“I’m saying someone cleared the lane,” I reply, voice tight. “And they cleared it in a way that moved civilians.”
The archivist stares at the projection, then looks at me. “That’s… that’s not negligence. That’s?—”
“Don’t say it yet,” I cut in, because naming things makes them real, and real things attract retaliation.
My fingers move again, dragging the cursor over the recalibration command’s metadata chain. Municipal telemetry doesn’t include military authorization strings, but it does store the authentication handshake used to push nav updates through civilian relays. That handshake has identifiers.
I isolate them.
A clearance marker appears, buried deep in the chain like a signature etched on the underside of a blade.
I copy it and cross-reference through the tribunal’s public command registry, because whatever the League claims about secrecy, bureaucracy always leaves fingerprints.
The system returns a match.
ADMIRAL CAEDRIN VOL — STRATEGIC CLEARANCE LAYER.
For a moment, the lab feels too small for the air inside it.
The archivist whistles softly. “Vol? That Vol?”
My tongue feels thick. “Yes.”
“Isn’t he?—”
“Retired strategist,” I say, voice hollow. “War hero. Senate darling.”
“Jesus,” she mutters, and the profanity sounds like a prayer in this cold room.
I stare at the clearance marker until the letters blur slightly. Admiral Caedrin Vol. The name is polished on statues, printed in textbooks, invoked in Senate speeches like a talisman against chaos.
And now it’s sitting in my projection field like a confession.
My hands tremble faintly, not from fear but from the collision of grief and fury that wants to blow my ribs apart.
I force my fingers still.
“Okay,” I say aloud, because speaking grounds me. “Okay. I need secondary confirmation from the central evidence vault. Something that ties Vol’s clearance directly to the override in tribunal archives, not just municipal handshake data.”
The archivist leans back, arms crossed again. “Are you going to tell anyone you were down here?”
“If I’m smart, no,” I answer. “If I’m honest, I have to.”
She gives me a look. “Smart wins. Usually.”
“Usually,” I agree, though the word tastes bitter.
I package the municipal telemetry overlay as an internal reference file, then encrypt it under tribunal evidence reconstruction statutes. I haven't uploaded it to the main case file yet. Not until I have that secondary confirmation, the kind the tribunal can’t dismiss as “municipal noise.”
I stand, my legs stiff from hours of tension.
The archivist watches me. “Hey,” she says quietly, and her voice has lost its edge. “If you’re going after Vol, you should know… people don’t go after Vol. People disappear.”
I meet her gaze. “I already got called compromised on broadcast. Disappearing would be new.”
She grimaces. “That’s not funny.”
“I know,” I say, and I mean it.
