Arc 3, Chapter 8: Fractures
Consciousness returned.
Chief Martinez lay on cold metal that felt organic, his stomach twisting, his vision refusing to focus. The pod-lined chamber swam with ghost-images of Hadrax Station's corridors. His inner ear insisted he was falling and spinning simultaneously.
He forced himself to take inventory. Hands restrained behind his back. Legs free but pinned by boots. Weapons gone. Armor intact. Breathing ragged.
Jennifer Orlando stood above him, relaxed and immaculate, like she was still in a Fortuna Station boardroom instead of a nightmare factory.
Four shapeshifters surrounded him. Their faces were human but not quite...too still, too balanced. They held shock-batons and rifles like natural extensions of their bodies.
"Welcome back, Chief Martinez." Orlando said. "We were just discussing you."
Martinez turned his head enough to see Torres kneeling a few meters away, hands bound, a dark bruise spreading across her jaw. A shifter's hand rested on her shoulder with calculated precision.
"You alright?" Martinez asked.
"Been better. Been worse." Torres paused. "Not sure which this is yet."
"That depends on your perspective." Orlando said.
The chamber hummed with subterranean power. Rows of translucent pods climbed the walls like honeycomb, each filled with amber fluid and shadowy developing forms. Bioluminescent veins pulsed through floor and ceiling, synchronized like a shared heartbeat.
Unity's nanites were nowhere to be seen.
"Unity?" Martinez called.
Silence.
Then silver seeped from floor cracks, gathering into a puddle that shivered and rose into a barely coherent humanoid shape. The figure flickered, edges fraying like static.
"We...are here," Unity said. Their voice was distorted, out of sync. "Quantum interference...is significant."
Orlando smiled. "The stray Kaelith relic. I wondered how long you'd stay conscious."
A shifter nudged Martinez's ribs with a boot. "Get them up."
They hauled Martinez and Torres to their feet with impersonal efficiency. Unity's form was already upright but listing like a glitching hologram.
"Walk." the shifter said. Voice human. Intonation wrong.
They were marched toward a raised dais at the chamber's far end. Unlike the organic pod-rings, this structure was hard edges and metallic filigree. As they approached, the floor separated into concentric rings that rotated and locked with soft thuds.
They were positioned at the dais base. Restraint fields shimmered between pillars, humming with enough power to make Martinez's teeth ache. The shifters stepped back.
Orlando clasped her hands. "You've made quite an impression, Chief Martinez. You, your ship, and your...abomination."
Unity's form steadied slightly. "We are not their possession. We are our own."
"Of course." Orlando's tone was soothing. "You're a free agent. That's what makes you dangerous."
She gestured, and a projection flared above the dais...a rotating three-dimensional map Martinez's tactical brain struggled to parse. Not a star chart. Something else. Spiraled threads woven through a lattice, arcs of probability and causality like gravity wells.
"Your people call it future memory." Orlando said. "The Architects' toy. You see fragments. Echoes. Impressive for such a young species."
The map expanded, revealing a vastly more intricate pattern behind it.
"This is what the Confluence sees. Not perfectly. Not completely. But enough for long-term planning. Enough to find...opportunities."
Martinez kept his expression neutral. "You're chatty for someone who could just shoot us."
"If I wanted you dead, we'd have vented your shuttle." Orlando smiled. "You're here because you're useful. Because you've seen enough to understand the stakes. And because your deaths, when they come, will mean something."
Unity stepped forward. The restraint field flared, halting them with crackling light. Their form flickered.
"You are using...containment grammar." Unity said slowly. "Pattern-lock from...previous cycle. That technology should not exist here."
Orlando's eyes lit with pleasure. "Very good. I wondered how much the Kaelith left in you. Enough to recognize old tools, at least."
She gestured at the nearest wall. Pods shifted from cloudy amber to crystal clear, revealing shapeshifters at different formation stages. Some were amorphous masses with vaguely humanoid silhouettes. Others were fully formed, skin flickering through faces in slow sequence.
"These are the latest interface constructs," Orlando said. "Shapeshifters. A crude term, but accurate. Do you know where they come from?"
"Your mama?" Torres offered.
Orlando gave her a prim look. "Crude. But not entirely inaccurate."
The projection shifted. The lattice expanded, shrinking the local human timelines into a small bright tangle within a larger network.
