Chapter 18
TATEK
The chamber smells like old circuits and stale air, the kind that settles into wiring no one's touched in years. We’ve stripped the fake garden of its illusions—cut the sim feed entirely—and now it’s just exposed projection panels, cracked utility lines, and the quiet hum of a system still too stubborn to die.
It’s better this way. Cleaner. Truthful.
No stars. No scripted breeze. Just reality.
I sit cross-legged in front of the access terminal, backlit by the dying glow of the diagnostic console I’ve cracked open.
The interface is analog-coded, the kind designed before predictive logic took over, with data layers that unfold like origami instead of blinking overlays.
Mara crouches beside me, her thigh pressed against mine for warmth and solidarity both, arms crossed tightly across her chest like she’s holding herself together by sheer will.
“You sure they’ll still hear it?” she asks, her voice low and rough with sleep not fully shaken off.
“If they’re still out there,” I say, not looking away from the screen, “they’ve been waiting for this.”
“And if they’re not?”
I pause only long enough to glance at her—just a flicker of eye contact—and say, “Then we go it alone.”
She nods once, lips pursed. There’s no fear in her. Just that surgical stillness she gets when a plan starts moving through her head like a wire being drawn tight.
I return my focus to the interface. The keystrokes are muscle memory, locked behind layers of conditioning I thought I’d buried when I left the Alliance behind. But they come back like a pulse, like a rhythm you don’t forget because it’s wired into your bones.
Two taps. Pause. Long press. Hold.
Then the unlock key.
Ember-9.
It was never a command line. Never an order. It was a promise. A protocol built for defectors and deep ghosts who’d rather die than let the truth rot in the dark. No names. No badges. Just a signal—and a choice.
A new window blinks open. White screen. Red cursor. The kind of minimalism only used in messages that aren't meant to be intercepted by accident.
“You’re shaking,” Mara says quietly.
I hadn’t realized I was.
I flex my hands, one knuckle popping. “It’s not fear.”
“What is it, then?”
“Memory.”
I start to type. Not a message—at least, not one anyone untrained would read as such.
It’s a data-buried pulse string, disguised as corrupted logistics chatter.
It rides on an outdated bandwidth channel most systems auto-archive without parsing.
But the right eyes—Alliance loyalists, embedded defectors, agents who never stood down—they’ll see it. And they’ll know.
I embed the cipher.
Three lines in, Mara leans closer, reading over my shoulder. “You’re leaving out location stamps.”
“If they’re worth anything, they’ll find us. If they’re not, the stamps won’t save us.”
She falls silent. But I feel her watching. I always feel her watching.
“You think they’ll come?” she asks after a beat.
“No.”
“But you’re doing it anyway.”
“Because if we don’t try,” I say, looking at her now, “then we’ve already lost.”
There’s something like pride in her eyes, but it’s tempered with grief. Like she knows what we’re trading for this chance.
“I don’t need them to come,” I say softly. “I just need them to see the fire’s still burning.”
I finish the sequence.
One last keystroke, and the payload loads—wrapped, coded, silently lethal in its own way. Not a bomb. Not a virus. Just truth. Compressed and weaponized and aimed like a bullet at everything the Coalition built in shadow.
I hesitate.
Not because I doubt it.
Because I know this is the last quiet moment we get.
Mara doesn’t speak. She just reaches over and lays her hand on mine, grounding me. Her skin is cold, but her grip is solid.
I hit send.
The cursor blinks.
Then vanishes.
The screen clears.
A simple confirmation appears: SIGNAL RECEIVED.
And that’s it.
But I feel it in my chest like a detonation.
When I look at Mara again, she’s not smiling.
But her eyes are on fire.
And that’s all the answer I need.
There’s no going back now.
The screen’s afterglow still pulses faintly behind my eyes as I rise, the tension in my shoulders refusing to shake loose.
My hand drifts instinctively to the sidearm holstered at my thigh—not because I need it now, but because the act of touching it calms me.
A ritual. A tether. The kind of thing you do before war.
Mara’s already moving. She paces the length of the broken chamber like the floor is laced with traps only she can see. Her mind’s moving faster than her mouth, but her jaw flexes like she’s chewing through numbers, probabilities, firewalls. When she speaks, it’s all at once.
“If we hijack the subgrid transmission node embedded in the sat spine at junction nine, we can bypass the lower-tier admin locks and use the override credential backdoor on the ministerial level.”
