The transition from the non-space of the Pesenniy Shag back into reality was a physical shock, a discordant note that shuddered through the hull of the Stoikiy. The flowing river of light outside the viewscreen tore itself apart, collapsing into the familiar, silent black of the void, now seeded with the hard points of distant stars. Task Force ‘Peresvet’ had arrived. The five warships of the elite formation moved with the silent precision of a surgeon’s tools, their engines burning cold as they established a standard orbital blockade over the system’s primary world.
On the command dais, Admiral Valeriy Sineus watched the maneuver, his hands clasped behind his back. The fleet was now at Level Two alert, a state of heightened readiness that hummed through the very deck plates beneath his polished boots. He had brought five thousand souls to the edge of this wound in reality. The price of his choice in the Synod was now arrayed before him, a testament in alloy and conviction.
— Main viewscreen, magnify Zarya-Prime, — he commanded. His voice was a low, steady instrument that betrayed nothing of the cold knot tightening in his gut.
The image on the screen swelled, filling the bridge with the sight of the planet. There was no vibrant blue of deep oceans, no swirls of white cloud over continents of green. There was only grey. A flat, uniform, lifeless grey had consumed the world, as if a painter had washed over a masterpiece with a single, sorrowful color. The planet was not dead; it was being forgotten. The intricate Gzhel Weave patterns on the hulls of his own ships, which had shone so brightly in the Song-Path, now seemed dull, their cobalt and white light muted as if coated in a fine, invisible dust.
A comms channel chimed, requesting priority access.
— On screen, — Sineus ordered.
The face of a woman in her forties appeared on a secondary display. Her features were sharp, her dark hair pulled back in a severe officer’s knot. Her eyes, however, burned with a cold, contained fury. It was Captain Eva Rostova, commander of the cruiser Reshitelniy and a native of this dying system.
— Admiral, — she began, her voice tight, each word a carefully controlled piece of shrapnel. — My long-range sensors confirm what we are seeing. The entire planetary biosphere has lost its mnemonic signature. It’s a complete information collapse.
— The Zabvennyy Shelest? — Sineus asked, his tone clinical.
Rostova gave a sharp, bitter nod.
— It is no longer a localized phenomenon, sir. My family on the southern continent reports it is now audible planet-wide. A constant, dry whisper inside the skull. The sound of everything turning to dust. They are forgetting the color of the sky.
Sineus processed the information without a change in expression. The rustle of oblivion. The sound of reality fraying at the seams. He had heard it once before, a century ago, in the moments before he gave the order that had created this very echo.
— Maintain your station, Captain. We are assessing the source.
He closed the channel. The personal cost, personified by Rostova’s barely concealed grief, was now a tactical reality. He had known this would be difficult. He had not anticipated the profound silence of a world that had forgotten its own song.
From her new station near the tactical displays, Ksenia Voronova watched the main viewscreen, her face a study in academic horror. The Strategic Psio-Tapestry beside her rendered the Zarya System as a fractured, ugly knot in the Gzhel Weave, its threads a dead, lusterless grey. To the military officers, this was a tactical problem, a corruption of data. To her, it was a desecration. The system was not malfunctioning; it was screaming.
The official reports were just noise, a cascade of error codes and sensor ghosts. But Ksenia, a field archivist of the Archive Mandate, knew that noise was never just noise. It was a language she did not yet understand. The military filters, designed to produce clean, actionable intelligence, were simplifying the data, erasing the subtleties of the decay. They were trying to forget the complexity of the problem.
She would not.
With deft, economical movements, she began to work at her console. She bypassed the standard tactical filters, her authorization as Narrative Compliance Officer giving her access to the raw, un-sanitized mnemonic sensor feed from the Stoikiy’s long-range arrays. A river of chaotic data flooded her screen, a visual representation of pure entropy. It was like staring into a digital blizzard, a storm of meaningless information.
— What are you doing, Archivist? — the tactical officer asked, his tone laced with suspicion.
— My duty, — Ksenia replied without looking up. — I am ensuring the narrative is complete.
She engaged a series of deep-level pattern recognition algorithms, tools not of a soldier but of a historian, designed to find structure in the ruins of forgotten texts. The blizzard on her screen began to shift. The random static resolved into faint, repeating lines. It was not chaos. It was a signal, buried under layers of decay.
— It’s not random, — she whispered to herself, her fingers flying across the console. — It’s a sequence.
The pattern grew clearer. It was a Gzhel Weave, but one that was broken, corrupted, its elegant curves twisted into expressions of pain. The pattern was looping, repeating itself over and over, a signal broadcast across the entire system. It was a song, shattered into a billion weeping fragments. A Mnemonic Hymn.
She stood, her discovery a cold, solid weight in her chest. She walked the few steps to the command dais, her simple grey robes a stark contrast to the dark, severe uniforms of the bridge officers.
— Admiral.
Sineus turned, his eyes dark and unreadable.
— The decay is not an attack, — Ksenia said, her voice clear and certain. — It is a byproduct. I have isolated a signal within the noise.
She projected her findings onto a secondary screen beside the main viewscreen. The image of the weeping Gzhel pattern appeared, its broken lines pulsing with a slow, sorrowful rhythm.
— It is a distress call, sir. A Mnemonic Hymn, repeating on a loop. The signature is fragmented, but the source is unmistakable. It is the echo of the fleet you erased.
She met his gaze, her own unwavering.
— They are not attacking, Admiral. They are crying for help.
The words hung in the silent air of the bridge, a truth more devastating than any weapon. The entire strategic and moral landscape of the mission shifted under Sineus’s feet. His enemy was not a monster. It was a victim. A ghost of his own making, begging for the remembrance he had denied it. Forgetting had not brought peace. It had only amplified the pain.
Before he could formulate a response, before he could even process the immensity of her discovery, the tactical officer shouted, his voice cracking with sudden alarm.
— Contacts! Multiple contacts, all around us! Sensors are blind, but the impacts… the impacts are real!