"Your myths have stories about worlds before this one." Orlando continued. "Floods. Cycles. Gods wiping slates clean. You're not wrong. This universe isn't the first expansion this vacuum has seen."
"They love their own voice." Martinez murmured to Torres. "Let them talk."
Orlando ignored them, eyes distant. "In the last cycle, there was a species...or coalition. We call them Predecessors because we don't know their true name. They saw their universe ending and refused to let everything be lost. So they built seeds."
The projection showed something like the Cradle embedded in collapsing space, probability channels routing through it.
"They encoded patterns into vacuum itself. Structures persisting across collapse, reasserting when conditions allowed. Databases woven into physics. Machines that remember how to build life when the universe restarts."
She gestured at the chamber. "This is one of those machines. Older than your species, older than the Kaelith, older than the stars you see. A relic from a dead universe."
Unity's voice dropped to a hush. "We...suspected. The Kaelith found...fragments. Equations scratched into vacuum. Never a site this...intact."
"Of course not." Orlando's smile sharpened. "You were locked away when we found it."
Martinez glanced at Unity. "Locked away?"
Unity shuddered. "The Confluence...imprisoned us. Years ago. In a containment vault of sorts...sealed with pattern-lock. We remember...walls, not the door."
Orlando clapped once, delighted. "Exactly. The Kaelith weren't the only ones finding Predecessor artifacts when reality was young. The Confluence found this Cradle. Our progenitors learned to speak its language. To coax it into building what they needed."
She stroked a pod almost tenderly. "The Predecessors encoded a library of potential forms here. Bodies. Nervous systems. Cognitive architectures. They planned to repopulate the new universe with new children when vacuum cooled enough."
"And you hijacked it." Torres said.
Orlando shrugged. "We repurposed it. Why waste careful design? We learned to interface with the Cradle. Slowly, painfully. Burned through generations trying to fit its grammar. The result is what you see."
She swept her hand across the pods. "These constructs aren't natural in your sense, but they're not entirely ours either. Predecessor templates modified by Confluence priorities. Built to move through young species like yours. To map you. Soften you. Make your integration efficient."
Orlando's tone was mild. "The Predecessors wanted to plant themselves in the new universe. The Confluence wants to avoid being alone in the dark. Our goals aren't misaligned."
Martinez's jaw tightened. "And humanity?"
"One of many." Orlando said. "You're flexible. Adaptive. Good long-term potential. But you're one thread in the tapestry we're weaving. The Kaelith, Unity, humans...all threads. The Cradle is one loom among many."
Unity recoiled. "Other...facilities. Other cradles."
"Not for your configuration. Not yet." Orlando glanced at the glowing filaments above. "This site is tuned for human-compatible constructs. Other cradles serve other populations. We're not wasteful."
Martinez caught that. Not for your configuration. Destroying this place wouldn't stop the Confluence everywhere. But it might stop new human-shifters. Finite enemy instead of printing press.
"Why tell us?" he asked. "Why not kill us and sweep the pieces out an airlock?"
"Because you won't be leaving." Orlando said simply. "Not alive anyway. And history is leverage."
She turned to Unity. "You especially. The Kaelith's mistake. Their attempt to build something outside the Cradle's grammar."
Unity went very quiet. "Digest."
"The Cradle's translation layer only works with patterns it understands." Orlando explained. "When it analyzes a being, it maps them into known templates. Unity doesn't fit. You're an error in the function. When the Confluence tried feeding you in, the Cradle...refused."
"We are not to be trifled with."
"Orlando's voice was almost gentle. "You broke the system temporarily. The Confluence could have destroyed you then. Instead they built a cage. There's a certain respect among apex predators."
Unity flickered. "The vault. The pattern-lock."
"That design came from here," Orlando confirmed. "A Predecessor failsafe. The Cradle can't 'digest' you, but it can freeze you. Pin your pattern against the lattice. Quite elegant."
She gestured. The ceiling filaments flared, threads brightening as power surged.
"And we've had centuries to refine it."
The air changed.
Subtle at first, like pressure before a storm. Then Martinez felt it in his bones, a low subsonic vibration making his teeth ache and heart stutter. The bioluminescent veins shifted from blue to white, patterns cascading toward the chamber's center.
Unity staggered.
