The door slid open without a sound big enough to match its size, which felt like a personal insult after that whole entrance speech Maci gave it outside.
The office behind it undersold itself completely: plain walls, a wide desk polished enough to double as a mirror, one tall window behind it holding a slice of the ring curving off into the dark. A woman sat behind that desk, her chair angled like she'd been reviewing something on it a second ago and had simply lifted her eyes to consider whoever kept the guests waiting.
The way she sat there made Hikaru's spine straighten before he'd even decided to be nervous, the kind of presence that filled a room without her doing anything to fill it.
Okay. So that's the boss.
Then his eyes actually caught up with the rest of him, and the intimidation took a backseat for a second. She had cheekbones like they'd been drawn with a ruler and skin so clear it looked lit from somewhere underneath, like she'd never once had an off morning in her life.
Okay, she's stunning. Focus, Hikaru.
Her hair was silver-white, pulled back without a strand loose. Then he clocked her ears, a subtle point rising out of all that silver hair, easy to miss unless you were staring, which he apparently was.
Wait, are those... is she an elf? A space elf?
Her pale violet eyes landed on Hikaru and didn't bother checking anywhere else first.
"So." She let the word sit there a moment. "You're the new custodian of a Starseed."
Custodian. That's a weird word for this. It makes it sound like I signed up to babysit it.
She rose from her chair in one motion, without a single wasted movement in it.
"I am Raelindra Vayne, Director of the Bureau." Her hands folded in front of her, unhurried. "I hold executive authority here, over personnel, operations, and enforcement of Coalition Law within Hub jurisdiction."
Maci, beside him, had gone silent, tail tucked tight against her leg in a way that told him more than anything Raelindra had said so far.
"And you are?" Raelindra's gaze shifted to him, waiting.
"Hikaru. Hikaru Tatsumi." He kept his arms loose at his sides, refusing to let the nerves win. "From Earth, in case that wasn't obvious."
"Noted." She said it like a form being stamped and filed away.
Maci straightened beside him, practically vibrating.
"Director, I found him. A new Gold bond, first one ever recorded, and I brought him in personally, in one piece, no less. I think that's worth..."
"You have three violations to answer for: unauthorized ship requisition, unsanctioned entry into a restricted planetary system, and extraction of a civilian with zero clearance and zero notification to this office." Raelindra's hands stayed folded.
Maci's whole posture deflated in real time.
"...worth something?" she finished, considerably smaller than she'd started the sentence.
Oh, this isn't going the way she thought it would.
"I had to move fast." Maci's hands came up, already building her case. "The signal was live, Director. Live. Do you understand how long it's been since anyone's seen a live signal? I had maybe an hour before it went quiet again, if I was lucky."
"You had a comm unit on your person the entire time."
"I was busy!"
"You were busy for the entire ninety seconds it would have taken to notify me?"
Maci opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again like she was hoping a better argument might fall into it on the second try.
"...no," she admitted. "Not for ninety seconds."
"Then you had the time."
She just got dunked on by a woman who hasn't raised her voice once.
Maci's tail drooped, actually drooped, the fight visibly leaving her in one long exhale.
"Yes, Director. Understood, Director."
Raelindra sighed, just once, and gestured toward the two chairs across from her desk.
"Sit. Both of you."
Hikaru dropped into the nearest one without much grace left to spare. Maci took the other, tail curling around the chair leg like it needed an anchor.
"I owe you an apology." Raelindra's hands unfolded, then folded again, the closest thing to restlessness he'd seen from her. "None of what happened to you tonight should have happened the way it did."
Second apology. She's really committed to this.
"It's fine." The sarcasm came out before he could stop it. "Really, it's fine. I only got jumped by a monster, dragged onto an alien spaceship, kidnapped by said alien spaceship, and dropped off on some alien space station in the middle of the night. Great Tuesday, ten out of ten."
Raelindra's composure didn't crack this time, but something in her expression shifted, harder to name than the first apology.
"You fought a Sable Beast."
It wasn't quite a question, somewhere between surprise and disbelief.
Oh. So that's what it was called. Nobody mentioned that part.
"Guess that's the official name for it, then." Hikaru shrugged. "Yeah. Fought it. Won, too, in case that wasn't obvious from the me currently sitting here."
"What happened to it." She leaned forward slightly, one of the only unguarded things he'd seen from her all night.
"Turned to dust, mostly. It's dead, if that's the actual question."
Something that might have been approval crossed her face, quick, controlled, gone almost as soon as it landed.
Did I just impress the boss lady?
"Had you fought before you used the Starseed, combat training, a prior activation, anything at all?"
"No." He reached down and unclipped the coin from his belt, holding it out flat on his palm so she could see it. "First time for everything, I guess. This coin just kind of, I don't know, gives you power and some armor when you use it. That's basically all I've got."
"What is this Key, actually." Hikaru turned the coin over once in his palm, like looking at it harder might produce an answer somewhere in the metal. "And why now. Why me, why that riverbank, why any of it."
Raelindra's hands folded again, the same unhurried movement from before.
"No one alive can answer either question completely." She let that sit a beat, hands motionless on the desk. "A Starseed Key is an artifact of the Vaelmori, a civilization gone since before anyone kept written history. Once bonded, it links its bearer to a Starei and channels a fraction of that Starei's power through the connection. Nobody has ever managed to replicate the craftsmanship, and if the Vaelmori left instructions anywhere, three centuries of searching hasn't turned them up."
So the actual expert answer is nobody has one.
Maci shifted forward, elbows finding her knees.
