Starnoemiara entered Orinvalde Crowncity the way Starbeam Charmley trained his people to enter any threatened node: with proof already in hand and with no expectation that a screen would behave.
Her aircraft touched down at Orinvalde's west strip under a low ceiling of winter cloud. The runway lights were muted, the hangars closed, and every vehicle on the tarmac moved inside painted lanes with escorts spaced like geometry, not like bravado. She stepped down the ramp wearing a plain field coat, hard case in her left hand, and a sealed sleeve tucked under her arm. Green radiance stayed dormant beneath her skin, ready to flare but not wasted on arrival.
A Solar perimeter runner met her and didn't offer pleasantries. He offered a route token.
"War room access," he said. "Door Thirteen corridor is hot-laned. You will walk in box."
Starnoemiara took the token, read the checksum aloud, and watched the runner's mouth shape match her digits.
"Confirm second verifier," she said.
A Star verification attendant stepped forward with an offline device. Two scans, one token, one sleeve seal. The digits matched. The attendant's tone stayed flat.
"Clear."
Starnoemiara pressed her thumb into the tamper line on the token sleeve and heat-set it with a brief hard-light pulse that left a visible imprint pattern—a Star signature that could be photographed later without anyone needing to "trust her face." Then she followed the escort vehicle through Orinvalde's administrative district, past sandbagged civic entrances and shuttered glass corridors where staff moved in timed shifts like a heartbeat that refused to race.
The war room sat behind layered corridors and quiet doors. Door Thirteen was not decorative. It was a sentence. Thermal plates lay on the floor in a staggered path leading to it, and guards stood outside its seam with rifles angled in a posture that said "we will not be pulled into your tempo."
President Corvin Alderhart and Vice President Elowen Brinewatch were already standing when Starnoemiara arrived. Corvin's ledger sat open on the table with a metal ruler pinning the page. Elowen had three devices aligned in front of her and a mechanical watch that did not care what the network claimed time was.
Starnoemiara did not salute. She placed her hard case on the table, opened it, and laid out components as if she were setting up a surgical field: two compact hard-light emitters, a collapsible frame, an optical filter strip, and a stack of adhesive lane markers.
"Starbeam Charmley's directive," she said. "We make the briefing un-spoofable on camera. We turn the room into proof."
Corvin's gaze held steady. "We're not chasing theater."
"You're not," Starnoemiara replied. "They are. I'm removing their stage."
Elowen's voice was precise. "What do you need?"
Starnoemiara's answer was procedural, not personal. "One wall. One camera angle. One fixed frame. No auxiliary screens in shot. Any system overlay must land outside the frame so the audience can see it's an intrusion."
A comms aide hesitated. "The wall display is our map."
Starnoemiara turned her head slightly. "Maps are useful. Maps are also mouths. We don't let mouths sit behind leaders."
Corvin didn't argue. He gestured once. "Do it."
Starnoemiara moved with quick economy. She positioned the collapsible frame behind the press podium, not touching the podium itself, and expanded it until it formed a rectangle slightly larger than Corvin and Elowen standing shoulder-to-shoulder. She anchored its corners to the floor with adhesive markers that bonded to the tile. Then she powered the emitters.
A thin hard-light plane shimmered into existence inside the rectangle—almost invisible unless you looked for it. The plane wasn't meant to block bullets. It was meant to block overlays. It acted like a light gate: only what was physically inside the rectangle would render clean on camera. Any hostile prompt projected onto the wall behind would appear distorted, skewed at the edges, visibly "outside" the verified frame.
She pointed at the floor. "Box discipline. Leaders stand inside the rectangle. Staff stay out. No one touches wall controls during live."
Elowen's mouth tightened in approval. "Simple."
"Repeatable," Starnoemiara replied.
She added a second layer: call-and-response voice verification. She handed Elowen a sealed strip with a printed code and a matching strip to Corvin.
"If the broadcast is challenged," Starnoemiara said, "you issue the code. Starbeam Charmley's secure channel answers. Citizens hear a response they can repeat. You win the 'which voice is real' fight with a pattern no splice can predict in the moment."
Corvin glanced at the strip. "We keep it short."
Starnoemiara nodded. "Short and ugly. Nothing poetic."
The producer entered with a headset half on, eyes strained. "We're live in four."
Elowen looked to Corvin. Corvin looked to Starnoemiara once, not for permission, for confirmation that the trap was armed.
Starnoemiara's tone stayed even. "Frame is active. No green. No wall. Paper anchors in shot."
Elowen stepped to the podium with the mechanical watch visible on her wrist. Corvin placed the ledger on the podium shelf so the camera could see it. They stood inside Starnoemiara's rectangle, and the hard-light plane tightened the image around them, turning the world outside into a slightly dimmer periphery.
The red tally light on the camera blinked on.
Elowen spoke first, voice calm enough to be trusted and sharp enough to move behavior.
"Westonglappa nodes," she said, "we are not centralizing authority. Maintain escort doctrine. Maintain physical tokens. If you receive an 'operator-tier' prompt demanding confirmation for centralization, do not press it. Stop in the marked box and wait for verified instruction."
Corvin followed, keeping his phrases short. "We will publish a verified auditable update with a new checksum. Match it. Move only on match."
