The ship was a ghost before he even docked. Station Erebos hung in the void, a skeleton of pre-war alloys and shattered observation ports. Its slow, decaying orbit was a testament to a time when physics was more reliable than politics. Sineus cut his stealth ship’s main drive, letting the vessel’s momentum carry it the final kilometer. The Kausal Compass, now a solid, unwavering needle of light, had led him here. To this dead station in a dead orbit.
He sealed the docking collar with a low hiss of compressed gas, the sound unnaturally loud in the absolute silence. The station’s internal pressure was zero. He moved through the airlock, his suit’s systems the only whisper of life in the frozen tomb. The corridors were coated in a thin, crystalline layer of ice from failed life support. His boots made no sound, their magnetic soles locking and releasing from the deck plating with practiced economy.
A red glyph blinked on a wall-mounted terminal, the station’s security AI still drawing power from some ancient, decaying source. WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED PRESENCE DETECTED. LETHAL FORCE PROTOCOL 7 ENGAGED. The message, from the AI called Warden, was a hollow threat. Its sensor grid was archaic, its weapon systems frozen solid for a century. He moved through its blind spots, a ghost haunting a ghost.
He passed a row of cryogenic stasis pods, their occupants long since turned to dust by hard vacuum and time. On the frosted plasteel of one pod, a Palimpsest Phantom flickered—a grey, silent after-image of a technician making a final, looping entry on a console that was no longer there. The phantom was a harmless scar, a memory of a routine that had ended decades ago. Sineus logged its position and moved on.
The core chamber was a sphere of reinforced plasteel, fifty meters in diameter. In its center, suspended in a web of cryo-conduits and power cables, was not the Aletheia Kernel. It was a massive high-gain transmitter, its central focusing lens a disc of polished, dead crystal the size of a small ship. It was a relay. The entire station was just an antenna. The intelligence was wrong.
Disappointment was a luxury he couldn't afford. The trail had not ended. It had simply changed. He needed the transmitter’s destination, the coordinates it was built to relay. He drifted towards the primary console, a crescent of dark metal at the base of the transmitter array. The screen was dead, but the hardline port was intact.
He jacked his personal terminal into the console, running a bypass protocol to draw power from his suit. The price of the information would be a fraction of his operational reserves. The console flickered to life, displaying lines of corrupted, pre-war code. He began the slow work of accessing the logs, peeling back layers of digital decay.
The moment his decryption sequence touched the log file, the station shuddered. A low hum vibrated through the deck plating, a sound that had not been heard in this place for a hundred years. Blue-white lights flickered on along the transmitter’s conduits, the ice sublimating into clouds of vapor. The transmitter was powering up. His access attempt was the trigger.
He tried to sever the connection, but the sequence was automated, a dead man’s switch wired to the log file itself. The hum rose to a piercing whine. The central lens began to glow, gathering energy from the station’s dying core. He had made a choice the moment he touched the console. The price was the end of the secret war.
His terminal screamed with a proximity alert. A massive, high-energy signal was broadcasting from the station. He watched the data stream, his mind processing the tactical reality with cold precision. The signal was a single, unencrypted packet. It contained the true, absolute location of the Aletheia Kernel: the Polaris Vault, a subterranean complex buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice shield. The broadcast was planet-wide. Every faction, every listening post, every corporate state and data-haven had just received it. Simultaneously.
The controlled lie was dead. A chaotic, world-breaking truth had taken its place.
The Palimpsest Phantom of the technician down the corridor flickered violently, then vanished, erased by a new, more profound emptiness. A cold that had nothing to do with the vacuum of space radiated from behind the transmitter.
Zane Kosta stepped out of the shadows. He wore no vacuum suit, only his high-collared black coat, its fabric shedding the frost that tried to form on it. His face was pale, his eyes the polished black obsidian of his cybernetic lenses. He was an impossibility, a void in the shape of a man. He was not hostile. He simply observed.
Kosta’s voice, when it came, was not through the comms, but directly in Sineus’s mind, a synthesized, inflectionless transmission.
— Thank you for your service.
The words landed with the force of a physical blow. Sineus saw the shape of the gambit, the clean, brutal logic of it. He had not been the hunter. He had been the key. Kosta needed his unique, pre-corporate lineage, the ghost in his genes, to bypass the transmitter’s final biometric lock. He had been used to unlock the door, and in doing so, had broadcast the location of the ultimate prize to the entire world.
He had found the location. That was the victory. But in finding it, he had given it to everyone. That was the defeat. A hot war for the truth was about to begin.
The starfield outside the shattered viewport was unchanged. A billion points of cold, indifferent light watched the new game begin.
