The rout was absolute. The remnants of Task Force ‘Peresvet’ bled energy and conviction into the void, scattering before the silent, untouchable wrath of the Ashen Choir. On the bridge of the Stoikiy, the air was thick with the smell of ozone and the quiet, desperate terror of disciplined men watching their reality come apart. Red emergency lighting painted the scene in strokes of blood and shadow. Ksenia Voronova stood at her station, a small island of stillness in the torrent of failure. The tactical officer was shouting firing solutions that did nothing, tracking targets that had no mass, fighting a war for which his entire education was a lie.
Ksenia ignored him. Her duty was not to participate in the failure, but to complete the narrative. She rerouted the primary sensor feeds to her own archivist console, an act of procedural defiance that no one had the time to question. The raw, unsmoothed mnemonic data of the Zarya System flooded her screen, a blizzard of entropy that would have been dismissed by any tactical system as mere noise. But an archivist knew that history’s most important truths were always buried in the noise.
She worked, her fingers moving with an economist’s precision. The algorithms she engaged were not for targeting, but for textual analysis, designed to find the ghost of a syntax in a corrupted manuscript. The blizzard on her screen began to resolve. The chaos was not chaos. It was a language. She isolated the core grief-memory that anchored each ghost ship to existence, the foundational trauma of its erasure. Each vessel was a knot of pain, a psychic scar given form. They were not ships; they were wounds.
She crossed the bridge to the command dais, where Admiral Sineus stood like a statue carved from cold fury, watching his fleet die.
— They are not targets, Admiral. They are arguments, — Ksenia’s voice was clear, cutting through the din of alarms. She projected her findings onto the secondary display. — They exist where their memory is strongest. We cannot shoot the ship. We must shoot the memory. Target their grief.
It was a tactical suggestion born from a philosophical treatise. A new paradigm for a new kind of war. For a moment, Sineus’s dark eyes rested on her, a flicker of something unreadable in their depths. He gave a sharp nod to his tactical officer.
— You heard the Archivist. Feed her vectors into the targeting solution. Manually.
The officer’s hands flew across his console, his training rebelling against the sheer absurdity of the command.
— Sir, ahe vectors are mnemonic, not physical! They are shifting too fast! I cannot get a lock—
His words were cut off by a fresh wave of psychic agony that washed over the bridge. On the main viewscreen, another frigate, the Gordiy, simply vanished. Its Gzhel Weave shield did not shatter; it dissolved into grey mist, its crew’s memories of pride and service erased in an instant. The ship and its two hundred fifty souls ceased to be. The manual process was too slow. The price of their doctrine was another ship, another wound in reality.
Sineus watched the Gordiy disappear. He saw the tactical officer’s desperate, failing efforts. He looked at Ksenia, who stood her ground, her expression one of absolute, terrifying certainty. He had brought five thousand souls here. Twelve hundred were already gone. His strategy was a failure. His personal power was a liability. All that remained was a single, impossible choice, presented by a woman who was his ideological opposite. He could lose the battle according to doctrine, or he could risk everything on her heresy.
He made the decision in the cold, silent space between one heartbeat and the next.
— Helm and tactical are yours, Archivist, — Sineus commanded. His voice was quiet, but it carried the weight of an epochal shift. — Prosecute targets.
A profound silence fell over the bridge, deeper and more shocking than any explosion. The crew stared, first at the Admiral, then at the young woman in the simple grey robes. He was breaking a thousand years of naval tradition, ceding control of his flagship’s weapons to a civilian, a political officer, in the middle of a losing battle. It was an act of madness. If she failed, his career would not be the only thing to disintegrate.
Ksenia did not waste a second on triumph or hesitation. She returned to her station, her face a mask of pure focus. With a series of swift commands, she physically linked her archivist’s console to the Stoikiy’s targeting mainframe. A river of her unique, pattern-based data flowed into the ship’s martial heart. On the main tactical display, the clean, rigid lines of military geometry softened, interwoven now with the flowing, organic complexity of her mnemonic analysis. The two opposing disciplines, erasure and remembrance, were fused into a single, functional weapon.
— Main batteries, slave to my console, — she ordered, her voice now imbued with the authority Sineus had given her. — Fire on vector designation seven-gamma.
The Stoikiy shuddered as its main cannons fired. The beams of energy were not aimed at the center of the nearest ghost cruiser, but at a point in empty space beside it—the calculated heart of its founding memory of betrayal. The lance of light struck the invisible vector.
The ghost ship did not explode. It screamed. A silent, psychic shriek of agony echoed in the minds of everyone on the bridge. The ship’s wavering form flickered violently, its details blurring as if a watercolor painting had been doused in solvent. Its own phantom Gzhel Weave, the symbol of its lost loyalty, frayed and snapped like rotten thread. The attack had not destroyed its body; it had wounded its soul. For the first time, a ghost had bled.
The Choir’s assault faltered. The pressure on the fleet lessened. They had a weapon.
The air on the bridge was still thick with the scent of burnt electronics. The low hum of the ship’s damaged systems was the only sound.
