The work was a kind of prayer, offered to a god of broken things. Kaelen sat cross-legged on the scuffed metal deck of the Stray Dog, a blank data-wafer resting on his knee. Around them, the ship groaned, a wounded animal settling into a slow death. The air tasted of ozone and hot, stressed metal, a constant reminder of the lanceship’s kiss. Their objective was simple: to build a lie. A perfect, glittering lie that would draw Julian Valerius into a room of their choosing.
He closed his eyes, letting the silence of the Ghost-Eater Shunt at his neck become a canvas. The ghost of Aris Volkov was a quiet hum now, a coherent presence, but the raw material of his erasure remained, a library of psychic shrapnel Kaelen could access. He reached into that chaos, not for a memory, but for the static between memories. He was looking for the psychic equivalent of corrupted files—the agony of a thought tearing itself apart, the screech of a memory trying to hold its shape against the void. These were the pieces he needed for the decoy.
Walter Bell stood over him, a silent black spire against the cockpit’s pulsing red emergency light. The raven Uplift’s function was to assemble the lie Kaelen curated. Kaelen would isolate a fragment of pure psychic noise, a loop of nonsensical, painful data, and push it across the short-range link between his shunt and Walter’s chassis. Walter would then take that fragment and weave it into the crystalline lattice of the blank data-wafer. It was slow, meticulous work. A forgery of a soul.
The first fragment he chose was the echo of a scream, sheared of its context. It was just the raw, tearing frequency of it, a spike of pure terror. He pushed it to Walter. The raven’s multi-jointed hands moved with unnerving precision, a fiber-optic line thinner than a hair extending from one fingertip to the waiting wafer. The wafer glowed with a soft blue light as it accepted the corrupted data. One piece of the lie was in place.
They worked in a silence broken only by the ship’s failing systems and the faint clicks of Walter’s actuators. Kaelen selected another piece: the looping sensory input of a fall, cut off before impact. The feeling of endless descent, over and over. He sent it. Walter’s hands moved to receive it, the delicate fiber-optic line retracting and preparing to connect again.
Then it happened. A tremor. A fine, almost imperceptible twitch in the raven’s manipulator arm. The pincer at the end of the fiber-optic line, poised over the wafer’s contact point, spasmed. The connection failed. Walter’s chassis remained perfectly still, but the arm, the one that had been crushed under the falling I-beam in the Europa bio-dome, refused the command. His dexterity was compromised, a fifteen percent loss of function that was, in this moment of microscopic work, a total failure.
Walter tried again. The arm twitched again, the pincer clicking uselessly against the wafer’s polymer casing. A flicker of frustration, so alien to the archivist’s placid logic, rippled through the local Resonance Field. It was a wave of cold, clean anger at the fallibility of his own hardware. He was a being of pure function, and his function was impaired.
Kaelen didn’t think. He acted. He leaned forward, his own hand reaching out, flesh and blood moving to assist the machine. He didn’t touch Walter’s chassis. He simply cupped his fingers around the delicate fiber-optic cable, his thumb and forefinger providing a steady, organic brace. The price was a breach in the wall of his own isolation, a moment of unasked-for, instinctual trust. He held the line steady, a millimeter from the contact point.
Walter’s amber optic, which had been focused on the wafer, swiveled to look at Kaelen’s hand. The light in it was soft, analytical. It held on him for a full second, processing this new data point: an unplanned, inefficient, human intervention. Then, the optic swiveled back to the task. The raven’s arm moved, and this time, with Kaelen’s hand guiding the cable, the connection was perfect. The wafer pulsed, accepting the new fragment of the lie. The trust between them had solidified, a silent transaction that registered a ten percent increase in operational synergy.
The oppressive silence of the damaged ship shifted. It was no longer the sound of two separate beings working in proximity. It was the shared quiet of a single purpose. The cold weight of the Ghost-Eater Shunt on his neck felt different now, not a void where a ghost used to be, but a cleared space, a quiet room where work could be done.
They fell into a new rhythm, a language of shared trauma. Kaelen would isolate a fragment, but instead of pushing it, he would make a clipped, precise gesture with his free hand—a gesture from the brutally efficient lexicon of Yama-Mitsui corporate field-ops. A flick of the wrist for data-packet size. A two-finger tap for signal decay rate. It was a dialect of erasure, a language they both knew from opposite sides of the same bloody equation.
Walter would respond with a subtle tilt of his head, a minute adjustment of his chassis, acknowledging the parameters. He would then calibrate the psychic signature of the decoy, layering the corrupted fragments in a way that mimicked a catastrophic failure, not a deliberate forgery. It was a private language, a code built from the wreckage of their former lives, a language Julian Valerius would never be ableto parse.
On a secondary monitor, a feed Zaina had managed to splice from a Consensus network relay flickered. It was mostly static, but for a moment, a single line of telemetry data resolved itself from the noise, a tracking update on their own transponder flagged with Julian’s corporate priority code: Target has accepted parley. Confidence at 99%.
Julian was sure of his trap. He was walking into a room, expecting a victim. He had no idea that the room was a mirror, and the victim was a reflection of his own arrogance.
The final fragment of the decoy was a whisper. Not Volkov’s, but a meaningless string of phonemes Kaelen had pulled from the background noise of the Ceres market, looped and degraded until it sounded like a dying man trying to speak a name that had already been forgotten. He gestured. Walter accepted the data, weaving it into the wafer.
The wafer pulsed one last time, then its blue light settled into a steady, quiet hum. The lie was complete. It was a perfect piece of brokenness, a story of a mind coming apart at the seams. It was the most honest thing Kaelen had ever built.
The work was done. The only sound was the low groan of the Stray Dog’s failing life support.
Starlight from the cockpit viewport caught the edge of the finished data-wafer, making the crystalline polymer gleam like a shard of ice.
Now they had to walk into the kill-room.
