Sunarken was brought into Orinvalde Crowncity with the kind of urgency that didn't shout. It lived in the way doors opened before hands reached them, in the way escorts were already in place when he stepped off the aircraft ramp, in the way every person he passed kept their palms visible and their feet inside painted boxes as if the floor itself had become policy. Winter cloud pressed low over the strip. The runway lights were dimmed. Nothing about the staging zone looked heroic. It looked governable, and that was the point.
President Corvin Alderhart met him in the outer war-room annex rather than the main chamber, because Orinvalde had learned that rooms were surfaces and surfaces could be targeted. Corvin stood over a paper map pinned with a ruler, not because paper was romantic, because paper didn't blink. Vice President Elowen Brinewatch waited with a ledger open to a page of anomalies—timestamps, cabinet serials, and repetition patterns that formed a message even before anyone spoke it.
"We are not losing Westonglappa to a calm prompt," Corvin said, voice short. "They're seeding the edges."
Elowen slid a photo across the table. It showed the inside of a comm relay cabinet: a small shim that looked like a maintenance spacer, installed too cleanly to be an accident. "This is how the operator-tier blink gets planted," she said. "Not by speeches. By hardware."
Starnoemiara stood slightly behind the podium line, the verified-frame discipline she had built now being repurposed as an evidence discipline. She didn't waste words. She set a sealed sleeve on the table and tapped the resin strip once.
"If you recover anything," she said, "it stays air-gapped and filmed in-hand with seal lines visible. They will claim contamination. They will claim tamper. Your proof has to outrun the accusation."
Sunarken opened his hard case on the table and laid down his own tools like a contract: heat-imprint seals, thermal plates, two tamper cases, and a compact Solar emitter tuned not for blast but for controlled weld and heat curtain. He didn't promise victory. He promised custody.
"I'll bring you the injector intact," he said. "And I'll bring you the hands that carried it."
They moved him out under a three-leg route designed to deny BRD a single clock to time. A low-profile aircraft carried him toward Leblaela's corridor spine. From there he shifted to rail under escort doctrine—hard-light rectangles projected at each junction between cars, lane markers painted on platforms, and a standing rule repeated at every door: no screen prompts without a paper token and a second verifier. Sunarken treated each transition like a test and each test like a trap. He didn't relax on green lights. He waited for the moment something offered him convenience.
The armored convoy that picked him up on the far end moved with deliberate spacing, vehicles staggered to prevent a single burst from collapsing the whole column, escorts rotating positions on a schedule that didn't depend on trust. When they left the rail yard and turned toward the coast, the terrain changed from civic geometry to infrastructure geometry—substations, transformer yards, fence corridors, and cabinets with access panels that looked boring until you realized they were the continent's throat.
The target site was not a capital. It was a grid nerve: a coastal substation feeding emergency comm traffic into nearby nodes, including a small comm hut that relayed "official" updates to local offices and shelters. The fence line was high, the warning signs new, and the technicians on shift looked like people who had been awake for too many half-hour windows. They moved carefully, scanning screens, listening for overlays, waiting for permission to breathe.
Galaxbeam's lattice came through Sunarken's comm bead as a brief coherence window—numbers, not fear.
"Seam approaches," Galaxbeam said. "Anomaly pattern tightening. Contact likely within two minutes."
Sunarken stepped into the yard and immediately enforced geometry. He placed thermal plates at the comm hut door and at the cabinet corridor mouth, because he wanted footfalls logged before anyone claimed innocence. He set lane markers along the access path. A Solar perimeter runner braced at the fence corner, rifle low, eyes wide but disciplined.
Then the half-hour window opened and BRD arrived exactly as predicted: not as an army, as a procedure.
A Blackened ground team appeared first, bursting into view from behind maintenance housings in short, controlled movements. Gunfire snapped—tight bursts aimed at railings and equipment housings to force defenders to compress into bad angles. The goal was not a massacre. It was motion.
