We break apart. His hands fall from my face. My hand drops from his chest. The kiss is already a memory, already something that happened in a world that no longer exists,because the world we're standing in now is painted red and screaming.
My comm crackles to life. Morrow's voice, tight with controlled panic: "Chief Venn, all hands to stations. Vex fleet on sensors. They're early. Repeat, the Vex are early."
I look at Dexter. He looks at me. His marks are still blazing with everything I just told him, everything we just were to each other for those four seconds, but his eyes have already shifted. The soldier is back. The softness is gone, locked away behind whatever door he keeps it behind, and in its place is the cold tactical calculation that has kept him alive through every war he's ever fought.
I see the same shift in his face that he must see in mine. The woman who stood at this viewport and said I love you still is already retreating, making room for the Chief of Security, for the officer, for the version of me that doesn't have the luxury of feelings when there are blast doors to seal and fire teams to deploy and a station full of people who are counting on me to keep them alive.
"Go," I say.
He goes.
I stand alone on the observation deck for two more seconds, bathed in red light, the ghost of his mouth still warm on my lips, and then I go too.
There are three days' worth of preparations and no time left to finish them.
The Vex are here.
Chapter 12
Dexter
The first boardingpod hits Hull Section Nine like a fist through wet paper, and the whole station screams.
Not a metaphor. Veridian-7 has a voice when she's wounded, a deep structural groan that travels through the deck plating and up through the soles of my boots and into the marrow of my teeth. I've heard it once before, six years ago, when a cargo freighter clipped the lower ring during a docking malfunction. That was a love tap. This is something else entirely.
The second pod punches through forty meters starboard of the first. Then the third. Then four more in rapid succession, and the station's voice becomes a sustained howl of shearing metal and ruptured pressure seals.
"Shield failure at points seven, twelve, and nineteen." Zane's voice in my earpiece is the only calm thing left in the universe. "Boarding pods confirmed in sections nine, fourteen, and twenty-two. Dexter, you have incoming in your quadrant."
I'm already moving. My team, twelve soldiers and four armed debtors who proved themselves in the drills, fall inbehind me without needing the order. The corridor lights have shifted to emergency red, turning everything the color of an open wound, and the air tastes different already. Sharper. The pressure seals are holding in this section, but somewhere nearby they're not, and the station's atmospheric systems are compensating by pushing harder through every functioning vent.
"Copy. Moving to intercept in Section Nine." I pull my sidearm, check the charge by feel, holster it again. Close quarters in station corridors means the rifle comes first, sidearm for backup. "How many pods?"
"Seven confirmed. More incoming." A pause that lasts exactly one breath too long. "Hull integrity is degrading faster than projected. They're hitting us with shaped charges before the pods. Softening the shell."
Smart. The Vex learned something since their last station assault. Or they hired someone who knows how Veridian-7 is built.
"Talia's running debtor network analysis," Zane continues. "She's flagged six individuals with probable Vex sympathies in critical zones. I'm rerouting security to contain."
Talia St. Laurent. I still don't fully understand what she is to my brother, but I understand what she does for him, and right now that's enough. She sees the station's social architecture the way I see combat geometry. If there are traitors waiting to open doors from the inside, she'll find them before the hinges move.
"Dexter." Zane's voice drops half a register, which means what he's about to say matters more than the rest. "Sector Seven is your priority. If they breach the main corridor, they have a straight line to life support. Everything else we can lose and recover. Not that."
I pull up the station schematic in my mind. Sector Seven. A long corridor with limited cover, two maintenance junctions, and a reinforced bulkhead at the far end that leads to the atmospheric processing core. It's the station's throat. You cut that, the body dies.
"Understood. We'll hold it."
"You'll hold it." Not a question. Not encouragement. A statement of fact from the man who's sent me into worse and watched me walk out.
I cut the comm channel to tactical only and pick up the pace. My team matches without complaint. Behind us, somewhere deep in the station's guts, an explosion blooms, muffled by distance and deck plating but felt in the slight shudder that runs through the floor.
The Vex are already inside.
We reachSector Seven in four minutes. It takes another two for the Vex to find us there.
I use those six minutes the way they deserve. Barricades from maintenance supplies. Sight lines mapped. Fields of fire assigned. The two debtors with demolitions experience wire the first maintenance junction with proximity charges. Nothing fancy. Enough to slow a push and shred the first bodies through the door.
My team is quiet. Focused. The kind of fear that makes people sharp instead of stupid, and I'm grateful for it. These aren't Torrence family soldiers, not most of them. They're station security, a few hired contractors, the debtors who chose to fight rather than hide. None of them signed up for a siege.
