Way of the Messenger – Part Two
Continuing this three-part saga of Warrior Jana’s flight from Strana Mechty, begun in Part One.
Ghost in the Void
The second jump rattled through the bones of the Silver Lien like a shiver of doubt. Jana lay still and counted her own breath until the ringing in her ears eased and the taste of copper bled out of her mouth. The ship felt older after each translation, as if the field shaved a little age from the crew and gave it to the hull. Bolts ticked. Panels sighed. The K-F feed lines hummed their low, patient chord through the deck and into her heels.
She slid two fingers under the collar of her shirt and pressed them to the small heat riding her ribs. The chip pulsed once, a steady artificial beat against her skin. She hated that it comforted her, the way a good blade in the boot comforts a soldier who knows the next room will not be friendly. It was more than a talisman. It was legacy trapped in a lattice, code and blood braided into a weight that never seemed to cool: Aleksandr and Nicholas Kerensky preserved for a day that always threatened to arrive too late.
The cabin light stepped from red to amber. The overhead speaker clicked with a small throat-clearing of static and then found its voice.
“Courier,” a clipped alto said, calm as a clean ledger. “Captain Voss requests your presence on Command.”
“Aff,” Jana answered, voice rough from sleep and quiet.
She sealed her collar, dragged her hand down the front of her Shark-issued jumpsuit to press out travel wrinkles, and palmed the hatch. The companionway beyond smelled like a machine designed by people who believed in profit more than comfort: sterilizer, oiled hinges, the faint sweetness that meant the scrubbers were working harder than the officers wanted to admit. A faint smear of grease ran along the bulkhead at shoulder height where the crew brushed, day after day. Above it, lacquered plates carried etched clan marks that had survived three paint cycles: the Diamond Shark’s long, lean body arched in pursuit; a worn Wolf’s head scratched small and defiant beside it where a deckhand with a steady hand and bad timing had put it years ago.
She let her fingers pass over the Wolf. She did not look for a Coyote. She had buried that heraldry on Strana Mechty, under ash and broken glass, with her brother’s last breath for company. Wolf was what fit now. Wolf was what held when you stopped asking which way to face. Wolf was who she was to be, whether she liked it or not.
The lift groaned up two decks and sighed her into Command.
Command ran cool, the way a Shark ship should. The lighting fell softly from recessed strips to spare the eyes. The aft panes showed the sail in ultraviolet tones, a thin triangle of gold foil busy drinking a K-class star’s tired light. No one on deck raised a voice. Orders moved like Merchant-class trade talismans—visible, counted, accounted for. The crew worked with the kind of competence that doesn’t need to announce itself.
Captain Darya Voss stood with hands clasped behind her back at the forward plot. She wore a Warrior’s harness stripped of everything pretty. Her hair was pinned with the neatness of habit. Her gaze took in information as if it owed her interest. If she smiled, Jana had not yet seen when.
“Courier,” Voss said without turning. “How did you find the jump?”
“Clean enough,” Jana said. “Sensors lagged half a beat on emergence. Chief Park says it’s noise.”
“Chief Park calls anything that troubles him noise,” Voss said. “He is usually correct until he isn’t. Factor Roshin is harvesting ice for margin.” She glanced toward a secondary pane where the Vox Lyra—a Buccaneer-class DropShip—showed as a modest wedge doing honest work. “He prefers margin even when he denies fear. I prefer silence even when I deny superstition. Today we have both.”
Jana took in the plotted chain, the thin silver ladder stepping out of Clan space toward the places cartographers scribbled and then looked away. One step, a long coast for recharging. Another step. The road the Sharks had forged largely on their own, a delicate star chain towards the Inner Sphere.
“The cargo remains secure?” Voss asked, eyes still on the plot.
“Aff.” Jana didn’t add I haven’t slept without touching it since Strana Mechty; Voss would hear the weakness, not the discipline. “No degradation. No tampering.”
“The crew wonders why a Wolf Warrior rides a Shark hull,” Voss said. The way she said ‘crew’ implied the Merchants assigned to the vessel.
“Let them wonder,” Jana said.
Voss’s head tipped a hair, the closest she came to approval. “They are Merchants. Their duty ends at the ledger’s edge. Ours does not.” She turned then, the gray of her eyes held steady. “You left the Coyotes when you took the Wolf’s oath. Do not explain that to people who did not live it. Do not apologize for it to yourself.”
“I do not,” Jana said. It was almost true. She was warming to this Captain and her direct brevity.
“Good. Hessa will brief you. There are noises in the ship’s spine we did not install.” She glanced at the system monitor. “Another pair of hands to solve this problem will help.”
Chief Technician Park had half his body inside an avionics trunk when Jana arrived. His lamp cast a hard blue-white across neat rows of junction boxes. Hessa, Star Captain of the ship’s security contingent and the steady knife at Voss’s belt, watched with arms folded. The room thrummed with the faint heart of the ship—the K-F coil’s hush behind it all like breath behind words.
“Here,” Park said without preamble. “Put your hand there.”
Jana pressed her palm flat against a conduit sheath. A tiny tremor ran under her skin, a pulse too regular for vibration and too coy for a fault. A whisper current. A heartbeat laid over a heartbeat.
“Feels wrong,” Jana said.
“Wrong and clever,” Park said. “There’s a coupler in there that shouldn’t exist.” He peeled the sheath back with a practiced tug. The connector beneath looked like glass kissed into shape by a careful mouth—no Shark stamp, no Wolf machining marks, polymer matrix too fine for any Technician aboard. “That is not us.”
