Starfrancielle staged out of Orinvalde Crowncity with the kind of authority that didn't need a podium. It lived in her kit layout and in the way she made other people's hands behave. In the corridor bay she opened her hard case on a folding table under two cameras aimed at resin lines, not faces, and placed each component in a straight row: offline verifiers, tamper sleeves, hard-light emitters, and a thin stack of paper tokens printed on Orinvalde stock with microtext that could not be copied cleanly on the fly. Starbeam Charmley's latest directive sat on top, not as a speech, as a constraint: recover an injector seed intact, capture one courier alive, and force the enemy's channel-priority behavior to expose itself under stress.
Professor Prince Galaxbeam didn't appear in person. He appeared as coherence. A brief window opened in Starfrancielle's comm bead where static thinned and timestamps aligned like gears.
"Sashax–Leblaela anomaly cluster persists," Galaxbeam said. "Hush half-beat signature consistent. Prompt shape consistent. Rail cabinet serial family repeating."
Starfrancielle's eyes stayed on the table. "Then we stop chasing symptoms."
Elowen Brinewatch stood at the edge of the bay with a ledger in her hand, the President just behind her with the kind of stillness that made a room straighten. Neither of them asked for heroics. They asked for governability.
"We're being asked a public question we cannot answer with hope," Elowen said. "If we keep recovering devices, why do the blinks keep coming?"
Corvin Alderhart's voice landed like a gavel. "Bring me a chain, not a trophy."
Starfrancielle slid a tamper sleeve into her vest pocket and closed the case. "You'll get receipts."
The movement into occupied territory was built as a denial of predictability. She took rail into Sashax's spine near Frostwick, not because it was convenient, because rail corridors enforced discipline by design. The platform was painted in boxes. Hard-light rectangles hovered at each car junction. The escorts moved on a cadence that didn't accelerate when people stared. Starfrancielle treated every threshold like a potential prompt and every prompt like a potential weapon.
"Hands visible," she reminded her team as the doors shut. "No screens without paper."
A Star Ranger answered. "Confirmed."
They disembarked, shifted to armored vehicle, and cut into Hollowbrook under night cloud. The city carried occupation pressure even where maroon banners weren't visible—denial schedules posted like commandments, patrol routes thick enough to make ordinary movement feel like permission theater. Starfrancielle didn't try to "sneak" through it with bravado. She entered with escort geometry, tokens in hand, and the calm confidence of someone who planned to leave before any argument about legitimacy could finish.
A continuity clerk waited in a back office lit by a single lamp, shoulders tight, eyes flicking to the door. The clerk had survived long enough to know what mattered: which rail cabinet work orders were real, which signatures belonged to legitimate maintenance supervisors, and which "urgent overrides" were written in the right cadence but on the wrong stock. Starfrancielle didn't flatter the clerk. She gave them a job and a shelter lane.
"You point," Starfrancielle said. "We move. You don't touch anything."
The clerk swallowed and nodded.
They crossed the state line into Leblaela in a dark convoy that never stayed in the same lane longer than necessary, turning toward Grufshire, then Glerton, toward a rail-side guidance hut squatting beside a transformer yard like a small, ugly heart. The hut looked boring. That was what made it dangerous. Boring is where people stop watching.
Galaxbeam's lattice tightened again. "Window approaches," he said. "Contact probability rising."
Starfrancielle stopped the convoy outside the fence line and built geometry before bullets could build chaos. Hard-light boxes snapped onto the ground: one around the hut threshold, one along the cabinet path, one around the vehicle doors. She placed the continuity clerk inside a shelter lane backed by a bark-plated construct—functional, quiet, a forest entity shaped into a brace that would take a hit without panicking.
"Boxes hold," she said. "No chase. Cabinet is the throat."
Her team repeated it back. The repetition was not for morale. It was for muscle memory.
BRD arrived the way they had been arriving everywhere: not as a single fight, as a synchronized half-hour behavior.
Blackened gunners opened first—short bursts that clipped fence posts and transformer housings, pushing defenders to compress and move. Sparks jumped from metal. Noise hit the nervous system like a shove. Starfrancielle didn't blink at the sound. She watched for the hands it was meant to control.
Shadow operatives followed, visibility bending in small betrayals: a yard lamp dipped, rose, and dipped again; the far corner of the fence line looked closer than it was; a corridor between cabinets seemed to turn wrong by a degree. The air itself felt like it was trying to guide her feet off-box.
A Death courier-technician moved last toward the hut panel, gloves sealed, cross-shaped pupils faintly luminous under the hood, carrying a slim injector shim that looked like a maintenance spacer. The courier's posture was calm enough to be infuriating. Calm was the costume of procedure.
The continuity clerk hissed, "That cabinet—those orders are fake."
Starfrancielle raised one finger. "Stay in lane."
Gunfire intensified. A Blackened burst chewed the dirt in front of a Star Ranger's boot, forcing a half-step backward. Starfrancielle did not correct with yelling. She corrected with geometry. A hard-light bulkhead rose between the shooter's angle and her team, slicing the firing lane into harmless segments. A vine-limbed construct pivoted at the hut threshold and wedged the door open, preventing a slam that could separate her team.
"Hold," she said. "Seal."
