The Caleth Corridor

The unit moved at 0340, two hours before dawn, in a column of six with Greel at the point and me behind Denavi's left shoulder.

The staging facility's pressure door made its soft seal-release and then we were outside in air that was colder than the interior by about twelve degrees and smelled like industrial coolant and rust and the particular mineral flatness of terrain that doesn't grow things. The Caleth Corridor's surface was ferrocrete and composite plate, a former processing district that had been in operational use when the Dominion first moved through and had been contested and traded and contested again until it looked like what it was: infrastructure that multiple forces had decided was worth dying for and none of them had managed to hold long enough to maintain.

The sky was low cloud cover with no light break. Good for the approach. The thermal differential Denavi had identified on the east entry would be less defined in this temperature, which meant the shadow zone might compress by a few meters at the relay's effective edge.

I'd noted that in the margin of the mission sheet at 0530, during the brief. Greel had looked at my annotation and told Maret to tighten the approach spacing.

Maret had said, "That's tighter than the protocol recommendation."

Greel had said, "The thermal shadow is tighter than the survey estimated. So we're tighter than the protocol." He'd moved on.

We crossed the first three hundred meters of open corridor in the kind of silence that a unit builds after enough exercises together: footfall timing unconsciously matched, no equipment rattle, nobody using the comm when physical signal covered it. I had Greel's hand-signal vocabulary from the training deck, learned alongside the rest of the unit in Durrik's comm exercises, and I'd used it enough in training that it was automatic now rather than translated. When Greel raised a closed fist, I stopped. When he spread two fingers sideward, I moved to his left. The signals ran the same as hunting hand-signs, close enough that I hadn't had to rebuild the reflex from scratch, just remap the vocabulary.

My pattern recognition was running at operational baseline, the same way it had been since I left the staging facility. At this distance from the supply node, the ambient read was background noise: the geological thermal signatures in the composite plate underfoot, the cold air moving between the corridor walls, the unit's six distinct biological signatures distributed in my awareness like a general field map. Nothing anomalous. Nothing that flagged.

At six hundred meters from the entry point, we moved into the wall corridor that Denavi had scouted on the perimeter observation. The drainage channel ran to the east wall's base, a narrow concrete cut that had been used for coolant runoff before the facility was contested. We moved into it in sequence, Greel first, and the walls came up on either side to shoulder height. The floor was dry. The channel angled toward the wall composite at a grade that gave us approximately forty percent of the approach in covered profile.

I was tracking six positional variables without trying: Greel at point, Denavi to my left, Maret behind me, Ollen behind Maret, and the two rear elements Ilden and Perrek managing the column's tail. All within expected positions. All moving correctly. Maret was a half-step closer to the channel wall than optimal, which wasn't a problem, it just meant he'd have to step out before any action and he'd need room to do it.

I didn't signal anything. It wasn't worth the complication at this phase of the approach.

The pattern recognition flagged on a cold read, no visual input, fifty meters before the wall composite.

I put my hand on Denavi's left shoulder and applied pressure, which was the signal for: contact possible, wait. She went still. The column stopped behind her.

The read was directional: north-northeast, beyond the wall composite, but not at the node. Closer than the node. Mobile signatures, multiple, at least three and probably four, the positional distribution consistent with a moving patrol rather than a static defensive position. Two of the signatures had the quality I'd started identifying over the past weeks of calibration: the slight overlay of pattern that Aeluun-integrated biology produces, denser movement information than standard biology generates, a signature that the pattern recognition read differently from the others. Not a flag I could explain in technical terms. It was the same as the way you learn to distinguish a buck's track from a doe's: the shape of it, the depth, the stride interval.

Two of the four were gifted.

The patrol was moving east along the exterior face of the supply node, which put them on an intercept with the east entry approach in approximately four minutes at their current pace if we didn't move.

Greel was ten meters ahead of me in the drainage channel, just at the point where it curved toward the wall composite. I covered the distance in a crouch at the channel wall's side, keeping my vertical profile below the channel lip, and put two fingers on Greel's arm. He looked back. I used the hand-signal vocabulary: patrol, north side, four units, two integration signatures, four minutes.

He absorbed it in the three seconds of stillness that I'd learned was his processing interval, then signaled back: confirm count. He wanted to know if I was certain on the four-unit number.

