The high, piercing shriek of the priority-one alarm klaxon shattered the solemn quiet of the observation deck. Red emergency lights pulsed, washing the hemisphere of absolute black in a frantic, rhythmic crimson. The serene starfield vanished, replaced by the brutal reality of a ship returned to war. Sineus and Ksenia Voronova turned as one from the viewport, their shared, silent oath instantly tested by the universe’s relentless causality. They moved without a word, their new pact an unyielding armor as they strode back toward the command bridge, the alarm’s cry a summons to a battle that was not yet over.
On the bridge, the controlled order had fractured into focused chaos. A tactical officer, his face pale, turned from his console as Sineus mounted the command dais. His voice was tight with disbelief.
— Admiral, massive sensor anomaly. The Choir… they’re gone. All contacts have vanished from their last known positions.
Sineus’s gaze went immediately to the Strategic Psio-Tapestry, the vast holographic river of light that mapped the health of reality. Ksenia was already at her station, her fingers a blur across the controls as she bypassed the military’s smoothing algorithms to view the raw, un-sanitized data. The scattered, flickering signatures of the Ashen Choir that had formed a loose blockade were gone. In their place, a single, massive entity was resolving into view. The hundred thousand grieving memories had coalesced, their individual, weeping Gzhel Weave patterns twisting together into one focused, spear-like form of pure, malevolent intent.
The entity ignored the task force entirely. It was diving, accelerating on a direct vector toward the grey sphere of Zarya-Prime.
— Planetary Merge, — Ksenia stated, her voice a cold, clinical pronouncement that cut through the bridge’s low hum. She did not need to elaborate. Everyone on the bridge understood the term. It was not conquest. It was erasure.
On the main viewscreen, the face of Captain Eva Rostova appeared, her expression a mask of cold fury. Her ship, the Reshitelniy, was closest to the Choir’s new trajectory.
— They’re not trying to win, — Rostova’s voice was a low, guttural snarl, the sound of a native watching her home be consumed. — They’re committing suicide and taking my world with them.
A junior comms officer at a forward station flinched.
— Sir, priority channels from Zarya-Prime are collapsing. We’re getting… chaos. Mass panic.
He routed the audio to the main speakers. It was not a single voice, but a thousand panicked broadcasts layered over one another, a digital scream of a civilization coming apart. Through the noise, the dry, whispering rustle of the Zabvennyy Shelest was now a constant, hungry roar.
— Mnemonic decay rate is accelerating, — Ksenia reported, her eyes locked on her console. — It’s doubling. The planetary evacuation has begun, but it’s too slow. There are 1.2 billion people down there.
The price of their previous victories, of the time spent negotiating and forging new weapons, was now being paid in minutes. Every second they had spent debating, the Choir had spent dying, and now it sought to share that final oblivion with an entire world. The value axis had tipped violently toward Forgetting. Sineus stood motionless, his face a mask of cold calculation. His old power was gone, his mentor was dead, his authority was a fractured thing held together by discipline and the memory of command. But the choice was still his.
— All ships, — Sineus’s voice, though lacking its old psionic weight, was absolute. It was the voice of pure command, a force of nature in its own right. — Intercept course. Maximum burn. We will not let them reach the planet.
The response was instantaneous. The ships of Task Force 'Peresvet' shuddered as their engines flared to one hundred and ten percent of their rated capacity. The low hum of the reality anchors rose to a strained groan. On the hull, the elegant Gzhel Weave patterns of the energy shields flickered, the stable blue light struggling against the immense power drain. The fleet lurched forward, a desperate charge into a battle they had already lost by the cold, hard logic of time and distance.
On the Psio-Tapestry, the grim reality was laid bare. A thin, red line projected the Choir’s path. A corresponding blue line showed the fleet’s desperate intercept vector. The two lines met well past the planet’s atmosphere, deep inside its gravity well where escape would be impossible. A single, stark metric glowed beside the projection: Intercept Probability < 10%. They were too slow. The Choir had a significant head start, and it was not deviating. It was a spear of memory aimed at the heart of a world, and nothing stood in its way.
The grey, dying sphere of Zarya-Prime grew larger on the main viewscreen, a silent testament to their failure. The stars watched, their ancient light indifferent to the frantic, doomed race unfolding in the darkness.
