Solarstride did not enter Lunna as a visitor. He entered as a stabilizer moving on borrowed minutes, stepping off a low-profile AES jet into night air that smelled of salt, coolant, and disinfectant. The tarmac lights were deliberately dimmed to avoid advertising the arrival, and the escort doctrine was already in motion—Moon Guards at perimeter corners, Star Rangers in drone overwatch lanes, and a Lunar medic team staged beside an armored transport as if medical continuity had been part of the landing plan from the start. Lunarpuff waited at the base of the ramp, posture quiet but immovable, her Lunar radiance kept cold and small so it would not pull civilian attention beyond the fence. "You are late," she said, not as accusation, but as calibration. "The corridors started drifting an hour ago." Solarstride's orange gaze tracked the dark horizon where the capital's glow sat behind layered clouds. "Then we do not waste a second pretending the night is calm," he answered. "Show me the package. Show me the people it endangers." Brinewatch's voice came through his secure earpiece with the same operational cadence she used for finance and war alike. "You are not here to win a fight, Supreme Commander," she said. "You are here to move a truth object through hostile geometry without creating a panic event. Bring it home intact. Bring your team home intact. Westonglappa cannot afford a heroic failure."
The shelter complex sat inland, a converted civic facility reinforced into an armored intake grid, and the convoy to it moved in measured silence—no sirens, no dramatic lights, only sealed vehicles and predictable spacing. The first contact did not arrive as gunfire. It arrived as disagreement. A corridor sign displayed one arrow on a fixed board and a different arrow on a handheld device. A checkpoint stamp verified correctly for one intake lane and returned an override error for another. A door cycle lagged by two seconds, then five. Lunarpuff did not raise her voice. She stepped into the lane, palms open, and her Lunar presence cooled the crowd's breathing the way night cools a fever. "Pairs," she instructed, steady and repetitive, making discipline feel like comfort. "Two by two. Eyes forward. Do not chase sound." Solarstride watched the human flow first, because a corridor that collapses is a battlefield the enemy wins for free. When the lights dimmed and a service door opened into a route that should not have existed, he did not surge. He spoke into his team's comms like an engineer speaking to a machine. "Mark the false path. Lock it without heat bloom. Do not push bodies." His Solar aura tightened into a controlled band—warm enough to sharpen visibility, restrained enough not to spike fear—and the corridor snapped back into legibility. From a shadowed mezzanine, a figure watched without speaking. A brief caption flickered on a small projector in the darkness, more symbol than sentence: a crosshair icon, then a clock. Lunarpuff's eyes narrowed. "Shadow," she said. Solarstride's reply was flat. "I know. They want me to swing."
The package waited in a sealed room under joint custody, not glamorous, not mystical: a hardened case with a verification wafer and a manifest fragment, the sort of object that turns rumors into evidence and evidence into policy. Beside it sat the human half of the objective, a Westonglappa civic authority pulled out of an earlier capture cycle—alive, sedated, and marked for later exploitation. Solarstride's jaw tightened when he saw the tag classification; it was the kind of label BRD used when it planned to weaponize a person's credibility. He did not touch the prisoner first. He touched the case, confirming the seal with disciplined care. "This is not cargo," he said to Lunarpuff. "This is continuity." Lunarpuff's gaze stayed on the door. "Then you will move it like continuity," she answered. "No ego. No spectacle." A new voice cut into the comms with calm steel: Starbeam. "Solarstride," he said, clipped and precise. "Bounded authority applies. You do not widen the operation to chase contacts. You are a courier under fire. If you break the doctrine, BRD wins even if you survive." Solarstride's response carried heat without anger. "Understood. I will not gift them the story they want."
They moved the prisoner and the case into an armored car, and the next phase began with a choice that felt mundane until it became lethal: rail transit. Air lanes were too visible. Sea lanes were too contested without a clean handoff. Rail offered the one advantage BRD hated—predictable movement under controlled verification rings. The train yard was sealed, the platform cleared, the carriage assigned with a sterile perimeter, and the route confirmed by Star verification architecture that made permissions local and perishable. Shadow tried to break that advantage with theater built from bureaucracy. A false boarding announcement played over a secondary speaker. A platform display blinked to a different track number. A maintenance gate unlocked itself as if an official hand had done it. Solarstride did not bark orders. He walked to the platform edge and stared at the signage the way a commander stares at an enemy formation. "They are attempting to move us without moving us," he said. "That is the trick." He turned to his escort lead. "Nobody follows audio. Nobody follows a screen. We follow the stamped route we confirmed with our own eyes." Lunarpuff stepped closer, voice low. "If the crowd sees confusion, it becomes contagion." Solarstride nodded once. "Then we will not let confusion be visible."
The ambush on the rail line came as a sealed-door event. The carriage lights flickered. A side hatch locked. A service spur opened ahead like an invitation. For one breathless moment, the train's own safety logic became a cage, and Solarstride felt the enemy's intention clearly: consume minutes, isolate the package, force a desperate breach that would look violent on camera. He pressed his palm to the door seam and bled Solar heat into it with surgical restraint—no explosion, no flash, only a softened latch and a controlled release. "We do not detonate our own corridor," he said through clenched teeth. "We correct it." A shadow moved at the far end of the carriage, silent as a thought. Lunarpuff raised her hand, Lunar chill spreading like a barrier of calm, and the forced-labor crew in the adjacent compartment—people BRD had placed to weaponize moral hesitation—stopped shifting toward panic. The Shadow cell's projector flashed again, brief and cold: "WAIT." Solarstride understood the message. They were buying time for the next predator.