The Death courier-technician reached the panel seam and began the attachment. That was the exact moment BRD wanted—the device installed, the team gone, and the next operator-tier blink already seeded for a later prompt.
Starfrancielle moved.
She didn't sprint down the yard like a hero. She advanced inside her own box, hard-light grid underfoot, and extended her hand not toward the screen, toward the seam. Her constructs did the dangerous part. A bark-plated limb rose beside the panel and pinned the courier's forearm gently but immovably against the metal, stopping the tool from finishing its twist. A second vine-limbed brace wrapped around the injector's base like a hand you couldn't shake.
The courier snapped their wrist, trying to slip free. Shadow pressure bent the lamp again, trying to hide the precise point of contact. The Blackened gunners shifted to a tighter burst pattern, trying to force her to flinch away from the seam.
Starfrancielle answered with light that behaved like policy. A hard-light shutter slid over the panel screen, making accidental contact physically impossible, and she spoke in a tone that didn't invite debate.
"Back," she said. "Hands visible."
A Shadow Elite appeared at the edge of the yard as if the darkness had chosen to be a person. They didn't speak. They communicated with posture and slow sign, palm open, then closing like a latch: GIVE. Their head tilted toward the continuity clerk as if to suggest a different kind of leverage.
Starfrancielle didn't grant the Shadow Elite a conversation. She shifted her team's geometry so the clerk was no longer in a direct line, and a construct widened like a living barricade.
The Death courier-technician tried their own leverage: contamination theater. Tracer gel smeared across the panel seam and flicked outward toward Starfrancielle's glove, meant to poison custody and later claim "tamper" on camera. Starfrancielle treated it as a gift.
She flashed a controlled pulse of Star radiance—hot enough to burn the gel away, not hot enough to scorch the panel—and deliberately left the residue pattern visible. She leaned slightly so the press lens Orinvalde had routed to the site could see the char outline, the smear arc, the attempted poison. Proof needed to be visible to ordinary eyes.
"Capture that," she said, not to the camera, to her verifier.
The Star verifier stepped in-box, photographed the seam, the residue, and the injector base. Starfrancielle used a tool to extract the injector without skin contact, dropped it into a tamper case, and heat-imprinted the resin line in full view. She did not look away from the seal while it set. She did not allow the moment to be interpreted later.
"Seal complete," the verifier said.
Starfrancielle double-sleeved it immediately, stamped it again, and handed it to the verifier for two-person custody confirmation. The handoff happened on camera, hands visible, no screen involvement.
Now she took the second objective.
The Death courier-technician recoiled and tried to retreat. A hard-light box snapped around their feet, and vine-limbs braced their knees in place without breaking them. Star Rangers moved in with controlled grips and locked hard-light cuffs at the wrists. The courier's eyes flicked toward the console prompt behind the shutter as if waiting for the moment the world would force somebody to touch it.
Starfrancielle leaned close enough that the courier could hear her over gunfire. "You're alive because you're useful," she said. "You will show us your procedure."
The courier's mouth curled into a small, unfriendly smile.
Gunfire outside surged again. Blackened gunners attempted to reclaim the yard by volume. Shadow operatives bent sightlines to conceal a flanking approach. Starfrancielle's constructs answered by turning the yard into a controlled maze: bark-plated braces blocking doorways, vine-limbs angling rifle barrels upward into useless arcs, and root-anchors stabilizing friendly footing so panic couldn't become a stumble into the wrong panel.
In the middle of it, Galaxbeam opened a coherence window. Starfrancielle used it immediately, transmitting only metadata—timestamps, cabinet serials, seal photos, and the hush half-beat signature as measured by her verifier's audio capture. She did not send the injector's payload. She did not give BRD an opportunity to intercept content. Orinvalde received receipts. Starbeam Charmley received the prompt shape and the channel behavior log.
The courier watched her transmit and stayed smiling, as if the real operation was still ahead.
The escort began to reform for extraction, and that's when the rail hut console blinked again—operator-tier enforcement overlay attempting to centralize authority "for safety," timed to the exact second hands were busy re-lashing doors, moving evidence, and repositioning the convoy. The green confirm pulsed with calm certainty, pretending to help.
Starfrancielle didn't argue with it. She caged it.
Hard-light boxes tightened around the console area. A physical shutter remained over the screen. She ordered the continuity clerk deeper into shelter lanes and kept the prisoner in-box, cuffs visible, posture controlled.
"Hands off green," she said. "We move with paper."
Outside, BRD's half-hour seam was still active. Bullets snapped. Shadows shifted. The yard lights betrayed angles. Yet the injector case remained sealed and visible, the courier alive and cuffed, and Orinvalde's war room was already receiving the proof that would let them answer the public question with something stronger than hope: a chain that showed exactly how the blink was seeded, exactly what prompt shape was used, and exactly which signatures rode the half-beat hush.
Starfrancielle loaded into the armored vehicle with the evidence still in two-person custody and the prisoner secured between hard-light restraints, and as the convoy's tires crossed the fence line, the console's operator-tier prompt pulsed one last time behind the shutter—patient, hungry—reminding her that BRD wasn't trying to win a yard.
They were trying to win the moment a tired human hand reached for relief, and they were willing to start the next half-hour window in the exact second the convoy believed it was already safe.
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