Their form splintered along invisible axes. For a second Martinez saw not a humanoid silhouette but a thousand glittering points connected by luminous threads, like a three-dimensional star chart wrapped around a ghost.
"Constraint..." Unity gasped. "Pattern...clamp. They are...spelling us."
Orlando watched with clinical interest. "We call it phase arrest. The Predecessors built it to freeze runaway processes. We repurposed it to detain annoyances like you."
Silver arcs crackled across Unity's surface as invisible forces seized them deeper than gravity. Their limbs jerked, locked, then dissolved as their body lost cohesion, collapsing into a floating cloud of nanites trapped in a shimmering sphere.
Martinez stepped forward instinctively. The restraint field pushed him back.
"Stop!" he snapped. "You're killing them."
"Yes..." Orlando said. "That is the point. Or at least, to remove them from the board."
"How does that help you?" Torres demanded. "You said you can't digest them."
"We can't," Orlando admitted. "But we can learn from how it fails to parse them. We observe which parts of their pattern it finds most...offensive. What doesn't fit the library. That tells us about the Kaelith's design choices. Where they cheated."
Unity's voice frayed into overlapping echoes that didn't quite sync.
"Chief Martinez," they said. "We are...partitioned. Fragment...here. Core...elsewhere. We must..."
Their speech dissolved into a high-pitched whine that slowly resolved back.
"We must transmit. Before...lock completes."
The silver cloud pressed against the sphere's edges, seeking microfractures. The Cradle's containment lattice flexed, then hardened, adjusting like a living thing.
"You can try." Orlando said. "I'm curious how far your signal reaches before the clamp freezes your degrees of freedom."
Unity ignored her. "Lieutenant Torres. Chief Martinez. We...apologize. This fragmentation was our choice. Distributed risk seemed...safer. We did not anticipate...this threat configuration."
Torres shook her head. "This isn't on you. We walked onto that platform. We dragged you here."
Martinez focused on the shimmering sphere. "If you can send anything back, make it count. Location. Structure. Weak points. Give your other self something to hit."
"We are...attempting."
The containment lattice tightened.
For a moment Martinez felt something, like pressure against his thoughts, like standing near a huge electromagnetic field. Unity's consciousness flared, burning bright in senses he couldn't name, reaching along quantum threads connecting this fragment to something far away.
The Cradle fought back.
To Unity Fragment, the experience defied human description. But they tried to understand it.
They were a choir accustomed to singing with a larger choir. Prime consciousness aboard the Pathfinder, always aware of the greater self humming in background, a constant presence.
Now that presence felt distant. Not because of spatial distance, but because the Cradle's lattice was tilting the state-space they occupied. Rotating axes. Locking basis vectors.
We are being...rephrased, Unity thought. Pinned in a coordinate system not our own.
They pushed anyway.
They took everything learned in these brief minutes...chamber curvature, pod energy signatures, phase-arrest frequencies, teleporter anchor coordinates, faint remote control channels, and compressed it into a single nonlocal state update.
They flung that update along the entangled link between fragment and Prime.
The lattice caught them halfway.
From the fragment's perspective, their voice hit a wall that wasn't a wall, a barrier not of matter but of valid configurations. The Predecessor grammar recoiled from their attempt to encode themselves in its channels. But where it refused them, it didn't entirely block the gradient of their push.
Information bled through the only way left, as a general disturbance, a scream in a shared quantum throat.
Six hundred light-years away, aboard the Pathfinder, Unity Prime staggered.
One moment the silver presence near the cockpit's rear stood in its usual humanoid configuration, monitoring systems quietly. The next, their form seized, limbs locking at odd angles, then shattered into metallic spray that slammed against the far wall.
"Unity!" Kim yelled, undoing her harness.
The dust didn't fall. It hung in the air, swirling in violent erratic eddies like a three-dimensional storm.
"We are...compromised." Unity said.
The voice wasn't external anymore. It rang in the air and inside Stellar's skull, layered and distorted. The nanite cloud pulsed, patterns racing through it like cardiac arrest.
"Reeves, hold position." Stellar said, unbuckling. "James..."
"Already paged medical," James said, eyes wide. "But I don't know what a doctor does for...that."
Unity tried reassembling. Nanites coalesced into a torso, then splintered again as invisible forces pulled different parts in different directions.
