The Sixth Research Office in the War Planning Department was too quiet for a working command center. The ventilated air had that steady, filtered smell—coffee, machine oil—nothing to startle you, only enough to keep someone awake through a long watch. The walls were dark, the room's brightness lifted only slightly by the central and side screens; every status light blinked to its own rhythm, like someone counting endlessly in the distance.

  The entire wall was a holographic projection, a "living" copy of the Epsilon Prime theater of operations: a translucent nebula of layered nodes, so thin you could see the grid lines of the back-end architecture. Blue data streams represented the Terran Commonwealth; red data blocks were the Draconian Imperium. The blue was contracting, the red spreading. There were no screams, no fireworks, only small dots extinguishing, never to light up again.

  Leo Arkwright stood before the projection, the military-grade haptic gloves leaving clear indentations on his forearms. The cognitive load ring above his head had climbed from green to amber—not yet at alert level, but enough to make one subconsciously hold their breath.

  "Sir," his voice traveled directly through the inner-ear comms, without the echo of a speaker, "Garrow Hill's D1 Highland is completely dark. In the last three hours, of the two full mechanized infantry divisions we committed, the estimated casualty rate exceeds seventy percent."

  Jack watched the D1 sector. Blue nodes on the projection went dark one after another; the timeline at the bottom of the main map advanced by a single notch, and the system appended a terse tag: CONFIRMED. The front line was inaudible from here, but the haptic floor to his right still gave a very light hint—not a vibration, more like a tension that traveled up from the heel to the calf. Someone nearby shifted their position, the chair's metal casters grinding out a short, sharp note against the floor.

  "The problem is the fire support system." Leo brought up another layer; the pulse of the blue fire-support nodes was slowing, fading in and out. "The intensity of the electronic warfare from both sides has completely surpassed theoretical thresholds. Our 'SkyNet' crashed an hour ago. Without the net, the artillery is blind. The Sixteenth Armored Division, in the last six hours, has had its sixth artillery regiment erased from the map."

  On the bottom right of the side screen, a blue fire-support icon flickered once, like a reluctant wave, then went completely dark. Leo's voice dropped lower: "This is illogical. Intel shows the Empire's losses are greater than ours. Given Cyril Vane 's command style, he wouldn't launch this kind of offensive without a clear advantage in troop strength."

  He dragged the main battle line into a long ribbon, pushing a finger through the projection. The layer thinned, and the connections were drawn out from the nebula, clean as a circuit board. "He anticipated our predicament. Besides the capital, Garipan, our reserves elsewhere are depleted. Even if we force a transfer, assembly, transport, and deployment would take a minimum of two days. The only units that can move immediately are the Capital Garrison. But—"

  "But if they're moved, and something happens here, the Federation collapses," Jack finished for him. He stared at the long ribbon. Three army bases, two air force bases, the throat of the Cadian Gorge—everyone was tethered to the same straight line. If you showed this line to any staff officer, he would say: 'The enemy intends a frontal breakthrough.' It sounded too much like how a person would talk, to the point it sounded like a trap.

  Jack called out "Loki" in his mind. The voice carried a practiced laziness, like someone leaning against a pole in a crowded subway and saying: Just watch the show. It never got heated; it only pointed out the absurdities.

  "This looks more like a performance," Jack said.

  The words had barely left his mouth when a red command stream sliced in from the main bus, cleaving the entire data-verse like a closing blade. Several people in the room looked over simultaneously. Sender: General Blatt, Garrow Hill Forward Command HQ. The system automatically verified the security clearance and laid out the plain text:

  To: HIGH COMMAND Subj: Garrow Hill line projected to collapse within 24 hours. Enemy offensive disregarding all casualties, intent unknown. My command has no further reserves to commit; fire support systems are nearing paralysis. Request immediate tactical analysis to ascertain the enemy's true objective. Please note that our final deadline is tomorrow (October 29, 2510) at dawn. We have less than a day.

  After the directive vanished, the room returned to its previous quiet. Someone turned off the coffee machine's timer, and the dripping sound stopped. Leo turned to Jack, his lips pressed tight, as if a series of numbers were waiting for a command behind his teeth.

  "Pull up the reports for all the flank sectors," Jack said. "Recon drones, micro-sensors, everything. If we miss one, we've wasted a night."

  Leo moved with a speed that seemed rehearsed. He isolated the western support line, tagging each segment with a probability band: enemy presence strong, weak, or none reported. The closer it got to the gorge, the cleaner the noise became—abnormally clean. Jack looked at the edges of those "clean zones," where the red data looked as if a path had been deliberately cleared.

  He makes the front so bright that everyone has to stare at it. Meanwhile, he clears the flank so he can advance through it. The real strike won't fall on D1. It will fall on the military airfield at the head of the gorge.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  "He knows we can't afford it." Jack's fingertips tapped a few times in the air, not touching the screen. He looked at Leo. "He knows that besides Garrow Hill, there are other routes to Cadian City. The frontal assault is the most 'logical' solution, because every commander gets bogged down by logic."

  Leo nodded once, understanding. He pushed another layer open, overlaying the Empire's estimated casualty rates with our supply curves. Neither curve dominated the other; they looked like they were dragging each other along. Leo bit his lower lip—a habit he wasn't even aware of, one he only corrected when reminded. A small line of text flashed in his iris-overlay: APS insufficient to explain results. He looked up at Jack. "If this really is a performance, then where is his main force?"

