"The hell I do." I grabbed his arm—or tried to, my hand barely wrapping around his forearm. "That encryption is based on human protocols. If there are system controls I can understand faster than your team?—"
"Then I'll call you in after we've secured the area."
"Er'dox—"
"This isn't negotiable." His amber eyes were hard, uncompromising. "You're a brilliant engineer. You're not tactical personnel. Vaxon's team needs to move fast without worrying about protecting civilians."
The word 'civilian' stung more than it should have. But he was right. I'd slow them down. Get in the way. Possibly get myself killed by someone desperate enough to assault crew members.
"Fine. But the second it's secure?—"
"You'll be the first one I call."
The breach team moved into position. Vaxon counted down with hand signals I'd never learned, military efficiency reducing complex operations to simple gestures.
Three. Two. One.
The bay door exploded inward—shaped charge, controlled detonation that turned security barriers into shrapnel and smoke. The team flowed through the breach like water, weapons raised, moving in coordinated patterns that spoke to years of training.
I couldn't see inside from my position, but I heard everything. Shouted commands. The sharp report of energyweapons discharging. Someone screaming, pain or fury, impossible to tell through the chaos.
Then Er'dox's voice, cutting through the noise: "Dana! Now! I need you on the transmission system!"
I was moving before conscious thought caught up, racing through the breached entrance into smoke and emergency lighting and controlled chaos. Security team had someone pinned against the far wall and couldn't see details through the smoke, just the basic geometry of capture and restraint.
Er'dox was at the communication equipment, his hands moving across controls with impressive speed despite the unfamiliar human-derived design. "The transmission is still active. Forty-three percent complete. I can't shut it down without the encryption keys."
I slid into position beside him, my eyes scanning the interface with desperate focus. The system was more sophisticated than what we'd seen in Bail's shelter, professional grade, built by someone who really understood communication theory.
"The encryption keys," I muttered, pulling up the system architecture. "They're probably hardware-locked. Physical token or biometric authorization. We can't decrypt without?—"
"Then we don't decrypt," Er'dox said. "Can we corrupt the transmission? Make it useless garbage instead of functional data?"
Could we? I ran through the possibilities, my engineer brain cycling through options at speed that surprised me. The transmission was fifty-eight percent complete now, streaming encrypted specifications toward coordinates in the Contested Reaches.
"Data injection," I said, the solution crystallizing. "We can't stop the transmission, but we can inject corrupted data into thestream. Overwrite the actual specifications with random noise patterns that look legitimate but are functionally useless."
"Will they detect the corruption?"
"Not immediately. Not if we're clever about it. Human encryption protocols include integrity checks, but they're designed to catch random transmission errors, not deliberate data poisoning." My fingers were already moving across the interface, pulling up the transmission stream and identifying injection points. "Give me ninety seconds."
"You have sixty. After that, too much real data will have transmitted."
Sixty seconds. Sixty seconds to build a data poisoning routine that would fool military-grade integrity checks while operating on equipment I'd been using for approximately ninety seconds.
No pressure. Just the security of an entire city-sized vessel depending on me not screwing this up.
I built the routine fast, no elegance, no optimization, just functional code that would inject garbage data masquerading as legitimate specifications. The integrity checks were the hard part. Had to make the corruption look like intentional content, not transmission errors.
Forty seconds. The transmission was seventy-two percent complete. My code was sixty percent ready.
"Dana—" Er'dox's voice carried warning.
"Almost there. Just need to… got it!" I deployed the injection routine, watching it propagate through the transmission stream with aggressive efficiency. Corrupted data began flowing, overwriting technical specifications with elaborate garbage that would take weeks to identify as useless.
The transmission completed. One hundred percent. But now maybe seventy percent of that data was poisoned beyond use.
"Did it work?" Vaxon appeared beside us, his armor scorched from energy weapon discharge.
