Chapter 85 — The Ship That Never Looks Back

Eight-Page Profile

Than Bao Nghiem stood waiting in the darkness of the Fishbone Corridor, far from any surveillance cameras he knew of, a thin briefcase clutched close to his chest as if he was afraid someone would snatch it from his hands at any moment. When Khe Lam appeared from the corner of the hallway, her eyes still dark from a nearly sleepless night at the Telemetry Station, he stepped out of the darkness, motioning for her to come closer.

"I don't have much time." He spoke, his voice low and rapid. "I need you to see this before Sun Keyu finds out I've been keeping it for too long."

He opened the briefcase, pulled out a thin file, only eight pages, and gave it to Khe Lam. She took it, her hands trembling slightly as she recognized the first words on the cover — her father's name, Do Viet Khiem, and the date of a pressure incident eight years ago that took his life.

"I opened this file many months ago, after the night of the routine inspection of the Tuan Re Group." Than Bao Nghiem said, his eyes continuously glanced towards both ends of the hallway. "I kept it private, not including it in the official report, because I didn't know what to do with what I found. But after that night at the Central Regeneration Station, after seeing Mr. Sinh die trying to protect the others, I thought I no longer had the right to stay silent."

Khe Lam flipped through the pages, reading each line with intense concentration, feeling each word like a knife cutting into a wound she thought she had learned to live with over the past eight years. Records described the incident as a routine pressure accident during maintenance on a section of pipeline near the Primordial Core, but the technical details, as Khe Lam read with the eye of a seasoned maintenance engineer, did not add up.

"This section of pipe," she said, her voice shaking, pointing to a small diagram in the file, "doesn't have an automatic safety valve in the position they recorded. If there really was a sudden surge of pressure as the report describes, the early warning system would have activated before my father got close enough to be seriously injured to the point of death. Unless the warning system had been disabled previously."

"That's exactly what I realized when I compared it with the original maintenance chart." Than Bao Nghiem said. "And there's something else, even more disturbing. See last page."

Khe Lam turned to the last page, where a short list listed people present or related to the scene on the day of the incident. A name made her stunned, not because it was strange, but because it was so familiar.

"Ton Khac Du." She read aloud, her voice almost incredulous. "He was there."

"Eight years ago, he was just a mid-level security officer, not as powerful as he is now." Than Bao Nghiem said. "But he was the first person to arrive at the scene, the one who drafted the preliminary report, and the one who personally forwarded the file to Chuong Khac Dinh's office for 'review,' according to the exact stamp I had seen in another file."

Khe Lam stood still, feeling the full meaning of what she had just read slowly sinking into her mind—not just a clumsily concealed accident, but something much more intentional, directly related to the man who now held the greatest enforcement power in the Council, after Zhang Keding himself.

"Why?" she asked, her voice breaking. "Why is my father a target? He is just an ordinary engineer, not directly connected to the Night of Broken Roots like my mother."

"I've wondered that many times." Than Bao Nghiem said, his voice lowered. "And I think I have a theory, though I don't have solid proof. Do you know what your father was doing in the months before he died?"

Khe Lam shook her head, realizing a void in her memory of her father that she had never tried to fill, because the pain of loss had always made her avoid delving into his final days.

"I asked a few people who worked with him, discreetly, without revealing his true purpose." Than Bao Nghiem said. "They said that for about a year before his death, he became strange — asking to work the night shift in areas near the Primeval Core, or asking strange questions about old maintenance records, about sealed areas. Some people think he was searching for something related to his wife, trying to understand what really happened to her, even though he never said it out loud to anyone."

Tears began to well up in Khe Lam's eyes, a painful new understanding washing over her — her father, whom her grandmother had always described as a man who quietly accepted his fate, had actually spent the last months of his life quietly searching for the truth about his missing wife, much in the same way that she herself, years later, would begin a similar search without knowing her father had gone ahead.

"He got too close." She said, her voice choked up. "He was starting to touch on the same secret, and they killed him to stop him from going any further."

"I can't say that with certainty based on just these eight pages of records." Than Bao Nghiem said, his voice was careful but there was no doubt in his eyes. "But all signs point in that direction. And I think, if I'm right, Sun Keyu is more than just a tough officer carrying out orders from above. He has your father's blood on his hands, from eight years ago, and perhaps some responsibility for what happened at the Central Regeneration Station recently."

Khe Lam closed the file, hugged it close to her chest, feeling a new anger rising in her, different from the familiar pain that had accompanied her for many years - a sharp, targeted anger, directed at the specific people who had decided that the lives of her father, her mother, Bui Dac Sinh, Dinh Khac Bat, were all acceptable prices to keep a secret buried.

"Thank you." She said, looking straight into Than Bao Nghiem's eyes. "For giving this to me, even though it might have put you in danger."

"I've already chosen where to stand since that night at the Central Regeneration Station." He said, a new determination in his voice. "I can't change what I've done in the past, the orders I've carried out without question. But I can choose not to do it again, from now on."

He gave her another small piece of paper, folded neatly. "This is the Guard's patrol schedule around the Telemetry Station area for the next week. I don't know what you're doing there, and I don't want to know the details. But if you need a safe break to continue your work, these are the least risky times."

Khe Lam received the piece of paper, a deep gratitude rose within her for the man who was once her greatest fear, has now become one of the most important silent allies in her journey.

"I need to go before I get noticed." Than Bao Nghiem said, glancing at the watch on his wrist. "Be careful, Miss Khe Lam. I think Ton Khac Du is sensing something moving, although he doesn't know exactly what yet. A person like him, when he feels threatened, will not hesitate to take drastic action."

He disappeared into the darkness of the hallway, leaving Khe Lam standing alone with a heavy eight-page file in her hand, carrying the answer to a question she had carried for eight years without daring to ask out loud—not an answer that brought reassurance, but an answer that opened a new door of pain, and also opened a clearer path than ever leading straight to the doorstep of Chuong Khac Dinh, and now, to Ton Khac Du.

She stood there for a long moment in the darkness, letting the last of her tears fall before drying them, folding the file away in her shirt, and walking away with a new determination, stronger than anything she had ever felt during the long journey that had brought her here — the search for the truth was now no longer just for her mother, but also for her father who had silently fallen while trying to take the first steps on the very path she was on.

She went to Bach Van that night, at the familiar technical hole, recounting every detail in the eight-page file with a monotone voice that she tried to keep from breaking down mid-sentence. He listened in silence, his face gradually turning pale as he understood the true scale of what they had just discovered.

"My father often said Ton Khac Du was the person he trusted most in the Council's security team." Bach Van said, his voice choked with a new disgust for a person he had heard his father praise countless times. "He had no idea he was trusting someone who orchestrated the death of an innocent man."

"Maybe he knows more than he lets on." Khe Lam said, recalling what his father once said about "needing to keep order" without knowing the details. "Or perhaps, like most of the Dome, he's learned not to ask questions that might lead to answers he doesn't want to hear."

Bach Van took her hand, squeezing it tightly in the darkness of the small engineering alcove, both looking ahead, where the path was now clearer but also more dangerous than ever—not just towards Chuong Khac Dinh, but now, straight towards the one man who still wielded the greatest enforcement power on the entire ship.