The data from the Doppler Carillon painted the main holographic display in Union Command. It was not a picture but a diagnosis, a system-wide autopsy report on a still-living patient. Hanno Valberg stood before it, his reflection a ghost in the swirling red metrics. He ignored the tactical overlays of the siege, the icons of Valerius’s forces tightening their grip. That was a problem of geography. This was a problem of physics.
He isolated the energy signature of the event, a ninety-second spike of impossible harmony that had resolved a continent-sized storm of schism static. Beside it, another number glowed with brutal clarity: a 2.1% drop in system-wide Weinstein Field integrity. A miracle, the news feeds were calling it. A victory. Valberg saw only the transaction. He sipped his nutrient solution, a precisely calibrated fluid, its bitterness a familiar anchor in a universe of decaying constants.
His eyes narrowed. The numbers did not lie. The composer had not created order from chaos. That was a Gatherer superstition. The data was clear. He had simply moved it. He had paid for a localized bubble of stability with a mortgage against the entire system’s future. A profound, structural theft.
— He's not creating order, — Valberg said, his voice a dry rasp in the sterile, ozone-scented air of the command center. The room’s only other sound was the low hum of the environmental controls. — He's concentrating it.
The realization was as clean and cold as a theorem. Jian Li had found a way to leverage the Carillon to draw upon the latent stability of the entire Weinstein Field, focusing it into a single point to resolve a paradox. A beautiful, elegant, and suicidally stupid maneuver.
— He's spending the system's final moments to buy himself applause, — Valberg murmured. The thought held no anger, only a chilling contempt for the inefficiency of it all. Saving a few thousand refugees at the cost of accelerating the Great Collapse for everyone was not heroism. It was a rounding error with delusions of grandeur. But the mechanism… the mechanism was everything.
He turned from the tactical display and walked toward the far wall of the command center. The polished black composite slid away, revealing the cool, blue-white light of the Simulation Grid. It was not a simple computer but an observation sphere, a contained reality where he could model the consequences of belief. He stepped onto the central platform, the door sealing behind him. Here, he was the only observer. Here, he was god.
He fed the data from the Carillon event into the grid. The harmonious waveform Jian Li had created filled the space around him, a shimmering, complex structure of light and sound. He watched it interact with a model of the schism static, seeing how its specific frequencies provided a framework for the warring realities to coexist. It was a treaty written in music.
Now for the real question. He keyed in a new directive, his fingers tapping on a holographic interface. The core hypothesis was simple. If one could spend global stability for local order, could one do the reverse? Could one spend local stability to project chaos at a distance? He was asking the universe for permission to turn a song into a weapon.
The simulation began. The grid took the stable, ordered reality of a control sample—a simulated block of Aethelburg itself—and applied an inverted waveform of Jian’s music. The harmonious structure was twisted, its intervals replaced with mathematical paradoxes. The result was a targeted broadcast of pure contradiction.
Inside the simulation, the effect was instantaneous. The model of the city block did not explode. It decohered. The clean lines of the architecture tore apart, flickering into a visual shriek of schism static. The process was reversible. The simulation confirmed it with a cool, green light of success. A new weapon was not just possible; it was inevitable.
Valberg stepped out of the sphere, the air of the command center feeling thin and simple after the contained chaos of the grid. He moved to his primary console and began to design. The weapon would not be a cannon or a missile. It would be an instrument. A Disruptor Array. Its function was not to deliver energy, but to broadcast a specific, weaponized belief—the belief that reality at a target location should not exist.
He worked with a chilling, dispassionate focus. The array would use a small, contained certainty field as its power source, spending that pocket of absolute order to project a wave of decoherence. It was an engine that turned truth into lies. He ran a final feasibility check on the design, his fingers tracing the elegant, lethal logic of its power schematics. The system returned its analysis. Prediction confidence: 100% feasible.
A thin smile touched Hanno Valberg’s lips. He had his solution. He keyed a priority one directive to the Union’s top engineering teams at the Forge, attaching the full schematics for the Disruptor Array. The order was simple: begin immediate prototype construction. All other projects were secondary. The price of this choice was a line he had just crossed, a final abandonment of creation in favor of unmaking. The axis of his world shifted, locking into a state of pure, weaponized order.
His final action was the most important. He isolated the recording of Jian Li’s anthem, the song that had saved the flotilla. He fed it into a corruption algorithm. The program inverted the harmonies, flattened the resonant peaks, and introduced a grating, subsonic pulse that was the mathematical opposite of life. The file saved to the system, ready to be loaded into the new weapon. The name was functional. corrupted_score.wav.
He had stolen the fire of his enemy’s art and forged it into a tool of absolute control.
The quiet hum of the command center felt like a held breath. The air was still.
Now he had a way to make the whole world silent, a final, logical solution to the problem of dissent.