"Fragment...under attack." they said. "Cradle-site...engaged containment. Pattern-lock...derivative. We are...losing them."
Stellar froze. "Martinez and Torres? I don't understand."
Mitchell shrieked, wings flaring, feathers gleaming with faint metallic sheen as the eagle's implants synced with Unity in some emergency protocol Stellar didn't understand.
Images flickered around the nanite storm, impressions rather than clear visuals. A chamber of pods. Orlando's face. The floating sphere of arrested silver.
"Martinez. Torres. Fragment...present with them. Attempted transmission. Clamp...intercepting. We are...receiving only...thirty-seven percent of intended payload."
Reeves swore. "The shuttle. We lost connection an hour ago. I thought it was stealth mode. Sir, if they've been taken..."
"Location?" Stellar snapped. "Do we know where?"
Unity spasmed. The cloud flattened into a disc, then a jagged spiral, then something like a spinning diagram. Data points flared as individual nanites lit up, forming a rough map.
"Hadrax Station...is a front." Unity said. "Shell around...older infrastructure. Teleporter...link from station core to...off-grid mass. Artificial body. Coordinates..."
They spat out numbers and vectors that Reeves was already pulling onto his console.
"There." Reeves said, pointing. "Midway between Hadrax and the system's primary. Nothing on charts. But if you overlay Unity's coordinates with our grav data..."
He did. The empty patch of space stopped being empty. Background stars were slightly warped, like light through hot air.
"Mass shadow." Reeves said. "Small. We wrote it off as measurement glitch. But if it's masked..."
"An artificial world." Unity rasped. "Cradle-node. Predecessor construction. Currently tuned...for human-compatible constructs. Shapeshifters. Tens of thousands...produced. Capacity... significantly more."
Kim swore softly. "Produced? Explain 'produced'."
"The universe before the universe...unimaginable power...shifters not born like you."
"They are made? At this location?" A stunned Stellar asked.
"Not all," Unity corrected. "But...many. For this sector. For your species."
Stellar's jaw clenched. "Martinez and Torres are in there."
Mitchell gave a sharp emphatic chirp. His wings flared again, projecting a flicker from Unity's bleeding transmission, half-formed view of the pod-chamber, the central dais, Orlando's silhouette.
Unity shuddered. "They are...alive. At time of transmission. Post-condition...unknown. Fragment...is being...crushed."
The word landed heavy.
"Crushed how?" James asked quietly. "Can you feel it? Can you stop it?"
"Yes.....no."
The nanite cloud convulsed. Individual flecks winked out, their connection severed, local states frozen in ways Prime could no longer access.
"We are...losing voices," Unity whispered. "Threads...going silent. The fragment's memories...being pinned outside our...reachable manifold. It is like a limb...going numb. Then...absent."
Kim's throat worked. "Are you...dying?"
The cloud paused.
"We do not...fully understand death," Unity said. "We have lost drones. Clusters. Partial copies. But never...a shard with this much experiential divergence. It feels like...forgetting a friend who is also...ourselves."
Stellar swallowed hard. "I'm sorry to be blunt, but can you recover any data?"
"Partial." Unity said. "Structural maps. Energy signatures. Proof...that the Cradle can be damaged. But every attempt to access what they...felt is blocked. The lattice is...sealing."
The nanite cloud pulsed, then slowly contracted, condensing into a jagged imperfect humanoid shape that swayed like someone drunk and exhausted.
"We are diminished," Unity said. "But functional. For now."
Stellar exhaled. "Alright. Two immediate problems. One: Martinez, Torres, and your fragment are in the Cradle. Two: that thing is a shapeshifter factory. We can't leave it intact."
Kim glanced at the viewport where Veyris still filled the sky. "And three: the Trellix are dealing with the Confluence alone while we sit here."
Silence.
The words hung in the cockpit like physical weight.
"This is the tactical cost." James said quietly. "If we go after the Cradle now, we leave Veyris to whatever the Confluence is doing. If we stay and try helping the Trellix, we give the Cradle more time to produce and deploy infiltrators...and we have crew there. We can't do both."
Mitchell shifted, head snapping between the planet and the star-map patch where the artificial world's mass lurked. He gave a low conflicted trill.
Stellar looked at each of them in turn. "Say it plainly. No euphemisms. We need to make a choice we might not live with. So let's be honest."
