Raeth moved. Seven feet of bonded Zethrani male positioned as a wall between the blaster and the console, and the scales along his back flared red in the dome’s emergency light.
“You will not touch her.” His voice carried a subharmonic register that resonated within the dome’s metal structure. “You will not speak to her. You are finished.”
Corsine’s blaster wavered. She looked at Raeth, at the broken manacle marks on his wrists, at the Prod burns visible through his torn uniform, at the red glow of scales that belonged to a species she had studied for three years and still fundamentally did not understand.
“I made you,” she said. “I triggered the bond. Without me, you would still be an empty, unbonded warden running a prison on a dead moon.”
“You triggered a weapon you could not control.” Raeth stepped forward. One step. The dome floor groaned under his weight. “The bond is not yours. It was never yours.”
Sixty-eight percent.
Corsine’s finger tightened on the trigger. Through the bond, I felt Raeth’s muscles coil, preparing to absorb the blast. He would take it. He would take every charge she had to keep her from reaching me and the console behind me.
I was not going to let him.
“Raeth. Don’t move.”
I reached under the console and pulled the manual relay switch. The one I’d identified during my tunnel mapping. The one where the backup transmitter and the dome’s atmospheric vents ran through the same manual relay. The sloppy design choice I’d filed away, waiting for the moment it became useful.
The dome’s emergency vents opened. Vexar-6’s toxic atmosphere screamed through the seals, a rush of sulfuric airthat hit the pressurized interior like a wall. The temperature dropped. The air turned acrid. Corsine gasped, choked, staggered backward toward the door where the corridor’s atmosphere was still sealed.
I held my breath. Raeth held his. Zethrani’s lungs could manage short-duration toxic exposure. My human lungs could not, but I needed thirty seconds. Thirty seconds for the upload to complete while Corsine fought for air in the doorway, blaster forgotten, hands clutching her throat.
Eighty-nine percent. Ninety-four. Ninety-eight.
One hundred.
The console beeped. Transmission complete. The evidence was en route to the Galactic Authority on an encrypted burst signal routed through the backup transmitter, and no one on this station could recall it.
I sealed the vents. Pressurized air flooded the dome. I breathed. The air tasted of acid, my eyes would not stop streaming, and the skin of my hands stung where the sulfur had kissed it, and none of it mattered, because it was air. Raeth breathed. The toxic atmosphere vented, and the clean recycled air returned, and Corsine was on her knees in the doorway, coughing, the blaster on the floor beside her.
Raeth picked up the blaster. Held it at his side. Looked down at the woman who had held his sister hostage for three years and sold forty-seven people like cargo.
“The Galactic Authority will receive that transmission within the hour,” he said. “Your operation is finished. Your buyers are compromised. Every name, every formula, every transaction is in their hands.”
Corsine looked up. Her watery blue eyes were streaming from the toxic exposure, her face red, her composure shattered. Shelooked old. Small. A woman whose empire had been dismantled by an engineer with a wrench and a warden who had learned to love.
“Sera,” Raeth said. “Where is she?”
Corsine said nothing. Raeth crouched. Brought his silver eyes level with hers. His scales pulsed red, and the sub-harmonics in his voice dropped to the frequency that made the dome hum.
“Where. Is. My. Sister.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. I watched the calculation happen behind her streaming eyes, the realization that her operation was already transmitted to the GA, that her buyers were already compromised, that withholding Sera’s location bought her nothing except the undivided attention of a Zethrani male whose scales were glowing red and whose claws had left gouges in her lab floor. Cooperation was the only currency she had left, and Corsine had never been sentimental about spending currency that still held value.
She gave up the facility name. The sector coordinates. The holding unit number.
Raeth stood. Looked at me. Through the bond, I felt his relief collide with his grief, the coordinates of his sister’s prison settling into his memory alongside the weight of the years he’d spent unable to reach her.
“We need to go,” I said. “Tessara’s waiting.”
We left Corsine on the floor of the Communication Tower. The guards would find her. The GA would find them all.
We ran.
***
The hidden docking bay held two ships, and only one of them was whole.