A Shadow presence followed, not with screams, with bending—lights flickering wrong, sightlines shortening, a corridor seeming to turn when it shouldn't. The comm hut's exterior lamp dipped, rose, and dipped again like a signal.
A Death courier-technician came last, walking like a person who believed their gloves were more dangerous than their weapon. The technician moved toward the comm relay cabinet with a slim injector shim held between two fingers, posture calm, eyes focused on the panel seam. If they could attach it and leave, the next "official" blink would not merely imitate Orinvalde. It would imitate verification.
Sunarken refused to chase the gunfire. He kept his eyes on the cabinet.
"Hold lanes," he ordered, voice clipped. "Cabinet is the throat."
A Solar heat curtain rose along the fence line—bright, controlled, not an explosion. The curtain didn't burn the yard. It denied flanking movement by making the side corridor physically uncomfortable to enter. Blackened shooters tried to angle around it and found the air itself pushing them back. They adjusted and kept firing, but their lanes narrowed.
Star verification support arrived on Sunarken's left, hard-light boxes snapping onto the ground around the comm hut and the cabinet corridor, forcing all friendly feet into defined rectangles. A Star verifier raised an offline device, not to "solve" anything, to refuse being solved by a prompt.
"Hands visible," the verifier called. "No green!"
Inside the cabinet corridor, the Death courier-technician reached the panel seam and began the attachment. The injector looked like a spacer. That was the cruelty of it. You could miss it even while staring at it.
Sunarken stepped forward and used Solar power like an engineer. He didn't blast the technician. He flashed the panel with a narrow solar flare that heated the metal just enough to expose the seam and the foreign material—resin reacting, micro-adhesive shining, the injector's edge revealing itself like a lie under a spotlight.
"Got you," Sunarken murmured, and then he moved.
A Shadow operative tried to turn the corridor into a blind seam, bending the light around Sunarken's shoulders, making distance feel wrong. Sunarken answered by making light physical. He projected a thin Solar line along the floor—an illuminated boundary that turned the corridor into a lane. Anyone who crossed it was lit. Anyone who tried to hide became visible in the wrong place.
The Death technician attempted contamination theater at the same time, smearing tracer gel across the panel edge and flicking it toward Sunarken's gloves, trying to poison custody with a single touch. Sunarken didn't recoil. He treated the gel as evidence.
He raised his palm and burned the tracer clean off with a controlled Solar pulse that left a visible residue pattern on the panel—charred in a precise outline, like a fingerprint you could photograph. He didn't wipe it. He let it remain, because residue was a witness.
Gunfire outside intensified. Blackened gunners angled a burst toward the cabinet corridor to force Sunarken to flinch and back away from the seam. Hard-light bulkheads from the Star verifier snapped into place at the corridor mouth, transparent walls cutting the firing lanes into harmless angles. A Solar perimeter runner returned fire in short bursts only when a muzzle presented itself cleanly, refusing to spray.
"Don't chase," Sunarken called. "Keep box."
In the corridor, he made the key decision: he would not fight for the panel with his hands. He would lock the evidence in place first.
He pressed the Solar emitter to the cabinet seam and welded the panel shut in a fast, controlled arc—metal glowing, then cooling, leaving a sealed line that could not be opened casually, could not be swapped mid-chaos. The injector was now trapped inside with the evidence of its attachment. The cabinet became an evidence locker rather than a target.
The Death technician lunged, trying to pull the injector back before it was entombed. Sunarken shifted his stance and used heat as boundary, radiance flaring around his forearms in a way that made proximity painful without being indiscriminate. The technician hissed and recoiled, gloves smoking at the edges. Shadow movement flickered in the periphery, a silent attempt to slip behind and grab the tamper case on Sunarken's vest.
Sunarken didn't look back. He moved custody forward.
"Camera," he said.
A local press lens—routed to the site deliberately by Orinvalde's staff—tilted toward his hands. Sunarken drew the welded seam into frame, pointed to the residue pattern from the tracer gel, then brought out a secondary tamper case and held it open in view.
