The chaos had a sound, and the sound was the station screaming. Abbot Clement moved through it like a shark through a panicked school of fish. He did not run. He walked with a terrible, measured purpose, his long legs eating up the distance in the flickering yellow emergency light. Deacon Marcus followed a half-step behind, his face a pale mask of shock, but his body still obedient, still the perfect second-in-command. They stepped over the twitching forms of monks who had spent their lives praying for a voice and were now broken by it.
Clement ignored them. They were no longer his flock. They were the wreckage of a failed experiment. His new objective was simple. Survival. Not of the body, but of the story. He reached the Docking Spine, the long, sterile corridor that connected the Penrose Oratory to the void. The air here was colder, smelling of chilled metal and the faint, clean scent of vacuum. A single shuttle, the Veritas, sat in its berth, its docking clamps still engaged. It was a small, functional craft, meant for short-range supply runs. It would be his lifeboat.
Marcus fumbled with the hatch controls, his hands shaking. The station shuddered, a deep groan of stressed metal as the psychic overload from the broadcast continued to play hell with the power grid. Clement placed a calm hand on his deacon’s shoulder and pushed him aside. He keyed in the sequence himself, his fingers precise and certain. The hatch hissed open.
Inside, Clement did not go to the cockpit. He went to a small, reinforced locker set into the bulkhead. He entered another code. A panel slid open, revealing a single object nestled in soft, form-fitting foam. It was a data core, a perfect, seamless ovoid of polished black ceramic that glowed with a soft, internal blue light. It was the Canon of the Gentle Obscurity. His life’s work. The entire curated, redacted, and perfected scripture. The voice of a merciful God, stripped of all its messy, human parts. He chose to save the story, not the people. The price of this choice was the two hundred souls he was leaving behind to drown in the truth. He took the core. It was cool and heavy in his hand, the opposite of the broken, lightweight slate that had started all this.
— Abbot? — Marcus whispered, his voice thin. — What about the others?
— The shepherd cannot save a flock that runs toward the cliff, — Clement said, his voice devoid of all emotion. He secured the data core in a pouch on his habit. — We will build a new fold. A stronger one.
In the Choir, a new alert flashed on Lena Petrova’s console. A small, angry red icon. Unauthorized launch prep in Docking Bay 3. Her head snapped up. Elias was still in the listener’s chair, his body rigid, a thin line of blood trickling from one nostril. He was the dam holding back the ocean, but he was cracking. Ana Sharma saw the alert and her eyes widened.
— He’s running, — Lena hissed. Her fingers flew across a different part of the console, pulling up a new schematic. The station’s exterior. Two small, unmanned work vessels, the station tugs, were docked near the spine. They were slow. They were clumsy. They were designed for moving cargo containers, not for combat.
— Can you stop him? — Ana asked, her voice barely a whisper.
— The system is a mess, — Lena muttered, her focus absolute. She was trying to route commands through a network that was actively having a seizure. — Power fluctuations are killing the connection. Come on, you bastards. Move.
She slammed her palm on the console. On the main viewscreen, two small icons representing the tugs detached from the station’s hull. They began to creep toward the Veritas shuttle. They were too slow. The chaos Elias and Lena had unleashed to seize the station was now the very thing preventing them from defending it. The power surges they had relied on were now their enemy, making the remote systems sluggish and unreliable.
Clement settled into the pilot’s seat of the Veritas. He could see the station tugs on his own screen, two pathetic little claws crawling toward him. He smiled, a thin, bloodless expression. He initiated the final launch sequence. Explosive bolts fired with a series of sharp, percussive thuds that echoed through the docking spine. The shuttle shuddered, free of its moorings.
— He’s away, — Lena said, her voice flat. She watched the red icon of the shuttle pull away from the station schematic. She had won the station, but the architect of its prison had just escaped. The tugs were still hundreds of meters away, their movements hopelessly sluggish.
From the viewport of the Veritas, the Penrose Oratory was a broken wheel of flickering lights against the perfect, terrifying black of Terminus. Clement did not look at it for long. He looked at the empty co-pilot’s seat, then at the pouch containing his data core. He had what was important. He pushed the shuttle’s throttle forward, and the small craft accelerated, a tiny spark of manufactured faith fleeing into the great, indifferent void. He had saved the truth that mattered. His truth.
The red icon on Lena’s screen shrank, then blinked out as it passed beyond the range of the station’s short-range sensors. He was gone.
The low hum of the Oecumene Horn in the Choir began to whine, the pitch rising. The air grew thick with the smell of burnt insulation.
Elias Vance’s body convulsed in the chair, a single, violent spasm. The broadcast was over.
A new kind of silence fell over the station, and it was worse than the screaming.
The last red line on Lena’s schematic flickered and died.
