The maglev car decelerated without a sound, its smooth momentum bleeding away as it docked with RosNova Command. The door hissed open, revealing a wall of cold, conditioned air. Sineus stepped out onto the polished dark-gray floor of the command hub, the silence a stark contrast to the imagined roar of the transit tube. The vast, cubical room was a void of function, its walls seamless data-screens that currently showed tactical overlays of Vertikalgrad’s upper sectors. Twenty operators sat in tiered rows, their faces illuminated by the green and amber glow of their consoles, a silent chorus attending to the corporate state’s machinery.
Mikhail Volkov and Dr. Aris Vance stood before the main screen, their backs to him. They didn’t turn. They didn’t need to; his arrival was a scheduled data point. The pressure behind his eyes, a familiar echo of the undercity’s fractured ghosts, throbbed in time with the station’s low, ambient hum. He walked toward them, his footsteps making no sound on the absorbent flooring.
— Patch the Sub-Scripta feed to the main screen, — Volkov commanded, his voice a low gravel that cut through the quiet hum. He didn’t look at the technician, a young man whose uniform was perfectly pressed.
— Acknowledged, Director, — the operator replied, his fingers moving across a holographic interface. His objective was simple: obey. — Channel open.
The main screen, a hundred square meters of black glass, flickered. The tactical maps vanished, replaced by a star-field chart of the solar system. For a second, there was nothing. Then, a line of pure, brilliant white light cut across the darkness. It originated from a point deep within the Earth’s crust and extended outward, a perfect, unwavering vector aimed at the void between Mars and Jupiter. It pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm, a heartbeat of impossible purity.
The room held its breath. The operators in the pit stopped their work, their heads turning as one to stare at the impossible line. It was not data. It was a declaration.
Vance, RosNova’s senior neuro-archaeologist, leaned closer to the screen, his reflection a pale ghost against the stark white line. He was a man who believed all reality could be quantified, and he was looking at a number he had never seen before. — The protocol is pre-war, — he murmured, his voice tight with a kind of academic reverence. — Mathematically perfect. There are no compression artifacts, no signal degradation. It’s uneditable. Unjammable.
The white line was the antithesis of a Palimpsest Phantom. Where the ghosts of erased memories were grey, cracked, and jittering, this was whole. It was a piece of truth so absolute it could not be scarred or altered. It was the first clean thing Sineus had seen in a decade.
— What is it? — Volkov’s question was pragmatic, stripped of Vance’s awe.
— It’s not data, — Vance said, turning away from the screen to face his superior. The light from the vector carved a sharp line across his face. — It’s a causal pointer. A direction embedded in the fabric of spacetime itself. And every listening post on the planet, from the Archive State’s orbital platforms to Shenzhen Ascendant’s deep-sea relays, heard this in the same, exact second.
The price of this new, perfect truth was the immediate and total annihilation of the cold war’s fragile balance. The secret was out, even if no one yet knew what the secret was. The race had begun the moment that line appeared.
Volkov’s jaw tightened. His gaze was fixed on the screen, but he was seeing the geopolitical chessboard, the sudden, violent cascade of moves and counter-moves that would now unfold. He saw fleets mobilizing, black budgets activating, and kill-teams deploying. He saw the end of the managed lie that had kept the world from tearing itself apart. His face was grim, a mask of ferroconcrete and hard-won experience. He understood the stakes.
Sineus felt the thrum of the station around him, the low-frequency vibration of a system under sudden, immense pressure. He had seen the cost of lies, the slow rot of Oblivion that ate away at the world from the inside. Now he was seeing the potential cost of a single, absolute truth: a fire that could burn everything to the ground.
He spoke into the tense silence, his voice level and cold. — The vector is clean. If we hesitate, someone else dirties it.
The choice was simple, causal. Act now and seize the advantage, or wait and react to the chaos sown by others. It was the only logic that mattered. Vance looked at Sineus, his expression a mixture of analytical curiosity and surprise. Volkov’s eyes, however, showed only recognition. He had heard the voice of a weapon confirming its function.
Volkov turned to the nearest command console. He placed his hand on the biometric scanner. — Green-light operative Sineus for immediate deployment, — he commanded, his voice resonating with absolute authority. The decision was made. RosNova would run the race. — Full support. Priority Absolute.
The console chimed its acceptance. An authorization code, a string of alphanumeric characters, flashed on the screen before vanishing. The die was cast.
On Sineus’s personal terminal, the screen embedded in his wrist flashed. The Level-1 alert was gone, replaced by a single, stark mission file. He opened it. There were no philosophical justifications, no strategic analyses. Just a single objective, cold and clear as the vector on the screen.
‘Follow the vector. Identify terminus. Secure asset.’
The hum of the command center seemed to deepen, the sound of a vast engine spooling up for war. The white line on the screen pulsed, a steady, silent beacon calling him into the dark.
And across the planet, his rivals began their hunt.
