Page 33 of Claimed By the Wraiths

He stared out at deep void. Nothing. The kind of empty that made people from populated systems uncomfortable, the absence of stars and stations and traffic, black in every direction except the one we were heading.

“The transport left Meridian ten minutes ahead of us,” I said. “Doesn’t sound like much. But it has bigger engines, and over a ten-hour run those minutes open into a real gap. We won’t catch them in transit. We’ll set down a few hours after them.”

“And then what?”

“Your codes get the Ghost through the perimeter and into a cargo berth.”

Tal waited.

“After we dock, we both get off.”

His grip tightened on the armrest. “That sounds worse than the part where my codes get us through the perimeter.”

“You walk into cargo processing and become a problem they can’t ignore. Senior diplomatic liaison. Your authorization will have just been accepted by a classified facility that won’t identify itself. Demand a supervisor. Demand names. Demand to know who accepted the authorization.”

“And while everyone is looking at me?”

“I disappear.”

He stared at me. “They’ll detain me.”

“Probably.”

“They may kill me.”

“Yes.”

That landed. I let it. He deserved the truth.

“Vain has reasons to keep you alive,” I said. “He needs to know what you gave Jessa, who else has copies, and whether you warned anyone outside his operation. You’re also a senior Consortium diplomat who vanished from a conference. A body creates questions he doesn’t need.”

“That isn’t the same as safe.”

“No.”

He looked out at deep void for a long time. “And the Raptor?”

“They can reach the Nexus area in about a day. That doesn’t mean they attack in a day. Deyric gets one clean shot at the station’s defenses. Until he has it, they stay dark.”

“So I get arrested, you crawl into the walls, and we wait for the man building an impossible key.”

“That’s the plan.”

Then he reached inside his jacket and pulled out his diplomatic credential.

“The last communications certification I handled included an emergency offline routing cache,” he said. “If the network went down, senior liaisons were supposed to know which physical nodes could be reached manually.”

He keyed the credential into the Ghost’s secondary display.

A schematic opened.

Not architectural plans. Infrastructure. Routing trunks, emergency access, service connections, docking interfaces. Detailed enough to move through.

“Three sections,” Tal said. He highlighted them as he spoke. “Cargo and processing on the lower ring. Holding through the middle. Command and research on the upper section. Cargo docking here. Military docking here. Central service spine connects all three.”

“Where would they bring a new prisoner?”

“Intake cells. Eastern side of the holding section.”