Chapter 90: Mull Point

Mull Point looked like a station designed by someone who understood function and was completely uninterested in anything else.

The *Requiem* docked at 0340 station time—the middle of the night cycle, the traffic thin, the docking control automated and indifferent. The junction station had been built from two salvaged cargo platforms bolted together along their long axis, the connection point visible as a thick seam of patchwork hull repair running around the station's midsection. Eight docking bays. Six of them occupied. The other two empty.

One of the occupied bays held a ship that was trying very hard to look like a commercial transit vessel and almost succeeding.

"The hull configuration is civilian registry," Aria-7 said through the comm, relaying from the warship eight hundred kilometers off-station. "But the drive signature is military-spec. Someone has fitted civilian skin over a military frame. The transponder shows it as a bulk carrier out of the Orlen system." A pause. "That ship does not exist in the Orlen shipping registry. Cross confirmed."

"Renn's team," Jax said.

"Most likely." A pause. "They've been docked for two hours and fourteen minutes."

Jax looked at the docking bay display. Six ships, one of them watching. Two hours and fourteen minutes was enough time to locate one medical technician in a station with two hundred permanent residents, depending on how they'd chosen to approach it.

He made a decision. "Zeph. Stay with the ship. Lock the bay if anyone comes near. Malik, with me." He looked at the last member of their team—Drayden, who had asked to come and whose tactical competence had been demonstrated more than adequately at the Judgment's death. "Captain Drayden. You know civilian medical facilities?"

"I've operated out of them," Drayden said. "When the *Talon* was running wounded personnel to neutral stations."

"The clinic is on level two. Commercial medical section. If Sable Kuro is working a night shift—"

"A medical tech on night shift in a transit clinic won't have support staff. Maybe one supervisor." Drayden was already assessing. "Low confrontation approach. Medical emergency. Something that requires her specifically—specialized equipment, a patient who knew her by name."

"Do that," Jax said.

---

The clinic was on level two, junction ring—third door past the cargo manifest station, the identifier light above the door showing green for open. Drayden went in first.

The supervisor was a heavyset man in his fifties named Gorven who had the tail-end-of-shift look—two stimulant patches visible on his neck, eyes that had stopped focusing on things they didn't need to focus on. He looked up when Drayden came in. Assessed her—the pressed uniform, the officer bearing, the nothing that indicated emergency but also nothing that indicated casual. "Help you?"

"Patient on my ship," Drayden said. She'd changed her uniform insignia on the walk from the *Requiem*. Independent merchant, non-affiliated. "Cargo accident. The equipment we have isn't enough. I was told your tech here has experience with crush injuries?"

Gorven looked toward the back. "Kuro's in the supply room. She does have—"

A door at the back of the clinic opened.

The woman who stepped through was not tall—a head shorter than Drayden, with the deliberate calm of someone who had trained herself not to move quickly in enclosed spaces. Her hair was pulled back, practical. She wore clinic scrubs. Her hands were bare, which Jax—watching through the door's narrow window from the corridor—noticed immediately because bare hands in a medical setting meant she'd been doing manual work, not procedure.

And the moment she stepped into the room, the Progenitor sensor relay through the bio-tissue link flared.

The signal that had been compressed tight for years—the void-touched signature that Aria-7 had been tracking across the Fringe, the lantern gutted down to an ember to avoid detection—blazed for two full seconds as Sable Kuro looked at the woman who had just walked into her clinic.

Not at Drayden.

Through the door. At the corridor. At Jax.

She'd felt them.

Her eyes found the door's window. Found Jax's face through the glass. Not surprise—recognition. The recognition of someone who had been waiting to be found by something that could see her, and had been afraid, and was now very afraid in a different way.

Jax held up his hands. Visible through the glass. Open palms. Not a threat.

Sable Kuro did not move.