I held up four fingers, then made the gifted-soldier signal Durrik had added to the unit's vocabulary when they got my assessment of my detection capability in the first week at the forward position: two fingers, bent at the knuckle, the visual shorthand for enhanced opposition.

Greel looked at the channel wall above us. The patrol, if it continued on its current path, would cross the north face and come around the east wall's corner into a position where it would have direct line of sight to our approach route and we would have none to them until they were inside twenty meters. Twenty meters with a Dominion patrol that included two gifted soldiers was a losing engagement geometry.

He looked at me. Not a question. Greel didn't ask questions with his face the way some officers do. It was a request for assessment: what do you read, what do you recommend, how certain are you.

I spread my fingers to indicate the patrol's movement direction: east, toward the corner. Then I indicated our position and the wall composite, and made the flat-hand gesture that indicated: hold, let them pass.

The patrol's approach track, if unchanged, would take them around the corner and down the east face, which meant they would cross the entry point approximately forty meters north of where we needed to be, their backs to our approach vector while they walked the wall. A sixty-second window, probably.

Greel held up his fist: full stop. Then he signaled back down the column: silence, hold, do not move.

We waited in the drainage channel with the ferrocrete walls on either side and the cold air running low across the open corridor above us. I kept my hand on Denavi's shoulder so the read would pass through the chain. Her breathing was controlled and slow. Behind her, I could hear nothing from Maret or Ollen or the rear elements, which was the correct answer.

The patrol's movement signature crossed the wall composite's corner at what my count made approximately three and a half minutes. The gifted-soldier signatures were distinct in the read: the leading element and the third position, which put the ungifted soldiers second and fourth. The lead was a gifted soldier, which made tactical sense for a patrol in contested terrain, better perception and reaction at the point of contact risk.

They moved down the east face. The signatures passed through the read, north to south, tracking the wall. When the trailing element crossed the corner and their movement vectors angled away from our position toward the entry sector north of us, I released Denavi's shoulder and held up two fingers. Sixty seconds.

Greel signaled: move.

We came out of the drainage channel in sequence, Greel pulling to the wall composite and pressing against it, each subsequent soldier filling in behind him along the wall face. I came up behind Denavi and we moved along the wall in the technical movement she'd described on the perimeter platform: vertical profile minimized, no separation from the wall composite, slow and continuous. No sudden changes in movement velocity. The relay at thirty-two meters in the wall was running on its sweep cycle, and the coverage gap in the thermal shadow was real and we were using it and there was no room for anyone to misjudge the geometry.

The entry point was a composite panel that had been identified in the survey data as a maintenance access, original factory installation, which meant it opened inward on a mechanical mechanism rather than the standard electronic locks on the operational entry points. Mechanical meant no electronic signature when it opened. Ollen had the extraction tool, a simple lever-format device designed for exactly this kind of panel, and he moved up through the column to the entry point without sound.

The panel opened on the second leverage application. Greel went through.

We were inside.

The supply node's interior ran warmer than the exterior, the residual thermal mass of active supply logistics and whatever power systems maintained the storage units. The corridor inside the maintenance access was narrow, two persons abreast, and ran perpendicular to the main storage gallery before opening into a junction. Denavi had the interior layout from the survey data and moved immediately to Greel's left to indicate the route.

My pattern recognition expanded into the interior space and ran a sweep. Multiple signatures at various distances. The garrison's distribution was sparse: a supply node runs with minimal infantry presence in low-threat intervals, and this node's garrison was small enough that the Compact's operational estimate had put it at eight to twelve soldiers total. What I was reading was consistent with the lower end of that estimate.

Two signatures in the main storage gallery, stationary. One signature in the power junction room that the survey had flagged as a secondary target. One at the primary entry corridor, probably a gate sentry, single position that hadn't moved in the time I'd been reading the space.

None of the interior signatures had the gifted-soldier quality. The enhanced soldiers were on the exterior patrol.

I signaled to Greel: interior, four contacts, none integrated, positions on request. He signaled back: give me the positions.

We had developed a spatial communication method over the weeks at the forward position: I could indicate direction and approximate distance in hand-signal terms, and Greel could overlay that information on his mental map of the interior layout. It was imprecise by sensor standards. It was faster than anything electronic and it made no signal that the node's passive monitoring systems could read.

I indicated: gallery, two, stationary. Junction, one, stationary. Entry corridor, one.

Greel processed and signaled the unit split: himself and Maret for the gallery, Ollen and Ilden for the junction, Denavi and Perrek for the entry corridor, me at the maintenance access junction as overwatch for the split's timing.

