The corvette Strelka settled onto the cavern floor with a final, shuddering groan from its landing struts. The silence that followed was more profound than the void they had just traversed. It was a heavy, waiting silence, filled with the low, resonant hum of immense power held in check. The exit ramp lowered, cutting a sharp trapezoid of light into the cockpit’s gloom. The air that drifted in was cold, sterile, and carried the clean scent of ozone.
Sineus led them out. The four other members of his unsanctioned crew followed in a tight, disciplined formation, their sidearms held at a low ready. They were dwarfed. The cavern was not a natural formation. It was a tomb for a god, a perfectly spherical void carved from the heart of the dead moon Kladovaya. And within it, the god slept. The Chronos Loom was fifty kilometers wide, a colossal machine of multiple concentric rings forged from a dark, non-reflective metal. They rotated in slow, counter-directional patterns around a core of pure, unwavering white light, a singularity of captured starlight.
Their path to the core was a single, narrow causeway of the same dark metal, stretching for a kilometer across a chasm that pulsed with contained energy. It was three meters wide, with no railings. A single misstep meant dissolution. They moved with the practiced economy of soldiers, their boots echoing softly on the metallic surface. The pilot took the lead, his rifle sweeping the area ahead. The engineer and tactical officer flanked Sineus and Ksenia. The sheer scale of the Loom was an act of psychological warfare, designed to crush the will of any who dared approach.
They were halfway across the causeway when the air grew colder. The low hum of the Loom was joined by another sound, a faint, high-pitched keen that seemed to emanate from within their own skulls. It grew in volume, multiplying into a chorus of a hundred thousand souls being unmade at once. Ahead, between them and the Loom’s core, the empty air began to shimmer.
Light coalesced. It was not the indistinct, flickering form of the ghost ships. This was something new. It was a single, unified consciousness, a wall of incandescent agony that stretched from one side of the chasm to the other. It formed a vast, intricate lattice of screaming light, a Gzhel Weave tapestry woven not from threads of blue and white, but from pure, weaponized grief. The elegant curves of the Continuum’s signature pattern were twisted into expressions of torment, the knots of the design writhing like things in pain. The Ashen Choir had found its final form.
Then, the voice struck them. It was not a sound, but a physical blow to the mind.
Remember us, or join us in nothing.
The pilot stumbled, his rifle clattering against the causeway. The engineer cried out, clutching his helmet as if to keep his own thoughts from spilling out. The tactical officer fell to one knee, his face a mask of sudden, unendurable loss. Ksenia gasped, her hand flying to her mouth, her eyes wide with the shared, psychic horror of a hundred thousand betrayals striking all at once. Only Sineus remained standing, his posture rigid, his face carved from stone. He had felt this pain before, in the feedback loop on the Stoikiy's bridge. This was the echo of his own sin, magnified and given voice.
As if in response to the Choir’s manifestation, the Chronos Loom itself stirred. The low hum deepened, shifting from a steady tone to a guttural, questioning thrum. The singularity at its core brightened, the white light taking on a new, intense brilliance. The machine was not inert. It was aware. It was watching. This was a complication he had not foreseen, a variable that invalidated every calculation. The tool they had come to use was not a simple device; it was another power in this chamber, with an agenda of its own.
Sineus looked at the wall of screaming light before him. He looked at his crew, broken and reeling on the narrow bridge. He looked at the awakening machine behind the Choir. There was no path around. There was no weapon that could breach this wall of pure mnemonic force. There was only the path through.
He raised a hand, a simple, clear gesture.
— Hold this position, — he commanded, his voice cutting through the psychic scream. It was not a request. It was an anchor of order in a sea of chaos.
He turned to Ksenia, whose face was pale but whose eyes were clear, analyzing, recording. He gave her a single, almost imperceptible nod. The price of access was to walk through the fire he himself had lit a century ago. He had to pay the debt.
Then, alone, Admiral Valeriy Sineus stepped forward to meet the ghost of his past. He prepared to walk into the heart of the Choir’s collective agony, to face the truth he had made.