Gorven said, "Kuro? This woman has a—"

The emergency comm on the wall crackled. Not an automated alert—a voice. Calm, professional, the voice of a man who had done this before in many different settings and had learned that calm voices got better results than commands. "Medical Technician Kuro. This is Special Agent Renn of the Imperial Council. Please remain in the clinic. You are not in any danger. I'd like to speak with you."

The words were wrong in every dimension. *Please remain.* As if remaining were voluntary. *Not in any danger.* As if Imperial Council Agents announced themselves to people who weren't in danger.

Gorven's head came up. His eyes went to the comm. Then to Sable. Then to Drayden.

Sable Kuro was already moving.

Not toward the door where Jax was—toward the supply room she'd come from. Jax shoved the clinic door open. The lock was minimal—a simple latch—and he hit it with his shoulder and came through as Sable reached the supply room door.

"Wait," Jax said. "We're not Imperial."

She didn't wait. She went through the supply room door. Jax followed.

The supply room was a narrow corridor of shelving, medical grade storage containers on both sides, the far end another door. She was at the far door when he cleared the entrance. She stopped with her hand on the handle.

"How did you find me?" Her voice was controlled. The control of someone used to managing fear in a medical setting.

"The warship found you. The same way it found Corvin Ash on Orvast." He kept his voice level. Hands still visible. "There's another void-touched on the ship. He's been working with the warship's power systems for two days. We're not Imperial. We're not here to take you anywhere against your will."

Gorven had followed them as far as the supply room entrance. "What in the—"

"Sir," Malik said from behind Gorven. The weapons specialist had come in behind Jax, quiet for a man his size, and was now standing at the entrance to the supply room with his hands at his sides and his body blocking the doorway. Not threatening. Blocking. The difference was significant. "Please stay calm."

Sable was looking at Jax. Her eyes moving—calculating, assessing, the rapid read of someone experienced with emergency triage. Checking his face for the specific indicators of lying. "If you're not Imperial, why are you here at the same time as an Imperial Council Agent?"

"Because we both know what you are." Jax met her eyes. "Renn's team has been tracking you for two weeks. We've been tracking you for four days. We arrived first by—" He checked his internal count— "approximately four minutes."

Her jaw tightened. "What do you want from me?"

"A conversation. On our ship. If you don't want to go further than that, we bring you back." He paused. "But Renn is in this station and he's going to this clinic as soon as he finishes telling you to stay calm on the emergency comm, and he's going to offer you a different conversation with different options at the end of it."

The emergency comm in the supply room crackled. Renn's voice again. "Medical Technician Kuro. My associates are entering the clinic now. Please—"

Three things happened in the next two seconds.

The clinic's main door—the one Drayden had come through, which Gorven had left open when he'd followed them—opened again.

Drayden's voice: "Stop there."

And the supply room's shelves rattled.

Not a tremor. Not mechanical. The medical containers on the shelving moved—small, coordinated, the kind of movement that happened when something in the ambient field of a void-touched individual who was very frightened briefly lost its compression and reached out. Three containers slid two centimeters. One fell. Glass broke on the floor.

Sable Kuro looked at the broken container. Her face went white. The specific white of someone confronting evidence of what they've been trying to hide.

"That was me," she said. Like confessing.

"I know," Jax said. "It's okay."

"It's not—it's never—"

From the clinic, the sound of Drayden's voice in the register she'd used to command a frigate, and a male voice that wasn't complying. Then a sound that was consistent with someone making rapid physical contact with a wall.

Jax didn't look toward the noise. He kept his attention on Sable. "We need to go."

She looked at the broken glass. The displaced containers. Her hands. The door behind her.

"My equipment," she said.

"There's no time."

"One bag." She was moving already—to the shelf, hands efficient and trained, pulling items from storage with the practiced speed of a person who knew exactly what she needed and could pack a medical kit in thirty seconds because she'd done it before. In the dark. Quickly. The packed bag of someone who had always been ready to leave.

Thirty seconds. She slung the bag and looked at Jax. "The ship you mentioned."

"Four minutes away at a run."

