JESSA

Tal’s session was as dull as I remembered diplomatic panels being. Trade route regulation. Tariff structures. Three delegates who loved their own voices and couldn’t read the room well enough to notice that everyone else had stopped listening twenty minutes ago. The moderator was polite and ineffective. The audience was checking their datapads.

I knew this world. I’d grown up in rooms like this, watching my father work the edges while the speakers droned. The real business happened in the corridors, over drinks, in the side rooms where the people who actually made decisions went after the panels ended.

Tal chaired the session the way I remembered. Quiet. Competent. Careful, attentive, giving everyone exactly the right amount of eye contact. He asked the right follow-up questions. He summarized positions accurately. He kept the panel moving so smoothly that the other delegates thought they were leading themselves.

He looked tired. The lines around his mouth were deeper than I remembered. His hair had gone fully gray since I’d last seen him at an embassy function on Larian Prime, when I was seventeen and still believed that diplomacy was about making things better.

I watched from the fourth row. Close enough to see faces. Far enough to leave without being noticed.

The session broke. Delegates filed toward the refreshment tables, forming the clusters and micro-alliances that were the real purpose of any conference. Tal stayed at the panelist’s table, organizing his notes. His aide, a young woman in a crisp uniform, caught my eye across the room and nodded toward the corridor.

Side room 14-B was small. A table, four chairs, a sealed window looking onto an interior corridor. Functional, private, forgettable. The kind of room where conversations happened that nobody wanted recorded.

I was there first. I chose the chair with the best line to the door and a clear view of the sealed window. Old habits. My father’s habits, actually. He always sat facing the exit.

Tal came in alone. He closed the door behind him. Stood there for a moment, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. Surprise, maybe. Or recognition. Or the face of a man seeing something he’d been dreading for years.

“Jessa Corren,” he said. Quiet. “You look like your father.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“He still talks about you. At functions. After the third drink.” He paused. “He says he made mistakes.”

I let that sit. Something to think about later, when three thousand people weren’t waiting.

“I need to speak with you about the communications you’ve been managing,” I said. “The ones using diplomatic encryption with modified authentication protocols.”

The color left his face. Steady, not dramatic. Tired to something worse in about three seconds.

“Not here,” he started.

“We’re already here. The room is clean. My partner swept the floor below us an hour ago.”

“And what happens to me?” He didn’t sit down. “If I give you everything. Do I disappear into some black site? Do your people hand me over to a tribunal?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t promise you safety. I can promise you that the man running this operation would rather die than let an innocent person pay for someone else’s crimes. He spent eight years trying to expose this conspiracy. He crawled through a maintenance conduit last week because I was on the wrong side of a blast door.”

 I stopped. I hadn’t meant to say that last part.

Tal looked at me for a long moment. “You trust him.”

“With everything.”

He sat down. Put his hands flat on the table. I recognized the gesture. I did it myself when I was bracing.

“I didn’t design any of it,” he said.

“I know. The communication patterns show you as a conduit.”

“I knew what was being shipped.” He swallowed. “Not at first. Just trade authorizations and diplomatic immunity tags. Routine facilitation. By the time I understood what the cargo was, I was in too deep to get out. They don’t let you leave this kind of work. You either keep managing the communications or you become a communication that needs managing.”

“I can help you get out. My people have the evidence to bring down the operational side. What we need is the political layer.”

“Your people.” He studied me. “The ones who’ve been hitting our relay stations.”

“Among other things.”

He was quiet for a long time. His hands hadn’t moved from the table.

“There’s a facility,” he said. “In deep void. The main one. All the communications I managed routed through it.”

“Nexus Station. We have the coordinates.”

He looked up. “The station commander is Kess Vain. Former military. Personal guard of about two hundred. Three sections. Labs, holding areas, command level.” He closed his eyes. “Thousands of people. Multiple species. I routed the intake communications. Every new shipment, every transfer order, every status update. I knew what the messages meant and I kept routing them.”

“We have the transport manifests. What we need is a way to make the evidence stick.”

“I have access codes for the diplomatic routing network.” He opened his eyes. “Every communication is logged on both ends. If someone could get into the network from inside Consortium infrastructure, with those codes, the conspiracy’s own records become the evidence. Authenticated by their own systems.”

My comm buzzed. Serak. Not a check-in. A priority signal.

“Hold on,” I told Tal. I angled the comm away from him. “Go.”

“The second security layer just doubled. Twelve personnel now, six teams. They’ve tightened the rotation on the service access points. Something changed in the last thirty minutes.”

“I’m with Tal. He’s cooperating. I need ten more minutes.”

“You need to get out.”

“Ten minutes. He’s giving me the access codes for the diplomatic routing network. This is everything, Serak. If I leave now, we don’t get another chance.”

Silence. Three seconds. I knew what those three seconds cost him. Three seconds of a man who wanted to say come to me right now and instead weighed the operational risk and let me stay.

“Ten minutes. I’m moving to extraction route two. When you leave that room, go left. Service stairs at the end of the corridor. I’ll meet you on the level below.”

“Acknowledged.”

I turned back to Tal. “The access codes. Give them to me now.”

He recited them. I entered them into my datapad, verified the authentication handshake, confirmed the connection. The diplomatic routing network opened. Years of communication logs, authenticated and timestamped by the Consortium’s own systems.

“This is everything,” I said. “This is enough.”

“Is it?” Tal looked at the door. “Because I think we’re out of time.”

He was right.