The moment Aera's hand touched the console, the dust-coated surface flickered to life. Dim blue light spilled across the corroded metal, pulsing with a rhythm like a heartbeat. Syrix interfaced immediately, its voice colder, sharper than usual.
"ACCESS GRANTED. SYSTEM: FORGE-COMMAND NODE 07. STANDBY FOR SYSTEM WAKE SEQUENCE."
The door groaned.
Then it screamed.
Metal bent, ancient servos twisting for the first time in decades. Steam hissed from cracked pipes. The Dawnbreakers raised their weapons, instincts sharp—every sound was a possible ambush.
But nothing came.
Just silence… and a corridor descending into the dark.
Aera looked over her shoulder. "We go together."
Elian nodded, his rifle already raised. "You lead."
The descent was steep and narrow. Lights flickered above them—emergency nodes running on backup power. Aera counted every step, every second. Her datapad tracked the internal structure. What had once been a military operations hub now looked more like a tomb.
They reached the lower level.
And found it—the Core Room.
Massive and circular. Cables sprawled across the walls like the veins of a machine god. At its center stood a monolithic server core, humming faintly, surrounded by control pods and shattered terminals.
"ANALYSIS: CORE SYSTEM FUNCTIONAL. CONNECTION TO IMPERIAL DATA NEXUS: PARTIAL. PROTOCOL INTEGRITY: DEGRADED."
Syrix was already interfacing again.
"RUNNING TRACE... ACCESSING STRATEGIC LOGS."
Aera walked toward the central terminal. She passed shattered chairs, skeletons slumped against walls. Officers who had died here—maybe not in combat, but something slower. Abandonment. Radiation. Suffocation.
They never left.
She swallowed.
"This place was command during the Third Offensive," Elian muttered, scanning the walls. "I recognize the insignias. Dezune's early war phase. The one Kael ended."
"Then there has to be something in here," she said. "Orders. Troop patterns. If this was a relay node…"
"ACCESS GRANTED," Syrix cut in. "DISPLAYING LAST STRATEGIC SIMULATION."
The central holo-table came alive. A massive projection of the continent unfolded—glowing with battlefronts, units, shifting lines of war. The Empire's colors, red and black, bled across the map like a virus. Dozens of simulation paths played on loop—some chaotic, others disturbingly clean.
Elian stepped forward, stunned. "These aren't just past strategies. These are predictive models."
Aera's heart pounded. "Wait—can we see their current plan of attack?"
"CALCULATING. CROSS-REFERENCING DATA. PARTIAL MODEL AVAILABLE."
The map shifted. Several models overlapped. All of them ended the same.
Total collapse of the Lucent Alliance.
City after city. Border shattered. Coordinated strikes. Surgical annihilation.
Aera stared.
"How… how long until this happens?"
"ESTIMATED TIMEFRAME: SIX MONTHS."
Silence hung heavy in the core room.
Elian's voice was low. "We can't let this happen. If we take this model back—if we give this to the Alliance—they might have a chance."
Aera nodded slowly, her voice like steel. "Then we carry it. All of it. The logs, the strategy, the warnings. Everything."
Syrix responded immediately.
"COPYING DATA. WARNING: SYSTEM IS FLAGGING EXTERNAL DOWNLOAD ATTEMPT."
Aera froze. "Can they see us?"
"NEGATIVE. SYSTEM IS ISOLATED. NO OUTBOUND PINGS DETECTED… YET."
She let out a slow breath. "Then let's move before that changes."
They left the Core Room with everything they could carry—data drives, blueprints, relics of an Empire obsessed with perfection. But as they climbed, something gnawed at Aera.
The silence had changed.
It was listening.