The sound was a key. Not the high, serrated blade of the alarm still echoing in the chamber, but a phantom sound from a fresher wound. The frantic, panicked clicking of a Geiger counter from the Slaughter Ravine, the sound it made just before the world had turned to white fire. That memory, sharp and new, unlocked an older one, a memory buried under years of regulated shame and recycled air. The red light of the core chamber bled away, dissolving into the flat, perpetual grey of a day he had sworn to forget.
He was in his Warden’s cockpit again, the real one, not the crippled wreck he’d ejected from. The air smelled of ozone and the faint, metallic tang of the nutrient synthesizer. Outside, under a sky the color of dirty dishwater, the convoy crawled across the wastes. They were civilian transports, repurposed ore haulers lumbering south, clumsy and slow. Seven hundred and thirty-four souls, according to the manifest. He had watched them from his perch two kilometers away, a steel shepherd guarding a flock of rust-pocked sheep. A child’s brightly colored shirt, a flash of yellow in a grimy viewport, had snagged in his mind.
The Geiger counter on his wrist-comm kept a steady, almost lazy rhythm. A normal patrol. A simple escort mission. The clicks were a comfort, a measure of a known and manageable poison.
Then the order had come, piped directly into his cranial link, bypassing the cockpit’s speakers. The voice of Director Joris Crane, stripped of all warmth, all humanity, leaving only the cold, clean architecture of command.
— The asset is the priority. The collateral is an acceptable loss.
The asset was a high-value Chorus target, an oracle of some importance, who had been lured by false intelligence. The convoy was the bait. The plan required their destruction to seem authentic, to sell the lie. Rhys was to hold his position, observe, and report. He was to watch them burn. The logic was perfect. A clean, efficient trade. Seven hundred and thirty-four lives for one key enemy. A 99% casualty rate for a 100% mission success. Victory, by the cold calculus of the Babylon Compact.
He had watched the enemy mechs, smaller and faster, close in on the convoy. His targeting system had painted them in neat, red brackets. His orders were clear. Do nothing. He felt the shear stress in his own mind, a system reaching its breaking point. The steady click of the Geiger counter seemed to mock him, a clock ticking down to a sanctioned slaughter.
He made a choice. He broke formation. He sent his Warden thundering down the slope, a twelve-meter metal god of defiance. He remembered the surge of adrenaline, the clean, pure feeling of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. He had traded his career, his honor, his place in the only world he knew, for 734 ghosts he had never met and one flash of yellow in a dirty window. The price was absolute, and in that moment, he had paid it without hesitation.
The memory fractured. The grey sky of the Ashfall Incident shattered like glass, and the pulsing red light of the Sunken Archive’s core chamber flooded back in. He was on the floor of a server conduit, the cold metal a shock against his back. Malachi Voss’s voice still echoed in the space, offering to unmake the world. But it was Crane’s voice that was louder in his head.
The truth landed, not as a memory, but as a revelation. A catastrophic system diagnostic run on his own life. The Ashfall Incident hadn't been a test of his battlefield ethics. It was a calibration. Crane hadn't been disappointed by his failure to obey; he had been collecting data on his disobedience. The operation had a designation, buried deep in the Compact’s procedural archives, a name Rhys had seen once on a redacted report. Manifest 734. It wasn't just the list of the dead. It was the name of the protocol for an operation so dirty it needed to be erased from the system itself, along with any components that proved incompatible.
He was not a failed soldier. He was a faulty component. His conscience was a bug in the code, a flaw to be logged, isolated, and eventually, purged. The Slaughter Ravine wasn't a new betrayal. It was the final, delayed consequence of a choice he had made years ago. The system he had served, the system he had defined himself by, even in his disgrace, had never seen him as a man. Only as a part. And he had failed a quality assurance test.
A structural failure cascaded through his mind, the load-bearing walls of his own history giving way. The shame he had carried was a lie. The honor he thought he’d lost was a variable in someone else’s equation. The entire narrative of his fall from grace was nothing more than a footnote in a maintenance log. The weight of it was immense, a sudden gravity that pinned him to the floor, leaving him breathless. The system hadn't just discarded him. It had owned his failure, packaged it, and used it against him from the very beginning.
The ghost in his own mind retreated, leaving him hollow, just in time to see her face the ghost of her own. He pushed himself up, his movements clumsy, his cybernetic hand scraping against the metal grating of the floor. Nysa was standing ten meters away, at the junction of two corridors. Her back was to him. She was no longer fleeing. She was still, a column of pale light and terrible stillness, facing the figure who blocked their path.
It was Elara Vane.
