Weeks had passed. The flagship Stoikiy held its silent vigil in the deep black, the low, resonant hum of its reality anchors a constant, reassuring presence. On the command dais, Admiral Valeriy Sineus stood before the Strategic Psio-Tapestry. The great holographic map flowed before him, a river of light depicting the territories of the Slavic Continuum and the whole of Kingdom 39. Its Gzhel Weave was perfect. The intricate knots of cobalt blue and brilliant white that represented star systems pulsed with a steady, healthy light.
The sector’s integrity read at one hundred percent. Mnemonic deviation was a string of zeroes. It was the same flawless map he had observed in the moments before the Zarya System began to unravel, but the perfection felt different now. Before, it had been a fragile lie, a carefully maintained illusion purchased with a century of forgetting. Now, it was a truth. A new truth, forged in the heart of a Precursor engine and paid for with the sacrifice of his mentor and the very structure of his own soul.
His gaze drifted to the coordinates for the Zarya System. The flicker was gone. The momentary desaturation of a single blue thread to grey, the hairline crack in the edifice of order that only he had perceived, was no longer there. The system’s Gzhel Weave was whole, its pattern as clean and unbroken as any other on the tapestry. The official record was perfect. The lie was complete.
But in its place, something else had appeared. Visible only to him, a second star now burned beside Zarya’s sun. It was a pinprick of impossible fidelity, a brilliant white point of light that did not exist on any chart. It was not a physical body. It was a mnemonic weight, a concentration of memory so dense it had become a fixed point in his perception of the universe.
This was the Verniy Fleet. This was the choir of a hundred thousand betrayed souls, no longer screaming in the void but contained, remembered. He was their living monument. The star was their tombstone, a silent, personal testament to a truth that could never be entered into the official Sudopis. He carried them now, not as a burden of guilt, but as a component of his being. Their oaths, their final moments, their century of agony—all were integrated into the fabric of his consciousness.
A soft footstep on the deck plating beside him did not make him turn. He knew who it was. Ksenia Voronova, the archivist who had been his warden, then his adversary, and now his co-conspirator, came to a stop at his side. Her gaze did not sweep the map. It went directly to the Zarya System, to the second star that should not be there. She was the only other person in the universe who could see it.
Her presence was a quiet confirmation of their pact, the silent oath woven in the air between them in the observation deck’s gloom. They were the sole guardians of this new, unbearable truth. The stability of the Continuum, the very integrity of the reality they had just saved, now rested upon their shared silence. The weight of it was immense, a gravity that felt heavier than any planet.
She stood beside him for a long moment, her expression as neutral and unreadable as it had been on the day she was assigned to his command. But her eyes, fixed on the impossible star, held a depth of understanding that transcended words. She had seen the cost. She had helped forge the solution. And now, she stood ready to help bear the consequence.
— The log is sealed, Admiral, — she said, her voice a low murmur meant only for him. It was a statement of fact, an act of complicity, and an affirmation of their shared duty. The official history now recorded a resonance phenomenon, a convenient fiction to explain the miraculous recovery of the Zarya System. The truth was here, burning in their shared sight.
He gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. The price was secrecy. The cost was the solitude of being a living archive, a man who was also a multitude. But the order held. The Gzhel Weave was whole.
The bridge was quiet, the air clean with the faint scent of ozone from the life support systems. The low hum of the ship was the only sound.
And in the quiet of his own mind, a voice that was not his own whispered a single, chilling word: Traitor.
