The callsign glowed on the dead screen, an impossible ghost. TINKER-01. Rhys stared, his mind refusing to parse the data. The monitor was powerless, its capacitors drained to inert dust. Yet the text was there, stark and green against the black, a signal from a network that was supposed to be a whisper, not a resurrection. Nysa saw it too, her breath catching in her throat. The Tinker’s Guild ghost network, Ben Carter’s parting gift, was more than a cloak. It was a key.
A new icon flared to life on the tactical map, a crude, heavy square moving with belligerent speed toward the northern edge of the Compact’s perfect steel ring. It was Ben Carter’s workshop-hauler, the derelict ore carrier he had armored with a lifetime of cynicism and scavenged plate. It hit the cordon not like a vehicle, but like a geological event. Metal shrieked, a high, tearing sound that even the monitor’s tinny speaker conveyed with visceral clarity. The hauler, a blunt instrument of pure mass, tore through a section of perimeter fencing and slammed into the leg of a Warden-class Mecha.
The twelve-meter war machine staggered, its hydraulic grace shattered by the sheer, unexpected physics of the assault. The perfect circle was broken.
On the monitor, six red icons, the symbols for Warden Mecha, swiveled in unison. Their patrol vectors were abandoned as they turned their full attention to the single, aggressive signature that had violated their sterile geometry. Plasma cannons, designed to cauterize nascent Edens and vaporize Chorus zealots, began to charge. Their barrels glowed with a hungry, white-hot light visible even on the low-fidelity display. The diversion was total. The entire northern quadrant of the cordon now focused on the lone, armored hauler.
It was a window of chaos, bought with scrap iron and suicidal intent.
A voice crackled through the monitor's speaker, cutting through the low hum of the server room. It was rough, laced with static, and achingly familiar. It was Ben Carter.
— Told you I'd collect, — the voice rasped.
The words were a statement of account settling that was also a gift. The debt, represented by the small, intricate Cog of Solace in Rhys’s pocket, was being called in, but not as a demand. It was being paid by the creditor. Rhys’s hand went to the gear in his pocket, the cool, complex metal a sudden, sharp reality. He could not speak. Nysa watched the screen, her face a mask of disbelief as the hauler icon was bracketed by targeting reticles. It was absorbing an impossible amount of fire, its thick, layered plating glowing cherry-red in spots.
— Pay this one forward.
The words were a final lesson, a last piece of hard-won philosophy passed on in the middle of a firefight. It was the core of Ben’s belief system, delivered as his own was being systematically dismantled by plasma fire. A dry laugh followed, a sound like rocks grinding together, utterly devoid of fear. It was the sound of a man who had seen the system for what it was and had chosen the terms of his own exit. It was the last sound they heard from him.
The monitor flared white, a silent, digital scream that overloaded the ancient display's photosensors. The light was so bright it bleached all other icons from the map, a miniature sun blooming in the dust and being extinguished in the same instant.
The light faded. Where the hauler's icon had been, there was now only a lingering scorch mark on the map, a black wound in the data. The comm channel was silent. Ben Carter's signal, the impossible ghost that had lit up their tomb, was gone. The potential for any outside help, for any reinforcement, was utterly and finally eliminated. The price of their brief window of hope was the man who had opened it.
Rhys stared at the blank spot on the screen. The phantom clicking of a Geiger counter started up again in his mind, a frantic, irregular rhythm of pure loss. The mentor was gone. The sanctuary was gone. The last voice of reason from a world outside the war had been silenced. The system had devoured another one of its own.
Nysa looked from the screen to the new, temporary gap in the steel ring. The sacrifice had been immense, a life traded for a handful of seconds.
It was a chance. It might be their only one. But the red icons of the Wardens were already beginning to pivot back, their attention returning to the silent Archive, the cage door swinging shut.
The hole in the world Ben Carter had made was already closing.