He cut the cabinet's service hatch, extracted the injector with a tool instead of fingers, and dropped it into the case without skin contact. The Star verifier read the injector's micro-etching aloud—serial, timestamp, a signature mark that identified its build profile. Sunarken repeated it, then heat-imprinted the tamper line on the case in full view of the camera, leaving a Solar signature that was visible, photographable, and difficult to fake in the moment.
"Sealed," Sunarken said.
The Death technician's pupils flared, cross-shaped eyes narrowing in rage, and the corridor pressure tightened—hush timing trying to distort the shouted "don't touch it" commands outside. Sunarken didn't shout into it. He reduced language to the minimum that moved behavior.
"Back. Hands visible."
A Shadow Elite appeared at the corridor mouth, posture angled, hands moving in a slow sign that read as demand more than speech: GIVE. The Shadow's presence was oppressive not because it screamed, because it didn't. It was a silent claim on the evidence.
Sunarken answered with motion rather than argument. He slid the sealed case into a second sleeve, heat-imprinted it again, and transferred it to the Star verifier's custody with a two-person confirmation that the press lens could see. Chain-of-custody split, doubled, protected.
Outside, Lunar med teams arrived and did the most important work in any infrastructure skirmish: they kept technicians from panicking. They moved people into shelter lanes, checked for shock, stabilized breathing, and kept the yard from becoming a crowd that would later blame "AES control" for their fear. The civilians did not become a weapon because Lunar hands kept them human.
Sunarken used the coherence window Galaxbeam provided to transmit only what mattered and only what could not be exploited: seal photos, cabinet serial numbers, exact timestamps of when the seeding team touched the panel seam, and the hush signature pattern observed in the corridor. Orinvalde received receipts instead of rumors. Starbeam Charmley received the injector's micro-etching and the residue pattern images. Elowen's ledger gained proof.
BRD tried to salvage the window with a second-layer attack. The comm hut screen blinked alive with an operator-tier overlay, calm and authoritative, attempting to centralize authority "for safety" while the yard was under fire. The green button pulsed like relief.
The technicians inside the hut stared. Exhaustion pulled their hands forward.
Sunarken stepped into the doorway and raised a Solar heat veil across the console surface—not a blast, a discomfort boundary that made touching the panel feel like touching a stove. The Star verifier boxed the console area with hard-light rectangles, forcing feet into place. A Lunar medic touched a technician's shoulder and spoke quietly, anchoring them.
Elowen's voice cut through the comm channel, short and actionable. "Waiting is compliance."
Corvin followed. "Do not centralize. Maintain local governability."
Sunarken held the line while gunfire snapped against hard-light and heat curtain, while Shadow sightline bends tried to unmake boxes, while Death hush timing tried to make commands arrive late. The yard stayed disciplined because Sunarken made rules physical: lanes that lit trespass, heat that punished reaching, welds that trapped evidence, seals that proved custody.
When the half-hour seam ended, BRD withdrew the way they always withdrew—fast, clean, leaving fatigue behind like a residue. Their seeding team retreated into the coastal fog, Blackened shooters walking backward under cover fire, Shadow presence folding away into absence, Death courier-technician vanishing with the calm of someone who believed the next window would be enough.
Sunarken did not chase them into the dark.
He walked the sealed case back toward the convoy with hands visible and escorts bracketing his lanes, the press lens still catching resin lines and imprint marks as if they were the only honest language left. Behind him, the comm hut screen remained boxed and untouchable. Ahead of him, Orinvalde's war room would receive an injector that was proof rather than rumor. Yet as they loaded into the armored vehicle, the console pinged again—another polite operator-tier prompt arriving early, hungry for a click—proving the seeding effort had been synchronized across more than one cabinet, and that the next half-hour window would not be satisfied with hardware.
It would reach for authority itself, and it would do it the moment the convoy's tires left the substation's painted lanes and entered the world where fear wanted to move faster than proof.
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