Chapter 17 Jordan
JORDAN
The sky over Terranus V looks bruised.
Not romantic-bruised, not sunset-poetry.
Actual bruised—purple-black clouds smeared across a horizon that doesn’t know what mercy is, broken in places by jagged bands of dirty light, like the planet is leaking through cracks in its own atmosphere.
The air tastes like dust and ozone and something faintly chemical, the kind of tang you get near industrial vents or old battlefield soil that’s been cooked too many times.
They built the platform on a ridge overlooking a dead plain.
Of course they did.
If you’re going to make a spectacle, you want drama. You want a wide open backdrop where the victim looks small and the executioners look inevitable.
The platform is modular steel bolted into the rock, latticework underfoot that vibrates with generator hum.
Cables snake everywhere—thick power lines, thinner data conduits, fiber bundles that glint in the harsh light like veins.
Drones hover at different altitudes, stabilizers whirring softly, camera lenses tracking me as if I’m a product being filmed for an ad.
My holding rig has been rolled out and locked onto a central anchor point.
They didn’t even bother to hide that I’m cargo.
The restraints stay on—polymer cuffs, ankle straps, collar.
My wrists are numb from circulation compression, and my shoulders ache from being held in the same position for too long. Every time I breathe, I taste grit.
There’s an audience feed too—holo walls erected at the far end of the platform showing live views of Baragon-aligned personnel watching remotely.
Not civilians. Not random viewers. Professionals in neat uniforms and corporate suits, faces lit by screens, expressions ranging from bored curiosity to smug satisfaction. A few look like they’re sipping drinks.
I want to vomit.
Morazin steps onto the platform like he owns gravity.
He’s dressed for the camera—crisp uniform, clean boots, hair perfect, that practiced calm arranged on his face like a mask he’s worn so long it fused. He doesn’t look out of place here, on a death-world with an execution stage. He looks at home.
He approaches me, hands folded behind his back, and the drones tighten their orbit, lenses narrowing, hungry for the close-up.
“Jordan James,” Morazin says, voice warm as if we’re meeting for a polite interview. “Comfortable?”
I stare at him. My mouth tastes like metal. “You’re really doing this.”
Morazin smiles faintly. “I’m finishing what you insisted on starting.”
He gestures, and the holo wall behind him displays a title card in clean corporate typography:
STABILITY brIEFING — NECESSARY RESPONSE TO CIVILIAN TERRORISM
My stomach turns.
“Terrorism,” I echo, voice rough.
“You destabilized critical systems,” Morazin says smoothly. “You attempted to incite political panic with stolen logs and misrepresented troop signatures. You threatened interstellar market confidence. You endangered millions.”
I bark a short laugh that tastes like dust. “You murdered a station full of tech workers.”
Morazin’s expression doesn’t change. “I corrected an imbalance.”
He turns slightly toward the main broadcast drone, and I feel the shift in performance—the moment he becomes a public figure instead of a man.
The camera light brightens.
The air seems to tighten.
Morazin begins.
“Citizens, stakeholders, and allied partners,” he says, voice amplified, clean. “You are about to witness the consequences of destabilizing behavior in an era where stability is the only humane choice.”
The holo wall shows him in dramatic angles—his face, my restrained body in frame, the ugly sky behind us, the platform lit like a stage.
“And here,” Morazin continues, “is Jordan James. A civilian insurgent who weaponized misinformation and attempted to undermine lawful authority.”
I force my breath slow. My compad sits on the rig shelf near my knee, screen still dark, casing warm in my bound hands like a secret heartbeat. The diagnostic trigger waits, silent.
Not yet.
I have to keep him talking. I have to drag him into the one line I need on record: high clearance approval, and anything that names the chain.
If he kills me too early, my backdoor still fires, but it won’t have the clean confession peak. It’ll have noise, chaos, and the aftermath where people argue about context and intent.
I need him crisp.
I lift my chin, letting my eyes look wide in a way that reads “scared” on camera. It’s not even hard. I am scared. I just choose the shape of it.
Morazin keeps speaking, pacing slowly, using his hands like punctuation.
“We live in a complex ecosystem,” he says. “Markets fund fleets. Fleets secure corridors. Corridors deliver medicine, food, rescue. When reckless individuals threaten confidence, they threaten supply.”
He stops beside me, close enough that I can smell his cologne—expensive, clean, totally wrong against the dust and blood air.
I turn my head slightly toward him and speak low, like I’m bargaining. Like I’m desperate.
