The guttural roar of descending engines tore the sky. Jian stood frozen at the heart of the Doppler Carillon, a living fulcrum between two impossible futures. Before him, the holographic ghost of Commander Valerius offered a perfectly logical cage. Beside him, Anja Farid offered a desperate, beautiful hope. The choice was his, a weight that felt heavier than the silent, black crystalline pillars that surrounded them. He was the prize.
The Union’s offer was a straight line drawn to safety. He saw it with the clarity of a geometric proof: a leadership role in the Axiom Egress project, his music repurposed as a unifying anthem for the great escape. He would be a hero, his name etched into the history of the survivors. The price was simple. His art would become a tool of control, a lullaby for a managed population marching into a future designed by Hanno Valberg. It was survival as a function of obedience, a perfectly forced order.
Anja’s plea was a branching path into the unknown. Stay. Heal. Sing the world back into tune. It was a chance to create something real, a harmony born from the chaos, not imposed upon it. The cost was just as clear: failure meant extinction. Success might mean the same, a dissolution into a planetary song he could not control. It was survival as an act of faith, an emergent harmony that might never emerge. He was paralyzed, caught between saving humanity by abandoning its soul, or saving its soul by risking its extinction.
The decision was stolen from him. The sky erupted. The Gatherer assault ships, looking like armored insects carved from obsidian and rage, opened fire. Not with plasma, but with swarms of biological projectiles that struck the Union’s perfect siege line. Where they hit, the sterile grey pavement did not shatter; it writhed, erupting into thick, fibrous growths that pulsed with a sickly green light. The clean hum of the Certainty Frames faltered, replaced by the wet, tearing sound of life violating logic.
Union plasma cannons answered, lances of pure blue energy slicing through the air. A bolt struck a Gatherer ship, and for a moment, reality tore. The ship’s living chitin tried to become superheated gas; the plasma tried to become organic matter. A shriek of schism static, wet and digital at once, echoed across the crater—the sound of two irreconcilable truths murdering each other. The air filled with the smell of ozone and scorched soil.
Jian watched the chaos and saw the final, ugly equation. He was no longer a guest, a prophet, or a composer. He was a resource, the focal point of a war fought between two kinds of madness. Both factions were willing to burn the world to prove their method was the only way to save it. His music was just another weapon in their arsenal.
— Li, make your choice! We will extract you! — Valerius’s broadcast image flickered, his voice urgent, cutting through the din of battle. The Union was trying to force his hand, to perform a tactical seizure disguised as a rescue.
His data slate, still passively scanning, caught a raw transmission from the Gatherer fleet. The voice was sharp, filled with rage. It was Beck Irvine, the Pathfinder who had called him a prophet.
— Forget the composer! Destroy the Union filth!
The words hit Jian with the force of a physical blow. The Gatherers were not here to save their prophet. They were here for revenge. The destruction of Seed-Dome Epsilon-9 had burned away their patience, leaving only a core of pure, righteous fury. Anja’s hope for harmony was being drowned in her own people’s thirst for blood.
She saw the understanding dawn on his face, the collapse of her own argument. Her expression was a silent, pleading question, a last appeal to the path she represented, even as her own faction betrayed it.
He looked from the battle to Anja, then to the silent, massive pillars of the Carillon. He saw the futility of it all. The Union’s forced order was a prison. The Gatherers’ emergent harmony was a dream their own rage made impossible. They were two sides of the same flawed coin, spinning toward oblivion.
He turned to the flickering image of Valerius and shook his head.
Then he looked at Anja, at the desperate hope in her eyes, and slowly, he shook his head again. The price of this choice was absolute. He had no allies. He was an enemy to everyone.
An explosion from a stray plasma bolt struck the ground fifty meters away, throwing them against the base of a massive crystalline pillar. Jian grabbed Anja, pulling her into the relative cover of the ancient structure. The battle was no longer a philosophical problem to be solved. It was a physical reality to be survived.
The black crystal of the pillar was cool and unyielding against his cheek. He could smell the sharp, metallic scent of ozone from the nearby plasma strike.
He had to find a way to make them listen.
