The first explosion hit the outer wall.
Stone fractured. Dust cascaded. The shielding held — barely — and through the settling debris, Skarreth saw them: Crimson Ledger troops in full tactical armor, moving in formation across the estate grounds, their weapons up, their targeting systems painting dots across the damaged wall. Behind them, the six ships held position in a loose cordon, their hull-mounted guns angled down. A broadcast on all frequencies repeated the tribunal warrant in flat, mechanical tones, demanding surrender, promising due process that would end in execution.
Skarreth's beast form gathered. Every muscle coiled. Every synapse fired.
And then — above the ships, above the cordon, above the dust and the alarms and Zenith's war-drum percussion — a sound tore through the atmosphere like fabric ripping.
Engine burn. Close. Fast. Not Ledger configuration.
A battered ship punched through the cloud cover at an angle that should have been impossible, trailing heat distortion andthe acrid scent of an engine pushed far past its operational limits. It was scarred, dented, patched in ways that suggested its pilot considered aesthetics a personal insult. It dove through the Ledger formation like a needle through silk, and two of the six ships broke cordon to pursue — which was exactly the opening the pilot had calculated, because the ship banked hard, pulled a maneuver that should have torn it apart, and laid down suppressive fire across the ground troops' eastern flank with a precision that spoke of a decade spent flying through kill zones.
Teck Vrenn's voice crackled through what remained of the estate's communication system — rough, flat, and stripped of everything except tactical utility.
"Nadir called. I'm here. You have nine minutes before their reinforcements arrive."
A timeline. Coordinates. Nothing else needed.
Skarreth's beast form threw itself over the wall.
Behind him, Nadir opened fire.
Behind Nadir, Zenith's war drum reached a crescendo, and every light in the estate went dark simultaneously — a system override that blinded every Ledger soldier's targeting display for three critical seconds.
And in the operations room, on a console Nadir had not fully powered down, a transmission confirmation blinked once in the darkness.
Message delivered. Free port. Recipient confirmed.
He needs you.
TWENTY-NINE
He needs you.
Her heart seized. A full stop, a skipped beat, a silence so complete she heard blood roaring in her ears. Then it kicked back to life with a violence that hurt her ribs, slamming against her sternum like it was trying to escape her chest and go without her.
She was on her feet before the second heartbeat.
No calculation. No risk assessment. No practiced architecture of self-protection sliding into place, no careful weighing of outcomes, no quiet internal voice reminding her that people who needed her always left, that vulnerability was a door that only opened one way, that she'd already survived this wound and could not survive it twice.
None of it.
She grabbed the portrait off the easel — dry, finally dry, twenty hours of forced patience rewarded — wrapped it in the protective cloth she'd bought for exactly this purpose, and strapped it to her back. She grabbed her bag. She was out the door in the time it took the message to fade from her screen.
The transport officewas three levels down, staffed by a Callexian with too many arms and not enough patience.
"Destination?"
She gave the coordinates of Skarreth's estate. The Callexian's multiple eyes blinked in sequence, a wave of disbelief rolling across a face designed for it.
"That sector's locked. Crimson Ledger enforcement action. No civilian traffic."
"What's the closest you can get me?"
The Callexian pulled up a nav chart. Four arms worked the console while two more gestured at the holographic display, sketching the boundaries of the interdiction zone. "Here. Relay station at the sector's edge. After that, you're in contested space. No escorts, no guarantees, no refunds."
"How fast?"
"Express burn? Seven hours. But you'd need —" The Callexian named a price that made Octavia's stomach drop. She'd spent most of her remaining funds on paint.
