Page 80 of Claimed By the Wraiths

Afterward, we lay together. His arm around me. My head on his chest.

The engines vibrated through the hull, through the bed, through us.

I thought about my father. Quietly. Just the awareness that he existed somewhere in the Consortium, in an office or a residence, and he probably knew by now that his daughter’s name had been on the credentials that started the unraveling of the biggest conspiracy in the galaxy.

Maybe someday I’d call him. Not today. But the option was mine now, and that was enough.

“Stay,” Serak said.

I’d been about to get up. Habit. There was always one more thing on the ship I could check, count, or fix.

The work nobody asked me to do and nobody thanked me for and nobody noticed until I didn’t do it.

“Stay,” he said again. His arm tightened around me. His voice was quiet, rough with sleep, the most unguarded I’d ever heard him.

Not a captain’s instruction. Not a request. A word, offered without protection, from a man who’d spent years proving he didn’t need anyone and was lying in a narrow bed asking me not to leave.

I stayed.

JESSA

The message arrived five weeks after Nexus.

Official Consortium seal. Formal language, the kind I’d grown up reading over my father’s shoulder.

Addressed to Captain Serak and the surviving personnel of the Rift Wraith unit involved in Operation Ebon Gate: Serak, Ressh, Thoryn, Deyric, Zevik, Solren.

Serak read it once, put the datapad on the mess hall table, and called everyone in.

They came the way they always did. Zevik arrived last with his boots untied and a protein bar hanging out of his mouth. Maris took one look at the Consortium seal and sat down without being asked.

Serak read aloud.

“The Consortium of Aligned Systems formally acknowledges that Operation Ebon Gate was compromised by internal conspiracy. All charges arising from the operation against the surviving Rift Wraith personnel named herein are vacated.”

Nobody moved.

“Service records restored,” Serak continued. “Ranks restored where applicable. Retroactive pay from Ebon Gate. Pension and benefits credit. Order of Meritorious Service, First Class. Optional reinstatement with choice of posting.”

“First Class,” Zevik said around the protein bar. “That’s the fancy one, right?”

“There’s more paperwork attached.”

“Less fancy.”

Serak set the datapad down.

“The offer is to six of us.”

That mattered.

Not Maris. Not Alix. Not me.

The Consortium was trying to repair what it had done to the people it had sent into Ebon Gate and then erased afterward.

It was not offering to define the crew that existed now.

Serak looked at the other five names on the message.