“I know,” he says, still not looking at me.
“No, I mean—look.” I angle the holo toward him. “Vakutans have redundant organs. The signatures don’t match. Whoever was in those suits had one heart rhythm. One lung cycle. These are mercs in stolen armor.”
He finally leans slightly, glancing at the projection. His expression barely changes, but his jaw tightens.
“Mercs,” he repeats.
“Yeah.” My fingers fly, pulling up the transmission header. “And their declaration broadcast? The encryption chain is stitched. It’s like a counterfeit bill: looks right if you’re not staring at it, but the fibers are wrong.”
Lonari’s hands flex on the controls. “So you can prove it.”
“I can prove ittechnically,” I say. “Politically, I don’t know if it matters. But yes. I have proof.”
The word proof tastes bitter in my mouth because proof didn’t save the techs on the floor. Proof didn’t keep the station from getting bombarded into scrap. Proof is a thing you carry after the fact and hope someone cares enough to read.
I switch panels, pulling up the financial logs I managed to snag—partial, but better than nothing. There’s a chain of payment authorizations buried under “maintenance contracts,” “equipment procurement,” “security consultation.” The kind of euphemistic paperwork that makes murder look like logistics.
I start tracing.
A payment node transfers out of a corporate shell.
That shell routes through a second shell.
Then a third.
Then it hits a League bank interface.
And there—right there—an identifier string that makes my stomach drop again.
Baragon intermediary tag.
Not a name, not a logo. Just a trace marker baked into the transaction format. Like a signature someone forgot to scrub, because even conspirators get lazy when they think they’re untouchable.
I exhale slowly, tasting recycled cockpit air.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay. That’s… that’s big.”
Lonari glances at me. “Big how?”
“Big like ‘this wasn’t a random merc job,’” I say, pulling up the flow chart so it hangs in the air between us, a spiderweb of financial lines. “This is structured. Routed. Shielded. Somebody paid a lot of money to stage that massacre. And they didn’t pay directly—they used shells. This looks like?—”
“A syndicate,” Lonari finishes.
I flick my gaze to him. “Don’t act like you’re surprised.”
He shrugs, the movement making his harness creak. “I’m not.”
I drill deeper, cross-referencing shell corporation IDs against known registries in the archive. Some are too new. Some are registered to dead addresses. Some are “charities,” which is always the funniest lie criminals tell.
I flag one with a repeating pattern in its encryption salt—a little algorithmic fingerprint that matches something in another file: the docking clearance overwrite.
Same coder?
Same toolkit?
Same sponsor?
My throat tightens.