“Spoofer?” Hessa asked.
“Half a spoofer, half a thief,” Park said. “It could exhale a clean diagnostic while it inhales our sensor songs.”
“Cut it,” Jana said.
“Neg,” Hessa said. “We find the pattern first. Cut one finger and you teach the hand to hide the others.”
It took three hours to trace. Jana and Park crawled and crouched through trunks and frames, their shoulders brushing painted warnings and old chalk notes that had never been recorded anywhere official. They found six couplers like the first, each disguised with dust, each humming a patient little lie. Park’s hands trembled once when he slid the scanner tight, and a line of tiny numbers climbed like a fever.
“Networked,” he said. “Not broadcasting—not exactly. Listening. And…suggesting.”
“Suggesting what,” Hessa asked.
“Paths,” Park said. “Routes we think we picked. If I were building a map you couldn’t tell from your own hand, I’d start like this.” He looked up at Jana then, and for a second, freeborn humor broke the worry. “Or if I wanted to impress an attractive Wolf with my competence.”
Jana managed half a smile. “Your board doesn’t need flirting.”
“Everything needs respect,” Park said. “Flirting is just respect with better timing.”
Hessa snapped the panel closed. “We seal this trunk and walk the others. We do not say a word to the crew, or they will make a ghost out of it. Not yet.”
“Aff,” Jana said. The word on her tongue tasted like a verdict she had not earned the right to give. She swallowed it.
The Vox Lyra pushed away from the Silver Lien on thrusters that coughed and then became gentle, her fat frame turning with the kind of grace only good pilots give bad shapes. Out ahead, the ice field rolled—shards of a broken body tumbling slow, faces flashing cold fire in the star’s tired light. Tugs nosed in with ion torches to carve, and Technicians in magboots clip-walked along scaffolds to coax the blocks into capture cages. It had the rhythm of a ritual old as flight: take what you need from a thing that won’t miss it, pray you’ve paid enough attention not to insult the dark.
As Jana discovered shortly after their headstrong flight from the fires of Strana Mechty, the Vox Lyra no longer served as a standard cargo vessel. Its bays had been converted over a century ago to acquire and transport stellar ice. The Buccaneer was assigned to Captain Voss’s small flotilla, one of only two DropShips capable of transporting ice, a lucrative trade good for the Clan amongst the Periphery systems that bordered the Inner Sphere.
Jana suited up because work kept her thoughts in straight lines. Hessa checked her seals with practiced roughness and thumped her shoulder once. The airlock cycled with the wheeze of an old singer clearing her throat. Vacuum greeted her with honest silence.
“Squad Three, near ridge,” Hessa said into the net. “Park’s seeing interference.”
“Could be static,” Park responded, static crackling. “Could be company. I’d love static.”
Hessa pointed at Jana, then at the airlock door as it gaped open. Jana kicked out of the airlock and glided smoothly towards a large, irregular iceball floating several meters off the stern of the DropShip.
Jana’s boots kissed the mottled rock of an ice boulder and clamped. The world narrowed to a lazy rotation of glitter and shadow. Her visor painted returns and path suggestions in polite green, not presuming to tell her what to do, only what a reasonable person might consider.
A glint at ten o’clock caught and held. Too steady. Not ice. Not a bored star.
“Movement,” she said, and kept her voice level.
The first shot shaved a bright scream off the buoy wedged nearby, under the ice lip. Vapor spumed. Jana slid right on a controlled microburst and left a place for the second shot to be lonely. She detached a hand cutter from her utility belt and gripped it firmly.
“Contact,” Hessa said. “Two?”
“Aff,” Jana said. “Crossing fields.”
They came like professionals: one laying crisp cover down the ridge, the second sliding along the shadowed face to close. No marks. No transponders. Silence that spoke of lessons learned in rooms without windows.
Jana let the closer one have her pace for two heartbeats so they’d trust their read. Then she spoiled it—boot magnet catching a strut from a nearby scaffold lock, leverage turning her body into a blunt weapon. They collided and stuck. His rifle barked a wild round that chiseled sparks from rock. She slid the cutter’s head under his shoulder ring and popped the valve like a cork. White frost flowered around his neck as emergency resin spat into a wound it could not fully forgive.
The second shooter stitched the buoy with measured fire. Chips rattled Jana’s helmet. She pulled the leaking body between herself and the shots and felt the thuds through her suit like accusations.
“Grenade,” Park said, voice flat, because excitement makes hands stupid.
A glitter like a thrown coin arced. Jana palmed the buoy and flipped it into the blast. Silver dust bloomed and died in shame. She was already moving—magboot to ridge seam, microburst to spoil the arc, a hand out for the lip.
The second shooter had good feet and no romance. He rode the slope on little thrusts like breath, used the boot clamps sparingly, and never braced longer than he had to. She chased the puffs and lost a half meter to a plain patch of rock that did not care about her gravity, then found it again with a hand under a seam.
He looked back once. Not fear. Curiosity. The kind scientists use with knives.
Then he stepped over the ridge and let the shadow take him.
“Enough,” Hessa said. “We keep our win. Back to lock.”
Jana grabbed the first shooter by the harness, looked above to pinpoint the Vox Lyra’s position, and kicked. Inside, Hessa stripped the helmet and found a young face that had learned early how to set its jaw for pain. Park scanned, whistled under his breath at the implants glowing faint on the med panel, and prepared the chair he’d bolted to the deck. The man said nothing, just laughed and laughed until he bled, and then smiled like a student proud of his exam score.
