Zalt Consortium.
Low-level operative, probably contract. Expendable enough to send on a suicide run, valuable enough to arm with a purpose-built weapon.
"They're testing whether I can hold what I inherited," I say, and I don't know why I'm saying it to her. To the debtor girl crouched beside a dead man's weapon in a maintenance corridor at midnight. But the words come out and they taste like the truth.
"Can you?" she asks.
I look at my hands. The shaking has stopped. The blood is drying in the creases.
Astra standsat the central console with her arms crossed and her jaw set, and the fury coming off her is almost visible. A shimmer in the air, heat haze off a reactor core. Two of her lieutenants flank her, both of them working terminals,running the kind of systematic lockdown that will make the station feel like a closed fist by morning.
She sees me and her expression shifts. Relief, then rage, then control, layered over each other in the space of a second.
"You should have waited for the escort detail," she says.
"Noted."
"You should have commed me the second it happened."
"Also noted."
"You're hurt."
"Handled."
Her eyes slide past me to Talia, and the control she's been wearing cracks into something colder. Her body goes still in the way that means she's assessing a threat, running the math on danger versus utility, and the result is written on her face before she speaks.
"She's a security risk."
"She just spotted something your team missed."
That lands. Astra's jaw tightens, a fractional movement that tells me I've hit bone. Her gaze cuts to Talia with new weight behind it. Not respect, not yet. Something more like recalculation. The expression of someone forced to update an assessment they were comfortable with.
"What did she find?" Astra asks me, but she's looking at Talia.
I nod to Talia. Let her deliver it.
"The resonance disruptor in the blade grip was station-manufactured," Talia says. Her voice is steady, pitched to carry across the hub without shouting. Not deferential. Not aggressive. The voice of someone presenting findings because the findings matter, not because she's performing. "Injection-molded casing with the compression pattern characteristic of your machines. Batch-stamped for qualitycontrol. Whoever built this had access to your manufacturing bays."
Silence in the hub. The kind of silence that has texture to it, thick and pressurized, the silence before a hull breach alarm.
Astra looks at me. "That's not possible."
"That's what I said."
"I'll pull manufacturing access logs for the last ninety days. Cross-reference with the batch stamp." She's already turning to one of her lieutenants, already moving, already converting the problem into protocol. That's what makes Astra good. Fury doesn't slow her down. It makes her faster. "Who was on the body?"
"Zalt Consortium markings. Low-level contract."
Her eyes narrow. "They're moving already?"
"Testing. Probing to see if the new leadership bleeds." I flex my hand. The one that killed him. "I bleed. But I'm still standing."
"Dexter needs to be here," she says, and it's not the first time she's said it, and the weight behind it is heavier each time.
"I know."
"When?"
