The channel run to the secondary insertion point took two hours and produced a new injury.
The dry channel Ghost had spotted was real and navigable and covered and also, at its midpoint, occupied by a Haven predator that had moved in opportunistically when the fauna escort pulled back from this section of terrain. Not a planned ambush, just wrong place, wrong time, which Haven had never cared about. The predator hit Santos from above at the channel's widest point and got three seconds of contact before Santos drove her combat knife into its secondary spine cluster, which was the correct thing to do and she'd done it before.
The contact left her with four parallel lacerations across her right shoulder and upper arm. Not deep. Not threatening. But across the same shoulder she'd been protecting since the Meridian contact.
Doc stopped her at the next channel junction and worked in silence for seven minutes. Santos held still with the specific stillness of someone who was absolutely in pain and was making a deliberate choice not to address that.
"Say something," Doc said.
"Merda," Santos said.
"That'll do." Doc ran her last good adhesive seal across the deepest laceration. "You're getting a compression wrap and you're using your left hand until we reach the insertion point."
Santos looked at her right hand. Opened and closed it. "It works."
"The seal I put on it four hours ago also worked. Then a predator sat on it." Doc looked at her without expression. "Left hand."
Santos didn't argue, which was its own kind of metric.
They reached the secondary insertion point forty minutes before Haven's sun completely cleared the western horizon.
The wormhole emitter was smaller than any ring Yuki had used before, a portable field unit, military-grade, the kind that required a receiving anchor on the home side to function. It had been staked into a cleared section of Haven floor with equipment anchors and was currently running on standby power, surrounded by the Continuity secondary team who'd been there since the standoff began.
Six of them. Not eight. Two had peeled off toward the ridge at some point, either to reinforce or to report. The four remaining were watching the eastern approach and the northern tree line. Not the western channel.
Ghost found a sight line from thirty meters into the channel cover.
He reported without shifting his scope.
"Lead element at the emitter. Two covering north. One maintaining comms with something." A pause. "They're not oriented toward us."
"They expect us from the ridge," Yuki said.
"Or they expect the arrest team to push us south and box us in from both sides."
"Either way, we're in their blind." She looked at Chen. "Can you reach Harrison from here?"
Chen had the Warden relay running for the last thirty minutes, bouncing a signal off the orbital relay Haven's surface station had been using. He'd reached Harrison's station contact point, a relay address Harrison had given him in the thirty seconds of direct comms they'd managed on the conduit terminal, and was waiting for the bounce-back confirmation that said the message had been received.
His array blinked twice.
"He's on," Chen said. He handed Yuki an earpiece.
Harrison's voice came through fragmented and managed, routed through three systems that weren't supposed to talk to each other, and the audio quality reflected that.
"You're alive," Harrison said.
"So far," Yuki said. "We need the secondary insertion point unlocked for departure. It's a portable emitter on Haven's surface. Someone on station is running the anchor."
"I see it in the deployment logs. It's registered under emergency extraction protocol for the sweep team." A pause, and in the pause she could hear Harrison doing something at his end. "If I pull the anchor authorization from station side, the emitter goes into hold mode."
"Which means the sweep team can't use it to extract."
"And neither can you."
"We're Reapers," Yuki said. "We know how to unlock a ring in hold mode."
A longer pause.
"Parr has station watch on every anchor point," Harrison said. "If I touch the emitter's authorization chain, he'll know from the access log."
"How long before he can respond?"
"Response time from alert to physical presence at the anchor: eight minutes. Digital lockout: two minutes."
Two minutes before Parr could cut the emitter completely. Eight minutes before he had people physically at the anchor.
"Pull the authorization on my mark," Yuki said. "Two minutes for Chen to unlock the emitter, six minutes for transit before Parr's people reach the anchor."
"Yuki." Harrison's voice changed register, dropping out of the professional tone to the one underneath. "If I pull this authorization, my access to station systems goes away. He'll track it to me."
She held that.
Harrison had been their eyes in the station network. Every camera blind spot, every door code, every route. He'd kept them alive in Workshop Seven and in the conduit network and during the equipment prep. If Parr identified him and locked him out, that asset was gone for every fight that came after.
"What's your escape plan if he identifies you?" she said.
"I have one. It's not comfortable." He paused. "It involves Webb's command quarters and a access code Webb gave me six months ago for exactly this kind of scenario."
"Webb knew you were a contact."
"Webb is thorough," Harrison said. "He planned for contingencies he hoped he'd never need." Another pause. "He's still under guard. But his quarters are accessible. If I'm there when Parr locks me out, I'm technically under Webb's protective jurisdiction until the legal situation clarifies."
"And the legal situation is."
"Getting clearer every hour. The data burst is replicating. Civilian courts have issued three more injunctions. Parr is losing narrative control faster than he expected." Harrison's voice steadied. "The formation data that went out twenty minutes ago is already generating secondary coverage. Two independent scientific organizations have issued statements requesting immediate access to the survey data."
That was fast. Faster than the directive package.
Because the directive package had been political, interpretable, deniable, something Parr's narrative machine could reframe as fabricated. But a six-month electromagnetic survey of an alien formation with a documented response event was a scientific claim that required either independent verification or explicit suppression.
And explicit suppression was its own story.
"Give me thirty seconds," Yuki said.
She pulled back from the channel edge and looked at her squad.
Ghost. Santos holding her right arm against her side with the careful deliberateness of someone who'd been told once not to use it. Doc checking Okoro's pulse with two fingers in the channel shadow. Chen managing the relay bounce and the emitter approach simultaneously. Cole with his comms unit and his mission log and his choice made somewhere on the ridge.