“Who sent you,” Hessa asked. Her tone didn’t offer him dignity to borrow.
“You don’t have the language for it,” he said. His eyes slid to Jana. “The Wolves never do.”
Jana didn’t look away. “Teach me.”
“You carry a seed,” he said. “Not a relic.” His tongue moved over a tooth that flashed a hint of metal. “Give it to us and you will sing again.”
Hessa punched him once. He coughed blood, smiled wider, and bit down. Park swore, lunged, and caught the jaw too late. The body jerked once. The lights along the med panel climbed and then fell like a choir told to sit.
“Toxin capsule,” Park said. “Neural fire. Whoever trained him did not shy away from finding an exit.”
Voss’s voice came from Command, level as a deck. “You will document. You will not talk to the crew about this. We remain on schedule.”
Jana wiped blood from her sleeve with two fingers and watched it refuse to come clean. The word he had not said sat behind her teeth like a shard.
They ran through two systems in silence, harvesting quickly and leaving quicker. Roshin complained with the finesse of a Merchant who knows better than to insult a Warrior to her face. He worried about inventory, mass ratios, and a chain of obligations that the Sharks had promised and would be paid for, regardless of whether things ended well or poorly. Voss listened without moving and granted him small luxuries that cost discipline nothing: an extra hour to run checks after docking, a favor queued for a future port where men with long memories would trade gossip before fuel.
Hessa moved through the crews of the attached DropShips relentlessly, searching for contraband. She collected four knives and two pistols from hands that had no business holding them in corridors. She replaced them with stern looks and long lectures about how sibko amateurs made the Bloodnamed die untidy. Jana followed her for a shift to learn the names of the people who would break or hold when pressure taught manners. She had a knack for hearing the way a person said ‘aff’ and which syllable carried pride.
Park sat with Jana over a ration that pretended to be stew and drew maps in the condensation ring his cup left on the table. “If I were writing an overlay into the display drivers,” he said, “I’d hide it in the maintenance font. No one reads the warnings unless the ship bites them. If I were suggesting coordinates without touching the nav core, I’d write a ghost in the fallback routines. If I were improving my chances of dying old, I’d take up cooking and stop this work. Alas.”
“You like the puzzle,” Jana said.
“I like being necessary,” Park said. “The puzzle is a kindness the job gives me so I don’t notice that necessary and replaceable are cousins.”
“Park,” Hessa said, appearing at Jana’s shoulder like a late fact. “Stop flirting with the dead and come fix my board.”
Park grinned, unoffended. “You see? Replaceable.”
Jana slept in two-hour knots. In the third knot she dreamed she stood in the Kerensky Chapel before it burned. In the dream, the glass did not melt. The saints kept their faces. Akule’s Grendel knelt in the courtyard like a pilgrim. When she woke the fourth time, she did not put her hand to the chip to make sure the world had not shifted. She already knew it would be warm, loyal, and waiting for orders.
The haunting began soon after the departure of the last DropShip being ferried by the Silver Lien, leaving only the Vox Lyra as its sole passenger. It started as static under a maintenance broadcast. Hessa told two deckhands to reseat their plugs and drink something with electrolytes. It persisted. Park told his team to run loopbacks and stop muttering. It persisted. The Captain permitted herself a glance at the forward panes when the sail flickered in ultraviolet as if something had put a hand between foil and star and then taken it away, polite as a guest who still rearranges the furniture.
Then voices walked through the ship.
They came thin, formal, clipped—like transmissions made by people who had learned to cork emotion because breath cost you accuracy. Wolf callsigns. Old cadence. The kind of string-of-letters-and-numbers that only means home if you bled under them once.
“—Echo-One, negative response. Enclave breach on the east gallery. Fall back by columns. Wolf Guard to my mark—”
Park swore and accidentally turned it into a prayer. “There is nothing in the buffers.” He dragged a diagnostic up the screen and stabbed at the place in the code where signals should wear uniforms. “It’s not in comms. It’s in the drivers. The panels are writing the voices into their own refresh.”
“Source,” Voss said.
“Us, if you will accept an answer that gets me yelled at,” Park said. Sweat gathered at his temple. “It’s like standing between mirrors and pretending the reflections are visitors.”
“Don’t be poetic on my deck,” Voss said. “Say it plain.”
“It’s happening,” Park said. “Not arriving.”
The forward panes shivered and then carried a map not loaded from any menu Park had authorized. Jana felt the hairs on her arms lift. Old Wolf glyphs labeled the starfield. Quarantine markers pulsed on systems that had been rumors even when she was a cadet. The road the Coyotes had mocked the Wolves for walking when they called them sentimental. The road you take when you believe in home.
A word flickered in the corner, small and patient.
Hecate.
No one said it aloud. The deck felt the weight anyway.
“What does it want?” Voss asked.
Jana found herself answering before Park. “It wants us to trust it. It wants us to go where it points. Then it wants what I carry.”
“Does your cargo answer to it?” Voss said.
“No,” Jana said. “Only to orders we haven’t heard yet.”
“Then we remain ourselves,” Voss said, and the way she spoke we made it not a promise but a working rule. “Helm, we continue on the chain. Chief, keep my screens. Sergeant, keep my crew.”
