Zeph punched the *Requiem* out of dock like she was stealing it.
The docking clamps released at 0928âtwo minutes ahead of schedule because Zeph had already run the pre-flight while Jax was still boarding, the departure sequence overlapping with power-up in a way that would have given any Navy dock officer a stroke. The ship pulled free of the station's arms with a shudder that ran through the hull, the docking seals popping in sequence, and then the *Requiem* was loose and Zeph's hands were on the controls and the destroyer leapt forward on a burn that pressed everyone into their seats.
"Transit speed in four minutes," Zeph said into the ship-wide comm. Her voice carried the particular quality that only appeared when she was flying with purposeâtight, focused, the rambling stripped away and replaced with the clipped precision of a pilot who was very good at her job and knew it. "Void entry in six. Strap in or hold on."
On the bridge behind her, Jax settled into the commander's station. The displays arrayed around him showed the *Requiem's* statusâshields charged, weapons on standby, sensor grid active. Standard departure protocol. He'd run it a hundred times on Navy vessels. The *Requiem* ran it differently. The displays were sharper than they'd been a week ago. Faster. The bio-tissue that had reached the sensor array showed its effect in the data refresh rateâinformation arriving a half-second sooner, the ship processing its environment with a speed that mechanical systems alone couldn't match.
"Helm, what's our transit time to target coordinates?" Jax asked.
"Eighty-seven minutes if I push it. Ninety-two standard." Zeph's hands moved across the control surfacesâthe hybrid interface that was half manufactured console and half bio-grown tissue, the living material warm under her fingers. "I'm pushing it."
"Copy."
In the cargo hold, Malik sat on a weapons crate and checked his kinetic rifle. Then his sidearm. Then the four grenades mag-locked to his vestâtwo flashbang, two fragmentation, the loadout of a man who expected trouble and wanted options when it arrived. His movements were automatic. Hands going through the motions while the rest of him went somewhere else. The quiet place. The still place. The space inside his head where the former enforcer retreated before an operation and the gentle soul retreated until the operation was done.
The *Requiem's* drive core spooled. The sound climbed through the hullâthe deep vibration that Zeph had lived with since she'd first set foot on this ship, the mechanical heartbeat that she knew as well as her own. But layered over it: something new. A harmonic. The bio-tissue threaded through the drive's power conduits adding its own frequency to the engine's note, the organic and mechanical sounds braiding together into a chord that hadn't existed before the growth.
The ship sounded alive.
"Void entry in thirty seconds," Zeph said. She felt the controls respondâsmoother than before, the reaction time compressed, the ship anticipating her inputs by fractions of a second. The bio-tissue wasn't just hardware anymore. It was a nervous system. And it was learning Zeph's patterns, adapting to her piloting style, becoming an extension of her hands the way the warship was becoming an extension of Kira's mind.
"Come on, girl," Zeph whispered. "Show me what you can do."
The *Requiem* hit void transit with a sound like tearing silkâthe reality breach opening ahead of the bow, the ship passing through the threshold between normal space and the dimension beneath it, and then the stars were gone and the void was everywhere and the destroyer was running fast through the space between spaces.
---
Kira felt them go.
She stood on the station's command deck with her hand on the tactical display and the warship's connection humming through her neural pathways, and when the *Requiem* hit void transit, she felt it. Not pain. Not disorientation. A tug. A thread pulling taut between the warship in the dock below and the destroyer carrying its biological offspring through the voidâthe bio-tissue in the *Requiem's* systems linked to the warship's energy grid through a connection that distance should have severed but didn't.
She could feel the *Requiem's* position. Not coordinates, not numbers. A direction and a distance, sensed the way a compass needle senses magnetic north. The ship was there, moving fast, the bio-tissue pulsing with the void transit's energy, the organic systems drinking the dimensional energy like roots drinking rain.
"Commander?" Aria-7's voice, noting the pause.
"I can feel them." Kira's hand pressed against the display. "The *Requiem*. I can sense the ship through the warship's connection."
Silence from the AI. Processing. Then: "The bio-tissue in the *Requiem's* systems maintains a quantum-entangled link to the warship's energy grid. If your neural interface has advanced sufficiently to access the warship's sensor data, it is theoretically possible that you are detecting the *Requiem* through that link."
