We both hear it.
A voice, amplified, crisp, authoritative, declaring in formal cadence that Coalition prisoners are to be surrendered for summary execution, that the Alliance will cleanse Yatori of “enemy contamination,” that anyone interfering will be treated as hostile.
It’s meant to inflame.
It’s meant to be recorded.
I lift my compad, thumb shaking, and try to pull the transmission header data.
Lonari watches me.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
“Listening,” I say, voice tight. “And checking.”
The compad protests, interface lagging under suppression, but the broadcast is coming through on open-band—designed to. I access the packet info and bring up the header.
My eyes scan the encryption tags.
And my stomach twists.
“No,” I whisper.
“What?” Lonari asks, stepping closer.
I angle the projection so he can see, though I don’t know if he can read it.
“This header,” I say, tapping the hovering string of code with a trembling finger. “It’s wrong. The syntax is… off. The encryption chain is trying too hard to look like Alliance-military standard, but it’s… stitched. Like counterfeit currency. Like somebody copied the pattern without understanding the material.”
Lonari’s gaze holds steady on my face, not the code.
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” I snap, then soften because my panic is clawing up my throat again. “I— I pulled logs. Docking clearance rewrites. Biometric scans. Transmission records. I got a partial archive out before they blew the door off the server room.”
His eyes flick briefly to my chest, where the drive is hidden.
“That’s what you’re carrying,” he says.
“Yes,” I breathe. “And they jammed everything. Holonet, entanglement, emergency transponders. Someone doesn’t want this leaving the moon.”
Lonari’s jaw tightens, and for the first time I see something emotional crack through his control—anger, sharp and hot, but contained like a fist wrapped in velvet.
“Then we don’t go back,” he says.
“What?” I bark, startled. “We have to— I have to get this to IHC space. To someone who’ll listen.”
He stares at me like I’m adorable in the way a child is adorable when they think rules matter.
“You go back to IHC space,” he says, voice low, “and you die. Or you disappear. Or they take that drive and you become a footnote.”
I step closer, face heating with frustration and fear.
“You don’t know that.”
Lonari leans in just enough that I can smell him—dust, leather, something faintly metallic like old blood that never fully washes out. His voice drops even lower, intimate without being kind.
“I know exactly that.”
