He had paid for the information in fractured ribs. The cost was acceptable. He pushed himself from the floor, a single, grinding motion of will against physics. His right shin screamed protest, the shattered composite plating a point of structural failure. He ignored it. Pain was data. It could be partitioned. His objective was not survival. It was to stall.
Kosta stood over him, a perfect engine of destruction poised to deliver the final, efficient blow. The obsidian lenses of his eyes reflected the cold, analytical blue light of the Aletheia Kernel, a light that promised a clean, empty future.
— It is over, — Kosta’s synthesized voice stated inside his skull, a declaration of absolute certainty.
But it was not. Sineus looked past the agent of Oblivion Systems, his focus locking onto the brilliant, terrible heart of the engine. His Ghost-Sight, pushed to its absolute limit by the pain and the proximity to the Kernel’s raw power, flared. The phantom after-images that had flickered at the edge of his vision began to coalesce. They became clearer, more defined, as if the approaching wave of absolute truth from his allies across the planet was giving them substance. He saw the ghost of Elina Petrova, the physicist who had birthed this god-engine, her face a mask of grim determination, standing beside the console. He saw the ghost of Mikhail Volkov, his old handler, a solid, unmoving presence at his back. They were not real. They were echoes, scars of memory and conviction. But they were his.
He had gathered the seconds. Now he had to break the pattern. With the last of his strength, a final, burning reserve drawn from a place deeper than muscle, he lunged. Not at Kosta, but to the side. It was a desperate, illogical move, a spasm of a broken body. His stamina was at five percent. This was the final expenditure.
Kosta shifted to intercept, his movements a blur of perfect economy. But Sineus’s target was not Kosta. It was a small, almost invisible service panel on the cryogenic housing of the Kernel itself, a detail he had memorized from Elina Petrova’s schematic. He slammed his good shoulder into the panel. The lock, brittle with a century of cold, shattered. He ripped the plate of alloy away with his right hand, the metal screeching in protest. Behind it lay a shielded recess, a secondary conduit wired directly into the Kernel’s core logic. Elina’s backdoor.
The chamber hummed, the vibration shifting from a low thrum to a high-frequency whine. The data-spike had arrived. A planet’s worth of focused intent, a carrier wave assembled from the mesh networks of undercity scavengers, the sanctified servers of the Vatican Datarium, the raw power of the Mideast Coalition’s energy grids, and the sovereign bandwidth of a dozen non-aligned powers, slammed into the Polaris Vault. The light in the room gained texture, the air itself seeming to thicken with raw information. The Palimpsest Phantoms of Elina and Volkov became almost solid for a heartbeat, their grey forms washed in the brilliant white light of the incoming data-wave, before dissolving.
Kosta saw the change. He saw the conduit. He moved to stop Sineus, his hand reaching out, the black alloy of his fingers promising the cold peace of nonexistence. But he was too late. The Kernel’s primary sequence was already locking. On the main console, a single word resolved in stark, block letters. Target: DISSENT. The weapon was aimed, one second from firing, ready to erase the very concept of opposition from a single, designated mind.
Sineus jammed his neural interface cable into the override conduit. He did not think. He did not feel. He became a conduit himself. The price of this choice was the last of his control, a total surrender to a dead woman’s design. He unleashed the chant-phrase, not as words, but as a stream of pure, rhythmic data, a sequence of nested causal loops he had reconstructed in the frozen dark. It was the key, the command that would turn the sword into a mirror.
For a fraction of a second, nothing happened. The Kernel’s blue light intensified, poised to discharge. Then, with a sound like a universe holding its breath, the energy collapsed inward. The deep hum of the erasure function died, replaced by a profound, ringing silence. The targeting matrix, locked onto its single, conceptual victim, pivoted. The blue light vanished, sucked into a single point of brilliance at the Kernel’s heart.
The weapon’s function had been hijacked. Its purpose was no longer to erase. It was to write. Its target was no longer one mind. It was every mind.
The air in the chamber was still, the silence absolute. The single point of light at the center of the Aletheia Kernel pulsed once, a steady, white heartbeat.