I blink.
She turns to face me, arms crossed. “What?”
“You say that like it’s not three different kinds of suicide.”
“I said it fast so you wouldn’t have time to argue.”
That pulls a smile out of me—tight, unwilling, but real. “I’m not arguing. Just admiring your insanity.”
“You think I’m wrong?”
I shake my head. “No. I think you’re right. That’s the problem.”
She exhales like she’s been holding her breath since the signal went out. Her hands drop to her sides, fingers twitching with kinetic energy that has nowhere to go yet. Not until we move. Not until we strike.
I move to the edge of the projection chamber and tap into the sim control port—rerouting the feed that used to play birdsong and starfields into something more useful.
The static clears, replaced by a fractured schematic of the station’s broadcast infrastructure.
Obol’s reach is wide, but its core is still centralized, like most ego-driven regimes. Power hoards itself.
“Outer colonies won’t take a random burst feed seriously,” I say. “They’re used to fakes. Coalition fear propaganda. Deserter manifestos.”
Mara steps in close, squinting at the schematics. “Then we don’t show them fear. We show them proof.”
“I can scramble their trace-back protocols, but only for five, maybe six seconds.”
“Then we make those seconds count.”
Her certainty is a living thing now. It radiates off her in waves, all that defiance coalescing into purpose. I’ve seen soldiers go into battle with less resolve.
I touch the schematic, zooming in on the subgrid broadcast loop tied to junction nine.
It’s a relic. Hardwired through dozens of failovers, each more fragile than the last. But if we punch through the access point at the right moment, it’ll let us dump raw feed straight to public channels across half the colonized fringe.
“This isn’t a message,” I say. “This is exposure. Once we send this—Obol’s true face, the cloning, the behavioral synth coding—there’s no retraction. No walking it back.”
“I’m not looking to walk it back.”
Her voice doesn’t shake.
I look at her fully now, stepping in until we’re chest to chest. The air between us is electric. Not from the tech, not from tension—just from her. All of her. Every stubborn, brilliant, maddening part of her that refuses to be anything but real.
“If you speak,” I murmur, “they’ll listen.”
She arches a brow. “Because I’m the only idiot who’ll try?”
“No.” I shake my head slowly. “Because you remember what they tried to make you forget.”
She stares at me a long beat. Then something shifts in her posture—just a little. Like a thread unwinding, tension giving way to understanding.
“I’ll do it,” she says.
“I know.”
I turn back to the feed and start rerouting the nodes we’ll need to access—building a lattice of code across ghost IPs and ping dead zones, each step erasing our footprints before the next begins.
It’s like constructing a bridge out of smoke and trusting your weight to hold.
And it has to hold. There’s no second broadcast. No redo.
Mara settles beside me, eyes scanning the patterns, mind already ten moves ahead.
“Video or audio?” I ask.
“Both,” she replies without hesitation. “No masks. No edits. No deniability.”
“You want to show your face?”
“I want them to know it’s me.”
The gravity of that choice hangs heavy between us. I nod once, lock it in.
“We need to move in thirty minutes,” I say. “Window won’t stay open.”
“Then we better be ready to burn fast and loud.”
She doesn’t say it like a threat.
She says it like a promise.
And stars help the bastards who try to stand in her way.
The moment she says it—burn fast and loud—the room seems to tilt, not physically, but in the way gravity does when your life suddenly acquires a direction.
For a few seconds after that, neither of us moves.
The schematic still floats between us, antenna relays ghosting blue across the fractured wall, junction nine pulsing faintly like a heartbeat we’ve just decided to trust with everything.
The hum of the station slips back into my awareness, the low industrial breathing of something too large and too old to care whether we live through the night.
Mara finally exhales.
Not a relieved breath. A centering one.
“Well,” she says, rubbing her palms against her thighs like she’s trying to wipe off adrenaline, “if we’re going to set half the outer colonies on fire, I’d really prefer not to die in the first five minutes.”
I huff a quiet laugh. “That makes two of us.”
She shoots me a look. “You say that now. Ask you again after the first gunship shows up.”
“After the first gunship shows up, I’ll be too busy keeping you alive to complain.”
She tilts her head, studying me with that unnervingly direct gaze she’s perfected since we stopped pretending we weren’t already bound together. “You make it sound like that’s optional.”
“It’s not.”
That earns me the corner-smile. The one she tries not to let happen.