The shooting started fast, with no warning. Not a single crack to test the air. A burst right away, then another. Glass, walls, the gates. Someone was screaming in the corridor. Someone was already down and silent.

  Wilt did not freeze. She moved like she had been waiting for it.

  Hands together, a sharp, economical motion, and a barrier settled over the hall. To her eye it was almost elegant, a clean dome, a magician’s trick made real. The psychic field did not just shield. It read motion like a scanner.

  She counted the attackers instantly.

  Twenty.

  Not an army. Not a palace storm. A team. Fast, disciplined, clearly professional.

  Wilt shut her eyes for a heartbeat and went hunting for weak points. Three of them. It was always the same with that type. Their thoughts snagged. Fear got in the way. Their minds were loud with static. You only had to push and they folded.

  She did not hesitate.

  She hit their consciousness like a collapsing ceiling.

  All three jerked as if shocked. One dropped his weapon. Another started blinking too hard, too often. The third clamped both hands to his helmet, like he wanted to tear it off and throw his own head with it.

  And that was it. After that, they were not themselves.

  Wilt took hold of them and turned them, sharp as blades.

  The first raised his rifle and fired into his own people, point blank, straight into their backs. Two went down before they even had time to turn. The second lunged toward the stairwell where more were pushing through and sprayed downward in greedy bursts, like it was personal. The third, the one who had been shaking the most, tried to fight her at first. Wilt pressed harder and he joined the others, firing with the hollow obedience of a puppet.

  The hall turned ugly in seconds.

  She worked fast and without mercy. Not because she enjoyed it. Because this was how you stayed alive. While they were confused, while they still had not understood what was happening, you could break them.

  Nine went down by their hands.

  Then her marionettes ran out.

  One of the attackers was not stupid. He realized you could not just fire into the crowd. They clocked the three wrong ones quickly and erased them. One fell near a column. Another collapsed on the stairs. The third was shredded in the doorway.

  Wilt released them the instant they dropped and felt her head lighten, like pressure bleeding off. Not enough to relax.

  She swept the room.

  Twelve of twenty were already on the floor. Eight were still standing. They did not push forward. They did not try to breach the barrier. They had done what they came to do. Test, make noise, show teeth. Then they started to pull back.

  Smart. Businesslike.

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  The eight retreated under smoke, splitting in different directions.

  None of the bosses were hurt.

  Frida Ak Lus stood along the wall, cold as ever. Leon Nol Us held his weapon but did not waste shots on Wilt’s barrier. Dean Morgan crouched behind an overturned chair, looking like he had already written a list of losses in his head. Zhukov swore under his breath and held the line with a couple of his own.

  When it quieted, sound returned to the hall. Not music, not conversation. Just breathing. Heavy, jittery. Someone coughed through the dust. Somewhere a person was crying, a person who had never been meant to be here.

  Norman wiped blood from his chin. Not his. Someone else’s spray.

  “We are alive,” he said quietly. “That is what matters.”

  Wilt lowered her hands. The barrier still held, but thinner now, stretched taut. She did not show fatigue, but it was written on her face. It had cost her.

  “That was a probe,” she said. “They checked who is with who, then they walked away.”

  Frida narrowed her eyes.

  “Which means one of ours is feeding them.”

  “Not one of ours,” Illget said. “Close to us. Or someone on our side is keeping Sperare fed, quietly. Otherwise they would not have come this fast, this precise.”

  Frida gave a small nod.

  “Then we start looking for whoever is in bed with them.”

  “Yes,” Norman said. “And we do it calmly. No hysteria. If you panic, you will tear each other apart and that is exactly what they want.”

  Leon asked, flat and dry.

  “Is your plan still on?”

  Norman’s gaze held steady.

  “It is. I will find Krysa.”

  A beat passed, then he looked at Wilt.

  “And your student?”

  Wilt glanced away for a second.

  “Lothar is between life and death,” she said. “The doctors are doing what they can.”

  The words hung in the air like a weight. Everyone in that room understood it now. Lothar was not just a boy. He was a key. If he died, the story changed shape. Nothing about that shape would be kind.

  On the far side of the mansion, in the comms room, Terry Goodman sat alone, watching diagnostic lines crawl across a screen.

  He had not really slept in a day. His hands smelled of machine oil and metal. He had brought the shuttle back into fighting condition as far as Chukur allowed, a world where you did not pull parts from a warehouse. You took them from someone else’s truck.

  He listened to guards running somewhere below, to Norman’s people trading clipped bursts over the radio, and he understood he had gone too deep.

  A month ago he had been captain of a trading tub that just wanted to keep breathing. Now he was fixing a ship for the Inquisition, hopping between planets where the wrong look could get you torn apart. Every morning he woke up with the same question. Was he going to make it out alive at all?

  He stared at the Confederation’s code, their rules, their procedures, and it all felt enormous and slow. Humanity lived under democracy, on paper. Elections, committees, congresses, audits. Clean lines, good intentions.

  In practice it was bureaucracy. A heavy machine that took so long to turn, to approve, to sign off, that by the time it moved the fire had already eaten everything.

  That was why the Inquisition existed.

  To go where the Confederation could not move fast enough. To take responsibility and stop asking permission ten times. To do the dirty work quickly.

  And Terry understood something with sudden clarity. That kind of thing almost always ended badly. Fast and unchecked led straight to hell. Sometimes you needed hell anyway, because the alternative was worse.

  He stepped out onto the balcony of the technical level. A narrow catwalk, cold metal underfoot, and above it the sky of Chukur, thick with dust. The sun was huge and low, an orange glare that hurt to look at.

  Tomos Goff was already there.

  He smoked the way he always did. Shoulders loose, eyes sharp. He watched the sun as if it were an enemy.

  Terry stood beside him and stayed quiet for ten seconds, maybe more. Then he said, “This is going to end badly, Tomos.”

  Tomos did not turn.

  “I know, boss,” he said calmly. “But we are in it now. No rewinding.”

  Terry let out a humorless breath that almost counted as a laugh.

  “Yeah. We jumped in.”

  They stood there, looking out at the burning disk through the haze. Somewhere below, people were already arguing about who was tied to Sperare, who would leak first, who would start twitching and making mistakes. And somewhere in the medical block, Lothar was clinging to life, his body deciding whether it could survive another day.

  Tomos drew in smoke and let it out slowly.

  “If the kid dies,” he said quietly, “everything shifts. And not in our favor.”

  Terry did not answer. There was nothing to argue with.

  Chukur’s sun hung motionless, like an eye that saw everything and forgave nothing.