Chapter 26 #2
Before Jane could fully process the catastrophic failure of military-grade security, Boroslava projected a text document over the table.
“A minder rights group calling themselves the ‘Libertas Core Network’ just published a manifesto claiming credit. It’s long and rambling.
Basically, they claim the gods of the galaxy are furious with the CPS, and that pain is all our agency understands.
They declare they are exacting old-style, eye-for-an-eye retribution.
In this case, a ship for an eye.” Boroslava paused, her voice tightening.
“The manifesto ends with this: Swing the comet in the eye of the storm to swallow the dark flooded city.”
“That last sentence,” Linder interjected, adjusting his collar nervously, “is a jumbled quote from one of the more recent Ayorinn Legacy quatrains.”
A white-hot spike of fury pierced Jane’s meticulously maintained control. The rotting Legacy again. She snatched her heavy ceramic water mug from the table and hurled it at the wall. It shattered with a violent crack, raining sharp shards and water over the credenza below.
Silence shocked the room. The staff stared at her, wide-eyed and paralyzed, as if she were an unexploded munition.
Jane closed her eyes, appalled by her own unprecedented outburst. She took a deep, shuddering breath, reached into her pocket, and slapped a fresh pain patch onto her neck alongside another stay-awake chem.
“My apologies,” she said, her voice dropping back to its customary, frigid calm. “Let us focus on the tasks at hand.”
She moved to the head of the table, rapidly recalculating the operational parameters.
“Linader, order all CPS informatics security specialists to drop whatever they are doing. Their sole priority is to stop the attackers — kill them if you have to — and regain control of the MilTCS. Boroslava, get that manifesto text suppressed across the entire planet. Then contact the Mabingion Space Station. Use my authority to order them to allow docking, but absolutely refuse any and all launch requests.”
A chilling realization settled over Jane.
With the MilTCS hijacked, every military ship currently in the air was a potential unguided weapon.
“Order all military ships to be grounded immediately for safety,” she commanded.
It was a bitter tradeoff. Grounding the ships meant she lost her air support for the ongoing raids, and fleeing minders would be impossible to track from the sky.
“Commandeer regular military ground vehicles to assist our raid teams. We will simply have to bottle the fugitives up within the Mabingion system.” She let her tone imply she was pivoting to hunt these new violent activists; only she and Boroslava knew the true targets were the journalists and the Ayorinn propagators.
She turned back to her aide. “One last order. Use my authorization to send orders to the incoming military fleet that was dispatched to ferry the Minder Corps off-planet. Instruct them to stay at the Mabingion transit jump point and form a blockade. Nothing leaves this system. I will clear it with CPS HQ.”
Boroslava nodded, her stiff posture easing marginally. “Understood, Administrator. Everything is in hand here. Perhaps you should return to your office and finish your… report in peace. We will call you if we need you.”
Jane hesitated, recognizing the tactful cover for her unintended nap.
The pounding in her head hadn’t entirely subsided, but she was starting to see an unexpected outcome from the attack.
She gave Boroslava a slight nod, then left the war room and returned to her office to send a request to the CPS High Marshal to enforce her order for a blockade of the Mabingion system.
It was critical to contain Ayorinn cancer at its source.
Despite the horrific chaos and the hijacked ships, the appearance of the “Libertas Core Network” — a name that sounded suspiciously like a media syndicate — proved her theory.
Her relentless pressure had finally forced the Ayorinn’s Legacy conspiracy out of the shadows and into the open, where she could destroy it.
#~#
The command chair’s adaptive cushioning did nothing to soothe the ache in Jane’s bones during her fifty-minute nap.
She woke with a gasp, her heart racing as fragments of a nightmare — endless seas of snow burying the gleaming spires of Concordance Prime — dissolved into the dim reality of her GCU office.
She rubbed her gritty eyes, her nerves twitching random rhythms dictated by the chemical stay-awakes in her system.
The secure percomp on her arm vibrated with a critical alert. It was a highly encrypted memo from CPS Headquarters on Karybdis, flagged strictly for her level of command.
Jane decrypted the file, then scanned the text.
The CPS reorganization announcement had spread like a quantum wildfire through the Central Galactic Concordance, igniting unprecedented chaos.
Across the galaxy, the vaunted HQ forecasters and morale officers had completely failed to predict the sheer scale of the insubordination.
Employees weren’t merely filing formal protests; they were abandoning their posts en masse, slipping through the fingers of the military squads sent to escort them with unexpected speed and efficiency.
The memo concluded with a directive so detached from reality that Jane had to read it twice. HQ exhorted its planetary administrators to “learn from the initial negative response” and ordered them to detain their CPS employees immediately to prevent further desertion.
Jane let loose an impolite snort of derision.
Detain them? The Karybdis bureaucrats truly did live in a stellar-fairy dimension all their own.
Ridderth Base alone housed nearly twenty thousand active-duty Minder Corps employees.
Who exactly was supposed to do the detaining when her own strike teams were evaporating by the hour?
And where did HQ expect her to hold them — in nonexistent, stadium-sized jails?
The only thing keeping Ridderth from total anarchy was the century cyclone currently burying the city under meters of snow.
But the storm wouldn’t last forever. Once the news leaked that the hijacked MilTCS was causing targeted military ship crashes, the panic would overcome any reluctance to brave the weather.
It wouldn’t just be the Minder Corps abandoning their posts.
Very likely, regular military personnel would grab their families, take whatever transports they could find, and flee the base in every conceivable direction.
According to the official memo, Jane’s duty was to round up the deserters, manage the chaotic exodus, and salvage the agency’s crumbling infrastructure on Mabingion.
It was the safe path. The bureaucratic path that would protect her pension, her flawless century-long record, and her comfortable future with Raneel.
But the High Marshal’s secret, verbal mandate echoed in her drug-jangled mind. End the Ayorinn Legacy.
The more Jane considered the widespread galactic rebellion, the more certain she became.
This catastrophic breakdown of order was the Ayorinn cancer metastasizing across the Concordance.
The destructive prophecies, seeded and nurtured by Ridderth’s bottom-feeding media companies, had finally broken the system.
The conspiracy was real, it was vast, and she was the civilized galaxy’s only hope for annihilating the source.
If she diverted her remaining loyal forces to hunt down the media targets and the Legacy propagators, she would be blatantly ignoring Karybdis’s evacuation orders.
HQ would undoubtedly make her the scapegoat for Ridderth’s collapse, effectively torching her career.
Managing the exodus was the easy way out.
But eradicating the Legacy would save the galaxy from burning.
When weighed against the survival of civilization, she really had no choice at all.
Jane stood, ignoring the sharp twinge in her lower back, and smoothed the lapels of her formal coat. The Citizen Protection Service had no higher calling than preserving the galactic peace, no matter the personal cost. How hollow would her career be if she lacked the courage to rise to that call?
She tapped her earwire to summon Boroslava for more orders.