Chapter 1: The Raid

The station smelled of human fear before we breached the wall.

I’d learned to read that smell over fourteen years of military service — the acrid edge beneath recycled air, the way it sharpened when a population understood, too late, that their locks and their protocols and their faith in treaty law meant nothing against a well-placed shaped charge. Station Helix-9 smelled of it strongly. They’d had perhaps thirty seconds of warning. Enough to know. Not enough to matter.

“Breach in five,” Lieutenant Torres said over the command channel.

I said nothing. My team didn’t need encouragement at this stage. They were Kathari military, trained since adolescence, and they’d followed me through six stations, two orbital platforms, and one engagement so classified it existed in no record I could access. They knew their work. I trusted them the way I trusted my own body — completely, without sentiment.

The wall came in.

Dust and smoke and the screaming of bent metal. My squad moved through the breach in the ordered silence of professionals, weapons up, fanning into the laboratory beyond. Humans scrambled backward against workstations, hands rising. A specimen container shattered on the floor. Something green and biological spread across the tiles, and I noted it — extremophile research, consistent with the station’s filed purpose — and moved on.

I was looking for the data cores.

And then I saw him.

He’d pulled himself upright against a workstation, using the edge for balance, and he was the only human in the room who wasn’t looking at my soldiers. He was looking at me. Not with the fear I expected — though that was present, I could smell it — but with something else underneath. Calculation. Assessment. The look of a mind that had already moved past panic into problem-solving.

I found that interesting, in the way I found most unexpected things interesting. Briefly.

I pulled his file from my data screen. “Dr. Derek Ashton. Xenobiologist, three years studying extremophile organisms.”

“That’s me.” His voice was steadier than it had any right to be. “You’re making a mistake.”

“We rarely do.”

I approached him. Protocol suggested I should already have him restrained and moving toward the ship. Protocol also suggested I use this moment — when he was still assessing me, still deciding how frightened to be — to establish the terms of what came next. I reached out and tilted his chin up with two fingers, claws careful against his jaw, and studied his face the way I’d studied every asset I’d ever collected. Looking for the lie beneath the steadiness. The place where he’d break.