“Morazin,” I say, voice tight, “if this is about stability… why kill me? Why not arrest me and make your point quietly?”
His eyes flick to me, annoyed at being interrupted—then he realizes interruption on camera is useful. Drama boosts engagement.
He smiles, indulgent. “Because quiet lessons don’t stick.”
I swallow, letting the audience see it. “Who benefits from this? Seriously. Who is paying you to make this a show?”
Morazin’s smile stays in place, but his eyes cool. “You assume payment because you can’t imagine conviction.”
I snort faintly. “I assume payment because your whole operation reeks of shell routing and merc kit.”
He leans closer, voice low enough it’s intimate, conspiratorial. The drones catch it anyway—directional mics hungry.
“Jordan,” he murmurs, “you’re still trying to make yourself important.”
“Then prove I’m not,” I whisper back. “Say it. Say who authorized Yatori. Say who signed off. If you’re so righteous, there’s no harm in transparency.”
His eyes narrow. He doesn’t like being challenged. He doesn’t like being cornered into specifics.
Good.
He straightens and turns to the broadcast drone again, reclaiming control with practiced ease.
“Let me be explicit,” Morazin says, voice rising, smooth as polished steel. “Yatori was an authorized operation under high clearance approval. It was sanctioned. Necessary. Structured.”
There.
High clearance approval.
My pulse spikes like a spark hitting fuel.
I press my thumb against the dead compad glass, subtle, hidden by my bound hands and the angle of my body. The diagnostic handshake initiates in silence, piggybacking the Yatori corporate grid the moment Morazin’s broadcast frequency hits the satellite routing corridor.
The compad warms—more, briefly—like it’s exhaling.
The backdoor opens.
Morazin continues, oblivious.
“And now,” he says, “we demonstrate the price of destabilization.”
I keep my face scared, blank, compliant.
But inside, something sharp and bright unfolds.
Because the livestream doesn’t just go out through his nice clean corporate channel.
It goes wide.
It goes feral.
The broadcast splits, replicates, slides into civilian entertainment packets like ink in water. Morazin’s face stays center screen, but now overlays begin to appear—first subtle, then undeniable.
A ticker crawls across the bottom of the holo wall behind him, not in his branding.
LIQUIDITY HALT — EMERGENCY FREEZE INITIATED
BARAGON INTERMEDIARY ACCOUNTS SUSPENDED
COALITION EXCHANGE PANIC: VOLATILITY CIRCUIT brEAKERS TRIGGERED
The crowd on the holo wall shifts.
A suited Baragon-aligned analyst leans toward his screen, eyes widening. Another person stands abruptly, chair scraping.
Morazin’s cadence falters for half a beat.
He notices the ticker.
His eyes flick to the holo wall.
Then the next overlay drops—my proof package, embedded like a blade:
Biometric mismatch charts. Docking log overwrites. Comm-jam signature graphs. Armor HUD anomaly captures.
And then—financial trails.
Not all of them. Not the deepest insurance trails I kept offline.
But enough.
Shell names. Routing tags. Node identifiers tying Nine channels to Baragon-linked accounts.
It’s not interpretive. It’s not “maybe.” It’s hard, ugly data laid across his speech like a stain.
The holo wall erupts.
Voices spill in through the audience feed—shouts, overlapping, panicked.
“What the hell is that—?”
“Who put that on the stream?”
“Kill it—kill it now!”
Morazin’s face goes still, like a man watching a building collapse in slow motion. For one brief second, the smugness slips and I see the raw animal underneath—the predator realizing its trap just snapped on its own leg.
He turns sharply toward a tech off-camera. “Cut that overlay.”
A frantic voice answers, tinny through his mic. “We’re trying—sir, it’s not local. It’s— it’s propagating.”
Morazin’s jaw tightens. He turns back to the main drone, forcing his voice steady.
“This is a hostile injection,” he says, too calm, too fast. “A last-ditch attempt by an extremist network to—”
The ticker updates again, almost gleeful:
MARKET SUSPENSION — ALL BARAGON-ADJACENT CLEARINGHOUSES
IHC EMERGENCY SESSION — COMMENCED
ALLIANCE HIGH COMMAND PING — PRIORITY STREAM LOCK
I see icons blink in the corner of the feed—Alliance comm markers. IHC emergency nodes. Red priority pings trying to latch onto the stream.
Political pressure builds in real time like a storm front.
Morazin’s console—visible on the holo wall now because the feed is compromised—lights up with incoming calls. Frantic. Priority tags. Names I can’t read from here.
He refuses to answer.
