Lonari doesn’t look at me. “You already are.”
“Wow. Charming.”
“Thank you.”
I make a sound that is half laugh, half strangled scream, and go back to the archive because the alternative is thinking about the station’s atrium and the way that tech’s body hit the floor with that awful wet finality.
The nav display flashes a boundary line.
COALITION TERRITORY — ENTERING CONTROLLED SPACE
My stomach tightens.
The stars don’t change, obviously. Space doesn’t care about borders. But the shuttle’s systems do; the comm panel begins to flicker with passive pings—external network probes, identity challenges, the kind of quiet digital sniffing that sayswho are you and why are you here?
Lonari taps a sequence on the console without looking.
The pings stop.
I stare at him. “Did you just… tell the Coalition to mind their business?”
“I told them we’re maintenance,” he says casually. “And boring.”
“That worked?”
“It usually does.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I’m going to need you to start explaining things like you’re talking to a civilian who is not, in fact, a syndicate crime dinosaur.”
He glances at me, one eye catching the cockpit light so it flashes a darker red. “Crime dinosaur?”
“You’re seven feet tall and you kill people with the efficiency of a spreadsheet,” I say. “Let me cope.”
He huffs—actual amusement, I think—and returns his gaze to the nav.
Fine. If he won’t explain, I’ll do what I always do when people refuse to give me clarity: I’ll make my own.
I expand the biometric feed.
The armor HUD glitch captures I pulled—scrappy, incomplete, but enough. The archive includes raw packets from the station’s security system: helmet telemetry, local scan captures, and the spoofed Alliance signature handshake that tried to convince Yatori the cruiser belonged there.
I run a correlation.
The system projects a grid of biometric markers—heart rate signatures, neural conduction patterns, metabolic heat maps.
Vakutan signatures should show redundant organ rhythms—two-heart pulse patterns, four-lung oxygenation cycles. Even a forged tag has trouble mimicking that kind of internal redundancy unless you have actual Vakutan bodies inside the armor.
This feed doesn’t.
The heart rhythms are single-track.
The oxygenation profiles are… human-like? Not fully human, but closer to human than Vakutan.
And the neural conduction markers are blank in places, as if someone scrubbed them.
My skin prickles.
“Lonari,” I say, keeping my voice tight so it doesn’t wobble, “they weren’t Vakutan. Like, not even close.”
