Alliance-issued energy rifle telemetry is standardized in a way that makes it efficient to service and easy to audit—unless the person auditing is the same person hiding the report.
The bolt profile has a signature prefix: a regulator handshake that says who issued it, who owns it, what unit it’s registered to.
A polite little metadata halo around murder.
And there it is.
ALLIANCE ARMORY REGISTRY: ACTIVE
UNIT: HIGH COMMAND SECURITY (HCSU)
STATUS: IN SERVICE
I blink once, hard, like my eyes might be lying.
They’re not.
“Clint,” I whisper, and my voice sounds wrong to my own ears, “the weapon is Alliance-issued.”
A beat of silence.
Then Clint’s voice cracks. “No.”
“Yes,” I say. “And it’s registered to High Command security.”
Lonari turns his head slightly, eyes narrowing. He doesn’t ask me to repeat it. He heard the shift in my tone. He knows.
Morazin hears it too.
His eyes widen, and something ugly flickers across his face—vindication. Horror. Relief that he wasn’t crazy.
“Told you,” he rasps.
I ignore him and keep digging.
Because one data point is a spark. Two is a fire.
I pull up the dead-man packet from the captured Nine agent—the jaw implant file Lonari dragged out of the tunnels like a prize. I’ve already been chewing on its outer layers in the background, like a dog with a bone. The header tags are encrypted, but the routing scaffolding? The scaffolding is always where human arrogance hides.
I cross-match.
Telemetry signature on one side. Dead-man packet liaison channel on the other.
My compad hums as it compares handshakes, key-exchange formats, timing pulses.
The screen flashes:
MATCH FOUND: LIAISON CHANNEL IDENTIFIER CONSISTENT
ROUTING: AHC LIAISON NODE / CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE LOOP
My mouth goes dry.
Same liaison channel.
Same bridge.
The sniper’s weapon isn’t just Alliance-issued. Its communication handshake uses the same hidden corridor as the Nine agent’s dead-man packet.
