Chapter 15 #2
“For anyone else thinking they can behave like you,” he says softly. “This is what happens when civilians weaponize truth. Fear will do what institutions won’t.”
I feel the ship hum under my spine. I smell antiseptic and stale air. I taste metal and anger.
And I know, with sudden brutal clarity: he doesn’t just want me dead. He wants the story of my death to be the weapon.
I swallow. “You really believe this stops collapse.”
Morazin’s expression turns almost serene. “It delays it. It manages it. It channels it.”
“You’re insane,” I whisper.
Morazin shrugs. “Call it insanity if that helps you hate me. Hate is a tidy emotion.”
He stands—at least in the holo he shifts as if he’s rising. “I’ll see you when the cameras go live.”
The holo flickers.
Before it cuts, he adds, almost conversational: “Oh—and don’t bother trying your dead-man release. We already found the obvious triggers.”
Then the holo disappears.
The air feels heavier.
Nineteen minutes.
I stare at my dead compad.
Obvious triggers.
Good. Because I wasn’t planning to use obvious.
I pull the compad closer with bound hands and press my thumb against the casing seam again, feeling the subtle warmth.
Sandboxed.
They’ve disabled the comm module output. Probably locked the OS into a safe mode with a supervised kernel. Maybe even mirrored my interface so anything I type gets logged.
Fine.
I don’t need the comm module.
I need the diagnostic subroutines.
I need a maintenance handshake—the kind of low-level ping that isn’t technically “communication,” just a system checking a satellite grid for calibration data. The kind of thing corporate infrastructure runs constantly without anyone looking twice.
My mind snaps back to Yatori’s bones—the way prison-company networks like to phone home through their own satellite grid so they can bill for “service quality.” Morazin said it himself: he owns paperwork that tells systems who to trust.
Which means he’s routing his execution broadcast through that same infrastructure to mask it.
To make the signal look like corporate traffic.
To bury murder inside a spreadsheet.
I lower my gaze, pretending to fiddle aimlessly, and begin the real work.
Step one: test power draw.
I press and hold the wake button, then the diagnostic touch point near the lower edge—hidden feature most users never learn. The screen flickers once—tiny, almost imperceptible—then stays dark.
But I feel it: a micro-vibration, a slight warming shift in the casing.
The device is awake. It’s just refusing to show me.
I breathe out slowly and shift my bound hands so my fingers can reach the underside port. I find the tiny diagnostic pinhole and press it with my thumbnail.
A faint chime—internal only, like a heartbeat.
Now I’m in service mode.
Not full access. But enough to run a subroutine.
I whisper under my breath, not because anyone can hear me through the collar field, but because words help my brain stay anchored.
“Okay, Jordan. Think ugly. Think boring. Think like an orphan trying to hide in plain sight.”
I build the trigger in my head first: a diagnostic routine that monitors for a specific broadcast frequency pattern—Morazin’s execution feed will have a signature, even if masked.
When detected, the routine initiates a “maintenance handshake” to the Yatori corporate satellite grid—harmless on paper—embedding a payload inside the handshake’s checksum field.
Payload: a burst packet containing Morazin’s own audio stream as it goes live, plus the confession fragments I can force him into repeating if I time it right. And—most importantly—a routing instruction to push that payload into civilian entertainment data nodes I seeded earlier.
Hide it in music. In holo ads. In silly filters.
Make it spread faster than they can scrub.
I can’t transmit now.
But I don’t need to.
I just need the hook ready, waiting, patient.
I start programming through the diagnostic layer—no GUI, just tactile code blocks I trace with my fingertips against the screen’s dead glass. It’s muscle memory from work-study nights, from servers that didn’t care if you were thirteen as long as your hands were useful.
Every action is careful. Minimal. No suspicious spikes. No obvious send attempts.
And when the trigger is built, I test it without tipping my hand.
A micro-ping.
So small it’s almost nothing.
The compad warms slightly. The rig’s overhead panel doesn’t react. No alarms. No footsteps.