"Harrison unlocks the emitter," she said. "He loses station access. We have eight minutes to get through before Parr cuts it from the other side. That means we take the insertion point from the sweep team first." She looked at Ghost.
"I have angles on three," he said. "The fourth is behind the emitter unit."
"Stun or live?"
"Stun if they hold position. Live if they orient." He said it without inflection, a tactical assessment, not a preference.
"I want as many of them walking as possible," she said. "They're Continuity security, not Meridian. Someone told them a story about contaminated Reapers. They're doing their jobs."
Santos, with her good arm: "What about us? What story are we in right now?"
Yuki looked at her.
"We're the ones who went underground and didn't come back contaminated," she said. "We're the ones with the data."
She keyed Harrison.
"Mark," she said.
Then she was moving.
---
The thing about a well-sited team that isn't expecting contact from a specific direction is that the first indication of that contact is often someone going down.
Ghost dropped the lead element with a stun round to the neck seam, non-lethal, but the shock system in that round was not gentle, and the person who went down went down full and stayed. The two covering north spun toward the sound and Santos hit them both from the left flank with controlled stun rounds from her good arm in the time it took them to orient.
The fourth trooper, behind the emitter unit, reacted correctly. Got low, stayed covered, didn't expose a target.
Yuki reached the emitter in the time it took the fourth trooper to make a decision.
She didn't give them time to make a bad one.
"Continuity security, I'm Sergeant Tanaka, Specter Squad," she said, loud and clear. "The emitter is in hold mode. My tech specialist is unlocking it for departure. You are not authorized to interfere with emergency Reaper extraction under the same protocol your team used to insert."
The trooper behind the emitter didn't answer.
"I know you have a story about contamination," Yuki said. "I know Parr's office told you we're compromised. There's a data burst on every civilian relay within range of this planet that shows what we found underground. You'll be able to read it when you get back to station." She paused. "Stand down and I will personally file a report stating your team conducted itself professionally and in good faith throughout this operation."
A three-second pause.
The trooper stood up.
Younger than Yuki expected. Mid-twenties. The expression of someone running a very fast calculation about what the next move cost versus what it bought.
"We were briefed that you were dangerous," the trooper said. "Alien contamination. Irrational behavior."
"I gave you a legal citation, identified myself by rank and unit, and told you to stand down," Yuki said. "Does that read as irrational behavior to you?"
The trooper looked at the downed members of her team. At Chen, who was working at the emitter with the focused speed of someone who'd unlocked ring systems in worse conditions. At Cole, who appeared at the emitter's edge with his mission log open on his tablet.
"Sergeant Cole," the trooper said. "Mission status?"
Cole said, "Specter Squad is conducting authorized extraction following successful mission completion. I recommend you stand clear of the emitter."
The trooper's face went through something complicated and resolved into something that was professionally appropriate and personally uncertain.
She stepped aside.
Chen hit the final lock sequence.
The emitter woke with the sound of drawn breath, different from the ring systems, smaller and tighter, the sound of an emergency system brought online for a purpose it barely fit.
A transit field formed. Smaller diameter than a standard ring. They'd be going through close.
"ATLAS would love this," Chen said, mostly to himself. "A portable field emitter with a holding anchor. The signal bounce mathematics alone—"
"Chen," Santos said.
"Right. Yes. Transit is ready." He looked at his timer. "Four minutes before Parr's people reach the station anchor."
Yuki looked at the young trooper.
"Come through if you want. Or stay and tell Parr what you saw." She held the trooper's gaze. "Your call."
The trooper looked at the three downed members of her team, still breathing, still in shock-system paralysis.
"I'll stay with my people," she said.
Yuki nodded. She turned to the Wardens who'd followed them to the insertion point, seven of them now, gathered at the tree line. She looked at them.
There was no exchange she could make. No words that translated. She raised one hand, prosthetic palm out, the gesture that had passed between her and the dying Warden in the cavity.
One of the seven Wardens raised a primary limb in the same configuration.
Then Yuki went through.
Transit was tight and rough. The portable emitter wasn't built for fully-geared Reaper squads and it argued with every transit parameter. But it held. They came through on the station anchor side in a staging alcove that smelled of maintenance chemical and was mercifully empty.
Cole came through last.
The field collapsed behind him.
Yuki heard it through the alcove walls, through the station infrastructure, the distant sound of emergency protocols activating. Parr finding the anchor access log. Parr understanding what had happened.
Harrison's voice came through her earpiece one more time, thin and abrupt.
"I'm at Webb's quarters. Webb's door is locked from inside and I don't have the secondary code." A pause. "Stand by."
Three seconds.
"He opened it," Harrison said. "Webb opened it himself."
Then the signal cut.
The alcove was quiet.
Santos was sitting on the floor with her right arm extended and her eyes closed and the expression of someone who had decided to stop pretending they weren't in pain for exactly thirty seconds.
Doc was beside her before the thirty seconds was up.
Ghost put his back against the alcove wall beside Yuki and said, without looking at her, "Harrison made it."
"Sounds like it."
"And Webb's awake."
"Sounds like it."
He was quiet for a moment. "What comes next?"
She thought about the formation's pulse locked at one-point-four seconds. About the Warden drawing patterns on Haven ridge stone. About Cole's mission log filed into permanent archive. About the formation data replicating through civilian networks, being seen by scientists who were already issuing statements, who would need explanations that Parr didn't have clearance to suppress.
About eleven years of people walking the wrong corridor.
"We go find Parr," she said, "and we make him explain the difference between contamination and contact."
