CHAPTER 2
VALTRON
Iknow I should keep it professional. I know the protocol: secure the asset, neutralize immediate threats, exfil, come back with a team and a plan. But standing in the middle of her cramped living room, the hum of the scrambler like a heartbeat behind my ribs, I find my professional voice rasping like a blade that’s been used too long.
She’s smaller than I remember. All humans are smaller than my kind—five foot four and a spark of stubbornness that would make a mountain jealous. Blonde hair in a messy knot, eyes wide and soft and dangerous in the way a cornered animal is dangerous. She holds the baton like she means it, but I can see the tremor in her fingers. Fear lives in the bones there, and under it the old fire, the one that used to make me reckless in ways I’d never admit.
“Sit,” I say. It’s more order than plea, and she doesn’t sit. She wedges back against the counter, weapon up, lips a hard line.
“I don’t sit for strangers,” she snaps. “Especially not strangers who throw signal scramblers at my walls.”
“You’re not alone,” I reply. Simple. Direct. I step closer because the physical proximity quiets the other noise—bureaucracy, old blood, ghosts. The scent hits me then, faint andcomplex: burnt synth-coffee, cheap perfume, the sulfur tang of neon rain. She smells like the city and like the studio and like something warm and mortal that I want to keep from being ground into dust.
She flinches when I explain the implants, and I don’t blame her. The first time I say it out loud, it feels like smashing a bone on a rock.
“Helios Combine implanted soldiers with compliance arrays,” I tell her. “At first it was market-sold pacification tech—behavioral dampeners, mood stabilizers. Harmless in theory. Keep the mercs from going berserk when there’s cargo in the hold. Keep the contractors from shooting civilians on a bad day. But then—somebody changed the firmware.”
Rhea’s jaw tightens. “Changed how?”
“Sabotage.” My voice is flat. I watch her process, watch the color drain fractionally from her cheeks. “The arrays were modified to trigger failure states during ‘off-contract’ ops. It looks like random malfunction—overheating, neural cascade, cardiac events. But the pattern’s deliberate. Timing. Locations. Victim profile. The file you got proves it wasn’t accidents. It’s murder.”
“Jesus,” she breathes. Her hand drops the baton by the length of a finger, not because she wants to, but because the weight of the word makes it fall.
“Not just murder,” I say. “Corporate murder. Policy-level elimination. Bodies made to look like training casualties. Families paid off. Reports falsified. Downtime repaired with hush money and new contracts.”
She laughs, short and hollow. “You make it sound so tidy.”
“It’s not tidy.” I glance at the entertainment hub where she’d propped the compad. “Argus built the packet to throw a net wide enough that only someone reckless would pick it up. He encodeda trail to test the geography of trust. He expected a journalist to see it. He expected someone like you to touch it.”
Her eyes flick to mine. “Someone like me?”
“A real reporter,” I say. “Not a stage anchor. Someone who’d chase a story into a burning room.”
Her face hardens. “Since when did you care who I am? You left.”
“Yes.” I don’t make excuses. None of it would make sense if I started trying. The past is both a razor and a mirror; every explanation becomes a new wound. “Yes, I left. I had orders. I had to follow them. I had to survive.”
“Survive.” She spits it as if the word is a drunk who stole her purse. “Some pilot you were. You ran.”
“I did not run,” I say, and the words aren’t the same as the soft lie I told myself in the dark when I blinked into space. “I did what I had to.”
Rhea snorts. “Fair. So now what? You rock up in my living room, tell me I’m marked, and expect me to—what? Move to a bunker? Let you tie me to your hip? Call it protection and call it love?”
“Protection,” I correct. “I said protection.”
“Because protection and being tied to the hip are different how?” she fires back. The baton comes up again, faster, more controlled.
I hold my hands open, flat. “Look—this is a bad door to be standing at. There are hunters being contracted who don’t care if you’re a morning show anchor or a Pulitzer winner. There are licensed bounty corporations in play, and then there are the things the Combine hires when they want no fingerprints. You asked me to be blunt.”
She looks at me, indignation and bruised trust woven into the same face. “Why would I trust you, Vakutan? You are part of the problem.”
The words are jagged, and they land. In the old days I might have shrugged them off, might have countered with barbs, but there’s something in her eyes that stops me. A need that looks dangerously like forgiveness, or bait, or both.
“You misread what I am,” I say quietly. “I am not their mouthpiece. I am not their hound. I am—was—an agent who still holds a file in his belt for the man he trusts. Dowron pulled strings for me once. If we can get the decrypted packet that proves the sabotage into his hands, he can use his authority to pull off a takedown that sticks. He has the power and the will, but not the proof. This packet is the proof.”
She steps back. “Dowron? You mean Supreme General Dowron? The one they say’s a relic but the one you keep whispering about in dark bars?”
“The only man I trust in the Alliance chain,” I say. There’s no flourish to it. It’s a statement of fact. Dowron is a goddamn relic, scarred and stubborn, but he’s also someone who understands the long game. “You leak to him, he’ll see a legal channel. A way to pin Helios without the galaxy erupting into a corporate war.”