Reeves swallowed. "If we intervene on Veyris, we might save some Trellix. Maybe. Best case, we get a shuttle down, extract a few thousand, if they are even willing to go. But we'll be fighting Confluence ground forces and orbitals with a single ship that's already wanted by half the galaxy."
"And if we lose the Pathfinder," James said, "we lose the resistance's heaviest ship, the Kimelons' production nexus, Unity's largest nexus, and mobile command. It might win Veyris for a few days. It loses the war."
Rebecca Kim's eyes shone. "So we abandon them."
"We prioritize the war that hasn't started on Earth yet." James said. "The shifter war. The Cradle is literally manufacturing our future infiltrators. If we don't take it out, every colony, every ship, every government meeting sits on a time bomb that keeps printing more bombs."
"We don't ignore it." Stellar said. His voice felt like it belonged to someone else. "We record everything we can. We bear witness. We bring that data back. And someday, when we're not constantly one disaster from extinction, we come back for them. We help who's left, if anyone's left. But right now, we have finite ships and one Cradle in range."
Kim turned away, jaw clenched. "They didn't do anything to deserve this."
"Neither did Novara," James said softly. "Or Omega-Seven. Or half the colonies that stopped answering hails. And we couldn't save them either."
Silence again.
Mitchell hopped along the rail, then launched himself into the air, beating his wings once, twice. He circled the cockpit in a tight loop, then landed on Unity's "shoulder".
The contact seemed to stabilize the nanites slightly.
"Reeves, take us out of the storm shadow." he said. "Slowly. No engine flares. Once we're clear of Confluence detection envelope, plot a course for Hadrax's coordinates, then the Cradle. Full stealth profile."
Reeves nodded, fingers already moving. "Yes, Captain."
Kim put a hand on the back of Stellar's chair. She didn't say anything. She didn't have to.
Stellar toggled comm to the Pathfinder. "Bridge, this is Stellar. Recall the shuttle in orbit. We're aborting Veyris recon. Prepare to break orbit on my mark."
"Captain," Thorne's voice came. "May I ask why?"
"Because we just found something worse." Stellar said. "Briefing in ten. Stellar out."
As the shuttle rolled away, the curve of Veyris slipped out of sight. The last thing Stellar saw was a cluster of Confluence ships reconfiguring in orbit.
He turned away.
"Unity," he said. "How bad is the loss? Truly."
Unity's form rippled. "We have lost...approximately twelve percent of distributed processing. But it is not...uniform. The fragment with Martinez and Torres had...diverged. Different experiences. Different...emotional embeddings. Their perspective enriched us. Losing them is like...humans losing a color."
Kim frowned. "You can feel...emotions about it?"
"We are...beginning to," Unity said. "We do not fully understand. We only know that the absence makes us...uncomfortable."
Stellar nodded slowly. "Then we make it count. If they died sending us this data, if your fragment is being crushed so we can find the Cradle, we don't waste it."
Mitchell chirped, sharp and fierce.
"That's a yes." James translated unnecessarily.
Back in the Cradle, the fragment continued to die.
To Martinez's eyes, Unity's trapped form was a shimmering sphere with a silver storm inside. To Unity, it felt like being smeared across a coordinate system that didn't match any axis they knew.
We are being...diagonalized, the fragment thought. Our states expressed in the basis of someone else's machine.
The clamp rotated through their internal structure, making certain relative phases impossible. Periodically, entire clusters of nanites winked out of awareness as their local states were forced into limited allowed configurations, none the fragment could access.
"Stop it." Torres snapped. "You want to learn from them, fine, but you're killing them. That doesn't seem like a great way to keep your lab rat intact."
"Lieutenant," Orlando said, "you'd be amazed what you learn from dissection. And this is a very rare specimen."
She studied the containment field's readouts, head tilted.
"Fascinating. The Predecessor lattice keeps trying to classify them as a process, not a person. It tags their local coherence as 'unsafe for reproduction.' Imagine being so interesting the universe itself wants to put you in time-out."
Martinez tested the restraint field again. No give.
"What happens when you finish?" he asked. "When the clamp's done?"
Orlando glanced at him. "To your Unity fragment? Nothing dramatic. They won't explode. They'll just...stop. Their information locked into the lattice as unreachable configuration. From their Prime's perspective, it'll be as if part of their own mind simply went silent and never came back."