The four exterior patrol members were a problem that would resolve itself in a specific timeframe: their patrol route would bring them back around to the east face at the end of their cycle, and when they reached the maintenance panel and found it open, the timeline collapsed. We needed the interior cleared before that.

The split happened at the junction, each element moving to their target in the timed sequence Greel had established in the 0600 brief. I took the overwatch position at the corridor intersection and tracked the unit's position distribution in the pattern recognition: three elements spreading into the interior, moving correctly, no compression against each other's approach vectors.

The gallery went fast. I didn't have line of sight but I had the signature read: both stationary contacts in the gallery moved, one moved toward where Greel was coming from, which told me something was wrong with the approach angle before the engagement sound registered. There was a brief exchange, physical impact, no firearm discharge. The gallery signatures resolved: one stationary, one mobile but losing coherence, which in the read's shorthand meant someone injured and going down.

One suppressed shot from Maret's position, which carried through the node's composite walls as a flat crack. The second gallery signature went static.

The junction was cleaner. The power room signature didn't move until Ollen was on top of it.

The entry corridor was the complication. The sentry there had a comm unit, and Denavi's assessment from the survey data was that the entry sentry's check-in interval was twelve minutes. We had the interior time of the approach and the split execution, call it seven minutes from first entry, which meant the sentry's last check-in had been five minutes ago and the next one was in seven. If the check-in missed, the exterior patrol would know something had happened before their route brought them back to the maintenance panel.

Perrek handled the sentry. I heard the impact from my junction position, a specific sound I filed without processing the details of it, and Denavi's voice came over the comm unit on the tactical channel: "Entry corridor clear."

Interior clear. Seven contacts, no Compact casualties. The eighth position, which the operational estimate had flagged as possible but unconfirmed, was empty.

Greel came back to the junction and looked at me. His face was running through its processing interval.

"The exterior patrol," I said.

"How much time did we use."

I'd been tracking from the entry point. "Eight minutes, twenty seconds."

He calculated the exterior patrol's route from their last position read when we entered. "They're at the north face. The east face approach puts them at the maintenance panel in." He paused. "Twelve minutes."

The supply node's communications system was in the main control room, which was the operational objective: the data in the control room was what Compact Command had sent us to seize. We needed the system intact enough to pull from it, which meant we needed the node controlled well enough that nobody transmitted an alert in the next twelve minutes.

"We could intercept the patrol," Maret said. He'd come up behind Greel from the gallery. There was a dark smear on his forearm that I clocked and didn't look at again.

"Intercept outside puts us back in the corridor with two gifted soldiers and two standard," I said. "Interior is better ground."

"If we're inside when they come through the panel, we have a funnel," Denavi said. She'd moved up from the entry corridor while I was talking. "Maintenance access is single file. They come in one at a time."

"They won't come through the maintenance access," I said.

Greel looked at me.

"Two gifted soldiers on the patrol," I said. "When they find the panel open, the gifted lead is going to read the interior before he enters. He'll know people are inside. He's not going to funnel his team through a compromised access point." I thought about the signature I'd read on the patrol lead: dense movement data, eleven or twelve years of integration development minimum, the kind of read that meant the patrol lead could do exactly what I was doing. "He's going to go to the primary entry and he's going to come in fast."

Greel said, "How fast."

"Fast enough that the timeline is not twelve minutes."

That landed. Greel looked at the junction corridor toward the main control room. He looked at me.

This was not a question. It was what I'd identified in the first week with the unit as Greel's specific method of command: when he looked at you directly after absorbing information, he was asking for your assessment of the situation's margins. Not what to do. What was true.

"We take the control room now and we pull what we can in eight minutes," I said. "When the patrol leader reads the panel and redirects, we'll have between four and six minutes depending on how fast a Dominion gifted soldier runs a two-hundred-meter exterior perimeter."

"Six minutes to pull from the system is not enough."

"It's what the situation gives us." I paused. "The alternative is trying to hold the control room against two gifted soldiers in a node we've held for eleven minutes."

Greel's face did the thing where it processed and filed and became flat. Then he said, "Control room," and moved.

We went.