"It's not theoretical. They're eighty-three minutes from the target. The ship is running clean. Drive output nominal." Kira pulled her hand back. The connection thinned but heldâthe thread stretching across the void between the station and the departing destroyer, carrying data that no instrument could measure. "The bio-tissue is transmitting the *Requiem's* status back through the grid."
"This is unprecedented." Aria-7's voice carried the quality that the AI reserved for data that didn't fit existing models. "I will log the phenomenon for Doctor Voss's review."
Cross stood at the communications console across the command deck. She'd been quiet since the departureâwatching the tactical display, watching the three Imperial contacts at the sensor perimeter, watching the clock that counted down to a fleet that was closer than anyone wanted to think about.
"Can you track them in real time?" Cross asked. No preamble. No surprise. The intelligence officer filing a new capability under *assets* and moving on.
"I think so. The signal is stable. If it holds through the transitâ"
"Then we have something Kaine doesn't know about. A communications link that doesn't use the QMesh, doesn't generate signal traffic, and can't be intercepted." Cross turned from the console. Her eyes were sharp. The fatigue of the sleepless night burned away by operational focus. "When the *Requiem* reaches Thorne, I need you to monitor the situation through that link. If anything goes wrong, we need to know before they can transmit."
Kira nodded. The warship's connection hummed in her pathwaysâthe ancient vessel below, patient, waiting, feeding her data from a ship eighty-three minutes away through a link that spanned the void.
She settled into the commander's station and closed her eyes and felt the *Requiem* running through the dark.
---
Cross brought Cade to the relay room at 1030.
Same room. Same console. Same marine at the door. Cade in his restraints, his hands positioned to type, his face showing the flat professional composure that hadn't cracked since the night they'd taken him. The man who sat on his bunk with his boots laced and waited.
"Second transmission," Cross said. She stood at the threshold. "Updated response to FULCRUM's tasking."
Cade's fingers hovered over the console. "The priority collection on Progenitor vessel data."
"We're giving them what they asked for." Cross's voice was level. The command register at full operational clarity. "Spectral analysis of the warship's hull composition. Resonance frequency observations during standby cycles. Electromagnetic emission patterns during power state changes."
"You have this data?"
"I have data." Cross set a datapad on the console beside Cade's hands. The screen showed numbersâspectral readings, frequency measurements, emission signatures. Technical data formatted in the style of a field observation report, the kind of product a deep-cover asset would produce from careful measurement and unauthorized access to restricted areas.
The numbers were wrong.
Not obviously wrong. Not random. The spectral analysis was close to what a real observation might produceâwithin the range of plausibility, grounded in enough accurate physics that an MI analyst reviewing the data wouldn't flag it as fabricated on first pass. But the resonance frequencies were shifted. Offset from the warship's actual operating parameters by a margin that Cross had calculated with the precision of a woman who understood exactly what a tuned resonance weapon needed and exactly how to make it miss.
"If they're building a Sunbreaker device," Cross said, "this data calibrates it to a frequency that will not destabilize Progenitor hull material. The weapon fires. The ship doesn't break. And Kaine's technical team spends days trying to figure out why their calibration failed."
Cade studied the datapad. His eyes moved across the numbersâthe flat assessment of a man evaluating the quality of a fabrication, because evaluating fabrications was what he'd been trained to do from the other side.
"The spectral analysis is convincing," he said. "The resonance data will survive a first-tier review. A second-tier analysisâcomparison against known Progenitor material databasesâwill identify inconsistencies within forty-eight to seventy-two hours."
"Forty-eight hours is enough."
Cade nodded. He entered the encryption sequence. His fingers found the keys with the same muscle memory as beforeâthe cipher generating, the relay frequencies loading, the signal timing protocol preparing to bounce the transmission through three civilian nodes to FULCRUM's receive point.
"FULCRUM also requested confirmation or denial of crystalline structures in the vessel's interior," Cade said. Hands paused. "You haven't addressed that."
"Deny." Cross's voice was flat. "Report that your observation access is limited to external areas. The vessel's interior remains sealed. Unable to confirm or deny crystalline presence."
"That's consistent with my established access profile. A communications technician would not have interior access to a Progenitor vessel." Cade's fingers moved. The denial coded into the report. "However. The denial itself is information. If FULCRUM is asking about crystalline structures, they have reason to believe such structures exist. A confirmed denial may prompt them to task a different asset or deploy a reconnaissance team to obtain the data directly."