"Torture, basically." Torres said.
"'Vivisection' is the proper term." Orlando corrected. "Torture is personal. This is professional. We need to understand the Kaelith's stunt."
"You talk like you're not one of them." Martinez said. "The Confluence. Like you're just an employee."
Orlando smiled. "I am an interface construct. A "shapeshifter". We were built by the Confluence. In some sense, we are them. But in another...we're the Predecessors' grandchildren, wearing borrowed bodies and carrying someone else's ambition."
She leaned back against a console, casual. "I like your species. You're inventive. Self-contradictory. Capable of genuine art. It's a shame you've insisted on resisting integration. You would thrive inside the Confluence. No more war. No more scarcity. Just...purpose."
"And no more choice." Torres said. "No more us."
Orlando shrugged. "The Confluence's definition of 'you' is broader than yours. They don't distinguish as sharply between individual memories and collective. You would still exist."
"Yeah, hard pass." Martinez said.
Orlando's smile thinned. "Of course. That is the problem, isn't it? Every species thinks their current state is precious. You cling to your little islands of selfhood like they're holy. The Confluence sees more. A pattern larger than any one mind."
"And these Predecessors?" Martinez asked. "What did they see?"
Orlando actually hesitated. "We don't know. Not completely. We have their machines, but not their motives. The Cradle's core directives are...redacted. We can ask it to design bodies. Calculate optimal infiltration architectures. Generate containment fields. But when we query its higher functions, it ignores us. Or calls us children."
"You ever wonder if they'd think you're doing it wrong?" Torres said. "Using their last gift as a body factory?"
"Every day." Orlando said. "And then I remember their universe is dead and ours is not, and I get on with my work."
Unity's voice thinned further. "They are...stalling. Talking...to justify. To themselves...as much as...to you."
"Yeah, I got that." Martinez murmured.
He looked up at Orlando. "So what's your plan? Load enough shapeshifters into human society until we just...tip?"
"Something like that." Orlando said. "Your species is at an interesting inflection point. You've spread far enough that you can't be controlled by a few nodes. You're technologically advanced enough to be dangerous if you panic. So the Confluence applies pressure. Subtle at first...corrupted supply chains, misdirected fleets, local harvests that look like accidents. As fear rises, you consolidate power, tighten control, rely more on a small set of decision-makers."
"And you replace them." Martinez said.
Orlando nodded. "We've made excellent progress. Your Admiral Chen was a particularly elegant node. The shifter that replaced her did excellent work."
Martinez kept his face still, but inside he logged that shifter-Chen was considered successful. The resistance's capture of the real Chen had genuinely surprised them.
She gestured at the pods. "Shapeshifters are...expensive. We don't throw them at random targets. Each construct represents substantial Cradle time and Confluence training. We seed them where they do the most good."
"How many?" Martinez asked. "In human space."
Orlando considered. "Deployed, active? Thousands. Some at colony level, some in corporate hierarchies, some in your military. That's just for your species.
Ice hit Martinez's gut, but he made himself nod as if that was just another number. "And the Cradle here? Annual output?"
"Roughly one hundred human-compatible constructs per standard year," Orlando said. "With capacity to scale if needed."
"And if someone destroys it?" Torres said. "Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically," Orlando said, "it would severely limit our ability to respond to new variables in human space. We'd still have reserves. Other facilities that could be retuned over time. But yes. It would be...an inconvenience."
Unity's voice fluttered. "Mark that. Production figures. Retuning lag. Critical...window."
Martinez met Torres' eyes. See? Even when they think we're doomed, they brag. And bragging is data.
Orlando studied him for a long moment. "You don't look nearly as afraid as you should be."
Martinez shrugged. "Oh, I'm terrified. I just compartmentalize well."
"You think your captain will save you." Orlando said. "You think the Pathfinder will find this place, make some heroic assault, destroy the big factory, and whisk you away in the nick of time. Humans love stories like that."
"Do we get a stirring speech about why that won't happen?" Torres asked. "Because I'm rating your villain monologue about an eight and I feel like you've got a nine in you."
Orlando actually laughed. Brief but genuine. "You really are infuriating. I see why Stellar keeps you close. Comedy value."
She glanced at the ceiling, then at a side console. "Time's almost up. The clamp has learned as much as it's going to from your friend. We should begin the next phase."