The control room was sixty meters down the main gallery, and I was moving third in the column behind Greel and Denavi when the pattern recognition fired on the primary entry, hard and directional: the patrol lead had found the panel. The read came in as movement signatures shifting orientation, the patrol reforming from east-face route into operational formation, the two gifted signatures moving to entry positions with the speed differential that I'd been briefed on from Denavi's four months of experience.

Faster. Not impossibly fast, but faster than ungifted soldiers by enough margin that the mental arithmetic of engagement timing had to account for it.

"They're at the primary entry," I said. "Two minutes."

Greel didn't stop moving.

The control room door opened on Ollen's technical tool, the electronic mechanism faster to work than the maintenance panel's mechanical system because Ollen had the override frequency from the survey data. We went in. The room was standard garrison logistics layout: four data terminals, one communications array, power management panels on the north wall. Maret went to the communications array to jam outgoing signal. Ollen went to the data terminals and pulled the extraction unit from his kit.

"Two minutes becomes one in a node's primary entry corridor," Denavi said, positioning at the control room door.

"One minute is one minute," Greel said. He was at the power management panels, reading them. "Ollen."

"Extraction running." Ollen had the unit coupled to the terminal, his eyes on the indicator lights. "Full pull takes six minutes. Priority items, maybe two."

"Priority items." Greel looked at me, which meant: you read the briefing's priority list, tell me what matters most.

"Logistics routing data and the communications traffic," I said. "The routing data tells Command where the supply lines run. The traffic tells them who's talking to whom."

Ollen adjusted the extraction parameters. "One minute forty for those two sets."

The primary entry engagement started ninety seconds later, which was faster than two minutes and exactly what I'd expected from a gifted-soldier lead running an interior clearance.

The sound of it was different from the gallery contact: faster, the engagement tempo running at a pace that I'd been briefed on and that still read as wrong against my built-in sense of how long human beings take to move between positions. The gifted soldiers were in the node's interior corridor, clearing toward the control room, and they were moving at a pace that compressed the available reaction time for anyone who didn't have a system that read ahead of the movement.

My pattern recognition pulled the two gifted signatures and ran them against the interior geometry. The lead was twenty meters out, moving on the main gallery toward our position. The second gifted signature was flanking, using the secondary service corridor that the survey data showed running parallel to the main gallery, which was a sound tactical split and meant the control room was about to have entries from two directions.

"Secondary corridor," I said, loud enough for Denavi to hear. "Second gifted element, north service access."

She moved to cover the north access without asking for confirmation. Greel pulled Maret from the communications array to the main gallery door, which left the array covering running.

Ollen's extraction unit showed seventy seconds on the priority pull.

The main gallery door contact happened at sixty-four seconds: the Dominion patrol lead hit the door with enough force to read on the room's composite wall and Greel engaged from a cover position he'd taken at the room's east terminal bank. The exchange in the main gallery lasted eight seconds. One of those seconds was the sound of an impact that I assigned to Greel.

Greel came back through the control room door with a shoulder that was working at reduced capacity and an expression that hadn't changed.

"One down," he said. "The gifted lead is in cover in the gallery."

The north service access opened.

What happened in the next forty seconds happened in the kind of compressed time that the pattern recognition made navigable and that I understood afterward better than I understood it during: the second gifted soldier came through the north access at the enhanced-speed interval that Denavi had described as faster than you expect, and Denavi was in the right position and did what you do when someone moves faster than you can track on pure reflex, which is you shoot the geometry rather than the target and you put rounds where the movement is going rather than where it is.

She hit the soldier. The soldier kept moving. This was the thing Denavi had told me on the perimeter platform: the enhancement makes them more predictable because it creates patterns, and it also makes them harder to stop because the physical development is real and a hit that would drop a standard soldier doesn't necessarily drop an enhanced one.

I was moving before I'd finished running the calculation: four steps from the data terminal position to the north access, inside the gifted soldier's guard angle, with the rifle at a range where the shot was not a shot but a contact engagement. The pattern recognition gave me the soldier's movement vector at close range more clearly than it had given me anything yet in a live engagement. The movement was faster than mine. The read was half a step ahead of it.

I put two shots into the center mass at three meters and the soldier went down hard into the north access frame and did not get up.

My hands were not entirely steady. I registered this the way I registered the temperature differential when we came through the maintenance panel: factual, filed, not acted on.

The extraction unit chimed on Ollen's terminal.

"Complete," he said.

