Page 31 of Claimed By the Wraiths

I already knew that. I’d felt the direction.

Deep void. The same coordinates Maris’s data had pinpointed weeks ago.

I braced against the wall and pulled myself up. My legs shook. My vision was wrong at the edges, too bright, too sharp, the aftereffect of pushing the meld past anything I’d tried in years.

“Can you walk?” I asked Tal.

“Can you?”

Fair question.

I took a breath. Then another.

The shaking settled. Not gone, but manageable.

“We’re going to the commercial docking level. Service corridors. I mapped the route.”

Eighteen hours of crawling through the station’s infrastructure was paying for itself. I led Tal down through the maintenance levels, through the routes I’d mapped that avoided the second security layer. Two junctions, a vertical shaft with a maintenance ladder, and a lateral corridor that came out behind the commercial berthing offices.

Nobody stopped us. A tired-looking man and a scared diplomat in the service corridors were invisible. The station’s security was focused on the conference levels, searching for the woman they’d already taken.

The Ghost was still at the commercial docking port.

“You’re coming with me,” I told Tal. “Your codes get the Ghost through Nexus. After that, I need them looking at you instead of me.”

He went pale but didn’t argue. Smart man.

I keyed the comm to the Raptor’s frequency.

“Maris.”

“I’m here.” No delay. She’d been monitoring.

“Jessa’s been taken. Military transport. Heading for Nexus Station.”

“How long?”

“Left six minutes ago.”

Silence. Then Maris said, “We’re already closer than when you left. The Raptor can be at Meridian in eleven hours at maximum burn. Nexus Station is another fourteen from there. We move now.”

Deyric’s voice came over the comm, close and flat. “Assume they took everything she was carrying. Her datapad. Her comm. The drive I gave her. The upload package, the worm, the authentication handshake. Everything on it is compromised. I have to rebuild it from nothing and re-key all of it before we broadcast a single byte.”

“How long?”

“Two days for the package itself if nobody speaks to me and Zevik stops asking whether I’m done.”

Somewhere behind him, Zevik said, “I asked once.”

“You asked four times.” Deyric’s voice flattened another degree. “And the package is the easy part.”

“What’s the hard part?” I asked.

“Nexus. If I probe their defenses from here, they see the probe and know we’re coming. So I have to reconstruct enough of their authentication and defense architecture from the mirrored diplomatic traffic and every Consortium system we’ve already cracked to build a one-shot entry spoof offline.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know yet. Longer than two days. I get one clean attempt. I’m not spending it early because you want a clock.”