We poured through the maintenance bay breach and split. Talia's team peeled left toward the central liftsystems, moving in the tight, coordinated formation she ran like a machine. Dexter's squad went right, deeper into the ship's guts, heading for the engine core. His hand brushed mine as he passed, a touch so brief it might have been accidental if I didn't know him.
"I'll find you after," he said, low enough that only I heard it. Not a request. A statement of fact, like gravity.
Then he was gone, and I was moving the opposite direction with Reeves and Kaito flanking me, my sidearm up, every nerve in my body singing a song I'd first learned on Sigma-9. This kind of violence was mine. I'd been built for it, first by training and then by survival, and there was a part of me that settled into it the way other people settle into hot water. The muscles remembered before the mind did.
The first Vex soldiers we encountered were half-suited, scrambling out of a side corridor with the wild-eyed look of people who'd been woken by an explosion and hadn't caught up yet. Reeves dropped two before they could raise their weapons. Kaito took the third. I took the fourth, center mass, watched him fold, and stepped over him without breaking stride.
Six years ago, that would have cost me something. A flinch, a flicker of guilt, a moment where the person I used to be would have surfaced to remind me that bodies were people. Now the cost was so low it barely registered, just a small tally mark on a ledger I'd stopped auditing.
We pushed deeper. The ship's internal comms were screaming, fragmented orders overlapping in Vex command dialect, and I parsed what I could from the chaos. Bridge under attack. Engine section compromised. Command staff retreating to the secondary CIC. Webb's name, once, in a burst of static that made my blood go hot and thin.
"Reeves. Kaito." I pointed down a branching corridor, narrower, darker, the amber floor lights flickering like a dying pulse. "Secondary CIC is that direction. Sweep and secure."
Reeves frowned. "And you?"
"He went this way." I didn't elaborate. I didn't need to. Reeves had read my file. He knew about Sigma-9. He knew what Webb was to me.
"Copy." He didn't argue. He took Kaito and disappeared down the left fork, and then I was alone in a corridor that smelled like ozone and recycled air and the specific metallic sweetness of a ship that was bleeding from places it shouldn't be.
I moved fast. Every intersection I cleared with my weapon up and my back to the wall, muscle memory so deep it lived in my spine. The ship groaned around me, stressed hull plates protesting the damage Talia's team was dealing to the bridge, and the floor vibrated in a way I felt in my teeth, a low, persistent hum that said the engine core was being made to suffer too.
Good. Dexter worked fast.
Three more corridors. A sealed door I bypassed with a code Zane's intel had provided, watching the lock cycle from red to green with a clunk that echoed in the empty hallway like a judge's gavel. Beyond it, the ship opened into a wider passage, some kind of officer's deck, and the amber light here was steadier, calmer, as if this part of the vessel hadn't accepted yet that it was dying.
I smelled blood before I saw him.
Not the sharp, bright copper of a fresh wound. Something darker, more settled. Blood that had been cooling for minutes, pooling, thickening. I followed it around a corner and there he was, slumped against the corridor wall withhis legs sprawled in front of him and one hand pressed to his side where something had opened him up badly enough that the fabric of his uniform was black with it.
Webb.
He looked nothing like what I'd expected and exactly like what I should have. Older. Greyer. Diminished in every way that mattered, a man who had been something once and had been ground down to this. His eyes found me when I came around the corner, and he didn't flinch, didn't reach for the sidearm that lay on the floor a meter from his hand. He just watched me with an expression I couldn't immediately name.
Then he smiled, and I wanted to put every round I had into that smile.
"Venn." His voice was thinner than I remembered, rattling at the edges. "I knew you'd come. I've been waiting."
My weapon was already up, the sight picture centered on his forehead. Steady. Not a tremor. Six years I'd imagined this, and my hands were as calm as water in a glass.
"You look terrible," I said.
He laughed, and it cost him. I watched pain contract across his face, watched his hand press tighter against the wound in his side, and I felt nothing resembling sympathy. What I felt was a vast, cold clarity, the kind that comes after a fever breaks, when the world stops wavering and every edge goes sharp.
"Got hit in the first wave," he said. "One of your people has good aim."
"Not good enough, apparently."
"No." He coughed, and something wet moved in his chest. "Not good enough."
I stepped closer. Three meters. Two. Close enough to see the individual threads where his uniform had been torn, close enough to smell his blood and the sweat underneath it and something else, something bitter, like the chemical tang of a combat stim that was losing its war against the damage. My sidearm never wavered.
"Six years," I said. "You sold out Sigma-9. You broadcast the anomaly coordinates that drew the swarm. Fourteen people died, Webb. People who trusted you."
"I know how many." His eyes were steady despite the dying. Whatever else he was, he wasn't a coward about this. "I know all their names."
"Say mine."
He held my gaze. "Astra Venn. Senior Security Specialist. You were supposed to live."