They ran three sleeps with the voices coming and going like the weather. Sometimes, Jana heard a cadence that tasted like a Wolf she had served beside, and the ache of it made her fingers press the chip too hard. Sometimes the map returned and added a point to its own chain with the neatness of a teacher correcting a homework line. Park killed two loops, and they grew back in new places, as if the phenomenon was both polite and stubborn.
On the fourth sleep, the map pulsed one word in small, archaic glyphs: packmate.
Jana could not tell if it was kindness or mockery. She did not ask Hessa what she thought. Hessa had recently adopted a principle of not giving stray facts more breath than they deserved.
They found the second saboteur by listening to the ship the way you listen to a dog that hears something before you do. A maintenance hatch near one of the jumpsail mounts unsealed itself with a sigh no one had told it to make. Hessa’s mirror caught a slice of a figure crouched by the navigation frame, a hand sunk into a nest of fiber with the confidence of a man who believed his hands were meant to tell machines what to do.
“Hands,” Hessa said, stepping into the doorway, weapon low and ready.
The man didn’t flinch. He turned and fired to spoil her aim and then moved to put the frame between them—the kind of motion learned from fighting in tight places where furniture is both enemy and ally.
Jana didn’t wait for tactics chatter. She hit him at an angle that turned his body into a hinge and the wall into a tool. The pistol went under a cradle and coughed. The knife he produced with his left hand traced a polite line across Jana’s forearm and bled clean on the deck. She gave him her elbow as payment under his jaw and liked the sound less than she liked its result.
He was good. He was also convinced. Those two things make people predictable. He reached for her ear with a hard thumb because that ends fights fast if done right. She turned her head at the last tick and let him find the hard ridge instead. She took the wrist and twisted until the joint had to pick a side.
“Stop,” she said, because people sometimes surprise you with a better choice when offered one.
“You are delivering a tool you do not comprehend,” he said, not angry, almost affectionate. “Give it to those who do.”
“Neg,” Jana said, finishing it with a move that had a technical name her instructors loved and a barracks name her sibkin preferred. He went limp in the honest way, not the tricky way.
Park arrived with a tech in tow and peered into the open frame and its nest of wires to ascertain the damage.
“He bent the arrival by micromarks,” Park said. “Not enough to kill us. Enough to choose the system we show up in.” He wiped a hand on his coveralls and showed Jana the faint smear of polymer his scanner refused to name. “Your friend on the ice had hands like his.”
“Not my friend,” Jana said.
“Everyone is someone’s,” Park said. “That is how we get jobs.”
They lashed the body to a gurney. The terminal still glowed. One word repeated across its surface in neat funereal script.
Hecate.
Hessa didn’t say it. She shut the panel with more force than necessary and called Command instead. Voss listened, asked three questions that made the answers better by being asked, and ended with:
“Understood. Prepare for the next jump. We will not give our guest time to choose a better invitations.”
The decrepit station sat in a bowl of darkness around a red dwarf that warmed nothing. Its skeletal arms curled like the ribs of a dead animal Jana had seen once in a laboratory on Strana Mechty. Dock collars yawned with the bad manners of mouths left open. The beacon did not flash; it pulsed—a slow throb that made technicians twitch unconsciously.
Jana glanced at the positional monitor. Their destination lay relatively close to the Silver Lien’s position at the LaGrange point. In stellar distances, it was within spitting distance.
She watched the initial scans come back: a Myaki-class orbital facility for terraforming, one of the few that had been carried with General Kerensky during the Exodus. None of them had reached their final destination… which was now engulfed in the flames of politics and petty rivalries. This one had apparently been cast off, dead weight for a fleeing flotilla.
The terminal beeped softly, data streams spitting out its report. Minimal power, structural decay well over seventy-five percent. Enough gravity for an atmosphere, though the recirculators were barely functioning.
In other words, the perfect spot for a Watch waystation.
Jana joined Voss on the bridge of the Vox Lyra to make their approach.
“Manual docking,” Voss said. “No handshake. No beacons exchanged. If a door opens by itself, we close it.”
“Aff,” responded the pilot, her voice carrying the flat focus of a warrior who had flown too many old things and did not trust new ones.
The Vox Lyra swung wide, thrusters delicate. Roshin’s voice rasped, all good manners pressed flat to hide worry. “Captain, my cargo—”
“Will remain our cargo,” Voss said. “Hold the ring. Engines hot. If I say cut loose, you cut. Do not ask me to repeat myself.”
“Aff,” Roshin said. The way he said it meant he had counted losses and profits, and for once the former had won.
The Buccaneer latched onto an airlock, the hull pocked with dents and debris scars from centuries of deployment as the red dwarf’s tiny neighbor. System protocols were sent, and the seal groaned, interrogated their bolts, and consented.
Jana followed Voss and Hessa across, boots touching down in a corridor stripped to bone: bare conduits, missing panels, warning stencils in a font that remembered a different budget and better lighting.
A woman waited at a junction, height straight, face unadorned, a small Wolf Watch insignia on her shoulder. She glanced at Jana, measured, and made the kind of decision Watch agents make when time has run out and trust is no longer a luxury.
“Courier,” she said. “With me.”
Hessa kept pace at Jana’s shoulder. Voss walked a half-step behind, eyes doing what eyes should do in unfamiliar halls: count exits, judge distances, find places to kill and not be killed.
“Interference inside the station,” Park whispered over the net, as if the thing listening cared about volume. “Low frequency. It…ticks.”
