“I will.”
CHAPTER 27
TYROK
The signal hits my console like a knife sliding between plates—clean, precise, and exactly where it wasn’t supposed to exist. For a fraction of a second, I think it’s interference, just another distortion in a battlefield already saturated with noise, but the waveform stabilizes too quickly, resolves too cleanly, and the signature embedded inside it pulls my attention into a narrow, focused line that blocks everything else out.
“Unknown transmission,” the onboard system flags, its tone neutral, detached from the weight of what it’s actually presenting.
“It’s not unknown,” I say, already moving, already leaning forward as I isolate the signal and expand it across the display.
The coding structure is subtle, layered beneath what looks like a standard distress ping, but it’s not meant for anyone scanning casually. It’s meant for someone who knows how to look. For me.
My jaw tightens as I strip the layers apart, piece by piece, the hidden markers aligning into something unmistakable.
“Stacy,” I mutter under my breath.
The signal pulses again, faint but deliberate, and I feel something shift inside my chest that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with recognition.
“She’s broadcasting,” I say aloud.
“Broadcasting what?” the system prompts.
“Coordinates,” I reply, my fingers moving faster now, pulling the embedded data into a navigational overlay. “And something else.”
There’s a second layer, not meant to be obvious, not meant to be found quickly, but she didn’t hide it from me. She never does.
I slow just enough to analyze it properly, forcing my breathing to even out despite the pressure building under my skin, because if I rush this, I miss something, and if I miss something, I don’t get a second chance.
The pattern resolves, and when it does, I feel the shift—cold, sharp, final.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say, my voice dropping.
The identification marker is subtle, buried in routing data, disguised as a standard relay node reference, but it’s there, and once I see it, I can’t unsee it.
“Source trace complete,” the system confirms.
I don’t need it to.
“I see it.”
The traitor wasn’t guessing, wasn’t leaking randomly, and he was routing, feeding controlled information through legitimate channels, masking it inside approved transmissions so it never triggered a full audit. Smart, careful, consistent—until now.
“Renn,” I say.
The name lands in the cockpit like a physical weight, and everything lines up—his access, his proximity, his timing, the challenge on the bridge. Not defiance. Diversion.
“You pushed too early,” I murmur, my grip tightening slightly on the controls. “You got impatient.”
Or scared.
Or both.
The coordinates stabilize fully now, locking into a trajectory that aligns with Combine approach lanes, but not directly, and she didn’t give them a straight path.
“She’s moving off their expected vector,” I say, tracking the deviation. “She’s forcing them to adjust.”
Buying time. Creating space. Even now.