Cross looked at him. The assessment. The cold math.
"That's a risk I've calculated," she said.
Cade transmitted. The QMesh pulsed. Seven seconds of encrypted data climbing through the station's array and into the dark.
---
The *Requiem* dropped out of void transit at 1057, and the first thing Zeph saw was debris.
Not much. A scatter of metal fragments drifting in loose formationâthe remains of something small, a shuttle or transport, broken apart by weapons fire and left to drift. The fragments caught the distant starlight and turned it into cold sparks. Tiny. Scattered across a kilometer of empty space like someone had thrown a handful of coins into the dark.
"Debris field," Zeph reported. "Small vessel. Recent breakupâthermal signatures still warm. Somebody shot something apart out here within the last twelve hours."
"The beacon?" Jax's voice from the commander's station. Level. The zero-temperature register.
"Bearing two-one-seven, range four hundred kilometers. Signal is weak. Emergency power levels." Zeph adjusted course. The *Requiem* turnedâsmooth, responsive, the bio-enhanced systems translating her input into motion with an immediacy that made her grip tighten on the controls. Too fast. Almost too fast. The ship had been a destroyer. It was becoming something quicker. "I have visual in three minutes."
"Torres. Prep for EVA recovery."
"Copy." Malik's voice from the cargo hold. Already moving. The sound of mag-locks releasing, the heavy boots finding the deck, the particular efficiency of a man who had been waiting for the order before it came.
Zeph brought the *Requiem* in slow. The debris field thinned as they approached the beacon's sourceâthe fragments spreading, the scatter pattern expanding, the geometry of a small ship dying violently at a point that they were now leaving behind.
The escape pod appeared on visual at four hundred meters.
Standard Imperial Navy emergency podâcylindrical, two meters long, the emergency beacon mounted on the dorsal surface pulsing a weak red light. The pod was tumbling. Slow rotation, end over end, the kind of spin that happened when a pod was ejected at velocity and nobody inside was conscious enough to correct the attitude.
The hull was damaged. Scoring along the port sideâkinetic impacts, three of them, grouped tight. Someone had shot at the pod after it launched. The shots had hit but not penetratedâthe pod's emergency armor doing its job, barely, the impacts denting the hull without breaching it. A fourth impact had caught the aft section, cracking the drive housing. The emergency thruster was dead. The pod was drifting on whatever momentum the ejection had given it, tumbling, its systems running on battery power that the weak beacon said was almost gone.
"Pod is intact," Zeph said. "One life sign. Faint. The occupant's biosignature isâ" She paused. Checked the readout. "Elevated stress indicators. Hypothermic range. Heart rate irregular. Whoever's in there is alive but not by much."
"Bring us alongside," Jax ordered. "Torres, cargo bay two. Pressurize for pod retrieval."
Zeph matched rotation with the tumbling podâa maneuver that required the *Requiem* to adopt a spin that would have made any navigator nauseous, the ship pirouetting on its lateral axis to match the pod's end-over-end tumble and bring the cargo bay doors into alignment. The bio-enhanced controls made it possible. The ship responded to her hands with a fluidity that mechanical systems couldn't have achievedâthe thrusters firing in micro-bursts, the corrections coming before Zeph consciously calculated them, the ship anticipating her intent.
"Alignment achieved. Cargo bay opening."
The *Requiem's* bay doors spread. The pod drifted inâguided by the ship's tractor field, the weak system that Zeph had jury-rigged weeks ago from salvaged components and that the bio-tissue had since reinforced with organic relays that tripled its effective range. The pod settled onto the cargo bay floor with a clank that echoed through the hull.
"Pod secured. Bay pressurizing."
Malik was already there.
The cargo bay filled with atmosphere in ninety seconds. Malik stood at the pod's emergency access panel with a manual release tool in his right hand and his sidearm in his left. Standard breach protocol. You opened unknown containers with a weapon drawn because the galaxy was full of things that looked like rescue opportunities and turned out to be something else.
The access panel released. The pod's hatch blewâexplosive bolts firing, the seal breaking with a hiss of pressure equalization. Air rushed in. Cold air, recycled through a failing scrubber, carrying the smell of blood and sweat and something chemical. Bitter. Acidic. The smell that interrogation drugs left on skin after they'd done their work.
Elias Thorne was curled on the pod's floor.