“Dampen,” Voss murmured. “Do not chase it unless you are certain you can catch it.”
“Understood,” Park said. “Confidence is not a feeling I am presently enjoying.”
They passed a long gallery of glass-fronted tanks that had been scrubbed clean and sealed. A few still wore labels in that old, careful hand Jana had come to fear: tissue lines, growth rates, vectors. Nothing inside now but a film that caught light like a memory and refused to surrender it. The Watch agent’s jaw tightened a hair. She did not slow.
The lights gradually brightened, then dimmed, a system fluctuation marked by a slow rhythm. Jana realized it matched the strobe from the station’s exterior. The temperature dropped by a degree and a half in a minute. Somewhere deep in the station, something big woke up with a rattle, then died away with a quiet gasp.
The doors at the far end of the corridor opened smoothly, hinting at precision and control. A woman stepped through, her simple gray jumpsuit and low cap giving her an unassuming appearance. Yet, one iris gleamed with metallic flecks and fractal patterns that shifted subtly, suggesting a mysterious depth beneath her plain exterior.
“You brought my key,” she said, voice soft and almost fond.
“Hecate,” Voss said, not giving the name awe.
“Names are crude things,” the woman said, and smiled. “But useful.” Her gaze slid to Jana and warmed. “Jana.”
“You don’t know me,” Jana said.
“I know the pattern of your hands when you fix a thing you love,” the woman said. “I know the way you hold a blade when you don’t want to admit you prefer it to a rifle. I know the little design in your blood you carry under your shirt.” She tilted her head a fraction, birdlike. “I know what it will let me do.”
“Us,” Hessa said. “Let *you* do? There is no us in this room.”
The woman let her eyes take Hessa in and she almost sighed. “You are the kind of Warrior who keeps heroes alive long enough to be useful. I admire you more than I will ever say.” She looked past them and down the corridor as if the station had whispered something pleasant in her ear. “And yes, Sergeant. Let *me* do.”
Park’s voice slid into Jana’s ear. “She’s in the station grid. She’s walking the old systems like she wrote them. She probably did.”
“Dampen harder,” Voss said.
“I’d prefer a different verb,” Park said. “But I will be rude to her code until she notices me.”
The Watch agent didn’t raise her rifle. She adjusted it, which is more honest. “Step away from my courier.”
“Your courier,” Hecate repeated, amused. “All of you speak of people as if you own them. It is quaint. You should own ideas. They waste less food.” She took a step forward, hand open, palm up, offering no weapon or any threat. “Jana. Bring me the key. It belongs to those who can tune it.”
Jana felt Hessa shift, a warning in muscle. Voss’s voice stayed steady. “Courier,” she said. “Remember your oath.”
Jana took one step forward. Hecate’s eye lit with satisfaction. Jana closed the rest of the distance in two fast strides and went through the intruder like she was a paper wall.
Hecate moved with the fluidity of water, sliding to her left. Jana adjusted her last step, a strike at her target’s midsection, but Hecate’s skin betrayed no weakness. Under the surface, muscles and bones resisted and then snapped back as if her joints were made of steel and myomer. Hecate’s left hand clamped onto Jana’s bicep with surgical precision, trying to wrench her bone with brute grip rather than leverage. Jana twisted into the pain, refusing to retreat, and carved out space using the bulkhead as an uninvited third partner in a brutal, unconsented clash.
Hessa’s first shot shaved paint off a conduit because the lights dimmed between trigger pull and impact. The second wrote a neat scar on the wall by Hecate’s skull. The third did the work of keeping Hecate honest; it took a chip from her shoulder and made the metallic iris flare bright like an angry star.
“Stop,” Hecate said to Hessa without looking. “You will hurt a thing I want.”
“Good,” Hessa said. “I like hurting things you want.”
Hecate’s knee hit Jana’s thigh with a sharp click, deep inside her calf. The pain made Jana see three colors and think of two choices. She chose the one that made her look ugly and drove her forehead into Hecate’s face. Her sibko instructors had called this move efficient. Her sibkin had said it was rude. The Coyote in her had once argued for a cleaner approach. But now, she was Wolf. Survival was all that mattered.
Something under Hecate’s skin tore. She smiled around it as if pain were an academic interest. “Not a messenger,” she said, pleased.
“Aff,” Jana said, and cut.
The blade she carried was a Shark locker special with a sharp edge. It cut Hecate’s side and found a seam where synthetic material met organic material. The smell that appeared was not human. It was a mix of ozone, antiseptic, and a metallic sweetness.
The Watch agent stepped into the lane Hessa’s shots had cleared and fired a short, mean burst that would have embarrassed a less disciplined woman. Three rounds hit the intruder high on the chest, where a human heart would argue for authority. Hecate staggered. The metallic eye spun a tight, angry pattern and then settled.
She laughed. “You still think in anatomy.”
“Park,” Voss said in Jana’s ear, voice so calm it could cut bread. “Status.”
“Drones inbound,” Park said. “She woke the station, and it wants to please her. They’re coming through the service ducts like a family reunion.” A pause. “By the way, I hate families.”
“Gunners,” Voss switched channels to the Silver Lien. “Target inbound contacts. Do not scorch my docking collar.”
The corridor shook with a sound like metal remembering what rain was. Hessa reloaded. The Watch agent’s jaw clenched on something she did not say because there are words you don’t let an enemy hear, even if the enemy is dying.
