Location: Lunar Boneyard Zone, Sector Theta-2
The desert was quiet.
Ash Vale moved like a shadow beneath the broken spine of what had once been a pre-Fusion War transport highway, long since abandoned and sand-swallowed. His rig's systems were running cold, stealth subroutines layered tight. No emissions. No heat. No signature. It had to be that way now.
He was deep in the Lunar Boneyard Zone—Sector Theta-2. A place scrubbed from most official maps, where the stars were clear, and silence came with a kind of weight.
Safehouse Theta wasn't a house at all. It was a relic, embedded in the crust of old war-torn stone—a repurposed seismic monitoring station from the 2100s, still clinging to the jagged edge of a crater basin. To anyone scanning from above, it would look like tectonic debris.
But as Ash reached the edge of the basin, the passive system in his rig pinged three buried signals. The rock beneath him hummed.
The access shaft cracked open.
He moved quickly. The hatch sealed behind him without sound, and he descended into a chamber lit only by low blue strips and faint, pulse-driven light from Horizon-built infrastructure. It smelled of ozone and recycled air.
He passed a biometric veil, removed his rig's mask, and winced. His shoulder still throbbed from the waste chute landing.
Inside, a bank of holo-panels lit up. A VI presence stabilized as he approached, not quite an AI, but close—Sobeck's people didn't trust anything fully sentient to run comms anymore. Not with what they knew now.
The room wasn't large—bare concrete and metal, with a single cot, medstation, and a datacore nexus spooling quietly in the back.
Ash connected his rig. The data burst that followed was encrypted, fragmented, and riddled with false trails. But the core of it—what he'd seen inside Specter-9—was intact.
The movement in ONI's archives. The anomalies. The inconsistencies in behavioral patterns from their own directors. The psychic bleed artifacts buried in their classified logs.
Something was inside the intelligence structure. And it wasn't human.
He sat back against the wall, breathing heavy. For now, he was safe. Horizon would send someone soon. A contact, a courier, maybe even Sobeck herself if she dared.
But the truth was out.
Location: ONI Operations Command, Luna Secure Sector 9
The lights in the Specter-9 command chamber shifted to red as the system-wide lockdown took effect.
Director Halbek's face was stone-cold, eyes narrowed at the digital readouts streaming across the curved wall of the Situation Room. Code strings, access timestamps, deep system anomaly flags. Too many pings. Too fast. Someone had slipped through.
"He got out," the technician whispered, not realizing her mic was live.
Halbek didn't respond at first. He just turned, walking slowly toward the center of the command floor where Vice Director Kamarov and two internal security leads were already reviewing the breach trail.
"Cut the chatter. I want a clean forensic pass now," Halbek ordered, voice low but sharp. "Confirm how deep he got, what he saw, and where he's gone."
The reply came within seconds.
"Specter-9 infiltration sublevel: compromised. Intelligence core seven accessed—partial copy made. Multiple heuristics detect tampering with Project ISHTAR files, deep-ping records on Black Signal anomalies, and..." The officer hesitated. "...synthetic behavior prediction models tied to psychological influence tags. Some of the data goes back over seventy years."
Halbek's jaw tightened. That meant the Ceph Operative's involvement—its digital fingerprints, however buried—had been seen.
"Was it Vale?" Kamarov asked beside him, already suspecting.
Halbek nodded once. "Yes. And he's off-grid now."
There was a beat of silence as the implications set in. The S-9 vaults were supposed to be unbreachable. No external connections. No uplink ports. Everything hard-locked in air-gapped data environments.
But Ash Vale had gotten out with something. And ONI didn't yet know how much he had copied—or worse, who he was going to show it to.
"We initiate Code Bleach." Halbek's voice dropped to a level only the senior officers could hear.
"Full memory audits. Everyone who even touched that archive gets an intel-psych scrub. Lock down the internal transport grid. Use disinformation if we must—feed a colony crisis narrative to bury the smoke."
"And Vale?" Kamarov asked.
Halbek didn't blink.
"We find him. We erase the trail. And then we erase him."
Far above, orbital surveillance drones adjusted their patterns.
Across Luna, data centers rerouted false access logs.
And in hidden black labs, the ghost of the Ceph operative—long embedded—watched its pawns move into place.
Unknowing. Efficient. Controlled.
The damage was contained... for now.