“You ready?” he asks as we approach another door—thicker, reinforced, with a faint shimmer in the air around it that makes my teeth feel weird.
Jammer field.
“Ready as I’m ever gonna be,” I say.
Clint palms the panel. This one opens.
Inside is a controlled safe room with no windows, matte gray walls, a table bolted to the floor, two guards standing like statues—Alliance uniforms, hard eyes, hands near weapons. The air feels heavier, like sound itself gets swallowed.
General Dowron stands at the far end of the table.
He’s taller than Clint, broader, older. His hair is cropped close, his face cut with lines that look earned, not decorative. His expression isn’t cruel, but it isn’t kind either. It’s the expression of a man who has learned compassion makes you sloppy.
He doesn’t offer a hand.
He doesn’t say “welcome.”
He just looks me up and down like I’m a threat assessment.
“Jordan James,” he says.
“Yes,” I answer, keeping my voice steady.
Dowron’s gaze flicks to Clint. “Confirmed?”
Clint nods once. “Physical token verification. Work-study code match.”
Dowron’s eyes return to me. “You have evidence.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Then we don’t waste time,” he replies. “Tell me specifics only a witness would know.”
My pulse kicks harder, but my brain slides into technical mode because fear is useless right now.
“The comm relays lagged before the attack,” I say. “Not normal lag—irregular packet loss like someone was injecting jitter to mask overwrite processes. Foreman Morazin snapped when I ran deep scans.”
Dowron’s face remains still. “Morazin.”
“Yes,” I continue, forcing myself not to spiral at the name. “Docking clearance logs were being overwritten in real time. I saw the overwrite delta—continuous write cycles, not batch edits. Then an Alliance-marked cruiser docked without proper authorization. Immediately after, holonet, entanglement relays, and emergency transponders jammed across all channels.”
Dowron’s eyes narrow slightly. “Describe the jam signature.”
“It wasn’t brute-force,” I say. “It was selective suppression with signal masking—like the station’s own outbound requests were being swallowed and replaced with false ‘failed handshake’ responses. Clean. Military-grade.”
One of the guards shifts almost imperceptibly. Dowron notices. So do I.
He leans forward slightly. “Go on.”
“Armored troops entered,” I say, voice tightening despite myself. “They executed the tech crew with precision. No shouting. No Vakutan boasting. Their HUD biometric displays glitched—brief overlay artifacts, like the armor systems were misreading internal physiology.”
Dowron’s gaze locks onto mine. “What kind of artifacts?”
“Pulse rhythm mismatch,” I say. “The overlays flickered between redundant and single-track indicators like the softwarewas expecting Vakutan redundancies but wasn’t getting them. It stuttered. Like a lie catching.”
Dowron’s jaw tightens. “You have captures.”
I nod and place my evidence packet on the table.