The air interception began at dawn's edge, when fog thinned just enough for rotor silhouettes to appear above the rail corridor. Blackened aircraft came in not to destroy the train, but to threaten the escort screen around it—forcing the defenders to choose between protecting civilians along the line and protecting the continuity package inside the moving carriage. A voice cracked onto open-band comms with swagger sharpened into insult. "Solarstride," Blackendale drawled, as if he were greeting an old rival at a club door. "Man, look at you. Haulin' paperwork like it's a crown. You really gonna tell me you ain't wanna throw hands?" Solarstride kept his reply short and professional. "You are attempting to bait a pursuit failure." Blackendale laughed. "I'm attemptin' to make you honest." Helicopters swept low, and a pair of drones peeled off toward a civilian freight spur—pure pressure theater meant to fracture attention. Solarstride's instincts screamed to strike hard, to burn the sky clean, to end the harassment decisively. Instead, he chose discipline as a weapon. He released a directed heat mirage—an optical distortion that blinded weapon targeting without igniting fuel or raining debris. The drones veered, lost their lock, and the helicopters pulled higher to recover sightlines. It was not a kill. It was a denial. Lunarpuff exhaled once, relief tight in her throat. "You held," she said. Solarstride's eyes stayed on the horizon. "If I break the sky with pride," he answered, "they win the ground with rumor."
The handoff point was maritime, not because sea was safe, but because sea was where BRD's loop became real: offshore consolidation, transfer platforms, and colossal ships waiting like moving fortresses. Westonglappa patrol craft held a disciplined screen, and the transfer platform itself looked almost civilian—industrial, functional, the kind of structure people forget is strategic until it burns. Solarstride boarded with his team and kept the engagement contained, refusing to widen the fight into open water. The case moved first. The captive moved second. The escorts moved last, because procedure mattered more than pride.
Then the Death Regime taxed the clock.
A sterile canister activated somewhere below deck. Hazmat alarms triggered with polite tones that sounded absurdly calm for something designed to consume minutes. Doors sealed under procedural safety rules. Ventilation switched to containment mode. The platform's own systems began enforcing a lockdown that did not care which side was righteous. A containment elite emerged in pale, clinical gear, posture rigid, voice flat. "Contamination classification initiated," the figure said. "Movement is now a violation." Solarstride's fists tightened. "You are weaponizing safety law," he said. The containment elite did not deny it. "Safety is always law," the figure replied. "Law is always time." Blackendale's voice returned, closer now, amused. "Aww, look at that," he said. "The platform doin' my work for me." Solarstride felt the decisive point settle into his chest with the weight of command: he could attempt to take everything and risk getting trapped, or he could take what mattered most and preserve the screen.
He chose partial success with the professionalism of someone who understood the real victory condition. The captive came with him. The sealed manifest came with him. From the hardened case, he extracted a core verification wafer—small enough to hold in one gloved hand, heavy enough to change how AES classified the next windows. He left the larger crate behind when the containment timers tightened and the naval screen's risk curve spiked, because losing the screen would turn an operation into a disaster that civilians would pay for. Lunarpuff covered the human geometry as they withdrew, keeping the forced-labor crew calm and moving in pairs even as alarms tried to make the platform feel like a tomb. "Keep walking," she told them, voice steady. "You are not the weapon. You are the reason we refuse chaos."
They returned through the Westonglappa screen without a chase, without a victory lap, without feeding the enemy footage that could be edited into panic. In Orinvalde Crowncity, Brinewatch immediately quarantined the rescued civic authority's credentials, issued replacement chains, and prevented BRD from using the hostage as a legitimacy knife. Solarstride delivered the sealed manifest fragment to Starbeam's verification cell, and the decode completed quickly enough to feel like a punch rather than a revelation. It was not a single target list. It was a rotation tree, adaptive and cruel, swapping not only continents but domains—power, medical, finance, broadcast, transport, civic authority—each window tuned to punish whichever defense posture had been strongest in the prior interval. Beneath that sat an escalation category that clarified the next phase with quiet brutality: Supreme Commanders and continuity operators were now priority targets, not because killing them was always possible, but because baiting them into pursuit errors was repeatable.
Solarstride read the final line twice. "They are not only trying to hurt cities," he said, voice low. "They are trying to break the people who keep cities governable." Starbeam's reply was immediate, cold, and controlled. "Then we reorganize around survivability. We stop treating Supreme Commanders as hammers and start treating them as protected instruments." Lunarpuff's hands clenched at her sides. "And we do not let civilians become the leverage that forces bad choices." Brinewatch did not soften the truth. "You brought back enough to change tomorrow," she said. "But tomorrow is already moving."
The board flashed again before anyone could pretend the room had time. A Solar substation went intermittent. A Lunar corridor camera blinked. A Star audit ring flagged clustered transfers. A Galaxy broadcast relay registered signal stress. All within the same minute, across different theaters, tight enough to be unmistakable. In the bunker, the silence was not fear. It was professionals recognizing synchronized pressure returning in a new shape, and realizing that the next window had started while they were still finishing the debrief.
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