Page 4 of Claimed By the Wraiths

I stood in the airlock as the pressure equalized, breathing hard.

Jessa was next to me, her hair falling out of whatever she’d tied it back in. A scrape along her forearm from the conduit. She pulled the data core from inside her jacket and turned it over, checking for damage.

“You came through the ceiling,” she said.

“The door was blocked.”

She looked at me. I looked at the data core.

“Your hands are dark,” she said.

I shoved them in my pockets. “Let’s get this to Deyric.”

In the briefing room, Deyric plugged the core into his console and started pulling it apart. The crew filtered in.

Ressh leaned against the wall, checking a scorch mark on his sleeve. Thoryn stood behind Maris’s chair, not a scratch on him. Solren was already scanning Jessa’s forearm, which she kept pulling away from him.

“Stop that,” he said.

“It’s a scrape.”

“It’s my scrape to assess. Hold still.”

“Communications logs, routing data, standard Consortium military encryption on most of it,” Deyric said, cycling through the files. “This will fill in some gaps.”

“Most of it?” Maris caught it before I did.

“There’s a second layer I can’t touch. Same wall we keep hitting.” He shook his head. “I need more time with it.”

“How long to crack it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Deyric didn’t say that often. “Could be days. Could be longer. I need to study the architecture.”

I looked at the data on the screen. Four raids in three weeks. The last two had turned up useful intelligence.

Every one of them had also turned up fragments of this same encryption, and every time Deyric had hit the same wall.

Whatever the Consortium was hiding behind that protocol, it was the thing we couldn’t reach.

“Keep working on it,” I said. “We’ll reconvene in the morning.”

The crew filed out. Jessa was the last to stand, same as always. She had the look of someone running calculations, mouth set, eyes focused somewhere past the display.

She stopped next to my chair. Didn’t touch my shoulder this time. Just stood there.

My hands were on the table. Still dark.

“Get some sleep,” she said, and left.

I didn’t.

JESSA

Icouldn’t sleep because he’d come through the ceiling. Crawled through a maintenance shaft meant for repair drones, dropped into the room, and put himself between me and the breach.

I was done pretending that was normal.

The mess hall was empty at this hour. The overhead lights were dimmed to nightcycle levels, the blue wash turning everything gray and soft. The place smelled faintly of the curry Maris had made before the raid, the spices still clinging to the recycled air.