The man was thin. Thinner than the word suggestedâthe kind of thin that happened when a body consumed its own reserves over weeks, the muscles burning for fuel, the fat gone, the skeleton asserting itself through skin that had forgotten what healthy looked like. His clothes were civilianâtorn, stained, the fabric crusted with dried blood from wounds that had been bleeding and had stopped and had started again. His left arm was wrong. The forearm bent at an angle between the wrist and elbow that anatomy didn't support. Broken. Untreated. Swollen to twice its normal size, the skin purple-black with pooled blood.
Burns. On his chest, visible through the torn shirt. Three circles. Precise. The particular diameter and spacing of interrogation electrodesâthe tools that MI used for chemical-assisted questioning, the instruments that left round marks because the current entered the body through contact pads and the heat followed the current.
His hands were ruined. The fingers bent in directions that fingers shouldn't go. Broken systematically. One at a time. The specific damage of a professional who understood that hands were the most sensitive part of the body and that breaking them one finger at a time produced cooperation faster than anything else.
"Stars witness," Malik said. Low. The accent thick. He holstered his sidearm and knelt beside the pod.
Thorne's eyes opened. Bloodshot. One pupil larger than the otherâconcussion, or the lingering effect of whatever chemicals they'd used. His breathing was shallow. Fast. The respiration of a body running on its last reserves.
"Commandâ" His voice was a rasp. Sandpaper on stone. "Commander Thorne. Authentication... Carthage seven-seven-one."
"We have you," Malik said. He reached into the pod. Careful. The hands that had broken people once now touching the broken man with the particular gentleness that was Malik's contradictionâthe enforcer's hands doing the opposite of what they'd been built for. "Can you move?"
"Legs work. Arm doesn't." Thorne's good hand found Malik's forearm. Gripped. The strength in that grip was wrongâtoo strong for a man in his condition, the desperate strength of someone holding on because letting go meant dying. "Intel. I haveâKaine's fleet. Sunbreaker. Three days."
"Save it," Malik said. "We're taking you home."
"Three days." Thorne's eyes were losing focus. The pupils drifting. "They're bringing Sunbreaker. Mounted on the flagship. Three days. You have... three days."
His hand slipped from Malik's arm. His eyes closed. Still breathing. The shallow, fast rhythm of a man whose body had finally decided to stop running and collapse.
Malik lifted him from the pod. Careful. Arm braced. The broken limb supported against Malik's chest, the big man's hands cradling a body that had been taken apart by professionals and put back together by nothing but willpower and a pod with a dead thruster.
"Commander Reyes," Malik said into the comm. His voice was the quiet register. Controlled. The tone that meant the situation was bad and getting worse and Malik was handling it because that was what Malik did. "Asset secured. One casualty, critical. He needs a doctor yesterday."
"Copy. Helm, get us home."
"Already on it," Zeph said.
---
At the station, Kira opened her eyes.
She'd been tracking the *Requiem* through the warship's linkâthe thread between the Progenitor vessel and the destroyer's bio-tissue carrying data across the void in real time. She'd felt the transit. The arrival. The pod retrieval. The life sign, faint and failing, that the *Requiem's* sensors had detected and the bio-tissue had relayed.
"They have him," Kira said. "One survivor. Critical condition."
Cross didn't move from the communications console. Her hands were flat on the surface. The controlled stillness of a woman who had spent two years waiting for news of a man she'd sent into the dark and was now receiving that news through a channel that shouldn't exist.
"Alive?" Cross asked.
"Alive. Barely." Kira stood from the commander's station. The warship's connection hummedâthe thread to the *Requiem* still taut, still transmitting, the bio-tissue feeding status data through the quantum-entangled link. "Tortured. Broken arm. Chemical interrogation marks. Someone caught him and worked him over."
Cross's jaw locked. The muscles standing taut. Her hands pressed harder against the consoleâthe controlled stillness becoming something closer to controlled force, a woman pushing down on a surface because pushing down was better than what her hands wanted to do instead.
"He confirmed Sunbreaker," Kira said. "Three days."
"Three days." Cross straightened. The professional mask reassembled in layersâcomposure first, then clarity, then the operational focus that burned everything else to fuel. "Three days until Kaine arrives with a weapon designed to kill the warship."
"And we just fed FULCRUM false calibration data."