Then—faintly, like a distant echo through thick walls—a tiny acknowledgment returns through the satellite grid: a checksum confirmation.
It works.
My lungs finally let go of air.
I have a backdoor.
Nineteen minutes.
My wrists ache. My shoulders burn from tension. My mouth tastes like fear.
But I have a hook in Morazin’s own infrastructure, and hooks are how you land monsters.
The rig shudders slightly as the ship changes vector. The ceiling lights dim, then shift to a cooler hue—broadcast lighting. Camera-friendly.
Footsteps approach. Two sets. Calm. Professional.
The rig’s forward panel flickers to life again, this time showing a camera feed: my face, pale and bruised at the jawline, hair tangled. Behind me, a sterile wall panel with a corporate seal—Yatori’s parent company logo, faint and smug.
They’ve staged the backdrop.
They’ve framed me as the problem.
A voice booms through a speaker—an announcer tone, sanitized. “Attention. Live transmission initiating.”
I feel my stomach drop, but my hands stay steady around the compad.
The holo blooms again—Morazin, now standing at a podium in a crisp uniform, lighting perfect, expression composed. The background behind him is a flag wall—Alliance and Coalition symbols blended into a “unity” motif, which is so nauseatingly manipulative I almost choke.
He looks into the camera like he’s about to deliver salvation.
“Citizens,” he says, voice smooth and amplified. “We stand at the edge of instability. We have grown complacent in our desire for comfort. We have mistaken peace for prosperity.”
I swallow bile.
He continues, calm as a knife: “War is not a tragedy. War is an engine. It funds fleets. It moves resources. It disciplines societies that have forgotten scarcity. Necessary suffering is the price of continued stability.”
My skin crawls.
My compad trigger sits idle, listening, waiting for the broadcast frequency peak.
Morazin lifts his chin, eyes bright with conviction. “There will be those who attempt to weaponize truth—civilians who believe they can destabilize systems with anecdotes and leaked logs. They will call themselves heroes. They are not heroes. They are accelerants.”
He gestures, and my camera feed appears in a corner of his broadcast—me in restraints, framed as cautionary tale.
“Jordan James,” Morazin says, voice turning almost gentle, “is one such accelerant.”
My heart hammers. My palms sweat against the compad’s casing.
He’s nearing the peak—his cadence tightening, the rhetorical climb toward the moment he thinks will terrify the galaxy.
“Let this be a lesson,” he says, voice hardening. “Institutions exist to protect you from chaos. When you defy them, you defy stability itself. And stability will defend itself.”
The ship’s internal network pings—broadcast channel reaching maximum distribution, routing through corporate satellites.
My compad’s diagnostic layer registers the frequency pattern like a predator scenting blood.
Trigger conditions: met.
Not yet.
Wait for the clearest confession line.
Morazin spreads his hands in that practiced statesman gesture. “The Nine understand this. Baragon understands this. We understand that peace is a lie societies tell themselves until the bill comes due.”
There.
There’s the line—names spoken on record, in full, in his own voice.
I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper. Then I press my thumb against the dead glass in the exact spot that initiates the timed handshake.
The compad warms under my touch.
A silent pulse runs.
No outward signal. No obvious broadcast.
Just a “maintenance handshake” buried inside a diagnostic subroutine—harmless on paper—pinging the satellite grid at the exact moment Morazin’s voice is clearest, most distributed, least deniable.
My backdoor opens.
And somewhere in the corporate satellite infrastructure Morazin is using as a mask, my little orphan-made hook sinks in and starts dragging his words where he doesn’t want them to go.
I keep my face blank in the camera feed.
I let fear show in my eyes if it wants to—let them think I’m just a restrained civilian about to die.
Because the real weapon isn’t my expression.
It’s timing.
Morazin’s voice swells. “This is what happens—”
And I whisper, just for myself, just for the part of me that used to scrub floors for adults who wouldn’t meet my eyes:
“Go ahead. Talk.”
Because every syllable he speaks now is mine.
And when the confession lands, it’s going to land with maximum clarity…
…and minimum ability to spin.