Jana slid her blade up under Hecate’s jaw with both hands and drove. The body convulsed. The metallic eye flickered and froze on a pattern that looked like an apology written by a machine. Hecate’s fingers snatched at Jana’s shirt and caught fabric and skin and the small, constant heat beneath both. For a fraction of a beat, the warmth ran between them like a permission. Jana tore free. Skin went with it. She filed the pain under later.
“Tell me a truth,” Jana said, out of breath and out of patience. Her hand clamped around Hecate’s throat.
Hecate’s mouth filled with a dark fluid that clung to her tongue like language. “The Wolves will split,” she said, voice almost kind. “You will choose which god to betray.”
“I don’t need gods,” Jana said. “I need orders.”
Hessa’s knife flashed in Jana’s vision, embedding into the woman’s chest and finishing what the bullet and the blade had begun. Hecate’s body went still.
Park’s voice came louder, teeth bared. “Captain, they’re in the ducts. We can hold for a minute. Maybe two.”
“Hold,” Voss said. Then, to Jana: “Courier. Package. Go.”
“Captain—” Jana started, and heard the flat edge on her own word.
“Go,” Voss said. “That is an order. Star Captain, see her clear.”
Hessa grabbed Jana’s arm, checked the bleeding with her eyes instead of her hands, and pulled her toward the dock. The Watch agent fell in, rifle up, walking backward without tripping over anything important. Behind them, the station fully woke. From vents and gaps, small drones with the purposeful ungainliness of fast birds poured out in a black seam and learned flight in a hurry.
They ran the transfer tube in a shower of fast, bright ricochets that wrote neat stars on bulkheads. The Silver Lien’s outer airlock stood open like a promise.
“Close outer,” Hessa shouted into the net. “Inner stays green until I say.” She shoved Jana toward the main hatch. “Get to the emergency shuttle, warm it up. Be ready.”
Jana hesitated, glancing back as the captain staggered into the airlock. Voss pushed past her, their gazes locking briefly. As the captain stepped through the hatch, she nodded, then disappeared down the corridor.
Hessa tugged at Jana’s arm, prompting her to move in the opposite direction. The Watch agent took position in the rear, shielding them. Hessa glanced back at the way the captain disappeared. “She is heading for the other shuttle to get to the Silver.” Jana just nodded, half-numb from pain and focused now on each step forward.
Park met them at the emergency hatch, hair damp, hands dirty, eyes bright with fear’s clever cousin. “She’s not done,” he said. “If Hecate were a face, the thing in the station ducts is a mouth. It wants to chew through our coil housing and then talk in math.”
“Keep it outside,” Hessa said.
“Captain says we hold,” Park said. “She also says to remind the courier she owes us drinks.” His smile was terrible and honest. “Someday.”
The ship shook. Distantly, something screamed—a sound drones make when they fail to understand why the air is on fire.
Voss’s voice cut across channels, sharp and calm. “All hands. This is the Captain. We will be remembered for not losing our heads. Gunners, bracket the ducts. Engineering, charge the capacitors and tell me when I can ruin a day on purpose. Factor Roshin—” She paused the length of a breath. “—cut loose and prepare to leave on my mark.”
“Captain,” Roshin said, voice small for a man who lived by large numbers. “If we cut loose now—”
“You will live to haggle,” Voss said. “Do you prefer to die to make a point?”
“Neg,” Roshin said. “Understood.”
Jana and the Watch agent sealed the two-seater shuttle. Jana slid into the second seat and felt the small ship come alive under her palms like a cat deciding whether to tolerate a new person. The systems read green, then amber, then green again as Park did something impolite to the station’s sense of self.
“Drones on the collar,” Hessa said. “Make them regret ambition.”
Gunfire spoke. The Silver Lien’s hull guns had been tuned for meteorites and pirates with bad aim. They learned this new target with enthusiasm, even if at the edge of effective range. It didn’t matter; drones flamed and spun, creating a small ring of debris around the ancient station.
Then, hatches dotted across the station’s body blew open. Fingers of a metallic cloud swirled, coalescing into a swarm of high-speed computer death. The fingers merged, then surged outward, reaching for them all.
“Jump capacitors at ninety-two percent,” Park said, and Jana heard what he didn’t say. We can overload. We can make a light that erases names.
“Hold,” Voss said. “Roshin—”
“I know, I know,” the Merchant muttered, because mics catch everything. “Cutting loose. Vox Lyra departing. Please don’t blow me out of the sky by accident.”
“Accidents happen to people who do not listen,” Voss said. “You are listening. You will be fine.”
The Watch agent looked at Jana without turning her head. “We launch on her word.”
“Aff,” Jana said, throat tight.
Hessa’s voice came hard. “Drones breaching frame two. Park—”
“On it,” Park said. “I have taught these ducts what regret is.” Something boomed. The Buccaneer rolled a fraction and came back to itself. “Regret achieved.”
“Courier,” Voss said, voice softening not a bit. “You will go now.”
“Captain,” Jana said.
“Finish it, Wolf,” Voss said, and the channel cut to shipwide. “All hands, mark. Overload on my count. Three.”
Gunfire, close. A scream, not human. The Watch agent’s hands tightened on the yoke.
“Two.”
Park, quietly: “Captain—”
“Aff, Chief,” Voss said. “One.”
For a singular moment, the void went bright.
The viewport bleached transparent. The tiny shuttle’s hull sang—a high, thin anxiety that told a practiced ear how close you were to the edge of math. Then everything went very quiet.