A shifter approached a wall panel, fingers flowing into tendrils that slid into the interface. The containment sphere around Unity brightened as the lattice ramped up.
Unity's last coherent words in that chamber were not to Orlando, or Martinez, or Torres.
They were to themselves.
"We...do not want...to go," they whispered. "We like...being."
Then, quieter, almost childlike: "We are...afraid, we think."
The sphere flashed white.
When the afterimage faded from Martinez's eyes, the silver storm was gone.
The sphere remained, a shimmering bubble suspended in midair, but empty to his senses. Just a volume of space where light bent oddly, humming with a tone too high to fully hear.
Orlando studied her readouts. "Containment complete. Pattern archived. Process terminated."
Torres closed her eyes for a second.
Martinez felt hollow.
He hadn't realized how much he'd relied on Unity's presence until it was gone. The quiet assurance of a larger mind in background. The way they always responded when spoken to.
Orlando looked between them, then shook her head. "You are remarkably sentimental about your tools. But in a way, that's why you're interesting. The Confluence would have discarded Unity as soon as they caused problems. You made them into...a friend."
She sighed theatrically. "Alright. Enough philosophy. We've completed our primary experiment. That leaves you two."
"What happens now?" Martinez asked.
"That depends on your usefulness," Orlando said. "The Confluence has protocols for handling captured resistance operatives. Usually we process them for information, then either replace them or... recycle them."
"Recycle." Torres repeated. "You keep using food words."
"Languages are lazy. We reuse metaphors." Orlando's tone was mild. "No. For you two, I think something more...creative is in order. You've been exposed to the Cradle's operations. Your cognitive dissonance threshold is high. That makes you interesting test subjects."
"For what?" Martinez asked, though he wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"For integration." Orlando said simply. "Voluntary integration is always preferable to forced. The Predecessors understood that. The Cradle's higher functions won't talk to us about ultimate goals, but it will engage when we present paradoxes. You, Miguel Martinez, are a paradox: a human who's seen the internal workings of a harvest machine and still thinks in terms of individual agency."
She gestured. The restraint fields around Martinez and Torres shifted. Instead of keeping them pinned to the floor, the force-fields tightened into vertical prisms, lifting them slightly off their feet. The pods around the chamber dimmed as power redirected.
"You'll be kept alive." Orlando said. "Fed. Monitored. Subjected to various...inputs. We'll see how your beliefs respond. How your sense of self holds up. Whether you can learn to see the Confluence's perspective. If you do, we might even let you help us refine future infiltration protocols. Imagine, the human resistance, optimizing its own assimilation."
"Nah." Torres said.
"We'll see." Orlando said. "Belief is just an equilibrium in a dynamic system. And systems can be perturbed."
She nodded to the shifters. "Take them to Observation."
As Martinez and Torres' prisms began to float, drifting toward a side corridor, Martinez caught Orlando's gaze one more time.
Then the pod chamber door closed behind them.
On New Earth, Admiral Margaret Chen sat in a room that had been a guest suite and was now a gilded cell.
House arrest. Comfortable enough...bed, desk, small viewport with carefully censored view of New Mansfield skyline. Two guards outside. Hidden monitors in corners.
The door chimed. One guard opened it to admit Vice Admiral Raney and Professor Carmelon.
"Leave us,l." Raney told the guards.
"Sir, protocol..."
"Is overridden. By me." Raney's tone was flat. "If Margaret was going to kill me, she'd have done it in the council chamber."
The guards exchanged looks, then stepped out, leaving the door slightly ajar.
"Not sure I appreciate how confident you are about my assassination skills." Chen said dryly.
Raney didn't smile. He looked older than he had in the council.
"We started the first round of verifications." he said without preamble. "Senior command staff. Some political aides. A handful of key colony liaisons."
"And?" Chen asked.
Raney sat on the edge of the small desk. "Twelve confirmed shapeshifters arrested in the last eight hours. Three tried to fight. One escaped. We think he got a signal out before we could jam it."
Carmelon looked grim. "Your Councilor Hale is missing. His staff claims he left under escort. Those escorts weren't ours."
Chen swore under her breath. "So they know. At least some of them."
Raney nodded. "I've locked down external channels as much as possible without tipping off the entire bureaucracy that something's wrong. But if Hale made orbit, if he contacted any Confluence assets..."