"A Starseed doesn't wait around for anyone to hand-pick it, Director. It's already chosen a bearer the moment it wakes up. We don't vet candidates, we don't pair anyone to anything, we just get called in after the fact, usually." She talked with her hands, sketching the point in the air like it helped the words land faster. "What's rare is catching one in the act. I picked up a live signal actually forming, not an aftermath report, not a secondhand account, the bond happening in real time. That doesn't come along often."
"So nobody knows." Hikaru's thumb traced the edge of the coin.
"What's a Starei?" He didn't phrase it like a real question. "You keep dropping the word like I'm supposed to already know it."
Raelindra considered him for a moment before answering.
"Cosmic creatures. They're the kind that existed millions of years before anyone was around to name them, older than most of the worlds currently standing in the Coalition." She said it like she was reciting from memory rather than reasoning it out fresh. "Each Key bonds its bearer to one specific Starei, and the bearer borrows that creature's strength. What none of us can tell you is why yours activated the way it did, or why it picked you."
Maci's tail flicked once.
"That's not some cosmic unknowable. It's just this one case. We don't have the data yet, that's all."
So it's less "the universe is unknowable" and more "I'm apparently the weird case file."
"So what is this place, actually." Hikaru glanced past her toward the window, the curve of the ring visible beyond the glass. "Maci gave me the population count on the way here. Big ring, lots of people, none of which tells me what this place actually does."
Raelindra's hands stayed folded.
"Bureau of Stellar Peacekeeping headquarters. Neutral ground, so no single world gets to call it theirs." Raelindra's hands stayed folded. "We keep order between worlds that have no reason to trust each other otherwise, enforce the handful of laws every member world agreed to share, and handle exactly what you handled tonight when it turns up somewhere undefended: Sable Beasts, Vaelmori tech in the wrong hands, disputes nobody else has the authority to settle."
So it's basically the UN, if the UN also had actual authority and a standing army.
Hikaru let that sit for a second.
"So it's a giant space police station."
Something crossed her face that might have been the closest she got to amusement.
"That is a considerable oversimplification."
"But not wrong."
"No," she admitted. "Not wrong."
Hikaru clipped the coin back to his belt, buying himself a second before he actually asked the question he'd been sitting on since the rooftop.
"That woman who attacked me, right before Maci hauled me out of there, kept saying one name like I was supposed to already know it."
Raelindra's hands went still against the desk.
"Nyxara."
"Yeah. And she said she worked for someone. Dramatos."
A stillness crossed Raelindra's face, the kind that comes right before someone has to say something they'd rather not.
Okay, that reaction was not nothing.
"Dramatos." Raelindra let the name sit in the room a moment before continuing. "You should know exactly what that name means before you decide anything else about tonight."
She touched a control hidden along the edge of her desk, and an image resolved in the air above it, a tall figure in dark plated armor, faceless behind a single vertical slit of red light where a visor should have sat.
That is a deeply unsettling guy to project into a room without warning.
"Dramatos built his empire from nothing over thirty years. Twelve systems currently fly his banner, each one taken the same way: offer order and protection first, then make refusal impossible once people are already dependent on it." The image shifted, the armored figure replaced by a wider shot, a formation of identical soldiers standing in perfect rows, faces hidden behind the same red-slit helms. "His army doesn't recruit. It's grown, uniform down to the last soldier, and it hasn't lost a single deserter in three decades."
They all look exactly the same. That's so much worse than an actual army somehow.
"What you fought tonight was standard issue." Raelindra's gaze didn't leave the projection. "Not even one of his better ones."
Hikaru's jaw tightened.
"That was standard."
"Standard," she confirmed. "The front line hasn't moved in four years despite everything thrown at it."
"Four years of nothing." Hikaru's arms crossed. "So what, you're just standing here waiting for it to change?"
"No." Raelindra let the projection dissolve. "Four years ago, I pulled three bonded bearers out of separate postings and put them into one coordinated response unit. Since then, we've retaken territory Dramatos held for over a decade."
Hikaru straightened.
"Wait. Other people have one of these? Like me?"
"Three of them, yes." Raelindra didn't blink. "And I want you as the fourth."
"No." The word came out flat. "I've got a life. I've got sisters who think I'm on some late shift right now, not recruited into somebody else's war. I didn't ask for any of this."
Raelindra didn't argue with him.
"Then consider what happens if you go home." Raelindra's hands stayed folded. "Nyxara already knows your face. She watched you use that Key. Dramatos hunts new bonds the second his people catch wind of one, and yours just announced itself in the open, on a planet with zero Bureau presence and a family who doesn't know any of this exists."
His mind jumped ahead of him before he could stop it: Akemi's front door kicked in, Tsukiko and Kirara backed into a corner of their own living room by something wearing one of those red-slit helmets, none of them even knowing what a Starseed was, let alone how you were supposed to survive one showing up looking for it.
He shoved the image down before it could finish playing out.
"An untrained bearer with no backup is not harder to find. It's easier." She met his eyes. "And if anyone traces that back to a house with three more Tatsumis in it, your sisters stop being people nobody's heard of."
Hikaru stared at the floor.
His mother's voice surfaced, thin and certain, the one instruction that had outlasted the hospital bed it came from: Take care of your sisters. He'd spent six years being the one protected instead of the one protecting.
And here's an actual chance to be useful, and my first instinct is to run from it.
"Fine." The word scraped out of him. "I'll do it."
Something eased in Raelindra's shoulders, small enough that he almost missed it.
"Good." She said the word like she meant it, more than the situation strictly called for. "Welcome to the Bureau, Hikaru Tatsumi."
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