When sight returned, the Silver Lien was not there. The Vox Lyra was a far, small spark angling away on honest thrust. The station’s ribs hung, scorched and rebroken, drifting apart like a jaw that had tried to take too big a bite. The drone cloud was dust.
The Watch agent blew out a breath she had been saving for years. “Jump station clear. Our ride should be here soon.”
Jana put her hand to her ribs. The chip answered. Warm. Steady. Loyal. “Intercept the Vox Lyra. Then we will wait.”
“Aff.”
A Scout-class vessel arrived shortly after Jana reunited with the Vox Lyra. The Wolf agent – Yeveth, Jana learned – provided the correct protocols, and soon the shuttle and DropShip were secured to the JumpShip’s spine.
There was no sign of Voss’s shuttle.
Yeveth brought Jana to the ship’s compact bridge and Captain Bregge. “Destination,” the captain said without preamble, voice betraying nothing.
“Inner Sphere,” Jana said. “Khan Ward.”
“Aff.” Bregge set the course with neat movements. “We will jump in eight hours, need to fully recharge the sail. Yeveth will show you to your quarters.” He turned away, murmuring orders to the crew on duty, Jana already forgotten.
Jana stared at the place where Voss had been and let the quiet put shape to things she did not intend to say. Hessa would have put a hand on her shoulder and then pretended she hadn’t. Park would have told a joke he pretended was at his own expense. Roshin would have drafted a debt ledger for a woman who would never collect. She let all of that be true and then put it away.
“You knew her,” the Watch agent said as Jana entered her sparse cabin.
“Enough,” Jana said.
“She knew you,” the agent said. “Enough to bet on you.”
Jana did not answer. The agent did not require it.
The Aluna May, known affectionately by her crew as the Lunatic, ran three short jumps before another recharge period. The JumpShip was Wolf-gray and clean inside, the way Watch boats are: everything tied down, nothing jangles, no one leaves a book where it might become a weapon in the wrong hands unless the owner intends it to. The galley had a coffee unit that produced something almost like the smell of a morning not bought with blood.
During the recharge, the Vox Lyra separated and joined a Diamond Shark JumpShip en route to elsewhere. The Buccaneer was in bad shape; Park confided to Jana that the ship was now marked as salvage; even the converted water tanks had failed, releasing most of its payload into space two jumps prior.
Jana shared drinks with Chief Park before they separated. They drank in silence, respecting the dead who gave them life.
Yeveth laid a hand terminal on the table and slid Jana a cup. “Report,” she said. The word sat between them like a blade laid flat and offered for inspection.
Jana told the story the way Wolves tell stories when facts matter more than pride: where they jumped, what they saw, what they found in the trunks, how the implants worked like polite suggestions, how the voices came and went, what the map wrote when it got lonely. She did not spend extra breath on Hecate’s smile. She did not say Voss’s name until the end.
“She died well,” the agent said.
“She died to make a point,” Jana said.
“Same sentence,” the agent said. “Different tense.” She tipped the terminal so its screen caught the cabin light. “What she bought is time. We will not waste it. The Society is a secret we will share with exactly the people who can use it and no one else.”
“Who else knows it as a word?” Jana asked.
“Enough to make me sleep with my boots on,” Yeveth said. “Not enough to stop me from sleeping.”
Jana sipped coffee that forgave nothing. “What do you expect from me?”
“Not belief,” said Yeveth. “Not confession. Only accuracy and speed. The Watch will walk you from point to point. We will not write your name in any book until the last door closes. You will deliver your legacy to Khan Ward. He will decide what shape the future wears.”
“Is he where he needs to be?” Jana asked.
“He is where everyone needs him to be,” Yeveth replied. “That is not always the same thing.”
Jana nodded. “Aff.”
“You are Wolf,” said the agent, as if confirming the identity on a manifest.
“Aff,” Jana said, and felt it land clean for the first time.
The Lunatic arrived at the edge of the Chainelaine Island group several weeks later. Yeveth told Jana that some verifications needed to be finished first before they could move into the Inner Sphere.
The first Watch safehouse was located in a belt nobody bothered to name because rock doesn’t care what you call it. Their relay contact used a mining skiff as a mask and a family foilgraph as a test. Jana handed over a tray of burnt-out chips Park had told her to give to people who would know how to listen to the damage. The contact—a woman with a scar that ignored makeup and a laugh that did not—took them and passed a sealed packet back.
“Tell Captain Voss I do not miss her,” the woman said. “She never liked my jokes.”
“The Captain is dead,” Jana said, flat.
The woman adjusted nothing on her face. “Then tell whoever replaces her that I will not miss them either.” She tapped the sealed packet. “You open that when the agent says. Not before.”
They left while the skiff still pretended to be a skiff.
The second station was a refueling catamaran that called itself a chapel because it had candles and a brass plate with the name of a saint Jana didn’t recognize. A Technician with oil on his cuffs recited a line from a Wolf song and watched Jana’s mouth while she finished it. He gave them a new registry, two filters, and a joke Park would have liked better than Jana did.
At the third location—the old heat exchanger strapped to the belly of an extinct station—the haunting touched them again for three breaths: a voice that might have been Akule, echoing light-years and months past logic, saying a word Jana had never heard him say in life. It sounded like apology. It sounded like command. It left no trace.
“Residual,” Yeveth said, hands steady on the controls. “Or they learned to leave lullabies as pits for us to step in.”