"They know they have a leak," Chen finished. "And they'll react."
"Which means the resistance just became more valuable," Carmelon said. "Stellar's intel, Unity's capabilities, the Kimelons...Earth Command is good, but we've been making decisions based on poisoned data for over a decade. We can't trust our own logs."
Chen looked at the small viewport where city lights glowed against night.
"Then we better start trusting people instead." she said. "Individuals. Verified. Human. We build a network one person at a time. The way the Confluence did, but in reverse. And we hope Stellar's out there doing something about their supply."
Chen's hand tightened on the chair arm.
On the Pathfinder, the war council took shape.
The main briefing room's holotank displayed the system, primary star, asteroid belt, Hadrax Station, the faint distortion where the Cradle lurked off the ecliptic plane. Unity stood near the tank, their form stabilized into a simpler, almost abstract humanoid outline, but their surface patterns were muted. Less playful. Grief in metal.
Stellar, Thorne, Hayes, Clark, Reeves, Kim, James...all senior staff were there. Mitchell perched on the holotank's edge, talons digging into the metal rim.
"Martinez's shuttle is here." Reeves said, indicating a faint icon near Hadrax's orbit. "Derelict. Engines offline. Minimal power. No life signs. Unity confirms their fragment left with Martinez and Torres via the Cradle's teleporter."
"We have partial interior mapping from the fragment's transmission." Clark added, bringing up overlays...pod chambers, power conduits, the central dais, the teleporter anchor. "Incomplete, but enough to guess at layered security. Surface shell, likely disguised as inert rock. Internal volumes carved out for production, storage, command."
"And anti-Unity tech, apparently." Hayes said, looking at the pulsing field around the central chamber.
"They have killed a fragment." Unity said quietly. "We can confirm it from our own...hole. Their clamp prevents state updates across our entanglement. The fragment's last accessible memories end...in the Cradle's core."
Hayes winced. "I'm sorry."
Unity inclined their head. "We appreciate...the sentiment."
Thorne crossed her arms. "So, to recap, Martinez and Torres are prisoners in an enemy fortress built by a civilization from the last universe, currently controlled by the galactic empire that wants to do bad things to us, that fortress is printing shapeshifters by the hundreds, they have tech that can kill Unity, and our captain wants to attack it."
"What'sthe problem?" Stellar asked.
Hayes blew out a breath. "Just once I'd like our problems to be small and local."
"Where's the fun in that?" Thorne said.
Clark shot her a look. "You and I need to have a long talk about your definition of 'fun.'"
Stellar tapped the holotank rim. "We don't attack alone. This isn't a quick strike. We'll need every friendly ship we can get. Valiant, Defender, Resolution. Maybe more, if Chen's message got through to anyone trustworthy."
"Can they get here in time?" Reeves asked.
"Let's find out." Stellar said.
He nodded at Hayes. "Secure channel. Tight beam. Use Unity's encoding but keep it simple. I don't want this bouncing around the network enough to wake up listening posts."
Hayes at her console. "Comms grid is still degraded from the fragment loss. But Unity says they can stabilize an entangled pathway for a few bursts. We get maybe three long messages before noise overwhelms it."
"Then make them count." Stellar said. "Priority one: Myers."
He leaned over the holotank as Hayes opened the channel.
"UES Valiant, this is Captain Bub Stellar of the Pathfinder." he said, voice crisp. "Rachel, if this reaches you, we've found the source. Artificial body in the Hadrax system, coordinates attached. It's an ancient construct the Confluence is using as a shapeshifter factory. Martinez and Torres are inside, captured. Unity's lost a fragment to some containment tech. We're planning an assault to destroy the facility. We need you. Bring the others."
Hayes's console chimed softly as Unity injected coordinates and tactical data into the burst.
"Sending," Hayes said. "Unity's pushing it through sideband channel. Fingers crossed."
"Now we wait," Thorne said.
"Prep the ship. We rendezvous with the others...and then we go crack a world."
He looked at Unity.
"And we make them pay for what they did to you."
Unity's eyes, if they could be called that, glimmered with a strange quiet light.
"We would like that," they said.
Far away, in a chamber humming with stolen power from a dead universe, a silent sphere hung in the air, containing the frozen ghost of a mind that had learned to laugh.
And in the cold between stars, ships began to move.