She nods.
I deactivate the projection.
“Elara,” I say quietly.
She looks at me.
“You understand now why speed matters.”
“Yes.”
“And why delay favors them.”
“Yes.”
We reach the command sector.
Analysts already stand at their stations, tactical displays layered across curved walls—transit vectors, surveillance pings, fleet movement overlays flickering in constant motion.
“Pull surveillance archives from Virex perimeter,” I order. “Cross-reference with Alliance fleet staging coordinates twelve hours pre-detonation.”
“Yes, Commander,” an analyst replies.
Elara steps into position at a secondary console without prompting.
Three cycles.
Outside, engines ignite across the system, dark silhouettes shifting into defensive formation.
Inside, rivals gather quietly.
And beyond this sector, Alliance narrative accelerates.
I rest my hands against the console and lean forward slightly, feeling the faint vibration of the station through the metal.
“We move immediately,” I say.
Because if truth does not outrun propaganda?—
Steel will.
CHAPTER 13
ELARA
The command sector hums with a restrained kind of violence—the sort that never erupts into spectacle but instead coils itself into circuitry and steel and waits. Processors run hot enough that the air carries a faint metallic dryness at the back of my throat, and the layered projections above the central console cast shifting light across Kael’s armor, painting his scar in cold blue lines that look almost surgical.
I steady my hands against the console before diving back into the detonation file.
“Pull the raw edit history again,” I say, more to myself than to him, though I know he’s listening to every breath I take.
Kael doesn’t speak immediately. He shifts slightly closer instead, close enough that the residual warmth from his still-healing plasma burns brushes faintly against my forearm. His presence is not crowding; it is deliberate, like a wall I can lean against if the floor gives out.
The metadata scrolls upward in disciplined columns—timestamp hierarchies, clearance tags, internal routing identifiers. I slow the scroll manually, forcing the processor to reveal each layer in increments rather than the sanitized summary Alliance Forensics published to the feeds.
“Look here,” I murmur, expanding a subsection of code that most investigators would have ignored because it appears structurally consistent.
Kael leans in, his voice low and measured. “What am I seeing?”