He keeps talking, voice louder, trying to bulldoze the narrative back into shape with sheer force.
“You see?” he says, gesturing sharply. “This is exactly what destabilization looks like—chaos, panic, frozen supply—”
Behind him, Baragon-aligned personnel are shouting at each other. A man in a sleek suit grabs someone by the sleeve and points at the financial overlay like it’s a weapon. Another person slams a fist on a table so hard the holo feed jitters.
Morazin’s eyes flick again to the ticker. His expression tightens.
He realizes what I realize:
The funding scaffolds are collapsing.
When markets freeze, when liquidity panics hit, when clearinghouses lock—Baragon can’t move money quietly. Nine channels choke. Merc invoices bounce.
You can’t stage a war cycle if your engine just seized.
And now everyone watching knows it.
Morazin’s mouth tightens into a hard line. He stops pacing.
Then he makes his choice.
“Enough,” he snaps, voice low.
He lifts his hand and signals off-camera—two fingers, sharp.
Shooters step into view at the platform edge—armored, rifles raised, optics glowing faintly. Execution squad, disciplined, quiet.
My stomach drops, but I keep my face blank.
Morazin turns back to the drone, voice like ice.
“Terminate her,” he says.
The shooters move closer.
Morazin barks to his tech crew, “Jam her feed. Hard. Cut the propagation.”
A frantic voice answers, “We can’t—sir, redundancy—there are too many nodes—”
I feel a savage thrill under the fear.
Because my redundancy protocol is doing exactly what it’s supposed to. My proof is already in civilian nodes, in entertainment packets, in stupid meme relays that will keep replicating even if his core channel dies.
He can kill me.
He can’t kill the spread.
Morazin’s eyes dart to me for the first time in minutes with real hatred.
“You,” he whispers, and the mic catches it.
I smile, small and shaky, letting the audience see it like I’ve accepted martyrdom.
“Yeah,” I whisper back. “Me.”
The shooters raise their rifles.
My heartbeat pounds so hard it hurts.
Then the horizon trembles—not physically, but on the platform’s sensor display, which flickers in the corner of the feed.
Orbital signatures.
Multiple.
New.
Morazin’s tech yells, “Incoming pings! Fleet signatures—”
Morazin snaps, “Ignore it. Fire.”
The shooters shift stance. One of them shoulders in closer, muzzle aligning with my chest.
I have minutes. Not hours.
I make my final move.
With bound hands, I tilt my compad slightly, hiding the motion behind my knee and the rig struts. I initiate a local comm spike—one I built as a contingency on the fly—targeting the nearest relay tower on the ridge.
It’s a crude overload: flood the tower’s signal amplifier with a sudden burst of junk packets timed to its power cycle. Like forcing a heart to misfire.
The tower’s status indicator on the sensor feed spikes—then flatlines.
A sharp pop echoes somewhere off-platform, like electrical equipment giving up.
Morazin’s head snaps toward the tower.
His tech crew screams in panic. “Relay down! We’re rerouting—”
Seconds.
I bought seconds.
The shooters hesitate for half a breath as their comms jitter—no clear confirmation, no synchronized fire command. Disciplined teams hate uncertainty.
Morazin roars, “FIRE!”
The rifles come up again.
The drones whir overhead, jittering slightly as signal paths reroute.
The holo audience feed is chaos—Baragon personnel shouting, Alliance pings flashing, IHC emergency nodes trying to assert control, market tickers screaming freezes and halts.
And there, sliding onto the sensor overlay like a ghost entering the room—
A new orbital signature cluster.
Stealth approach.
Hardened comms.
Boarding capability.
I don’t know it’s Lonari yet. I don’t know the name Nun’s Tooth. I don’t know the plan in his war room.
But I know the feel of it in my bones: something moving with intention toward me, cutting through the black like a promise.
The shooters close in.
One steps within arm’s reach, rifle muzzle so close I can see the faint heat shimmer at its tip.
I lift my chin, eyes burning, throat tight with dust and defiance.
Morazin steps forward too, reclaiming center stage despite the collapsing world behind him.
“This is stability,” he says into the mic, voice shaking with fury now. “This is order.”
I stare at him and taste copper and grit and the sharp, bright edge of my own stubbornness.
“Then choke on it,” I whisper.
The shooter’s finger tightens on the trigger.
Above us, the sensor overlay flashes again:
INCOMING ORBITAL TRAJECTORY — UNKNOWN VESSEL — STEALTH VECTOR
The horizon is about to fill with ships.
And I’m about to find out whether seconds are enough.