Or curiosity outside equations.
Looking at myself now—hair loose, skin warm, wearing something that flowed instead of hid—I realized how long it had been since I'd allowed myself to take up space without apology. The woman in the mirror didn't look like she was bracing to be calledtoo much. She looked like she'd stopped shrinking. She looked engaged. Alert in a different way. Alive beyond crisis.
I was HERE. Present. In space. On an alien ship. Wearing starlight and tech that made Earth look prehistoric. With a mind full of impossible equations and a body that responded to this universe like it had been waiting for it. Annoyingly, my thoughts drifted back to Dravok. To the way his eyes had flicked gold when he'd watched me scroll through the shopping interface. To the low hum in the air when he stood too close. To the kiss I was absolutely not thinking about.
I shook my head, forcing the thoughts away.
One crisis at a time, Nadine.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, surrounded by boxes and soft light and the quiet reassurance of a ship that seemed to accept me without question.
"Okay. I'm dressed. I'm fed. I'm… terrifyingly well-equipped." I mumbled aloud, my gaze drifting back to the faint glow tracing my arm. "Now," I added, resolve settling in, "let's figure out what the hell is going on."
Because no matter how incredible the tech, no matter how breathtaking the stars, I hadn't forgotten why I was here.
I had underestimatedthe scope of Nadine's shopping spree. Not the volume, that was expected. Females were acquisitive by nature. But the precision of it surprised me. She hadn't selected randomly. Every item had purpose: function layered with comfort, efficiency disguised as indulgence. Even her frivolities were structured. It amused me more than it should have.
I closed the commerce interface and returned my focus to the task at hand. Nythor. Finding him had not been difficult. Cronack. Now I had to figure out how to get there without being noticed. The Cryons had used Cronack as a testing ground: harsh atmosphere, mineral density suitable for subterranean containment, negligible civilian presence. When Xandros and his mate Ashley reduced it to slag and scattered ruins, the Empire had written it off entirely. That had been in the earlydays of the Cryon war—when Emperor Daryus had still been maneuvering the GTU—Galactic Treaty Union—pretending diplomacy might succeed. Before Heather. Before the Empire stopped asking permission.
Cronack had been one of the Cryons' quieter atrocities. Not like Earth—Earth had been public, brazen, politically explosive. Cronack had been surgical. Hidden. A laboratory buried beneath a hostile atmosphere and mineral-dense crust, ideal for subterranean containment and genetic experimentation. By the time Lady Madeema uncovered what was happening there, the evidence was damning enough to fracture alliances.
Xandros had not waited for the GTU's ruling. As Commander of the Imperial Forces and with the help of his human mate, Ashley, he had led the strike personally. That was a mistake.
Empires were excellent at ending wars. Terrible at noticing what lingered afterward.
The Ohrurs were hiding Nythor somewhere on Cronack. The Pandraxians had erected a large defense grid around the planet after Xandros reduced it to rubble, an automated perimeter grid woven from orbital sentries, quantum signal dampeners, and phased interdiction fields. Nothing entered without authorization. Nothing exited without being logged, catalogued, and cleared. Yet the Ohrurs were still moving personnel and material through it. Which meant they weren't breaching the system. They were using it.
Of course, Nadine chose that moment to enter the bridge. Without greeting, her eyes flew to the projection hovering above the central console. The Pandraxian defense web glowed in layered gold threads, but over it, I had superimposed faint traffic anomalies I had been tracing back to their point of origin.
I dismissed the irritation of her presence and began probing the Ohrur commerce network that interfaced with the outer grid. It resisted. Not aggressively. Politely. Access permissions cycled.Queries returned in loops. The system redirected me toward innocuous supply manifests. It was built to bore intruders to death.
Nadine stepped closer. "Wait."
Her hand closed over mine. The contact sparked through me like a shorted circuit. I ignored it.
"Don't force it," she advised, already studying the shifting data streams. "If you brute-force a mercantile network, it flags you as hostile. But this isn't military encryption."
I glanced at her. "It's still layered."
"Yes, but look athowit's layered." She leaned in, her blonde hair falling over her shoulder as she isolated a cluster of subroutines. "This isn't about secrecy. It's about logistics. Resource flow. Transactional redundancy."
She began filtering differently, cross-referencing energy expenditure against declared output, orbital traffic against declared cargo mass. I withdrew my probe and watched.
"They don't lock down what matters," she murmured. "They hide it in plain sight. Under noise. Over-report the obvious, under-report the expensive."
She rerouted the model, stripping away surface shipments, mining reclamation equipment, and atmospheric processors. What remained were inconsistencies. Small. Repeated. Too regular to be errors.
"There," she uttered softly.
A thin filament of data threaded through the Pandraxian grid at predictable intervals, tagged as automated debris stabilization units. Low mass. No biological signatures. Cleared automatically by the perimeter because they matched approved cleanup protocols from the post-war reclamation phase.
"They're piggybacking on old Pandraxian authorizations," she theorized, sounding reluctantly impressed. "The Empire declared the planet inert. So they built the defense net toblock invasion, not maintenance. The Ohrurs are using obsolete cleanup permissions that never got revoked."
I felt something sharp and pleased settle in my chest. This female was mind-boggling. "They are invisible because the system assumes they belong."
"Exactly." She nodded.
I overlaid my own filters atop hers, tracing the false maintenance routes downward. The debris drones never remained at surface level. Their trajectories curved. Down. Through collapsed mining shafts that the Pandraxians had destabilized but never fully mapped. Beneath the fused crust. A deeper chamber resolved in the projection, a hollow space too geometrically precise to be natural.
