“How do you see this and not flinch?” Rhea asks, her voice a low cut of curiosity.
I tighten up. I don’t answer right away. There's predator scent in the air—actual predators, not metaphorical ones. People here walk like they’re hunting. Maybe they are. Maybe Glimner trains you to take what you can without asking for forgiveness. “You learn to listen,” I say finally. “And to trust your fists more than your faith.”
She laughs, and the sound is a bright knife in a dark room. “Charming.”
We weave deeper into the belly of the pleasure district, away from the open stages and into darker corridors where the lamps pulse slower and the clientele narrows. The gambling den we’re hunting is something of a local legend: half-club, half-auction, all-vice. They call it the Serpent’s Ledger. The sign above the door is an old-fashioned neon coiling into a stylized S that looks like it could bite.
We step through and the air changes. It’s cooler. Cleaner. That’s the Glimner trick—masks and zones. The ledger smells of spilled spirits and old money. Holo-odds flicker in the air. Cards slap. Dice tumble with soft, hungry clicks. Men and women with too-perfect faces lean in to the games like the outcomes might save them.
“Stay close,” I tell Rhea. She gives me a sideways look and slides in front of me as we approach a velvet booth whose occupant is the last person I expected to see sitting calm in a place like this.
Bishop is small enough to disappear into the shadows if he wanted to. He’s wrapped in a holo-disguise that comforts him with pixelated age and innocence—wrinkled skin dancer-makeup, a soft linen shirt that suggests poverty more than it reveals. He trembles with the kind of fear that polishes itself into habit. He’s exactly the kind of thing who would hide under a godless glamour and hope no one recognizes the person underneath.
Rhea’s fingers tighten on the crystal-case at her side. She’s pale but steady. If anyone can get the right answer from a man like Bishop, it’s her.
I don’t do subtle. I plant myself at the edge of his booth like an immovable shadow. Men who come near our table slide away when they feel the weight of me, which entertains me more than it should.
“Bishop,” I say.
He jerks, eyes darting under his disguise. His voice is not a man’s voice but a whimper rendered human. “Please—I don’t want any trouble.”
“No trouble,” I say. “Just questions. You worked for Helios.”
He starts to babble the kind of denials the guilty love—too detailed, too small, a weave of truth and lie. I watch him like a hunter studies the twitch of prey’s ear. When Bishop starts todrop the names—contracts, drops, test sites—he tries to make them sound like numbers to be forgotten.
Rhea’s there like a blade. Smooth but aiming for bone. “You fled with a prototype chip,” she says. “You planted it in civilians. You tried to sell it. Why?”
He goes still. His hands gather in his lap like a child’s. The holo-lace of Rhea’s gown shimmers as she leans closer. Her perfume—sugarfruit, a smell that’s become his and my anchor—hits me and something in my chest perks dangerously.
“I ran,” Bishop says. “I ran when they started talking about scale. I didn’t want to be a goddamn executioner in lab coat. I couldn’t—” He chokes on the words. “I thought if I had the chip, I could—trade it. Get off-world. Make a life.”
“Who hired you?” Rhea asks. Her voice is soft. It’s the wrongness of softness that cuts deepest.
He looks at me. Fear trembles across his face like a fever. “They said Dowron wanted it. But not Dowron. Belos. Belos wanted a tested army—private units—paid by Combine contractors so they’d answer only to those who could pay. They called it privatized enforcement. They’ll take back the war in contracts and call it peace.”
A clink of glass echoes, then another. Someone two tables over laughs too loud and turns, their expression blank. Sensing the mood tightening.
“Who is ‘they’?” I ask. My voice is low, flat as a blade. “Names.”
He swallows. “Admiral Belos is the signature. There’s a director—Malik—and a procurement head, Voss. They worked with Helios. They call the program Project Arbitrage. It’s not just soldiers. They were embedding compliance into crowd-control drones—into aid relays—into officers’ neural arrays. They tested on Trenar-4. It failed in clinical terms but succeeded statistically. They got the datas that mattered.”
Rhea’s fingers drum on the case. She tastes the words before she says them. “Project Arbitrage? That’s the name in the file. We have coordinates. We have logs. We can expose them.”
Bishop’s gaze flickers between us, animal and pleading. “Expose them and you die,” he whispers. “They will hunt anyone who sees, who knows. They have assets—people who sleep in your headquarters and smile in your camera’s face. They have fleets. They have money. They’ll make sure there’s no one left to tell the story. They’ll erase you like a bad feed.”
“They’re building a fleet,” Rhea says, and the words are an arrow. “A mind-control fleet?”
Bishop nods, a rapid, terrified rat-bob. “Prototype brigs. Armed barges fitted with high-frequency emitters—the sort that rewrite response curves in the field. They’ll market it to alliances as a way to reduce casualties. The contractors get to sign off on ‘policy enforcement.’ Contract soldiers will be compliant, and the Combine will own the market. It’s terrifying.”
I feel a cold truth settle in my gut that’s worse than the ice on the relay. We knew corruption. We knew graft. But a market for obedience? The idea tastes like copper and rust.
“Where is Bishop’s contact?” I ask. “Where do they test?”
He says three locations in a staccato, and I memorize them with a soldier’s speed: an orbital yard outside Naras Gate; a decommissioned tutorial float in the Jarek Belt; a private contractor outpost tucked behind a smugglers’ ring at the Helios Combine’s liaison node. Each site is a pin in a map of a system about to be bent to their will.
“How do we get to it?” Rhea asks.
“We don’t,” I say. I should have known better than to step into a plan built on hope. But she doesn’t look away. She looks like a woman who will walk through fire to set a story alight. “We hit one. We hit it fast. We leak early, hit press windows, hit allieswho won’t want to be on the wrong side of history. Create noise. Force the Alliance to respond publicly.”
