"I've already designated those corridors for blast-door isolation," I say, and my voice comes out level, professional, a perfect match for his. "Bulkhead sequences Charlie through Foxtrot can seal on my command. We funnel them through the chokepoints and lock down behind them, cut the boarding parties into manageable sections."
He looks at me then. Just for a second. His eyes are dark and focused and completely readable if you know the language, and I do. He's impressed. He expected this. He's also remembering, the way I'm remembering, howgood we used to be at this. Two minds running the same calculation, arriving at the same answer, finishing each other's tactical sentences like finishing each other's thoughts in bed.
The irony tastes like that cold coffee. Bitter, metallic, impossible to swallow and impossible to spit out.
"Secondary concern," I continue, pulling my attention back to the table like dragging a hook out of my own ribs. "Internal security. We can build the hardest perimeter in the sector and it won't matter if someone opens a back door from inside."
Talia straightens in her chair. She knows this is her cue. She's sharp like that, reads a room the way I read a sensor grid, mapping the currents and the silences.
"I've been running the debtor networks since yesterday," she says. Her voice has a calm precision to it that I appreciate more every day. "Information flow between decks, loyalty assessments on all non-essential personnel, and a quiet audit of access credentials for critical systems. If someone's planning to open a door for the Vex, they'll need a code. And I'll know when they try to use it."
Our eyes meet across the table. Two human women in a room full of Kael command hierarchy, holding pieces of this station together with competence and stubbornness and the particular kind of fury that comes from knowing exactly how expendable someone thinks you are.
The look lasts less than a second. It says everything it needs to.
"Medical is prepping triage stations on Decks Four, Seven, and Eleven," Dr. Okafor adds, her voice carrying the weary authority of a woman who knows she'll be elbow-deep in someone's chest cavity before the week is out. "I've requisitioned additional plasma supplies and emergency surgical kits. We're short-staffed, but we'll manage."
"Engineering can reinforce the blast doors on the primary chokepoints," Valdez offers. "Give me twelve hours and I can weld secondary plating onto the critical junctions. Won't hold forever, but it'll hold longer."
Zane nods at each report, absorbing, calculating. The projection rotates slowly between us all, the red vectors tightening by increments so small they're almost imperceptible. Almost.
"Do it," he says. "All of it. We have three days. Use every hour."
The briefing continues. Supply allocations, personnel rotations, emergency communication protocols if the primary array goes down. I take notes, assign tasks, coordinate timelines with the efficiency that earned me this position. My hands are steady on the datapad. My voice doesn't waver.
And through all of it, Ethan Cole says almost nothing.
He offers a suggestion here, a logistical clarification there. Professional. Helpful, even. When Valdez raises a concern about power distribution to the defensive grid, Ethan provides a rerouting solution that's technically elegant and immediately actionable.
But he's quiet. The kind of quiet that sits wrong on my nerves, the way a sensor reading sits wrong when the numbers look perfect and your gut tells you perfect is the problem.
I watch him the way I used to watch enemy positions through a scope. Not the obvious signs. The tells. The micro-expressions. The places where the mask fits a millimeter too loose.
His hands are relaxed on the table. His breathing is even. His eyes track the conversation with the appropriate level of engagement, moving to each speaker at the naturalpace. He looks like a man who cares about the outcome of this siege. He looks like he belongs at this table.
And that is exactly what bothers me.
Everyone else in this room is afraid. Morrow's jaw is clenched so tight I can see the tendon jumping. Chen keeps touching the sidearm at her hip like a talisman. Even Zane, for all his controlled stillness, has that deep-blue pulse in his marks that betrays the weight of what's coming. Fear is the honest response. Fear means you understand the stakes.
Ethan doesn't look afraid. He looks prepared.
There's a difference, and I can't prove it to anyone, and it sits in my chest like a stone.
The observation deckat 0200 hours is the quietest place on the station. The viewport stretches floor to ceiling, a wall of stars and void that makes the recycled air feel almost irrelevant, as though the vacuum itself is breathing just on the other side of the glass. The commercial ring is dimmed to its night cycle, the corridor lights dropped to a low amber glow that barely touches the edges of the room.
I stand close enough to the viewport that my breath fogs the surface in small, rhythmic clouds. The cold radiates off the glass in a way that's almost comforting, something real and physical pressing against the skin of my arms, my collarbone, the hollow of my throat.
I know he'll find me here.
I'm counting on it.
The sound of his footsteps is so familiar it hurts, a specific cadence, the particular weight of his stride that I catalogued somewhere deep in my nervous system years ago and never managed to delete. He stops besideme. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of him along my left side, the faint hum of his bioluminescent marks pulsing at a frequency I swear I can feel in my teeth.
Neither of us speaks.
The stars hang motionless in the viewport, which is its own kind of lie. Nothing out there is motionless. Everything is hurtling toward or away from something else. Gravity and velocity and the cold indifference of physics, pulling and pushing in patterns that look like stillness only because we're too small to see the movement.
The silence between us feels like that. Like something that looks still but is full of motion underneath.
