The alarms screamed. Sineus did not. He stood motionless in the center of his workshop, a calm island in a hurricane of noise and debris. The air, thick with the smell of ozone and pulverized granite, tasted of electricity. A fine grey dust from the hole punched through his roof coated every surface, a uniform layer of fresh ruin. The synchronized pulse of the hijacked comms array was a maddening, rhythmic heartbeat counting down to a war he had spent years trying to prevent.
He ignored it all. His gaze was fixed on the shattered remains of his father’s gimbaled compass, its brass housing bent and its glass face cracked. The needle, once a symbol of unwavering truth, was gone, lost among the splinters of stone and wood on the floor. The world’s foundation had not just cracked; it had been breached. He turned away from the wreckage, his movements economical and devoid of hesitation. There was no time for assessment, only for action.
He walked to the far wall, to the heavy steel door of the high-temperature incinerator. He keyed in the access code, and the door unsealed with a pneumatic hiss. The interior glowed with a faint residual heat. His first choice was not what to take, but what to destroy. He moved to a row of flat-file cabinets, pulled open the top drawer, and lifted out a stack of hand-drawn maps and survey notes. This was the price of moving forward: his own past. He fed the first sheaf of papers into the incinerator’s maw. The records of a decade of quiet work, of tracing phantom coastlines and forgotten trade routes, curled into black ash in a silent, instantaneous flash.
— Sineus, confirm your status! — Ben Carter’s voice, tight with adrenaline, cut through the noise from a single, hardened speaker that had survived the energy surge. — My board is lit up. I’m tracking at least twelve distinct naval and corporate groups mobilizing, from Axiom’s Atlantic fleet to the Russian Northern Fleet. The whole world is racing to those coordinates.
Sineus did not reply immediately. He pulled another drawer, this one filled with leather-bound ledgers detailing his network of contacts, informants, and dead-drop locations. Each name was a relationship built on years of trust, each location a carefully chosen point of security. He fed them into the fire, one by one. He was erasing his own history to protect the mission. The flames consumed the paper without a sound, a hungry, sterile fire.
— Let them, — Sineus finally said, his voice flat and calm against the backdrop of chaos. He slid another ledger into the incinerator. — A race is a competition. This is an interdiction.
— Interdiction? — Carter’s confusion was plain. — They’re going for the Chronos Engine. You have the only working key. You have to get there first. That’s the only move.
— That’s the obvious move, — Sineus corrected, his eyes on the fire. — Which is why it’s the wrong one. They’re all racing to a locked door. They have the Astral Compass, or at least its signal, but they don’t have the operational code to interpret its data. They’ll get to Thule Ultima and find an island of impossible rock they can’t navigate and a spire they can’t enter.
He slammed the file drawer shut and moved to the next. This one contained geological surveys, core samples from deep-sea drilling, and resonance frequency charts. The raw science behind his work. It all went into the fire. The price of his new strategy was absolute, just as Cato had warned. He was sacrificing his own archives, the very substance of his life’s work, to buy himself a single advantage: surprise.
— They’re focused on the destination, — Sineus continued, his voice a low counterpoint to the alarms. — I’m focused on the method. The broadcast from the Compass isn’t just a map; it’s a cipher. And the key to that cipher isn’t on Thule Ultima.
A pause on the line. The sound of frantic typing. — Where is it?
— Where the old orders hid everything too dangerous for the world to know, — Sineus said. He turned from the incinerator, the last of his critical paper records now ash. The workshop was sterile, scrubbed of actionable intelligence. He had achieved one hundred percent intel denial at the cost of his own legacy. — I’m going to the Vatican Subterrane.
Carter was silent for a full five seconds. — The Subterrane? Sineus, the security there… it’s not just modern. It’s layered with Memorum wards that have been active for centuries. No one has breached the lower vaults and come back.
— I’m not a normal intruder, — Sineus stated simply. He crossed the workshop to a reinforced locker and began assembling a small, waterproof pack. His movements were a blur of efficiency, a routine executed in seconds. A compact rebreather, a fiber-optic scope, a set of ceramic lockpicks, and a small, diamond-wire saw. He did not pack a firearm. Where he was going, bullets were useless. The entire preparation took less than 60 seconds.
— They’ll be looking for you at sea, heading north, — Carter said, his voice shifting. The doubt was gone, replaced by the cold logic of a fellow strategist. He understood the plan now. — You’ll be heading south. It’s insane. It might work.
— It will work, — Sineus said. He shouldered the pack. It was light, containing only the essentials. He took one last look around the ruined workshop. The hole in the roof let in the grey, unforgiving light of the North Atlantic day. The dust was beginning to settle. The alarms had finally fallen silent, their circuits fried. All that remained was the steady, pulsing hum of the countdown from the single active monitor.
The dust settled on the floor, covering the spot where his father’s compass had shattered. The old truth was broken. A new, false truth was being broadcast to the entire world.
He had to go under the world to get ahead of it.
