The tactical officer’s shout was a blade of sound in the disciplined quiet of the Stoikiy’s bridge. Ksenia Voronova’s revelation of a Mnemonic Hymn, a distress call from the dead, hung in the air for less than a second before it was rendered irrelevant by the sudden, brutal reality of combat. Around Task Force ‘Peresvet’, the void tore open. Not with the clean geometry of a Song-Path, but with a shimmering, agitated sickness. Thirty ghost ships, their forms indistinct and wavering like heat haze over black asphalt, flickered into existence, surrounding Sineus’s fleet in a loose, predatory formation.
They were the Ashen Choir, and their hymn had ended.
— All ships, engage targets of opportunity! — the tactical officer’s voice was sharp, honed by years of training. He was reacting to a threat his mind could process: enemy vessels in attack posture. — Stoikiy, main batteries, fire on the lead cruiser, bearing zero-nine-zero.
The flagship shuddered as its primary energy cannons discharged. Lances of pure, coherent light, each capable of gutting a lesser vessel, crossed the distance in an instant. They struck the shimmering form of the ghost cruiser and passed directly through it, continuing into the empty void beyond. There was no flare of dissipating shields, no explosion of vaporized alloy. The energy simply vanished. The laws of physics, so long taken for granted, had been revealed as a political negotiation. And the Choir was winning.
— No effect! — the officer reported, his voice tight with disbelief. — I repeat, zero energy dissipation on target! Sensors show no mass, no energy signature. There is nothing there!
The Ashen Choir returned fire. No energy beams lanced back. No projectiles streaked through the void. Instead, a wave of something unseen and unfelt washed over the Continuum fleet. On the bridge of the Stoikiy, a helmsman suddenly slumped in his chair, his face a mask of confusion as he forgot the sequence for orbital maneuvers. A gunnery ensign cried out, clutching his head, the memory of his family’s faces on his homeworld suddenly replaced by a blank, grey void. It was an attack not on the body, but on the soul. Mnemonic pain, a violation of the self, spread through the fleet like a plague.
The crew’s conviction was the ship’s first and final armor. That armor was being systematically dismantled.
— Mnemonic integrity failing on the frigate Smeliy! — a damage control officer yelled from his station, his voice strained. — Her crew's memory-signatures are flatlining!
On the main viewscreen, the Smeliy’s fate was rendered in stark, terrifying detail. The brilliant Gzhel Weave of its energy shield, the intricate pattern of cobalt and white that was the very symbol of Continuum order, did not just flicker. It shattered. The lines of light broke apart into a meaningless scrawl of digital noise. The ship’s internal memories, the collective experience of its 250 crew that held its reality together, were erased in a single, silent instant. The frigate’s form desaturated to the same lifeless grey as the planet below it, and then it simply ceased to be, collapsing in on itself without a sound.
— Recalibrate all sensor arrays. Full spectrum, — Admiral Sineus’s voice cut through the rising panic, as cold and precise as a surgical laser. He stood motionless, his gaze fixed on the chaos, his mind a fortress of cold logic against the storm. — Dump all tactical filters. I want raw mnemonic data, no smoothing. Report all deviations, no matter how fleeting.
He was not fighting ships. He was fighting a hostile idea. His orders were a desperate attempt to learn the language of his new enemy in the seconds he had before his fleet was annihilated. The officers, jolted by the calm authority in his voice, moved to obey. They were soldiers of a civilization built on the principle of order, and their admiral was the living embodiment of that principle.
But order was breaking. The task force, built for decisive fleet action, scattered in disarray. It was not a controlled retreat; it was a rout. The cruisers and frigates fired their weapons wildly, their energy beams slicing through empty space as the intangible Choir pursued them. Another frigate’s lights went out. A cruiser listed, its engines dead, its crew lost in a fog of forgotten duties. The Ashen Choir’s assault was relentless, an inexorable tide of oblivion washing over them.
Within fifteen minutes, the initial engagement was over. The ambush had been a decisive, catastrophic defeat. Four frigates and a cruiser were gone, erased from the Sudopis as if they had never been built. Twelve hundred souls, their lives, their memories, their very existence, had been consumed. The remnants of Task Force ‘Peresvet’ limped away from the battle, their Gzhel Weave patterns fractured and dim, their crews reeling from the psychic wounds.
Sineus stood on the bridge of his flagship, watching the ghosts of his past tear apart the fleet of his present. His methods were useless. His weapons were toys. His entire understanding of warfare was obsolete.