“They?” Jana asked.
“The ones we do not name on open channels,” the agent said. “They were a shape long before it was a proper noun.”
At night, when the ship’s lights went to their lowest polite level and the hum of the wall plate lulled the thin bones inside the hull, Jana touched her side and felt the chip wait. She remembered the Kerensky Chapel as it had been and as it had become, and then refused to let her mind spend time there, as if memory were a resource she needed to hoard.
She dreamed once of Coyote tutors correcting her grip and then of Wolf instructors correcting the same grip differently. In the dream, she defended both ways, and the man trying to kill her admired her choices. She woke with Hessa’s voice in her head.
It took hours before Jana slept the sleep of the exhausted.
The last safehouse sat in a cloud of dust that used to be worlds. A woman with secrets in her eyes a scar on her lip came aboard with a case that weighed more than it looked.
“Open your packet,” she told the agent.
Yeveth broke the seal. Inside lay a thin strip of metal with a single etched glyph: Ward.
“Orders,” the woman said. “You go to rendezvous Six. Your courier goes with you. The Wolf leadership will meet you there. Khan Ward will have three questions for your messenger.” She tilted her head at Jana. “You will refrain from questions unless he gives you leave to do so.”
“Aff,” Jana said.
The woman’s gaze softened the tiniest fraction. “He will like that.”
The Lunatic finished recharging. The universe continued its business of ignoring human concerns.
The final briefing before departure to meet the Khan was a room dimmed to spare eyes and nerves. Jana watched as an agent adjusted two dials because rituals comfort professionals more than they admit.
“You will carry what you learned about the Society,” the agent said. “You will give it to the Watch. We will choose who needs to know. Not the whole Wolf Touman, not the loud men who think having a rank is the same as having judgment. Just the ones who can use it.”
“Aff,” Jana said. “They built islands in the dark to teach their shadows to speak. They wrote on our screens because they wanted us to think we were finishing an equation we’d started ourselves.”
“They build projects and call themselves gods,” the agent said. “We will call them Dark and then turn them off.”
Jana looked at her hands, the calluses earned from holding blades, and the small scars that come from learning how to handle the parts of a ship that cut you if you look bored. “Voss said not to apologize to myself for being a Coyote,” she said, more to the deck than to the agent.
“She was right,” the agent said. “Wolves do not apologize for surviving. They apologize for failing to keep promises. Keep yours.”
Jana put her palm to her ribs. The chip warmed. She felt her breath move under her hand and matched the two rhythms until they held the same count. The word in her head sat still and did not rattle.
Wolf.
“Wake me when we are close,” she said.
“Aff,” the agent said.
The Lunatic flashed in the void. No voices came through the panels except the ones humans let out on purpose. Jana slept with her hand where it belonged and dreamed in a language with fewer animals and more teeth.
Khan Vlad Ward waited. The legacies she carried waited. The destiny of the Wolf waited.
The fate of Kerensky’s children waited.
She slept the sleep of the living.
The following details were recorded by Courier Jana [surname redacted per Watch protocol] for delivery to Wolf Watch Command en route to rendezvous Six:
— Couplers recovered from Silver Lien starboard/port avionics trunks: six confirmed, polymer matrix not of Shark manufacture; conductive behavior mimicked standard diagnostic signature under base load and introduced micro-suggestive variance under stress; likely Society origin.
— Whisper bug recovered at ice harvest site: variant unit employing tight-beam passive handshake; message format implied ability to piggyback on external ship’s maintenance displays; destroyed during engagement by improvised shielding.
— Saboteurs: two aboard, one neutralized during EVA (fatal vacuum compromise), one neutralized in navigation frame (fatal neck fracture). Both carried dental toxin capsules (neural fire). Implants: subdermal signaling nodes in wrist/temple, non-HPG.
— Haunting phenomena: voices and maps manifested through display driver layer, not comms; content included archaic Wolf distress calls and cartographic overlays indicating quarantine zones; no raw data in buffers; phenomenon ceased when Captain Voss ordered system-wide dampening and manual isolation of key buses.
— Hecate: female-presenting operative employing biomedical augmentation and direct network manipulation through proximity; demonstrated enhanced joint articulation and accelerated recovery from impact; neutralized via combined ballistic and edged-weapon force; post-mortem fluids gathered from Jana’s flight suit exhibited metallic particulate.
— Captain Darya Voss: status—KIA in action. Overloaded Silver Lien jump capacitors to deny pursuit and clear egress. Last transmission: “Finish it, Wolf.”
— Factor Tural Roshin: status—alive; Vox Lyra detached pre-detonation and broke contact per Captain’s order. Transported to System 55-C and handed off to CDS Bloodwater. Awaiting Clan Diamond Shark Watch debriefing report from crew.
— Assessment: The Society’s operational reach extends beyond Clan Homeworlds into deep Periphery infrastructures. Their objectives appear to include repurposing Clan genetic legacies and rewriting caste roles through engineered selection. Their operational doctrine relies on secrecy, insinuation through maintenance layers, and plausible deniability.
— Recommendation: Trusted Watch nodes only. Limited disclosure to Khan Vlad Ward and designated strategoi. Prioritize countermeasures at the display-driver layer; train crews to recognize “suggestive” anomalies; forbid automated docking in suspect harbors; maintain manual redundancies per Wolf best practices.
Submitted under seal by Warrior Jana. End record.
To be continued…