The red emergency light from the corridor cut a single, sharp line across the deck plates of the Admiral’s quarters. Ksenia Voronova entered the darkness, the heavy silence of the room a physical presence. Admiral Sineus sat at his desk, a statue carved from shadow, his gaze fixed on the scattered fragments of his shattered Boyar’s Seal. The air was cold, still carrying the faint, sharp scent of ozone from the battle that had broken him. The ship needed a commander. Reality needed an anchor. Ksenia had come to forge one.
She did not speak. Words were useless here. This was a tomb of conviction, and she was not here to offer comfort. She was here to provide a tool. In her hands, she held the jade data-slate, the forbidden knowledge given to them by the Celestial Mandate. It felt cool and unnaturally heavy, a solid piece of an alien logic. She walked to his desk, placing the slate beside the broken pieces of his authority. The contrast was absolute: the shattered symbol of his past, and the alien key to a possible future.
With a quiet touch, she activated the data-slate. A soft, green light bloomed in the darkness, casting the Admiral’s face in stark relief. Flowing hexagrams, the written language of the Mandate’s computational prophecies, swirled across its surface. Sineus did not move. His eyes remained fixed on the wreckage of his seal, lost in the void of his failure. Ksenia bypassed the primary files, her fingers tracing patterns on the cool jade. She was looking for a specific appendix, a piece of heretical theory buried deep within the Mandate’s cold calculus.
— They called it the Chronos Loom, — she said, her voice quiet but clear, a single point of order in the room’s entropy. — A Precursor engine. We believed it had two functions. Preservation, to anchor a memory forever. Or severance, to unmake an identity.
She found the file. A new series of hexagrams appeared, more complex, their light pulsing with a different rhythm.
— We were wrong. There is a third function. One the Archive Mandate deemed too dangerous to even record as a possibility.
Sineus remained motionless, a man already erased. Ksenia leaned forward, her finger tracing a specific, glowing hexagram on the slate.
— It is called Integration, — she stated. — It does not cut the thread of a memory. It does not merely save it. It takes a dissonant memory, a paradox like the Ashen Choir, and weaves it into a living bearer. The Loom can make you the archive, Admiral. It can make you their living monument.
For the first time, a flicker of something shifted in the Admiral’s posture. It was not hope. It was the barest tremor of attention, the reaction of a master strategist presented with a new, impossible variable.
Ksenia pressed her point, her voice gaining a cold, hard clarity that mirrored his own. She laid out the two paths their failed philosophies offered. The choice he now faced.
— We could confess, — she said, naming the first price. — Reveal the truth of the Verniy Fleet. Give those hundred thousand souls their names back. But the Continuum would fracture. The Synod would fall. The very order you built, the order Ferapont Orlov died to protect, would collapse into the civil war you erased them to prevent.
She paused, letting the weight of that consequence settle in the dark room.
— Or, — she continued, naming the second, more terrible price, — we could follow your old path to its final, monstrous conclusion. Use the Loom to erase the Choir. Or worse, erase the very concept of their sacrifice from this entire sector. We would win. But we would have to hollow out the soul of our own people to save their bodies. We would become the Screaming Darkness in everything but name.
She looked at him, at the man who had built his life on the hard calculus of necessary evils. She saw the trap he was in, the perfect prison of his own making. She offered the only key she had.
— We don’t cut, and we don’t confess, — Ksenia declared, her voice dropping to a near-whisper, the words a synthesis of his pragmatism and her faith. — We bear the truth. Together.
The alien hexagrams on the data-slate swirled, and for a single, impossible moment, they resolved into a perfect, unbroken Gzhel Weave. Its cobalt blue and brilliant white light flared, washing the darkness from the room.
Admiral Valeriy Sineus looked up.
The emptiness in his eyes was gone. In its place was a focus, a terrifying clarity. He saw the path. He saw the cost. It was a price beyond honor, beyond life, beyond memory itself. It was the price of becoming the sin he had committed, and in doing so, transforming it into a final, silent act of redemption. A new, impossibly heavy purpose settled into the core of his being. He would not be the butcher of the Verniy Fleet. He would be their tomb. He would be their name. He would be their memory.
He gave a single, sharp nod. It was not an agreement. It was a command. A command issued to himself. The pact was sealed. The decision was made.
The light from the data-slate cast their two shadows long against the wall, two figures bound by a new, unspoken knot of conscience. The low, rhythmic ticking of the cooling power conduit was the only sound.
Now they had to reach the dead moon where the Loom slept.
