I nod once. “Now talk. What did you pull?”
She shifts her bag strap and presses her palm to her chest where something hard sits under fabric. “Partial archive. Docking logs, biometric scans, encrypted transmissions. Some of it was still downloading when they blew the door.”
“How much is partial?”
“Eighty-three percent,” she says immediately, like she memorized the number to keep herself from screaming.
I whistle softly. “That’s a lot of truth for somebody with a tier-three clearance.”
She glares. “I’m good at my job.”
“Yeah,” I say, and there’s something in my voice that makes her eyes flick away for half a second. “I noticed.”
We crest a ridge and the station comes back into view, smaller now but still glaring against the bleak landscape. Smoke threads from vents. Tiny flashes of light bloom and vanish along its exterior where dropships have docked. The open field is chaos—bodies, movement, dust, gunfire.
And above it all, that cruiser hangs like a judge.
Jordan lifts her compad and taps at it again, like stubbornness will force the universe to cooperate.
“Any luck?” I ask.
She shakes her head, furious. “Holonet’s dead. Entanglement relay won’t handshake. Emergency transponders aren’t even pretending. They’re suppressing outbound traffic with signal masking.”
“Military kit,” I say.
“Yeah,” she snaps. “Which means whoever’s doing this came prepared. Which means?—”
“Means you can’t call for help,” I finish. “Means you’re on your own.”
Her jaw clenches. “I hate being on my own.”
I glance at her. “No you don’t.”
She looks startled. “What?”
“You hate being forced,” I say. “You’re fine alone. You just want it to be your decision.”
Her eyes narrow, like she doesn’t like being seen that clearly.
“Okay, Freud,” she mutters.
I almost laugh. Almost.
Instead I point toward the station’s lower flank, where a narrow band of shadow marks a service corridor that runs under the hangar level. “We go in there.”
Jordan’s eyes widen. “Back in?”
“Not the front,” I say, like she’s insulting my intelligence. “There’s a maintenance route that feeds into an old shuttle bay.”
She stares. “There’s anold shuttle bayand you didn’t use it to escape five years ago?”
“I couldn’t,” I say, and the words come out harder than I expect.
Jordan’s brows lift. “Why not?”
I gesture at my body like it’s obvious. “Because the access is built for human-sized techs crawling through vents and stickingtheir hands in places they shouldn’t. Because the manual controls are behind a panel that requires a hand small enough to fit. Because the door is keyed to maintenance clearance and the keypad’s set at a height that assumes you’re not… this.”
I spread my arms slightly.