"Who flies it?"

"A woman with one working arm and a ten-thousand-year-old warship that does what she asks."

Sable Kuro looked at him for two full seconds. Then she went through the far supply room door.

---

The corridor outside the supply room was quiet. Emergency lighting—the station's night cycle, the main corridors dim.

They came out into level two's main passageway to find Malik already there—he'd gone around through a parallel route while Jax was in the clinic, reading the geometry before anyone said anything. He was at the junction ahead. He pointed left without turning. They went left.

Behind them—not close, maybe forty meters—footsteps. Controlled, rapid. The specific cadence of trained people pursuing at speed without making noise. Renn's associates. Not all of them. At least two.

Sable was fast. The cargo-worker's build of Corvin had been—she was a runner's build. Light, efficient. She kept pace with Jax without effort.

The docking ring junction was ahead. The lift.

"Drayden?" Jax said into his comm.

"Occupied," Drayden said. She didn't sound distressed. "Don't wait for me. Get her to the ship."

Jax didn't ask. He filed it.

They reached the lift. Malik already had the door open. Sable in first, Jax second, Malik last. The lift descended.

"How many?" Malik asked.

"Two behind us. Don't know the rest of the team's positions."

"The fake bulk carrier," Sable said. "If they came on a military ship—they're not going to let you leave."

"They won't be able to stop us." Jax's voice was the flat certainty of a man who had done his math. The warship was eight hundred kilometers off-station. The *Requiem* could undock in two minutes. Whatever Renn's team had in their fake bulk carrier would not stop what was waiting in the dark eight hundred kilometers out.

The lift opened on the docking ring. Bay five—the *Requiem's* berth, thirty meters down the walkway.

Zeph had the bay door open. The *Requiem's* ramp down.

"Go," Jax said.

Sable went. Jax and Malik behind her, the controlled retreat of two people maintaining spacing, watching the angles. The pursuit footsteps behind them—closer. The lift had not slowed them enough.

Sable reached the ramp. Up it in four steps. Zeph grabbed her arm at the top—not to stop her, to guide her past the ramp's mechanism, through the hatch.

Jax and Malik at the bottom of the ramp.

Two figures appeared at the end of the docking ring walkway. Not uniformed. The unremarkable clothing of people who operated in environments where uniform would stand out. But the way they moved told the rest—bodies angled to minimize exposure, spacing maintained without looking at each other to maintain it. Not civilians. Not station security.

One of them raised a hand. Not a weapon. A device.

The *Requiem's* ramp jammed.

The mechanism seized—locked, the hydraulics frozen, the ramp stuck at its current position. The hatch above still open, Sable and Zeph visible at the top. Malik on the ramp, Jax at the bottom.

"Void take it," Jax said.

The device in the agent's hand was a military-grade EMP dampener—targeted electronic interference that froze specific systems. Not powerful enough to affect the ship's main systems. Powerful enough to lock a loading ramp.

Malik looked at the ramp's mechanism. The hydraulics. He went to his knees beside the manual release—the backup that every ship was required to carry, the handle that mechanics used when power systems failed. The handle that required four hundred newtons of force to operate under normal circumstances and, with the dampener suppressing the hydraulic assist, required more than that.

Malik's arms were not normal.

The handle moved.

The ramp dropped all the way down—not raised, dropped. The backup release's function was full retraction or full extension, and the mechanism had chosen extension. The ramp hit the dock floor with a ringing clang. The hatch was now accessible from the dock level, the *Requiem's* interior open.

The two agents moved.

Jax met the first one at the base of the ramp. The agent was fast—trained, skilled, the reflexes of a person who had spent serious time practicing this kind of work. The first move was a wrist lock, the kind that ended engagements quickly. Jax's prosthetic arm caught the agent's grip.

The wrist lock didn't work on a cybernetic limb.

Jax's real hand found the agent's collar. The prosthetic hand found the ramp's handrail. The agent went into the ramp rail with enough force to rattle the whole mechanism.