The main gallery was quiet. The gifted patrol lead was in cover somewhere in the gallery, which meant we had a problem between us and the exit. Greel had a shoulder that wasn't functioning correctly. The two ungifted soldiers from the patrol were unaccounted for, which meant they were either holding the primary entry or they were somewhere in the interior I hadn't placed them.

I went to the main gallery door and read the space: gifted lead, cover position behind a storage unit twenty meters down, stationary. Two ungifted signatures at the primary entry, holding, not advancing. They were waiting for the gifted lead to direct the interior engagement, which was standard Dominion doctrine from the briefing.

I had the geometry of the gallery. The gifted lead's cover position was good against the control room door but it had a secondary angle exposure from the gallery's service equipment alcove, which was accessible from the maintenance corridor running off the north access. If someone went through the north access and into the maintenance corridor, they had a shot into the gifted lead's position from an angle the lead hadn't covered.

I told Greel this in four seconds of hand-signal.

He looked at his shoulder. He looked at Maret.

Maret went.

I held the control room door angle and tracked the gifted lead's position while Maret moved through the north access. The lead's signature was stationary, reading the gallery, focused on the control room door because that was where the threat had been coming from. When Maret's position cleared the maintenance corridor and opened the alcove angle, I pushed through the gallery door and moved toward the lead's cover position to give him two things to track.

The lead came out of cover toward me. The pattern recognition read the movement vector: fast, direct, closing range to remove the shooting angle advantage. I went sideward to the gallery wall, which changed the geometry, and gave Maret the clean angle he needed.

The engagement ended.

Two ungifted soldiers at the primary entry, who had been holding their position and waiting, did not hold it when the radio silence from their patrol lead ran past thirty seconds. They left. I heard them going: movement signatures pulling away from the primary entry and out into the corridor at double time.

Greel was at my shoulder. The extraction unit was in Ollen's kit. We had what we came for.

"They'll call it in," Greel said. His voice was the same as it always was.

"Yes," I said.

He looked at the gallery, the patrol lead's position, the node's control room door behind us. He ran through the processing interval.

"The mission brief's success criteria was data acquisition," he said. "We have the data."

"Yes."

"Vasht's assessment of the node's strategic value was the data, not the facility." He paused. "We pull out."

I thought about the twelve minutes I'd given him at the exterior, and how it had become eight, and I thought about the two ungifted soldiers moving through the Caleth Corridor at double time with a radio in one of their hands. The response team the node would have available was not the same thing as a full defensive response. But we were six people at the end of an approach that was now compromised, and Greel had a shoulder that wasn't working correctly, and we had what we came for.

"East approach, same route," I said. "The relay's sweep cycle will be on its far rotation in about four minutes."

"Then we move in four minutes." He turned back to the control room. "Ollen. Maret. On me."

I stayed in the gallery for thirty more seconds running a final pattern recognition sweep of the interior: no additional signatures. The four patrol members were accounted for. The interior was clear. The node's communications array was still running, which meant the two ungifted soldiers had already transmitted something or would in the next two minutes.

The read I had of the spaces around the node's exterior showed the two ungifted signatures moving north, away from our east entry route. Good. Their instinct, reasonable, was to get distance and report rather than to circle back and engage.

When I came back through the north access and into the maintenance corridor and through the maintenance panel into the cold corridor air, the unit was formed up at the drainage channel's edge. Greel was holding his arm against his side. He caught me looking.

"Functional," he said. "Move."

We moved. Back along the wall composite, through the twelve meters of thermal shadow, into the drainage channel. The pattern recognition ran the exterior on the east approach and read clear. The relay was on its far rotation. The perimeter was empty.

Three hundred meters of open corridor and then the staging facility's pressure door, which opened from a signal Denavi sent on the approach comm thirty seconds before we reached it.

Inside. Pressure door sealed.

Greel sat down against the corridor wall, which was the first time I'd seen him sit down without choosing to. Ollen was already talking to the medical kit. Maret was three steps away from his bunk room door and I watched him decide not to go through it, standing in the corridor instead, his back against the wall.

I sat down on the floor of the staging facility's entry corridor, with the rifle across my knees and the extraction unit secured and the pattern recognition running its ambient sweep of the interior the way it always did, automatic and quiet, reading the unit's six signatures distributed through the space.

Five signatures, counting correctly this time. There had been six going in.

The sixth signature wasn't here. I ran back through the engagement timeline and found it: the secondary corridor contact, the gifted soldier coming through the north access, the two shots at three meters. The engagement had ended.

