Sunarcblade was pulled into Orinvalde Crowncity at a time when the war no longer sounded like rifles and sounded instead like a polite interface waiting for a tired thumb. The war room carried its own discipline—lane boxes painted on the floor, thermal plates watching Door Thirteen's seam, sealed trays of procurement requests stacked like ammunition—and President Corvin Alderhart stood over a paper ledger with a metal ruler pinning the page as if gravity itself were a threat vector. Vice President Elowen Brinewatch did not waste his arrival with welcome; she slid the ledger toward him and tapped the margin where the latest spoof attempts had been annotated in tight handwriting, then spoke in the same actionable cadence she used on live camera: the enemy was no longer "damage," it was authority drift, and they would not lose Westonglappa to panic governance or to a calm green button masquerading as safety. Starnoemiara waited just off the podium line, the verified hard-light frame she had built still faintly shimmering behind the press position like a quiet cage for overlays; she gave Sunarcblade one constraint that mattered more than bravado—he was not allowed to win by speed, only by proof—and when Sunarcblade answered he did it with procedure, opening his hard case and laying out heat-imprint seals, thermal plates, and custody sleeves in a straight row, promising a chain-of-custody that would show where the Orinvalde echo entered and which desk, corridor mouth, or repeater was being used as a lever.
They moved him out on a three-leg route designed to deny BRD a single clock to time: first a low-profile aircraft slipped out under radio discipline and landed on a Westonglappa forward strip near Leblaela's perimeter, where Solar perimeter runners kept orange radiance tight and Star verification attendants forced every step into a painted box before anyone crossed a threshold; then a rail segment carried him deeper along a spine that still ran under escort doctrine, a moving corridor built from hard-light rectangles and a standing rule that nobody touched a prompt without a paper token and a second verifier; finally an armored vehicle delivered him to an industrial seam at the Leblaela boundary where Darkwing's occupation pressure could be felt even without seeing maroon banners—denial schedules that made delays look like policy, patrol mass that made waiting feel like confession, and checkpoints that treated "permission" as a performance. Starradale met him there with no ceremony and no warmth, pointing at a map seam with a gloved finger and speaking in short commands that held up under gunfire: the boats could be caught, the repeaters could be jammed, but the hand—the human workflow that pressed green—had to be proven, and proven in a way a press lens could understand without interpretation. Sunarcblade answered by turning the room into an evidence factory: thermal plates went down at the logistics desk and corridor mouth to record footfalls and touch angles, heat-imprint seals were set on the day's most "perfect" procurement packets so any swap would leave a visible scar, and custody sleeves were numbered, photographed, and stamped in a rhythm that did not change when voices rose.
BRD tried to convert that discipline into a moral dilemma the moment it began to work. A "helpful" bulletin landed in the node, formatted in Orinvalde cadence, telling local operators to centralize authority "for safety," and within minutes an OPERATOR TIER enforcement overlay bloomed across the dispatch console with a bright green confirm pulsing like relief. The staff were exhausted, their eyes flicking between the console and the doorway where Darkened pressure had taught them that hesitation could be punished, and Sunarcblade watched hands drift toward the button with the same inevitability as a falling object. He didn't argue; he stepped between hands and screen and laid the physical token on the desk where everyone could see it, then heat-imprinted the tamper line with a controlled Solar pulse that captured his print and the clerk's print into resin—proof that a human had chosen paper authority over a prompt. Starnoemiara's hard-light box snapped into place around the console area, pinning feet into defined rectangles so panic could not become motion, and when gunfire cracked outside—short controlled bursts meant to pull guards away from the desk—Starradale's voice stayed flat in the comms, refusing the bait: "Hold your box. Don't chase." Sunarcblade used Solar power like infrastructure rather than spectacle, micro-welding the desk drawers shut with molten seams so no one could swap the forged packet mid-confusion, then sliding the evidence sleeves into the camera's line of sight as a local press lens—deliberately positioned by AES—captured hands, seals, timing calls, and the fact that nobody touched green.
Leadership voices came in like anchors, not speeches. Corvin's channel cut through with a single refusal: do not centralize, maintain local governability. Elowen followed with the only permission that mattered to terrified staff: waiting is compliance. Starbeam Charmley's voice arrived next, a two-code call-and-response exchanged live so anyone listening could hear that the verified channel still existed, still answered on cue, still arrived with the correct timing. BRD pushed back with subtler pressure—an overhead "official" instruction that sounded close enough to confuse, a Death-coded hush that tried to delay corrective audio by a fraction of a beat, a Shadow operator appearing in a doorway and communicating through posture and hand signs to bargain for the evidence packet without saying a word. Sunarcblade didn't respond with rhetoric; he drew a Solar arc along the floor that became a bright lane boundary, a line that lit anyone who crossed it and made every attempt visible and logged, then he gave the simplest command cadence in the room: "Back. Hands visible. Evidence stays sealed." The Shadow operator's hands paused, shifted, and the silence sharpened into threat, but Starnoemiara moved the chain out of reach—Sunarcblade slid the sealed packet into a secondary sleeve, heat-imprinted it again, and transferred it into her custody so no single capture could break the proof.
The extraction turned the whole problem into motion again, because proof only matters if it survives transit. They moved the packet to a coastal point and boarded a fast cutter under night cover, spray hitting the deck like thrown gravel, and out on the water the bombardment horizon flickered in a rhythm that made timing feel alive. The Orinvalde echo adapted as if it could smell the custody transfer; an operator-tier blink hit the cutter's own comm surface, presenting a polite compliance overlay that claimed to "synchronize routing for safety," and the green confirm button pulsed on a maritime console while gunfire snapped from a pursuing skiff in the dark. The moment threatened to split attention—bullets loud, clicks quiet—and Starradale barked the only sentence that mattered: "Hands off green." Starnoemiara's hard-light frame locked the console area into a visible box, and Sunarcblade raised a Solar heat veil over the panel so touching it became physically uncomfortable, forcing everyone back to paper token authority even as the boat bucked in chop. The half-hour window opened fully, the civic backbone blink reached for authority on water and on land at the same time, and the cutter kept running with the evidence sealed and moving—yet the overlay still pulsed behind the heat veil, proving BRD's enforcement package could follow custody across domains, still hunting for the first exhausted hand that would choose relief over proof in a single quiet click.
No comments:
Post a Comment