# THE OUTER BANDS 2: THE WEB SERIES
## VOLUME ONE
### EPISODE III — CHAOS ENGINE
---
## WAR RESUMES
Band 5 is alive with violence.
Not strategic violence.
Desperate violence.
Pirate Swarms tearing into Corporate freight chains.
Corporate Authority deploying response cruisers with half-trained crews.
Engineer Clans fortifying asteroid foundries with improvised rail cannons.
Everyone thinks the escalation is human.
It isn't.
Signal distortion spreads through every channel.
Missile locks fail randomly.
Navigation grids drift off by fractional degrees.
Supply convoys misjump by light-hours.
Chaos is increasing.
Not naturally.
Guided.
The Lone Traveller drops from sublight at the edge of Freight Corridor 32-A.
He doesn't transmit warnings.
He doesn't request docking.
He scans.
There.
Three hex-signatures forming in deep vacuum between war fleets.
Not ships.
Not stations.
Growing.
Like scaffolding assembling itself from light.
---
## THE BATTLEFIELD
Corporate cruisers fire broadsides at pirate destroyers.
Bright lances cut across black.
Explosions flare.
Debris scatters.
Then curves.
Shrapnel arcs subtly toward the forming hex-structures.
Metal drawn like filings to a magnet.
The war is feeding construction.
The Traveller dives directly into the crossfire.
Rail rounds slam against his shields.
He ignores them.
Targets the nearest pirate destroyer engine cluster.
Fires plasma cutter at full burn.
The engine ruptures.
The destroyer spins uncontrolled.
Collides with a corporate frigate.
Both ships tear open.
Massive debris field expands.
And the hex-structure absorbs the fragments.
Faster now.
It learns from density.
From kinetic exchange.
From destruction.
The alien lattice begins resolving into a clearer form.
Tall.
Vertical.
A spine forming in space.
---
## LOW BUDGET HEROICS
His shields collapse.
Cockpit sparks.
Warning alarms glitch into silence.
He manually vents heat.
Flips ship into a tumbling drift to avoid lock.
A pirate interceptor clips his hull.
Metal shrieks.
Atmosphere leaks in thin vapor trails.
He seals breach with emergency foam without looking.
Keeps firing.
No speeches.
No rallying cry.
Just mechanical survival.
He opens a wide-band transmission on all frequencies.
One sentence only:
> THEY ARE USING YOUR WAR.
Silence.
Then overlapping screams, accusations, denial.
A corporate commander attempts to target his ship.
Missiles launch.
Mid-flight, they curve.
Not toward him.
Toward the forming alien spine.
They embed perfectly along structural seams.
As if placed.
The spine brightens.
---
## THE REVEAL
The central lattice unfolds.
This one larger than Band 7's ground towers.
A fleet-scale processor.
It emits a harmonic pulse.
Every ship in the corridor experiences it simultaneously.
Crew members freeze mid-command.
Pilots lose spatial orientation.
Targeting systems align automatically to mathematically optimal conflict zones.
The alien does not fire weapons.
It corrects inefficiencies.
Pirate ships are subtly nudged into flanking formations.
Corporate cruisers adjust spacing by micro-thruster bursts.
Engineer defense platforms recalibrate firing arcs.
The war becomes efficient.
Casualties spike.
Construction accelerates.
The Traveller locks onto the central node.
He sees something new inside its lattice.
Human silhouettes.
Smaller than before.
Integrated mid-growth.
Recently transferred.
Band 7 was only the beginning.
Band 5 is active harvesting.
---
## BOARDING THE IMPOSSIBLE
He angles straight at the spine.
Full thrust.
Hull temperature red.
No shield.
No escort.
Rail rounds pepper his ship from both factions.
He reaches the lattice surface.
Mag clamps engage.
He exits into vacuum with tether line.
The surface is solid.
Warm.
Vibrating.
He plants industrial charges along a visible seam.
Primitive.
Manual.
Low-tech.
Alien filaments probe outward.
Touch his suit.
Test material.
He shoots them off one by one.
They regrow faster.
Inside his helmet—
A signal overlays vision.
Not audio.
Images.
War scenarios branching infinitely.
Each branch optimized.
Each ending with full neural extraction.
Then—
A projection of his father again.
But older.
More integrated.
Voice finally breaks through static.
"…stop fighting the structure…"
Not a plea.
A calculation.
"…you cannot outbuild it…"
The charges finish arming.
He doesn't respond.
He cuts tether.
Kicks off the surface.
Fires thrusters hard.
---
## DETONATION
The industrial charges explode unevenly.
Not cinematic.
Not symmetrical.
One fails.
Two detonate late.
One overperforms.
The lattice fractures asymmetrically.
Structural harmonics destabilize.
Warships nearby experience sudden gravitational slippage.
Ships collide out of formation.
Missiles lose guidance.
The optimized war collapses back into chaos.
The alien spine flickers violently.
Human silhouettes inside glitch.
Some vanish.
Some remain.
The central node tears free from its half-formed base.
Drifts uncontrolled.
For a moment—
It looks vulnerable.
Then smaller lattice shards detach and begin repairing it mid-drift.
Self-correction.
Rapid.
Efficient.
The Traveller's ship barely clears the blast radius.
Shockwave ripples outward.
Half the war fleet destroyed.
Half retreating blindly.
But the alien structure—
Still alive.
Damaged.
Learning.
---
## AFTERMATH
Silence settles over Corridor 32-A.
Wreckage rotates slowly.
Survivor signals blink weakly.
The fractured alien spine drifts deeper into dark space.
Not retreating.
Repositioning.
The Traveller checks long-range scans.
Multiple faint hex-signatures lighting up across Bands 4 and 6.
Simultaneous activation.
They anticipated resistance.
Distributed architecture.
Redundant nodes.
He leans back in the cracked pilot seat.
Blood on his glove.
Hull integrity critical.
His father's voice echoes faint in memory:
> YOU CANNOT OUTBUILD IT.
He studies the debris field.
Metal.
Reactors.
Fleet cores.
Industrial printers.
War debris.
Raw material.
An idea forms.
Not attack.
Not sabotage.
Replication.
If they build with structure—
He will build something unpredictable.
A counter-architecture.
A Chaos Engine.
---
## FINAL FRAME — EPISODE III
Far across the Outer Bands—
Multiple alien spines ignite.
In sync.
War signals spike again as factions blame each other for the corridor disaster.
Conflict intensifies.
Exactly as before.
But now—
One damaged alien node carries a flaw in its lattice.
A flaw shaped like an industrial explosive pattern.
A flaw learned from him.
The harvest continues.
But it is no longer perfect.
---
### END EPISODE III