"Which may or may not work. If Thorne's intelligence is currentâif Kaine's fleet is three days out instead of twoâthen our fabricated data arrives before the final calibration. The Sunbreaker device targets the wrong frequency. The weapon fails." Cross picked up her datapad. "If the intelligence is old, if the calibration is already complete, the false data arrives too late to matter."
The tactical display glowed between them. The station. The warship. The three contacts at the perimeterâscouts and picket, the forward screen of a fleet that was closer than they'd thought. And somewhere in the void between here and there, the *Requiem* running home with a broken man who knew how much time they had.
"Aria-7," Kira said. "The *Requiem's* return timeline?"
"Based on current transit speed, the *Requiem* will arrive at the station in approximately eighty-four minutes. Howeverâ" The AI paused. The particular pause that preceded information that altered the operational picture. "I am detecting a new sensor contact in the *Requiem's* vicinity. Imperial frigate, bearing one-four-eight relative to the *Requiem's* position. Range: twelve million kilometers. The frigate is on a standard patrol sweep."
Kira's hand found the display. She didn't need to touch itâthe warship's connection fed her the data directly, the *Requiem's* bio-tissue transmitting the sensor picture through the quantum link. She could see what the destroyer saw. An Imperial frigate, cruiser-weight, running a search pattern across the sector. Not heading for the *Requiem* directly. But close. Close enough that a void transit signatureâthe reality breach that every ship created when it jumpedâwould register on the frigate's sensors like a flare in the dark.
"If the *Requiem* enters void transit from its current position," Aria-7 continued, "the transit signature will be detectable by the frigate's long-range sensors. Probability of detection: seventy-three percent."
"And if they wait?"
"The frigate's patrol pattern will take it out of detection range in approximately forty minutes. However, the *Requiem's* position will become increasingly exposed as the patrol sweep continues. Remaining stationary carries its own risks."
Kira closed her eyes. The warship's connection showed her the *Requiem*âthe destroyer sitting in space near the wreckage of whatever ship Thorne had been on, the escape pod in the cargo bay, the Imperial frigate sweeping toward them at a speed that ate the forty-minute window one second at a time.
She couldn't reach them. Couldn't comm them without using the QMesh, which the frigate would intercept. Couldn't do anything from the station except watch through a link that only carried data one way.
The decision was Jax's. And Zeph's.
---
On the *Requiem's* bridge, Zeph watched the frigate's sensor contact drift across her display.
"Twelve million klicks," she said. "Patrol sweep, standard grid pattern. It'll cross our detection threshold inâ"
"I see it," Jax said. His cybernetic arm was still. Dead still. The servos holding position with the mechanical precision that preceded his sharpest tactical decisions. "Transit options."
"If I jump now, the signature hits their sensors at seventy-three percent detection probability. If I wait forty minutes, the frigate moves past and we jump clean."
"Forty minutes stationary in a sector where we just recovered an escape pod from a debris field."
"Yeah." Zeph's hands rested on the controls. The bio-enhanced interface warm under her palms. The ship waiting. Responsive. Ready to move the instant she told it to. "Forty minutes is a long time to sit in someone else's wreckage."
Jax looked at the display. The frigate. The debris field. The *Requiem* sitting between them like a target painted on dark canvas.
"The debris field is warm," he said. "Recent. Whoever destroyed Thorne's vessel did it within the last twelve hours. If the frigate is part of the force that caught Thorneâ"
"Then they're looking for the pod." Zeph finished the thought. "The pod we just picked up."
"Affirmative."
"So sitting here for forty minutes means sitting in the exact spot where the people who tortured him are actively searching."
Jax's arm whirred. One cycle. The servos engaging and disengaging in the mechanical equivalent of a man cracking his knuckles.
"Run," he said.
Zeph hit the drive.
The *Requiem* leapt. The void transit calculations had been loaded since arrivalâZeph wasn't the kind of pilot who approached a hostile extraction without an exit plottedâand the ship responded to the command with the bio-enhanced speed that made the difference between a destroyer and whatever the *Requiem* was becoming. The drive spooled in three seconds instead of eight. The reality breach opened ahead of the bow with a crack that was smaller, tighter, cleaner than any transit Zeph had flown before.
The bio-tissue. The organic systems woven through the drive core and the conduits and the power relays, smoothing the transit signature, compressing the breach, making the jump with a precision that mechanical systems couldn't match. The *Requiem* slipped through the opening cleanlyâthere and gone, the transit signature a whisper instead of a shout.