The second agent was past him. Up the ramp.

Malik was already there. The second agent's approach was the kind that relied on surprise and a significant technical advantage—which the agent had had when the EMP dampener was in their hand. The agent's free hand reached for the device, intending to use it in close range on Malik's cybernetic tattoos, the glow-tech bio-augments that might have a vulnerability to electronic suppression.

Malik took the device away from them first.

He was gentle about it. One move, the device in his hand. He looked at it. Handed it up to Zeph.

The second agent stood on the ramp without their main advantage and looked up at the mass of Malik Torres and made the decision that a sensible person made in that moment. They stepped back.

"The ramp still won't retract," Zeph called from above. "The dampener corrupted the retraction sequence!"

Jax looked at the docking bay. The walkway. One agent down, one retreating. More coming—the sound of additional people moving fast on the level above, the stairwell at the end of the walkway.

"Leave it extended," Jax said. "Disengage docking clamps on my mark. Zeph—detach and power up."

"Jax," Zeph said, "if the ramp is extended when we detach—"

"The ramp bends. It'll close." He looked at Malik. "Inside."

They went up. Docking clamps disengaged—the *Requiem* floating free in its bay. The ramp, still extended, hit the bay wall as the ship pulled back. The mechanism bent—not broken, but bent, the ramp section folding against the ship's hull with a grinding impact that Jax heard from inside as a loud bang and a vibration through the floor.

The bay doors were closing. Someone on the station had triggered the lockdown.

Zeph had the drives at full thrust before the bay finished closing. The *Requiem* blew through the bay doors on emergency drive—the bio-enhanced thrusters burning at a rate that left the docking bay's atmosphere venting into space behind them, the station's lockdown mechanism too slow to stop a ship with biological propulsion that could go from zero to combat velocity in two seconds.

They were clear.

"Drayden," Jax said.

Static. Ten seconds of static.

"Here." Drayden's voice. Strained. "Lower level. I'm—" A sound that was controlled breathing over pain. "I need the shuttle."

"Where—"

"External maintenance access. Level one, ring section C. I disabled two of Renn's people. There are two more unaccounted for."

Jax looked at the pilot's console. The *Requiem's* position, the station behind them, the warship ahead. The math. "Zeph. Can you retrieve her in the shuttle while maintaining combat speed?"

"Not without slowing significantly and giving Renn's ship time to undock and intercept." Zeph's voice was tight. The engineer running the calculation she didn't want to run. "I can get the shuttle to her in seven minutes. Then twelve minutes back. In that window—"

"Renn's ship will have time to get guns on us," Jax finished. He looked at the comm. "Drayden. What's your status?"

A pause. Longer than necessary.

"Ribs," she said. "Two, maybe three. Cracked. I can move." Another controlled breath. "I can make it to ring section C. The maintenance airlock."

"The shuttle can't dock at a maintenance airlock."

"I know." A beat. "I've done spacewalks with worse."

Jax's prosthetic hand flexed on the console. The servos quiet.

"On my way," he said.

"Jax—"

"I'm on my way." He looked at Zeph. "Hold position. Don't let Renn's ship clear the station. Use whatever you have to."

He was in the suit locker before Zeph could object.

In the command deck's corner, Sable Kuro sat against the wall and held her bag in her lap and watched the crew of the *Stardust Requiem* work. The station behind them. The warship ahead in the dark. The agent's EMP device that Malik had taken sitting on the console, its indicator light still active.

She looked at her hands. The void sense that had broken open for two seconds and sent containers sliding across shelves was compressing again now, pulling back down under the nine years of habit that had kept it there. The familiar pressure. Not comfortable. Just familiar.

The ship—the *Requiem*, its bio-tissue warm under her palms where she rested them on the floor—pulsed. Faint. Patient.

Recognition.

She pressed her palms flat.

The bio-tissue brightened.

"Stars," she said softly.

The ship agreed.