The news of RosNova’s collapse was a dead signal on a dead channel. It changed nothing. The mission remained. Sineus watched the last of the bio-foam seal the perforations in his suit, the hiss a quiet counterpoint to the blizzard’s shriek against the ferroconcrete walls of the rescue hub. Lena Petrova worked with a focused economy of motion, her presence a solid fact in the swirling chaos of the world. The ice-crawlers waited outside, their engines a low thrum of borrowed time.
He needed the next move. The political landscape was a collapsing waveform, irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was the physical path to the Polaris Vault and the override conduit Elina Petrova had buried within it. He pulled the data-shard from his belt, a cold, dark rectangle of polymer recovered from the corpse of Station Erebos. Its surface was smooth, inert. It held the key.
— Patch me in, — Sineus said, his voice flat. He offered the shard to Lena.
She took it without a word, her fingers brushing his. She slotted the shard into her terminal, the device’s screen flickering as it negotiated the archaic, pre-war encryption. A cascade of raw code scrolled past, elegant and brutally efficient. It was a language of pure causality, a dialect the modern world had forgotten how to speak.
The file resolved. It was not a simple schematic. It was a memory log, Elina Petrova’s final test of the Aletheia Kernel’s hidden function. On the screen, a simulation played out: a targeted broadcast, a single packet of information delivered to a closed network. The test was a success. The hijack was viable. He had confirmation.
— There, — Lena murmured, her finger tracing a line on the screen.
Buried within the log was a secondary file. A detailed schematic of the Polaris Vault’s core chamber. And at its heart, a single, clearly marked access point: the override conduit. It was a physical port, shielded behind a panel of reinforced cryo-ceramics, wired directly into the Kernel’s primary targeting matrix. He now had the final piece of the technical puzzle. The path was no longer a vector; it was a physical map.
With the ‘how’ secured, he had to confirm the ‘why.’ Why his support had vanished. He opened a secure channel, a ghost-line into RosNova’s high council. The feed materialized on Lena’s slate, a window into the heart of the dying institution.
The virtual assembly was in chaos. The polished, serene daises of the Cross-Arcology Assembly were gone, replaced by a frantic grid of panicked faces. Directors shouted over one another, their voices a cacophony of blame and fear. The memetic warfare unleashed by the Kernel’s public revelation was tearing their own networks apart.
— We need to control the narrative! — one director yelled, his face slick with sweat. — Flood the public channels with denial!
— Denial is useless when they’ve all seen the same memory! — another countered. — My evacuation logistics for the upper spire are compromised! The system is prioritizing resource allocation to the undercity shelters!
A faint, grey flicker of a Palimpsest Phantom, a ghost of some past betrayal, momentarily superimposed itself over the second director’s face. A hairline crack of pure black ran through its form, a visual echo of the system’s failing integrity. The lies were coming home to roost, manifesting as ghosts in their own machine. They were not talking about the mission. They were not talking about the Aletheia Kernel. They were trying to save their own curated reality, a house of cards in a hurricane.
Sineus watched their infighting, his face a mask of cold granite. These were the men who had sent him, the institution he had served. They were drowning in the consequences of the very system they had built. They were no longer a functional asset. They were a liability.
He made the choice. The price was the last shred of his official existence. He reached out and terminated the connection.
The feed dissolved into a waterfall of dead pixels. The shouting voices vanished, replaced by the howl of the Antarctic wind. He was an island, the last tether to the continent of RosNova severed by his own hand. He had abandoned the collapsing lie.
He turned to Lena. — I need a new network.
She nodded, already pulling up a fresh encryption suite. He fed her the master keys he had stripped from Augustus Paxton’s channel, a ghost of a past victory repurposed for a new war. The Archive State’s own weapon, turned against the world it sought to control.
A new channel bloomed into existence, a dark, silent space built on stolen code and mutual desperation. It was a network of ghosts and fugitives. He sent the first encrypted packet to Jax, at a terminal in a forgotten corner of Vertikalgrad’s undercity. The message was simple: a set of coordinates and a single word. ‘Listen.’
He sent the second packet to the loose coalition of Freeport skippers who had held the line at Float-Hab 7, giving them a frequency, a time, and a single command: ‘Hold.’
The third went to a private, firewalled server belonging to Dr. Aris Vance. The man of logic, now sidelined and adrift. The message contained a single, complex equation: the timing of the data-spike. ‘Calculate.’
The final packet was for Lena. He didn’t need to send it. She was already looking at the same data, her mind racing. She was the keeper of the ‘why,’ the historian who would give the final act its meaning.
He had replaced the rigid, failing hierarchy of RosNova with a decentralized web of trust. A network built not on authority, but on shared purpose. It was a fragile thing, a whisper in the storm, but it was real. It was true.
He glanced back at the blank screen where the council had been. For a moment, he thought he saw the phantom again, no longer cracked and flickering, but solid, clear, and watching him with something that looked like approval. Then it was gone.
A priority alert chimed on the terminal, a raw data feed from Jax’s node in the undercity. It was a single, grainy image: a district plaza, the air shimmering with an unnatural cold. People were running. The physics of the place were fraying at the edges.
Oblivion Systems was making its move. The war had come to the civilians.