I'd counted the engaged signatures during the fight. I'd been tracking threat positions and unit positions and extraction timeline and the ungifted soldiers at the primary entry and the relay sweep rotation.

At some point in the first eighteen seconds after we went through the maintenance panel, I had killed someone for the first time in my life. I had filed it as a threat neutralized and moved on to the next calculation, and I had not stopped moving until now, and now I was sitting on the floor with the rifle across my knees and my hands in my lap and the pattern recognition running its quiet ambient loop.

Greel was talking to the medevac channel on his comm unit, his voice at its regular flat cadence, requesting medical assessment at the forward position. Ollen was already working on his shoulder.

The mission sheet was still in my vest pocket. I didn't pull it out.

The node's data was secured. The patrol was neutralized. The two ungifted soldiers were somewhere in the Caleth Corridor calling in a report to whoever was running their chain. The node would not be blind to what had happened here tonight. And the question that the data couldn't answer in advance, the gap Denavi had said was always eighteen inches wide, had turned out to be the gifted patrol lead's read speed and his decision to redirect to the primary entry in under ninety seconds instead of two minutes.

I'd been right about that. Which meant I'd been right about the revised timeline, and the team had gotten into the control room with enough margin for the extraction to complete.

Being right about that had required going through the north access gap at three meters from a gifted Dominion soldier, and I had not known, in the moment I started moving, whether being half a step ahead on the read was enough.

Greel's voice from the wall: "Vasht is on the line. Debrief in twenty."

I said, "Copy."

Maret pushed off the wall and went to the water supply unit in the corridor alcove and drank for a long moment and then came back and sat against the wall across from me. He looked at nothing specific. His forearm had the same dark smear it had from the gallery engagement. He didn't clean it off.

I didn't say anything to him. He didn't say anything to me. That was the right answer for right now.

Denavi came through the staging bay door, saw the two of us in the corridor, and sat down between us without asking. She had her scope in her hands, turning it in a slow rotation that I recognized as the same thing Ollen did with his diagnostic tools: not nervous, just needing something to do with her hands.

"The approach geometry held," she said.

"Yes."

She kept turning the scope. "The gifted lead was reading ahead. He had us placed before he redirected."

"He had the panel read," I said. "He didn't have interior positions." I thought about the gifted patrol lead's signature in my read: dense and clear and running fast ahead of his movement, an integration that had been active for years longer than mine. "He was good."

Denavi nodded. This landed in the specific way that Denavi received tactical information: absorbed, filed, no sentiment added.

"How far ahead were you reading when you called the redirect," she said.

"About a minute and a half."

She considered that. "Better than sensors."

"Different from sensors," I said. "Sensors give you position data. The read gives you intent data."

She looked at me then, with the expression she used when she was recalibrating her understanding of something. Not surprise, just adjustment. "That's useful."

"Yes," I said. "When it's reliable."

She went back to turning the scope. Maret had his head against the wall with his eyes on the ceiling. Greel was still on the comm. Ollen's medical work on the shoulder was quiet and methodical.

I thought about the twelve minutes I'd given Greel at the exterior and the way he'd looked at me with the not-quite-a-question in his face, and the fact that he'd pushed rather than pulling back, and what that said about his assessment of the information I'd given him. He'd trusted the read. The read had held.

That was a data point. I filed it.

The pattern recognition was running its quiet ambient loop and the six signatures of the unit were distributed through the staging facility and Greel was on the comm requesting medevac assessment and the data extraction was secured in Ollen's kit and Maret's arm still had the dark smear on it and I was sitting on the floor of the corridor with my hands in my lap and nowhere to be for nineteen more minutes.

I pulled the mission sheet out and opened it to the marginal notation from the 0600 brief. Read through it. Added one line at the bottom, below the approach geometry notes:

Gifted lead read speed: under 90 sec from panel to redirect. Revise all future patrol-encounter timelines accordingly.

Then I folded it and put it back, because in nineteen minutes Vasht would be on the secure link asking me what happened and I would need to know exactly what was true before I said any of it.

The node's data was in Ollen's kit. The approach had held. The gap had been where Denavi said it always was, in the place you hadn't known to look, and we had found it and moved around it, and we had come back with five people instead of six only because the sixth was the gifted patrol lead at three meters in the north access and the read had been half a step ahead of him.

That was what was true. Everything else I'd have to work out later, in some hour that wasn't this one.