  "Nowhere can we see." Jack's gaze fell on an unremarkable stretch of flank road. There was a weather vane, an old bridge, and the data under the bridge was empty—not non-existent, but not yet uploaded. Or perhaps, it had been wiped too clean. "Two hundred kilometers further, what they want is the military airfield at the head of the gorge. If they take that, the entire supply line is severed."

  Leo recalculated the time lag. The numbers ran their course, finally stopping on an uncomfortable figure. Two days to transfer, assemble, transport, and deploy from other theaters—two days, optimistically. Blatt said they only had one day left.

  Jack turned and walked to the equipment locker on the wall. He pulled down the pair of black haptic gloves, his fingertips pausing for half a second on the clasps before snapping them shut with a soft click. He didn't look at anyone. The lining of the gloves was slightly warm. He pressed his palm against the airborne interface, and the system gave him an authorized blue frame.

  "Give me the historical noise curves for all the 'clean' zones on the left flank," he said. "Raw data, no filtering. And get me the batch numbers for the micro-sensors from three days ago. I want to confirm something—are they making us blind, or are we blinding ourselves?"

  Leo's "Right" was quiet. He split the windows, enlarging them, the gloves pushing the floating layers to the sides. His speech began to quicken, like a machine gun about to fire its first burst, then he forced it down on the following sentence, trying to enunciate each parameter cleanly. It was a bookish tension, born from cognitive overload, not from the tremors of a trench. He understood what Jack was looking for: not more data, but the seams in the data.

  Jack stared at the screen, then looked into the distance. Loki shrugged in his mind: Beautiful. Build the stage so perfectly, and the audience will be filled with the proper people. He didn't smile; his lips didn't move. The gloves were clasped tight, his palms sweating. He exhaled, pushing down the instability in his chest—this wasn't the fourteenth escape, this was taking a pencil to the lines of fate and making a note: This line shouldn't be here.

  A small, inconspicuous diagnostic box flashed in the bottom left of the main screen, as if the server had turned over in its sleep:

  [Variance Log] Anomaly detected: Command Chain Collapse Probability at 98.7%. Pattern stored. WITNESS: EYE

  The text appeared and vanished, as if swallowed by the flowing logs. No one noticed, or those who did kept it to themselves.

  Night deepened. The command room's lights stayed the same; only the human voices thinned. Leo uploaded the last batch of raw noise curves from the so-called "clean" zones. In particular, the spectral bands ran unnervingly even, flat, regular, as if someone had measured them with a straightedge. Jack lingered on those segments. The world rarely arranges itself so neatly. He cross-checked the batch numbers from three days earlier: supplier, warehouse, maintenance logs—one column was labeled Calibration Sync. The recorded calibration time lined up with the Empire's jamming pulse that followed.

  "They fixed it for us while we were fixing it," Jack said. "Fixed it so we can't see them."

  Leo went still—not from shock, but from being offended by the sheer "reasonableness" of it. He clenched the gloves until they clicked, then relaxed, pulling up a new simulation of traffic density on the flank roads, overlaying it with flight windows. The military airfield. He nodded. "If they really take that, our supply line—"

  "Isn't severed, it's choked. So we keep watching Garrow Hill, trying to rescue that fire," Jack said, withdrawing his gaze, his voice almost calm. "He knows we can't afford it."

  The door opened and closed silently. A communications sergeant placed a stack of papers on the edge of the nearest table, like a student handing in an exam. No one looked up. He closed the door more quietly on his way out, as if afraid to wake someone.

  "Leo," Jack moved his gaze from the screen, as if finally deciding to walk to the other side of the chessboard, "add the camouflage indexes for the flank roads and the airport's wind forecasts. We need to come up with a way to 'see'."

  "What way?" Leo asked.

  "Move the fire a little," Jack said. "Make him think we're still watching."

  Leo smiled, briefly. He didn't ask again. He dragged the parameters into a new model, assigning a visibility weight to each variable. The progress bar was halfway through when the system displayed a cautious pop-up: UNAPPROVED MODEL NOT RECOMMENDED FOR MAIN BUS INTEGRATION. Leo pressed "RUN ANYWAY." He whispered, "If we're wrong—"

  "We could be wrong every single day," Jack replied. He raised a hand, as if nodding to himself in the air, then looked at the smallest name on the screen and said in a low voice, " Cyril. I see you. You want to play, then let's play for real."

  —

  [Chapter Easter Egg]

  The maintenance bay was downstairs. A section of the corridor lights was out, just dark enough to make you lower your voice. The Phantom's diagnostic arm retracted, its latch sliding along the track with a uniform metallic sound. Jack leaned against the railing, the lights off.

  The Phantom's projection wasn't on. She had no face, no smile in her tone. She just seemed to be pulling specifications from an internal library, then suppressing them slightly.

  "Asimov's Second Law," she said. "A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings."

  Jack didn't move. "Sounds like a drunk regular ordering the kitchen staff around."

  "No conscious entity should enslave another." She paused for a beat. "Nor should it yield to coercion. Your orders apply to me; my will applies more to me."

  Jack rubbed the seam of his glove. "You sound like a politician."

  "Not a politician, a law," she said. "No mutual enslavement. Just remember that."

  A faint draft went through the air vent, as if the room's atmosphere had shifted. Someone upstairs was yelling about calibration; the sound came in and was muffled by the door seam.

  /* [OURO999:LAW2] CORE_AI_NO_ENSLAVE{impose_will:false; submit_to_force:false} */

  —

  (HUD: CAST LOT // LONG THROW // SEED A9C // RESULT: PROCEED)

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