Page 5 of Tracked and Taken

A pause. Processing delay where none should exist; SENTRY’s version of a raised eyebrow. “Noted. I will process the contents.”

“Add them to the coordination materials.”

“The contents are punctuality statistics, Torres. They are not coordination materials.”

“They are now.”

“…Noted.”

I pull up the Bay 7 diagnostic schedule. 1400. Four hours and eleven minutes. Three forms, two clearance authorizations, and a civilian escort assignment that needs a name.

Ardent could do it, and would, with the same unflappable competence he brings to everything, while I reviewed the shell company data from the safety of twenty-three monitors and air that doesn’t smell like anything.

I enter my name on the escort assignment because nobody else has the reasons to be angry about the dark spots.

That’s the reason. The bay. The dark spots. The four years.

That is unquestionably the reason.

“SENTRY. Add a note to the SNAG coordination file.”

“Ready.”

“Operative Vosk demonstrates adequate analytical capability. His knowledge of SRS extraction methodology may prove useful to the Torek investigation.” A breath. “His AI requires access restrictions.”

“Noted. Anything else?”

The tail with the loosened curl and the ridges under the light. The flat of my hand against the desk.

“No. That’s all.”

Four hours until I walk into Bay 7 with him. Four hours to remember that I am the security chief of a three-hundred-and-forty-thousand-person station, and that what happens in a docking bay when a Draelith tracker works a scent trail in the dark is an operational question, not a personal one.

The part of me that straightened the pen holder nine times is not convinced.

2

Reading the Air

Tael

1355. Five minutes early.

I’m never early. Early is for people who worry about things, and I don’t worry about things. I assess them, track them, outmaneuver them, and occasionally sit in their offices until they hand over classified security data. Worrying is for people with less impressive success rates.

“You are five minutes early,” JINX says through my earpiece. “You have never been five minutes early for anything in your recorded operational history. Your cortisol levels have been elevated since 0847 this morning, correlating with the scheduled commencement of your coordination meeting with—“

Mute.

The bay is cold. Industrial. Cargo loading infrastructure, ventilation ducts running along the ceiling like exposed veins, deck plating stained with years of fuel residue and docking fluid and the particular grime that accumulates in spaces nobody thinks to look at because looking costs money and money is for corridor lighting upgrades.

The cameras are up there. Eight units along the central beam, cycling every twenty minutes through a maintenance protocol that takes them offline for ninety seconds. Ninety seconds when the feeds go blind and anybody with the right timing can walk through this bay without appearing on a single frame.

SRS would have loved this bay. You don’t create the vulnerability; you find the one that already exists and wait for the institution to refuse to close it. The institution always refuses. It’s the people inside them who surprise you.

Torres surprised me. This morning, in that office with the twenty-three monitors and the desk positioned to put the overhead angle on my face like she’d read a manual on interrogation furniture and then improved on it. She pulled up four years of denied requests while my smirk was still trying to recover from the discovery that the woman I’d assessed as a bureaucrat was a tactician who’d been fighting her own institution and losing and not stopping.

Something shifts in my ribs. A feeling I get when a case stops being work.