The hard-light frame held them in a clean image. Behind them, the wall display still showed the Westonglappa map, but it sat outside the verified rectangle and didn't dominate the shot. The public saw two leaders in a controlled frame holding paper proof. It looked like governance.
Then BRD attempted to make it look like theater.
The wall display blinked.
A system overlay tried to appear, huge, clean, and terrifyingly calm:
OPERATOR TIER — POLICY ENFORCEMENT
CONFIRM AUTHORITY TO CENTRALIZE ROUTING
A green button pulsed beneath it, bright enough to pull the eye.
The frame did its work. The overlay rendered outside the verified rectangle, skewed and warped at the edges like a reflection in broken glass. On camera, it looked wrong. It looked like an intrusion rather than an instruction. The audience could see it attempting to climb into the shot and failing.
Elowen did not turn around. Corvin did not glance back. Their refusal to react was part of the weapon.
Starnoemiara stood off-camera and lifted one hand. The Star verification runner in the room obeyed instantly, projecting lane boxes around the console area and forcing staff into defined positions. No wandering bodies. No hands drifting toward green.
"Hands visible," the runner called, voice firm, not loud.
The producer's whisper came through the control room mic. "The audience can see the intrusion."
Starnoemiara answered without looking up. "Good. Keep rolling."
Elowen kept speaking, voice steady over the blink. "That screen is not us. You are seeing an intrusion attempt. Do not comply. Default to physical tokens and escorts."
Corvin added, "Waiting is compliance."
In the war room, a junior analyst's throat bobbed. The analyst's eyes kept darting to the green button on the wall overlay as if it were a snake.
Starnoemiara walked to the analyst and spoke low, close enough to cut through adrenaline. "Do not fix it. We log it."
She handed the analyst an evidence sleeve. "Photograph the checksum string on the overlay footer. Do not touch the console."
The analyst swallowed. "Yes, ma'am."
The camera stayed live. The public saw the leaders refuse the bait. They saw the intrusion sitting outside the verified frame like a parasite failing to bite.
BRD changed tactics mid-stream. A calm voice suddenly played through the war room's overhead speakers, smooth and convincing, attempting to wear Corvin's cadence.
"All nodes," the voice said, "centralize authority now. Confirm for safety."
The sentence was short, correct-sounding, and murderous.
Starnoemiara didn't flinch. She moved to the podium's side and tapped Elowen's sealed strip once, the signal.
Elowen looked down at her code and spoke it into the mic. "CROWN-FOUR."
A beat of silence. Then a second voice arrived through the secure channel, crisp and unmistakably not the same source as the overhead speakers.
"STAR-LANE," Starbeam Charmley replied, his tone surgical. "Verified."
Corvin added the matching second code without missing rhythm. "EMBER-TWO."
"LOCK-TRUE," Starbeam answered immediately. "Verified."
The overhead "Corvin voice" attempted to speak again, but it now sounded like an imitation standing next to the real thing. The room heard the difference in timing, in channel quality, in the way the responses arrived on cue rather than smeared by a splice.
Elowen leaned slightly toward the mic. "You just heard verification. Follow the verified voice. Not the overhead."
Corvin's gaze stayed forward. "Continue local governability. Do not surrender your routes to a prompt."
Off-camera, Sunaegis watched the thermal plates near Door Thirteen. Two sets of footprints approached the seam, paused, then retreated. Someone outside had been listening for panic and didn't hear it. That retreat was a victory you could not cheer for. It was just one more avoided collapse.
The wall overlay refreshed again, impatient now. A new line appeared beneath OPERATOR TIER:
CONTINUITY AUTHORITY TARGETED — IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED
The green button pulsed harder. The half-hour window had shifted from a bluff to a grab.
Starnoemiara's fingers tightened on the edge of her hard case. "They're trying to draft your signature live," she said quietly to the Star runner.
The runner's reply was a short command. "Lock the console lane."
Hard-light bars slid into place around the console area, turning the space into a cage where any approach would be visible and logged. The analyst finished photographing the overlay footer and placed the evidence into a sleeve, sealing it with shaking hands. Starnoemiara heat-imprinted the seal with a quick pulse, locking custody into something the system could not argue away later.
Elowen ended the live segment the way she began it: with action, not comfort.
"Nodes," she said, "if your screens blink right now, stop. Box. Verify. Wait. We will publish the correct checksum through verified channels."
The producer cut the stream.
In the instant after the red tally light died, the war room's tension didn't vanish. It condensed. Everyone turned their eyes toward the wall overlay again, because the audience was gone and the decision was still there.
The green button pulsed.
Starnoemiara stepped forward and placed her body between the console and the nearest hands, using herself as a physical policy.
"No one touches it," she said. "We let it scream outside the frame. We keep governance inside."
Outside, distant bombardment flickered on the horizon like lightning. Somewhere in occupied Leblaela, someone stared at their own operator-tier prompt and wanted relief. Somewhere in Sashax, a strike team moved under Darkwing's maroon pressure, waiting for the moment a node surrendered.
In Orinvalde's war room, the civic backbone blink pressed against authority again—harder, closer, more personal—trying to make a disciplined room choose speed over proof in a single, quiet click.
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