyone's status. She gave Santos something from her kit without telling her what it was, and Santos accepted it without asking, which was their own language.
Ghost stayed on the ridgeline and watched.
He was very good at watching. Yuki had known him for four years and had never fully adapted to the quality of his attention, the complete stillness of it, the way he could exist in a position for hours without the gradual degradation that observation posts usually produced.
She went to him as Haven's sun slid lower.
"Sweep team won't advance past the officer's line until dark," he said. "After dark, they will."
"We're not here after dark."
"How do we get off Haven without a working ring?"
She'd been running it since the standoff began. The mission ring had been the orbital-strike target. Gone. The secondary insertion point that the sweep team had used was at the east end of the corridor, which was currently occupied by Parr's backup team.
"Harrison," she said.
Ghost raised an eyebrow. "From Haven."
"He opened camera blind spots on the station from his station console. The same signal relay infrastructure." She looked at Chen across the ridge. "If the Warden relay is still live, and if Harrison can reach us on it."
"He doesn't have a Haven ring. He can't open one remotely."
"No. But he has access to station resources, and Parr's teams got here somehow. There's at least one functional wormhole point on this planet. Harrison needs to know where it is."
Ghost looked at the lower treeline.
"The secondary insertion point the sweep team used," he said.
"Which is currently guarded by people who want us dead."
"Occupied," he corrected. "Not guarded. There's a difference." He studied the tree line. "Guarded means they're expecting contact from our direction. Occupied means they're facing the arrest team."
She ran that.
"Give me a route," she said.
He studied the terrain for forty seconds. She waited.
"There's a dry channel system east of the ridge that follows the geology down to the lower corridor zone without crossing open ground. If we move from the north end of the ridge, below the sight line of both positions." He paused. "Four hundred meters of exposed traverse before we hit channel cover."
"Open ground."
"But lower than either position's angle. If they're watching the ridge, they're not watching below it."
Yuki looked at the lower treeline. At the arrest team's repositioned line. At the light on Haven's surface.
"We move at dusk," she said. "When the light change gives the ridge watching maximum visual noise."
Ghost said, "That's a reasonable plan."
Coming from Ghost, that was high praise.
She left him watching and went to tell the others.
On her way back, she passed the section of ridge where Cole was sitting with his back against a stone, eyes closed, comms unit in his hands. He wasn't transmitting. He was holding it the way you held something you'd just put down for the first time in a long while.
She stopped.
She looked at him for a moment.
"When this is over," she said, "whatever over looks like, what does a Continuity observer who filed accurate mission logs against his director's interests actually do next?"
Cole opened his eyes.
He said, "Years ago I would have said 'wait for vindication.'" He turned the comms unit over in his hands. "Now I think I say: whatever you tell me to do, Sergeant."
She looked at him for three seconds.
"Then for now you keep your head down," she said, and moved on.
At the far end of the ridge, where the surviving Wardens had gathered in the configuration she was starting to recognize as their equivalent of close formation, one of them was doing something she hadn't seen a Warden do before.
It was drawing.
On the stone of the ridge surface, with the tip of one secondary limb, in lines too precise to be accidental. A pattern she recognized, not because she'd seen it before, but because she'd just spent forty minutes in a chamber where it covered every wall.
The formation's patterns. Reproduced on the ridge stone in a language that was neither human nor Warden.
In a year she would understand what it said.
Right now it looked like a warning and a greeting at once, which was not a combination she had a word for.
