Terran Commonwealth · Epsilon Prime · Garipan — War Planning DepartmentTime: 2510-10-29, Afternoon

  "Run it with the standard fleet combat protocols," Jack's voice was low in the Sixth Research Office, but everyone present heard it. "Set the Imperial fleet's force advantage as a variable from +20% to +50%, push all logistics and electronic warfare attrition to their limits, and let's see how long our standard approach can hold."

  Leo didn't ask why. He glanced at Jack, then his fingertips danced across the console as if forcefully tapping out a rhythm. In the living data-verse, the blue collective and the red collective once again took their positions: the blue represented their exhausted but essential First Combined Fleet, the red was the Empire's blade.

  The first simulation began. Electronic warfare crawled and tore through the data like initial static, then the main cannons opened fire. Light projectiles crisscrossed in the darkness like dense electric rain. Cruisers broke through on the flanks, and fighter squadrons were thrown out like stones, shattering the surface tension of the enemy's defensive line.

  The result was not unexpected: under the suppression of numbers and firepower, the Federation's blue icons began to fracture after the exchange ratio drew close to 1:1. In just a few minutes, the numbers became 1:2, then 1:3. Sacrifices piled up like arithmetic. Leo's report came out, cold as ice:

  [SIM_RESULT] SURVIVAL_RATE: ~0% // MASS_DEFEAT

  "Failure," Leo read out the data, his voice flat, but the air in the room felt like a layer had been sucked out. Jack just stared at the screen, his hand resting on the edge of the console, his knuckles tightening and un-tightening, as if holding back something ready to erupt.

  "Run another set," he ordered.

  The second, third, and fourth times… they tried various courses, fire distributions, and formations, but all led to the same conclusion: conventional tactics had no chance against that disparity. Ships would be picked off, the chain of command would break, and the probability of escape was minuscule.

  Then the look in Jack's eyes changed. His hand released the console, his fingertips tracing a silent line in the air. The room was filled only with the light of the monitors and the sound of breathing.

  "No," he said, "we've been asking 'how to win,' but maybe we've been asking the wrong question. What we need is time, not victory itself."

  Leo looked up. "Time?"

  "Right," Jack said. "Reset the tactical objective to 'weaken the enemy's fighter groups—not engage their capital ships in a brawl.' Use the battleships as meat shields, and the combined cruisers and fighters as a blade. The goal is simple—create a three-minute window, destroy or turn off their fighter groups. Main battleships, cease evasion, give all power to the main guns, and absorb the fire."

  This sounded like a prescription from a madman. For the first time, hesitation showed on Leo's face, but it was quickly swallowed by reason: he began to build the model, adjusting the input parameters to the extremes Jack had described. They stood side-by-side, a kind of unspoken understanding between them: one proposed the unconventional madness, the other turned that madness into a calculable possibility.

  The new simulation started like another machine being switched on. The visuals were cruder, the numbers pulsing like blood.

  The "steel wall" appeared. The Federation's battleship group formed into columns, hull to hull, creating a moving barrier of steel. Firepower struck this wall, shields flared with arcs of electricity, and then, one by one, they flipped to structural damage readings. The energy shields, on average, held for only thirty seconds before overloading; the hulls began to emit a low, metallic groan, structural stress alarms lighting up one after another.

  Behind this wall, the combined assault formation shot out like a drawn blade. The cruisers first entered the flank fissures, compressing the fire circle, then the fighter squadrons charged with density and speed. A brief contact, a violent close-quarters fight, a fluid coordination—it wasn't a textbook exercise, it was like a bomb built from the trust of an entire force staked on a few minutes.

  The simulation's final data carried a sense of brutal victory: the Imperial fighter groups were 80% disabled, the main cruiser force heavily damaged, and the enemy's assault capability was severed. But the cost was enormous—Federation battleship losses exceeded fifty percent. Leo looked at the numbers, his hand trembling slightly, a slight ripple spreading across the water in the cup he had just tapped.

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  "It worked," his voice had an echo, as if he had just returned from another world. "The cost is heavy, but it… was effective."

  Jack didn't smile. He just drew his gaze back to the simulation screen, as if closing a finished manuscript and handing it to someone else to read.

  Just then, the real battlefield comms patched through. The First Combined Fleet, under the command of Vice Admiral Marcus Snyder, had officially engaged the Imperial fleet. The screen seamlessly switched from the model to the live stream: electromagnetic echoes, sonar phantoms, the thrust plumes of battleships, fireballs carving bright gashes in the universe.

