ONE
The slave ship captain dropped to the floor before he had even registered the blaster shot.
Rhaezon stepped over him without breaking stride, clearing the corridor junction without issue, having mapped the ship's layout in his head before boarding. Behind him, Davn moved in silence. No footfalls, no breath loud enough to track, just the soft click of a sidearm's safety disengaging and re-engaging as each doorway proved empty.
Their Free Worlds Alliance team had taken the slave ship's bridge in under ninety seconds. The crew complement matched the intelligence briefing: twelve armed, four unarmed support staff, all but one who had surrendered the moment the Alliance breach team cut through the hull plating. The captain alone had not surrendered. The captain was no longer a consideration.
"Lifeforms in the lower hold," Davn said.
Rhaezon moved down the access ladder, dropping the last eight feet to the deck rather than climbing. The impact sent a vibration through the floor plating that he noted instinctively — solid construction, commercial-grade, a vessel that hauled livestock or ore in its legitimate life and had been retrofitted withcell partitions that smelled of welding flux and something worse underneath.
The smell hit him at the bottom of the ladder. Old sweat, old fear, the chemical bite of sedation agents vented through recycled air. His jaw tightened and scales surfaced along the back of his neck before he pressed them down. Ten years of this work, and the smell still got to him every time.
The first block held six cells of captives. Davn had already moved ahead to secure the far corridor, so Rhaezon worked the locks alone. The crude magnetic bolts were designed to be cheap and reliable rather than sophisticated. He'd cracked worse. He had the first cell open in four seconds and stepped back, keeping his hands visible, making himself as unthreatening as a man his size could manage.
The occupant, a Thyraxi juvenile, their sex indeterminate beneath the bruising, pressed into the far wall and would not look at him.
"I'm with the Free Worlds Alliance," Rhaezon said, his words delivered in a low, even tone. "You're being extracted. No one here will touch you."
The Thyraxi's gaze flickered up, caught on the left side of Rhaezon's face, and dropped. The flinch was small but readable. He'd noticed his scars. The burned tissue damage that pulled Rhaezon's skin taut from jaw to shoulder, the way the light caught the uneven surface and made it look worse than it was. Or exactly as bad as it was, depending on perspective.
Rhaezon stepped aside to give the Thyraxi room. They slid past him with their spine against the opposite wall, maintaining maximum distance. It was a standard response. Rhaezon gave no reaction and moved to the next cell.
The second held a pair — bonded, from the way they gripped each other. Pruvian, both of them, purple-skinned with spiraled gray striping. Their eyes went wide at the sight of him: his heightfilling the cell door, wings folded tight against his back, the scars. The larger of the two pulled the smaller one behind them.
"Free Worlds Alliance extraction," he repeated. "The ship is secured. Please move to the corridor and wait."
They moved. They did not look at him as they passed.
Third cell. Fourth. A Draelith merchant with a broken arm who whimpered when Rhaezon knelt to check the injury, then went rigid and silent, remembering that showing pain invited more of it. Rhaezon steadied the arm with both hands, his grip calibrated to the gram, and fashioned a rough splint from a section of conduit casing he yanked from the wall.
"There's a medic on the transport," he said. "You'll be feeling better in less than twenty minutes."
The merchant nodded without meeting his eyes.
Fifth cell. A species he didn't recognize — tall, thin, with bioluminescent patches along the temples flickering in distress patterns. They recoiled when the door opened and did not stop recoiling. Rhaezon held position in the doorway, hands open, and waited. Thirty seconds. Forty. The flickering slowed. He spoke the extraction brief again, careful to keep his voice soft and low, and they moved past him on shaking legs.
Davn's voice came through the comm piece. "The rear block's clear. The center block has four cells. Two from here need carrying."
"Copy."
Rhaezon moved deeper into the hold.
The last cell block was smaller — four units, retrofitted from what had been a cargo partition. The lighting was worse here, a single overhead strip buzzing at a frequency that scraped against his hearing. Three of the four cells were occupied. He worked the first two locks and repeated the process: door open, step back, hands visible, brief delivered. A young Korvathi female who wouldn't stop thanking him in a dialect he only half understood.An older male of a species he couldn't place, who simply stood, walked out, and said nothing at all.
The third cell.
He cracked the magnetic bolt and pulled the door open, already stepping to the side, already arranging his posture into the practiced geometry of non-threat.
The woman inside did not press herself to the far wall. She did not flinch. She did not look away from the ruined left side of his face.
A human.
He had heard of them. A fringe species, relatively new to the transit lanes, bipedal and unremarkable in most physiological respects. The intelligence briefs described them as adaptive and numerous, and largely unimportant to the power structures that governed this sector. He had never encountered one in the flesh.
She was sitting on the cell floor with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up — not in a defensive curl but in the posture of someone who had been waiting and had gotten comfortable doing it. Her hair was dark and matted. Her clothing was torn at the shoulder. There was a bruise along her jaw that had progressed to the green-yellow stage of healing, which meant it was old. Days old. Which meant she had been here long enough for injuries to cycle.
She looked up at him, and her eyes tracked across his face with an attention that was neither frightened nor pitying. It was inventory. She was staring at him the way he inspected a room: systematically, without sentiment, filing each detail into a framework he could not see.
