Chapter 230: After Hours in the Ring

The lift pod came to a smooth halt, its doors hissing open to reveal a broad platform junction dimly lit by overhead strips that pulsed in low amber tones. The simulated night had sunk deeper, and the usual industrial clamor had faded to a hollow hum. Dormant cargo rails stretching into shadowed corridors, half-abandoned maintenance hubs standing like silent watchmen.

Ethan stepped out, his footsteps echoing against the worn metal floor. He was already calculating his route back toward the station's upper rings when a sudden flicker of motion snagged the edge of his vision.

A young man burst into view from a connecting corridor. He looked barely out of his teens, gangly frame swallowed in a half-zipped salvager's coverall, boots mismatched, one of them clearly patched with thermo-tape. His breath came in shallow bursts as he ran.

"Sir! Please, wait!"

Ethan slowed, his posture slipping into subtle readiness. His eyes narrowed slightly.

"Sir… you don't know me, but… I think my cousin's in trouble. You looked like a merc, and—" he gasped, waving a shaking hand. "I don't have anyone else who can help us right now."

The words tumbled out fast. Too fast. But not rehearsed.

Ethan studied him, carefully.

"Start from the top," he said evenly.

The salvager nodded, swallowing. "He… my cousin, Jalen, works shifts for a contractor cell. Tonight he was scheduled to drop off a reactor casing at Bay 77-F. That hangar's supposed to be decommissioned, it's marked as non-op on every platform listing. But earlier, I saw the energy grid blink real faint. Power spikes. Internal comms to the bay are dead. I tried flagging a supervisor, but they told me to get lost. Something's wrong."

Ethan said nothing at first. He scanned the young man's face, stretching out with the lightest threads of his inner psychic sense. No deception. Only desperation. The kind that came from fear, not guilt.

"Bay 77-F," Ethan echoed.

The salvager nodded quickly. "Off-grid. It's buried near the exterior shield fold. Cargo flows don't run there anymore. But it's drawing power, I swear. Something's happening there."

Ethan exhaled slowly, glancing down the corridor behind him. "What's your name?"

"Rell," the boy said. "My name's Rell."

He nodded. "You did the right thing, Rell."

Ethan didn't do charity. But this wasn't about that. This was about instincts—the same kind that had kept him alive through war zones and syndicate death traps in Kynara. And tonight, those instincts whispered that something off the books was happening in the shadows of Ashen Prime and he might gain something from getting involved.

Two hours later, Ethan moved fully equipped under the false stars of the simulated night, every step calculated.

Bay 77-F sat like a forgotten wound at the edge of the industrial ring, its outer signage half-flickering beneath layers of grime. The bulkhead was scarred and pitted, its metal warped from past explosions or heat damage, signs of prior use, though the records called it decommissioned. The air grew colder here, the hum of energy overhead barely audible. The path had wound through disused tram corridors and half-lit catwalks, the kind where maintenance drones no longer dared to patrol. If this part of the station had a heart, it was artificial and infected.

Ethan crouched just outside the threshold of a long service tunnel, his back pressed against the wall, cloak half-draped over his form like a shadow stitched into the metal.

 "Iris," he murmured into his mic. "Overlay the map. Cut visuals and reroute security feeds for Zone 77-F and the three adjacent corridors."

"Acknowledged," came Iris's quiet, almost soothing voice. "System breach initiated. Scrubbing surveillance telemetry... masking bio-signatures. Partial loop injected. You are now ghosted for 17.4 minutes before system rollback triggers a diagnostic."

Good. That was more than enough.

His visor flickered with digital pulses, doors, heat signatures, sensor cones. Three guards. One outside, casually pacing the auxiliary power node. Two inside the hangar. One in motion, the other still, posted at a side chamber.

Ethan narrowed his focus, breathing slowing. Then came the psychic layer, threads of emotion and static thought shimmering into awareness like underwater ripples.

Boredom. Mild irritation. Hunger. Low awareness.

They didn't expect trouble.

Which meant it was time.

Ethan ghosted forward, steps silent against the grated floor. His movements were fluid, almost unnatural in their grace, enhanced subtly by his psychic reinforcement. Every joint moved with mechanical precision, breath synced to his balance, weight distribution feathered between each motion.

He reached the first guard in the shadows, just as the man turned, pausing mid-stride to light a synth-cig.

Ethan moved in one clean motion.