"Transit clean," Zeph said. She checked the sensor log. "Signature output was... eighteen percent of standard. The bio-tissue damped the breach signature."
"Eighteen percent." Jax processed the number. "Would the frigate detect that?"
"At twelve million klicks? Maybe. But they'd read it as a small vesselâshuttle-class. Not a destroyer. Not worth pursuing."
The *Requiem* ran through the void. Eighty-four minutes to the station. In the cargo bay, Malik sat beside Thorne's stretcher with a med kit he didn't know how to use and a hand on the broken man's shoulder, holding steady while the ship carried them home.
---
They docked at 1247.
Voss was waiting at the airlock with a medical teamâtwo volunteers from the station's crew who had basic first-aid training and the particular wide-eyed expression of civilians confronted with the aftermath of professional violence. Voss took one look at Thorne's injuries and her face went clinical. The warmth gone. The academic tangents shelved. The doctor who had tended bar-fight bruises and void-sickness for years confronting something from a different vocabulary.
"Stretcher. Med bay. Now." Voss's hands were already movingâchecking pulse, pupil response, the broken arm immobilized with a field splint that Malik had applied during transit. "Chemical interrogation residue. Do we have a toxicology kit?"
"Standard military kit in the *Requiem's* supplies," Jax said.
"Get it. The compounds they used are still active in his system. If I don't neutralize them in the next hour, his liver starts failing."
They carried Thorne through the station's corridors. Stretcher, four bearers, Voss walking beside with her scanner running and her mouth issuing orders in the rapid-fire cadence of a doctor who was losing a patient and refused to let the losing continue.
Kira was in the corridor.
She'd come from the command deck when the docking clamps engagedâthe warship's connection telling her the *Requiem* was home before the station's sensors confirmed it. She stood at the junction between the docking bridge and the main corridor, watching the stretcher come through, watching the man on it who had spent two years in the dark because Helena Cross had sent him there to keep Kira alive.
Thorne looked worse in the station's amber light. The burns darker. The broken arm more wrong. The ruined hands visible over the stretcher's edge, the fingers bent in ways that made Kira's own hands clench at her sides.
Cross was in her quarters. She hadn't come to the docking bridge. Hadn't come to the corridor. The admiral who had sent this man to his destruction was sitting behind a closed door while the results of her operation were carried past on a stretcher, and whether that was discipline or cowardice or the particular inability of Helena Cross to face the human cost of her calculations was a question that Kira didn't have the time or the inclination to answer.
The stretcher passed. Thorne's eyes were closed. Voss's voice a stream of medical orders, the doctor's brisk steps leading the way to the med bay.
Then Thorne's eyes opened.
Unfocused. Bloodshot. The dilated pupils tracking nothing, then tracking somethingâfinding the corridor, finding the people, finding Kira.
His good hand shot out. Fast. Too fast for a man in his conditionâthe same desperate strength that had gripped Malik in the cargo bay, the body's last reserves burning for a moment of focus. His fingers closed on Kira's forearm. The grip was iron.
"Vance." The rasp. Stone on stone. His eyes locked on hers and for one second the fog cleared and the man behind the injuries looked out with the clarity of someone who had carried a message through torture and escape and the cold drift of a failing pod and was not going to let it die unsaid. "She didn't tell you everything."
Kira stopped. The stretcher bearers stopped. Voss turned, scanner raised, mouth open to order the patient to lie still.
"Cross." Thorne's grip tightened. His pupils were fixed on Kira's face. "She didn't tell you about the others."
"What others?"
But Thorne's eyes rolled. The clarity dissolving. The grip on her arm going slack as the body surrendered what it had borrowed from tomorrow's strength for one more second of today's urgency. His hand slipped from her forearm and hit the stretcher rail with a sound like a dropped tool.
Voss pushed past Kira. "Med bay. Now. Move."
The stretcher went. Thorne went with it. Unconscious. The man who had clawed his way back from the edge long enough to deliver three sentences that changed the shape of everything Cross had told her.
*She didn't tell you about the others.*
Kira stood in the corridor. The amber light. The sound of boots retreating toward the med bay. The warship pulsing in the dock below, connected to her through pathways that were healing because a woman she didn't trust had spent two years arranging for them to exist.
What others?