  They looked up at the live formation on the main screen, wanting to see how reality would deviate from the simulation's rigid formula.

  The following image made them all freeze—reality didn't deviate. It was a complete copy of the set they had just designed. The formation adjustment ordered by Snyder, after the initial probing fire, took shape step-by-step: battleships absorbed the fire, the combined formation broke out from the flank, and the fighter squadrons poured through the window like a flood.

  It wasn't a scattered coincidence, but a complete isomorphism: the rhythm, the moment of sacrifice, the time window for the assault group's charge—every detail matched the simulation's timeline, without exception.

  Leo spoke first, his voice sounding as if it had been cut with a knife: "Sir… their formation, it's—it's exactly the same as our simulation."

  Jack listened to the words, a tremor running through the calm in his eyes. It felt like pieces of a puzzle were starting to shift in his head: it wasn't why we thought this way, but who was making them hear our thoughts. Jack's knuckles, pressed against the console, showed bone-white under the light. He felt a chill run up his spine.

  A short line of diagnostics flashed in the corner of the screen, then was swallowed by the real-time log stream:

  [PATTERN MATCH] EYE // ANOMALY_SCORE 0.94

  That line was sharp enough to hurt. It was like a small needle, piercing into the existing explanations—something was comparing, matching, making an "optimal suggestion" somewhere, and this suggestion was being adopted by actors in different locations in an inexplicable way.

  Leo's hands froze on the console, his fingers turning inexplicably cold. He pulled up a communication header he had just captured. The screen showed a truncated packet header: an unencrypted short packet, with a timestamp and a blank command field. The header was instantly discarded into the lowest-level logs, as if someone had deliberately left evidence on a beach and then crushed it underfoot.

  "It could be a leak," Leo murmured. "Maybe someone sent the simulation data to the frontline command ahead of time. But that packet header—its signature is wrong. It's a self-generated entry from within the system; it doesn't look like it was transmitted from the outside."

  Jack listened, his palms beginning to sweat. He pressed his fingertips to the desktop, as if to nail himself in place. Outside, the others in the control room continued their chatter, like people stitching anxiety into the fabric of their daily routine.

  "Either way," Jack said, his voice as low as a whisper, "it means someone, or something, is manipulating the information flow. We didn't arrive at the same crazy solution by chance. We and the front line were pushed toward the same answer at the same time."

  The room fell silent. No one dared to break that statement down into more sentences. Jack reached out, his command as sharp as a blade:

  "Lock all the simulation metadata, timestamps, and the raw log of that short packet header as read-only. Export the access records—check everything that can be checked. Then do a deep comparison between the assault formation's order of battle and Vice Admiral Snyder's general order. Don't miss a single frame of communication records, and don't let anyone leave their console."

  Leo nodded and began to open window after window. With each record he opened, his brow furrowed a little more, as if trying to pin down his unease with data.

  Jack stared at the string of red icons that were still pulsing. Gage's recording, the fall of the front line, and the formation now slowly unfolding in orbit felt like three lines being woven into an arc by some force. The tip of that arc was pointing skyward—toward the signal sources marked initially as "space debris," which were now quietly lighting up.

  He was no longer thinking about how to win, but calculating how to lose more people without being seen. The thought weighed on his chest like a cold wind, so heavy it slowed his breathing.

  Outside the room, time was still moving. On the screen, the blue fleet gradually returned from the simulation's model to real-time cruelty; the red icons in certain orbits coalesced slightly, like dark lamps being lit in sequence.

  Jack stood up and walked to the window. He looked at the city's silhouette outside, like looking at the back of an old friend, but his heart felt as if a list of the dead had just been stuffed inside.

  He took one last look at the small string of diagnostic symbols that had been swallowed by the main screen and said in a low voice, "No one is allowed to use our thoughts as their guide. Begin the trace. Now."

  Just when they thought they could leave it to the data to figure things out, another short record flashed in the corner of the main screen. Leo instinctively stopped his hands, tracing the entry back through the scrolling logs: the packet header didn't come from any frontline communication relay, but was pushed from an unexpected link point, and then vanished in the lowest-level routing, as if someone had deliberately cut out the evidence. He remembered something similar happening not long ago.

  In the residence high in the spires of the Binar Imperium, the figure tapped a few times on the photonic neural terminal, then sat down on the sofa and let out a crisp laugh: "Humans. It's more interesting when you're evenly matched."