His left hand clamped over the man's mouth, muffling any sound. His right delivered a palm strike just beneath the ear, nerve compression against the base of the skull. The guard's body went limp. Ethan dragged him swiftly behind a stacked crate of salvaged piping, binding his hands with magnetic ties stripped from a belt pouch.

No alarms. No noise.

One down.

He scanned the entry vestibule with a slow lean. Inside, the loading bay was alive with faint activity, far more than the outside suggested. Two unregistered transports squatted like insects on the deck, hatches yawning open. Sealed containers moved via repurposed labor drones. No IDs. No Federation tags. Only generic hull plates and wiped signatures. A man near the center barked out commands softly, glancing between a handheld terminal and the crate labels.

It wasn't military, but it was organized. Deliberate.

Black-site op.

He slid around the perimeter, hugging the curvature of the support scaffolding. Each footfall calculated, every sensor ping intercepted and rerouted by Iris. A trio of floor sensors blinked red on his HUD, active pressure plates. But he saw the timing. The blinking intervals.

One, two... move.

He darted across in a blur, sliding under a service table just as a worker turned to adjust a monitor. From here, he could see the side chamber clearly. A narrow room half-enclosed by temporary partitions. Inside, bound to a reinforced chair, sat a bruised, bloodied young man.

Jalen.

A guard stood outside the chamber, arms folded, back to the room. The man muttered curses under his breath, speaking to no one in particular.

"Stupid slaghead gave us a faulty regulator. Hope the bastards dock his tongue next."

Ethan's eyes narrowed.

He moved again, fast, but surgical. A step. A breath. Then another.

Just as the guard shifted his weight... Ethan struck.

He closed the distance in a heartbeat, the heel of his palm smashing into the man's diaphragm with enough force to buckle the wind from his lungs. The follow-up elbow hit the base of his skull with pinpoint precision, and a quick psychic surge barely more than a whisper of will, slipped into the man's neural balance, overloading his inner ear and orientation centers.

The man collapsed, unconscious before his weapon even twitched.

Ethan entered the room.

Jalen's head snapped up, eyes bloodshot and wide with a mix of pain and disbelief.

"Who...?"

"Quiet," Ethan said calmly, already cutting the bindings with his plasma dagger. "I'm with your cousin. We're getting out."

"Thought… I was dead…"

"Not tonight."

He helped Jalen to his feet, supporting most of the younger man's weight. The salvager groaned but moved. Bruised, shaken, but not broken.

Iris's voice pinged in his earpiece. "Residual activity spike in corridor 12-C. Another guard heading toward your location. You have 90 seconds to exfil before the loops reset."

Ethan didn't hesitate. He slung Jalen's arm over his shoulder and tapped a concealed panel behind a crate. The deck beneath them shifted, an old maintenance crawlspace barely wide enough for two.

They dropped down the shaft, Ethan catching the rungs one-handed, Jalen clinging tightly. The shaft reeked of dust, insulation fibers, and disuse, but it was safe.

He'd studied the grid before coming in. He always studied before taking risky actions.

They emerged five minutes later in a disused tram node, long since closed to public use, its platform cracked and dimly lit by flickering overheads.

Jalen slumped against a wall, panting.

"You're...*cough* insane," he wheezed.

Ethan shrugged. "You're alive."

An hour later, the trio stood in a shadowed maintenance junction.

Rell's face lit up like a beacon when he saw his cousin. He nearly tackled him.

"You idiot!" Rell half-yelled, half-laughed. "I told you not to trust them!"

"Yeah," Jalen coughed, "but we needed the creds."

Ethan stepped back, giving them space.

"You didn't have to help us," Rell said quietly, eyes glistening. "No one does anymore."

"I was bored," Ethan replied, tone flat. "And I needed the practice."

Rell gave a weak laugh.

Then, more hesitantly, he stepped forward, pulling a small, shielded case from inside his coverall. "My cousin… found this a few cycles back. From a wreckage job. Said it was tied to a prototype stealth core. Thought it might be worth something but we didn't have the channels to sell it safely. I think you'll do better with it."

He offered it with both hands.

Ethan accepted it with a nod. The shard was dense. Cold to the touch. He didn't recognize the data signature, but Iris would.

He tucked it into his jacket.

"Be careful who you work with," he told them. "Next time, the stars might not line up."

Jalen gave a weary nod.

Rell saluted.

And then Ethan was gone, disappearing once more into the rails and shadowed steel bones of the station, a step closer to whatever path lay ahead.

A quiet reminder: there were things beneath the surface of Ashen Prime.

And even deeper beneath the Federation itself.