The vault door slid aside with a soft hiss.
Inside, on its pedestal, sat the first piece of the Regalia. It was a dense, crystalline lattice, cool to the touch, with intricate circuits of light pulsing within its depths. It felt dormant, but powerful. This was the key to reclaiming our legacy.
"Got it," I said, my voice low as I disabled the protective systems. "Let's move."
I lifted the key from its resting place, feeling the faint warmth it emitted against my palm. This was real.
"Package secured. Moving?—"
Alarms shrieked through the station. Not a soft chime, but the full-throated wail of a facility-wide lockdown. Red lights strobed as blast doors began slamming shut. Our fifteen-second delay had cost us.
"What happened?" I demanded, securing the Regalia in my flight suit's shielded pouch.
"Silent alarm," Tamsin said, her fingers flying over her interface. "Someone must have spotted the encryption breach. The whole station's going into lockdown."
Through the vault's entrance, I could see guards converging on our position. Too many of them, their movements coordinated, their formations drilled and professional.
"This way!" Tamsin grabbed my arm, pulling me toward what looked like a solid wall. Her palm slapped against a hidden panel, revealing a maintenance hatch. "Service corridor—connects to the industrial levels."
We squeezed through the opening as the first guards reached the vault chamber. Shouts echoed behind us. They'd discovered the theft, but we were already gone.
The service tunnel was a tangle of pipes and conduits. We crawled and climbed, squeezing through gaps that scraped skin from our arms. An explosion shook the station, deep and resonant.
"They're sealing the docking levels," she said, consulting her scanner. "Blast doors, energy barriers, automated defense systems. They're trying to trap us."
We reached a junction where maintenance passages branched in three directions. Tamsin hesitated, studying her display with a frown that made my gut clench.
"Problem?"
"The direct route to bay seven is blocked." She looked up at me, and I saw something in her eyes that made the air in my lungs turn solid. "There's another way, but..."
"But?"
"It goes past the command center. Past Kelloch." Her voice was steady, but I could see the war playing out in her expression. Professional survival instincts battling eighteen years of accumulated rage.
Another explosion, closer this time. Whatever window we'd had for clean extraction was closing rapidly.
"How much longer is the alternate route?" I asked.
"Twenty minutes through maintenance shafts and service lifts. Safer, but slower." She gestured to a different passage. "The command center route is eight minutes if we move fast."
Eight minutes versus twenty. In a station-wide manhunt, that difference was the margin between escape and capture.
But I could see what the proximity to Kelloch was doing to her. The way her hands had started to shake, her breathing gone shallow and rapid.
"Your call," I said. "You know this station better than anyone."
She stared at the scanner display, thumb hovering over the route selection. For a heartbeat I thought she'd choose the safer path.
Then her expression hardened into something cold and determined.
"Command center route," she said. "It's faster."
We ran through corridors that grew wider and more expensive as we climbed toward the executive levels.
"This level," Tamsin said as we reached a junction. "Command center is fifty meters that way. Emergency exit to the docking levels is?—"
She stopped, pointing ahead where guards were establishing a checkpoint. Portable barriers, heavy weapons, everything needed to lock down this section of the station.
